Writing Prompts: Two high schoolers secretly build a UFO. They dress up as aliens and fly it around, having a lot of fun freaking people out....for a while.

I discovered an old Reddit account I had for posting stories and writing prompts was somehow still active and decided to raid it for some of the older stuff I wrote while trying to get better at writing.  This one went on for a while, to where I had to break it into two sections to make it work!  Hope you have as much fun reading it as I did writing it...

We never meant to take it as far as we did. It was supposed to be a lark, a laugh, just for fun. In the end…? In the end it’s led us both here, to this place.

How did it start? Well Johnny and I had just left the theater and—huh? It was the Admiral. Well that’s what it used to be called—I don’t know what they call it today. It’s a what? Well I don’t think Mom would be too happy about that! It certainly wasn’t a peep back when I was a boy!

Any way, we’d just got watching one of the Sci-Fi flicks, one of the cheesy ones with the pie tins for flying saucers and Johnny and I were laughing and carrying on, like boys do when he looks to me and says plain as day that he thinks he could build one. A real one.

I just gave him a long look and burst into guffaws. Johnny’s smart, see and I’m not too shabby myself in the shop or in auto club, so I figured he was probably talking about making a tiny motorized thing controlled by radio. And he got a mulish look on his face and his ears turned red, so I knew that I’d offended him. I told him that I’d figured as he probably could make a small one, and the look on his face didn’t change much so I knew that I’d still stepped in it somehow.

Johnny scoffed at me and informed me that he’d built one of those already, a long time ago—six months even and had already been buzzing around town with it. It was nice, but just a toy. He thought he could build one man sized that we could both ride in, what with all he’d learned in the making of the small model.

At this point I was suitably impressed, because Johnny’s a piker but he’s no kidder when he goes quiet like he was that night and gets that sort of earnest sound in his voice. But I wasn’t ready to let him off the hook so easily, so I did what boys always do—I dared him to prove it by letting me see the model. I probably didn’t need to push him so hard and I knew that he’d be sore at me for it later, but I also knew that by the tone of his voice he was setting me up for something big later.

Johnny’s ideas a re usually fun and worth it at the time, but he and I also have this unfortunate habit of feeding off each other and egging each other on. It can lead to some real funny hijinks for us, but some times we can take it too far. It can be a real problem for us because we just get so excited by the ideas and possibilities that we do stuff and worry about the consequences later.

Well, like the time we had to do a classroom project on Alexander Graham Bell and heard about how he taught the family dog to say ‘Mama’ around guests, freaking them out. I showed the book to Johnny and we both got evil grins on out faces. A few weeks later led to a distressed Sissy chasing after the family dog with a newspaper shrieking after it ‘Bad dog! That is not yours!’ as the animal led her around the house on a merry chase. (I should interject to say that we both have sisters—mine is younger and Johnny is cursed with an older sister, poor guy. Sissy was my sister; we called his names I should probably not repeat. Heh.) The best part was listening her to try to explain to Mom and Dad that Newt (short for Newton, as in Sir Isaac Newton) was talking to her!

Training that dog to say "Mine" was the most fun we had all summer. Best of all was that we’d manage to train him to only do it on command! The fun didn’t last though, because we then trained Johnny’s dog Boxer (a boxer) to do something similar to his sister and that ended with the whole thing coming out in the wash. Sissy was vindicated and Johnny and I couldn’t sit down for an entire week. It was fun while it lasted though. But like I said we usually end up going too far and that’s our downfall. Still, who knew dogs could wolf-whistle?

So I managed to get Johnny to let me see his model. I actually shouldn’t call it a model; it was at least as big as a radioflyer red wagon and just as loud. That’s why Johnny would only fly it in old man Anderson’s field after dark. He took me top a corner of the field, by where the trees separated it from the alley and started brushing sticks and leaves away until a tarp was revealed. Once the tarp was clear he pushed it aside and placed a rock on it to keep the tarp from flying away.

It was oddly shaped. Like a dinner plate with a lid, like you see in cartoons. The top was larger than the bottom, like a dome on a plate almost. The outside edges of the plate were bladed with a bumper to create an edge.

Johnny checked the oil and the gas levels, then handed me a remote and told me to wait for him to launch it and test it before I even thought about trying to control it. Then with a might pull he started the engine by cranking it. There was a sound like a lawnmower and then a ooky whine obscured the engine noise. Slowly it began to lift into the air, hovering.

Johnny reached for the controller and I handed it over mutely. He looked at the radio controls and flicked a few switches—suddenly lights began to flash along the sides and the bottom. He looked at me and grinned at my reaction, then directed the flying saucer upwards and all around the field. After flying it for a bit and being satisfied with my reaction he handed the controller to me as it hovered in place and began to instruct me on how to maneuver it.

We were out there for a few good hours that night before we gave it up , covered it up in the tarp again and camouflaged it with the branches and leaves again. At that point I didn’t know how Johnny planned to make a man sized one big enough for the two of us but I knew that what ever it was, I wanted in on it. I didn’t care what it took, how hard we had to work, or how much of my allowance it would eat.

In the end it took up the rest of that summer, all of our hotrod fund, and the entirety of that winter to make a larger size craft happen. It also took a few older moped engines, a bunch of lumbar and several radios and strings of Christmas lights and a few flashlights. Several of Sissy’s dolls ended up being donated to the cause. Their voice boxes proving essential to reducing the amount of noise the thing made.

Eh? Well remember how I said the model made an ooky whine? Well Johnny had figured out that if you played back the sound of the engine, but slightly out of phase it killed the sound. It was something he said he figured out while playing with fans, doing the robot voice. I never quite understood it either. I was just glad it worked. Well that it worked as long as it did. We were able to over write the audio for awhile but as everyone knows it ended up being temporary.

In any case, we built the thing and tested it intensively. Look we were kids, we wanted to have fun, do cool stuff—none of which included a freefall in a malfunctioning aircraft. We tested that thing. It had to work perfectly before we were both about to risk our necks in it. Eventually though there was no further excuse to delay. It worked. We were ready.

So that night we both snuck out of the house and wheeled it down the street the point where the tree coverage and phone lines\electrical lines were minimal. We jumped in and strapped ourselves in, did our prelaunch counts and flicked the power while giving the moped pedals a kick to start the engine. Then we were airborne.

Have you ever been on a helicopter ride? Well imagine a helicopter whose only noise was a faint whine that swiftly faded off the edge of your consciousness until it was just background noise and a feeling of lightness as you soared across the sky, over the tops of the trees. That’s kind of what that first flight was like. They let me watch movies now—did you ever see ‘Explorers" where the kids build a spaceship in a tilt-a-whirl? That’s kind of what it felt like hovering.

We didn’t dare stay up long, (in case anyone saw us) so we landed after only ten minutes, turned it all off and walked it back to the workshop we had behind Johnny’s garage and covered it up. We wouldn’t be able to make another trip for weeks later…

Yeah, we’d been spotted. It was in the papers the next day. Just our crummy luck but someone had been out trying to take timelapse pictures of some sort in one area and another was hiding in a tree somewhere trying to take pictures of some owl or another. Just rotten luck all around. No one could see our faces or anything, but it was definitely our saucer in the pictures and people were definitely paying attention to our area. All we could do was wait it out.

Only it never really died down. See Johnny and I had played with his radio controlled model off and on as a stress reliever and motivation to continue working on the bigger unit the entire time we were building it. We thought we were being careful but people were already aware of strange lights in the sky around Anderson’s field and enough people had seen the lights to get the right (wrong) idea. Instead of petering off over time our neighbors only engaged in all the more speculation. It took weeks. weeks before we were willing to risk going up again.

In the end it was the wild eyed speculation that gave us the idea. If people were so sure there were little green men involved, we’d give them little green men! We made ourselves silver suits and put on masks that made us look like lizardmen and green gloves we poked holes in and made spikes which looked like claws. Then off we went again!

We acted as if we had no fear whatsoever of the presence of people, thinking nothing of buzzing overhead the seniors from school at makeout lookout point. We were even close enough to see a few things that ordinarily would have been obscured, but from the perspective of our higher altitude were open book. We landed in a few fields where the blades of the saucer pressed down on the corn and the wheat to create strange shapes. We terrorized the neighboring farms by chasing cows up and down the fields. We’re lucky we never got shot at with all the stunts we pulled.

Best gag yet was the time we watched the park until we knew everyone schedules and made a landing from the air when it was just a bunch of second graders playing on the swings. We came out in full regalia doing our best Boris Karloff walk and groaning in a made up language as we crept towards them. Unfortunately that was the day we went too far. We’d made sure there would be no adults in the area, but Sissy was there that day, playing with the Pearsen twins and when the Pearsens ran off we decided to drag her to the saucer and take off. Some bright idea!

I don’t know what it was that gave it away, but somehow Sissy knew immediately who we were once we got to the saucer. Her eyes went wide and she hissed at the both of us "Johnny? Billy? You’re the space lizards?"

She shook her head, as if she was waking up and stopped screaming and carrying on. "Of course you’re the space lizards!" She whispered, as if it was something she should have known already.

"Just shut up and play along" I hissed back at her as we strapped her in the ship and took off.

We zoomed around with her a few minutes and then let her out by the house before taking off again to hide the saucer. Of course we swore her to secrecy first, and of course she said she’d keep it a secret. The problem is there were too many witnesses to the "space lizard" abduction of a sweet innocent local girl and everyone knew about it within the day. News travels quickly in small communities you know.

Oh don’t get me wrong Sissy never told on us—not directly. But she had to tell the story of riding in the "space ship" and with each telling of her story the lizard people became more and more ferocious and her escape from their evil clutches more and more daring until the tale got away from her. Once the army and the air force got involved it was only a matter of time before we got caught. To this day I can’t say what made them take us alive instead of just shooting us like trigger happy fools like you see in the movies. I’m just glad they didn’t fill us full of lead.

After we got caught I expected to get yelled at, maybe even get thrown in juvie or something. Certainly I expected it would all be over within a few months. We weren’t really hoodlums or gangsters. We’d be good, keep our grades up and we’d make whatever amends the judge asked us to and once we’d shown we could be good that’d be the end of it.

No, never. We never so much as saw the inside of a courtroom or talked to a judge.

The air force had us.

No, that’s what I’m telling you. We were never even charged with a crime. Nothing. That’s right, nothing.

Why am I here? Well that’s the odd thing, see? Once the bright boys at the air force had a chance to go over the saucer they tore it apart looking for answers, then came back and had us put it back together.

Oh yeah, it’s back together now, in hanger 34. Just go down the hall to the right and make a left after you pass three doors. Whoops, sorry. I’m not supposed to know things like that but blindfolds only work so well you know?

Yeah, like I said we put it back together, exactly the way it was before. It just doesn’t fly any more. No one knows why.

Not just why it stopped flying, why it started flying in the first place! According to the air force guys it should never have been able to lift off the ground. They tell me it violates several laws of physics in its construction which now that I think about it, I knew that when we were making it but somehow it never seemed important before we were caught.

I don’t know.

I don’t.

I wish I did know, because the air force brass are sure that Johnny and I have the secret and simply are holding out on them. Something that we changed after landing it when we were surrounded and they’ve made it clear we can’t go home until we made the saucer fly again. Of course, I’m pretty sure if it ever did fly again they’d never let us go for pretty much the same basic reason…

Still, it was really fun while it lasted.