Nonfiction -
A Cupp and a Saucer

Miss Cupp wasn’t the sight the sleepy eyes of a ninth grader wanted glaring at him. Standing just inches over five feet, she was the sort of wide, full-bosomed woman who isn’t so much flabby as dense. Her sternness stretched from squinty, bespectacled eyes down to the tips of black, clackity shoes. From her scalp sprouted a chestnut mass disciplined to staunch, obedient waves. Everything about Miss Cupp said, “Don’t tread on me.” The fist that cracked the wooden pointer across her laboratory bench said it. The stare that bore down as you struggled with her tests said it. The pursed lips, the tight dress, the sleeves rolled to the elbow—they said it. My science teacher would make a wrestling coach proud.
Yet, distant as she was, something about this woman earned my respect. Neither friend nor peer, she was no enemy either. Her standards were severe but impartial. Because Miss Cupp was spare with approval, it was all the more to be coveted. To add to her stature, she lectured atop the podium with the sacred ciphers, the Periodic Table of the Elements, above and to her left. Behind her, the blackboard awaited the revelations of science. Viewed through my fourteen-year-old eyes, Miss Cupp held the keys to the kingdom of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein. The lab bench she lectured from was the portal. And I wanted in.

Childhood Fascination With Science

My enchantment with science began years before Miss Cupp. Who knows how much of it I owe to Mickey Mouse? As a young boy, I sat transfixed watching Fantasia, eyes fastened to the screen while Mickey played the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. White-gloved, white crescent and stars on his blue conical cap, Mickey gestures and a broom comes alive. Arms and legs pop from its torso. More magical sweeps of Mickey’s hand, and the broom hauls buckets of water. Before long the water swells to waves, the waves to torrents, the torrents to floods. Only the appearance of the wizard to a chastened Mickey restores calm. From that instant, I longed to be a sorcerer.
On a mid-elementary school afternoon my mother walked me to the nearby library to get my first library card. These were the early days of the atomic bomb, and after checking out a few books I was certain that when I grew up I would be peering into the building blocks of matter. This intellectual energy flowed naturally into childhood chemistry sets, first a Gilbert and then a larger Chemcraft collection. The rubbing alcohol smell of the Bunsen burner, its warm, blue-yellow flame, the racks of test tubes, and the curled-neck flask on its little metal tripod swept me to the laboratories of Priestley and Mendeleev. The small, box-shaped bottles of chemicals were labeled with mysterious, polysyllabic names. Each new one I could pronounce piled on evidence—I wore Mickey’s sorcerer cap.
I vividly recall the schoolmate I persuaded to taste a fingertip smudge from a bottle of white grains. The pungent smell made him recoil.
“Look, Jenner,” I reassured, “don’t be afraid. The label says ammonium chloride, and that’s the chemical formula for table salt.” I was showing off my wizardry.
After a tasty smidgen, Jenner’s lips curled reflexively.
“Eeeyoo!”
He sputtered, rubbed his tongue with his finger.
Then it came to me.
“Oops. Salt is sodium chloride.”
By my later elementary school years Mickey the Sorcerer had turned into Man the Scientist. I’d read pages on atom-smashing. I’d tried my stint as chemist. Now the magic of movies was propelling me into space. I rode with Lloyd Bridges and his crewmates aboard Rocket Ship X-M, past the moon and onto the radioactive deserts of war-wrecked Mars. I shivered in the frigid snows of the arctic, running first toward and then away from the blood-sucking humanoid in The Thing. I memorized “Gort! Klatu, barada nikto” so that I could save the earth if my path crossed that of the robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Junior High School and Astronomy

When the time came to walk the intimidating halls of junior high school, thoughts of science, crackling electric fingers, charged my imagination. I was determined to master the worlds of chemistry, astronomy, physics, mathematics. Though forbidding, George Gamow’s One, Two, Three...Infinity became an obsession. I pored over it, page by reread page, until through sheer willpower I coerced the words into coherent knowledge. The idea that we swim in time, much like the three dimensions of space, seized me. To picture planets following not Newtonian orbits but Einsteinian grooves in curved space-time gave me chills. That the universe could be finite and closed, and yet have no “outside” outside it, took breath and reason away. This noble invention called science wore holy garments.
A few short months before meeting Miss Cupp, I’d earned enough from my newspaper route to purchase a four-inch, reflecting telescope. After an hour of assembly, this beautiful eyeball of science—a black, cardboard tube with a mirror at one end and a viewing lens at the middle—was ready. Perched at the edge of a canyon, I fastened it on its tripod and waited for darkness to fall. The sweet, bitter licorice scents of summer greenery gusted up the slope.
Patrick Moore’s A Guide to the Planets, so I thought, would prepare me. I trained the small finder on the moon, switched to the magnifying aperture, and guided the telescope to its target. A brilliant white globe slid into view. At first the brightness was too much. Once my eyes adjusted, I was struck by the depth of the terrain, the obsidian blacks and acetylene-torch whites. Lunar photographs are drab imitations compared to the telescopic mountains that stretch upward through a lens. The valleys yawn deeply; the craters snuggle patiently; the seas heave unending tints of gray. Ancient dust beckons human feet to free it for a dance in space. As much as the earth, the moon begs us to call it home.
Over the following weeks I shifted my attention to two planets. Jupiter was a pearl stuck in black velvet, its gray belt bulging earthward. I could see three, and sometimes four, of its moons obediently circling their parent. Tiny golden Saturn tilted her hatless brim, so near it seemed I could trace it with my fingers. As cars whisked by, as couples strolled, as cyclists pedaled and families bickered and old men rasped—my telescope was transporting me to heaven. Overhead, bathed in the night sky, miniature wonders put on their performance. But no one looked.

Honor in Miss Cupp's Class

In the second week of Miss Cupp’s class, for reasons she never explained, she chose me to be class attendance keeper. Now I sat behind the lab bench, at the holy of holies. From my elevated position I surveyed the class, carefully marking attendance in the book of judgment. I knew this appointment was double-edged. On the one hand it granted honor and power. Yet it also brought the suspicion that I might be too much of a teacher-pleaser, not one of the boys, what in those days we called a “kiss-up.” Confident with books but not with girls or sports, I found myself in a precarious position.
I would soon discover how easily the mighty fall.
Within a week of the new assignment, I sat holding the attendance roster, waiting for class. In a few minutes Miss Cupp would barrel through the doorway. Quentin stepped up to the lab bench.
“I need to go to my locker,” he whispered.
Okay, I thought. But why tell me?
“Can you give me a pass?”
He was asking for the special slip issued only to teachers. With the approved date, time, and signature, it became an admission-free ticket to roam the school grounds.
“I can’t do that. The pass has to be signed by a teacher.”
I didn’t know Quentin well, but I sensed he was popular. Not an intellectual, he represented the “sosh” and “jock” types whose approval I craved.
“Couldn’t you just sign Miss Cupp’s name for her? She wouldn’t mind.”
I squirmed.
“I can’t do that. She’ll catch me.”
Quentin was not about to be turned down.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be back before she gets here. I just want the pass in case I’m stopped in the halls.”
I paused. He’s being honest, I thought. With such a small gesture, one that Miss Cupp would never discover, I could exercise my newly acquired power. Helping a fellow student would earn respect. It wasn’t a big infraction.
“All right. But hurry back.”
I scribbled Miss Cupp’s name at the bottom of the pass. Aware that the writing was un-adult, I did my best to make it look rushed. Quentin scrambled out the door, pass in hand.

Flying Saucers Have Landed

In the years leading to that science class, Sorcerer Mickey reached out with both hands. In his right he offered the known, the tools of science and reason. In his left he offered the unknown, the mysterious. The latter came to earth, trailing sparks of magic, in the form of a flying saucer.
I was twelve years old. We were driving home from El Centro. My chin rested on my hands, elbows extended on the back of the car’s front seat. I gazed drowsily through the windshield at the cloudless, black two a.m. sky.
Suddenly, far off and to the left, an object hung in the air, captured in the V between two jagged peaks. After a second or two, the nearer peak eclipsed it. Softly, fleetingly, nature lifted and then lowered her veil in the desert night.
“Did you see that?”
“Yes!” My mother’s voice was tense with excitement.
“I didn’t see anything,” countered my step-father. His eyes must have been fixed to the road.
As we wondered aloud what it could have been, I knew. Though it gave only a glimpse, the phenomenon continued to hover inside my head, straight above my eyes. Unbelievably, it looked exactly like one of George Adamski’s cigar-shaped mother ships. Horizontally suspended, each of its five to six chambers encased in luminescence, the vessel appeared and then vanished. If only in that instant one of the smaller craft had dropped from its belly.
Within a year I was sitting at the midmorning session of our flying saucer club—the World Investigators of Saucer Phenomena. It felt good to be co-founder and president of WISP. Five to ten adolescents huddled in the clutter of my dimly lit garage. The conversing of eager minds spread a blanket of anticipation across the room. Bright yellow beams shot through the slits of the closed garage door. Into the spotlight dust particles glittered. Taking turns, they bobbed, waltzed, then took exit. At one end of our meeting house, on the presiding officer’s table, sat a 3-by-5 card databank of sightings (gleaned mostly from books). Flying Saucers Have Landed, Space, Gravity, and the Flying Saucer, and The Truth About Flying Saucers lay nearby. Our own mimeographed “UFO questionnaires” were stacked alongside. A few contained reports of actual sightings.
We were small, but we planned big. Eventually we would publish our findings, based on the questionnaires we’d collected. We were fashioning an organization destined to grow to world-wide proportions. We called our own small group the “Hub.” Later the Hub would be joined by subsidiary WISP clubs, tips at the spokes of a wheel, each funneling its data inward to us. We had magnificent plans.
The sky-blue WISP flag, sewn by Linda, our secretary, was tacked to the wall of the garage. A white flying saucer—stitched from cotton bedsheets—flew across its threads. Linda and I had written the lyrics to all the WISP songs, and from the collection the group chose to sing “They Glide Through the Air” (sung to the tune of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze)—

They glide through the air with the greatest of speed,
They fly in a manner we cannot exceed.
They’re not from this planet, it must be agreed:
Those UFOs we’re talking about.
Oh they come in all shapes and all colors,
From torpedo- to cone- to disk-shape,
They are silver, metallic, and glowing, it seems,
Oh how do they make their escape?
Ohhh...

Romping on the fringes of the unacceptable made us giddy.

Science Fiction, a Ouija Board, and More Flying Saucers

Before long the paths of the playful converge, and so I came to meet Richard, a schoolmate who was soon to join WISP. Tall and with a flat top, Richard approached me after a gym class with a puzzled face and a book in hand.
“I’ve been reading The War of the Worlds,” he began, “and there’s a sentence I don’t understand.”
Intrigued to meet a fellow reader of science fiction, I asked him what it said.
“It says the Martians had been circumcising humans for years before they invaded earth. Why would they do that?”
I asked Richard to show me the page. I read the sentence carefully.
“Not circumcising!” I laughed, my finger pointing to the crucial word. “Scrutinizing!”
From that moment Richard and I were best friends. He brought a sharp mind, hungry curiosity, and a few idiosyncrasies to our flying saucer club. Buying chemicals from a local store, he experimented with incendiaries, eventually singeing his face when he dropped sodium into water. Together we mixed food coloring into our dinner servings, interested in the effects of color on the flavor of food. What would blue mashed potatoes or green milk taste like?
One evening, accompanied by two schoolmates, Richard and I played the Ouija board. The four of us pulled wooden chairs around a tiny table in a darkened bedroom. A corner lamp cast golden shadows across each face. We lowered our fingers as one, crowding them onto the triangular planchette. There was a tremble in the air. And then the pointer jiggled. Once. Twice. Then it slid across the board. Startled, we turned to each other—
“I didn’t do that!”
Soon the planchette was gliding fluidly, pointing at letters and spelling out words.
“Who’s controlling this?” we asked the board.
“Wegebva,” the pointer spelled out. Wegebva informed us that she was a dead Egyptian priestess who had lived centuries before Christ.
Suspicious, we wanted more.
When were you born? When did you die? How old were you when you died?
Wegebva innocently replied.
We grabbed a pencil, performed some quick computations, and&...aha! The numbers didn’t add up. Armed with reason, we had identified Wegebva as our own fingertips. Unwittingly, we had been jiggling out unmathematical conversations from the spirit world of our own thoughts.
Another day Richard and I were flipping through the pages of Adamski’s Flying Saucers Have Landed. The photo of a Venusian flying saucer, rising from Mount Palomar, fascinated us. It was tipped upward, as if frozen mid-liftoff. The upper cabin, gray portholes wrapping its circumference, was partly obscured by the concave undersurface of the craft. From that surface three white bowls—spherical landing gears—extruded, encircling a raised central platform.
“Have you ever noticed something?” asked Richard. “What’s that?” “When you turn the picture upside-down”—as he said this he turned the book over—”it looks like a plate with a hamburger in the middle and a pickle slice on top, ringed by three whole onions.” He was right. How fortunate to be in the company of the playful spirit of curiosity. Too restless to be hardened by certainty, it peeks and smiles at everything, even itself.

Dishonor in Miss Cupp's Class

Unfortunately the second hand sped round the clock faster than Quentin did the hallway. Miss Cupp entered the room. No Quentin. The minute hand swept past the hour. No Quentin. My only hope was that he would prudently stay away. As I turned to the duties of attendance, Miss Cupp, pointer to her side, began to lecture.
At five minutes past the hour, Quentin opened the door.
“Where have you been?” Miss Cupp was applying her drill sergeant tone.
“I just went to my locker,” Quentin replied. And then—how could he?—he handed her the slip.
“Here’s my pass.”
The sweat began to bead on my forehead. Swallowed in heat, I struggled against the tears. What could I say?
Miss Cupp studied the slip, looked at me, then stared at Quentin.
“But this isn’t my signature.”
Silence. Miss Cupp’s heavy gaze turned to me. Unbidden, the blood red of my face shouted, “Guilty. Guilty.” The room was still. The eyes of my classmates, of Quentin, of Miss Cupp bore down hard on a spirit much too raw for its own good.
Miss Cupp ordered Quentin to his seat. She lifted the attendance book from my hands and closed it, saying nothing. At the end of the hour, she turned to me. “In the future,” she whispered, “I will be recording attendance.” That was it. No lecture. No scolding. No censure. She simply withdrew the tokens of honor she had bestowed.

A Debate: Do Flying Saucers Exist?

As the school days plodded on, I submerged my failure into the tumult of junior high school. Quentin never spoke to me again. Though no longer seated at the lab bench, I thrived on the excitement of science in the classroom of Miss Cupp. WISP grew. By the end of the year, the right and left hands of Mickey the Sorcerer were about to clap.
Richard and I invited others in our science class to debate “Do flying saucers exist?” The science club accepted the challenge. Science and mystery were to clash. There was drama in this coming together, because Miss Cupp, the paragon of science, was sponsor of the science club. For her, reproducible sensory evidence was fact, all else foolishness. She left no doubt that a belief in flying saucers was not only childish but contrary to the canons of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein.
The science club, it turned out, overplayed its hand. As we expected, our opponents claimed that flying saucers were temperature inversions, weather balloons, the planet Venus, and other misinterpretations of natural events. We countered with detailed photos of unexplained aerial objects. Did these airborne metallic disks, atmospheric torpedoes, and hovering lights look like hot air pancaked against cold? We quoted pilots, astronomers, and physicists who had seen UFOs. Were they observing mere weather balloons? How could Air Force pilot Thomas Mantell radio back the report of an illusion, chasing it to his death? We played a taped reenactment of the famous Washington D.C. radar sightings of UFOs. How could trained radar controllers mistake the planet Venus for an unidentified flying object?
When it was time for the class to vote—”Which side presented the best debate?”—the count was thirty to one in our favor. I was exhilarated. The triumph, however, was coupled with regret. I hadn’t intended this debate as a battle against my science teacher. In what Miss Cupp hoped would be the vindication of science against foolishness, it must have seemed to her that foolishness won. Yet again I let her down.
If you were to skim through my ninth grade yearbook you’d find one page especially poignant. On one half is a photo of the science club. Twelve faithful students circle the lab bench, eyeing ropes and pulleys positioned for a demonstration. Behind the students, at her post, stands Miss Cupp, stalwart and strong.
On the other half of the page you’d see the photo of our flying saucer club, the World Investigators of Saucer Phenomena. Richard, Linda, and I pose with twenty others, “Thousands See Saucers” emblazoned across the blackboard behind us. Several students hold paper plates in cocked hand, Frisbee-UFOs at launch position. I think you’ll find more laughter here.

Miss Cupp Lives On

What you couldn’t possibly see, unless you looked with sensitive eyes, is the sorrow I shouldered over a betrayed trust. I wanted Miss Cupp at my back too. But she wasn’t.
Perhaps today, memories older, Miss Cupp would understand that I haven’t forgotten the sorcerer’s cap. I walk in the cool night breeze, gaze up, and am drawn into the smooth dark arch of the sky, at home with the stars. I see ringed worlds and spinning spiral galaxies, wonderful luminaries invisible to the unaided eye. With eyes more deeply set, I catch the starshine of alien city light. It grows clearer, bolder, until I see luminescent mother ships hover and glowing disks dart, magnificent blurs of technological light.
These spectacles invariably transport my thoughts to something still undone. It’s more earthy, though it rides vehicles celestial. Like an insect trapped in time, I’ve been stuck all these years in the pitch of a frozen instant in a junior high school classroom. I was too young to say it then. But I can say it now. I’m sorry, Miss Cupp.

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Copyright @Vic Burton 2010