Watching X-Files with no lights on...

I've had an odd year, from an aviation standpoint. Not that I've even set foot on an airplane.

It's just that when we moved up from Cincinnati, we had a temporary apartment near a small regional airport. Cessnas and traffic copters and little pleasure craft were always flying overhead. And Ohio State football game days, all the planes dragging advertising banners would come and go right over our apartment.

Then I'd drive across town to my job, which was separated from Port Columbus International Airport by just a swath of interstate. I'd be sitting in some godawful meeting, staring out the window and seeing an alarmingly large 767 filling the sky, noisily disrupting my daydream.

So when we moved from the apartment to our house in a rural area, I figured my close encounters with flying machines would be fewer and farther between.

They probably are, but my new aviation encounters are much more intriguing. There is a small airstrip a couple miles from my house. When I say small, I mean, not much bigger than our own property. It's tucked into a low spot between a small river and a small hillside. It's right next to a very old metal bridge, on a road that virtually nobody drives on. The grass "runway" has a clump of trees near one end, and corn growing along one side. You'd never realize it was an airstrip if you were standing in the middle of it.

But what makes this airstrip interesting is that it frequenly hosts black helicopters. Not for very long, mind you. They fly in, they land, they disappear again. But they are there.

Yes, I said black helicopters. And no I'm not wearing a tinfoil hat. (I have a fitting next week.)

These are not the big bubble-headed traffic copters. These are lean, angular machines without any obvious markings.

Sometimes, they fly around with large objects dangling below them. Sometimes they take off two or three at a time. Other times they fly in at night, with spotlights pointing at the ground as they find their way in.

As I sit at my desk in my "home office" (a.k.a. the bedroom) I see them rise up out of the trees and fly off over our house. The frequency varies. Sometimes I'll go several weeks without seeing any. Other times, I'll see them three or four times a week. Today, one flew right over our house at fairly low altitude.

And that's not all. We're also not too far from an old military base that was converted to a commercial freight hub. In theory anyway. I figure the helicopters are coming from there. But the other thing that comes from there are these big, low-flying, slow-moving, four-engine jets. They are solid gray, again with no obvious markings. We don't see them as often as the helicopters, but there was a stretch of about a week and a half where they were flying low over our area about three or four times a night, every night. Or maybe it was one plane circling the area three or four times. It's hard to tell.

It would be interesting to plot the activity levels, and see if there is any corresponding military activity overseas some months later. But doing that would probably get me on some list that I don't want to be on. Then again, maybe this post will get me on a list. I think Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton is within 50 miles. That base was included in a variety of alien rumors back when aliens and UFO's were still in vogue.

If you don't see any new posts for a while, please call the FBI and ask for Agent Mulder or Agent Skully. And get fitted for a tinfoil hat.