Previously you’d have made your fire downwind from your new bed. You’d have made it in a circle of rocks about 12 inches in diameter. Then you’d have found dry wood, perhaps some tinder dry bark, broken up some small twigs and then with a bit of lint from the clothes dryer at home that you’d brought in a little pipe tobacco can, you’d have found your trusty Bic lighter and started a fire. (Twirling sticks is for desperate people or Tom Hanks movies).

While you’re cutting the material for your mattress – UFOs never once entering your thoughts – you would avoid cutting off the end of your thumb. To the bone. It hurts.

If you do that, you’ll find yourself gasping and a strange sense of liquid running down your face. Your eyes have started to leak. Some would say you’re crying with pain.

But knowing you’re going into shock, you grab a can of condensed milk out of your pack, plunge a knife through the top and guzzle as much as you can. There’s a theory that an instant sugar hit will overcome shock.

Next, you dip your wok (that’s a cooking device) in the stream, gathering just enough water for a coffee. Placing the bowl-shaped wok over the rocks on the fire, you marvel at how well it balances compared to a flat-bottomed pot. And soon you’re in Folgers heaven.

Shortly, you’ve spread your poncho over the “mattress,” laid out your sleeping bag, placed your rolled up Swanni (NZ all-around outdoors woolen jacket) as a pillow, taken off your boots, jumped into the “sack” (as New Zealanders call it) pulled the rest of the poncho over you – and you’re laying back like a King in a four poster.

But it’s a better bed than any King or Queen ever experienced.

Above you, the Southern Cross is sparkling, and off to the east (or is it west) the “Iron Pot” (or Big Dipper) is testing your knowledge of the constellations.

Happily, you relax, watching a natural panorama in the heavens that beats the heck out of Sesame Street, The Simpsons, LAPD, and even Playboy.

To your left, out of the corner of your eye, a blade of grass moves gently in the warm breeze that is still wafting in from the ocean. Beyond that, the stream is happily bouncing its way toward the cliff and the waterfall that will take it 500 feet straight down before it too joins the sea.

As you begin to doze off, your eyes becoming a little heavy, you notice in the heavens a small traveling light. Awake again, you see another, and another. BUT – by the way they track and the speed at which they travel, you know for certain these are simply satellites.

It’s a marvelous thing that down here, at the bottom of the world, you can see satellites going about their business, traversing the heavens for who knows how long until, like some aged person who has run the race of life, they’ll just blip out and go to black.

It makes you wonder about life. And, as you do that, you become aware of how vast space is, at least from this perspective (which is long before Hubble ever went up there). It makes you wonder: “Is there anybody out there?”

And the thought is enough to start a surreal epiphany – a short period of time in which time stands still.

In a patch of space where no stars seem to be twinkling, a light appears – and moves on a trajectory that will take it directly overhead.

It’s a light that’s brighter than a satellite. And it’s traveling at a different speed. You can’t stop the surprising one word thought: “UFO.”

But you’re a journalist. You might write stories about them, but you really don’t believe in them at all. So you instantly become an expert and explain it to yourself as a “secret American spy satellite that’s keeping an eye on Russian submarines.”

This seems like a very good insight and a perfect expert opinion.

Except that the light stops, directly overhead, brightens up by about 1000 lux (a unit of light) – pauses for a millennia – and suddenly reverses and gathers speed until as if switching to cruise control, it glides back along the exact same trajectory on which it appeared.

It is at that moment that you understand that there is a lot of stuff out there that you don’t understand.

There is something out there called "intelligent life." In fact, now that you are coming back to your senses, you realize that whatever gave that blade of grass beside your bed the will to become a self-propagating species, and whatever it is that lives in wood so that it can become fire, and whatever it is that brings the taste of salt to the wind…and whatever it is that is piloting that craft way up there…there is a “Life Force” in all things.

And from there, through the passage of many years, you will see the occasional "UFO" in different times and places – and you will know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that no matter what the news media might say, regardless of the debunkers and “experts,” you know for certain that one day, you will meet the crew of that strange craft. And many more.

One day.

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