I have a very early memory of being outside on a summer night, catching lightning bugs with some other kids. My grandmother’s fourth husband showed me how to make my T-shirt glow by smearing its soft body across my chest. Even then, I was horrified at killing something to steal its light. I was horrified to think that somewhere, a lightning bug’s mate was flashing its insectile Morse code and receiving no reply. My family are all big believers in UFOs. For years, I’d go out at night, staring up at the sky, hoping for a sign with the fervor of a nun waiting for the voice of God, hoping for a star to move and prove itself not a star but an alien trying to signal me like a lightning bug. 

My mother worked in radio, back when everything was done locally, when it was all live shows and vinyl records and deejays calling the tunes. I imagine her sitting in master control with her Cher hair and platform shoes, pumping Fleetwood Mac and Hall & Oates onto the airwaves. At the end of every shift, the night deejay would sign off with, Thank you, Maria. Later, she worked for a radio station whose tower was in the middle of a cow pasture in Odessa, Missouri. The tower had a white strobe light on top. The farmer complained that his cattle wouldn’t milk because the light stressed them out. The first cattle mutilations were reported in Nebraska in 1974, era of Kool-Aid and Satanic panic and subliminal messaging. (See also: playing records backwards. I am no one. Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.) It might’ve been UFOs, but it might have been a cult or Satanists. Ranchers also reported seeing black helicopters– who knows what designs Big Brother might have on the bovine population? Anyway, someone should’ve told the farmer that he was lucky his cows were only upset and not left bloodless and milk-less in the middle of a crop circle. Around the time my mother started working in radio, NASA launched the Voyager Golden Records. To the makers of music—all worlds, all times. By 2025, we expect the spacecrafts’ power to run out, so they will no longer be able to transmit information back to us. Another trail of rapidly fading, bioluminescent bug juice, another one-sided firefly conversation. A reverse Close Encounters of the Third Kind earworm.

Yes, I was one of those kids raised on television. Mom would park my bouncy chair in front of the boob tube, handing the reins of my young mind over to Nickelodeon and Scooby-Doo. I used to yell out the answers to Picture Pages and couldn’t understand why Bill Cosby couldn’t hear me. First, it was the old cable boxes, the kind with buttons. Then came the Hamlin boxes with wood veneer and a sliding dial like a thermostat. The years when I could wake up at 5 a.m. without an alarm and go downstairs to find nothing but test patterns on every channel. Then The Little Rascals, then Hello Kitty Theater. Saturday morning cartoons paired well with technicolor cereal boxes, and their technicolor contents turned the milk hues not found in nature. I would plunge my arm into the box up to the shoulder, pawing through Cocoa Puffs or Fruity Pebbles for my toy surprise. It was always sure to be some plastic disappointment. Never anything as cool as a decoder ring. Maybe the milk I slurped in day-glo high fructose corn syrup slurries came from Odessa, Missouri. Back when everything was still mammoth and solid, when TVs were consoles, when my grandmother drove a 1967 Mercury Cougar, when nothing was ephemeral. When government cheese came in five-pound blocks, all emulsifiers and oil, hardly any cow involved in the making of this product. (In the government’s vast UFO conspiracy, I’m certain that the cheese is somehow involved.)

Satellite dishes from that era still squat on rooftops like gargoyles even now. If you drive through the country, you might see some old C-Bands, up to sixteen feet in diameter, like we’re a NASA outpost searching for alien transmissions. My uncle who lives in the Mississippi Pine Belt invested in such a dish, along with a pair of VCRs. He made bootleg copies of movies and rented them out till the sheriff shut him down. For years, we had copies of movies he’d made for us and watched them over and over. One of them was Poltergeist, where people talk to ghosts via a dead TV channel. They’re here is still one of the top movie quotes of all time, but also, Go into the light. Pop culture is our love language. Electronic voice phenomenon, like Poltergeist, is just another nugget, the idea of capturing a spirit’s voice on tape, only now, it’s all digital. Digital makes spirits of us all. Everything is ephemeral. Every holiday, we watched The Twilight Zone marathon. We watched Unsolved Mysteries and X-Files and Alien Autopsy. Now, we bury our dead with their cell phones, keep paying the carrier. We ring them up just to listen to their voices captured on a voicemail message. And if they, like E.T., want to phone home sometime, they should still have signal.  

I got my first Walkman when I was 11. At night, I would fall asleep listening to En Vogue and Madonna and the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack. Sometimes, I would be awakened by the sound of the cassette clicking off. Now, I fall asleep to white noise streamed through my Google Home device. After 12 hours, it cuts off. I awaken in the sudden silence. When I was 12, I found an alien handprint on my bedroom window, inhuman digits outlined with a faint bioluminescent residue, all powdered glowworm and pixie dust. They’re here. I am ready to go into the light.