As the sun went down, Anderson sat on her back porch, staring across her garden toward the woods, and listened to the voices in her head.

In her junior year at college she had taken a Psychology Department seminar on creativity. She had been amazed – and a little relieved – to discover that she was not concealing some private neurosis; almost all imaginative people heard voices. Not just thoughts but actual voices inside their heads, different personae, each as clearly defined as voices on an old-time radio show. They came from the right side of the brain, the teacher explained – the side which is most commonly associated with visions and telepathy and that striking human ability to make images by drawing comparisons and making metaphors.

There are no such things as flying saucers.

Oh yeah? Who says so?

The Air Force, for one. They closed the books on flying saucers twenty years ago. The), were able to explain all but three per cent of all verified sightings, and they said those last three were almost certainly caused by ephemeral atmospheric conditions – stuff like sun-dogs, clear-air turbulence, pockets of clear-air electricity. Hell, the Lubbock Lights were front-page news, and all they turned out to be was … well, there were these packs of traveling packs of moths, see? And the Lubbock streetlights hit their wings and reflected big light-colored moving shapes onto the low cloud masses that a stagnant weather pattern kept over the town for a week.