The neighbours had a tabby cat called Looney that liked to visit my house during the day because she was lonely. I worked from home most days and was able to keep her company while her owners were out of the house at work - she was an interior designer and he was a pilot.
I didn’t mind - Looney was a peaceful and friendly cat who mostly lay on a windowsill in the daylight and napped the day away. I occasionally talked to the neighbours when I saw them, though it was usually the woman rather than the man. The few times I met him, I found out that he was a commercial airline pilot who flew the London to New York route.
The pilot had a very erratic schedule as a result and I never knew when he was around or not. Because it was around this time that I, like many other people around the world, became fascinated with the revelation that aliens were in fact real and that some governments had been in contact with them for decades now.
I had watched and read more than a few videos and articles online and had learnt that commercial airline pilots were among the privileged few who had been seeing strange objects in the sky during their flight hours for many years now and I wanted to know if my neighbour was also one of these pilots.
I positioned my desk near to the front of the house where I could look out of the windows and keep a lookout for my neighbour when he appeared. I could then pop out, strike up a conversation with him about Looney and then mention his profession and the aliens.
Unfortunately I had a busy few days at work that had me working into the evenings as well. As a result, I wasn’t able to keep as close an eye on my neighbour’s potential arrival nor could I keep up my now usual evening occupation of watching video after video on aliens, of which there were a seemingly endless number.
So I missed a very special video that had come out the week before on UFOs (or UAPs - Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, as they were recently renamed). My neighbour, the pilot, featured as one of the talking heads - the video had been made not long ago so he looked exactly the same and was easily recognisable.
In the video he was confirming exactly my questions on aliens: he had been witnessing them for years, from when he was an RAF pilot to his current job as a commercial airline pilot. Other pilots appeared as talking heads to make similar statements, but then once the video was over, I noticed a follow up that had been uploaded just the day before - it had the picture of my neighbour on the thumbnail and the question “Disappeared - killed or abducted?”. Of course I clicked on it.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
It was by the same person who had made the previous video only now they were addressing the camera directly. It started:
“Hey guys, so new developments on the missing plane mystery: turns out the pilot on Flight 273 from Heathrow to JFK has been confirmed as Thomas McGuire, one of the pilots I interview last month in my video - here,” (the creator pointed to a corner of the frame and a link helpfully popped up to the video I had just watched.)
Missing plane? I paused the video, looked up a news site and it was there on the front page. A plane flying from London to New York had gone missing, feared crashed in the North Atlantic somewhere. Rescue efforts were underway but so far no wreckage has been found. There was also no mayday from the plane before it supposedly crashed.
I waited for Thomas McGuire’s wife to return home that day but, if she did, I didn’t see her. Nor did I see her the following day, or the day after that. Looney the cat was fine - I often fed her chicken slices and water, and she was fine to stay overnight indefinitely until her owners appeared.
That had been over a month ago. The situation remained changed for weeks with the plane seemingly being erased from the face of the earth, similar to the flight in the South Pacific a few years ago. One day I saw someone walking up to my neighbours’ house and I sprang up, rushing out to meet them. I knew they had an adult son but not what he looked like - if this was him, perhaps he could shed some light on what was going on with his parents.
It was a young man who claimed to be working for an estate agent - the neighbours, or at least the woman, had decided to sell up. I asked after the woman and he said that she was fine and was staying with her son’s family elsewhere. I told him about Looney and he shrugged. I went back inside.
Was it normal for the estate agent to go into the house along with a couple of colleagues without the owners’ presence? I wasn’t sure but I expected it was fine - they were probably just taking pictures for the house listing. The woman likely didn’t want to be reminded of her husband’s, almost certainly permanent, absence.
But, just the other day, someone purportedly working within the Pentagon had leaked footage from a satellite showing Flight 273 being swarmed by fast-moving bright lights before blipping out of existence quite suddenly - the plane and the bright lights all disappearing in the blink of an eye.
I continued monitoring the internet for news of the flight and found a community of like-minded people fascinated with the case. There were innumerable discussion threads throwing out one wild, unsubstantiated theory after another. The aliens were working with the government, there were different factions and Earth was another battleground in an interstellar war, there was more than one alien race, and so on.
One discussion thread stood out, because of what I found out today. It said that the pilot had encountered an alien fugitive and had agreed to harbour them - he had been found out and that was why he had been spirited away. Well, all of these ideas were certainly sad, considering the pilot’s fate, but nonetheless fascinating, I thought to myself as I went to the kitchen to feed Looney her afternoon snack.
“What an interesting time to be alive, eh?” I said to the cat.
Looney looked me dead in the eye and said “Yes, it certainly is - and time is running out for what we must do next.”