It’s July 1979 and Mike Hoban is sitting in the solitary armchair of his one-room apartment in North Finchley, London. At his feet, Jane Abraham, his girlfriend of three years, is working on a quilt she started just before Christmas. Mike is reading “The World According to Garp”, with a gentle smile on his face. It’s the post-exam, pre-head-for-home period familiar to any student.
They’d paid the rent to the end of the month from Mike’s wages as a barman, and Jane was putting off returning to her Canterbury family home.
“Is that good?” Jane asked without looking up.
“Very,” Mike replied. “I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like it.”
“At least it’s not Science Fiction,” said Jane with a disapproving expression. She was more of a Jane Austen or Thomas Hardy type, and she tried hard to elevate Mike from what she saw as his lazy literature. She loved him, but she realised they had firmly differing ideas of culture.
Jane was a medical student. Mike studied physics. They started dating at the university Labour Club and stayed together until the end of his three-year degree, but now it was time to part. At least temporarily. He was studying at Cambridge’s Cavendish Lab, and she still had a few years of medical study. She was determined to make this last, though.
He laughed at a witty passage in his book, and Jane looked up, her scowl giving way to a warm smile of encouragement. Perhaps there was hope for him yet.
She looked out of their small window at the familiar view across London. The sky was a kind of azure rarely seen in the capital: cloudless, sun-soaked, and empty. Empty except for… She rose to her feet and pointed.
“M-Mike,” she whispered, “what the hell is THAT?”
Mike looked up from his book, followed her outstretched arm with his eyes, and saw a huge, dull-grey globe hanging stationary in the sky about a mile to the south.
“I have no idea.” He pulled the curtain to one side to get a better view. “A balloon maybe.”
The globe in the sky was still and featureless, but Mike knew it wasn’t a balloon. It only stayed like that for a couple of minutes, but they were the longest minutes of Mike’s life before it accelerated off to the South.
Before Mike could say anything, two Phantom jets came streaking across the sky from the Northeast.
“Wow, did you see those?” Mike said. “They’re USAF, not RAF.”
“The yanks?” Jane replied. “What are they doing chasing things across London?”
“I dunno.” Mike was visibly excited.
The next morning, they sat in Goldberg’s café on the High Road. Mike was still excited about the encounter. Jane less so.
“You realise we can’t talk about this to anyone,” she declared after letting him bubble incoherently for a few minutes. He looked perplexed.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m taking up a career in medicine. You’re going into research. It would destroy our reputations if anything about this gets out. You must promise me not to mention it to anyone.”
After some cajoling, Mike eventually agreed, and they did not mention the topic again.
Mike married Dr Jane Abraham, despite her parents’ disapproval. They lived happily for 20 years until she died from an incurable auto-immune disease. Mike never spoke of that day in July, until he retired, a Professor of physics at MIT, some quarter of a century later. That was when he was called to the UAP hearings before the Congressional Aeronautics Committee in 2023. His role as the sober debunker of wild theories about aliens secured him the spot.
He stood unsteadily; his knee had been giving him trouble for years. He cleared his voice and tapped the microphone before him.
“Mister Chairman, members of Congress,” he began, “I want to tell you the story of when I was an undergraduate in London. I am at a complete loss as to what I saw that day…”