A guest post by Robert J. McCarter.

I saw a UFO once. UFO as in Unidentified Flying Object. As in, I have no idea what it was. None. Not to this day.

This was in the mid-seventies. I was around twelve and living on an eighty acre ranch outside of Globe, Arizona. My older brother and I were in the living room of the historic ranch house which had a large window that overlooked our barn, pasture, and Icehouse Canyon as it wound its way down from the Pinal Mountains. The area is a hilly desert covered with prickly pear cactus, mesquite trees, and crawling with ants and scorpions.

My brother and I were being brothers (in other words, bickering). He was seated facing away from the window and I was standing looking out at the view when something caught my eye. I saw a round white shape, a bit diffuse at the edges, slowly and silently crossing the blue sky down the canyon a ways. It’s pace and elevation were steady, it was perfectly round, and because of its diffuse, non-reflective nature I couldn’t tell how far away it was.

I started freaking out, telling my brother that I was seeing a “UFO.” It couldn’t be a plane, they aren’t round and silent. It couldn’t be a cloud, the shape was too uniform. It couldn’t be a balloon, again the shape and the absolutely steady motion.

My brother didn’t believe me, thought I was messing with him, and never turned around while I watched the UFO dip slightly and then slip between two hills about half a mile away. This gave me perspective on its distance–it was closer than I had first thought, maybe 150 feet up, and fairly small, about two or three feet in diameter.

I probably would have forgotten about the incident except that a day or two later, I was outside looking in the same direction when a remote control airplane took a similar flight path (it was a bit closer but was flying across that canyon at the same height). The plane made a ton of noise and it really struck me then just how quiet and strange my UFO was.

Guest Writer Bio:
Robert J. McCarter is very comfortable writing about characters as long as one of those characters is not himself (though the Fictorians got him to break that cardinal rule today). Actually Robert is anything but comfortable speaking (or writing) of himself in the third person, he finds it pretentious and silly. So, let’s drop all that usual bio crap. For more, head over to his website.

The Longest Ten Minutes

September 11, 2014

Evan Braun

About a decade ago, I worked for a short time at a small Bible college in Huntsville, Alabama. My main job was to film the various classes, then edit them so the courses could be made available for online correspondence. I intermittently worked on this project through three school years. During this time, I lived onsite at the school’s dormitories, and as a result I became friends with a lot of the students who stayed in dorm.

Around the time, a very strange incident happened to me which I’ve tried several times since to figure out. I’ve even tried to purvey the details into various stories and books. Every time I’ve done so, an alpha reader ends up scoffing at it: “Ridiculous. That’s so implausible.” Somehow the fact that it happened in real life doesn’t make it any more plausible. As a result, the following anecdote has yet to actually be immortalized in the written word, until now.

One evening, after dinner, I accepted an invitation from a group of students to join them at a favorite park of theirs. First, we stopped for some smoothies and milkshakes, and then we started to drive. The park was near one of the students’ home, about twenty minutes away, so it necessitated a short drive. The sun was already down at this point, so the only illumination was the street lights. In the near-dark, I sat in the back seat next to a friend of mine—a male student—while two women sat up front. We exchanged some quiet chatter, but we were mostly kind of tired from a long day, content to listen to the music playing over the stereo.

Suddenly, I felt a hand land on my leg, just above the knee, and rest there. At first, I thought this was an accidental grazing. Maybe this friend had meant to lower his hand onto the seat beside him, and somehow missed. Maybe. The strange thing was that the hand did not pull away. It stayed… and stayed.

I was fairly speechless at this point, but also kind of terrified of what it might mean, so I resisted the urge to turn to him and very politely say, “Excuse you, but your hand is resting on my leg.” I mean, what if this was real, intentional? I didn’t want to embarrass him, but in retrospect I obviously should have said something right away, because my silence only seemed to encourage the behavior.

Because it didn’t stop. One minute passed, then two. To my shock, the hand inched up, up up up, until it found my inner thigh. This was clearly no accident! And he did not move his hand. If anything, he groped tighter.

This went on for an agonizingly long time as my mind raced to find the perfect, tactful solution. Five minutes. Seven, eight. Ten? Yes. Ten minutes. This is the part people can never believe, because ten minutes is an insanely long period of time in this context. But I distinctly remember checking the time at least three times. And I’m sure it can’t have been much less than ten minutes, because I later drove that route many times. The timeline is not in dispute.

“Excuse me,” I finally whispered as we neared our destination. “Your hand’s on my leg.”

His hand lifted immediately. “Oh, sorry!”

And we never spoke of it again.

The Thin Line Between Memoir and Realistic Fiction

September 10, 2014

Kristin Luna

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“When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.” – Stephen King, Joyland

In the summer, my brother and I would walk to our small town library. Sometimes, we’d cross paths with a man walking his mountain lion on the sidewalk. One time, the mountain lion bit my arm, and I needed fourteen stitches.

It’s crazy, but it’s actually mostly true. I was afraid for my life when I saw the mountain lion, but it never actually bit my arm. But it’s plausible, and who’s to say I’m wrong? It’s my memory, after all.

I technically could sell this story as a memoir. But when someone starts digging into my history and finds that, although there was a man in my hometown that had a pet mountain lion, there are no hospital records of me getting stitches.

This sort of thing is nothing new to the literary world. The most recent case of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces brought this to the public’s attention. Frey’s gritty, gripping tale of addiction was marketed as a memoir, although years earlier, Frey had tried to sell it as contemporary realistic fiction. When no publishers picked it up, he pitched it as a memoir. When Clifford Irving received a three-quarter million advance for The Autobiography of Howard Hughes, he delivered. Only, Hughes proved he had never met Irving, and Irving spent 17 months in jail for his lie. Misha Defonseca wrote a harrowing tale of her childhood during the Holocaust, only to be disproven by a genealogist who found that Defonseca was Catholic. “Ever since I can remember, I felt Jewish,” said Defonseca. “There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world.”

These transgressions were surely career-killers, amiright?

Well, not exactly. James Frey became a household name. His book Bright Shiny Morning, released after the scandal, was a bestseller. His lie only seemed to make him more popular.

I can understand how a reader would feel betrayed. I felt a twinge of it. But here’s the thing. I don’t expect most memoirists to tell the truth. I expect embellishment, because our memories are dirty liars. A Million Little Pieces is still one of my favorite books, even after The Smoking Gun revealed factual inaccuracies. Because a good story entertains or reveals some truth. And if it’s a really good story, it does both.

While I don’t care if a memoir’s facts are proven false, many people do. Like, say, publishers. Readers. Higher ups in the publishing world. While A Million Little Pieces sold even more copies after the scandal, you can bet that no one wants to publish another “memoir” by Frey, unless it’s about how he lied.

Remember the story I wrote at the beginning of this post? Here’s an interesting experiment. What is the first thing that you remember about it? I doubt that the first thing you remembered was that part of the story wasn’t true. And that is the power of story. A story doesn’t necessarily tell the truth, it just reveals it.

The $80 Million Bank Heist (you’ve probably never heard of)

September 9, 2014

Jace Killan

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I’m a sucker for a good bank heist flick and I enjoy crime drama television, though I started to notice that many shows reflect similar stories to those in the news. After Bernie Madoff, a number of series had an episode about a billionaire hedge fund guy screwing over an everyday Joe in some sort of investment scheme. There have been other examples where these series use popular and current news in their episodes like a kidnapping, a missing spouse, a serial killer, and so on.

I enjoy reading and watching fiction that is based in reality. I like it when a story takes me to the uncomfortable edge of “what if”.

And so I keep a look out for those fantastical stories that only reality can tell, vested in irony and karmic justice, or those dramatic tragedies superseded by the ultimate protagonist. Reality is awesome and I’m grateful to be a part of it. But sometimes it can be too strange to be believable.

I love heist films like Ocean’s 11 or Bandits; Inside Man was awesome. Maybe it’s because I can imagine just for a moment, the “what if.” Not that I’d ever rob a bank, but what if I tried, could I get away with it?

I was asked to spend a couple years researching and helping with a case involving an $80 million dollar bank robbery. Yes, million and that figure alone puts the story into my NOT very realistic category.

Well it wasn’t one bank; it was actually more than two dozen banks. Believable now? What if I were to tell you that this bank heist didn’t involve guns or hostages? It didn’t involve get away vehicles or hideouts or even a crew of specialized talent. Boring?

It was one guy that exploited a connection. From what I could tell, the “robberies” happened from 2002 through 2009 when he was eventually arrested by the FBI.

To make the story even more unbelievable, the banks wired him the funds. You see, they thought they were participating in loans made to a billionaire and other landowners.

As an example, one gentleman borrowed from our bank-robbing friend, roughly $6 million using some property in Hawaii as collateral. The heist involved oversubscribing the loan, meaning that this bandit reached out to four different banks to subscribe the loan that he had made to the land owner, indicating that each bank would be in first position (and of course he failed to disclose that three other banks would be just as involved and just as clueless to his scheme). The four banks wired some twenty four million combined unaware that this same individual had transacted with many other banks on many other properties in the same manner. He used some of the funds to make payments on older fraudulent loans so that he could keep the Ponzi scheme going.

He lived large for a number of years and I imagine that there are still some funds yet to be accounted for. I’m sure he’ll be watched closely when he’s released, but the writer in me wonders if there isn’t a closing twist in this tale involving a cache of money on a private island somewhere. What if?

I’ve read numbers as low as $60 million and as high as $135 million, but the court documents and FBI seemed to settle on $79.9 million. What’s a few million among friends?

At the end of it all, he was sentenced to 72 months in prison, I believe half of which was due to not claiming some of the monies on his income taxes that he transferred to his personal accounts. You don’t want to mess with the IRS. They expected their piece of the heist totaling more than $500,000.

I find it interesting that a man who robs a bank of $5,000 could easily spend a couple decades behind bars while someone that defrauds institutions of $80 million might serve just a couple years with good behavior assuming he pays taxes on the money he’s embezzled.

So I’ve thought about writing the tale but it seems to be stranger than fiction.