I miss flying saucers.

The night sky was a mystery. In a lawn chair vigil on a summer's evening, gazing at the stars, you hoped to see something moving up there . . . something that wasn't supposed to be moving.

Such are the memories of a dinosaur, a Sun Belt baby boomer, born in the wonder years between Sputnik and Apollo 11. Today, abduction stories and anti-government paranoia have killed the UFO tale.

I used to watch for those lights at night. The sky was a blackboard, awaiting luminous tracings by an unknown hand.

Summer brings it to mind. A few weeks past, my family was in the Sierra, far from city glare and deep into the pine-dark where the flying saucers of my childhood were thought to appear. Camping, stargazing, bedding down under canvas, the pleasant chill at the back of the neck, all summon the sense of the otherworldly that used to drive me deep into my sleeping bag. Something could be out there. Something was out there.

Nowadays, the slate is blank and neither UFO nor truth is out there, to paraphrase ``The X-Files.'' Not even ``The X-Files'' is out there anymore.

Television shows like Mulder and Scully's are in fact part of a cynical haze that dimmed the flying saucer firmament. Mention space visitors today and it's all about psychosexual violation, mutilation and murder, Pentagon plots. Or it's a sales pitch: ``Roswell'' is a cute teen show. E.T. hawks Reese's Pieces and chums around with the Toys R Us mascot.

The flying saucers have landed -- and they're ``branded.''

UFOs once were pure, and not for hire. The modern saucer era took off, so to speak, with a curt news story in June 1947. Private pilot Kenneth Arnold was cruising near Mount Rainier when he saw a swarm of objects glint between him and the mountain, skipping like stones. To this day, no one knows what he saw. (One recent theory, printed in the mystery magazine Fortean Times: a trick of perspective and a flock of very large pelicans.)

Arnold landed and told his tale to a reporter, and the story caught the country's imagination. Space visitors in a pulp novel were one thing, but in the Associated Press . . . this was news.

And the postwar imagination was fervid indeed. Suddenly, Americans knew about rockets plummeting to Earth from beyond the horizon, and atomic weapons, whose invention prompted Robert Oppenheimer to pronounce himself ``death, destroyer of worlds.'' Strange new forces threatened annihilation. Wartime pilots had seen eerie things off their wingtips, too, things they nicknamed ``foo fighters.'' Whether they were Soviets, Nazis or ghosts, no one knew.

Anxiety about the technological unknowns was in the air -- and, with the coming of the UFO, in the atmosphere.

It built fast in those early Cold War years. Fifty years ago came the high point.

The sweltering evening of July 19, 1952, blips rippled across air-traffic-control screens around Washington, D.C. The Pentagon, the White House and Congress lay below. Post-Sept. 11, we can taste the fear of those 1952 Americans tracking those specters.

Civilian pilots saw lights. Jet fighters roared up to investigate. In a night of racing across the capital and its suburbs, interceptors failed to catch -- much less shoot down -- any bogies. A week later, phantoms again mocked their way across radar screens in the Washington area, and again vanished, leaving behind nothing but breathless headlines.

One air-traffic controller, quoted this summer in the Washington Post, stands by his story: He saw a whitish-blue object outside the tower window. But he never saw it again.

``Where did it go?'' asked Howard Cocklin, 83. ``Why don't people see these things today? Why 50 years ago?''

The saucer hunt came and went for years. But it began to take macabre turns.

In the old contact tales, long part of UFO lore, aliens came down as ``space friends,'' wise and movie-star handsome, sometimes in snappy uniforms. Now, they became monstrous. They kidnapped, probed, violated. They grew leathery and long-fingered. Like anti-social teenagers, they took to skulking around waste places and hurting animals.

I don't know why the saucer story grew bitter. Maybe NASA drained the universe of its thrill. In the days of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, a space vehicle was a ship. In the shuttle years, it's a bus, a tow truck, a mechanical bull ride for rich tourists.

Maybe too many watchers despaired of waiting for a saucer to land on the White House lawn -- a prospect that seemed so near in the summer of '52. The lights in the sky never came close enough; maybe the government was holding them back?

Or maybe they were already too close. The saucer mystery meshed with darker, psychological mysteries -- of medieval demons who seduced women in their sleep, of folk fears lurking on the heath. UFOs put a modern dust jacket on ancient stories.

And then in the '70s, supermarket tabloids helped renew the Roswell yarn and the ripe comedy that surrounded it in edgy 1947. The tide of paranoia rose to where it is today. In the modern version, that clumsy Cold War balloon that tore itself into flinders in New Mexico is a space vessel, rubbery bodies and finally a bottomless government conspiracy.

Roswell lives on -- in a thousand documentaries and Web sites, and in the sour taste of pop-culture boredom.

Nowadays, you can see a UFO any time you wish, thanks to the movies. Or a stegosaurus, or a game played on flying broomsticks. Technology finished the job of waving away our mysteries like smoke, and we yawn and pass the popcorn.

Wonder is so hard to come by. All of our dreams are animate, and none of them are real.

Go out in the mountains, gape at the dark. The night sky glitters with junk. They're lovely little specks, bright drifting Space Age flotsam. Dead.

What hope do we have of being moved by a flicker among the pines?

Who still lies awake, pulse thudding, peering past the tent flap at that blazing, empty blackboard?

Space is more silent than ever.

http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/editorial/3982682.htm