by David Kubicek
Those of you who have read the comments after my short story “Ball of Fire” in The Moaning Rocks and Other Stories know the basic inspiration for that tale. To recap, my brother John and I, while investigating UFO sightings near Wilber, Nebraska, ended up parked in a farmer’s driveway just after sunset waiting for a UFO which didn’t show up that night. But earlier in the day we had done something else for an article I was writing: we took a fake UFO photo in the name of scientific experimentation.
John was in high school at the time and was heavily into science. He and some of his friends had started a club called the Aerial Phenomena Investigation Team (APIT), which proposed scientific explanations for UFO sightings. They also examined UFO photos for possible hoaxes (such as garbage can lids thrown into the air and photographed). One of the first articles I sold (to Grit , which at that time was a weekly newspaper) was about APIT, in which the team mentioned stapling two aluminum pie pans together to make a credible UFO if it were seen in the right context. 
To the left is a section of the photo that Grit published showing the pie pan UFOs.
On the day John and I went to investigate the UFO sightings in southeastern Nebraska, we stopped at the farm near Crete where our Dad grew up and where one of his sisters and two of his brothers still lived. It seemed like an ideal location to create a hoax. I was working on the Grit article, and we thought it might make a good addition to the story to actually show the pie pan UFO in flight, looking like an honest to God alien spacecraft.
To create our illusion, John stood on the roof of the car and flung the “UFO” like a frisbee while I photographed it from the ground. This was before digital photography so I couldn’t see the result until the film was processed, and there was no Photoshop so we couldn’t manipulate the images later. I had to shoot lots of photos and hope for the best. I shot in black and white for two reasons: 1) If it were in color, it might be easier to see that the UFO was a fake, and 2) In those days, because of the difficulty and expense of printing color photos, most newspapers used primarily black and white, and Grit was no exception. 
Luck was on our side, and we got a fairly decent UFO picture (at right is the full frame and an enlargement of the significant portion), but unfortunately Grit published only the photo of the APIT members holding the pie pan UFOs and not our fake UFO
photo.
The trees along Turkey Creek are about half a mile away and the phony spacecraft is actually closer than the windmill tower in the foreground, but because of the way everything came together the spacecraft seems to be rising out of the trees. So here, for the first time in print, is the result of John’s and my dabbling in UFO trickery.
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