Flight of the Navigator

"Flight of the Navigator" was much better than "The Fourth Kind". It was even much scarier.

A 1970s-era Floriday boy is abducted by a UFO and wakes up - the same age - in the mid-1980s. He returns home and reunites with his parents who are, of course, in an emotional state somewhere between shock, fear and total elation.

NASA takes him for study, to find out why he hasn't aged in the past several years. Once he is at NASA headquarters, the UFO that captured him - now in the Top Secret custody of the U.S. government - communicates with him telepathically. The boy finds the UFO in a secret bunker and boards it.

Once aboard the UFO turns out to be a friendly intelligence with a voice provided by Paul Reubens aka Pee-Wee Herman.

The boy and his UFO go on all sorts of wild adventures before - in a heartwrenching scene - the UFO returns him to where he belongs - his parents house in the 1970s. They didn't even know he was gone!

This was the movie that inspired me to build my spaceship.

My parents had just finished building their house on Belmar Boulevard. Tools, building supplies and other scraps littered the backyard.

I connected four or five 2x4 boards with joyces for the - I now admit - rather shoddy foundation. For the floor I nailed plywood boards on top and then glued and taped bathroom tiles over the plywood in irregular patterns.

Adults thought all of this was very cute, but I thought I really was going to have a spaceship that would take me to distant planets - it was just a matter of time and effort.

In a sense, I am still this little boy and I am still attempting to visit outer space.

I think of all the years I've wasted in-between, but now I'm back.

But perhaps there is no such thing as waste.