BIG BARRY’S BALLOONS: A SPACESHIP ODDITY

Big Barry Had The Balloons
By Ted Colin
Associat Editor,
Humor News Nuts Online Magazine

I recently received a call from a Big Barry who owns a toy factory over in Kalkaska County. He said that one night he threw an outdoor cookout party for his employees just behind the factory and according to Barry, several UFO‘s started to hover overhead. Barry said that all of his employees were so amazed at the hovering crafts that many of them dropped their plastic glasses of vodka laced fruit punch.

I was intrigued with what Barry had told me so I asked him if he still had any vodka laced fruit punch left. He said he had about ten gallons of it so I agreed to stake out his factory for an evening as long as I could have a gallon of fruit punch. Barry asked me “Are you going to use the fruit punch as bait to bring in the aliens?”

“Let’s just say that the fruit punch might make it easier for me to spot your UFO’s“, I replied.

Barry agreed to give me what I wanted so I showed up the next evening with my colleague Gerrard to see if we might just spot some UFO’s. Barry left a gallon of fruit punch on a picnic table just behind the main building. It was an old wood plank table set up evidently for the lunch breaks of the employees. Outdoor picnic table lunch facilities are common at Northern Michigan businesses. Barry not only left us the gallon of punch and some plastic cups to drink it with but, he also left us an old box full of various outdated snack packs that came from the vending machine. Barry had certainly gone all out to keep us happy. Gerrard and I each brought a sleeping bag since we were not intending to go anywhere especially if we had any fruit punch.

It was cloudy that evening so it got dark fairly early. Gerrard and I looked up at the gray darkening sky and saw several objects directly over the back parking lot of the factory. Gerrard and I squatted down behind the picnic table so as not to scare off the aliens. I started watching the aliens really close when I heard the constant crunching of corn chips by Gerrard. We had not been there more than twenty minutes and all the candy bars from the snack box were devoured by Gerrard. Now he was working on eating all the corn and potato chips. He was just smacking away while I was vigilantly watching the space ships hover over the yard. I figured it wouldn’t be long and all the snacks would be gone and I had not even eaten a bag of pretzels.

Finally, I had had enough of Gerrard. “Gerrard,” I said, “quit scarping down all the snack food and get your cell phone out. We need to get some pictures of these spaceships to prove that we didn’t just make this up.”

“I can’t take any pictures,” Gerrard replied.

“Why not?” I asked. “Didn’t you bring along your cell phone like I told you?”

“Oh I brought along my cell phone,” Gerrard assured me. “The only thing is the battery is dead so I can’t even tell people live what we’re doing on our Twitter account.”

“Dog gone it Gerrard. I spent all last night trying to figure out how to set up a Twitter account to compliment our blog. I did it just so we could be high tech tonight. Twitter is where it’s at now. Bloging is just so 2010. I was hoping pictures from your cell phone would compliment our tweet tonight and we’d be world famous with our proof of alien visitation. Now since you’ve messed everything up I guess there’s only one thing left for us to do. We’re going to have to capture one of those spacecraft and hold it until morning.”

I was really mad and it was a hot night and the heat made me feel even more intensely upset. I was still determined to prove that we had seen aliens so I stood up and moved around the picnic table and motioned for Gerrard to follow me. The closer we moved toward the initial siting the space ships seemed to appear. There must have been a dozen of them hovering over the ground at different altitudes. Some hovered over the barn while others hovered just a few feet above the earth. All of the spaceships seemed really small so I imagined that either the aliens were little teeny guys or perhaps the spaceships were just drones. In either case capturing just one of them would prove the existence of extraterrestrials once and for all.

As I said before it was really hot that night but, just as Gerrard and I approached the aliens a cool breeze came up which felt really good. Suddenly, the spacecrafts moved and tossed around.

“I’m getting kind of scared,” Gerrard whispered to me. “I’ve got to get a look at those things before I just go up there and grab one.” Gerrard pulled out a flashlight and aimed it directly at one of the spacecrafts. The light hit the nearest craft which was shaped like a heart. I believed that it must have been some sort of stealth design so that conventional radar and even a tachyon beam would not be able to detect it.

The craft itself was blood red in color with a curious message at the heart of it so to speak. It said, “BE MY VALENTINE”. Since we were no where near Valentines Day on the calendar I interpreted the message as one of friendship. Maybe the aliens thought that their message was a way to say “hello”. This gave me confidence that if we grabbed one of them they would not put up much of a fight since they might be thinking that Gerrard and I had peaceful intentions.

Gerrard suddenly flashed his light on another square shaped balloon This balloon was a steel blue in color with purple letters on it that said “HAPPY BIRTHDAY”. “Now how did they know that today is my birthday?” Gerrard gasped.

“I didn’t know it was your birthday Gerrard,” I said. “If I had known it was your birthday I wouldn’t have been so upset when you ate up all the free candy bars and didn’t leave any for me.”

“Well, the reason the battery on my cell phone is dead is because I took so many pictures at my birthday party earlier today. I took a picture of mom and then I took dozens of pictures of my new pet rat named Jimmy. He is really quite. I put a little paper birthday hat on him made out of the same construction paper as the hat that mom made for me. He was so adorable I couldn’t stop taking pictures of him even after he drew a lot of blood when he bit mom’s finger. She had to get some rabies and tetanus shots but she‘s o.k. now”.

Gerrard and I were almost up to one of the spaceships when suddenly a gust of wind came up and all the spaceships sailed off into the woods behind the factory and were gone from sight. We did not go after them because the forests in Michigan are so dangerous at night. Big Foots and other monsters are all skulking around in the forest and humans are a nice little bedtime snack for a Michigan forest monster.

Gerrard and I stayed up a while longer waiting to see if the spaceships might return but they never came back. Gerrard saved some pretzels for me so I had my dinner that night and between the two of us we polished off the gallon of fruit punch that Barry had left for our payment.

The next day I told Barry about what Gerrard and I had seen during the night. Barry was puzzled as to why space aliens were so interested in his factory. “After all,” he said “we just make balloons here for special occasions. We make massive amounts of balloons for birthdays or holidays like Valentines Day and then ship them off en-mass to retailers all around the country. Occasionally, we test blown up balloons out back to see how long they stay blown up. Sometimes they go way up height and out of sight but they always return to earth when the helium seeps out. I just don’t understand why aliens would take such and interest in our low tech business.”

Well, there you have it. This is a mystery definitely solved but, not proven. We know aliens hover over Barry’s balloon factory but no one knows why. Perhaps the next time Barry has some left over fruit punch we might go back and spend some more time investigating the UFO sittings at Big Barry’s balloon factory.