I was only five years old, with a fever of 106°, when THIS HAPPENED. My mom brushed it off as a dream and didn’t seem to want to talk about it so I kept it to myself. But some interesting things happened after that.

First of all, I never forgot it. After more than fifty years, I’ve forgotten most of what happened to me at age five but this experience was seared into my mind as a kind of super memory. I can still recall it easily. No memory before or since even comes close. Then, things began to happen that brought up the memory and made me reflect on it.

No God Up Here

One year later, in 1961, Yuri Gagaryn, the Russian cosmonaut, became the first person to publicly go into space.

(Warning – space geek stuff! This was even though the X planes had been operating top-secretly since 1959 and reached the 50 mile mark of space many times, eight pilots being later given astronaut wings, including X-15 pilot Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. The X pilots, however, did not orbit the Earth.The Russians hold that honor. And yes, I am that geeky.)

Gagaryn was widely reported to have said at the time,”I don’t see any God up here,” but he did not. This came from a speech by  Nikita Khrushchev during a Soviet anti-religion campaign. Gagaryn was a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church, celebrated Christmas and Easter and baptized his first daughter, Yelena, not long before his launch into space.

Because of my experience I dismissed this atheist challenge to God’s existence without much thought. They were simply wrong. That was all. In fact, it kind of made me mad.

Black Sky Redux

But it wasn’t until May 5, 1961, less than a month later, that Alan Shepard piloted Freedom 7 to become the first American to publicly reach space. That was the first time I heard Walter Cronkite mention that the sky was black in outer space.

Black sky. At high altitude. Hmm. This naturally caused me to remember my experience just a year before. At six years old, I already knew what the black sky of space looked like. How could I know this? Interesting, but I kept it to myself.

It was the first of a series of ripples from that time that would continue to remind me of the day I apparently died.

 

Photo: Yuri Gagaryn, press photo.