“Check this out,” she half-shouted, excited that someone was listening.

Anyone else might have written her off.

I picked her up from a backwoods rural Missouri town, full of Confederate flags and jacked-up trucks with massive exhaust pipes, cows and goats as cash crops, and that one high school where everybody knows everybody. Easy country to dismiss a story in.

“This right here,” she pointed at the blurry picture on her phone, “this is a real UFO.” The picture was blurry, as are most eyewitness accounts. Traveling on these curvy hills, she waved it in front of me. For a second, I thought we might crash. I figured she wasn’t lying, but I chuckled anyway, having heard plenty of UFO stories throughout my life — including seeing some strange things I couldn’t explain and never got a photograph of.

I kept my eyes on the road and let her talk.

“It was the weirdest thing.” Always a good way to start a story. “So what had happened was,” she started, and I laughed. Because a Southeast Missourian telling a story starts with one of these sentence stems. But this lady? She used them both. Evidently, it was important to her. “My grandma told me about the time she saw one. It was one of them round disc things, covered in lights that blinked. And there weren’t no sound. It just,” she motioned with her hands, “floated! Right over me.”

I glanced in the rearview. She wasn’t performing. She meant every word.

“My family sees them all the time.” Her voice rose in pitch with each word. “The last time I saw one? It was like 200 feet above us, just hovering there. The weirdest part was the sound. There wasn’t any. Like no birds chirping, no crickets, no cars running. Our car was parked and turned off, but we couldn’t hear anything. Just a low hum vibration. And three red lights — one, two, three. At the right spots. Maybe they were engines? I don’t know. As soon as I got my phone out the window, it took off like a shot and disappeared!”

“I wonder if there’s something to it. What if my family is a UFO magnet, you know?” She looked out the window of the Versa. “We don’t have the rH factor in our blood. That means if we get a piercing, our bodies try to get rid of it. I had to take all kinds of supplements so my body wouldn’t kill my babies. It’s like my body thinks a baby is a foreign thing, like a virus. So I’m wondering — maybe I have alien blood. Maybe I’m related to aliens. Either that, or it’s a magnet for them.”

“It could explain a lot,” I said. Not thinking it was ironic until just now.

I knew about the reported crash in the 1940s in Cape Girardeau — the one locals still argue about. But most sightings happen further out, way past Marble Hill, where roads go from blacktop to gravel to dirt. These are the hillsides and farmlands you don’t want to get lost in.

If’n you do, you’ll come back as a ghost.

Or maybe a UFO.

I’d rather not find out.