Free Republic

There was nothing much happening in Jerome and Benno Leuer’s yard in Hamel, Minn. on August 11, 1948. It was noontime in the thick of summer and the boys, 10 and 8, were idly playing when, as they later described it, something overhead caught their eyes. They looked up and their jaws dropped. Roughly 12 ft. up in the air was a dull gray, circular object, about 1 ft. thick and 2 ft. in diameter, slowly descending between them. They stood transfixed as the object settled onto the ground, making a clattering sound like metal hitting metal. The object rested...

<p>On the first day of January 1959, eight-year-old Carlos Eire awoke to a tropical sun peering through the wooden shutters of his Havana bedroom. There were "galaxies of swirling dust specks" in the soft light and he "stared at the dust, as always, rapt."</p>

On the first day of January 1959, eight-year-old Carlos Eire awoke to a tropical sun peering through the wooden shutters of his Havana bedroom. There were "galaxies of swirling dust specks" in the soft light and he "stared at the dust, as always, rapt." The child watching those tiny floating particles could not have known how much his own boyhood galaxy had just changed. Thanks to the power-lust of a young revolutionary, this innocent would soon lose his safe place in a simple world of lizards and lightning bugs, of parents, aunts and uncles, and be rocketed past childhood into...