We Saw a UFO in the Florida Sky

PALM BEACH — After 21 grueling days on the road, with sleep a distant mirage and bodies battered by the constant back-and-forth to Houston, the World Cup grind finally granted us a reprieve. 

Weeks of madness: interviews conducted on the fly, live TV crosses battling time zones, and an industrial output of content for print, web, and social media. Trench journalism demands everything, but eventually, the soul yearns for a haven.

That haven was Jupiter Beach, nestled on the peaceful fringe of Palm Beach. As night fell and dawn broke in Portugal, Miguel, André, Patrícia, Charlotte, and I — our work companions on this adventure — decided to spread a blanket on the sand and celebrate the luxury of silence. 

On our makeshift table, we assembled an altar of heroic endurance and homesickness: chorizo, cheese, and bread. As we shared the familiar tastes of home under a magnificent moonlit sky, with a colossal full moon silvering the Atlantic and the tropical warmth enveloping us, the accumulated fatigue finally began to dissipate.

It was then that the cosmos decided to offer us a dramatic spectacle. Out of nowhere, we transformed into children pointing at the infinite. A colossal fireball tore across the night sky, leaving a luminous, dense trail that seemed hand-drawn by a whimsical deity. A small, silent explosion in the ether followed, and a second, more contained but perfectly visible trail kept us in a state of shock and wonder for minutes that felt like an eternity.

In that instant, we were believers. It was a UFO, literally an unidentified flying object that challenged our mundane routine of pitches and press conferences. The mystery (and the identification that debunked the UFO theory) lasted until the internet brought us back to earth: it was the launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9, fired from the John F. Kennedy Space Center, a mere 180 kilometers north of our beach. 

Science fiction gave way to space engineering, but the poetry of that timeless trajectory was magically and uniquely etched into our Route 66.