Christopher Auner
Humanities Kansas
February 18th is Pluto Day, the 95th anniversary of Kansan Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto. In commemoration, HK is sharing this essay, originally published in the Written in the Stars celestial poetry chapbook.
Humans have always looked to the stars for answers—not just about the universe, but about ourselves: Who are we? Where are we? What does the future hold? Through constellations, we tell stories about our world. Through astrology, we tell stories about who we want to be.
But sometimes, when we look to the stars, we’re searching for something beyond ourselves—friends, companions, co-conspirators in this vast, cold universe.
In 1964, Elmer D. Janzen—chiropractor, ventriloquist, UFO enthusiast—opened his Geneseo, Kansas, home as a museum. This was at the height of UFO fever in the United States, when flying saucers regularly made headlines. Still open today in the self-proclaimed UFO capital of Kansas (aliens welcome!), the museum features drawings of humanoid aliens, spaceship diagrams, and newspaper clippings about a dog from Venus. (Her name was Queenie.)
The museum showcases Janzen’s passion for the weird and the town’s fond remembrance of the man, but it also tells of a time of discovery, imagination, excitement for the future—and more than a little trepidation about what we might find out there beyond the clouds.
Lest we discount Janzen as an eccentric, it bears mentioning that even Clyde Tombaugh, Kansas’s astronomical sweetheart, reported several UFO sightings during his scientific career. Tombaugh built his first telescope on his family’s farm near Burdett, Kansas, and was a self-taught astronomer with a high school diploma when, in 1930, he discovered the long sought-after “Planet X”—soon dubbed Pluto, after the Greek and Roman god of the underworld. (Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet and hailed as the first known object in the Kuiper Belt in 2006.) Tombaugh earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Kansas while continuing to work summers at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, where he first caught sight of the smudge of light that was Pluto.
In addition to discovering Pluto, 15 asteroids, and hundreds of stars, Tombaugh also observed several UFOs. Although he tended toward a scientific explanation rather than an extraterrestrial one, he was nevertheless open to the idea of intelligent life on other worlds. And perhaps it was this openness that drew him back to the sky night after night, straining to see just a little bit further into the unknown.
Sometimes we look to the sky in search of faraway worlds, but we find ourselves instead. What if those stories about aliens and UFOs are really stories about us? Stories to make the darkness a little less lonely, the strange a little more familiar. They speak of our thirst to make meaning, to seek connection, to ask questions and discover answers.
But sometimes when we look up at the night sky, we aren’t looking for answers. We look to the stars to set our imaginations alight.
Christopher Auner is a writer from Lawrence, Kansas, who has a background in teaching, publishing, freelance writing, and higher education. He earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Kansas and an MA in literature from Missouri State University.
