I know how it is. Every so often, that ancient feeling of melancholy visits you from across the years. You never got over the fact that you didn’t get a pony when you were a child. No great, golden mane; no palatial stable. The closest you ever got was one of those stupid Holly Hobby horses and you blew that sucker apart with a firecracker. And who would blame you?

Or maybe you still harbor decades-old bitterness because your parents refused to buy you a new Huffy bike when you were a kid. Those heartless bums. That Huffy could have made you king of the neighborhood and changed the course of your life. But, no. You had a Schwinn with a dorky banana seat and tassels hanging from the handlebars.

And look at you now. You work your fingers to the bone and nobody knows who you are. Your wife hates you, and even your dog thinks you’re lame. Everything would have been different if you’d gotten that Huffy. I think you should call your parents right now and yell at them. Better yet, wait until after midnight and call them drunk and shrieking.

I’m with you, brothers and sisters. I, too, suffer the constant gloom of having been cheated. Only my lament has nothing to do with bicycles, horses or anything little kids get for Christmas. The source of my gloom are lights in the sky. Or more specifically, the lack of them.

Another year is racing to an end and I still haven’t seen a UFO.

Frankly, I don’t get it. If anyone deserves to see an extraterrestrial craft, it’s me. I’ve been looking my entire life for one. I spend most of my nights with my face turned up toward the sky. If I were to rob a convenience store, witnesses would only be able to describe my Adam’s apple because I’m constantly looking up.

“It was a really ugly Adam’s apple,” they would tell police. “Looked like the dude swallowed an elbow.”

I have a telescope within hand’s reach this very moment. I have a chart on the wall informing exactly how to identify an alien if one visits. I stay up until dawn every morning and yet I’ve never been scanned.

When you watch those television shows about UFO sightings, witnesses were always doing mundane things. They were walking the dog out by the powerlines. They were parking with a date out by the powerlines. They were taking out the trash.

Week after week, I take out the trash in hopes of seeing the mothership. Except this week. I forgot this week because of the stupid holiday. The trash is piling up outside and it’s starting to smell. But that’s not the point. The point is that I’ve never seen a UFO and taking out the trash isn’t helping.

Earlier this summer, I spent a week in St. Agatha (population: 6). It’s about as far north as you can get in Maine without bumping into a Canadian. St. Agatha is very dark. There’s one guy with a lamp up there, but he almost never uses it.

Every night, my Adam’s apple and I lay in a hammock doing nothing but monitoring the open sky. There were a trillion stars up there and a fair share of man-made satellites, but ET never made an appearance. ET is probably using a cloaking device and laughing at my ugly Adam’s apple.

You remember that Brady Bunch episode where Greg fools Bobby into believing a spacecraft is visiting the back yard? Of course, you do. Don’t pretend you didn’t watch “The Brady Bunch.”

I had a brother just like that. He’d direct me outside on a freezing cold night, point into the sky as if the UFO of my dreams were right overhead, and then push me face first into the snow. I guess the bottom line is, older brothers are cruel-hearted scoundrels.

It’s not that I ask for a lot. I just want to sit around a campfire one night with a group of people talking about strange occurrences they have experienced. I want to get all silent and solemn as I poke at the embers and imply that I have a really great story to tell. Then I want to clear my throat and begin my tale in a low, ominous voice.

“Strange? You wanna talk about strange? It was a night just like this …”

I’ve got nothing. I’ve written maybe a half-dozen news stories about people who’ve seen weird things in the sky. I’ve talked to people who make a career out of investigating UFO sightings. And all I’ve had to offer was my passion for the subject and this huge Adam’s apple.

I console myself with the fact that the sky will always be there. I will spend more summers in dark St. Agatha, and the dream is still alive. There is hope. I’m not a complete washout. I had a Huffy when I was a kid.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can visit his blog at www.sunjournal.com