“The story finally told.” On a cold winter’s night in 1972, on a country road 30 miles east of Minneapolis, MN, Willard Van De Bogart (the site’s narrator) describes seeing a bright ship stop in mid-air above the road around 4 a.m. He got out to look, got back in the car due to cold, and watched the ship move off and disappear into the sky. He was en route to a video conference at the University of Minnesota; upon arrival he sketched what he had seen from memory.
Shortly after, designs and blueprints of a sound-and-light ship appeared in his dreams, in enough detail that he built the mock spaceship in 1972. It appeared in concert at the University of Wisconsin in 1976, and at colleges, universities, and other venues across the country over the following decade.

He writes that the experience taught him “the distance between Earth and the rest of the universe was only a short distance,” describing the universe as porous and everything as interconnected. With the advent of cyberspace, the Ether Ship’s “maiden voyage” moved outside cyberspace and into the galaxy to meet other intelligent life forms, with further journeys planned.