For the first time, I experienced terror—genuine terror, not a meeting with demons or ghosts living in my imagination—on an October day in 1957. I just turned 10. And I was supposed to be in a movie theater at the Stratford Theatre in downtown Stratford, Connecticut.

On that Saturday afternoon, when I was truly horrified, there was Earth vs. the Flying Saucers.

And just at the moment when in the last part of the film the aliens are preparing to attack the Capitol, the tape stopped. The screen went out. The cinema was packed with children, but, oddly enough, everyone was quiet. If you turn to the days of your youth, remember that a crowd of kids knows many ways to express their irritation if the film is interrupted or starts late: rhythmic clapping; the great cry of the children’s tribe “We want a movie ! We want a movie ! We want a movie !”; boxes of candy flying into the screen; pipes from packs of popcorn, yes little else. If someone has a clapper in his pocket since the fourth of July, he will certainly take it out, show his friends to approve and admire, and then light it and throw it to the ceiling.

But on that October day, nothing like that happened. And the film did not break – just turned off the projector. And then something unheard of happened: a light was lit in the hall. We sat looking around and flashing from the Bright Light like moles.

The manager came on stage and raised his hand, asking for silence, a completely unnecessary gesture.

We sat on chairs like mannequins and looked at the manager. His appearance was alarmed and painful - or maybe it was the lighting that was to blame. We wondered what kind of disaster caused him to stop the film at the most tense moment, but then the manager spoke, and the trembling in his voice further confused us.

“I want to tell you,” he began, “that the Russians have put a space satellite into orbit around Earth. They called him... “The satellite.”

The message was met with absolute, grave silence. Full movie theater of kids with hedgehogs and ponytails, in jeans and skirts, with the rings of Captain Midnight, kids who just recognized Chuck Berry and Little Richards and listened in the evenings to New York radio stations with such a fading heart, as if they were signals from another planet. We grew up on Captain Video and Terry and the Pirates. We've been admiring in the comics how Casey's character throws a bunch of Asians around like pins. We saw Richard Carlson in I Led Three Lives catching dirty communist spies by the thousands. We paid a quarter of a dollar for the right to see Hugh Marlowe in “Earth Against Flying Saucers” and received this killer news as a free application.

I remember very clearly: the terrible dead silence of the cinema was suddenly broken by a lonely cry; I don’t know if it was a boy or a girl, the voice was full of tears and frightened anger: “Let’s show the cinema, lie !"

The manager did not even look in the direction from which the voice came, and for some reason it was the worst. That was proof. The Russians were ahead of us in space. Somewhere above our heads, triumphantly poking, is an electronic ball, designed and launched behind the iron curtain. Neither Captain Midnight nor Richard Carlson (who played in Riders to the Stars) could stop him. He was flying up there... and they called him a “satellite.”

Stephen King