A Saucer of Loneliness

"A Saucer of Loneliness" is a short story by American writer Theodore Sturgeon that first appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction n. 27 (February 1953).

A policeman shows up, the crowd increases in size, and an FBI agent arrives.

The FBI man orders her to shut up and takes both the girl and the now-inanimate saucer into custody.

He heard about the bottles hereabouts and that she had quit throwing them, and he had taken to wandering the dunes at night, looking for her.

And the meaning of the saucer has become clear: it too was a bottle cast into the interplanetary or galactic sea, by some alien being also consumed by loneliness.

It was also the title of the seventh book in the anthology series The Collected Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, published in 2000.

The woman's loneliness, revealed only gradually in the short story, is obvious from the beginning in the episode.

In 1982, this short story of Theodore Sturgeon was adapted by the French television, with the title "La soucoupe de solitude" and actress Catherine Leprince playing the main character.