Let me start by debunking a series of myths. We are, by no means, diminutive or green. And we are beyond earth’s childish addiction to gender – really just a variation on segregation. These myths, to which I refer, have become larger than the truth about us. Chris Carter, that over-privileged, annoying California surfer, has seen to this - and with the help of that obsessive madman, Fox Mulder, we will never be taken seriously. Damn the both of them.
Contact was finally getting close to the ultimate paradoxes on which we base our collective intelligence, but then Men in Black came out and plunged us back into the dark ages. If it’s not the jaundiced, hollow-eyed X-files sleestacks, then we’re multi-tentacled, shape-shifting reptiles that can slide under linoleum without a trace. With Contact, you at least acknowledged the possibility of questions without concrete answers. No, nothing measurable happened to Dr. Ellie Arroway. But her recorder did transmit 23 hours of nothingness, didn’t it?
Gotcha.
Humans. What it must be like to have to deal with primitive, complex emotions, not to mention dress codes, gas station restrooms and bank queues. What’s worse, though, is that after all these centuries of practice, you can’t seem to shake the whole baggage-thing. Why are you so bent on the propagation of misery? It’s not enough for you to feel emotions, but you’ve built an entire culture around them, pedestalizing things like unhealthy attachments, obsessions, and temptation. Comfort-food? Advil? Prozac? Why don’t you want to feel? Or is it that you only want to feel good? How immensely shallow. Your civilization has cultivated an army of buffers, and you can’t create enough -iatrists to keep up with your mutating neuroses. You have my undying curiosity, but not my respect. You celebrate weakness in ways we could never imagine. Grand scale bullying, in our opinion, is just another form of weakness. Your organized crime, I think you call them mobsters (or is it lobsters), are an example of this grandiosity, as they’re idolized in every media permutation. I’ve tried to understand this obsession. But I still don’t get what a family of mobsters has to do with opera singing.
How about Roswell? For God’s sake, if we’re that advanced technologically, why must we resort to clunky metal discs for aerial transport? And another thing, saucers are concave so that they can hold the stem of a teacup. A more appropriate image might be a plate. Little green men in flying dinner plates. Just kill me now.
In short, we do not use any form of enlarged stoneware as a means of travel. It’s more like “Q” on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Despicable as he was, Q operates from a highly advanced consciousness – basically he goes where he wants when he wants, without limitation, using his thoughts as transportation. In his world, thought is the same thing as action. In your world, however, action is, well, quite theoretical. You think and dream and agonize and second guess yourselves out of everything you truly want. And if you actually achieve something of greatness, you talk yourself out of deserving it and transform the whole success into another neurosis.
Perhaps the greatest abomination, though, was your everlasting love affair with the Planet of the Apes nightmare. It’s not scientific, and it’s worse than science fiction. What’s that…they weren’t depicting aliens? Well if they have their own planet, and it’s not earth, they’re aliens. Hairy cretins in khaki’s with Ph.Ds…whatever points you scored with Carl Sagan, the apes purged you of all remaining credibility.
So you probably think being an alien isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. We live in that dark, twinkly, amorphous freeze outside of earth’s atmosphere where anything can happen. Sound chaotic? Chaos is a sort of astronomical Shangri-La. Chaos is nirvana for aliens.
The universe is wild and random, as it was originally intended by, well, what you might call God, I suppose. But we are not indoctrinated by your categorical thinking. It’s not that we’re atheists, or even agnostic. Religion, to us, is more generalized – like part of our collective unconscious. One of yours studied this theory - Jung believed in the universality of patterns and stories among random cultures across the planet. He suggested that this universal tapestry of subconscious thought served as the connective tissue bonding all humans together. But the nature of this magic glue was beyond the realm of conscious choice – like eye color. You don’t meet with your mother’s gynecologist before you’re born and provide a checklist of preferable traits. You get what you get, end of discussion. And this pretty much describes how we live – not as individuals, but as one. I think The Borg is the best example I can give to describe our inexplicable existence. I know, I know, more Star Trek, but geez, that Gene Roddenberry was downright clever.
Pay attention now: We do not want to colonize Earth, nor do we wish to exterminate its inhabitants. Think about it. If we have access to every other planet in the solar system, as well as unlimited access to any of the other galaxies (of which there are 4,995,000 in case you were wondering), why would we want to colonize here? I mean what’s so great about Earth that we would want to live here at the exclusion of everywhere else? Vacations, yes, of course. Especially around Christmas – something about the glowing red lights that’s so good for our green complexions (kidding).
To bring it all home, aliens:
a) are not green
b) are neither male nor female
c) do not travel in flying saucers and crash in the desert
d) do not wish to subjugate and enslave Earth’s inhabitants (though we’ve gone back and forth on this one)
So, you ask, what are we then? We are air, we are light, we are thought and memory. We are the past and the future, doom and hope. We are what humans will be in fifty million years, and we’re what you were fifty million years ago. As that irascible, wild-haired genius once said, “Time is not at all what it seems. It does not flow in only one direction, and the future exists simultaneously with the past.”
Chomp on that for a while…
