Alien Visitations

Are we visited by aliens?  That topic is widely debated.  I have yet to see a UFO in person, but I tend to fall on the believer side.  When entire communities claim to have seen something bizarre, multiple police officers chase strange lights for miles, and airline pilots report near misses with craft flying faster than should be possible, I’m ready to give credence to such stories.  My own father saw three strange craft one night, and he is a man who does not lie.

I can understand the opposition’s attitude to such ideas.  Allowing for the real possibility that there are more intelligent races out there in the vast universe, they are most definitely not in our immediate vicinity.  Scientists point out the insane number of years it would take for any craft from any life-sustaining planet to reach our little blue marble of a world.

Of course, I would assume an advanced race would have harnessed the ability to travel ‘wormholes’ or employ a kind of tesseract technology.  You fans of Dune or A Wrinkle in Time know what I’m talking about.  Why not?  Just a few hundred years ago, contemplating the idea that the Earth orbited the sun instead of the other way around was deemed heresy.  Who are we to say aliens don’t have the technology we can’t conceive of yet?

Humans are an incredibly arrogant species when it comes to entertaining the idea that we’re not the end all of intelligence.  Personally, I shudder at the thought we might be the best thing the universe ever spawned.

To me, the biggest question isn’t whether or not we’ve been visited by extraterrestrials.  The question is why would aliens want to have a look at us?  Especially aliens who have mastered long-distance space travel.  Aren’t we just a bit primitive to incite curiosity of that sort?

Well, there is always the idea of alien abductions and the apparent experiments that are part and parcel of such things.  This gives me the icky memory of dissecting frogs in high school biology.  Can you imagine an E.T. class field trip to Earth for something along similar lines?  Eek.

Some who support alien abduction theory have the idea we’re part of a breeding experiment.  That the alien civilization taking samples is dying out and using our DNA to save their race.  Or they’re breeding hybrid creatures destined for slavery. 

Could they be scouting to prepare for invasion?  Producers of movies like Independence Day and War of the Worlds love this scenario for the big bucks it brings in.  But seriously, I strongly doubt extraterrestrials would come in with lasers and blasters a-blazin’.  You want to knock us on our asses?  Hit us with a horribly contagious disease.  Even quicker, knock out our power grids and watch us flail.  Was there ever a better example of how dependent we are on our high-tech toys than the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina?  We can go to the moon, but we couldn't pull people off their roofs or out of a sports stadium for several days.  The inability to cope with just one small area gone dark shows me more than anything how bad off we are in the face of a real emergency.

There are theories that what now makes up the human race was actually planted here by an alien intelligence.  Or we were created by E.T. playing with early hominid DNA already present on Earth.  Why not?  It sure would explain the so-called missing link between us and monkeys, wouldn’t it?  How much crazier is that than thinking some omnipotent, unknowable deity slapped together mankind to exalt himself?  Is it too far off to think our ‘creators’ occasionally buzz the planet to see how we’re coming along?  If so, I bet they head back home shaking their big lizard heads.

Or maybe we’re an interstellar safari.  A zoo attraction.  Somewhere a bug-eyed alien child is roaming around wearing a souvenir shirt that says, ‘My parents went to Earth, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt’.  Which raises the question:  can we put members of Congress in the interstellar gift shop as a bunch of funny bobble heads for the aliens to take home?

Please?

My take?  I don’t have a clue why aliens would bother with us.  Maybe they’re filming the universe’s funniest (or saddest) reality show.  Could be we’re all just a bunch of Snookies and Kardashians entertaining everyone else.  Otherwise, I can’t see the attraction. 

But then, I’m not an alien.  As far as you know.  Play on, silly humans, play on.