December 22, 2013

Slice of PIE: Do I REALLY Believe In UFOs?







 
As a kid (like 13 and 14), I was an ardent believer in UFOs. I read every book I could get my hands on at the library...
 
There was no internet in those days, so everything I read was in the form of a book. I just knew aliens flew in the skies of Earth – and I wanted to meet one! More than anything in the world, I wanted to see a UFO.

I even dreamed about them and in the dream I would see the spaceship or the alien and be so scared I couldn’t speak, so I couldn’t let anyone know what I’d seen. That was a “bummer”. I waited for alien contact whenever I was camping in the wilderness (I “invented” camping in my family as my parents had both grown up in the heart of the city and my brothers and sister were more interested in sports having to do with balls, pucks, and nets.

I biked everywhere and taught myself how to camp out. I bought the tents, backpacks, propane stoves, and I bought waterproof ponchos and ground cloths. What I never let on was that camping was my bid to see a UFO. They rarely seemed to appear over cities (at least according to my research) and never abducted anyone from a crowd or a city park or a rock concert. I eschewed all the “city” things and waited in the wilderness.

When I became a Christian, I continued to read about UFOs, but their appearance took on a more insidious nature:


Forty-some-years-later, what do I think?

I still don’t know if UFOs are alien spacecraft observing Earth and Humans.

I do know that aliens floating around our skies and abducting Humans doesn’t make much sense – at least not from a Human perspective. I’ve heard it said that if UFOs really are alien spacecraft, then their behavior is not particularly intelligent. I mean, think about it: they constantly abduct people who have no knowledge of anything important; they cut up cows repeatedly; they fly over Washington, DC yet never land (What are they afraid of? If they have the ability to travel at speeds faster-than-light in teeny-weeny spaceships then by implication, they don’t spend much time cooped up in those teeny-weeny spaceships and must have some sort of teenier-weenier-sized power source that can hurl them over interstellar distances in the blink of an eye – and probably produce a super-duper-sized city disintegration ray that would make mincemeat of any kind of offensive weapon we could throw at them.

Even more likely, given that one of the main tenets of the “UFOs Carry Intelligent Life” religion is that they will be psychically more advanced than us. They should be able to take over our less-developed minds without difficulty (after studying us and practicing Human and bovine mind control for decades (or several thousand years if Ezekiel’s Wheels, the Pyramids at Giza, and the Easter Island Heads were the work of alien spacecraft equipped with tractor beams, antigravity rays, and dedicated study teams)) and make us walk, wholesale, into their alien abattoirs and do with us whatever their evil minds might conceive.

Of course, all of my observations are predicated on what would make sense to a Human.
 
Aliens, by their very nature, will be alien and most likely incomprehensible. The following science fictional aliens spring to mind:
 
HG Well’s Martians
Star Trek’s Horta
Babylon 5’s Vorlon
David Brin’s Jophur
District 9’s “prawns”
Larry Niven’s Puppeteers
Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris
 
I know there are others, but these are among the best known and best realized of what’s out there.
 
That being said, every one of these is comprehensible to us in some way.
 
Someone truly alien will be incomprehensible. By definition something incomprehensible is “unintelligible, impossible to understand, impenetrable, unclear, indecipherable, inscrutable, beyond one's comprehension, beyond one, beyond one's grasp, complicated, complex, involved, baffling, bewildering, mystifying, unfathomable, puzzling, cryptic, confusing, perplexing”.
 
We won’t get them. They might get us because they’ll have been around this part of the universe enough to have bumped into others aliens. We won’t even know what questions to ask: What does an incomprehensible alien look like? Act like? Smell like? Sound like? Think like? Sense like? Sex like?
 
I don’t know. And despite the fact that I saw two, glowing orange, box-shaped objects fly silently over my house on October 28, 2013 in a north-east to south-westerly direction and that I, personally can say are Unidentified Flying Objects – I still can’t say for sure if there are alien intelligences operating flying objects in our atmosphere.
 
I know what I’d like to BELIEVE, but the evidence that intelligences like our own are floating around over our heads is pretty much nonexistent.
 
Sorry, self.


 

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