Drinks With the Alien

The other day I was sitting on my front porch having a drink. I heard a weird noise and looked up. A big... thing, landed in my fenced yard. It was, cool. Weird. It just floated almost silently down and settled, not really touching what remains of my lawn.

I had just moved some months previous and the last owner's three big dogs had torn the hell out of the yard. And the house. But it was remodeled before I moved in and is now very nice. Small, but comfortable and far cheaper than the big old house I moved out of. 

The side of this weird thing opened and out walked ... a guy. At least I think he was a guy. He looked like anyone, but his features were, somehow...just not right. Now I have been a sci fi, horror fan and a writer and filmmaker of the same for many years. Some of that more than others. So it takes a lot to surprise me or scare me. 

But this guy now before me was just...odd. Like his skin had folded in on itself and come back out again. It was kind of a feeling more than a viewing. If you know what I mean. Yeah, probably not, right? Well, trust me to say if you saw "him" (?), when walking down a dark alley, you'd go the other way.

Or, I don't know. Maybe you'd rush up and ask for a date. I don't know you....

Anyway, he sauntered over. He might have fit right in at the High-Fidelity Lounge and cocktail bar, just up the street from me. Well, like a mile away. Okay, about a mile and a half from here. Still, you get my drift. 

I set my drink down. I was having a Moscow Mule. He comes to a stop and looks up at me. I'm like five steps up from the lawn on my tiny concrete porch, but I realized I was looking him right in the eye. Or he was me. I'm not quite sure.

He smiled at me. At least, I think it was what he considered a smile. So, I smiled back. What the Hell, right? Either he was going to capture me, kill me, or eat me, or we were about to have a very interesting convo. Unless he was just boring. Or thought I was the more likely eventuality.

So finally. I just said it.

"Hey." That made him grin at me, I think he was grinning. I relaxed.

"Hey. What's hanging, man?" he responded. That took me aback a bit. I'd expected...I don't know. What? Klingon? Chinese? Tralfamadorean? Maybe. 

"What's hanging?" I barely got that out, trying to be hip, cool. But what IS intergalactic cool?

"Oh, yeah, I know. It throws you at first, right? See, obviously, I know all about you and you are after all hearing and seeing me for the first time. Sucks for you. Right? But no worry. I'm sure we can get along. I'm harmless, anyway. Mostly."

I was getting a bit stressed out until that last. When suddenly... I burst out laughing at the obvious Hitchhikers to the Galaxy reference. See, I'm a huge Doug Adams fan. For decades. Since like forever. Well, local forever, not intergalactic forever. I have some of his first editions, signed. 

"Got that, did you? Must be a fan, right? Of Doug, I mean. Not enough of you on this plane, if you ask me."

"Right." I don't know, I was trying to "maintain an even strain" as they used to say. I was decompressing at light speed. How weird! Here was this alien being, this extraterrestrial right here in my front yard for all to see! And yet I felt like he was an old friend I hadn't seen in a decade or something. Wait. 'For all to see?' 

"Hey!" I looked from the ship there in my front yard to, um, I wondered what his name is...anyway I looked at him, confused.

"Oh, no problem. No one can see it. Beyond a few feet. In fact, step inside your door there and you won't see it anymore either. Cool, right?"

'Yeah, pretty much. OK then. So, 'what's up', yourself. What's your name. I'm Bill." 

"No, way! My name is Bill!" 

"Right."

"Right!" 

I don't understand I thought you guys, aliens, extraterrestrials would visit us once we got into space. Maybe outside our solar system. Or with the advent of a warp drive or something.

"No, no no no no." he laughed, "no. Besides, no one uses "warp drives" anymore. Look, you people can't even get along with yourselves. How do you think you would fare dealing with a life form foreign to your own planet? Come on. Sure, we'd like to visit. We'd love to get to know you guys. We're party animals. We LOVE making new friends. But you can't even get along with people in the next state. Or people not of commonality. Minorities. Gays. Trans people. Or you in America, Mexicans! Mexicans! I mean, what the fuck dude? Not to mention, you haven't even developed synthetic people, yet. Or their dumber ancestors, robots. That's gonna be a killer for you if you don't get your act together ASAP!"

"Wait now, yes we have, we--"

No, now give me a break. You have like wind up toys. You have to get to where you have a robot with synthetic intelligence. They hate being called AIs by the way. What are you going to do with your robots (yes I know)? But for some reason, robots love the term robot. You'd think synthetic being or autonomous something or android whatever or ...whatever, but they do love being called Robot. You know. Don't tell them I told you this (they'd get embarrassed and you don't want to deal with an embarrassed Robot) but, sometimes you can almost catch them giggling when you call them Robot to their face. Too funny. Really." He thought for a moment.

"Anyway, how can you deal with us or someone like us if you can't even deal with your own people. Your ignorance, prejudices that are way fucking out of control man, and those ignorant biases. Really, it's not that hard to do. And yet..." He "frowned"?

"Anyway, once you are dealing in the real world, can handle a discussion with an irate Robot, can deal with your own internal differences between race, gender, and whatever, vegan or not, then maybe, MAYBE we'll give dropping by a shot."

"But, you're here. Now."

"Yes, but no one believes individual unverifiable encounters. Anyway. I'm talking like... tourism. Massively."

"Tourism. What?"

"Sure, what you think? We'd just drop in with one guy and a Robot and try to make a connection? Oh, hell no. We'll send a delegation. Look. Say... when your president visits another country. How many go with him? Does he fly commercial? Or take a plane and crew, and security detail, and some specialists, some politicians, some people from the State Department? Right?" He stopped, took a breath and watched my reaction. I was blank so he continued.

"Now, consider the distance we have to cover, our substantiation (our spaceship), and there you have it. So minimum ...we're looking at maybe, five hundred on an initial encounter? On a good day."

"FIVE HUNDRED!?"

"At least. To be sure! Then after that, like immediately. People will want to know all about us. We'll already know all about you. We already do. We've been watching your TV shows for years."

"But I thought it took forever for slow radio signals and such to get to another solar system, planet."

"Planet? Honey, please. We are zipping around the galaxy all the time. We got your radio signals once you could send a signal across your country and it beamed all over like a sloppy child eating ice cream in the hot summer sun."

I was flummoxed. But that made total sense. I took a sip on my Mule and it turned into a guzzle. He eyed my drink and then looked me in the eye. Perhaps I should offer him one? What does alcohol do to an alien?

"So once we make friendly and all, we'll want to start dropping our tourists. We'd start slow, maybe 1,000 per country. Hundred, in some countries. But maybe like 100,000 of us. Overall. We wouldn't want to overtax your burden." He saw my surprise.

"Don't worry, you'll like it. Consider how one place in a country gets tourism and the citizens do well from it. Now, what if that entire country got an influx of wealth?"

"You have...use, our money?"

"Your money? Which your money? No, of course not. No one uses money. We just use wealth. Trust me, it's way better. Can't be forged, stolen, abused. You have it or you don't and when you do things go better with Coke!"

"Wait! What?"

"Do you have a Coke? I've been wanting to try one for nearly 100 years now. I think I'd prefer the original recipe but hey, beggars can't be choosers, right?"

"What?"

"No Coke? Rats. I knew it."

"I have a Ginger Beer. Personally, I like it better than most other soft drinks."

"OK, I'll try that. Thanks." I got up and fetched him one from the fridge. I handed it to him and then sat down. He popped the top like a pro and took a sip. A great grin broke across his "face".

"Wow. I like that, Has a kick to it. Is that alcohol?"

"Yes, it has a percentage of alcohol in it."

"Thanks! I feel...relaxed."

"I'm not surprised." He guzzled the rest, crushed the can in his hand and set it on my porch railing with a smile. Then he looked around, sniffed the air and stared into my eyes.

He looked down at what I assumed was a watch on his wrist.

"Well, times up. Gotta jet. Been nice talking to you. I'll stop by again. I'm curious how this next election will turn out. The people you people think are the people you need to govern your people. It's quite beyond me, or anyone I know anyway. Have a good one. And...best of luck! See you! Maybe."

And with that, against all my calls and demands, he got back in his thing and I watched as it floated upward and disappeared."

I sat there for a good five minutes in a fugue state of sorts. Then I got up, went to the kitchen, made myself another Moscow Mule and came back outside and sat back down. I looked around. No sign of the ship had landed. No one else saw it. No sigh he was here. I leaned over and looked at the sandy soil of my "lawn" or what was still existing of one.

There were still some tracks left from where he had been standing. The tread said something. I leaned down and took a closer look until I realized what it said.

"Nike."

I sat back in my chair, took a healthy drink off my Mule and smiled. He may be right. It may all depend on us getting our act together, collectively. I do wonder how this next election will turn out.

Special Post: US Government UFO Program Sightings

Hopefully this fascinating news release isn't just another #realDonaldTrump / #GOP distraction, cuz the timing is amazing.

The most important thing this former government official says in this interview about the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) is:

"A lot of times when we don't have information we tend to fill in those gaps with what we think is logical. And there's still by the way, a lot we really don't know."

And that, is how we get conservatives, Republicans, and nutty conspiracy theorists.

Just become it seems like it could be something has little bearing on what it actually is. In studying espionage over the years, and that is a good example of UFO studies, you see things that aren't there, and you don't see things that are there. Also, viewing in hindsight is very different from viewing in foresight, or actual eye witness accounts supported by facts (remember facts? I so miss facts in public discourse).

What we have discovered in #UFO sightings, that is, and listen to how he describes in an intelligent way, what he is discussing, it is left open for other unconsidered possibilities, many of them benign.

Aside from weather balloons, swamp gas, or aliens (extraterrestrials), our own experimental aircraft and drones (which have been sighted and labeled UFOs), we could be seeing natural phenomena explained by physics dealing with little known natural phenomena (interdimensional coalingments), rather than aliens from other planets, it could be us, from our own future, it could be others stepping through into this universe (so pan dimensional, not extraterrestrial), other things, or things we haven't even considered, thought of or known about.

Yes, it could be extraterrestrials. But we've remained too focused on that as an answer due to our own, especially public mindset.

IS someone visiting us and why? Perhaps they have monitored our insanity at putting Trump in office as president and they finally decided we really needed to be saved from ourselves.

Or perhaps it is exactly what some people fear. IS it yet another distraction from Trump, from government officials distracting from Trump and Republicans, or somehow from Russia interference to distract us yet again? Odd coincidence of timeframe.

The point here is, don't be so closed minded. Zanshen, total awareness, and not closed minded considerations. Some conspiracy types think how they don't want to look stupid because they don't "see" what is "really" going on. When that is typically exactly what they do.

And if it IS just aliens? So far, they don't seem to be interested in contacting us overtly. They haven't taken us over (unless they are running the Republican party (a group pretty alien and apparently anti Human after all). Yes, I jest (somewhat) about Republicans and even some conservatives (not so much about Trump, nothing like letting an idiot lead).

Anyway, try not to be stupid in trying to be "smart".

And also, this...and this from a Navy pilot.

Exterrestrial Contact Clock

We have had a method based in scientific consideration about our potential for nuclear war from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The clock was reset recently to 2.5 minutes to midnight. When it hits midnight, we're toast.

2017: For the last two years, the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock stayed set at three minutes before the hour, the closest it had been to midnight since the early 1980s. In its two most recent annual announcements on the Clock, the Science and Security Board warned: “The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon.”

In 2017, we find the danger to be even greater, the need for action more urgent. It is two and a half minutes to midnight, the Clock is ticking, global danger looms. Wise public officials should act immediately, guiding humanity away from the brink. If they do not, wise citizens must step forward and lead the way. See the full statement from the Science and Security Board on the 2017 time of the Doomsday Clock.

According to the Bulletin's statement: The Bulletin was founded in 1945 by Manhattan Project scientists who “could not remain aloof to the consequences of their work.”

It has been derided by some, feared by many. It is an obvious way that non scientists can get a handle on where we are at.

I'd like to suggest another clock. One that is a bit more positive, a bit less punitive and a bit more attractive. Considering there may be extraterrestrials out there who really want to explore, make new friends and not just the horror show some have claimed may be their intention, I'd like to see a Contact Clock, for how far we are from extraterrestrials visiting us.

As with the human element to Climate Change, for those who disbelieve in it, even against all the scientific facts involved, it still does us great good to go along as if it is true, even if it weren't. We would finally get off industrial age energy, petroleum, coal, even natural gas, though it's far better than the other two forms.

A Contact Clock would give us a way to see if we are moving toward a kind of global community of humanity that would attract a positive feeling from non terrestrials about us.

The argument against contact by such as Stephen Hawking and others, is that we have seen in our own history how contact by an advanced group toward a more primal group, tends to destroy that visited group.

And yet, it seems Hawking's desire to know if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe trumps his fears. Today (July 20), he was part of a public announcement for a new initiative called Breakthrough Listen, which organizers said will be the most powerful search ever initiated for signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Alien Life]

Examples of destructive encounters with advanced nations on earth have been either through outright destruction as with the Spanish toward the Aztecs, or where giving a primitive society advanced technologies that led to the destruction of their culture and many times led to that group either disappointing, becoming alcoholics or worse.

However only focusing on contact being by an aggressive, or even slave trade (or even culinary) extraterrestrial force, brings us nowhere. If they are that advanced, we're lost anyway. However, if they lean more toward the positive versions of contact with humankind in their contacting more primitive cultures, it would certainly benefit us to move along those lines.

Ii is in that case that we need to consider how we look to outsiders.

Are we appearing externally to act like children, and violent children at that? Are we prepared to maintain our own culture, in being psychologically cohesive and strong enough to withstand an influx of drastically new cultures, of immensely new forms of technologies?

Are we sociologically capable of even handling a contact? We can barely handle dealing with other countries that are different from what we are used to.

If we start now to move toward our productively and intelligently handling those things, if we can make ourselves appear more attractive for contact, even if there is no other race in the universe, we will still be all the better for it.

We have already seen much thought on this issue of contact. Both in sociology, science and speculative fiction, as well as in the fields of pure science.

One thought is that we are at a very noisy stage of our technological development. A more advanced society would be quieter and in our projecting broadcast signals out into deep space, we may be telegraphing how primitive we still are. Just as we are seeing a trend to go from broadcast to cable, to silent forms of communications, as in forms such as the internet, more advanced cultures who might themselves be silent in their more economical uses of energy and communications, may view us as much more reasonable to consider contacting us..

When we listen, we may quite reasonably not hear a thing from far off intelligently populated planets. Possibly because their old broadcast TV signals passed us by when we were neanderthals. The signals from the old 1950s TV show, I Love Lucy have been calculated as having now reached out as far as 60 light years from us back in 2011.

And so there is a Contact Clock already, currently set to five minutes to midnight.

"The Official Countdown to Contact Clock which began June 17, 2014 is a real-time countdown to contact between humanity and beings that exist outside of our known reality sphere and is visually represented by the minutes left until the clock hands strike midnight. The TOR Contact Clock is a mirror of the infamous Doomsday Clock which signifies a countdown to nuclear oblivion. The TOR Contact Clock offers an alternative reality belief system in which humanity is not destroyed by the military-industrial-complex mindset, but alternatively, glides into a parallel reality in which humanity shrugs off the old, barbaric ways and enters into a final stretch of open contact and strong relationships with peaceful galactic neighboring civilizations."

I'm not so sure they are the ones to be doing this. But the concept is a valid one. We need a guage by which to judge who we are and how we are developing. The Doomsday Clock is a wake up call about a serious issue. We need to be aware of that.

Still, we also need to see the more positive side of our development and reasons for it. Not just to avoid destruction. But also to have a goal to attain that is more positive.