'Take me to your leader'
Sigmund Siignatuur
WHENEVER ALIENS land on a piece of waste ground when you are taking your dog for a walk — they never land in crowds as they are notoriously shy — they invariably say (or this is the stereotype of an alien): “Take me to your leader”. This is almost always said in a metallic voice. I don't know what a government official would say if I took an alien from Shmeisani in a taxi and presented him to the above. I suppose the story would appear on the front page of all newspapers. It would sound something like: “The government official and Alien discussed issues of mutual concern to the planet Sirius and Jordan. Later Alien paid a visit to the local football stadium where he witnessed a game between Ramtha and Faisali. He later abducted all the players to coach budding alien football stars on the planet Sirius.”
For those unaccustomed to UFO sightings, these creatures/people are recognisable by the fact that they are about 1.5-metre tall, with large heads and wrap around eyes. There are others, but I will come back to these. I got in touch with a leading UFOlogist and asked him if these chaps are (whatever sex they purport to be), very dangerous. In other words, should I take out an all party Alien Abduction Policy with Lloyd's Insurance Company? He told me that most inter-galactic space travellers were like muggers. That is, they often steal small, meaningless things, like a bunch of flowers and banknotes (is this small and meaningless?). This UFOlogist said that one should run away from an alien because of the uncertainty, but they, in the main, are not particularly dangerous. He also advised that you should offer them an attractive trinket, otherwise they may whisk you away and you will end up building villas in West Venus. I will, in the future, always carry a spare set of dentures with me. I wonder if aliens have any idea how attractive they could look with a set of Sigmund Siignatuur Plexiglas Remote Sensoring Dentures. I guess not.
I pursued the point of their being relatively harmless, and the expert said they were, with one exception. He told me that the Grey ones were more dangerous and they permanently abducted people. I asked him if they were called Greys because their colour was grey. He told me that they were called Greys because they left their spaceships drinking Earl Grey tea. He told me they came from Andromeda or Zeta Reticuli. He emphasised that their military, totalitarian society aims to conquer Earth and make us their slaves. They have no feelings and conduct their medical and genetic experiments without anaesthetic. I thought that having an appendicitis on Andromeda would be something to be avoided.
You can always recognise their form of transport in West Amman because they are the only people who are not in a Mercedes Benz. They prefer flying in large dinner plates or cigar shaped vehicles.
I wanted to find out what exactly these aliens are doing here, apart from giving us yet another mystery to solve. You have to go to Europe or America to find out answers to such issues, because the average Jordanian seems far more interested in the price of vegetables than in whether an alien spacecraft has just landed amongst his extended family. You don't have to come from outer space to be an alien in your own society, or so I believe.
I therefore sought an explanation from outside. I found this UFOlogist who I contacted more confusing. Basically he said that to travel at the speed of light, time comes to a standstill. In the time it takes to think “I must stop now” they (the aliens) would travel an infinite distance in an infinite amount of time. They would end up beyond the universe at a time when everyone and everything was dead. So this is a UFOlogist who doesn't' think they could arrive? This seemed very contradictory, so I sought the advice of Howard Menger.
Menger has had intimate dealings with these creatures. He said that they come here to: a) deliver potatoes (he says they were delicious) and, less importantly, b) warn the world. Menger said that aliens had told him about the dangers of nuclear war and environmental pollution. I understood then that these characters had created the puncture in the ozone layer. I started to think that they would strike us a deadly blow. I am thinking about asking Rosetta (my wife and famous for furious knitting) to knit a shawl that would cover up this hole in the ozone layer. She thinks it is about three metres across. I forgot to tell her it is millions of kilometres across.
Other UFOlogists think that aliens want to study such ideas as love, fear and pain. Obviously Ariel Sharon should expect a visit in the near future.
Another concept that I became interested in while looking rather superficially at this phenomenon was the idea that it was an obsession of the developed world, and that LDCs (Less Developed Countries) were much less interested in this concept. I asked a leading Jordanian psychologist who is also interested in astronomy, and he said very unconvincingly that people who saw such apparitions were on drugs. Not convinced, I paid a visit to my local library and the very thoughtful bilingual archivist put forward a much more plausible suggestion. She said that people in this region were more concerned about the day-to-day mundane economic factors, e.g., the “bread and zibde questions” whereas post industrial societies were largely satisfied with their material wealth and needed stimulation from the excitement of “little green men visiting them from Pluto”, to enhance mystery as nourishment rather than cheese as nourishment.
I also find it strange that while there have been thousands of sightings and presumably many of these can be explained, we are left with a residue that cannot be explained: why are these sightings only on lonely roads, why not on the New Jersey Turnpike?
What of the conspiracy theorists? The Middle East would have had much to contribute to such theories, but we have noted aliens are a minor distraction for a small band in the upper middle class. It has been held as a truism for many years that governments, particularly the US government, have vast knowledge of UFO sightings and have covered up such accounts for reasons of national security. Some UFOlogists believe that the US government has worked with the aliens for many years. They have never said, however, whether these aliens have Republican or Democrat leanings. One has to remember that conspiracy theories are immune to contradiction because they are beyond proof or disproof. No matter what a government does or says, the conspiracy believer shouts “trick” or something similar but less polite.
Just to finish on a note of obscurantism, the following may be observed. Frank Drake gave a lecture which changed thinking about the old topic of “Is there life out there”, e.g., in space. The answer, he said, is a mathematical equation: N=rfxpxnexflxfjfxcxL. Well, I believe it changed at least three people's perspective on such a problem. The rest of us just wait for the dog to salivate and notice that men who look like vegetables abduct us to ask about the secrets of gibneh safra.
May 31- June 1, 2002 |
