Ok, so the title is a little misleading, but it is a homage to an old film, It Came From Outer Space. Back in my school days, I saw a 16mm version of this film, and in the opening scene, there was a flash on the left as the flaming ball came crashing to earth. I put the film on the Steenbeck, went through it frame by frame, and chuckled. The alien craft was actually a ball of some description, set alight, and swung on a rope down a hallway. As it went past the hallway table, which had a mirror on it, that provided the flash I saw in real time.

So what’s this all about, well it’s about aliens. You know little green men (not related to green cows) who have special powers, and visit earth more regularly than Charlie Sheen does drugs and p0rn stars.

Now, here’s the thing, as far as I am concerned, aliens have not visited this planet. Yes, I do believe that aliens exist, and one day we will have contact with them, but as yet, we have not had contact with them. Let’s look at it realistically.

In terms of the universe, Earth is hardly what you call on the way to anything. We are no where near the centre of the universe, and in terms of the age of the universe, if the centre of the universe is Epimenides of Knossos, then Earth is still not even a thought in the milkman’s mind. We are a very young planet, that doesn’t even rate any significance in the Universe. So why would some alien randomly point at a map and say “Let’s go there and see if there is anything of interest.” The closest Mars gets to Earth is 54.6 million km, so you would have to travel around the Earth 1362.5 times, to travel the same distance. Travelling at 299,792 kilometres per second (Light-Speed), it would take 4.3 years to get to Proxima Centauri, the furthermost star we know of in the universe is 14 billion light-years away. The maths are a bit beyond me, but if you were to go around the Earth that many times, I think you would need more than a new pair of shoes and a Vegemite sandwich.

So is it really logical, that if an alien life form had the technology to travel these distances, they would not make it known that they were out there?

But what about crop circles, alien abductions and experimentation, mystical stuff that is beyond what humans can develop, insert any other woo woo you can think of?

Well I hate to disappoint, but those things can fairly easily be explained. If you have proof otherwise, I’d like to see it. All of these things just prove how amazing human beings are. Not only can we perform the necessary tasks to keep alive and functioning as a species, we can use our brain to invent things that don’t exist, for good and for bad. Crop Circles have been proven time and time again to be nothing more than a prank. Alien abductions, well I think I could safely say they are a bad mushroom trip, drug trip, very vivid dream, or just someone out to make money by selling snake oil. Sorry to disappoint you, but in life in general, as in the case of aliens, if someone out there wants to spend money on these things, then someone will be willing to take that money. Heck I’m happy to take your money to tell you something you want to hear.

As for things that humans couldn’t develop, well, we did develop them. During World War Two, the British started the old wives tale that their pilots were eating carrots, and that’s how they could see the Germans so well at night, and over distances humans can’t see. It was believable too, as there is some scientific proof that the vitamins in carrots help with the health of the eyes. Eat too many of them though, and you can do some serious damage to your sight. What the British didn’t want the Germans to know about is a thing called radio detection and ranging, or RADAR. If you were developing a new technology, and you didn’t want others to know about it, so you could make the money from it, saying it is an alien thing is a pretty safe way to go about it.

So what about alien abductions. Well ask yourself this question. If you were to travel to the most distant place you had ever been to, where amazing life forms are to be found, would you really in all your wisdom, steal one of these things, put it on a table, and shove things into its anus, to work out what it is all about? Seriously, what is it with the anal probing thing? That is some seriously messed up thinking going on there.

So here’s the way I look at it. Dream the dream, and keep that dream alive, that one day we will have contact with an alien species. It will be a wonderful day, and I just hope we go into it with an open heart and open hands. Keep striving to be the aliens ourselves, who go out there and discover new worlds. Necessity is the mother of invention, and as long as we strive to discover, new things will be found and created. Aliens also make for great cinema, except for that bloody awful Avatar, gee that movie shit me to tears.

Go forth and prosper my fellow beings, just don’t fall in the pit of myth, where someone accepts cash or EFTPOS, to tell you what you want to hear. If they really had proof, it would be one of the most profound and amazing discoveries ever on Earth, and would open up so many wonderful and exciting possibilities. The finder could basically make any amount of money out of it they want. So why don’t they? It’s simple, they haven’t boldly gone where no one has gone before, and the only time they came in peace was at Woodstock. Even then they have no memory of it from the trip they were on.

Live long and prosper, and don’t forget to put your bins out Red House.