ESSAY

True Alien Visits

But why here — why us?

Photo by Dre Erwin on Unsplash

Just to be clear: this is my first assumption: Faster-than-light travel not only is possible but has to be.

This is my second assumption: Curiosity is a universal phenomenon — and I mean universal in its broadest, most far-reaching, galaxies-including sense.

This is fact number one: I have seen them.

This is fact number two: I was not dreaming, hallucinating, or what have you. I was wide awake, in full and conscious possession of all my senses, and both thrilled and amazed at what I saw.

This is fact number three: The year is 1969, spring is almost over, busy melting a few lingering patches of snow; summer in the wings, cooling its heels for the time being, wishing spring would hurry up and be done.

I did not look for them. I’m not even sure I believed in them. They just showed up one day — apparently looking for me.

And they found me. So, yes, I have seen aliens.

I know that there might be as many opinions about this assertion as there are readers, but in this particular case, there is only one opinion that holds any water with me, and that is my own. Also, and again just be clear: in this case, my opinion is not an opinion; it is a certainty.

Seeing them was a wide-awake experience — not imagination, wishful thinking, or dream. An experience that, in less than a minute, revealed to me the deeper nature of my blue-skied spring universe.

Yes, it was a truly wide-awake, wide-aware experience. And yes, it is a blue-skied, wonderful sunny day in this spring of 1969. Here’s how it happened.

It is lunchtime. Almost all the snow in and around Stockholm has melted by now, and the park lawn — just a short walk from where I work in the computer department of Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s largest daily — hints at green here and there while the sun more than just hints at warm comfort.

I’ve had a quick lunch and now look around for and find a nice, dry spot to lap up some sun.

I spread my jacket on the grass and lay down.

Clasping my hands behind my head as my pillow, I sigh from the sheer pleasure of things. What a day. Looking straight up into the blue, blue, endless sky, I am ready to swear on a Bible: there is absolutely nothing wrong with the world.

After a while, my eyelids grow heavy and slowly close into a warm, beautiful, and very pleasant dozing. The sun knows exactly how to warm and lull me and does a great job of it.

And so I drift. Not really sleeping, no. But no thoughts, just this warm, sun-fueled, wonderful drifting.

Until I bolt awake. Not a sit-up bolt, but an eyelids-opening-in-a-hurry bolt. Startled, I don’t move, but I look out and up into the vast blue above. Still not thinking, just looking. And there, clear as day, probably a mile or so up, hovers a silver saucer. Small (from this distance). Colored sparks shoot out from the perimeter of the craft, a circular on-and-off rainbow.

Five seconds, ten, perhaps thirty. I take it in. Still no thoughts, just a wide-awake wonder. The craft remains stock-still, mid-space, sparkling. Silver. Shiny. Dead still.

And then, as if assured that I had now seen them, it takes off like a shooting star — now you see me, now I’m gone. Standstill to ten thousand miles a second in just one of them. It leaves a faint trace that dissipates almost right away.

I’m still looking.

It takes me a minute or so to realize what I have just seen, what I have just experienced. There is no way around this: I have just seen an alien craft. There is zero doubt.

I shiver at the realization. My God.

I heave myself up onto my elbows and look around at my fellow sun-dozers. Did anyone else see this?

The answer is no. They — and there are quite a few of them — are all sun-lulled and probably drifting just like I had. Not a surprised, up-sitting, looking-around face among them. So it was only me, then.

Shivering again.

Later in life, I had this experience. I saw a hawk, way, way up in the sky. Not much more than a speck. Hovering, eyeing some soon-to-be ex-mouse or some such on the ground. Then something or other yanked my attention, and I looked away and around for a heartbeat or two to find out what, and then back at the hawk. No hawk. I could not find it, and could not find it, and then it moved, and finally, my focus caught up with it and I saw it again, clear as anything. Still hovering.

A few days later, someone explained to me that spotting a bird that high up in the air is a game of chance since, looking up into empty space, your eyes have nothing obvious to focus on and might focus above or below the bird, effectively rendering you blind to the very spot (height) where it hovers; you just haven’t focused at the right distance yet.

And on the subject of distance. The craft I saw was at least a mile, perhaps two, up in the air. I was drifting sleepward and then — out of the blue, literally — I was prodded. Yes, that is the right word, prodded. Very much tapped on a virtual shoulder.

I only realized this later, but I still see it now. I was prodded to open my eyes and to focus on the precise spot, at the precise height where the craft hovered. What were the chances?

I can only conclude that they wanted me to see them. They nudged me. They willed me to see. Yes, I see that now. And I did see them. And satisfied that I had, they took off.

No, not dreaming, not imagining — seeing, experiencing.

Allow me an odd aside. Much later, I thought this: What if this was not a craft with friendly aliens in it? What if the sparkling silver disk itself was the alien? I don’t see why not. We certainly have enough strange critters here on our own little planet, next to which a silver-disk-shaped, sparkling being would be no more strange. Maybe even more logical than some of our fauna.

I’m not saying this was the case — I’m leaning more toward long-lost friends saying hi from within their craft — what I’m saying is that it could be.

I am sharing all this to highlight a point I have long pondered and now want to make: Aside from nudging me of all people — which certainly is a question well worth its own pondering — why Earth, why us, why now? And this is why I am asking:

Our closest starry neighbor is Proxima Centauri, roughly 4.25 light-years from us. That translates to 40,208,000,000,000 kilometers, aka far away.

Say these aliens (or alien) could travel at near-light speed but not — letting Einstein have a preliminary say in this — exceed it, and say these aliens (or alien) came from our nearest star neighbor: he, she, or it would have traveled for about four years and three months to reach us and was now facing another four and a quarter years traveling back. For just a glimpse? A look around? Or perhaps a wider survey?

But even so, why?

Why Earth? Why their interest?

Why go to such lengths? Especially if they came from farther away than Proxima Centauri, for other nearby (strange word in this context) stars are ten or so light-years — i.e., a twenty-year round trip — away.

Are we really that interesting? Would some aliens travel ten, a hundred, a thousand years to check us out? I just don’t see it.

Which is my way of saying that I believe that faster-than-light travel (my first assumption, above) is not only possible but must be, and is in use by more advanced beings.

And given that:

Say these aliens can travel a billion times faster than light, and that they came from a star in a galaxy so far away as to have yet to be discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Say it only took them, or it, by circumventing space-time, a few of our heartbeats to reach us; the question still remains: why Earth? Why us? What could possibly be of such interest to them on our small and very distant planet?

Do we have a reputation?

For they do visit us, I know they do. This certainty gives me comfort.

Many others know this, too. It’s even quite likely — though, as yet, unconfirmed — that our military and other parts of our government know this as well. But I cannot help wondering: with so incredibly many planets in this galaxy, in this universe to choose from — the count is well beyond many trillions times trillion — why this one? Why seek us out to inspect or survey?

What possible interest do we hold for those light-speed-conquering beings? Why is the Earth a place to visit, to explore?

What is their fascination with us? It surely begs the question, don’t you agree? What is our reputation elsewhere in the universe? How come we are even bothered with?

Surely, there is some reason, some overarching interest that brings them here to take a look for themselves.

That’s my point.

And for me, the mystery.

At times, though — looking at the world today and at its so bloody and violent history, its endless wars, its warring religions, its starvation, and its diseases, its modern insane consumerism and current ecological onslaught, its me-me-me-ness, its ego-is-everything-ness, its compassionless rush toward oblivion — at times I cannot help but wonder if we are not a galactic experiment gone very wrong.

A cautionary tale.

A lesson to learn.

That is why they arrive from near and far to see for themselves what to avoid at all costs.

© Wolfstuff

[embed]Wolfstuff So, who am I? Really really. I could tell you that I was born in northern Sweden during a snow storm, and subsequently…wolfstuff.com