Aliens, etc.
I just watched the first half of a ‘Documentary’ I downloaded from the internet which may or may not have been called “spiritworld” (I wasn’t paying that much attention). It’s one of those conspiracy documentaries rather unoriginally about UFOs, the moon landing and the US Governments involvement with Nazi scientists. The three reasons I continued to watch it were that 1) it was something to have on in the background, 2) several parts made me laugh and 3) I like watching things about UFOs and aliens.
It rather lost credibility as documentary early on however when it showed a series of grainy still images with random captions and labels saying either “secret Nazi base” or “UFO over Berlin”. Really they could have been photos of anything, and adding a caption does not count as evidence, which does not work in a film’s favour when it’s trying to prove a point. As a comparison, consider Zeitgeist and its sequel Zeitgeist: Addendum: those movies have some hard pills to swallow, but at least it sites all its sources and systematically examines each point it makes. (By the way, I recommend watching both those films since they are freely available on Google videos and, though occasionally questionable and quite depressing, are thought-provoking nonetheless.)
Anyway, aliens: Firstly, aliens, ‘greys’ particularly, are scary, at least in my opinion. I used to have this fear when I was a kid that I would look out a window at night, particularly the skylight in my bathroom, and see an alien face pressed against the glass. I think that scared me more than anything, because I was never really afraid of the dark or spiders or stuff like that when I was a kid. Also, and I’m certain a lot of people would disagree on this point, I think that Signs is one of the scariest movies I’ve seen, not the best horror film (I think that would have to be Jacob’s Ladder), but one of the old-fashioned, non-gory, scariest. Aliens are also one third of the appeal of The X-Files for me, the other two thirds being Mulder and Scully.
I suppose the reason that aliens are so scary is that, like the vampire and the werewolf before them, they’re both human and inhuman: they look kind of like us, but they’re most definitely not us, and that is something that has always terrified mankind: the different, the unknown. That’s not to say I believe in aliens or, more specifically, in aliens that have made contact with humans. Where Mulder says “I want to believe” I would have to say “I would quite like to believe” because it would be kind of interesting, even though it would change so fundamentally so many things that we thought we knew about the universe and how we look at the world. For example, aside from anything else, following contact with an intelligent species from another world, how would literature change? No longer could we examine our small existences in our little microcosm, because now humanity would be playing on a much greater stage. (Actually, I’d quite like to conceive and write that someday: a post-contact Modernist novel examining the consciousness of ordinary life in the wake of new revelations.)
The other main point I wanted to address in this opinion, apart from the enlightening revelation that I’m scared of aliens, is the question of UFOs. Something UFO ‘documentaries’ almost always fail to address is ‘why?’ As far as I can see, if UFOs were extra-terrestrial craft that had travelled millions of miles (and even if they came from our nearest star system, they would have to have travelled at least two lightyears – that’s two whole years of travelling moving at the theoritically limiting speed of light), there are only three reasons they would come to Earth.
The first would be that they want to make contact with us.
The second would be that they want to observe us or our planet.
The third would be that they want something from us, like food or fuel or something.
For the first, you would think, having travelled all that way, they would come down and say “hello” properly, rather than just dancing about, flashing some lights in the sky then flying off home again.
For the second, surely they would want to observe us acting naturally and so would not want to be seen. I’m off the opinion that a race with the technology to span galaxies would be able to make themselves unseen if they wanted to, even if they just turned off the interior lights, made the windows of one-way glass or painted the bottom of their saucers blue.
For the third, if they were stealing from us, again you would assume they would want to not be seen, whereas if they wanted to trade with us, they would come down and do so.
That is what I don’t get about supposed UFO sightings and grainy photographs and footage: either the aliens would want to be seen and would make sure they were by everyone, or they would want to be unseen and make their craft invisible / undectable / unfilmable.
Unless, of course, they flew over here for the fourth reason suggested by Douglas Adams: that they just like messing with our heads, kidnapping the odd farmer here and there so they can laugh at the results.
Having said my decidedly non-commital piece on this unknowable topic, I shall leave you with a quote from Arthur C. Clarke which I feel sums up the debate of the existence of extra-terrestrial life:
“Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
Tags: aliens, Arthur C. Clarke, Conspiracy, Documentaries, Douglas Adams, E.B.Es, Mulder, Scully, The X-Files, three reasons, UFOs, Zeitgeist
