THE EXTRATERRESTRIALS IN THE FOG
The night I was walking the dogs and narrowly avoided a probe.
Extraterrestrials are here and let’s just say that I’m pretty damn sure I’ve seen ‘em.
As a species, our knowledge of the exact physical structure, form, and nature of the universe is limited and rife with conjecture. We pepper our discourse on what’s out there with concepts like dark matter to explain the literal holes in our understanding of constructs like star systems, the expansion of space, wormholes, and your basic garden variety space-time fuckery like rifts and their like.
As our technological know-how won’t really let us see past the outer wall of our universe, we disseminate our limited knowledge into highly-educated guesses about what’s out beyond the garden gate, how vast and expansive it is—please see: every fucking analogy citing grains of sands and deserts and the world’s beaches—and just where the hell everything started.
This begets barroom brawl-worthy conversations like:
“You see, the Big Bang was the beginning of everything and all matter used to fit inside an area the size of a head of a pin called the Initial Singularity—“
“—Hold on, all matter of the universe erupted out of a virtually nonexistent point? Planets and quarks and our sun and eventually Volkswagons and Taylor Swift?!”
“Yeah, the Initial Singularity”.
(contemplative pause while beer is consumed)
“That makes no fucking sense whatsoever and you might just be the stupidest motherfu—”
Punch! Punchpunchpunchbite!
Dark matter and string theory and quantum mechanics now pepper any lucid conversation by people in white coats to understand everything that’s too big or too small. People in sweatpants or yoga tights or thongs, on the other hand, usually flip an internal coin and declare that either life exists outside of Earth—or this blue marble and its hairy denizens are it, baby. There’s no tangible middle ground, either lifeforms are bopping around the cosmos or every single science-related domino that lined up in the vast array of computations that created everything simply resulted in homo sapiens on the Planet Earth that spins within the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Done. Here we are, the pinnacle of creation. Congratulations everyone and be sure to tip your servers!
One might posit that human arrogance is never so prevalent as when we discuss the possibility that creatures existing in another galaxy/ solar system/ universe doesn’t exist. Some of our science fiction books, television shows, and movies have peppered us with ideas that extraterrestrial beings, whether bipedal and human-like, or slithering and oozing, are here to steal our organs or enslave us or simply blow our planet out of orbit after they eat all of our mice. Historically, these narratives were deft metaphors about McCarthyism, or racism, or environmental commentaries that were better handled with euphemistic concepts like battling Silons or the Borg—concepts that camouflaged big ideas when wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve could get one black-listed in any number of ways.
The dilemma with asking your neighbour over beers if they believe in aliens is that your neighbour is struggling to pay their mortgage/ rent, put food in their kids’/ pets’ mouths, and get through their days without driving off the road or contracting syphilis from the mail carrier, among laudible goals.
Basically, our neighbours spend their every waking moment being humans and doing human things, so when some bastard with time on their hands pipes up about extraterrestrials, most people’s thoughts and assumptions develop from a formatively human perspective. We think about human-like beings traveling billions of light years using advanced incarnations of our technologies: spaceships and metal and propulsion systems and gas and toilets and bar fridges, so the general response is framed using our limited understanding of how things work. If we can’t comprehend daylight savings time, how the fuck can we understand interstellar travel?
A second and exponentially more dire—direr?— dilemma when throwing out questions about alien visitors is that your neighbour might just nod quietly and whisper that, yes, they were once scooped up from their childhood farm in middle-agrarian wherever and brought aboard a spaceship and given a good, solid anal probing.
We’re Really Not Here For Your Anuses
A quick and important tangent here. If, as humans, we hiked across Australia, for example, and eventually came to a river teeming with a vibrant ecosystem and lifted up a rock to find a frog that we had never seen in our personal history of lifting up rocks and finding frogs—would we then proceed to stick our fingers up its ass?! Would we stick anything up its ass? Is that the first thought one has when one finds a species that piques one’s curiousity? Hey everyone, this Hainan gibbon is so rare and endangered and we found one of these beautiful creatures and this is a great opportunity to examine it and really stick something up its ass!
I should think that the same assumptions should apply to alien visitors who are in an examining mood. How the hell would a species with the capable know-how to traverse billions of galaxies arrive at our planet and not have the technological know-how to simply scan us with a device or even run their fucking ‘hands’ over us to get all the physiological data they needed? Methinks people who have been ‘probed’ are either buying into some trite cliché about alien visitors having proctological fetishes or have substituted the words ‘alien captors’ for ‘dodgy uncle’. Either way, I wish them well.
But, let’s get back to the original question: what if extraterrestrials are here and—shocker—they’re not bipedal, human-like creatures with overly large eyes and four fingers on their hands? What if they don’t have circulatory systems or skin or skeletons? What if they’re energy or sand particles or they look like trees or they propel themselves around the universe (es) with contraptions that harness light? What if they are a sort of light?
We’ll never know until some jet fighter pilot manages to put a hole in one of the plethora of physics-defying orbs that have been making the news lately. Ooh, maybe they already have? Researching that will take one down a deep rabbit hole flecked with conspiracy theories and unsettling accounts by people who think they’ve got the goods on visitors to our planet—or people who have been to the Interstellar Proctologist’s Office.
I only needed to take our dogs out for a walk to get the real goods on extraterrestrials.
They’re Here
This was a while ago, not in a galaxy far, far away, and it was on a night when a dense fog had wrapped itself around our town. I leashed up the pups and we ventured out into the night for one last pee break before bed.
We walked up a hill near our house and the fog filled the residential streets with a semi-opaque, undulating mistiness that was serene and slightly off-putting at the same time. Streetlights and the odd illuminated house window had become bright orbs or rectangles in the haze and there was a muted stillness to our neighbourhood.
“This…”, I instructed our pups sagely, “is the type of fog that promotes malfeasance of the Sherlockian kind”. I immediately laughed to myself because as far as I know, neither of our dogs have ever read Conan Doyle and really could give a flying fuck about my attempts to set an eerie scene for a ghost story while we traipsed.
After a few minutes, we stopped as one of the pups identified a beautiful little boulevard garden on which she very much wanted to shit. Our older dog performs both kinds of business within a block of the house every single time we go for a walk—maybe it was her formative months as a starving Mexican street dog where she was always scrounging for food or looking over her shoulder for the next asshole. The other one, the younger bohemian pup who’s prone to just wandering off at times or walking into poles or parked cars, requires the absolute perfect hedge, pristine flowers, or pile of leaves for her bowel business.
This has resulted in much longer walks, at times, where I’ve coaxed her strongly through smiling, clenched teeth to just fucking shit already and why does it take you so long to fucking shit holy fuck what’s wrong with those leaves they’re perfect and it’s raining now and it’s snowing now and please just shit just shit just shitshitshit!
Bohemian pup finished her business and both pups’ ears perked up as they simultaneously stared at something down the street that had suddenly grabbed their attention.
Standing at the end of the block and partially obscured by the bank of mist, were two men of equal height, who appeared to be dressed very similarly in ‘preppy’ clothes, if that’s still a term with the kids these days, and both of whom were staring at us. The thing that dinged the bell on my sphincter-meter was that both of their heads were cocked to their left at exactly the same angle, touching their shoulders, as though they were each trying to hold a phone under their left ears—like people did in the old days with corded phones before they realized that position caused all kinds of nasty health effects.
They stood in the mist, silently, and just watched us. Meeting folks on the street, our dogs can sometimes let loose with a cacophony of fuck-you barks at anyone whom they deem irregular or of the Siberian Huskie family, but with this pair, they remained still and quiet. The dogs watched these men watching us with a strange reverence I had only seen once before when they observed a coyote trotting down the street in front of us—but that was more of a respectful we know you hunt for your food every fucking day and we’re going home to our hundred-dollar dog beds and so have a great night and good luck with everything and please don’t eat us.
As I bent to pick up Bohemian Pup’s deuce, I had some quick thoughts about why two people would stand like that, shoulder-to-shoulder in the middle of the dark street with their heads cranked at such an unnatural angle, and just stare at some motherfucker and his two pups. It was as if they had never seen a midnight walk or poop bag—
—And then it hit me at the exact moment my fingers found warm detritus through the poop bag’s protective walls, these guys weren’t from around here—and I mean, they weren’t from around anywhere on the planet. This wasn’t a simple cultural difference defined by a people who weren’t privy to domesticated dogs or their touted environmentally-safe-but-really-not plastic shit bags. This was two beings observing three domesticated mammals in their natural environment.
Their dual heads cocked to the side was the key evidence, the smoking gun as it were, that I needed to accuse these bastards of not being remotely human. It was unnatural and freaky and if you grabbed any two people out of a crowd and asked them to perform the same physical maneuver, they likely couldn’t—or wouldn’t—and then the police would get involved and/or a lovingly applied can of pepper spray. But, these guys looked like they were head-on car crash victims, only that they were walking around.
In that split second after I grabbed Bohemian Pup’s poop, I stood up and the ‘men’ were gone. They had been standing at the juncture of two wide residential streets and there was no way they could have walked or even run out of sight in that time—no humanly way—even with the fog rolling through and obfuscating the hedges and houses.
I know I’m circumventing any logical explanation for these two and pulling together the sinewiest of threads to formulate my conclusion, but isn’t that keeping in line with all good scientific conjecture about the space-time continuum; or the space between the spaces at the sub-atomic level? When we lack empirical evidence, we need to parlay what we know with what we think we know.
Therefore, I can state that extraterrestrials are mostly definitely here, are mostly definitely creating or commanding human skin suits with collared shirts, and are mostly definitely watching us pick up our dogs’ poops from a safe vantage point, as one example.
And if they are here to assess our behaviour toward an end goal of either reaching out to Earthlings in another symbiotic exchange of helpful technological know-how (also see: the Great Pyramids or Stonehenge); or conversely blowing the Earth into nanoparticles, I should truly hope that observing the everyday benevolent and cooperative interactions of the majority of humans will offset the actions of those few who insist on fucking slaughtering each other.
I await the Nobel Peace Prize with bated breath.
I will book us 2 tickets to Sweden to accept your soon to be award prize.