FLYINGSAUCERY
PETER BROOKESMITH PRESENTS HIS REGULAR SURVEY OF THE LATEST FADS AND FLAPS FROM THE WORLD OF UFOLOGY
THEY WERE CERTAINLY NOT GREY-SKINNED DWARVES
ALIENS HAVE FEELINGS TOO, YOU KNOW
Long years ago, having given forth disbelievingly on alien abductions at an FT UnConvention, a commentator whose name I forget identified the cause of my scepticism: I was in denial. The implication being that I was an abductee myself, but could not face the Truth and the Facts. And of course to deny one is in denial merely compounds the diagnosis, doesn’t it? Today, however, I can reveal that I have indeed been abducted (although that is not quite the right word) by aliens, no less than three times and, at their own special request, will reveal the truth about them here. Better yet, I have a witness to all the events I shall describe. Eat your heart out, Linda Cortile.
This is how it all fell out. I was abed and asleep and a-snoring. Lying at my side, my wife was awake and became aware of presences in the room. She heard a chirruping voice like a chipmunk’s: “Has she been blocked?” She found she was powerless, unable to move or speak. Somehow they took my consciousness out of my body and, even more somehow, allowed hers to observe but not participate in what was happening to me throughout. She described this as “being there but not there, as if I were on a Big Wheel and you were on another ride in the fairground below.” One of the curiosities of the episodes was that neither of us could make out much about the physical appearance of the entities: we had to make do with the tone of their voices, intuition, and some corner-of-the-eye impressions. And so I found myself in a room on what one supposes was their spacecraft. And what a room it was: the carpet was what we used to call ‘cinema quality’, a mass of swirls in orange and purple, with flecks of green. The lampshades were just as gross, in red and lime green; the wallpaper was brown and ochre block print. My hosts were very pleased with the décor, which they had hoped would make me feel comfortable and relaxed and would give me no qualms about asking to be shown the rest of the establishment: “Just say what you need.” So explained their spokesman, who was elderly, silver-haired, and softspoken. He was dressed in a sparkly white robe, somewhat like a cassock, and (thought the wife) had the air of a wise, retired professor, perhaps of history. “Thank you for trying so hard,” I said politely, “but it’s not quite the right era.” I’m not sure what the ‘right era’ would be for me, although I am very fond of Georgian interiors, but the crassest of Seventies fluorescence never did appeal. High Table in a particularly puritanical Cambridge college would have been a more relaxing place to be. My hosts betrayed no disappointment, but went on to explain why I was there at all.
This was something I had to write about and publish, so that “the people who mattered” would know the truth. They were concerned because the notion of aliens, as generally understood, was a mass of untruths that was being exploited by the unscrupulous and the gullible (no names were mentioned, sadly), and they wanted to set the record straight. They didn’t abduct people and poke them in naughty places, or otherwise abuse them, and they didn’t need any help with their reproductive processes, thank you: their own were perfectly effective and efficient. If they had visitors from Earth, they asked them first if they would like to come with them to learn about them or verify what they did know – although I don’t recall being invited, I have to say. Perhaps the card fell off the chimneypiece. And, they insisted, they most certainly were not skinny robotic emotionless grey-skinned dwarves with bulbous black eyes, or praying mantis-like creatures. “That’s all a myth.” I chuckled sympathetically. After the event, though, I have wondered why they didn’t make their actual appearance clearer.
I was then offered a drink, which I declined; it seems the wife was worried lest I accept. Maybe both of us had a subconscious memory of fairy-fare and its dangerously enchanting properties. Perhaps the wise elder sensed our concern too, for he responded that they never intentionally harmed humans or caused them distress. It was important that I get this message to the people who mattered. It wasn’t clear if this phrase meant the powers that be on Earth (few of whom, surely, pay much attention to abduction lore, or even ufology in general, although many currently seem obsessed by the thought that President Trump is alien to civilisation as we know it; see FT350:55). It may have meant the mythmakers. Or maybe the people at large, the ones who ultimately matter the most.
“You will come again.” This wasn’t a question or an invitation, if not quite an instruction. More a blunt statement.
“That’s very German,” I said, laughing. ( Vee haff arr veys, etc.) They didn’t get the joke. And then I was back in my bed, probably still snoring.
The next night I found myself back with them again. This time in a mediæval or Renaissance banqueting hall, sitting in a heavy chair at a table groaning with all manner of deliciouslooking comestibles. On my left sat a row of females dressed in gowns and wearing those strange headdresses (wimples?) that had two tall pointy bits and some diaphanous material floating between and down. On my right was the old professor, and at his side a row of wazirs or eminences of that nature. The hall was packed with people; there was a huge roaring log fire. Those at table would chew baked meats off the bone, and toss the bones to dogs lurking beneath the board, as seen in all the best ‘historical’ B movies. All of which was rather more congenial than the eye-blitzing Seventies horror of the previous evening, and I made no remark about the setting (or was it set?). Still wary of the fare, I said I wasn’t inclined to eat or drink. “But all this was for you! We hope we’ve got it right.” Reassured, I set to, with a trencherman’s relish that in actuality I haven’t felt in over a decade. To be sorely disappointed. Food and drink were insubstantial and absolutely tasteless: like eating or drinking air. School dinners were more flavoursome, even if their flavours were sometimes repulsive. Tastelessness, readers will no doubt recall, is also characteristic of fairy food. Once more my hosts iterated their message: that they were entirely harmless and were not the abusers of abductionist legend. I said I understood. And that was the end of that episode.
But not the end of my adventures. The next night I was among them again. This time I was met by an entity with a military air, soft-spoken but always precise and to the point. He told
me they had no malice toward us, and nothing to hide. I was here to take a tour of the whole ‘ship’, and was free to go anywhere I chose. I noticed, this time, a sense of weightlessness, although objects didn’t float about as they do, if allowed, in the ISS or on lunar missions. One port of call, naturally, was the pilot’s cabin. Everything in it was white and dazzlingly lit. I thought my photophobia was well known, but not to them – another odd gap in their knowledge. The lights dimmed by themselves, and one could make out seats (unoccupied) and something like desks. The ceiling, like the rest of the place, was vast, and entirely transparent and non-reflective. All one could see above were stars. There were no visible controls – no dials, knobs or levers, and no digital displays, buttons or keyboards. Somehow one intuited that the ‘ship’ was controlled by telepathy, or something like it.
With no particular logic, I remarked that so far I’d seen only adults: I presumed there were no children here. “In your world, children are seen but not heard,” said the military entity. I chuckled. “Wrong era again I’m afraid,” I said – reminded of the mannerless, tyrannical little fiends one has to negotiate in street and supermarket today. And so one found oneself in a place of happy alien weenies, in the charge of a soothing old lady. “We too have marriages, but take them much more seriously than you do.” In retrospect, I wonder (not for the first time) why aliens seem to take contemporary Western decadence as the global norm. I was also shown what one took to be lecture halls, a museum full of “prior modes of transport” (which I am now unable to describe, unfortunately), and a “library of thoughts” which, I said, impressed, was very ingenious.
There was a small farewell committee: the wise old professor and his spouse (who had supervised the children), the military personage, and a very curvy female who made me smile. “We’ve discussed all we need, and communicated, eaten and shared together,” I was told, “and you are always welcome here. You are The Ambassador. Life is short. Live well and be happy. No one knows what will happen tomorrow.” I shook hands with the professor; the military man bowed, and the curvaceous person presented me with a commemorative gift. So ended the third encounter.
Titter as you may, this is all faithfully reported. Of course there is a catch or two. I have no memory whatever of these events, and cannot produce the gift I was given, to shock and awe sceptics and believers alike. The whole story was told me by the wife, who has a truly remarkable recall of her sometimes immensely convoluted dreams and whose consciousness, as noted, was present throughout as a kind of recording angel. She dreamed these three episodes over three consecutive nights, a little under three years ago. Blessed with a talent for satire, she never quite makes it clear if she believes this is a series of genuine events, or simply takes pleasure in twitting me with the thought that she does. I tend not to recall whole dreams, but only scenes that have no obvious significance – such as driving a pickup truck with excessively dim headlights and, once I’ve got out, the vehicle has become a bus, leaking oil. (Go, Freudians, go go go!)
There was a sequel, some time later. Again in a dream, she had a message from the aliens (“But I don’t think they were really aliens,” she says cryptically) expressing some disappointment that I hadn’t written this up and told their story to the world. Well, now I have, and you may address me as Your Excellency. Alert readers will have noted the holes in the story, which aren’t that different in kind from the holes in other abduction accounts, such as where they came from, what they were doing here, and how come they seemed to know so much and yet so little about us. And why were they so concerned with their amour propre? Such logical nitpicking is probably out of place in such cases. It reminded me of nothing so much as Susan Clancy’s account of trying to find ‘genuine’ alien abductees for her research, and discovering how many would-be volunteers just knew they’d been abducted, or had simply dreamed they were. At least I was saved the trouble of having to dream it all myself.