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Posty’s Favourite Columns

Greetings! We Come To Fleece.
First published in The Age, 2 March 2001

I’ve just been reading about “Project Blue Book” and various other official attempts to explain away unexplained lights and ships in the sky, and man are those boys creative.
A glowing sphere that changes colour through blue, white and red, travels at speeds of 1600 miles per hour and changes course to follow a jet fighter? Why that’s just a weather balloon, you big silly. Six triangular ships that dart about at amazing speeds and then converge into just the one light and disappear? A flock of geese, what else? And let’s not forget meteors, swamp gas, ball lightning, temperature inversions, radar “ghosts”, unusual clouds and that old classic, Mistaking The Planet Venus For Something That Actually Moves. These are all considered adequate explanations for strange lights and sightings. Not very convincing are they? But we have to be protected, it’s for our own good, we don’t want folks to get hysterical or anything.

Personally I find it insulting. Finding out that there are other living beings in the universe would not shatter my world view or bring on an attack of the heebie-jeebies. I’d be delighted and curious. But that’s just me, I guess.

Now even with that list of primo, world’s-best-practice explanations for strangeness, there are still sightings that they can’t explain away. Numbers vary, but somewhere between three and 20 per cent of sightings cannot be explained. And they leave it at that. Oh how mysterious, but never mind, don’t worry about a few…anomalies. I on the other hand, am intrigued by the anomalies. Even if it is the low figure of three per cent, that leaves room for healthy doubt. As far as I’m concerned it would take only one confirmed sighting to junk the whole We Are Completely Alone story. Just one, and I’ve seen UFOs twice (long story, some other time), so I’m not buying the lonely-as-a-cloud story. It’s just too ridiculous and mathematically improbable.

Which brings us to the next question: if there are aliens and they are visiting this planet, what the hell do they want? Current theories veer between “Our space brothers are here to guide and help us”, and “Those butt-monkey bastards are stealing my eggs and killing our cattle for their own dastardly purposes”. I have a different take. We live on a relatively young planet, way out in the sticks of a nondescript galaxy. Why on earth (HA!) would an older, more advanced species want to fool around with us? Maybe they’d fly by on anthropological missions and say things like, “Ooh the meat monkeys are hitting each other again. They’re so cute”, but why would they interfere? My personal theory is that interstellar space would act as a very effective moat or quarantine zone to keep undeveloped, unevolved monkeys like us away from the other folk. Why not wait until we got our act together and actually travel out there to meet them? ’Cause I figure that any species that could get it together to develop that sort of technology will have sorted out a whole lot of other issues as well, thus making them fit and proper potential citizens of the universe.

So, where does that leave our alien visitors? If they’re breaking a quarantine zone, we can assume that they’re tools. Poachers, smugglers, dodgy arms dealers and maybe shonky researchers doing illegal tests on lower species. Black marketeers looking to sew up the market before the big boys come along. Makes sense to me. I can’t wait until the American military finds out that they’ve actually been dealing with Lenny the Fence and Sammy the Squealer all these years. Quelle embarrassment.

I can’t wait until we get out there and find out what’s really going on. I think that, as a species, we need to find out where we rate on the ladder of evolution. At the moment we’re like a spoiled only child, never let out to meet the other kids, and we’re sitting in a room banging a drum and saying, “I am the prettiest; I am the smartest; I am the bravest and the most beautiful person in the WHOLE UNIVERSE.” I think not. And when we find out that we’re not, let’s try and not have a major hissy-fit tantrum. What a way to meet the neighbours.

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