2674. An alien encounter

People had always regarded Evan as being a bit strange. He was obsessed with thoughts of space aliens and unidentified flying craft that went this way and that instantaneously.

Lady Luck was on Evan’s side. A strange alien craft had landed on his lawn. How did they know that of all the lawns in town his lawn would be the most welcoming. Evan went out to greet the machine.

A loud voice through speakers welcomed him. It spoke in immaculate English, perhaps with a slight tinge of South African accent.

“Welcome Earthling!” said the voice. “We would like to meet you in person. There is a hatch door at the top of our craft. If you wish it can be opened for you to enter, but you will need a ladder to get to the roof of our craft if you wish to use the hatch.”

Evan went to his shed and got a ladder. The hatch opened. Evan jumped into the craft. It was all water. Evan drowned. The aliens were some sort of fish.

2639. Bananas

Patient: Doctor I’m hungry. I’m finding it more and more difficult to find something to eat that I can keep down.

Doctor: The results of your blood tests have come in. That might tell us something. Yes, I see you are low in potassium. Do you like bananas? I have a banana left over from my lunch. Would you like it? Bananas are high in potassium.

Patient: That is very kind, thank you.

The patient takes a bite of the banana and drops dead.

Doctor: Nurse! Nurse! Come quick!

The nurse enters.

Nurse: Oh doctor, didn’t you know?

Doctor: What? What?

Nurse: These seven-armed, green-blooded aliens from outer space are allergic to bananas.

2545. Earthlings’ sensory perceptions

Below is a translation of an extract of a speech that Qhak’eot gave to the Breakfast Club on his home planet of Stex:

I can say nothing bad about Earthlings. They were kindness to a fault. Their hospitality was nothing but the best. I was treated like royalty.

Since I am by profession an artist – burning coloured acids into a metal board – I was taken from one famous Earth gallery to another. I went – among many others – to the David Zwirner Gallery of Art in New York, to a Vincent van Gogh exhibition in Amsterdam, to a John Constable exhibition in London, and to various Vatican galleries in Rome.

Naturally I didn’t let our Planet Stex down. I said all the right things, and ooh-ed and ah-ed in all the right places. The thing that amazed me the most – although I didn’t convey a thing on the matter – was how irrationally proud Earthlings are of their infantile ventures into the Arts.

Most of the paintings I saw were a complete mess. What the Earthlings didn’t seem to realize was that we see a far greater range of colour than they do. We have eyesight that not only perceives the familiar rainbow of colours but also parts of the ultraviolet (UV) spectrum that are invisible to Earthling eyes. Rather like birds on Earth. As well as that our eyes are like a bumble bee’s; multifaceted. And also, as you know, we can turn colours off and on which Earthlings are incapable of.

The Sistine Chapel in Rome was particularly disgusting with its vulgar colours of overweight angels flopping around some sort of ultraviolet muddled biosphere. I probably wouldn’t recommend a visit there. In fact I would recommend by-passing Planet Earth altogether. Their music is also simplistic. They have such a limited range of sound that I’d rather listen all day to a machine. I have no comprehension as to why Earthlings think their Arts are superior when they have such poor and limited sensory perceptions in all areas.

2531. Phailsod throws a birthday party

With Phailsod’s birthday coming up he thought he would commemorate it by inviting a few fellow Thraczoits around for a feast. Thraczoits don’t live as many years as Earthlings. Thirty would be around about the average life expectancy. However, don’t get me wrong; a Thraczoit year is equivalent to six Earth years, so in fact the Thraczoits live a lot long than Earthlings but have fewer birthdays.

The rarity of a birthday occurrence bothered Phailsod more than a little because he had watched Earthlings celebrate birthdays and they got a lot more birthday presents than on his planet. However, with his long awaited birthday coming up he invited lots and lots of fellow citizens and most were wealthy enough to bring along fabulous gifts.

Phailsod spared nothing. This would be the most memorable birthday party anyone had attended. He invited over two hundred Traczoits and they all came.

All agreed: the superiority of soil for their roots and the quality of light for their photosynthesis were truly amazing. It certainly was a birthday feast to remember.

2519. An experience of a lifetime

Some cynical readers will no doubt question the veracity of this story. To each their own – such people are entitled to believe what they like, but I know this story to be true.

Grayson was out in his substantial backyard planting seed potatoes in his garden when an alien space craft landed on the lawn. It was slightly larger than a city bus and shaped like one of those elongated medicine pills except it was a thousand times bigger! There were no doors or windows. The texture of the thing looked a bit like asbestos except it was faint blue.

An opening appeared in the side and two men ventured out. They looked remarkably the same as humans. They approached Grayson.

“Excuse us,” said one, “we’re sorry to have perhaps given you a fright. What you see is not our normal bodily form but we didn’t want to scare you. We wondered if you could help us. The skin of our space craft is pale blue. That means it is extremely low on fuel. Could we – this sounds so silly to you perhaps – could we borrow a cup of sugar? That’s all we need.”

“Goodness!” said Grayson. “I’ve got a whole bag of sugar you can have so you’ll have a backup supply.”

Grayson went in his house and returned with the sugar. The two men were extremely grateful.

“We’re not meant to associate with humans,” said one, “but desperate times call for desperate measures. We would like to thank you by giving you a special gift. You’re 68 and live alone. We investigated you before we landed. You have no living relatives. If you wish we could place you in our machine – the process takes about an hour – and it scans your body and corrects every imperfection. When done you’ll look about 30 and your body will never age.”

How exciting! Grayson leapt at the offer. And it did! The process took a whole Earth hour. When he looked in the mirror he couldn’t believe his reformed youthfulness. He’d forgotten he used to have auburn hair!

The bus-sized medicine-looking pill went whish and disappeared into the sky. Its skin had a healthy glow of pale pink.

What an experience! It took several years but Grayson gradually realized there was some extra-terrestrial being living in his body.

2516. Roses

Hudson loved growing flowers. To be fair, no one was sure he was into flowers in a big way because he liked gardening or because he won every bloom competition there was and he was into the glory of winning. Be that as it may, Hudson grew flowers and would spend an inordinate amount of time in his garden.

Coming up was the annual rose competition. There were a number of categories but the prize that Hudson had his eyes on was “The Supreme Rose Trophy”. The winner’s name each year was engraved on a little metal plaque and attached to a large shield hanging in the local hall. Hudson had the perfect rose. The timing was going to be perfect. It was as if the Fates had conspired for him to be the winner.

Two days before the rose exhibition something phenomenal happened. Hudson was in his garden and an alien space craft landed on his property. Two aliens emerged from the craft. They approached Hudson. Could he spare a little sugar? Their highly sophisticated craft ran on sugar and they were out of such fuel. Just a cup would be fine.

“Of course,” said Hudson. “I shall go into the house and get it.”

A few moments later Hudson reappeared. He carried a gun. He shot the two aliens dead.

They had landed on his roses.

2496. Earth’s cosmological contribution

Good Smakin Darit Ingtincton Comrades.

Thank you for inviting my crew and me this Smakin Darit Ingtincton to speak to you. As you know we have just finished a 472-year cruise of liveable planets within our own galaxy. Of course we didn’t visit them all, but we did manage to visit over 400 places during the course of the trip.

Being almost a billion years more advanced than many of them there was little we could learn from most. On Planet Stackton we learnt a solution to the problem we’ve always had here of debris collecting on our stella-panels. Of course the Stacktonians like us are a long-evolving, highly developed planet, so we were not surprised to find something we didn’t know.

Perhaps the most stunning discovery was on Planet Earth. They are a very young planet where intelligent activity has been evolving to a relatively low degree over a mere several million years. There we found they had a contraption that absolutely stunned us. It’s such a simple concept and so obvious. I guess we were more amazed at our own lack of invention in the matter rather than in the creative Earthling invention itself.

We brought several examples with us in order to show the variety of design that is possible, and we shall be passing them on to our scientific experts so they can use these artefacts as a sort of blue print.

What are they, you might ask? Naturally we don’t have names for them as yet, so we refer to them in backward Earth terms. They call them salt and pepper shakers.

2459. Backward imbecilic aliens

Well you’d think that the space aliens from Schimintallic would be a little less arrogant. They’ve had several million years longer than us humans to evolve, and you’d hope the Schimintallics could have evolved a bit of humility. Not so. They are a planetful of scumbags.

They seem to have got stuck in the evolutionary process around about where we were when we were cavemen. I’ll give you an example.

When we sent scientists to their planet to investigate, the scientists were able to capture a number of Schimintallics for scientific experimentation. Honestly, it was no more than if we did a laboratory dissection on a few rats, or a guinea pig if you don’t like rats. But the Schimintallics didn’t like it. Apparently we had culled a few crucial creatures in their society. We told them to “get over it”. How else can we learn if we don’t explore? There’s no good pretending; over the millennia they simply haven’t chalked up intelligence to rival our own.

Anyway, they’re taking us to the Interplanetary Rights Committee. We’ve got a good case. It’s no different from some duchess or other coming out of the royal palace and tossing a baby over the balcony into the crowd. It’s between her and her doctor – or in this case between us and the lab technician.

They’re calling it murder. Honestly, they can change the names of things as much as they like. A caveman is a caveman no matter what you call it. Of far greater interest to us Earthlings are the endangered Pinknosed Scallywaggle Bumblebees on their planet. One of our scientists accidentally stepped on one and it was pretty devastating. He’s been suspended of course, which is a pity because he was one of our leading necropsy investigators. He was the one who discovered that Schimintallics have an organ that detects dark matter. Backward imbeciles! What next?

2453. Interplanetary warfare

Once cosmic aliens had been discovered it didn’t take long for the forty million or so known forms of intelligent life to work out that basically intelligent life was all the same no matter where they stemmed from in the universe. They were all violent and mean. They were greedy. They were corrupt. They were rotten to the core.

One of the good things about all this however was that weapons of war would not work if they were fired via the instowarpicator. This was a device of extraordinary inventiveness that enabled alien species (I call them “species” but really we need to invent a new word for these divisions)… the instowarpicator enabled each planetary “intelligentis” to travel almost instantaneously from one planet to another.

As I say, lethal weapons of war were neutralized if they travelled down the instowarpicator. Lethal weapons of mass destruction had to travel via the conventional way, that is, through space at the speed of light.

It is believed that almost every planet (if not all) had at some stage fired a destructive weapon at an enemy planet somewhere sometime. The good thing was that the weapons would take thousands (in some cases millions) of light years to reach their targets. This made the inhabitants of every planet blasé about interplanetary co-existence. Each had thousands of years to discover and make an antidote to destructive forces.

So all in all, the cosmos was safe. It’s just that every race of planetary intelligentis hated each other’s guts.

2446. Interplanetary visitation

Now that interplanetary visitation is commonplace there are some people who won’t accept reality. Gone are the days when we didn’t know whether or not life existed on other planets – let alone intelligent life.

What gets me down are the tourists. There are hundreds of known planets seething with life, but these aliens from just the one planet seem to wander aimlessly around the cosmos like maggots on a hunk of dead rotten meat. And they take photographs of everything. You would think by now they would have upgraded their technology.

My home has a spectacular view of a waterfall. It’s why I paid such an extravagant price for the house; it was the view. Now it seems like you can’t see the waterfall for the tourists. Also, I estimate there must be three or four knocks on my door every day. It is tourists asking if I am willing to sell.  These tourists from just the one planet seem motivated by greed. They are buying up a good portion of the real estate around here and they’re only living in it for about a month of the year.

Other planets are finding the same problems. There’s a move afoot to get the Interplanetary Confederation to ban tourists from Earth altogether.