by E. C. Osondu
#2
There is this thing about their skin color. It is green. But you know a sad kind of green. Not the green of plants and forests and trees and leaves. A kind of weird green like the green of being sick. Sometimes the green glows in the dark, but not in this cool way, but in a kind of way that weirds you out, like a ghost-mode green glow, you know, not Sharpie green, not Day-Glo green, but old-lost-crayon-with-the-skin-peeled-off kind of green.
Why can’t they just be white like everyone else? You know, how hard is that? I understand that their planet is hot. I think that’s great; you can just have a tan all the year round, like Hawaii right? How hard is that? Look at all the problems in our world today because some are black and some are white—now if you add green to that equation you are bringing more problems into the world. And honestly, I think a cooler color for them would be gray. Gray like what you get when you mix white with black. That way everybody will see a bit of their own color in them and that would be so cool.
#3
They come across as so scientifically advanced. They always have these jets that travel at the speed of light, and the jets don’t even use gas but are powered by converting whatever energy or force-field that surrounds them as they zip around at supersonic speed.
And one other thing, they are so good with gadgetry—like all the stuff that they have is usually capable of doing tons of stuff all at once. Their watches can tell the time, check the weather, and then the very next second turn into a dangerous weapon blasting dangerous rays and eviscerating everything in its path.
They must study a lot of Math and Physics and other stuff from kindergarten. I think that there is something we need to learn from them because they say among the countries of the world we are like number what? in Math and science, so why can’t we just copy their model? We can start teaching our kids Math and Science from kindergarten and before you know it we’d be number one and your watch could begin multi-tasking in all kinds of cool ways, like tell the time and forecast the weather and tell you where to park and if as you are parking and a would-be carjacker comes to steal your car you could just zap them with a dangerous laser beam from your watch.
#4
I have not really given it much thought but the thing that I notice about them for the most part is that they don’t have a sense of fashion. You know what I mean? They are not stylish. They look like they are always dressed in a costume for a middle school play about the Middle Ages. Don’t they like have fashion designers? I get it. Not everyone can wear designer clothes, but we can all still try to look decent. What’s with the shiny, gaudy clothes that always have high shoulders and wings like Icarus?
Look, if I am popping over to my next door neighbors’ I always try to look decent. Now, these guys are coming to visit from their planet that is billions of miles away from ours, why can’t they dress for the occasion?
#5
So obviously they have found a cure for cancer. I say this because I have never heard that any one of them died of cancer. Considering that they have such extreme temperatures in their planet one would have thought that they would suffer from cancer, but they don’t, so that is really something. I think that they should be willing to share their knowledge with us. You don’t think they get cancer? Fine. So how come they don’t get cancer? What is it about them that makes them not get cancer? Is it what they eat? How much they sleep or don’t? Is it something in what they drink? I think that this is the kind of information that they should be willing to share with mankind; otherwise anybody that tries to get this same information from them by force gets my vote. Who of us has not lost a dear one to cancer? It is the only reason why I think we should draw closer to them. Otherwise they mean nothing to me. They are only little green men after all, aren’t they?
#6
Out of curiosity let me just ask you this first. Do they like have families same as us? I have never really seen like an alien family that includes father, mother, and kids. Sometimes they have wives, but their wives often walk unsmilingly behind them dressed in purple robes with pyramid-shaped headgear. They never converse with their husbands. I probably saw one of their babies once but that one came to stay with a family here on earth. So if they were such great parents, I don’t think that their baby would run all the way from their own planet down to ours to live with some family down here.
So I think that is something they can definitely learn from us. Slice it however you want to. We are very family oriented. If you arrived from another planet today and landed your aircraft, hovercraft, spaceship, call it whatever you want—you would meet human families at the mall, at the beach, in restaurants, just about anywhere you go. So, in my view, they need to be like us. You know what the Russian writer said—all happy families are alike. We are all happy families and this is why we are all so alike.
#7
They don’t have a democracy. That is one thing I know for sure. They come across as people who live under some kind of autocratic dictatorship. They are obviously used to a command structure with a single all-powerful ruler who calls all the shots. We don’t operate that way. We believe in one man, one vote, no matter the size of your head. And it is a kind of leveler and has kept our union strong.
I think they need to come over here, see how our government works and then take our system back to their planet and shake things up over there. They would be happier for it. A democratic citizenry is a happy citizenry.
I think that is all I have to say. Let me add this. I fought in a couple of wars so that people all over the world could have liberty. All the countries where people had no liberty, their government soon collapsed and their citizens went into the streets burning flags and stuff until they became democratic. So there is a lesson for them right there. They should embrace democracy or one day on their own planet their citizens will set fire to whatever is the equivalent of flags over there and demonstrate on the streets until they have one person, one vote. That is all I have to say.
#8
You must give the human race credit for something. We have clearly been evolving. We always work towards getting better. Our ancestors invented fire by striking two stones together—since then we have come up with countless and uncountable ways to get fire. We keep evolving, we keep getting better, we keep improving and we don’t believe we are even there yet. But tell me this; I have been seeing pictures about these alien guys. I have watched movies about these alien guys. I have read books about these alien guys. After all these years nothing seems to have changed about them. They look the same. They speak the same. They move the same way they have always moved—two steps at once, always in lockstep. Is it possible that the difference between you and us is that we keep changing while you remain the same?
Look at all our inventions. Our earliest computers were so huge they needed so many hands to move them. Nowadays you can fit some computers into your pocket. This is the way the human race rolls. I am not trying to be boastful here, just taking pride in our accomplishments as a species.
But as for you guys, your spaceships all look the same way they have always looked even when I was a kid. Your technology sounds the same with your equipment always beeping and flashing lights. It is quite possible that one is a little behind when it comes to news about your technological advancements; so, tell me, what are the new frontiers that you have conquered since? I’d be very curious to know how you have brought about new changes in mobility. Are your ships traveling at higher or lower altitudes? Are they traveling at faster speeds? Have you improved your propulsion force? These are genuine questions because, the way I see it, change is what has made us the superior beings that we are in the universe.
#9
Here is something that has always bothered me about your species. How come you folded your arms when we decided that one of your planets was no longer a planet? You accepted it just like that. I tried to imagine if someone somewhere came over here and told us that we were no longer a country or that we are not qualified to be a
country. We would consider that the equivalent of somebody walking into your house and pissing in your living room. Will you condone that? How come you guys didn’t see the signs when we first started belittling you by calling you the “dwarf planet.” That should have been the signal. You needed to know that much sooner rather than later you would become the non-planet.
But let us go back to the beginning. We named you. Yes, we gave you your names. To name is the first claim of ownership. It is quite possible that you guys have a different name for yourselves, but we don’t know that. So if you do, you could start by announcing it to us.
So if one day we wake up and we decide that we are taking over the planet that formerly used to be known as a planet but is no longer one we hope you will not be angry. We named it. We unnamed it. And now we own it. It is pretty straightforward. We own all kinds of territories and we will simply be adding to the variety of the territories we own.
#10
What do aliens eat? What does their diet consist of? Do they eat three times a day the way we do? Are they vegetarian? Are they herbivores? Do they eat meat? What type of meat do they eat? Are they cannibals? Do they juice? Do they eat healthy? Are they always feasting?
You may wonder why I raise these questions. I ask because there is so much we can learn about other species from their diet. From their diet, for instance, we can begin to understand why they live forever and we can then infer that by doing the same—following their diet, that is—we can begin to live forever as species, thereby ensuring that we are not wiped off the face of the earth.
If you watch them closely you’ll notice that they never look overweight. They all look trim and fit. What could we learn from this? They must follow a strict diet regimen. Species that control what they eat control everything else. So we can see that that the possibilities are endless for humankind. Their diet may help us fight the obesity epidemic so we can all shape up and not ship out of our beloved planet earth.
There are so many other things connected to their eating habits that could be of benefit to us. How do they grow their foods? Do they practice sustainable agriculture? Do they practice crop rotation? They come from a dry planet; so how do they irrigate their crops? Water is one of the scarcest commodities today. All the trouble in the drier parts of the world is caused by the fight for scarce water resources. So there is so much that we can learn from them. Imagine what we can accomplish if we can seed the clouds with rain and make it rain at the press of a button. We will be able to grow enough food to feed all of mankind. If man can feed himself believe me most wars would be over. Forget all the talk about wars being fought for ideology—the main reason why we have all these wars is because people are scrounging for scarce resources.
It is also quite possible that they do not eat at all. In my view this is even better news. If they don’t eat, then how is it that they do not feel hungry? What we are looking at right here is an end to world hunger. If we can end hunger, we have solved the biggest problem in the world. People fight wars every day over food. All the political upheaval in the world can be traced to food, one way or another. So, what we need to ask is why they do not get hungry. Is it that they pop a pill three times a day or even once a year?
#11
To me the thing is that I think we really want aliens to exist, but have we thought of the fact that they actually may not exist? It is quite possible that we would wish that they existed, but in actual fact those other planets are just like totally barren with no form of life out there. I am trying to be logical here—think of the number of years that the earth has been existing and then imagine that aliens have been trying to get in touch with us all these years without any success. It is not possible.
Another possibility is that they exist in a dimension that is invisible to the human eye and human inventions, so it is quite possible that we don’t see them but they see us and are laughing at all our efforts to search them out. So what I think is that we may just be looking at the Sphinx from behind. And remember if you look at it from behind, the Sphinx would just look like a collection of stones.
If they can see us and we can’t see them, this raises the possibility that they may not want us to see them because they know all about us and our ways. It is like you want to go out on a date with someone and a few days before the date you are allowed to look at this person through some kind of monitor. So you see them but they don’t see you, right? You can see all the stuff they do when they think that no one is watching them. It is very likely that what you see may gross you out so much that you want to have nothing to do with them any longer. That is the way I see it. It is just possible that we think we are the ones pulling the strings but all the while they are the ones peering at us and shaking their heads and saying we do not want anything to do with these folks.
#12
I think aliens were once like us. Do you know what I mean? They were once people, but then they evolved to a higher level and so they are more conscious beings. Having evolved in their mental sphere they have gone on to make advances in almost every area. Think of their advances in Engineering, Astronomy, Chemistry, and Physics. They have left us behind simply because they were once like us. It is the same way we have evolved beyond the Neanderthal man, and he now looks to us like we were not once like him. It is the same thing with aliens. I believe that we will one day advance to where they are today, but who knows by then to what extent they too would have advanced? We should not feel bad about it. If you doubt my theory, let me just give you one little example: You know we have made some advancements in aeronautics so we now have airplanes and jets that fly faster. But they were the first ones to do that. Their flying saucers and what we naively called UFOs were already moving at the speed of light before we launched the Concorde jet. So the way I see it, it is only a matter of time and mankind will become aliens.
Child’s Play
I can’t remember the exact age when my sister and I began to do it. We would go behind our large family compound to the clearing behind the house. We would look around to make sure no one was watching. All the grown-ups must have left for the farm and the market. We would hold each other’s hand and begin to spin on our feet. Faster and faster we would spin until all the trees and houses around us turned into an unrecognizable blur and then the ground would open up and we would find ourselves in a new place where we would play with our new friends all day.
And then the hours would go by super-fast and we would find ourselves spinning again and we would be back home in the space behind the compound. We would be so tired from playing with our friends all day that we immediately fell asleep after dinner and snored heavily until morning.
I remember one day blurting out to my mother the fact that we usually went to play with our friends in another world when she left for the market. I don’t know why I said it. She looked at me; her eyes immediately widened and grew teary.
“Ah, this child has malaria,” she said. She touched my forehead with the back of her palms and shook her head.
“Your head does not feel hot, but you certainly have malaria fever. Maybe it is hiding. Let’s go give you a cold shower.”
She fetched cold water in an iron bucket and after giving me a cold bath told me to go take a nap.
I never mentioned our trips again.
Playing in the other world was a whole lot of fun and made the kind of play my sister and I used to play at home look childish.
Before we started going to the new world to play, my sister would sit in the sand and I would sit in front of her and she would gesture to me to get the pots and pans we needed to start cooking before everyone got home from the farm.
I would gather a few empty cans of discarded Peak Milk and De Rica Tomatoes and bring them to her.
She would indicate that today we would be cooking rice and stew and so we needed to get two cooking fires going. She would get the cooking fires ready by putting two or three pebbles together and putting some tiny sticks in between them. She woul
d pour water into the sand and pour the wet sand into the pot then we would begin to add stuff to the food on the fire. If she was feeling adventurous she would pluck some basil leaves from the garden and add them to the pot. When the food was ready, we picked up short sticks and pretended they were spoons and began to eat. We would sometimes build a house by pouring water in the sand and molding the sand into shape to form walls.
This type of play was actually no great fun, as we would discover when we began to go into the other world to play. They did not play pretend. It was all real. But still fun.
The greatest thing about playing in the new world was that we could play as loudly and as crazily as we wished. There was never any adult asking us to tone it down or come back into the house because it was time for lunch. Besides, it never grew dark.
Our new friends never spoke a word to us, they only gestured, but we understood them perfectly. That was great for my sister who had never uttered a word since she was born.
When we indicated that we were interested in shooting, they handed us real guns. We looked up at the sky and they understood that we wanted to shoot at a flying thing. They clicked a button and mechanical crows filled the sky with their dark wings and threw shadows over us. Aiming our guns up high we began to shoot and no sooner did the mechanical birds fall to the ground than they’d shrug almost as if nothing happened and their wings would come together and they would fly back into the sky only for us to shoot at them again. My sister, who would normally cry at the sight of blood when we killed a chicken for Sunday lunch, enjoyed shooting the birds immensely, surprisingly.