Earlier this year, in April, two men were working on a car late at night near Las Vegas when they came face to face with what might be the end of our world.
“Me and him saw it,” the first witness said.
“It was like a big creature,” said the other. “Around 10 feet tall.”
The way NASA tells it in the news story I read, a small meteor had streaked across the sky and landed near the men’s garage. The 10-foot-tall gray Martian with hypnotic eyes? That’s anyone’s guess.
I used to laugh hard at stories like this. I’m a bit more careful about it now.
I’ve met folks who swear they’ve seen UFOs. They are smart, sane people. It’s not likely to happen to me because I have trouble seeing my car keys on the dining room table. If something is blinking in the sky, it’ll need to honk its horn loud, maybe several times, to get my attention.
For this April case, keep in mind that Las Vegas is just 83 miles away from the U.S. Air Forces’ top-secret base, known as Area 51. UFO believers are convinced, among other things, that the Area 51 base is storing bodies of alien pilots who crashed their flying saucer in the desert in 1947.
As the theory goes, our scientists are secretly studying the technology recovered from that crash because they know, in the near future, our planet will be invaded. Most likely, all mankind will perish.
If it sounds like a made-up story, it has familiar roots. In 1897, H.G. Wells published a novel, called “The War of the Worlds,” that scared the bejesus out of his readers. The story was told as an eyewitness account of a Martian invasion that began with the landing of an alien cylinder. Creatures emerged and incinerated Englishmen with a death ray.
Forty-one years later, in October 1938, actor Orson Welles adapted the story into a radio drama that was so realistic that it caused a panic among listeners. Martians had landed in New Jersey and were killing every human in sight.
Welles’ show was a nationwide sensation, and alien invasions became commonplace in movies. One of the most memorable has been “Independence Day,” a blockbuster film starring Will Smith in 1996. In this one, humans fought back with old airplanes and won.
In an award-winning Mel Gibson film, Signs, in 2002, humans won again by hitting aliens with baseball bats and dousing them with water.
Why do we like to scare ourselves with creatures like these from outer space?
I’ll give two factors. First, it seems to be in our nature to be drawn to prophecies that the world will end while we’re still in it. The religion-based scenario is that Christ and his winged disciples will be returning any day now to wipe this world clean of sinners. This has been a big seller among doomsday cults throughout American history.
It’s satisfying in a way. If we believe this annihilation will occur in our time, everyone will die when we do. I can’t take my money or baseball cards with me to the Great Beyond, but no one else gets them either.
A second factor is that this is a complicated universe with a lot of things we don’t understand. If we’re faced with some inescapable catastrophe, we can’t find a fix from a YouTube video.
If the sun explodes, we may be incinerated instantly or we may freeze to death because we’ve lost our source of heat. But which is it?
We look for answers in whatever limericks Nostradomus wrote 500 years ago. Then, of course, there was that Mayan calendar from 1,500 years ago that just stops in 2012, or maybe it was 2023. Oops. Our time is up.
Film critics will say that, at its heart, an alien invasion generally is an allegory. The nationwide fear that fed Orson Welles in 1938 wasn’t really Martians. It was Nazism and socialism. For Will Smith and Mel Gibson, the enemy actually might have been the rise of disinformation on the internet or the breakdown of the nuclear family.
One of my personal stories is about my father’s Aunt Olive and that “War of the Worlds” radio show. At the beginning of the broadcast, there was a disclaimer that the following show was a work of fiction. Olive was among the listeners who tuned in late that night, missed the warning and thought the invasion was real.
She didn’t have a lot of book learning and wouldn’t know about allegories. Instead, she had such a fright that she never again felt safe anywhere. I suppose it was a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, but Olive became a street person and battled mental illness the rest of her life.
I know I have some of the same DNA as Olive, and I know I’m not immune to panic. It builds within me because I see a new UFO story on my news sites every day. There’s a break-through on the 1974 Berwyn Mountain UFO crash, for example, or a new posting of old footage recorded by fighter pilots, or comments from a bureaucrat about thousands of sightings that need to be investigated.
Wild theory claims aliens in UFOs flew over Fukushima nuclear disaster and saved mankind (msn.com)
It can be overwhelming, and if I’m feeling a bit insecure, I start losing my grip on that whole allegory argument. It comes to this: Why am I so sure I’m right about the end of the world and the two guys in Las Vegas are wrong?
“Me and him saw it,” the one guy said on the internet. I didn’t, but how could I?
I wasn’t there.