“I want a limousine stocked with every alcohol known to man.”
I am deathly afraid of extra terrestrials. I always have been. I may not outwardly express this fear to people as a go-to point of conversation but, believe me, if the subject is breached, I will be more than forthcoming about this paranoia. This season in particular dredges up some memories from my youth, cowering in my bed, watching what appeared to be an apocalyptic scale alien invasion occurring outside of my bedroom window. That particular time it was a bit windy outside and there were leaves floating across a beam of light provided by a sensor light fixture outside of my house to protect us from you know, intruders. While my father all but delicately dispelled my notion that thousands of space craft were converging upon me, that fear was paralyzing. I can remember it extremely vividly. I would stay awake through all hours of the night focusing on activity in the skies outside of my room that I deemed to be suspect. Every airplane had the potential to split off into a few satellite UFOs and engage in some alien flight pattern. I swore every star was vibrating with some menacing signal directly aimed at me. As far as I was concerned, there was a galaxy full of spacecraft with lasers and fucking abduction pods looking directly at me, in my pajamas, daring me to make one false move. I would stare at the floor during long car rides at night because I was afraid that if I were to provoke one of these craft by looking at them, my family’s car would be subject to a tractor beam and then we’d be up shit’s creek…in space. That concept also scared the fuck out of me. Did aliens understand that human beings couldn’t breathe in space? Did they provide space helmets to abductees? Are they adjustable? Or did they just abduct humans with no regard for whether or not they lived or died and simply use their human carcasses for their strange experiments? I had no idea, and I read every book my middle school library had to offer on the subject of UFOs and alien activity. They were of no value. They contained all the surface speculations and ridiculous nonsense any network television special claiming to have an inside edge on “what it all means”. Even at such a young age, I had my doubts that even the most PR hungry alien nation would give any sort of exclusive to Fox 5.
Honestly, I really can’t overstate my fear of being abducted by aliens. So much so, that I have wondered aloud if I actually WAS abducted by aliens and I just didn’t remember. Most accounts of alien abduction include an inexplicable loss of time, where the abductee cannot account for hours, sometimes days. DAYS!? Uh, hello, fucking time and space are relative, so there is a definite chance that I could have been whisked away to some Venutian internment camp and had my ass hole tickled by a three foot tall alien scientist type, only to be teleported back to my bed, none the wiser. That is a real thought that has crossed my mind as a potential reality.
The 1993 movie “Fire In The Sky” was received with mixed reviews, and loosely based on a book written by Travis Walton, in which Travis describes in great detail, his alien abduction experience. The movie features an abduction sequence with frequent flashbacks to what happened after he was abducted that are some of the most frightening images I have ever had the displeasure of viewing. That scene was shot and cut in such a way that it actually felt like someone took all of my worst fears into account and put it into a seven minute clip for the sole purpose of scaring the living shit out of me. I’ve only seen this scene once in it’s entirety and I refuse to ever watch it again. Even as I write this, I can picture my 8 year old self sitting in front of my mom’s friend’s television, about ready to piss myself at the sight of these aliens poking and prodding at Travis Walton. The rest of the movie’s plot line was centered around the townspeople and local police force discrediting Travis and his friends who were at the scene of the abduction, and the media frenzy that followed it. It really doesn’t matter though, the movie wasn’t great. Travis Walton is more than likely full of shit and has probably made a decent amount of money off of whatever book sales/movie rights he’s sold since the incident in the mid-seventies. Good for him. Fucking jerk off. He couldn’t have just kept it to himself? He couldn’t have quietly let the fact that aliens were shoving things into his colon quietly eat away at his mental stability until he had a nervous breakdown and needed electro shock therapy just to remember what year it was? No, he had to go write a fucking book. He had to go make a fucking movie out of it. For what? To fund some kind of alien defense laser beam? No. To better educate the already paranoid masses on HOW FUCKING HORRIBLY SCARY IT PROBABLY IS TO GET ABDUCTED BY ALIENS? Thanks Trav, whenever I do actually decide to go seek therapy about how my fear of aliens, so accurately portrayed in your biopic, has rendered me a cowardly shut-in who sleeps under an American flag holding a shot gun, I’ll invoice you. Health insurance doesn’t cover psychotherapy OR soft tissue damage from alien probes. YOU YOU YOU YOU OUGHTA KNOW.
The truth is probably out there. I think.
