Amsterdam, December 2005

The issue of UFOs and the so familiar aliens fascinated me for many, many years and I finally could not help but present my own particular point of view in spite of the fact that there are already a large number of such opinions available. I suspect that anyone who at all knows these aliens would feel the same.

I'd like to have these pages translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, as well as Japanese, some day, and publish this as an e-booklet, a practical/ interactive/ multimedia handbook on aliens. Every home should have one.

UFO is a window, a snapshot, an associative link, a theatrical prompt, an aerial machine of some kind, all of it, and more. Functionally, alien is an agent and a catalyst in our evolution. It's neither threatening, nor deceptive. It informs us about certain important aspects of our own being, and it does it in a metaphorical, poetic way, using what we humans know as theater, a happening, and cultural memes as the most appropriate means of acting on us.

We, the people, answered rather well to that not so alien stimuli. We have created a colorful and intriguing popular culture in response to it,

"[the] extraordinary 50-year citizen science and political movement, [...] a pageant of books, lectures and slide shows - a mixture of thoughtful, privately funded research, hoaxes, misguided zealotry, quasi-religion, and much more. It was conducted with little assistance from the government, the press, academia or the church. It was the pure product of a free citizenry and perhaps the finest example of how a constitutional republic can provide the means to overcome extreme intransigence by the state"

Our institutional response, though, was less than imaginative. Government administrators and technocrats produced nothing worth talking about, or so they say, and it took them well over half a century to achieve that. The government, as well as corporate, scientific, military, etc, establishments have shown themselves to be too mediocre to grasp the significance of these peculiar "objects" and associated "beings". Alright, the entertainment industry worked hard, they gave us Star Trek, Taken, the X-Files, of course, and Dark Skies, one of my personal 20th century cult favorites. But, it's all so desperately outdated, and - except for a handful of movies - so male, white and middle class.    continue