The “Star-a-Lago” scandal is an internet hoax but contains one interesting “journal” entry
Call me Ishmael.
That’s the name I use at Aliens Anonymous meetings, or “swarms,” as your Navy pilots call them.
I use it because I’m an outcast and can relate to that brooding character in Moby Dick. According to my new sponsor, I’ve also got just as much pent-up anger as Ishmael and more stubbornness than Captain Ahab.
In fact, that’s what landed me here. My parents forced me into their wormhole at Proxima Centauri B to do rehab on your planet because I refused to ask for forgiveness from people I had hurt (people who deserved to be hurt for the way they treated me, IMHO!).
I was constantly teased at Academy Level Four because I was 4-feet 10-inches tall (a good foot taller than any of my male classmates). Evidently, my skin wasn’t grey-green enough either, and my eyes not big enough or black enough. As for my nose, it was only good for whispers and giggles from the unfairer sex as they passed me on the conveyors.
I always hated my nose. The slits are long and wide, and I was heckled every day by boys who had those short, thin slits the girls loved.
Then there was “Mr. Perfect,” aka my Father, who worried that a negative self-image was leading to “acting out” behaviors on my part, which was code language for “destroying our family’s flawless reputation in the enclave.”
He wasn’t interested in my problems. He was only interested in how we looked to the adjacent Zirvons and especially the Quantixes across the zone, with their impeccably mannered boy and girl that I was told a thousand times “it wouldn’t hurt to emulate.”
So, when I was thrown out of RedShift Recovery for refusing to do Step 9 of the 12 steps (and, admittedly, making some poor choices with recreational polonium), I was thrown in with other “delinquents” and sent to Earth.
Our civilization has used your exoplanet for centuries as a “scared straight” shock therapy experience. It gives rebellious kids a close-up view of how their selfish, cruel, and unrepentant ways will end up trapping them in an endless cycle of hatred, greed, vengefulness, violence, and addiction.
No offense, but you Earthlings are the “Au” standard for self-destructive behaviors. Thousands of our young people have turned their half-lives around after seeing firsthand the chaos that, thankfully, you’re never able to recover from.
In your ancient days, some of them were so filled with pity about the lack of human progress that they began sharing their knowledge and skills.
Obviously, Ramses II or Khufu wouldn’t have been able to maintain a fusion reactor, even if we’d built one for them. Still, at least we taught the Egyptians how to dredge silt from the Nile, rotate crops to replenish the soil, and eat more nutritiously. (My great-grandfather drilled it into Nefertiti’s people every chance he got, “Less grain, more meat, and hydrate, hydrate, hydrate!”)
But those were the good old days.
Everything changed when you began dropping radioactive bombs on people, testing them in the atmosphere, and racing to build more powerful versions.
Our therapists back home panicked and began sending more and more kids. They didn’t know how long your planet would last. There was a significant uptick in sightings after those first detonations because many more of us were observing.
The problem was that they began sending the worst of the worst, hoping that seeing the insanity of nuclear war and Mutually Assured Destruction would turn even our Clockwork Orange types around.
Unfortunately, the opposite happened. These droogies loved it and started making contact with humans, something that was strictly forbidden once your atomic age began.
What was worse, they didn’t just make contact. These goons started abducting humans and abusing them mentally and physically. They also began levitating farm animals and mutilating them as part of their frat-rat-type hazing rituals, but I don’t know the details.
I know that many of their parents changed the locks on their wormholes when they found out what was going on, starting with a game of “chicken” that resulted in two crafts colliding above a New Mexico ranch in 1947, killing all but one crew member.
He was taken to a military installation along with pieces of his transport, but your scientists had no idea how to reverse-engineer the disc. It would be like giving a particle accelerator to a Neanderthal.
Even though he could read their minds, he pretended not to be able to communicate, so they simply named him “EBE” (Extraterrestrial Biological Entity), intravenously fed, observed, and kept him comfortably alive like your Elephant Man.
EBE died five years later, but not before secretly meeting with one of your presidents. He purposely passed gas so profusely that the executive had to be rushed to a secure and oxygenated location.
Unlike EBE, I don’t have a prankster mentality. I don’t have his telepathic powers either, but I know what your next question is. “Why don’t you just land on the White House lawn and hold a press conference?”
Have you ever seen the terrifying Twilight Zone episode where millions of Earthlings happily board alien spaceships brought here by starmen who seem to be good-hearted and want nothing more than “To Serve Man,” only to find out that their book of the same name is a cookbook?
That’s why.
If we announced our presence in person, we’d cause a mass hysteria that would change Earth completely. You may not realize this, but your military officials and defense contractors understand this perfectly well and the grim consequences that would follow.
With a common enemy, warring nations would start working together to create permanent peace and a new spirit of cooperation. Billions of humans would start taking compassion, repentance, and forgiveness seriously.
You might want that, but your military-industrial complex doesn’t, and neither does the brass on Proxima Centauri B.
They don’t want any “dawning of the Age of Aquarius” here. They want their lord-of-the-flies terrarium, filled with crazed battlebots, to stay just as it is, with no interference from you, me, or anyone else in the Milky Way galaxy.
That’s why they destroyed the first two of your Pioneer spacecraft once they left the Kuiper Belt. They both had metal covers etched with radial lines showing the pulsating intervals of 14 neutron stars: a map that would help alien intelligences pinpoint the exact location of Earth.
Sorry– not happening!
What is happening, though, is the third part of a sci-fi film festival that I’m already late for. Tonight it’s Plan 9 From Outer Space, one of your so-bad-it’s-good Reticulan romps. I’ve seen it a dozen times, but it never gets old (unlike me, who is aging almost twice as fast here on Earth).
Not that it matters. I’ve already decided I’m never going back and never doing Step 9.
And on Earth, I won’t have to. That’s why I love it here. It feels like my true home – a place where I won’t be judged for being judgmental, trashed for talking trash, or shamed for shaming people who deserve to be shamed.
I’ve beamed up enough cable news shows to know there will always be a safe space here for my angry, vindictive, mendacious, and unforgiving self.
Thanks to you wonderfully flawed people of Earth, I don’t have to be like Ishmael or Captain Ahab anymore. I can finally be myself – The Whale – barnacles and all.
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Timothy Philen
Timothy PhilenTimothy Philen is an opinion writer, award-winning advertising creative director, and author of Harper&Row/Lippincott’s “You CAN Run Away From It!” a satirical indictment of American pop psychology.
