We had a praying mantis hanging out in our rose bushes for a couple days recently. This was the first praying mantis I’ve seen since I moved to Mendocino twenty years ago. I love praying mantises.
Not only are praying mantises exotic and beautiful and fun to watch, they are responsive to being talked to. This one in our roses, for example, looked at me when I spoke to her and seemed quite interested in what I had to say.
Speaking of which, this mantis visitation reminds me of the two times in my life I definitely had contact with aliens from outer space. And that reminds me of an article I published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser way back in 2011 and then posted on my blog.
So I went into my blog archives, which you can do, too, by going to the bottom of my blog page where several hundred of my articles are archived. Just type in key words and see what comes up.
I did that, typed in aliens, and up came my memoir of the two times I encountered aliens from outer space. I will now re-tell those two incidents.
*
On a winter evening in 1981 at Sacramento City College I read a few of my short stories to a receptive audience of about forty people. After my performance I was about to exit the lecture hall when a most unusual being approached me.
She appeared to be an extremely slender female human approximately six-feet-tall, wearing a sleeveless form-fitting dress made of glimmering silver fabric. At first glance she seemed exquisitely beautiful, and at second glance her face resembled the face of a praying mantis. Most striking of all were her eyes, huge multi-faceted diamonds suspended in large transparent globes floating in her eye sockets.
She was also radiant, and by radiant I mean she seemed to be glowing from within, and her inner light was indistinguishable from sunlight. She spoke with an enticing Serbian accent and I might have fallen in love with her had she not been so obviously an alien from another planet.
“I em Yanina,” she said, her diamond eyes turning subtly turquoise as she spoke. “I hev mosst unusual life to tell, bet I em no writer. Hearink your stories I em zinking, ‘Yes, he is what I em needing for to tell my story.”
Then she took my hand and I felt a fantastic flow of energy entering my body, a terrifying flow that made me quickly let go of her hand before I was rendered her compliant slave.
“I pay you very well,” she said, her diamond eyes glowing ruby red. “Come now to my hotel.”
So powerful was her magnetism, despite my fear of her, I almost agreed to go with her until I realized she was not alone. Standing behind her was a huge man wearing a black suit and a pulsating red bow-tie, his jowly face dominated by a stupendous carrot-red handlebar mustache.
Yanina noticed me noticing her gigantic companion and said, “He is Raul. My bodyguard.” Then she smiled a smile so multi-dimensional it might have been a 3-D rendering of one of Escher’s drawings of infinity.
“Oh,” I said. “Why do you have a…”
“When I tell you my story you will understend why,” she said, reaching for my hand again.
I shoved my hands in my pockets, and using every drop of my emotional strength I said, “Gosh, I’m so sorry but for the next thirty or forty years I’m focusing on my own stuff, though I sure do appreciate you thinking of me in this regard.”
“You are afraid of me,” she said, nodding sagely. “Don’t be. There has never been story like mine. We will save the world. I promise.”
Somehow I escaped.
*
My second meeting with an alien from outer space also took place in Sacramento, seven years after my close encounter with Yanina.
The summer day was blazing hot and humid, my garden a riot of basil and sunflowers and corn and tomatoes. I was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs leading from the garden up to the deck adjoining my house and thinking about where in my garden to stand while holding the hose running over my head to cool down, when I heard a whirring sound and saw something the size of a hummingbird zooming toward me at an altitude of about two feet.
In fact, I thought the thing was a hummingbird because hummingbirds do make a kind of whirring sound when they fly fast, though this was a different sort of whirring than hummingbird whirring.
A split second later the thing was hovering in the air about a foot from my face. It was definitely not a hummingbird. I should note I was not under the influence of any drug or alcohol at the time, though I was excessively warm and more than mildly depressed.
The thing was definitely a machine. I could hear other sounds accompanying the whirring, notably clanking and squeaking. I felt certain the thing was looking at me and checking me out.
I said something like, “Yikes!” and the thing flew away, and I never saw it again.
*
Some years after my close encounter with the alien flying machine in my garden, I saw a documentary made by Errol Morris entitled Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, the title referring to the work of Rodney Brooks, an M.I.T. scientist who designed tiny robots and wrote a famous paper suggesting we send one hundred one-kilogram robots to Mars instead of a single hundred-kilogram robot. That way, if some of the robots broke down or didn’t work properly, there would still be many more robots to carry out the exploring. The paper was entitled “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System” published in 1989 in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.
After seeing this documentary, I was convinced that the flying thing in my garden was an exploratory robot sent from a distant solar system to check out life on earth.
Given the state of the world today, I regret not helping the alien named Yanina write her story. Maybe her story would have saved the world. I also regret not saying to the little alien spacecraft, “Hey let’s talk. Maybe we can figure out a way to interact that will help reverse humanity’s headlong rush to destroy the biosphere.”
Should aliens ever contact me again, I’m ready to communicate.
fin
Incongroovity from Todd’s album of piano tunes Incongroovity.