Hysterical, my mom and sister threw out any and all literature pertaining to aliens in our house the other day (I used to be quite interested in it all, and therefore had several books). Why, you ask? Because my niece started telling stories of being taken out through her window at night, into a spaceship, and playing with people before being returned – all before her mom and grandma woke up in the morning. When asked to draw one of the people she plays with, she apparently drew the quintessential grey.
Anyway, she’s almost five years old, can’t read, and has no access to any of my old books except one. What she watches on TV is closely monitored. The chance that she was interested and smart enough to pick up that one thick book and find a drawing and fabricate a story around it is pretty slim… Still, I’m sure my sister and mom didn’t ask her the most unloaded questions when “interviewing” her…
So anyway, our entire family has always been infatuated with aliens for inexplicable reasons… So I guess it’s not really surprising that my niece might be, too. But what freaks me out is my mom’s and sister’s reaction to it. Throwing away my books? Um, why not just box them up and send them to me? When I asked my mom on the phone last night, she said, “If they’re not God’s creatures, whose are they?” Of course, I sighed and rolled my eyes… Isn’t everything God’s? I mean, if you believe in one God in the first place?
I guess what I’m asking is, what do you guys think? Do you think if aliens exist, they’re necessarily evil? Do you believe in aliens?
My first explanation is that this is just another manifestation of the hypochondria, boredom, and hysteria that permeates that household in Ohio. I’m not sure which would be better – a crazy family or aliens actually abducting my family.
Classic. The part about the anal probe joke, not the 5 year old girl.
Qazzz, is it possible your neice could have heard about aliens from her friends at school/daycare whose tv viewing habits are not as monitored as hers? Kids can tell pretty elobarate stories.
And some people have suggested that stories about alien abductions & anal probes are a way of dealing with suppressed memories of childhood sexual abuse.
This may not be as funny as some think.
In any case, I believe, despite the OP’s claim to the contrary, that the five-year-old has fabricated a fanciful tale from what she’s learned from her family. The OP does state, after all, “our entire family has always been infatuated with aliens for inexplicable reasons…”
So no chance she could have been standing nearby while someone was flipping through the channels and caught a glimpse of a preview for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Fire in the Sky, or Signs? All it takes is one image of what an alien might look like to burn it into an impressionable mind.
Seems to me these questions are reversed; without going into the philosophical issues, I’m pretty confident that non-existant beings cannot be evil. If they did exist ( I don’t belive they do in the tabloid, FOX TV news special sense) I don’t think they would necessarily be evil.
While your Mom seems irrational at best, I’d also comment that plenty of God’s own have been plenty evil so maybe we’d be better off with Non-God aliens.
Given that there’s not one whit of verifiable physical evidence, despite the large number of people who claim to be abducted, it seems most likely that alien aductions are simply a psychological or physiological phenomenon.
And I, too, have a hard time imagining that a five year old in America, in a family “infatuated” by aliens, could have avoided hearing stories of alien abductions and seeing pictures of greys.
Feeling paralyzed, sensing a presence, and feeling that one is floating are all symptoms of sleep paralysis that some psychologists think can be integrated into by some individuals into an alien abduction dream or fantasy.
If her family is concerned, they might want to take her to a sleep specialist.
Sounds like what happened to me as a child. I saw a picture of one on tv, and for whatever reason, was terrorized by that single image in nightmares while feeling a need to read everything I possibly could on the subject for years. Until I was almost out of high school, in fact.
Why Oh Why couldn’t your mother and sister just have smiled and said “That’s nice dear”??? Is it really necessary to freak out? Kids say all kinds of crap. I had a three year old boy tell me that his mom and dad kept him leashed to a wall in his bedroom. Being close neighbors and a frequent visitor, I knew it was complete rubbish, I did not call the cops. He also told me that the ferry he and his dad were on got taken over by pirates and they went into a cave. O-KAY!
If your mom and sister really believe this tripe, why do they think throwing books away is going to help? And if they don’t, why are they taking it so seriously? Wha?
No offense, but it sounds like your family is bit…unusual.
Just in case, you might want to give the kid some friendly advice.
Note: Inclusion of the above link in this post should in no way be interpreted as endorsement of the claims therein by The Straight Dope, the Chicago Reader, or this poster. But it’s pretty effin’ hilarious stuff.
Manipulation is a child’s first and primary survival tactic, and most kids are better at it than their parents realize. Watching mom and dad squirm over a tall tale would make fantastic entertainment for a four-year-old.
My brother-in-law, who suffers from moderate mental retardation and is, essentially, a permanent five-year-old child, noticed that he got a big reaction when he told his mother that “a voice” had instructed him to do some of the naughty things he typically did. Since it served the dual purpose of getting him more attention and keeping him from getting punished, he kept it up and elaborated on the story. It took a specialist to convince his mother that he was faking the whole thing.
The parent’s best weapon is a blasé attitude and a quick retort.
You know, religion aside, why can’t there be aliens? I am aware of the very broad equation that has been used to simulate the odds of humans contacting an alien species. But those are just odds based on an assumed equation.
I would like to discuss the aliens themselves. The picture that was linked to above shows the stereotypical modern alien. Whenever I see a picture like that, I always think of the human race, a million years of evolution down the road. We probably won’t look so different.
Assuming that these aliens come from an environment not too much different than Earth’s, would those slanty black eyes give some sort of benefit over our normal ocular irises?
And the Michael Jackson noses are much smaller than ours. Not much air can fit through there at the same time.
The huge bulbous heads on the toothpick necks? Hardly enough muscles to support such a brain.
And hairless, smooth skin?
With our protective lifestyles these days, hair, nostrils, and muscles might become obsolete and be removed from the next edition of the human race.
What kind of environment could these creatures come from?
You have perhaps heard the theory that these “greys” are not space aliens at all, but time-traveling advanced humans come to mess with the past or study us or something. To me, this is actually more believable than the space aliens story, albeit not very. It’s not that I don’t think that aliens exist at all, they very well could. I just don’t think they come down to earth on a regular basis and kidnap people, erase their memories, etc. Impossible.
If your family lives in Chicago, that would mean the aliens would be hovering over a major metropolitan area, not to mention a well-patrolled border and very busy air space, without being seen by ANYONE. I just don’t buy it. There is no way that could happen, unless they possess magical powers enabling them to not only collectively fool millions of people, but also to erase all hard evidence of their presence. Uh-uh. No way. Oh, but if they have “beaming” technology, they could hide on the other side of the moon or something, you might say. Why then would people describe seeing the ships come down, or remembering themselves flying out the window? Nope. Not buying it.
I always think of a human fetus. Y’know, related to the old “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” idea. Not that there’s anything to that concept scientifically speaking, but it seems to me the rise of the classic alien grey head coincides more than a little neatly with the advent of in-the-womb photography in the middle of the 20th century. The overwhelming strength which which the fetus-like alien face has caught on suggests to me something interesting about human psychology.
