ET, go home!
With all that is going on in the world today, I am surprised that recently Congress held a House Oversight subcommittee on unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. Except now they’re calling them unidentified aerial phenomena, aka UAPs. Some people believe these phenomena are advanced flying machines piloted by creatures of superior abilities over mortal men. People are saying they have the evidence they are here. We’ve been hearing that since 1947 at Roswell. Government officials are calling the UAPs a concern to national security. What should be done? Give them areas of sanctuary? I say we need an incident, a provocation, that will unite the family of mankind.
An extraterrestrial invasion might do it. Yeah, that’s the ticket. It worked in the 1950s science fiction movies. In those films, alien beings would attack the earth and wreak havoc on things with impunity until there was some turning point where humanity united and defeated them.
The Japanese films were the most fun to watch. In “The Mysterians,” the aliens would melt army tanks that were obviously rubber toys. The spoken lines were classic in that one too. A two-story-high metal monster is destroying things, and a soldier fires a cap gun at it and nothing happens. Then when the soldier reports to his superior, he replies anxiously, “Even the pistol had no effect on it?” In the end, as the aliens are trying to escape their human pursuers, the flying saucers are shot out of the sky with lasers. Earth wins.
In American movies like “The Thing,” something as dangerous as the monster was a human antagonist, in this case a doctor/scientist, who wanted to save the alien at the expense of the humans. The audience would howl when the egg head jumped in front of the humans trying to kill the alien, crying, “We must understand the monster!” The Thing gets cooked with electricity, and the professor type just gets roughed up a little. In my circle of friends, even in adulthood, when someone came up with a weak idea to a tough problem that needed to be dealt with, someone would mock them with “We must understand the monster!
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