In Continuum.

This video, shot by a grainy camera by Stan, features the little alien popping his head up from the edge of the window sill, blinking a couple of times at the camera, and then disappearing out of sight and into the night. It all looked very convincing, and a truckload of people out there have already bought his story and indirectly made him a celebrity of sorts. I, for one, needed to see that video to judge for myself, being the skeptic as I am. So I did a little research, surfed through Google, and finally came across that little video that reminded of that creepy scene from Signs somehow. Anyway, so that alien appeared just as he described, blinked a few times at the camera, and disappeared out of sight as he described in the news interview. It all looked too good to be true, which was why I thought it be probably fake. Still, there wasn't a plausible explanation for things until I saw another footage, shot by the same man, in his HOUSE. This time, our little extra-terrestrial pervert actually infiltrated his house, and he manage to catch him on film as it played hide and seek along the corridors. Who in the world would believe a thing like that? Well, a lot of people. 

Apparently, people would believe anything as long as it is being written down now. If I go onto the internet and I claim that I have seen aliens doing experiments on my parents' brains in the middle of the night, someone on the internet is going to believe every single word I say. Of course, having that little pervert caught on tape is going to add to your credibility, but someone's going to believe you anyway, blindly at that. Even after a skeptic recreated that shot on camera at under one hundred dollars, people on the internet are still raving at the fact that that footage is absolute proof that aliens do exist in our universe. Seriously, unless the alien does something more than just hiding under window panes or disappearing into the darkness, I am probably not going to be convinced. Oh, of course, let's not forget that aliens are probably not going to travel a few thousand light years just to run around your house and peep at your daughters in the middle of the night. Let's say in five hundred years, humans are able to travel to other planets like our alien friends right now. I don't suppose we are going to travel all the way there just to play hide and seek with them. It really doesn't make any sense at all - but it's not like people gives a shit about logic either. 

People believe in all sorts of things, everything from Jesus appearing in their moldy bread, to the end of the world in 2012, to little alien perverts visiting their homes. There is actually a multi-million dollar market in conning people like that, all legal and all legit. Every year, there are dozens of U.F.O. conventions that happen all across the world, and people attend these conventions not to see evidences of the existence of extra-terrestrials, but to buy products and merchandises related to our alien friends from outer space. Millions of dollars are earned from these conventions each year, all for the existence of a being in our universe that exists no more than our own wild imaginations and the computer generated graphics in Hollywood blockbuster movies. Even books on the topic of the end of the world sells better than Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling, people want to read about the end of the world, and there are even people who take drastic measures to survive on the day of reckoning. I have read about people taking jungle training just because they think that the cities are going to be destroyed, and humans are going to have to survive out in the woods. There is also this other man who believes that the world is going to end with a Terminator-like nuclear holocaust, in which case he'd retreat into his underground bunker that has supposedly everything from bathrooms, to entertainment systems, to storerooms full of food, internet access, and porn. 

It doesn't matter that there has been over a hundred end of the world predictions in human history, and none of them has happened yet. For some reason, people seem to be obsessed with the idea of our world coming to an end, but that's probably the only way they are going to find a reason for their pathetic little existence in our world. You should hear about people who claim to have been abducted by aliens and the kind of experiments the aliens have done to them. Everything from drilling holes in their heads, to inserting chips into their skins, to fitting a dildo-like devise up their vaginas. Yes, people have all claimed to have such experiences with extra-terrestrials, and some even claim to have had marriages with husbands and wives from another world. For the record, I am not making these things up, you only need to type a few words in any random search engines to find actual online communities that discuss these things to great details. While most of us are going to find them to be delusional and amusing, they see themselves at the forefront of mankind, the ones who have "seen the truth" and "has a need to expose the world to it". There are cool geeks, and then there are the geeks that gives the cool geeks a bad name. Agent Mulder from The X Files was cool, these people aren't.

 

Mulder and Scully are probably going to weep if they meet these people. So much for the "The truth is out there" poster that has made so many appearances in the opening credits of the popular American TV serial that lasted for a grand total of nine seasons. It's curious to note here that every witness of aliens so far described aliens to look like every other alien in the X Files series, or any other popular culture that we know today. For all we know, alien life forms may very well be a floating blob of meat, or a seven legged freak, a cross between a human and a frog, or George W. Bush. For some reason, aliens have to have big watery eyes like Japanese anime characters, they have to have big heads because they are supposed to have big brains, which also leads to their great supposed intelligence. Well, if they are really so intelligent, I don't suppose they'd travel all the way to Earth just to run around a random Colorado neighborhood. Perhaps they are conducting some kind of empirical research on us humans, just watching and observing, not doing anything more than that.

The truth is, the truth really isn't "out there", as Mulder would like to believe. I'm pretty sure the truth is as "out there" as your imagination is concerned, and humans are susceptible to believe in anything and everything. I'm pretty sure mathematically speaking, there is not a single doubt that aliens probably do exist somewhere out there in the evening skies and amongst the clouds, but then it's probably not true that any of them have made contacts with each other at all. I've always had the feeling that aliens probably look like us, and they probably live on a planet that look like ours too. When we do meet them one day, we are probably going to be really disappointed somehow. They are probably going to have the same bad taste in music, same awful smell after workout, same pollution problems on their planets, and most of all the same uncanny ability to destroy ourselves. Yes, this willingness to accept anything and everything that the authority tells us is merely an evidence that mankind is doomed, somehow. We only need a man in a lab coat to tell us what to do, and we will to as told. At least that is what Julie Bowker said in class one day in regards to the Milgrim experiment, and you can't help but wonder if the same can be said about other aspects of our society as well. 

So is it pretentious to say that I am disappointed with the species - not really. I do think that our species deserves to be better than this, better than being so gullible. The next time we see one of these extra-terrestrial or religious mumbo jumbo, we should question ourselves whether or not these things make logical sense, if they are just another money making scheme. Because seriously, I truly believe in the saying that money makes the world go round, and money can drive people to do anything for them to earn even more money. 2012, if you don't already know, is also the year that the internet as we know it, is going to seize to exist. All the ISPs around the world have already signed an agreement that they are going to sell internet websites in packages, very much like television channels we watch these days. You pay a certain amount and you get a certain variety of websites, and you pay more just to get more websites. So much for the freedom of speech, even the internet is going to be taken away from us if we do not do something about it. That'd be a more realistic scenario to the end of the world, rather than a great flood or great balls of fire falling from the skies. 

This is how humans perceive anyway: we select, we organize, and we interpret. If we are going to begin by believing that that little perverted alien thing is real, then our perception process is going to be leaning towards that direction. We are probably going to organize our thoughts that way, and interpret it the way that we'd like to make our selection more substantial and true. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy I tell you, and it is bad for you. Like I mentioned before, it truly is embarrassing sometimes to know that there are people who'd question things, and then there are people who'd just blindly accept anything as fact. That is not to say that I do not have my own ridiculous beliefs that people are going to find strange. In fact, I suppose some people might think that my belief in the existence of alien friends to be a little, well, out there. But at least I don't think I have had aliens drill holes in my head, I don't think I have impregnated an alien woman with alien babies - I do like female humans, thank you very much, and I do not believe that the world is going to end in four years' time just because the Mayans said so. Well, too bad the Mayans aren't really around anymore, or else we'd be able to laugh at them when the clock hits 2012 in four years' time and realize that we are still here. It's a trick I tell you, to predict the end of the world to be on the day when it is not humanly possible for you to be around. Just in case, you know, if it doesn't happen, people won't laugh at you for being this stupid.