UFOs vs Aliens
"No other object has been misidentified as a flying saucer more often than the planet Venus."
Two things about me: the first is I love aliens.
I love cartoon aliens and puppet aliens, and stories about sentient alien clouds and the Piggies from Speaker for the Dead and things like Solaris where you’re not even sure it’s alive because it’s so far removed from what we understand as life.
I love Salacious Crumb and xenomorphs and even Alf.
I love the idea that we’re not alone out there, that on other planets there’s life. Could be something like smile molds or lichens: that counts! Those are alien life forms! They don’t need to be able to banter with us to count as life!
I watched every episode of X-Files, and loved that.
The scariest film I ever saw was Communion, about a man getting abducted by Grays.
I have been obsessed with Grays for a long time — if real, are they from another dimension? the future? And if not real, how did we as a people all come up with a similar “look” for our aliens?
(I think I found an answer to that, a very deflating answer.*)
The other thing about me: I don’t care about UFOs.
How various aliens get here, if aliens are real, seems beyond the point. Warp engines or faster-than-light travel or wormholes: I don’t care. Not for me. If you have a video of a glowing orb moving very fast, I’m not going to even click on it. Again, not for me. The part of alien lore I love is that it could be real. Vampires aren’t real, werewolves aren’t real, but aliens could be, because 100 billion miles away there’s a lichen on a rock.
I don’t care what the aliens drive.
Having said all that, I live in New Jersey, and New Jersey is now the improbable hub of a barrage of nightly drones. Or small manned aircraft, or unmanned nondrone aircraft? No one knows. We don’t who’s flying them, what they are, or what they’re presumably looking for. They’re unidentified, they’re objects, and they’re flying over everyone homes every night.
This is not aliens. These things have red lights on one wingtip and green lights on the other: that’s apparently an FAA regulation. I don’t think little green men came all this way just to follow our Terran flight customs complete with correct color scheme for our eyeballs’ rods and cones.
A whole lot of people fascinated by drones think it is aliens: it’s not. Or they think it’s manmade drones, but that drones are chasing aliens. Again, don’t think so.
Eventually what the drone army above is is doing will be revealed, and even then the alien-hopers will say that that’s clearly a smokescreen to hide the aliens.
So what is it?
(It’s not this either; what’s up there doesn’t look like this. Which is good, because this is a Predator drone with missiles.)
I don’t know.
That’s actually a very mature and reasoned answer on my part. The guy who says “I know what this is” knows no more than I do, but is willing to go to the mat with his gut instinct and call that guess a fact. No one knows, other than the people flying the drones, and they’re not talking.
Once every few day a plane will fly by low over the house. It’s loud and slow and constant, and we’ve learned to simply stop talking for the 70 seconds or so of screaming decibelage. Plenty of other planes I’m sure fly overhead too far away to be heard or seen. I can rule out either of those sorts of planes as what’s overhead every night: these things are not supernoisy, and if they were far away I just wouldn’t know they were there.
Every hour or so I go out on the deck to look around. It’s dark by 5 pm, but the drone pilots apparently don’t clock in until 6.
Earlier this week a huge supernoisy one appeared, literally over our street, only 100 feet up. A second supernoisy one sliced an arc around the first one. I stood up and looked for minutes on end: it was stationary, and loud as a helicopter.
An hour later, I saw news reports of a car in town that has crashed into a riverbed. The helicopter-sounding thing hovering like a helicopter over my head was, in fact, a helicopter, filming it live for local news.
A month ago I’d have seen a helicopter and (rightly) assumed it was a helicopter. Now I go with surveillance drone first, and helicopter second. This is understandable, sure, but still not rational: hoofbeats should mean horses, not zebras.
I have a regular old smartphone, which I usually use to film kids’ concerts. Filming a kids’ concert is a very good way of learning a phone camera’s limitations. The colors seem yellowed, the grainy very grainy, kids on stage become sentient blobs in matching blob-like formalwear.
I am, in other words, not equipped to capture a UFO. But I decided to give it a try.
One night, one of the drones got close enough I could have grabbed it with one of those Batman grapple guns. It was flying very slow, slow enough to track visually, gliding way more than flying.
Thanks to light pollution, there’s no black sky around me, so the drone is backlit. The ones that pass overhead have clear fuselage: they look like planes, not quadcopters, but move very slowly.
I took out my camera and tried to film it. I figured I’d at least get the red and green light, and the strip of bright halogen bulbs underneath.
But I didn’t.
This is what I got instead.
I got a dot. A dot with some background audio of some aircraft gliding by.
I did this three or four times, each time getting a blinking dot.
You can create a seizure in certain people if you show then a flashing light that flashes are the right interval. I wonder if rinky-dink digital cameras have a similar lacuna. If there’s the specific interval to flash a light so it’s impossible for it to keep focus, so it just can’t zoom in, and just films an unfocused featureless speck in the sky. With a film camera I could maybe have recorded it, but who has a film camera anymore?
People who have been saying they’ve seen drones over their houses have received online “no you didn’t” rebuttals than seem, to quote Larry David, not commensurate to the offense.
Seeing a drone in the night sky, to me, seems like seeing a bottle of Vanilla Pepsi at a 7-11. You can buy a drone at Walmart. There are literally over a million drones in America. I’ve (tried to) fly my friend’s drone. It’s well within Occam’s Razor that what I’m seeing is a drone.
Having said that, maybe I was mistaken at 7-11 and saw a bottle of Diet Vanilla Pepsi. Or Vanilla Coke, or regular Pepsi. Or a cardboard cutout of a Vanilla Pepsi. Or I was at a Wawa instead.
But people seem really really invested in telling the people of Jersey who are seeing drones, eh, Vanilla Pepi that it wasn’t really a bottle of Vanilla Pepsi!
This is partly because lots of people are looking into the night sky and seeing planes, and stars, and planets, and concluding “Aliens.”
I’d like to think I’m not one of those people: I’ve never and still haven’t seen any aliens. I will admit to not regularly standing outside at night (when there wasn’t anything in the sky) to verify night after night there wasn’t anything there.
But a few million of us are seeing the same things, night after night: lots of low-flying crafts. And no one wants to admit they’re up there, or that we don’t know what they’re doing.
It’s a mystery. One we can’t skip to the last chapter for.
*I seriously considered a book about the Grays — not them as real extra-terrastrials, but how we collectively decided on one particular humanoid shape for what “aliens” would look like. Then I read a biography of Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, who famously hypnotized people who claimed to be abducted by aliens. There were two or three such psychiatrists. Everyone who saw psychiatrist A had similar stories, and everyone who say Psychiatrist B had similar stories.
You know how you hear a clock radio song and incorporate the song into your dream before waking? That’s what was happening. Mack didn’t mean to, but his internal belief system leaked all into the minds of those they hypnotized. Mack’s beliefs included ecological worries, and debates about if we would survive as a species. So his abductees’ hypnotized sessions all were about future humans time-traveling back to warn us to not pollute the planet.
PRINCESS LEIA OF THE WEEK
Baseball uniform week! (I’d do drone week but we’ve had enough drones for now.)
SPIDER-MAN OF THE WEEK
SUPER MARIO OF THE WEEK
MICKEY MOUSE OF THE WEEK
UPCOMING APPEARANCES (ALL NEW FOR 2025)
JANUARY 10-12: FAN EXPO NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans, LA
JANUARY 24-26: FAN EXPO PORTLAND — Portland, OR
MARCH 21-23: FAN EXPO CLEVELAND — Cleveland, OH
MAY 16-18: FAN EXPO PHILADELPHIA — Philadelphia, PA
OCTOBER 17-19: BALTIMORE COMIC-CON — Baltimore, MD
You’ll notice a lot of these are from the same company. Funny story: I thought you could apply to these conventions for free, and if you got in then you could decide if you wanted to go. I never submitted my credit card so they could charge me.
But Fan Expo had my credit card on file somehow, and charged me. I’m sure somewhere in the paperwork they said they’d do that, but that’s on me for not reading the fine print. So I bought table space while meaning to simply suss out the availability of table space. So I’m going to see some of America in 2025.
Ironically, I decided to do a lot fewer conventions than in the last year or two. Credit/blame goes to me overhearing some vendors of knickknacks talking about how much they made over the weekend. Turns out I’m doing very well for an author…but not nearly as well as a local selling 3D-printed tchotchkes.
I keep flip-flopping on attending: I love having all the conversations at conventions, and I always bring a book and my laptop so if/when it’s slow I can get reading and writing work done. And after a month or so of not going to one I start to feel some FOMO. But I also don’t want to sweat over “making my table” every weekend, and I don’t want to be so far away from home, and I don’t want to miss my family.
If you invite me? Sure, I’ll come! But I may stop trying to invite myself to these things.