My novel Catch a Falling Star is about an alien invasion that goes horribly wrong for the aliens. I wanted to make the story as realistic as possible, even though, admittedly, the story is really about people on Earth. The thing is, in order to supply realistic details to a story I had been working on for twenty-plus years, I started researching alien encounters with a certain gleeful seriousness, being a Carl Saganite who didn’t believe anything that was not provable and was always open to finding proof.
The thing about the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory and alien encounters is that the Wonderland on the other end contains proof of all sorts, for and against, with varying degrees of veracity. And if you follow the white rabbit of truthiness far enough, you are definitely going to find out things that, at the start of it all, you really did not want to know. There is a big downside to being way too smart for your own good.
Here’s a bit of validated conclusion on my part that will probably disturb you if you have seen even half as many fake alien videos on YouTube as I have. Skinny Bob is real. If you are immediately disgusted with how foolish and easily fooled you think I am after that statement, actually watch both videos all the way to the end so you can follow how I made this remarkably stupid conclusion.
The first video comes from an amateur researcher who is part of the MUFON community and spends lots of time working on uncovering and disclosing the truth because he is compelled, not because he is making money. He reveals that the leakers of this particular item of film property have gone about it in a way that protects their own secrets and has not led to making a lot of money. In fact, they distributed the video in a way that guarantees that governmental forces can’t easily erase it from being seen, copied, and studied. Still, as Nick Pope, the former British government UFO researcher, has stated about the Skinny Bob videos, they could simply be someone’s attempt to spend time and resources pulling off a masterful hoax in CGI and film-craft. Some people do live to fool other people. That’s where the second video really blows a hole in the white rabbit’s head. If you watched the very last bit about the frame rate, you can see that the leaked footage was intentionally reduced in frame rate from 18 frames per second to 12. Because I am an animation nut, I already knew that film in the present day tends to be 24 to 26 frames per second. Not only did the frame rate of the film suggest it comes from before 1975, but that someone had altered it for their own reasons to change how it would look. I immediately thought, “Aha! This will prove it is fake and the alteration was made to make the footage look more real.” But the restored footage doesn’t look less real. In fact, if anything, the footage looks even less like a robot or CGI program image. Why would someone want to make a video look less real? We can now cook and eat that old white rabbit.
And so, the inevitable conclusion. Once again the fact that so much effort has gone into suppressing and covering up these things proves that they are almost certainly true. You don’t make an effort to cover up a total fiction. Skinny Bob is real. And there is more to the story. And, dang me, I want to know.
![LoveOnTheLookOutBouguereau[1]](https://i0.wp.com/catchafallingstarbook.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/loveonthelookoutbouguereau1.jpg?w=172&h=265&ssl=1 "LoveOnTheLookOutBouguereau[1]")
Politics in an Alien World
I am working on the end of my sci-fi comedy novel, Stardusters and Space Lizards. It is about an alien world that is dying from too much warfare and ignoring of pollution-created climate change. So today, after personally declaring war on the Trumpinator yesterday, I want to talk about politics. Not Earth politics. Alien politics. Any resemblance to real-world politics will be coincidental, or the result of truth being far stranger than fiction.
Let’s be thoughtful for a moment and analyze the way politics works on an alien planet. The political world always seems to devolve into two sides. Remember, we are talking made-up alien worlds here. So let’s give the two sides completely made up names. Let’s call them Dumbocrats and Ratpublicans. They are nothing like we have here on Earth. These are aliens, remember, nothing like us.
On one side you have the party that is totally self-centered and cares more about business and profits and what the individual can gain from those than it does about anything else, even insignificant things like other alien people’s lives. These are the conservative, me-party folks who try to maximize benefits for themselves and the relatively small circle of alien people they care about and think of as their own. We’ll call them Ratpublicans, again, totally randomly, for no particular reason.
Then, on the other side, you have the selfless ones, the ones who are more interested in making everybody happy, an exercise in futility that invariably leaves no one happy in the long run. I mean, if you give everything away to help others, eventually you are left with nothing. It is the reason liberal alien people often starve to death. It is also the reason that these selfless beings get so used to being poor and having nothing of their own. We’ll call them Dumbocrats, only because it is the name we have left over.
What always works best is when neither side gets everything they want. It is far better that the two sides grab the Enchilada of Happiness from opposite sides and pull with relatively equal force. That way it stays about in the middle and no one gets the whole enchilada. If the Ratpublicans get the whole thing, then the most powerful, ruthless, and evil among them will selfishly eat what they want and horde the rest, letting everyone else, even less-powerful Ratpublicans starve. If the Dumbocrats get the whole thing, they will give small bits to everyone, even the space rats and space pigeons, and visiting Space Goons from other planets, and no one will have as much as they want. Keeping the whole enchilada in the middle of the great political tug-of-war is the whole trick to making things stay balanced and under control.
If something throws the whole system out of balance, say an orange-headed alien in a gold-colored fright wig suddenly uses the magic of corrupt business practices to seize control of the Enchilada of Happiness, then the whole system starts to break down.
Now, you may have noticed already that instead of outer space aliens, I have used old movie clowns to illustrate this essay. I think it is entirely possible that the best people to listen to when it comes to the matter of politics and what to do about them are the clowns, the comedians, the mockers, and the fools. They have looked at the way things are with a keen eye to find what they can make fun of and make us laugh about. But because they are looking with a keen eye, often they are seeing the truth for what it is. Did you ever hear what Charlie Chaplin had to say?
Of course, we all know this whole discussion is about aliens on other planets. It doesn’t apply here. How could it? We are nothing like them. We’re smarter and better and have all the answers… if only we would take a moment to realize that we do.
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