Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft

A scoop from the skies for 60.life

The majority of Americans (57 per cent) now thinks aliens definitely or probably exist. That’s according to a survey end of last year by YouGov America, with 34 per cent believing UFOs are likely to be connected with extra-terrestrial activity, up from the 20 per cent who thought the same in 1996. With news that UFOs were shot down over the US this February, that figure may well have risen.

Incredibly, during the hubbub, 60.life was offered an exclusive interview with ‘The WISE’, a confederation from a galaxy far, far away…well, far away for us, but for them, relatively do-able over a weekend, unless it’s a bank holiday when random lanes on the super-wormholes tend to be coned off.

They appeared as bursts of darting radiance, a bit like the Northern Lights but not so green and spoke in an unknown language that amazingly, I could hear simultaneously in English. Opening on a fairly formal note and uncannily echoing The Carpenters, they announced, ‘We’ve been observing your Earth, and we’d like to make… a contact with you.’ Loosening up a bit, they added rainy days and Mondays also got them down.

It was immediately apparent their intelligence is far superior to ours, yet at the same time, they are considerably more humble. They explained this sense of balance has underpinned their evolution. It is imperative, they affirm, that you always match technical and creative advances with equal measures of humility and discipline. Otherwise, the immense progress you generate inevitably outstrips your ability to deal with it. Then you just piss it all away over a cliff.

They seem sensitive souls, recounting their sadness at first seeing the Cadbury’s Smash ads of the 1970s because they would never in a million light years have laughed at us for making mashed potato the slow way. It is for this reason The WISE now serve proper mashed potato as a delicacy at major celebrations and conventions.

My first question, which granted wasn’t very incisive, was this: ‘Why not go to the national press rather than the blog of a mature woman typing in her back bedroom, who finds a lot about modern life not only wearing but frankly ridiculous?'

Their reply was that they didn’t want to give their first terrestrial interview to a news outlet that might sensationalise the headline, encouraging readers to skip straight to the comments clutching their metaphorical popcorn. They feared that if their explanations about their first official visit to Earth weren’t heard in full, there was every possibility they’d get cancelled.

They were at pains to say while they understood this modern cultural expression of moral outrage often springs from the pursuit of justice and/or a place of kindness, when meted out in the court of social media, risks closing down discussion and denies opportunities for humans to admit mistakes - perhaps even be forgiven - in order to forge further growth.

‘Cancel culture has created a climate of fear’

Ironically, it has created such a climate of fear, those who wouldn’t dream of knowingly offending anyone have retreated into the relative safety of innocuous parlance. At the very most, all the mild-mannered dare do is whisper (with a few Father Dougal sideways glances) that the world has become a wee bit unfathomable, before shaking their heads, sighing deeply and heading to Waitrose.

My next question: ‘Why make yourselves known to us now?’ The answer was unsettling. They think humanity has never been in such a precarious position. Conflicts are rife. Warheads are primed. And strangely, many democracies appear surprisingly invested in the pursuit of compliance and control.

The WISE also think tech is rewiring our brains, which is why we’ve become so crap at concentrating, yet we’ve imparted ‘deep learning’ to AI. ‘Have we really thought this through?’ they asked. ‘Has the course upon which we are set been democratically agreed?’. In short, have we evaluated the existential threat?

There was another factor as to why they decided to appear to us at this moment in time. Had they left their visit a month longer, they reasoned, the whole hoopla of whether Meghan would make it to the coronation, perhaps wearing a flying saucer on her head, would inevitably knock them off the front pages, which after seven million years of pondering when to reveal themselves to the human race, would be unbecoming. They might even end up on South Park, a prospect that would crush them after the Cadbury’s debacle re reconstituted potato.

There are many facets of our human lives that perplex them. That we can compose sublime music and great literature yet seem hellbent on producing light entertainment shows where people pick dates on the basis of others' genitals. That we say we want technology to free up our time, yet spend most of our earth hours staring at it.

We beat our eco chests pursuing net zero, yet are so enslaved to consumerism, we seem oblivious to the thousands of container ships circling the globe, stuffed with tat that once warehoused can be delivered to our front doors the next day - if we order in 1 hour, 24 minutes…1 hour, 23 minutes…1 hour, 22 minutes. We dutifully rinse our yogurt pots for recycling yet buy a new dishwasher because it’s cheaper to replace than fix. We bang on about the value of being our true selves, yet appear narcissistically addicted to altering our faces and applying filters to photos, calibrated for homogeneity.

These enigmas are something The WISE will ponder before reverting back to 60.life. All they asked of me when I wrote this up was to avoid saying the aliens had ‘reached out’, a phrase that makes them queasy, much like ‘in sooth’ did during the Middle Ages. They also loathe the phrase someone is ‘smashing it’ because it sounds so uncouth. But in sooth, their aversion might well be connected with a certain ‘70s TV ad. Who knows? We’ve only just begun.