Wil Wheaton and I got excited and made this “Fighting Time Lords” shirt for you! No, really. Specifically FOR YOU.

[Sorry, non-Doctor Who fans. This one doesn’t make any sense to you.]

The Whitehouse’s official stance on aliens, UFO’s and the like is that we haven’t yet made contact, and no information regarding extraterrestrials has been concealed by the government from the public. But, isn’t that EXACTLY what they would say if they WERE covering something up? And if The Silence are involved, do they even know they are covering it up? If Fox Moulder voted for Obama, would it be “Change I WANT TO BELIEVE in?” Further more, do astronauts have sex in space? How does that even work? So many mysteries.

When I was a kid, I was both facinated and terrified by the idea of aliens visiting Earth. The early 90’s saw a strange surge in alien related media. Perhaps The X-Files started it, or perhaps the interest in UFO’s paved the way for the show. Either way, there were TV specials, movies and books coming out left and right that all seemed to say the same thing: We are not alone, and the truth is being kept from us. I soaked up every bit of info I could (which was hard pre-Internet) and felt that I had an above average working knowledge of “the truth.” I knew all about the inconsistencies of the reports surrounding Roswell, the military personell that had come forward only to be discredited, the similarities in abduction stories and the “greys.” I just accepted that this was the secret truth and eventually it would all come out. I could understand, even at 11 years old, why the government would lie about these events, but I never even questioned the “abductees” themselves. Why would anyone lie about such a thing? I also wanted us to get as close to a Star Trek reality as possible in my lifetime, and aliens jump starting our technology and society seemed like a good way to get the ball rolling.

I realize now how I let my youthful naivety and enthusiasm for sci-fi get out of hand. I firmly believe there are other lifeforms in the universe, those we would recognize as life and those we would not, but I doubt they are monitoring us or conducting experiments on us. A life-sustaining world might be such a rarity in the universe, and the distances between them so great, that even given millions of intelligent species two of them would just never cross paths. Life may also be abundant in the universe, but just not all at the same time. Perhaps species are born and die in the relative blink of an eye and hardly ever coexist. I hope that’s not the case. How lonely if it is.

COMMENTERS: Were you, as I, fascinated by aliens as a kid? Are you now? Any defining moments that lead you to believe one way or another? One thing that sticks out for me was the TV movie version of “Communion.” There was a scene where a little boy runs to a lake, a woman chases him, then sees a spaceship floating over the lake and when the boy turns around he has the face of a grey. THAT. SHIT. SCARED. ME. TO. DEATH. The images was burned into my brain and haunted me for years. It was especially horrifying because I believed it was 100% true and was probably going to happen to me eventually. So far it hasn’t… or has it? [No, probably not.]