Hunt told reporters that an applicant should be judged by their entire professional history, not the brief period in which they were forced to compete as a gladiator on Xarbok 7.

ALBUQUERQUE, NM—Concerned that the span of unemployment on his résumé could be a liability during an upcoming job interview, local man Erik Hunt said Wednesday that he desperately hopes he isn’t asked about the two years he was out of the workforce because he was abducted by aliens.


The 34-year-old job applicant, who appeared visibly nervous as he waited in the lobby of digital marketing firm Everhart Media, told reporters he hopes the interviewer inquires about his relevant experience, skills, and education rather than focusing on the gap in his work history that resulted from an eerie white light transporting him from a fishing boat on Cochiti Lake to the laboratory of a giant spacecraft, where he spent 24 months as the subject of alien medical experiments.

“I can just see the hiring manager getting to those missing years on my résumé and hitting me with all kinds of questions about what I was up to,” said Hunt, who acknowledged that he dreaded having to explain how he was kidnapped by a highly advanced alien lifeform in June 2014, shuttled across the galaxy at the speed of light, and then abruptly returned home in May 2016. “It’s my track record of success in marketing that should count most, right? The fact that I was held in suspended animation while a team of 7-foot humanoids operated on my digestive tract has virtually nothing to do with the associate brand manager position.”


“Honestly, I just wish they’d skip over it altogether,” he added.

Hunt, who stressed that he wouldn’t feel comfortable lying outright to potential employers, said he hoped he could gloss over things by alluding to time spent freelancing independently and then changing the subject. However, if the interviewer were to ask any follow-up questions or request references who could confirm he was continuously employed during the two-year period, Hunt confirmed he would be at a complete loss, having no way to provide any contact information whatsoever for Commander Zerpolax.


The digital marketing professional noted that he had extensively reformatted his résumé—adding a paragraph-long statement of purpose and lengthy descriptions of projects he had spearheaded—in the hope of drawing attention away from the interruption in his employment history, which during an interview last month forced him to provide detailed explanations of merging his consciousness with that of an unfathomable being from a distant nebula instead of focusing on his key professional qualifications.

“The frustrating thing is that my level of experience should make me a shoo-in for this position,” said Hunt, who added that his decade of developing relationships with clients and building a strong portfolio of brand-facing creative campaigns ought to be given more weight than the year he was on display in a human zoo in the Alpha Centauri system. “It’s really going to suck if they end up picking someone totally unqualified just because the six months I spent learning how to use a smuggled laser blaster so I could fight my way to the mothership’s escape hatch gives me a less conventional CV.”


“Maybe my best bet is to try to spin the whole thing into a positive,” Hunt continued. “If I can focus on how having excruciatingly painful incisions made to my vital organs while I remained conscious was a character-building experience, that might actually give me a leg up.”

Hunt went on to state that until he was hired, he would avoid mentioning to interviewers the hybrid human-alien embryo that is gestating inside him and will explode from his skull in a few months.