Aliens: Guest Blog by Paul Heller

We are the UFOs that your gov-speak calls Unexplained Aerial Phenomenon. We’ve been observing you closely since your Galileo’s heliocentric prediction earned him a lifetime of house arrest. Despite your cosmologic maunderings as to our existence, you’ve never drawn the self-evident conclusion that if you saw us it would only be if we wished to be seen.

 Well, here we are, in your faces, the orcas of your skies.

 Our initial optimism about you as a species was based on your seeming to have brains that were embryonic facsimiles of our own. We were guarded – we’d erred in optimism before. Our fallback was that if you continued in your predatory ways, like thousands of defunct species before you, you would end up disappearing down a black hole of your own making. What we failed to reckon was that you would take your galaxy’s beloved Earth down with you.

 Valhalla, Arcadia, Eden, Avalon, Rakuen. The Ellysian Fields. Shangra-la. So many names you conjured for a yearned for mythic paradise in the just beyond, when all along it was the ground right under your feet.

             Paradise Earth. We’d vacationed amongst you for millennia. Our favorite time was the long temperate Mediterranean period that preceded your mania for conquering nature. We would mimic the architecture of the epoch to avoid attention, or if we were forced to evacuate when one of your incessant armed arguments with each other erupted nearby, we would call on a volcano to incinerate the evidence of our presence.

             We’ve informed the animal and avian species of our decision. We’ve assured them that our blow will be human specific so they’ve nothing to fear. A band of their fiercest petitioned us to do to you what you’ve done to them. We understand their bitterness, but it is not in our character to be cruel. We pity your young who are beginning to walk the walk their 60’s forebears sang of. We’ve raptured an articulate few so a firsthand account of your galactic atrocity is witnessed throughout the entirety.

 We are sad, for ourselves as well as your young. In our fourscore thousand years we have never had to make such a decision – wiping out a fellow species, especially one with seeming intellectual capacity. How you could have brought ruin on your paridisiacal home mystifies us. There is nothing like Paradise Earth in any of the universes we are aware of.

 So now, in the name of the Wakan Tanka of all and ever, Blackout.