UFOs: Why so sloppy? Plus, the rejuvenation of mice…

With all that’s been happening lately, I figure I could either talk about this multilevel and likely catastrophic “borrow from Peter to pay to Paul” mindset the world has fallen into, or I could talk about UFOs and aliens instead. I choose door number two.

Last Saturday, my husband and I watched Unsolved Mysteries’s 2020 episode “Berkshires UFO,” about multiple sightings and abduction accounts during a single night in 1969, in a small town in Massachusetts. The interviewees struck me as credible – as much as I can tell without knowing a person. They seemed sincere and discerning.

One story struck me in particular. A mysterious light had been beaming through the slats of a covered bridge as a woman drove through it, and when she emerged on the other side, the brightness settled over her car. This was the last thing she remembered. She “came to” in a parking lot some distance from the bridge, but in the passenger seat. Her mother who’d been sitting next to her was now in the driver’s seat (the children were in the back). One might reasonably assume that the woman had grown tired of driving at some point, and the grandmother had simply taken over – though how would a person forget such a thing? But here’s the kicker: the grandmother did not know how to drive.

Now, that is seriously interesting. So, the next day on the couch, I said to my husband, “Why?”

“Why what?” He was busy removing cat hair from his hoodie. “Those people,” I said. “They seemed perfectly sensible to me. As sane as anyone. Let’s assume they were telling us the absolute truth and everything they described happened as they said – why would the ones who abducted them put them in the wrong seats? Why so sloppy?”

“Not only that,” he said, finger raised, “remember the other report, that zigzag the UFO was doing when it took off? I find it really hard to believe a witness would add a detail like that. It’s weird. I don’t see why anyone would make something like that up.”

“Yeah, a square-wave-ish pattern or something – up, then over, up and over. But that goes to my point. It’s not only weird for someone to make it up, it’s weird for a UFO to do. I mean, why would anyone need to move like that? Seems inefficient.”

I am convinced that something is going on – but I don’t know what. It’s become a storytelling exercise for me, a search for plausibility.

If aliens can do all the things people have reported witnessing – teleportation, telepathy, gravity-defying maneuvers with technology far beyond anything we possess – why do they have such a difficult time returning people to their own car seats, or returning cars to where they were taken? Abductees have awakened wearing the wrong clothes, or wearing their clothes backwards – just imagine, if we’re talking about pants on a woman, it would not only be weird but difficult to do. So I assume all the pants reversals were happening only to men – but then the aliens couldn’t be bothered to learn that zippers belong on the front of everyone’s pants, where hands can reach?

My couch-hypothesis number one went something like this. The first aliens to visit arrived long ago. They’d happened upon our planet somehow, and word got out among the “alien” intra-galactic community about Earth, a planet with emerging intelligent life that ought to have been the subject of study, but it had been spoiled, contaminated from visitations. As a result, the alien “academics” – when they got around to exercising whatever right they had to study Earth – couldn’t care less anymore about being careful. Earth became a place where they could tamper as they’d always wanted to do. They could conduct their studies the right way, and they could conduct their studies the wrong way. Meanwhile, Earth’s borders, so to speak, were not as rigorously enforced as they ordinarily would have been. Thus, quite a few extra space-alien representatives began poking their heads in. Opportunists, I suppose. Entrepreneurs…

Which is what one could reasonably infer from eyewitness accounts – a governing authority struggling to maintain order, demonstrating some measure of seriousness and concern (monitoring nuclear plants, disabling missiles in their silos, etc.), but also others who can’t be bothered to put people’s clothes back on properly. Childish aliens who frighten people and then make a show of attempting to calm them with telepathic messages, but then go ahead and paralyze them (that’s not frightening?), only later to wipe their memories – imperfectly, at that. I mean, why bother? Put it all together, and they sound sloppy as hell. Surely there are better ways of studying us. Or perhaps an entrenched bureaucracy has gotten in the way of common sense. That can happen.

My husband had a different take. He proposed that the “aliens” might not be the main drivers of all the alien activity people have been reporting, rather the real authority behind them are machine beings. Maybe this is why the aliens seem so immature: it’s because they are. The artificial beings can’t do anything with them. They’re just trying to keep their wards occupied, filling their days, making rules for them that for some reason are hard to stick to. As in, do not spook the human pilots while in the air. Do not fly in square waves! And for goodness sakes, no matter how much you enjoy slurping irradiated cow lips and gonads, do not tamper with the livestock! Do not irradiate humans with your flashy beams – their bodies can’t handle it any more than yours can. Pay attention! No one will rescue you if you’re so foolish as to crash. And on and on…

But here’s couch-hypothesis number two: the aliens are fully mature, hundreds of years old in fact, yet struggling with a raging case of adolescent hormones triggered by a rejuvenation serum. One step further: these aliens may in fact be human.

To be honest, this is my favorite theory, the one that to my mind best explains the sightings and the behavior. A recent article really brought the idea home for me: scientists have figured out how to undo the epigenetic crimpings of DNA in mice (caused by environmental stressors) that disrupt the functionality their DNA, which manifests as old age. The mice grew younger, without developing cancer. (While researching for a short story a while back, I learned that sheering off epigenetic “marks” is well-known to cause cancer.) In addition, the FDA has just lifted the requirement that new drugs be tested on animals first, so you know human trials won’t be far behind. There appears to be a range of effectiveness at present. A reduction of biological age by at least 40% was mentioned. If a person’s biological age is 50, for example, that means resetting to a biological age of 30. Food for thought, an interesting observation I ran across in the 80s: if you use special software designed to age-regress the image of an adult human far enough, you’ll get an image that looks about the same as the “grays.”

Sign me up, I’m ready for my dose! Just kidding. Ask me when I’m 80. But when that day comes, I bet that most of us won’t be able to afford the procedure – but we might be allowed to do it anyway if willing to strike a deal. And what sort of deal might that be? Off the top of my head, probably some form of surgery to prevent us from having children – and yet if we’re willing to leave Earth permanently, sky’s the limit! I expect governments will use rejuvenation for recruitment, for space colonies or military service. If that’s what we will do (and I’m sure it is), do you suppose it could have been done before? Only if humanity had had enough time and stability on Earth to develop a sufficiently high culture without plastics or other petroleum products (clearly, oil was a cheap and easy shortcut – but is Roman “bendable glass” just a myth?). This new discovery prompts all sorts of questions. Like my other pet theory – that space aliens never came to Earth from distant star systems, rather some version of us left for them. They were sorely missed. And maybe now they’re back, a tad altered.

Based on what I’ve observed in interviews, most experiencers are ordinary folks. Sane people. Possibly even extraordinarily sane, given how well they’ve endured the inevitable social backlash. Back to my original question, “UFOs: Why so sloppy?” – the more sobering explanation might be that those behind the happenings, whoever they are, have been behaving oddly on purpose. In which case, we might as well enjoy our time as top cheese while we can!