Canny, explicable, and believable - is that so much to ask?

 

My previous post featured a picture of a sign in front of a local coffee shop, blaming extraterrestrial influences for their lack of drip coffee.  Now, before we go any further, I feel that I should clear up something about my opinion regarding the possibilities of alien intervention and its effects on coffee.

I don't believe a word of it.  Not a word.

Yes, when it comes to the entire category of what we will perhaps unfairly call "pseudo science", I'm a complete skeptic.  Sadly, in spite of a lifetime of science fiction and fantasy intake, some solid internal layer of disbelief has remained impenetrable, and as a result I don't believe in UFOs, ghosts, Chupacabra, crop circles, or any of the other X-Files entries that continue to resist rude and unseemly demands for documentation and evidence.

Truth to tell, that's my problem with all of it, the lack of hard evidence.  If once, just once, something would happen that left clear and irrefutable proof, that's all I ask. I don't want to hear about mysterious events that have no rational explanation - screw that, I want mysterious events with a clear and obvious explanation: alien visitors, psychic ability, pyramid power, whatever, doesn't matter, provided that there's proof.  In the real world, all we seem to have is this massive archive of blurry, out of focus, grainy and otherwise deficient images of fringe phenomena such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and large headed Greys from Arcturus, an archive that no one really takes seriously. It may well be that the truth is out there, but that's a sword that cuts in both directions: maybe the truth is that it's all false.

One of the great changes to the paradigm for the new Doctor Who episodes is that Earth-based plot lines don't just deal with three people in an isolated castle, but rather take place on a global scale and are witnessed by all of humanity.  A spaceship like an inverted mountain hovers over London and makes countless people stand on ledges and prepare to jump, they evacuate the city at Christmas due to several years of alien incidents, everyone on the planet looks like the Master for a few days, Earth gets shifted to another location, and everyone knows*, it's part of history. Now that's what I'm talking about!

Now, this is not to say that I don't think that there's life on other planets, I doubt very much that in the infinity of space we're the only planet that's managed to produce what we will charitably call intelligent life.  I just think that if extraterrestrials managed to cross the great gulf of interstellar space, they wouldn't waste their time with the sort of silliness that's been attributed to them.  In fact, if there are any aliens reading this (sit down, Laurie…) hey, it's time. Enough with the crop circles and anal probes, drop a shuttle craft down in front of the White House and send someone in to talk to Obama, okay? Seize the moment - after all, the next guy could be another George W. Bush.

- Sid

* Except Donna Noble.