A dozen bright lights flew in tight formation high in the starry night, then started twirling around each other in an impossibly playful way, and finally disappeared in a flash over the horizon. Not a sound was heard. Nothing I know could have moved like that. These weren't drones or planes.
I grew up reading Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke and watching the original " Star Trek " series on television.
I therefore took it for granted that the universe teemed with other sentient species.
Back then, these came in two kinds: Bug-Eyed Monsters, or BEMs, who looked like giant versions of Kermit the Frog and made modern-music sounds; and Highly Evolved Minds, or HEMs, who had traded their physical bodies for the enviable capacity to play tricks on Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.
Both varieties conformed to old archetypes.
There were once monsters in the dark. There were spirits in the woods and the clouds.
We may have driven these mythical entities from our planet, but why couldn't they endure in outer space?
Even " The Day the Earth Stood Still ," supposedly a benevolent vision, left the future of humanity in the hands of robots that pretended to be pacifists but seemed happy to pulverize anything they disapproved of.
With the success, later in the century, of " E.T.: The Extraterrestrial ," a third archetype achieved dominance over popular culture: space aliens, it turned out, were Just Like Us, only cuter – and somehow able to make bicycles fly through the air.
No comments:
Post a Comment