James Hynes

I got a delicious little thrill up my spine today from this, courtesy of the Guardian website. It's a British radio interview last month with Edgar Mitchell, a former Apollo astronaut, and the sixth man to walk on the moon (that we know of, ho ho). In the interview, Mitchell says that he knows there is extraterrestrial life, and that they've visited us, because he's been briefed by government officials about the truth of the Roswell incident, among other things. Of course, he also says, according to this Guardian article, that his kidney cancer was cured long-distance by a Canadian named Adam Dreamhealer. Soooo, bearing that in mind, the interview's kinda thrilling to listen to, if, like me, you're a Scully with Mulder tendencies. At the very least, the breathless, jokey incredulity of the interviewer makes it worth listening to.

Okay, got that? I e-mailed the link to, well, let's just say, a friend, because why drag him into this publically? And he asked me by return e-mail what I thought: was there seriously anything to this, or is Mitchell one of those Apollo moonwalkers who's been driven round the bend by his experience? Well, on the one hand, the guy has a Ph.D from MIT and he was fucking astronaut, okay? On the other hand, Adam Dreamhealer. Which makes it, as my late, great dad used to say, six of one, half a dozen of the other. But, just for the record, I don't believe it (though I think Mitchell does), but I wish I did.

See, there are two Jims when it comes to this subject. One is the kid who spent much of his childhood in the 60s reading Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke, as well as every paperback on UFOs for which he could scrape together the cash, from semi-respectable ones like The Interrupted Journey and Incident at Exeter (which my mother tolerated) to really lurid ones (which I hid from Mom), such as the book that posed the question on the back cover, "Is There a Galactic High Command?" Let's call this Jim, say, Lizard Brain Jim, because that's where he still lives, and Lizard Brain Jim really really really wants Mitchell's interview to be the first trickle through the levee of cover-up and denial, culminating with benign Zeta Reticulans shaking hands (or whatever) with President Obama on the White House lawn on the afternoon of Inauguration Day. After which, over the following weeks, they will divulge the secrets of faster-than-light travel and teleportation; cure cancer and end racism, hunger, and war; reveal whether God and the Higgs boson really exist (and if they're the same thing); and show a middle-aged midlist writer how to make a living without having to take a day job. This is the Jim who, even now, still secretly devours books about UFOs, alien abduction, crop circles, and cattle mutilations with the avidity other middle-aged guys devote to internet porn. This is the Jim who never misses an episode of UFO Hunters on the History Channel, the Jim who made a road trip to Roswell once, the Jim who actually saw a UFO once (kinda) when he was a teenager and will tell you all about it with very little prompting. Okay, usually, no prompting at all.

Then, there's Forebrain Jim, who at the same tender age as he was reading Childhood's End and Flying Saucers: Serious Business was also reading every popular physics and astronomy book he could get his hands on, especially the works of Fred Hoyle and George Gamow, and who was planning on studying astronomy in college. This is the Jim who taught himself the constellations from his parents' back yard, and eventually learned how to tell the difference between the planet Venus, a meteorite, a satellite, a jetliner, and, you know, the mothership. This is the Jim who, today, still keeps up a bit with popular physics books (and who even has an ill-informed opinion about string theory), and who knows why it's really really really unlikely, even if there are intelligent ETs, that they would cross vast reaches of interstellar space to make goofy patterns in Wiltshire wheat fields, suck the blood out of cows in Colorado, and diddle middle-class white folks in their sleep. And, since they unfortunately share the same brainpan (where they coexist like Mulder and Scully, though unfortunately without secretly liking each other), at the same moment as Lizard Brain Jim is geeking out over UFO Hunters (or the History Channel's bottomless store of cheesy international Roswells: Russia's Roswell, China's Roswell, Brazil's Roswell, etc.) Forebrain Jim is rolling his eyes, sighing audibly, and often laughing out loud at the sheer, pseudoscientific silliness of the show, especially at the staggering credulity of the Hunters themselves, especially the guy in the MUFON baseball cap, who is positively eager to believe that every blinking light in the sky is an extraterrestrial roadster, that the same government that can't even lie convincingly about Iraq and Katrina could keep dead aliens at Wright-Patterson AFB secret for 60 years, and that lunchtime in the break room at Groom Lake is like the cantina scene from Star Wars.

So there you have it, my Hegelian/Reticulan dialectic. (Only one dialectic of many, of course.) Put a gun to his head, and Forebrain Jim will tell you, don't be an idiot, of course I don't believe in UFOs (even if he did see one). But bear in mind that, even with the gun to his head, Lizard Brain Jim is keeping his fingers crossed behind his back and hoping that they're really Out There, hiding behind the moon where we can't see them. Because he's thinking, just like Lady Brett in A Sun Also Rises, "Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?"

This Just In: But wait, there's more! Bigfoot's real, too...well, maybe. At any rate, there's an article about it in yesterday's New York Times, "Two Georgians Say They Have Bigfoot's Body." And there's even a picture, I kid you not, of a dead bigfoot in somebody's basement freezer. Looks like a gorilla suit with some organ meat tossed in. Did I mention I sometimes watch Monsterquest, too?

Oh, Well: Turns out the two DNA samples collected from the Bigfoot in the Freezer are from a human being and an opossum. And the Bigfoot in the Freezer really is a gorilla suit with some leftovers. Sigh.

Messin' With Sasquatch: Turns out you don't want to piss off sasquatch hunters, either.

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