I’m in the garden on a comparatively bright,clear Sunday afternoon. Totally sober. I see a UFO in the North Perthshire sky!
It is a long cigar-shaped silver object, high in the sky, barely moving (I don’t know what we will say instead of cigar-shaped when everybody stops smoking(courtesy Dr.Vijay and Dr.Anbumani) and no one remembers cigars… courgette-shaped perhaps?).
All the roomies see it too. We observe it through binoculars, the zoom lens on My borrowed camera (see picture below) and T’s astronomy-for-beginners-telescope. The telescope is a disappointment… the only thing I have ever seen through it was he moon, and that was upside down.
(Picture copyright belongs to T.so no piracy please)
We speculate on the UFO. It is probably an alien expeditionary force on a mission to seek out intelligent life…They will be disappointed. As they scan the Scottish countryside they will only see people shopping,mowing the lawn and tending the smoky plumes of a thousand barbecues.The aliens will conclude that this is a primitive hunter-gatherer society where we worship at sooty altars with charred meat offerings. They will quickly move on to more interesting planets where advanced multi-brained creatures are already beyond the reality TV stage and have invented cold fusion and ion drives.
I wave at the aliens in a forlorn attempt to initiate First Contact, thereby securing my place in history… They do not notice me.
After 30 minutes we all get bored with squinting into the bright sky as the alien
craft gets smaller and higher, turning in slow circles over heads. We go back to our primitive tasks and mankind’s opportunity to end our 4 billion year solitude slips away.
I explore alternative theories. Perhaps it was not aliens. Perhaps it was a sinister unmanned surveillance dirigible being tested by secret establishment forces in the Ministry of Defence controlled airspace that stretches high above my garden.
In the evening I investigate options to insure myself against abduction by aliens. If I don’t turn up on my g-mail one day, you will know what has happened.
