I once hung out a bit with a guy who worked at a restaurant. He told me the usual stuff about how he would go around the tables taking orders and faking smiles etc. Then one time he went to the bathroom, did his business, and went out to wash his hands. He looked in the mirror to see if he had any dirt in the face, but to his shock he suddenly couldn't even recognize the person in the mirror. It looked vaguely like him, but something was off. He faked another smile, and the creature in the mirror followed. He made an ugly grimace, and the creature again followed. He smiled again, but this time the creature remained neutral.
spoiler
GET IT IT'S AN ALLEGORY FOR ALIENATED LABOR
I remember thinking Communion was awesome and pretty scary in parts but i read it like fifteen years ago. It's probably on libgen but the popups there are too bad on my phone to properly check. Also i think i might have already recommended it to you a couple years ago or maybe I'm having déjà vu. Oh sh*t or what if dirt_owl is a cover memory and I'm being abducted by aliens right now
ₗᵢₑₙₛseconding the Communion suggestion. The book is well written and terrifying. It encourages you to revisit some of your own strange memories where "missing time" might have happened. Additionally, this isn't scary, but it makes you wonder. Leslie Kean's book on UFOs features a chapter on an Iranian air force pilot who tailed a UFO over Tehran in 1976. Later on during a debrief he tells his supervisors he shot at the UFO. Apparently, there was a US intelligence guy present who told him "You're lucky you didn't hit it."
Betty and Barney Hill. Something definitely very fucked up happened to them either way.
Fun fact, barney hills granddaughter fights in the UFC. Cool as fuck fighter too, always brings the heat.
That's how I feel about about most UFO things. The logic part of my brain knows its almost sure to be bollocks but they're fun either way.
There is technically nothing scarier than an alien looking at earth and then just leaving us tour own devices. That implies there they are too callous or stupid to have material analysis but not too stupid to have warp drives. Utterly terrifying what that would mean about the universe
I truly think that in order to travel the stars, a civilization would have to have some empathy. Empathy is linked to intelligence and I think if they didn't have empathy they would have wiped themselves out before reaching interstellar flight.
Yes, we are well onto going that way ourselves. If the universe is weirder than we'd hope though that is a possibility
To be fair to our hypothetical alien friends, to encounter a planet like our own would have to present THE most profound technically, morally, and socially difficult problem in the universe, if they messed it up they could easily trigger a nuclear holocaust and ecocide
Even if they were somewhat competent, they would still most likely trigger a World War, and with the people they're trying to save being potentially labeled "alien collaborators" and massacred, to say nothing of the global guerilla war these hypothetical aliens would face should they pull a 'Soviets in Afghanistan' move
I believe any species that would take material analysis and historical materialism seriously would elect for utmost secrecy and remote observation and wait for more advantageous conditions to arise
And that's not even getting into the more "economic/logistical" aspects of successfully overseeing a planet like this; how many ships are required, how many personnel, how much material, how far is earth from the closest "civilized" hub, how high are we on the list of galactic priorities? These are all questions any rational and historically minded species would have to ask itself and work out
Nah, our system is held together by gum and tape at best.
For any reasonable level of intergalactic technology they could could sort it out. Buss the oort cloud. Turn a handful of those iron rich asteroids into drones. Turn the carbon rich ones into food and hand it out for free. They could have it all sorted in a year with less deaths than we normally have in a year
When I was a kid. I pointed my first shitty phone towards the sun with a sepia filter on. There was some kind of orb doing wild ovaloid movements around the sun. Turned the camera away for a few seconds and when I went back to the sun it wasn't there anymore.
Raiden, something happened to me last Thursday when I was driving home.
I had a couple of miles to go - I looked up and saw a glowing orange object in the sky, to the east!
It was moving very irregularly...
suddenly there was intense light all around me - and when I came to, I was home.
What do you think happened to me?Pascagoula is a pretty creepy one. Two workers, no-nonsense dudes, come stumbling into the Sheriff’s office saying they’ve been abducted and implants inserted into them. The Sheriffs think they were making it up so they leave the two in a room alone and secretly record them.
You can listen to the recording here: https://www.clarionledger.com/videos/news/2020/07/13/charles-hickson-calvin-parker-recorded-talking-alien-abduction-pascagoula-river/5409533002/
Transcript of part of it:
"Jesus Christ, God have mercy, I thought I'd been through enough of Hell on this earth and now I've got to go through something like this, see," Hickson said. "But they could have, you know, I guess they, well, they could have harmed us, son.
"They had us. They could have done anything to us, but they didn't hurt me."
"I just want to cry right now," Parker said. "What's so damn bad about it is nobody's going to believe us.
"I got to get home and get to bed and take some nervous pills or something, see a doctor or something. I can't stand this. I'm about to go all to pieces. I can't sleep like it is. I'm damn near crazy."
Scariest alien story:
Before you read this dirt owl remember it is fiction. You said the state of things was getting you down and I don't want to make you sad.
Posadas was wrong. There are no aliens. We are alone and nobody is coming to save us. When humanity inevitably destroys the environment and ends all life on earth there will be no one left in the universe.
This guy I worked with, who seemed to be of solid mind and not prone to psychological weirdness from what I knew of him, told a story that stuck with me. He said that he and his wife were having a beer in their backyard around dusk, just chatting and enjoying the nice weather, when they noticed an orange orb in the sky. They looked at it for a minute, when suddenly it launched right towards them and came to an immediate dead stop a few hundred feet above them, and just hovered there for a few seconds. Before either of them had the chance to snap out of the shock and try to take a pic, it had zipped off below the horizon. He said it made no noise and was absolutely not a plane/drone/helicopter/etc. At first I thought he had taken meth or some kind of psych, because that's a fucking weird ass thing to claim to have seen. But I know he's not that type of guy, and I know beer isn't gonna make you see things like that. Plus, according to him his wife saw it too and can back him up. He seemed to be really unsettled when he recounted it, and the more I think about it the more creeped out I get. The way he described it, it basically just showed up, got extremely close extremely fast, looked at them for a minute, and then left as quick as it came. A brief and harmless encounter, but enough to totally shatter your worldview and understanding of what's possible. It might be a tall tale or a pipe dream, but I still think of it whenever I'm just hanging around outside around dusk.
Nothing, just a joke about me encountering french "people" on a commute
