I was just ten years old when man first stepped foot on the moon.  Now at 59, I feel I was cheated out of a future I expected to have.

     Instead we got heavily invested in wars and have remained so ever since.  Although our technology has improved vastly, it really has been incremental improvements and no real break through technologies.

     I know the break throughs are out there to be had because the same year we set foot on the moon, the same month in fact, I encountered some off-worldly beings who set foot, or at least set ship down on our planet.  I was invited on board although only while landed, I did not have the privilege of experiencing flight on board their craft.  Even so the technology I did see told me there were some break throughs to be had in our understanding of physics and applying those would allow us to go visit them where ever they were from.

      Their ships had no toilet facilities, no food preparation or storage facilities, not even any chairs.  Just one table.  This tells me one of two things, either they met up with a mother ship or they traveled the distance between stars so rapidly that no need for such facilities on board existed.  I had the distinct impression that it was the latter although communications with the beings was marginal at best.  No clear ideas were communicated telepathically, only some emotional context and a sense when I asked a question of yes or no.

    I strongly suspect that if we had not spent the last fifty years fighting over what we thought were the last drops of oil, we would be able to take vacations on or immigrate to planets around other star systems today.  Steven Hawking died a few days ago.  I’m saddened by his loss as a courageous person who fought what normally would have been a disease terminal in a few years for more than fifty, but not so much as a scientist because like most mainstream scientists today he was too heavily invested in what we think we know, big bang cosmology, Einsteinian gravity / relativity, to look for the break throughs we need to get us there.

    The majority of people who seem to have interactions with extraterrestrial species do so as abductees.  I was fortunate in that I was invited rather than abducted.  Unlike abductees I’ve had one and only one encounter that I am aware of.  I’ve seen other craft that I believe are likely not from here but they aren’t the craft that had landed.  The craft that had landed was saucer shaped and about twenty-five feet in diameter.  It did not rest directly on the ground like the craft in the movie, “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, but rather rested on three legs with circular pads at the bottom much like our own Eagle lander except the craft was shaped like the craft in the movie somewhat, and the scale was much larger.  Since I only had the one occurrence and I was only ten at the time, I did not learn as much as I would have liked to.  But what I did learn is what is physically possible.

     I learned that these large distances between stars are traversable and in almost zero time.  I learned that other planets exist with atmospheres compatible with ours.  These beings wore no head gear or breathing apparatus.  The door of the craft was open to our atmosphere.  This is something I always find funny about Star Trek, they’ll go to some newly discovered “class M” planet and beam down without any concern for atmospheric chemistry or pressure. and fortunately every species in the Universe speaks perfect English.  It seems likely to me that atmospheric chemistry and pressure are likely to vary wildly over quite a large range, yet, similar environments tend to result in similar adaptations even on our planet and there is no logical reason to believe this does not hold true for the universe at large, so it’s not entirely surprising that beings might come here that are compatible with our atmosphere.

     I am anxious for us to make the break throughs we need to travel to distant stars.  Distance, position, time, are really just numbers, coordinates in a mathematical matrix.  We need to learn the universal load instruction that allows us to change our coordinates instantly.  Now that I’m a bit older I wish I’d have the opportunity of another visit.  Really I’d like to see their home world, how life has evolved, how an advanced society has organized itself.  I’m not to happy with the direction man seems to be headed in.  A few elites controlling everything for their own purposes with no or little concern for the death and mayhem they wreck on the rest of us.

    When I was younger, radio used to fascinate me.  This was back in the 60’s and 70’s when clear channel AM stations still existed blanketing the entire country at night and there was a great deal of International Shortwave broadcasts.  What fascinated me was the idea that if I spoke into a microphone and that microphone modulated a signal being transmitted, and that signal was of a frequency that was able to make it through the ionosphere, then my voice would keep traveling through space forever, long after I am gone, and to distances I would never visit.  There was something magical about that.

    I operated a bootleg AM radio station during my Jr High and High school years.  One evening, when I concluded our broadcast day, I encountered the long delayed echo phenomena.  Amateur radio operators encounter this on shortwave bands when a signal goes around the Earth in two different paths resulting in an echo, but in this case I turned off the transmitter only to hear the last fraction of a second we transmitted repeated on a radio I used to monitor our broadcasts.  With ham operators, they are operating at a kilowatt on frequencies where absorption is low enough for a trip around the world to be possible, but I was operating 100 watts at 1200 kHz and this was at night.  100 watts was barely enough to make it to the other end of town let alone around the world, and the frequency meant the signal was being reflected back to Earth by the ionosphere, except for straight up or at angles close to straight up.  So I guess something straight up could have intercepted the signal, amplified it, and sent it back.  It’s a mystery perhaps that I will never solve.

  The evolution of our own technology leads me to wonder if there is not the equivalent of a universal internet, a communications and computational system of unimaginable complexity and scale.  And if aliens use it to communicate among themselves, they probably leave remote sensors on planets they visit like ours, and where an existing network exists they probably tap into it and transmit it’s contents back to their home.

     At any rate, I had hoped by this time we’d be roaming the universe, interacting in a positive way with other species, now it looks like we’re never even be able to interact with our own in a positive way.  I’m still hopeful that we might learn to get along with our own species.  I expect others will do their best to keep us quarantined until and unless we do.  I do see some signs of hope though, statistically, the number of people killed in wars in any given year has gone down.  Still, we are a long way from recognizing each other as belonging to one race and acting in a way that is best for all life on the planet.