Brentwood Press - Index

Brentwood Press - DiscoveryBayPress_08.22.08 - Index

18A | brentwoodpress.com outdoors august 22, 2008
Strange sightings from the playpen
We hikers who enjoy hitting the trail at
night catch sight of some pretty odd things.
Sometimes, those odd things consider us
pretty odd, too.
I flowed downhill beneath a canopy of
black oak in the shadow of Mt. Diablo. As
I swung around a bend I spotted two deer
spotting me. The doe, in three majestic leaps,
disappeared into the fortress of the trees.
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But the fawn didn’t
follow. I stopped four
paces from it and the
little deer bleated like a
lamb, accessing its ancestral
memory, searching
for the identity of
the long, smooth and
shiny, softly rumbling
… thing. I was sitting
in my car.
I’d quit the trail
a few minutes earlier
and was settling in for the steep and hairpin
trip down middle-of-nowhere Morgan
Territory Road on the way back to East
County. I’d caught the two creatures’ eyes
in my high beams in plenty of time to slow
down. The mother bounded away. The child
stood there, mesmerized by the sight of an
automobile.
I rolled down my window and bleated
back at the fawn. It took a step toward me.
Its nostrils flared and its head bobbed in
excitement. The huge ears were fully alert; a
riff of hooves timbrellated off the pavement.
Then it dawned on me that I wasn’t
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doing the fawn any favor by encouraging it to
hang out in the middle of the road. I swung
open the door and jumped out, shouting and
waving my arms like a lunatic. The undignified
spectacle achieved the desired effect.
Those who claim to have encountered
extraterrestrial beings describe spaceships
carrying passengers. This we take for granted.
This is the way we imagine the human
race, far in the future, will explore the stars.
What physical form would humanity
have taken by then? Scientist and futurist
Arthur C. Clarke sees the next step in human
evolution entailing the transfer of consciousness
into some synthetic vessel, something
less vulnerable than flesh and blood. Extraterrestrials
– possibly hundreds (or hundreds
of thousands) of years ahead of us in their
evolutionary journey – might have attained
such a state. According to Clarke, if UFOs
represent an authentic extraterrestrial visitation,
they’re probably not vehicular transport
for space aliens. The UFOs probably are the
space aliens.
Like the fawn, we haven’t a clue. Unlike
the fawn, we think we do.
The main sticking point of the “little
green men” theory of ETs is not that ETs
look too weird, but that they don’t look
weird enough. Close-encounter witnesses
speak of creatures with eyes, ears, noses
and mouths – never mind the number – in
more or less familiar locations. If there’s
anything eerie about the aliens it’s their lack
of eeriness: their head-mounted organs of
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MARTIAL ARTS
Photo by Ger Erickson
Considering the astronomical odds that
sentient life on another planet would
take a biological route nearly identical
to ours, it’s as likely that Et would resemble
a banana slug as a humanoid.
sense; their bilateral symmetry and bipedal
locomotion.
That extra-terrestrials resemble us
contradicts our experience of the Nature we
find on Planet Earth, where extravagance is
the rule. The Nature we know is a Beethoven
scribbling several dozen versions of a melody
just to get it right, recombining tones of the
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diatonic scale like DNA molecules. What are
the odds that sentient life on another planet
would take a biological route nearly identical
to ours? Astronomical.
“Genuine extra-terrestrials,” wrote
Clarke, “would be really alien – as different
from us as the praying mantis, the giant
squid, the blue whale … We are products of
thousands of throws of the genetic dice.”
“Is the human race alone in the cosmos?”
is a question for the ages – ages to
come, that is. Our radio and TV broadcasts
began speeding out of our little corner of
the Milky Way’s Orion arm in only the
most recent and miniscule fraction of the
life of the cosmos. We can’t blame ET for
not picking up on adumbrations of our
existence. As Clarke put it, “It is not likely
that ultimate questions will be settled in such
short periods of time, or that we will really
know much about the universe while we are
still crawling around in the playpen of the
Solar System.”
I eased back into the driver’s seat and
pulled slowly away from the site of the
close encounter, wishing the fawn luck in
its attempt to convey the incident to the
herd. “UFO” – however it translates into
bleat-speak – is about as helpful an expression
as “non-dairy creamer.” Now that you
know what the stuff in your decaf is not
… what is it? And what’s the identity of all
those smooth and shiny objects, anyway?
Since, like the fawn, we’re all infants in
this playpen, your guess is as good as mine.
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