Little green men, blinking lights, and one Southern woman who would like a word…

I’ll tell you what… the question of what I would ask an alien took me straight back to my childhood, when summer evenings were long, lightning bugs were plentiful, and the night sky felt close enough to reach with a cane pole.

Back in the 1960s and ’70s, we would stretch out on the ground in our yards and often times on the ground next to my grandfather’s pond and stare up at the stars, waiting for something that blinked wrong, moved too fast, or turned a circle no ordinary airplane had any business turning. We were looking for flying saucers. UFOs and aliens were a bigger topic than Bigfoot in those days. You know Bigfoot had a mighty good publicist back then too.

Did we ever see one? Well, I swear we did. A couple of times, at least.

Once, on a stormy night at my grandparents’ house on Lake Placid, we watched a revolving light drift low over the pond. It was too quiet, too deliberate, and altogether too strange to be ordinary. We stood there in the damp dark, looking up with our mouths open, certain that somebody, or something, was looking back.

No, I never saw any little green men. But if I had, I would have invited them onto the porch, offered them something cold to drink, and started asking questions before they could change their minds and zip back into the clouds.

First things First Y’all… I would like to know where they came from and why they came here. Is home unhappy? Are they searching for something their own world has lost? Are we an experiment, a field trip, or the cosmic equivalent of slowing down to look at a yard sale?

Maybe they simply want to understand us. If that is the case, I am willing to explain what I can, though I should warn them that we humans are not always easy to account for. We can build a machine that talks to the stars, then spend twenty minutes arguing with the self-checkout at the grocery store.

I assume any visitors capable of crossing the heavens must be far ahead of us in technology and good sense. Still, I wonder whether their world is truly wiser. Do they have wars with beings who look different from them? Do they divide themselves into camps and spend their days hollering across the galaxy? Or did they outgrow all that foolishness somewhere around Saturn?

Next thing, How many kinds of aliens are we talking about? Are there dozens of civilizations slipping through the dark, each with its own language, customs, and opinion about Earth? Do some come to mine what we have for their own worlds, or are they just curious? Since we have never managed to find them and study them in any earnest fashion, where exactly do they live, and how have they stayed hidden this long?

They could be floating behind the moon, tucked inside a cloud, or parked over somebody else’s pond while another child lies in the grass and whispers, “Did you see that?”

One last Question… I admit that the present chaos of this world occasionally makes me think of the movie Cocoon. If the visitors are peaceful, and if their planet has porch weather, decent coffee, and considerably less carrying on, I might be persuaded to go back with them.

Life down here has become quite a journey… especially lately, and I still want to know whether E.T. truly phoned home. More importantly, did anybody answer?

Because I am curious. I have always been curious. And if there really is a number for an intergalactic pickup, somebody please hand it over. I’ll be out by My pond with a small suitcase, looking up…