NZSM Online

Get TurboNote+ desktop sticky notes

Interclue makes your browsing smarter, faster, more informative

SciTech Daily Review

Webcentre Ltd: Web solutions, Smart software, Quality graphics

GIGO

Aliens at the Bottom of the Garden?

Over the past 10,000 years or so, humanity has developed a whole range of explanatory schemas to provide a means of looking at the world and making some kind of sense of it. From this striving for understanding has come our religions and philosophies, our science and technlogy.

But, with the world being such a complex place, there will always be things that defy explanation -- we will always see lights in the night, hear suspicious creaks, feel the chill wind of the unknown down our backs.

What does change is the way in which we try to explain such things. We pick and choose our metaphors and our images depending on where and when we come from.

It's interesting to note that close encounters in the 1950s and 60s were generally with friendly aliens who had travelled all this way to help us evolve into caring sharing folks who would be welcomed into the Intergalactic Brotherhood. They were benign aliens, wise and compassionate, just waiting for the right moment to raise us up.

It has been only relatively recently, in the more anxious 80s, that the aliens have been seen as sinister creatures, luring us out into the dark and stealing babies, playing tricks with time and memory to confuse their playthings.

Or perhaps this isn't really a recent shift in alien attitudes after all, but merely a return to our older past.

Perhaps the menacing grey aliens are simply a modern metaphor for the sorts of gremlins and ghouls that have always haunted the human imagination. A couple of centuries ago and the supposed victims of alien abductions would have been talking about sexual experimentation with succubi, losing time with the menacing Sidhe fairy folk of Ireland, having their babies taken by the elves from the deep dark wood.

There seem to be something in the human psyche which reacts to the dark, to the unknown. One might argue that it stretches even further back than the Brothers Grimm recognised, far back in our past when we huddled around the first fires and watched anxiously for the telltale light of hungry eyes waiting in the darkness.

These are lights in the night which I'm sure existed.

Vicki Hyde is the editor of New Zealand Science Monthly.