SORD WAS ANGRY AT his mother.

“Why should I read this crap?” he wondered. “Nothing in this ancient prose has value for where I am today. Some flipping ancestor from a hundred-plus years ago? Doesn’t make sense she’d force this penance on her overburdened son. I have enough to read with school alone.”

He stared upward toward the only source of natural light in his room, reflected from a series of mirrors that began at the bioplas rooftop twenty meters overhead.

“At least this guy could venture outdoors whenever he wanted. He had freedoms I can only imagine. I’m sure he never appreciated them like I would.”

Sord grabbed his vidscreen pad and pressed on the file icon. The story appeared in plain text on his reader.

***

My friend. This is a start; my intended message to you. In telling you these things, I’ll assume you are a direct descendant, though you don’t have to be that for any particular reason. It just makes it easier to recall these tales as if I was sharing them with my own grandkids many generations later.

Since I as yet have no grandchildren, I’m projecting a bit on probability metrics. For context, it is the year 2021. What a year! Perhaps I’ll give you one man’s picture of what it’s like, living in this time of great uncertainty, small dashes of hope and courage, and astounding cowardice, greed, entitlement, and fear on many fronts.

I prefer to start off with something fun because those topics are too heavy and burden my somatic energy. To pique your interest and keep you reading, as I’m sure segments of this long tome will readily lull you to sleep, I will begin with aliens and the possibility of other sentient beings in the universe.

Part of my intention in projecting who you are is to envision where you might be as you consume this word flux. For my convenience, I’ll assume you live a hundred years from today. I’m hypothesizing that you are in a time after humanity has suffered utter devastation and near-extinction due to its inability to control the burgeoning, dynamic technological change in an otherwise diseased and dysfunctional societal state.

At this time, in fact, our species is not even remotely aware of the need to manage such change. You will encounter this perspective as a recurring theme throughout, and it is likely a foregone conclusion, a forlorn reminder, by your time.

I’m a realist, I believe. Not stupidly hopeful that humanity will muddle through this next stage or filter somehow as it always has, despite its ignorance. Our collective languor was only a minor hindrance in the recent past, but that changes quickly as annihilation technologies are democratized.

We don’t get a hall pass on this one. Not this time.

In the relative near-term, I place a high likelihood on the virtual extinction of our species. Indeed, the fact that the sky is devoid of tangible signals from alien life forms, whether dead and gone or still around, is evidence that a final, conclusive Great Filter hides in wait a few clicks ahead for us.

Our species and those from which we descended have certainly passed multiple Great Filters already. RNA and DNA precursors in the primordial ooze. Cells combining symbiotically with other cells to produce mitochondria. Random evolution to multicellular entities. All the way through to fish and dinosaurs and mammals, including this not-so-great ape typing away. My species of ape is doing all it can to evade and ignore an obvious and painful future, though time now runs short.

I find no driving force in humans to ensure we have a strategy to overcome and surpass the looming menace in the next few decades, the most challenging we’ve ever faced. The approaching Great Filter is not associated with chance like the fortunate combination of those two ancient single-celled entities or the six-mile asteroid that wasted the dinosaurs. It is not one of fate or chance, independent from human decisions.

No, the Great Filter just around the next bend will be a direct result of human indifference, denial, rationalization, laziness, short-sightedness, faithlessness, lack of discernment, poor planning. Oh, and my recurring theme as always: fear and entitlement.

Unfortunately, we humans do not and cannot perceive ourselves as just another species on Earth. Another species with a finite lifespan, like the ponderous multitudes of previous earthly inhabitants forever lost in time.

For me, this fact has always been abundantly obvious. We assume we deserve this planet and all its wonders, yet we mismanage those aspects of Earth and our nature that might ensure the longevity of our species. Indeed, species longevity has never been a goal for humans.

As a species, we are bereft of any goals, much less the most important one. Perhaps I first recognized this issue while shaking uncontrollably beneath my third grade desk, the nuclear fallout siren blasting at our ears and scaring everyone in class.

In the 1960s, “Fallout Shelter” signs were posted everywhere in grade school. I was befuddled. Why should I fear the Russians? Why would they want to burn me to a crisp, some eight-year-old, freckle-faced, crew cut kid from Williams, Arizona? Don’t they have kids in third grade just like me? Even if the bomb doesn’t hit our little town directly, will the nuclear fallout poison our water supply from the nearby mountains? What will the radiation do to us? Will we become mutant monsters like the sci-fi movies we watch at the theater?

I’m not sure every kid recognized the weird irony in this, but I did. It made no sense that any person or nation would overtly and actively endeavor to render the Earth unlivable for humans.

How does the existence of aliens relate to this topic? It can’t help but relate. Nuclear annihilation is directly attached to our species. You don’t see orangutans plotting self-destruction, do you? And alien visitors are indelibly linked to humanity as a species on Earth who sport a foolhardy penchant for self-annihilation. Read on to understand.

Are we the only sentient beings in the universe? Will we hear from aliens soon, or are we simply not listening correctly? Does the fact that we’ve found no others as yet either prove or disprove the existence of a Creator? Does that even matter? And closer to home, closer to that which I will impart to you – what have been my experiences regarding aliens? What do I believe, and how much of my belief is influenced by my desire to believe?

By the way, I am recounting most of these experiences in first person. It seems a better way to allow you to jump virtually into my shoes, the sneakers of a kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970s Arizona. Much happened in those decades, so you’ll hopefully experience the situations as my memory serves.

Born in the 1950s, I’m now in my mid-sixties. My long-term memory is quite strong, though I might forget where I placed my keys a minute ago. Such is aging in today’s realm. I assume that wherever and whenever you exist, the problem of aging as an illness has been fully resolved, if not also legalized for use.

Assuming this is so, I imagine your society has come or is coming to terms with the astounding implications of anti-aging alone, much less many other technological advancements. Given today’s state of human intellect and its blindness to long-term species survival, eternal life will be one more amazing technological capability we stumbled into without a plan. Another feat of immediately available science for which humanity is utterly unprepared.

At this time, our technology advances are far outpacing our ethical advances. Beyond myself, I find few others who believe this is true. A recent, especially relevant example is the discovery of CRISPR gene editing technologies.

Yet this remarkable, new tech is not our only immediate risk. Multiple others have appeared in the last few decades including nanotechnology, monitoring tech, social media, and AI.

I contend we have already passed the critical, no-turning back inflection point to self-immolation. Self-obliteration. Technology has rocketed along an accelerated Moore’s Law curve up the vertical axis. Faster, cheaper, easier to create, easier to replicate, and virulently more capable of destroying humanity.

Concurrently, human ethics, decency, and morality slog along in thick, dry sand like a rotting donkey-cart groaning at every wheel turn across the long stretch of a Death Valley summer. Arguably, it’s late morning, the summer sun has yet to reach its zenith, and the cart’s witless human riders just sipped their last drops of water.

We face an intractable problem, an unsolvable dilemma, because we are an undisciplined, willfully ignorant, and short-sighted species. Nature rather blithely handles such evolutionary mistakes by eliminating them, assuming they don’t eliminate themselves first.

As much as it pains me to consider our situation, I have no doubt that humanity is drifting aimlessly toward the entropic, gravitational tug of the next Great Filter, implying a disastrous near-term future.

This future is one enabled by annihilation tech that doesn’t appear as if it is capable of harming anything right now. I only hope you are present in that future century to understand the dynamics of this time I inhabit as we descend further into the thickening fog of this next filter. But before plunging into our idiocy and laziness, let’s finally get around to aliens.

***

Imagine 1963. Better yet, go back and see what was on video at the time. Movies on black and white televisions replete with stories of alien visitors, giant ants, and supernatural humans from nuclear explosions.

Coupled with what I watched on the tube, I was reminded on every clear night about the sheer vastness of space. Williams was no different than any other mid-sixties small town, but it had one stunning aspect that most did not – a magnificent blanket of nighttime stars and clear views of the Milky Way.

“Mom,” I requested as she turned the chrome handle of her meat grinder to combine the meat and cereal for her weekly, disgusting hash concoction that was only edible when doused with ketchup, “can we sleep in the backyard tonight?”

She craned her neck to acknowledge me and grinned. Her ruby lipstick was smudged from wiping her face while cooking dinner in the overheated Williams summer.

“You kids are going to get electrocuted, you know that!” Dahlia yelled. “Didn’t you see the bolt emerge from the sink a few moments ago when the lightning struck outside in the street? I thought I was going to die right there, and I well could have. For God’s sake, Denise, don’t let them go out on an evening like this!”

Dahlia lived across the street with Joe, her car salesman husband, and their son Curtis, my buddy. Marilyn Monroe was a big star at the time, and Dahlia was a voluptuous, dark-haired version of her. With waves of hair folded atop her head, false eyelashes, and a penchant to be the focus of attention, she was abrupt, boisterous, and sneezed loud enough to blow the roof off the house. My mom, who tended to keep to herself, was the polar opposite – except when Dahlia was around.

Alcohol and smoking were their vices du jour, their constant companions. Indeed, these were nationally accepted, ubiquitously performed adult indulgences. As is common even today, people visit friends in some part, even in large part, as a rationale to drink heavily, eat heartily, share opinions and stories, and laugh.

Nothing wrong with that. It’s just that in the sixties, drinking copious amounts of hard liquor was a regular event. Cigarette smoking was not only common, but people often thought ill of you if you chose not to partake. Inherent threads of the social fabric of those times.

In addition to these vices, adult pill popping was just as common – mostly uppers, downers, and sleeping pills. This color. That color. Scientific evidence had not yet emerged on the long-term effects of these drugs, and the media at the time had good reason to avoid any negative exposure since the various adult vices were large advertising contributors.

“Let’s see if these clouds clear and the lawn dries out,” my mom replied. “You know how these things pass quickly, Dahlia. I won’t let them sleep outside unless the skies are sparkling.”

Starry Williams. The famous astronomer Percival Lowell placed his observatory in the slightly larger town of Flagstaff some thirty miles to the east, due to the elevation and generally clear nights in Northern Arizona. While staring upward at the sparkling wonderland above, we’d scream out at every odd movement in the sky – and there were many odd movements.

Unlike the skies today, satellites and space debris were relatively uncommon, so if you saw a light moving erratically or in a straight line across the night sky, our elementary school minds would easily conflate every sighting with a flying saucer or hostile alien. To add to the credibility, the town newspaper regularly reported on sightings that quoted individuals we knew by name, with graphic descriptions of unexplained lights in the sky.

My father was an auto dealer, a nice name for ‘car lot salesman and owner.’ He had a small dealership and sold mostly used autos and farm equipment. Working six days a week, Dad was almost always away from home. This left five rowdy and rambunctious kids to my poor mother.

Like other moms at the time, many with three or more children and fathers who were away much of the day at work, the most rational approach for managing their kids was to relinquish us to the risks and rewards of the generally kid-managed, unsupervised, fun, and often dangerous neighborhood and surrounds.

This ‘get them out of the house’ strategy worked fairly well. It was the days before any widespread birth control pills, leaving moms overloaded with many unplanned children.

And the houses lacked modern conveniences that might give them time to manage their own. Some women were still washing clothes by hand or with a washboard and wringer. Dryers were high-end items, so sheets regularly flailed in the wind on the clothesline, even in winter.

Refrigerators were terminally small, and freezers had enough space for a few pounds of hamburger. Electric dishwashers and microwaves were nonexistent. When fathers finally got home, they were too tired or annoyed to interact with rambunctious children, letting the mother shoulder the tremendous burden of child rearing throughout the entire day.

The town was a heavy mix of World War II veterans, Catholics, and Mormons. Large families were an expected part of life, reinforced in the media, and we had a reign of freedom that few children in America have today.

In summer, kids were found everywhere in the neighborhood except at mealtimes. The very accessible national forest, replete with innumerable discoveries, was literally yards away. Ponderosa pines dropped needles that inhibited competition from undergrowth bush, making the forest accessibly ours. And when we tired of the forest, downtown was only a few miles away via bicycle.

Life was generally good for us kids, though it could sometimes get very bad, very quickly.

We slept outside many summer nights. Lacking affordable telescopes, we used high-powered hunting or wartime binoculars to scan the skies, stare at the moon’s craters, and spot occasional moving objects. And we loved to scare each other with horror stories.

Vampire bats that came in the middle of the night, cutting through cotton sleeping bags with sharp teeth, slicing imperceptibly into big toes, and taking turns as they bled the body dry. Ghosts of Native Americans whose land we now lived and slept on, their centuries-old pottery shards strewn about the small streams just yards away.

“C’mon kids,” Dad commanded one evening, his husky voice calling us to attention. “We’re driving out to see the UFOs.”

Lord’s Ranch, a few miles north of town, had become a local hangout for watching strange lights during the summer of ‘63. Dad knew the Lord family well, given connections with many of the town’s leading businessmen and ranchers through his dealership.

My little sister and I were donned in our usual summer clothing – shorts, t-shirts, and no shoes. It’s not that we lacked shoes but only that our tennis shoes were typically nonfunctional given shredded, unhelpful laces or detached soles. So we went barefoot everywhere in the neighborhood, with the exception of the forest. Weekly bee stings were the price paid for romping on clover-infested bluegrass lawns.

This night, however, my dad was not about to be delayed by a lack of kids’ shoes. He grew up in East Los Angeles. On his mother’s side, he was the son of a son of a son and so on, back to the first mulatto mayor of Los Angeles in the late 1700’s and land-grant owner of a large chunk of the dry, sparsely populated San Fernando Valley.

On his father’s side, he was the poor great, great-nephew of one of Los Angeles’ wealthiest landowners. Not that he ever saw a penny of it, as money, possessions, land, wealth, and power are fleeting things when not managed carefully through generations. We descendants sure as hell were not heirs to the tremendous wealth that occupies that same ground today.

“Can’t find your shoes?” he groaned, shaking his head at my sister and me. “Hop in the back anyway and let’s get going. These saucers come out just after sunset, which means we’re late already.”

We piled into the bed of his pickup and headed north on the old road toward Lord’s Ranch. As we jostled up and down on the bumpy two lane, wind whipping our hair, nothing of the spectacular scenery was new to us. It was just a part of our lives and places to explore in future days. Another dark road lined with graffiti-damaged aspen. A stream we hadn’t yet traversed in bare feet. Some mysterious metallic glint in the forest that required inspection.

Our relationship with the forest was akin to the joke about the fish being asked – ‘how do you like the water?’ We were the forest and the forest was us. Nothing could uncouple us from each other. The smell of the pines permeated our earliest existence with every breath. The wind in the pines was our elevator music. We knew each tree by its height, branch strength, and climbability.

After a few miles, Dad swerved onto a dusty dirt road, almost jettisoning my sister and me from the truck bed. Lord’s Ranch was a mile off-road, and we were well-experienced by that time to know enough to hang on tightly to the rusty edge of the pickup. We knew of instances where somebody stood up in a truck bed at an inopportune time and was flipped overboard onto the hard ground while bouncing slowly to a painful rest, akin to being bucked from a galloping horse.

The Lord’s ranch house was a quaint two-story, sewn from forest logs. As we drew closer, I carefully half-stood up in the bed and saw Mr. Lord and two dogs bounding out the door.

“George!” Mr. Lord yelled. “Good to see you and your family here.”

Mr. Lord appeared well-versed in his reaction, as he should have been. Multiple reporters and curiosity seekers had visited his ranch in the previous few months, and all the town locals knew of the mysterious sightings.

“Uh oh; they’re bare-footed,” Mr. Lord warned as he gazed into the back. “We’ll need to pick up the little ones, George. Too much broken glass on the barn stairs.”

He grabbed me around the waist and my mom snatched my little sister in her arms. I recall it being an uncomfortable jaunt up the stairs as he held me like a sack of beans, placing enormous stress on my ribcage. But I was awfully glad he carried me since the barn stairs to the rooftop were littered with glass shards.

And I was keenly aware of the pain involved in a single misstep on glass. The previous month, I had severely impaled my right foot while playing in the street, which in those days was our primary playground. When I got home, arms flailing and lungs screaming, the large glass triangle remained embedded in my foot.

My mom, ever the makeshift nurse for childhood accidents, quickly found the shard amid the torn flesh. With one quick flick of her wrist, she dislodged the beast and placed it on the table next to me. Blood was squirting profusely from the one-inch wide, half-inch deep hole.

Call a doctor to stitch it up? What? Not on your life. That would cost money, and her experience informed her it might heal by itself at some point.

After making the assessment to avoid the professionals and the expense, she wrapped my foot tightly using gauze from a twenty-year-old World War II medical kit, circling multiple times, round and round my bleeding foot. The sheer pressure from her dressings was enough to discourage additional blood cells from ever attempting the journey outside.

“Don’t you dare walk on my carpet with that,” she warned, half angry, half-joking, “or we’ll both be cleaning up the blood stains.”

After a few days of hopping around on one foot, the bleeding and throbbing pain finally subsided and the injury scabbed over within a few weeks. Despite lingering heel pain that lasted another four years, that day elevated my kidhood status and made me a neighborhood macho celebrity of sorts.

“Wow, there’s your bloody footprint,” my friends would say as we’d play in the streets. I’d beam with pride, knowing the entire traumatic event was well worth the suffering.

That night at Lord’s Ranch, my sister and I shared a ratty aluminum folding chair placed there for UFO gazers, among other random chairs. It was the kind with shredded green and white crisscrossed plastic slats that always itched on bare, sweaty skin. Despite jostling and wrestling for position with my little sister, it was at least a temporary but comfortable place for us to sit with feet up and off the glass-strewn, flat rooftop of the barn,

The view was resplendent with the typical Northern Arizona night sky. Out on that dark ranch, the Milky Way was even more beautiful than in town. And because the ranch sat on a rise above the meadow’s tree line, you could peer westward unobscured for many miles.

We waited anxiously for a few minutes as the evening sky grew darker. My father was engaged in active conversation with Mr. Lord while my mom sat nervously awaiting for the big event, knowing she left a few kids unattended back home. Her mind was no doubt burdened by the usual chores – dishes, laundry, and baths she had yet to oversee before her night concluded.

“There you go. There’s one on the horizon!” Mr. Lord exclaimed, pointing in the distance.

We strained our eyes, peering directly westward where the sunlight had all but faded.

“That’s it?” Dad queried with subdued enthusiasm. “That red, blinking light?”

“Yes, isn’t it great?” Mr. Lord replied unquestioningly. “Just wait and see what it does.”

The light was roughly ten miles off in the distance, and once it appeared, we held to radio silence as if the object deserved an element of religious reverence for what the unearthly vision might mean to humanity. To me, it appeared no different than the blinking red and white radio towers on the hillsides.

Radio tower lights didn’t typically move, however, and this one did. In a few minutes, it slowly rose up a thousand feet, stopping momentarily to cut a perfect right angle turn to the left. As if drawing a square in the sky, the light stopped again after a thousand foot horizontal trip, then descended to the ground and out of sight.

We stared at each other. Mom and Dad were no doubt trying to reconcile if this was a human activity that someone was engaged in off in the distance, like a helicopter with a pilot in training doing night maneuvers, or an extraterrestrial mystery. Whispering started.

“Shhh!” Mr. Lord demanded. “It’s not over.”

In silence, we waited another minute until the object made the exact same sequence of moves at the same speed, only in reverse.

Mr. Lord beamed proudly as it dropped below the horizon. “That’s probably all we’ll see tonight, so I believe the show is over.”

My dad was somewhat miffed. “Don’t you think that’s a helicopter?”

“Not likely,” Mr. Lord replied. “This has been a nightly occurrence for months now, as we discussed earlier. We’ve contacted everyone who would know, from the private and public airstrips to Army to police to weather forecasters. You name it. Nobody can confirm this is anything like a normal helicopter or other piloted ship. We’ve had to conclude it’s not of this world.”

I stared at my dad’s face of incredulity. He’d been through a lot in his thirty-plus years. Growing up poor, seeing action in the war, scraping his way to a modicum of success in a small town business. Wheeling and dealing. Working over and under more cars than he’d care to remember.

He shook his head, not fully convinced. “Look, I’ve got my four-wheel drive back at the house. Let’s head out there after taking the kids back. This thing can’t be that far away, and the Scout can easily work the back roads.” As a local dealer of this first SUV, he was known to invariably brag about the vehicle.

Mr. Ford put out his hand, withered and wrinkled from working years on his ranch. “Done that,” he advised. “Traversed lots of Forest Service roads in Jeeps and even the most impassible fire break paths. It’s very remote out there. Lots of small hills. No place for a helicopter or any other craft to land. We suspect the saucers are going underground after they do their nightly maneuvers.”

“Humph,” Dad shrugged. Given that Mr. Lord was a good friend and customer, he was forced to give him the benefit of the doubt, though mentioning ‘Jeep’ as a proxy for every four-wheel drive vehicle was not to his liking. “Okay, kids. Now you can tell your friends you got to see a flying saucer at Lord’s Ranch. His ranch is famous for this. It’s been in the national news and on television.”

My mother was utterly bored at the entire goings-on. When kid management is your primary concern, you become very pragmatic.

“George,” she interjected, “we should let Mr. Lord get back to his house and wife. Besides, I’ve got to get these kids ready for bed. And the laundry.”

Dad nodded begrudgingly. He wanted to see it again, as if another round trip in the sky might confirm his suspicions. “Okay. Let’s get going,” he conceded.

My father died not long after that, so I’ll never know what he was thinking at the time. He was a World War II Army Air Corps radioman in the North Pacific and spent a lot of time in the air. I must assume he was as interested as I was, but also skeptical. What are these lights? How do they move? Are they government-created? Why Northern Arizona? Something to do with the above-ground nuclear testing a few hundred miles away in the Nevada desert? Such questions were never resolved.