Doctor Who_ The Dying Days - Lance Parkin [55]
But everyone could see that for themselves. This wasn't a model, a computer graphic or any other kind of special effect. It wasn't a hoax, a mass hallucination, a scare story, a dream, a practical joke, a fossilised polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon or a science fiction drama.
It was an alien spacecraft, coming to rest ten feet above Nelson's Column.
53
C
hapter Seven
Work, Rest and Play
By eight o'clock in the evening, British Summer Time, on Tuesday, May 6th 1997, everyone in the world knew that there was an alien spacecraft hovering over London.
Back in the late sixties the United Nations had agreed what would happen if mankind encountered alien lifeforms.
The experts agreed that the "First Contact", as they called it, would be a faint radio signal from deep space. It followed that the First Contact would almost certainly be with a radio telescope facility somewhere in the world, or perhaps a military listening station. The alien radio signal might be many hundreds of years old: radio waves travel ed at the speed of light, and so even those from the nearest star would be over four years old. That meant that the human race would have time to carefully compose its response - this wouldn't be a conversation with aliens, more like an exchange of letters.
So it was agreed: the staff of the radio telescope that picked up the message would pass it on to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. A team of experts would translate the message (any aliens trying to contact us would have considered the language barrier, and would keep the message straightforward - using basic mathematical or geometric concepts, perhaps, or a series of simple pictures). This translation would then be made completely public. The world would decide what response to send, and the world would send only one reply, leaving aside all cultural, political and economic differences.
Few of the people drawing up the First Contact Protocol thought that it would work like that in practice, and when the time came it didn't. For many centuries there was some debate about exactly when "First Contact" between mankind and aliens took place. The Martian Invasion of 1997, of course, was always cited as the definitive moment, but it had become clear years before then that the major governments had positive proof of the existence of extraterrestrial life. Aliens had visited mankind for thousands of years, leaving their trails across the archaeological strata and their subtle influence on human development. Visitors from other worlds were worshipped as gods or hunted down as monsters through the centuries.
In the late twentieth century, as the human race began to venture out into space, they had reached a level of scientific understanding that allowed them to interpret the old legends and superstitions. They also now possessed a level of technology that allowed aircraft and radar to sweep the skies for unidentified flying objects. Alien spacecraft and other artefacts began to arrive on Earth with alarming regularity.
The year that the United Nations drew up the First Contact Protocols, the governments of half a dozen of its member states were already concealing the existence of aliens from their citizens and from each other. The UN
realised that such insularity was dangerous, and that if one country were to acquire alien weapons or other technology, then this would destabilise the carefully balanced world order. During Waldheim's term as secretary-general, restricting access to alien science became just as much a priority as preventing the proliferation of nuclear technology. A policy decision was made at the very highest levels of government that the public should not