The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [3]
--Henry Vaughan,
16th Century metaphysical poet
FORWARD
UFOs And Sunday School
(an essay of sorts by Maxwell J. Polito, world renowned UFO researcher and Occultist, originally handwritten after this novel was conceived, as an afterthought)
It was not supposed to happen this way, not any of it. And most certainly not to me. Yet I’m a part of it, immersed in it, quite like an actor immersed so intensely within a role that to him reality is reduced to an indistinguishable blur.
I have never exactly thought of myself as an actor, but at this moment I would surrender everything to distinguish the role I am forced to play from the man I truly am. If my circumstances dictate the role, then perhaps by playing it out I will find that man. This notion provides me with a subtle comfort, though my limited choice in the matter is evident even in the very nature of my writing these words.
So how, might you inquire, were things supposed to have happened, and, what tale have I to tell in contrast?
Firstly, for all of us, things went this way:
We were no more than a few decades into the twentieth century when the subject of Unidentified Flying Objects reached the attentive and ever-gullible ears of our society. The vanity and excessive ignorance of the notion that we were alone in the universe gave way to the restless ideology that there must be something more, something out there, something physical and independent from our otherwise spiritual concepts of God. The “science” of contemporary UFOlogy became the inevitable result of scientists, truth-seekers, and those obsessively curious trying to find a way to explain the outrageously downright unexplainable....
....such as, for example, supersonic saucers soaring quite rudely into USAF air space, time and again without so much as a knock on the door of our atmosphere before entering. Bodies of bulbous-eyed embryonic humanoids were recovered in Roswell, famously, though evidence of the wreckage of their craft suggests the incident was nothing more than a top secret kite the government was flying one day made of aluminum foil and balsa wood. I went on a picnic where once I flew a kite, and when the wind sent it crashing down and I recovered it, there were no alien bodies littering my surroundings, as far as I could tell. Way before any of this, Orson Welles broadcasts a War of the Worlds which caught those of us who didn’t know any better on a bad night, when even the Nazis seemed like bags of posed plastic soldiers compared to those invading Martian bastards. Sightings and reports eventually flourished in such whimsical diversities that, perhaps, the U.S. Air Force would have found things much simpler had they hired an illustrator for their Project Blue Book files, secured national syndication rights, and had themselves a lucrative Sunday comic the whole family could enjoy.
We cultivated these phenomena even through real wars, which in comparison proved to be frightening jolts into tangible reality, and it was from these wars and recurring pressures that we sought escape in UFOs. While our kids spent bedtime hours holding flashlights to Amazing Stories beneath tented bedcovers, we spent daytime hours watching The Day the Earth Stood Still and wondering privately about what we would do if what we saw came true.
Since then, the mythology surrounding E.T.s has become far more defined, as the human race advances within civilized society, boldly and often blindly leaping into new frontiers of awareness and knowledge, the phenomenon advances with us. Space aliens are no longer simply from Mars or Venus, as the limits of our imaginations once dictated. To some, they are hailed as saviors from a distant galaxy. Others believe they’ve emerged from black holes or time warps to mutilate our cattle or to sketch witty, circular doodles in wheat fields.
But even as our little green men mutated into seemingly less hostile, greyish, often coverall-clad beings (as in Whitley Strieber’s accounts and so many others all across the globe, from Budd Hopkins’ research to the Hill