“This one time…” by Nelson Boles

Congrats to Obama for securing the democratic nomination. This afternoon, I visited the Obama site and saw they updated with a graphic, proudly announcing that Barack Obama accepts the democratic nomination.

But the first thing I noticed on this page was how odd the photo looks. Compare this photo with other images of Barack Obama. Hmm…

On November 5, 1975, near Snowflake, Arizona, logger Travis Walton disappears mysteriously during an encounter with a flying saucer. Authorities treat with skepticism the outrageous story related by the only witnesses to the alleged event, including Walton’s co-workers and his best friend and future brother-in-law, Mike Rogers. They are suspected of foul play despite no apparent motive or knowledge as to Walton’s whereabouts.

A state lawman finds a tabloid newspaper in the crew’s pickup truck and quickly concludes that tensions had arisen between Walton and surly co-worker Allan Dallis, leading the lawman to conclude that a murder cover-up is under way. However, all of the suspects pass lie-detector tests and the case becomes stalled. Five days later, and just as mysteriously as he disappeared, Walton reappears, claiming to have been abducted by extraterrestrials and taken aboard a UFO. [link]

While the film is based on Walton’s book detailing his experience, the abduction scenes in the movie are the most memorable and the least consistent with Watson’s account of what happened to him. The image of Walton restrained on the alien operating table with a needle-like instrument piercing his eye, isn’t in Walton’s less terrifying and less dramatic account. Instead, he describes how there were two types of aliens, shorter ones with “huge luminous brown eyes” that seemed afraid of him and human-like ones that didn’t speak:

I stood frozen to the spot. He was a man about six feet two inches tall. His helmeted head barely cleared the doorway. He was extremely muscular and evenly proportioned. He appeared to weigh about two hundred pounds. He wore a tight-fitting bright blue suit of soft material like velour. His feet were covered with black boots, a black band or belt wrapped around his middle. He carried no tools or weapons on his belt or in his hands; no insignia marked his clothing.

I ran up to him, exclaiming, babbling all sorts of questions. The man remained silent throughout my verbal barrage. I was worried by his silence. He took me firmly but gently by the arm and gestured for me to go with him. [link]

The screenplay writer acknowldedged that the abduction scene was dramaticized at the request of the movie’s producers. It’s not surprising that the violent abduction and alien sequences in the movie received critical acclaim or that for the next ten years, the X-files played off of these kind of terror-inducing images of aliens. But if you believe Walton’s account, the supporting testimony of the men that were with him, and the consistency of their story over the past 30+ years, something very different and much more interesting happened that night to Travis Walton.

I saw this picture of an octopus from the recent discovery of almost 100 unknown species of deep sea creatures near Antarctica. The octopus, arranged symmetrically for added emphasis, instantly felt out of place not attached to a face. Concentrate on the head and eyes. Have you noticed how similar octopuses and aliens appear?

I’ve always known that octopuses are intelligent, but until looking at this specific picture, the anecdotal pieces never connected so clearly:

1. octopuses can change colors so convincingly, it doesn’t even make sense with slow motion playback,
2. they can kill sharks,
3. in labs they’ve been rumored to leave their tank at night, walk across the room, eat crabs/fish from another tank, and walk back to their own tank before they are discovered,
4. “When under attack, some octopuses can detach their own limbs, in a similar manner to the way skinks and other lizards detach their tails.”
5. they shoot ink,
6. they have no internal skeleton and can fit through a 1-inch hole
7. they are extremely smart and have sunction cups on their tentacles,
8. they have tentacles,

Not all of these characteristics or abilities are commonly associated with aliens, but they are all very strange when you think about them carefully, and even stranger in aggregate in one animal. There is a lot we don’t know about aliens and a lot to learn about the other forms of life in the oceans here on Earth.