I would like, if I may, to start today's pointless, rambling update by quoting a passage from one of my favorite books. Its relevance to my current ramble should, I hope, become clear forthwith.

Unfortunately, I got stuck on the Earth for rather longer than I intended," said Ford. "I came for a week and got stuck for fifteen years."
"But how did you get there in the first place then?"
"Easy. I got a lift with a teaser."
"A teaser?"
"Yeah."
"Er, what is..."
"A teaser? Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven't made interstellar contact yet and buzz them."
"Buzz them?" Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him.
"Yeah," said Ford, "they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul who nobody's ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennae on their head and making beep beep noises. Rather childish really." Ford leaned back on the mattress with his hands behind his head and looked infuriatingly pleased with himself.

From The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.

This evening found me reading - well, re-reading - a passage in another book and, courtesy of a disquisition on 'UFO' sightings, thinking along these lines:

If there truly is, as UFOlogists claim, intelligent life in space, and it truly is trying to make contact with the Human race, then why the Hell is it going about it in such a phenomenally silly way?

Think about it. According to the UFOlogists, we on Earth are living in a state of siege. We are constantly being monitored - and, in some cases, prodded and, yes, probed - by highly intelligent bug-eyed beings from another planet, apparently because they are trying to 'make contact' with the human race. However, for some reason known only to their huge-headed selves, they have decided that the best way to go about this is to appear in front of and-stroke-or abduct, as Douglas Adams puts it, 'poor unsuspecting souls who nobody's ever going to believe'. Usually from their bedrooms or from broken-down cars in the middle of Utah, Arizona or Texas.

(Obligatory Liberal Moment: why this alien obsession with Utah? Or at least with the First World? There's a whole planet out there: would little green men really be that discriminating? If the aliens really are coming, why do they never seem to abduct people from equatorial Africa? Or is it because people in equatorial Africa have mostly never seen Independence Day, Taken or The X-Files and have far more pressing things to think about than aliens? Worrying about OMG ALIENS is largely a Western preoccupation and could be said to stem from the lack of anything more serious to worry about...)

And what do they do when they finally get in touch with a human? They abduct them, stick a probe up their back passage, then let them go again.

So, we're supposed to believe that a supposedly hyper-intelligent alien race is traversing huge distances at (we must imagine) huge expense to make contact with a race who must, to them, seem no more intelligent than the average domestic cat, for the sake of conducting colonoscopies on them. Speaking as someone who has Been There and Seen That, there are only so many colonoscopies you can witness before you start to get just a teensy bit bored. Trust me on this: the human digestive tract is not that fascinating.

Does this strike anyone else as the behavior of a highly intelligent, advanced species? Maybe I'm just too dumb to get it, but if being hyperintelligent means thinking that traversing huge distances at huge cost to conduct a procedure that could be replicated by any Earth endoscopy unit is the Idea of the Century, I'm quite happy to stay dumb.

As for hybrid children - well, just what is the point of that? Wouldn't it be like, in Earth terms, having sex with your cat, either to see what came out or in the hope of creating something very like this? (Or this, or this, or this.)

The idea that humans should be able to breed with Gray Aliens - honestly, have you seen these things? Do they even have groins? - and produce viable offspring would be so laughable it was utterly ridiculous, if it wasn't for the fact that it's taken so deadly seriously by so many people. Google 'hybrid children' - there's screeds of this stuff. Take the Starchild Project for example (debunked here). I remember coming across this page several months back, and being disturbed that they seriously think it's good methodology to compare the skull of an abnormal infant - the so-called 'Starchild' - with a normal adult, instead of comparing like with like.

Douglas Adams's 'teaser' hypothesis, tho' made in jest, is looking more and more likely by the minute. I'm beginning to suspect that 'the Grays' are the stoner frat boys of the universe, given their apparent obsession with butts and sex...

Do aliens really have nothing better to do with their time than this?

We're also supposed to believe that said highly intelligent race, though they are trying to make contact with mankind, haven't got the sense to realize that landing in the middle of Times Square in the middle of the day would be a lot more sensible than constantly buzzing the US deserts at midnight, on the offchance that some poor idiot is going to be tooling along the roads in a pick-up truck. Nor have they got the sense to bother showing themselves to anyone who might have a mollusc's chance in Hell, to borrow another Adams-ism, of being taken seriously.

Either the little green men (or little gray men, depending on who you talk to) have one Hell of a sense of humor, or we're dealing with, to borrow a phrase, a race of highly techological morons here.

And, if you take nothing else away from this rant, take this: The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one of the most awesome books I have ever read, and if there is anyone out there who has, by some mischance, not read it, I urge you to correct this as soon as is humanly possible.