Extra-terrestial Contact

Where there is a light there is life

"It's time. It's time to tell them how it is."

"Yes sir, I'm doing it now," I said to the elder as I set to work.

"Make sure you tell them everything. They have to know."

"Yes sir, I agree. I'm on it."

"Right then, I'll leave it in your capable hands. Use your imagination Marcus."

And with that, the elder calmly turned and silently ghosted out of the small back room that served as a makeshift office. I sat back in my recliner, put my hands together and rested them across my chest. I sat a short while thinking, where do I even begin?

My father used to tell me things that made me laugh. Things like " Never trust a fart." And he had a slight Irish accent and intonation which intrigued me. When he counted to three he would pronounce "One, two, tree...." His mispronunciation of the number three was amusing and embarrassing at one and the same time.

He also used to tell me very wise things too, a lot of which, due to my youth and innocence, was lost on me at the time. Like all kids, I thought he knew very little of the world, very little of my world. I now realise, in some respects a little too late in life, that my father knew things that even now I can only imagine.

My father had his youth stolen from him by the events of WWII. He spent four years in a prisoner of war camp in Poland. He saw the horrors of armed conflict and lost friends and family in the process. He was captured and held in a camp where grown men, some mortally injured, starved to death. Who knows what something like that does to a man? I have sometimes asked myself the question, how does a man survive an experience like that?

One day my father said something very interesting to me when I was trying to resolve a difficult problem. "Use your imagination son." It took me a long time to figure out what he was trying to tell me. I do believe my father survived those atrocities by using his imagination, by imagining a life beyond those grim huts surrounded by ominous smoking chimneys, barbed wire fencing and armed guards.

Many years later I came across the Schrodinger's cat theory, a theory that tried to explain how a cat can be both dead and alive at one and the same time. In fact, this is nothing more than a thought experiment and very far removed from the reality of the lives that we live, or is it?

My father's words, “Never trust a fart.” come back to me; "Never trust a Schrodinger cat in a box with a piece of radioactive material." And should the cat in the box emit a resounding fart we may have to ask ourselves, "Is it a fart or a poop, or indeed is it both at one and the same time?" I suppose if I was that cat and I knew about that radioactive material and what was about to happen, yes, I would be shitting myself AND farting resoundingly for all to hear outside of that bloody box.

Cat and sealed box apart, I could entertain you with a very simple demonstration of the quantum belief that it is possible for something, or somebody, to be in a duality of existence at one and the same time, with little more than a torchlight and a window.

When it gets dark in your living room, go to the window and turn on the torch. Point the torch at the window at a forty-five-degree angle. You will see that the light emitted by the torch passes through the glass and shines on the ground outside. At the same time, the light is also being reflected back into the living room. That is a kind of quantum physics in action demo. However, this is not my preferred scenario. Neither is my fathers' mis-pronunciation of the word three adequate, though it is close.

In this ambiguous paternal rendering of language, the three becomes both a numeral and an organic artefact, a tree as we call it. However, inadequate as it may be for some folk, it does demonstrate that via linguistic ambiguity, it is possible for something to be two different things at one and the same time. A three and a tree, a fart and a poop. And still, my father's eloquent and wise words echo through the ages and guide me on my journey through life.

"Use your imagination, son."

My imagination is the portal to other worlds. These multifarious worlds are where I often find the answers to difficult problems. And through this process, I have discovered a duality of being. I can be in two, or more, than once place at a time.

The mobile phone pings to alert me that I have a message. It is my lovely wife asking how I am. She has to live with the thought, at least for the moment, that I could be dead or alive. I am Schrodinger's cat in a box. But from my perspective, I am very much both dead and alive at one and the same time. I am alive to the world of trying to explain something to you about a very complex situation and preoccupied with that as I am, I am dead to the rest of the material world that I am surrounded by.

Yet another example, quite a hilarious one as it happens, that there is a potential duality of existence can be seen in the Monty Python comedy programme.

In the dead parrot sketch, John Cleese goes back to a pet shop where he earlier bought a parrot. Cleese contends that the parrot is dead. The pet shop owner equally contends that the parrot is in fact merely sleeping. This is a surrealistic, groundbreaking example of Schrodinger's thought experiment about the cat in the box.

"Use your imagination, son."

I enter worlds of semi-make believe, semi-fixed in this world that we call our reality of existence, the material world. I am somewhat blessed to be able to enter altered states pretty much at will. In this respect, I am either blessed or cursed. For the worlds that I enter can go either way, a nightmare or a dream.

The elder lightly tapped my door and ghosted back into my room. " How is it going? Are you making any progress?" he sagely enquired.

"Yes sir, I have made a good start and now I am about to move on," I replied.

"Excellent. May I be so bold as to ask you the title of the piece?"

"Yes indeed sir, you may. It's called 'Where There is a Light,' I think it's a good title, don't you agree?"

"Indeed, it is. I'll leave you to it then. Don't tarry Marcus."

Once again the elder ghosted back out of the store-room. And now I have to move on with my original plan, as per the polite request of the elder.

Where There is a Light.

Sometimes late at night, not too long after my wife has fallen asleep, I get up and go to the patio window. I have been doing this for quite some time now, ever since I first caught sight of what I simply call the light.

When I first saw the light I thought I was imagining it. However, one night I decided to go out and explore this phenomenon to see at first hand what was going on. I slipped on a pair of chinos, a light T-shirt and a pair of loafers and I crept over to the sliding patio door. As I passed through the door, I stopped on the paved pathway that ran across the border of the garden, the length of the full width patio door. I gave a quick look back at my wife to make sure I hadn't disturbed her and in so doing I was truly shocked by what I saw. There, lying beside my wife, was my very own body!

I stood paralysed by the realisation that I was in two places at one and the same time. How on earth could that happen, how could it be? How could I be both inside the room and yet outside on that path simultaneously?

I momentarily dropped my head and got yet another shock. I was bathed in some sort of soft luminous light. The source of the light seemed to be inside my body. And as I lifted my head, I noticed yet another thing. I had no reflection in the windowpane.

I stood there in my chinos and T-shirt, wracking my brains. Suddenly, for some reason, I remembered something a little out of the ordinary from the about the same time that the light began to appear.

I had told my wife that I wanted to go into town a little while and mooch around doing some window shopping. It was a small town centre, little more than a single street overpopulated with fashionable coffee bars, charity shops and a new bric-a-brac shop.

The bric-a-brac shop was what caught my attention. I just love rummaging around in those type of shops which are usually full to bursting with serendipitous surprises.

This particular shop was called Roadside Johnnies which, even just from the window, showed great potential for me getting lost for an hour as I buried myself deep in all manner of paraphernalia.

I went in and was surprised to find that I was the only customer in the shop. And what's more, it seemed like I was the only person in the shop! That was fine by me since I assumed that such was the mess of antiquities the owner would know nobody in their right mind would want to steal anything. The owner could rest in peace, safe in the knowledge that upon his or her return not a single item would be missing.

I fumbled through all manner of boxes of old train sets, mini-disc cameras and dozens of LP records from the fifties and sixties. After about fifteen minutes I heard the old-style doorbell chime to signal that somebody was coming in behind me.

"Hello, can I help you?" crackled an old male voice. "Please feel free to browse, I'm sure you will find something to capture and enrapture your attention."

"Oh, err, well thank you, sir. To be honest, something already has caught my eye."

"Excellent sir. And what might that be, if I may ask?" the voice said in a well educated and charmingly polite tone."

"Well, you have an old basket in the window......"

"Yes?"

"Well, what caught my eye was a little pinky as I call it, the pinkish, purple multi-faceted hexagonal crystal rock, or ball of sorts."

"Ahhhh, yes, I thought that would catch somebodies eye before too long. It is ever so pretty, is it not?"

"Could you tell me how much it is, please?" I replied.

"Well to be honest sir, it is not for sale, I'm sorry." the voice said apologetically.

"Oh, I see, already spoken for, not a problem, I'll mooch around a little more, if it's all the same to you, see if anything else catches my eye," I said.

"Not at all sir, you see the thing is, nothing in this shop is for sale. It is in fact all free, on the one condition that I like the person and that that person is genuinely interested in acquiring such objects of beauty for his own pleasure, not to sell on and make a profit. Please take my hand."

And with that, his right arm came up and he proffered his veiny, leathery, wrinkled old hand. Being a stickler for politeness, I took his hand in an instant.

Despite very clear signs that this was a man of some great age, the old man had a grip of steel. He squeezed my much younger hand as if he could squeeze it to pieces if he chose.

The old man held on to my hand tight. I felt a gentle surge of energy pass from him to me. I was entranced. I felt like he was rummaging through my mind as comprehensively as I had rummaged through his shop antiquities.

"I can feel you are indeed a very good man sir. Your father too I detect. He was a brave man, a soldier of great misfortune I would say. And quite the comic when he wanted to be. He was an astute man of great imagination."

Suddenly he relaxed his grip on my hand and, as he did so, I felt a nervous tremble or tingle pass all the way from my temple down my neck, shoulder, arm and hand, all the way to my fingertips. I found it quite weird how he seemed to know a bit about my father. Was he a mind reader or something, I thought.

"Please, take the crystal, it is yours, you are a worthy soul to possess a thing of such beauty."

And with that, the old man let go of my hand and deftly reached across to the basket in the window to gently clasp the crystal and hand it to me.

"Can you tell me anything about it? What exactly it is, where it came from, that sort of thing?"

"All I can tell you, sir, is that it is made from something not of this planet. I came by it via somewhat extraneous circumstances, shall we say. Perchance it arrived here care of some rogue meteorite which was visited upon us some millennium ago. Will that be it, sir?"

It was clear the old man wanted to bring the exchange to a finish as he stepped aside to let me pass.

I went straight home and thought no more of this rather strange meeting, putting it down to mere old age eccentricity. As for the crystal, I simply placed it on our bedside table next to my alarm clock. My lovely wife paid little mind to it, except when she wanted to move the dust around on the top.

I stood outside our bedroom window, all aglow with a soft light. I turned my head to the left, to my bedside table. There was the crystal hexagonal ball. I wondered if that had anything to do with my present condition. After a few moments, I snapped back into the present. I turned to look over my shoulder to see the light still illuminating the tree-tops and the night sky. It was time to go and investigate a little. However, at the last second I decided to go back into our bedroom to retrieve the crystal ball. Maybe it would serve as some sort of good luck charm.

As I approached the old copse, which on the other side was nothing more than scrubland, I wondered what I might find. I thought perhaps it might be a gipsy encampment, or maybe some oil drilling outfit looking for liquid gold. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I tentatively brushed aside some bushes and low hanging tree branches and came out onto a well used double track with a grassy hump down the centreline. The light at the end of the track glowed through the rising tall pine trees. I followed the track and in little more than a minute I had reached the end.

For a few brief moments I could hardly believe my eyes. Right there in front of me was an exact replica of our small town centre, complete with coffee bars, charity shops and even the Johnnie Roadhouse bric-a-brach shop. I simply stood stock still trying to mentally process what I was seeing. After some indeterminable time I slowly stepped forward and tentatively made my way towards the centre.

The town centre high street was devoid of any sign of another human being. It was a ghost town, without so much as even a single ghost. I tried a few shop doors to see if they would open. They were all locked.

I then tried the Johnny Roadhouse door and it opened. I stepped lightly inside. Suddenly I heard the door shut behind me. I quickly tried the handle to re-open it, only to discover that it was tightly locked. I tried not to panic and turned back to face the interior of the shop. Scattered around the floor where all the self-same boxes as I had rummaged through in the real Johnny Road Roadhouse two miles away. Just as before there were transits, mini-disc cameras, LP vynil records from the fifties and sixties.

"Hello, so we meet again, Marcus." crackled the familiar voice of the man who had been so charming and polite to me at the original shop.

"Well......well hello again, I guess, sir."

"I was expecting you, of course. We have work to do and you seemed to be the ideal candidate Marcus."

"Work? I'm sorry, I don't understand. What is this all about, who are you, what do you want with me? What is all of this, some sort of holographic art installation?"

"No, Marcus dear friend, it is.....how shall I call it? It is.......a mere three dimensional pigment of your and my imagination. And yet....it is a staging post, one of a great many dotted around the world where the deceased come en-route to their final resting place. For you and your people it is something quite amazing, but for us manipulating sub-atomic particles of light and atomic lightwaves it is child's play."

"And what is it you want with me, may I ask Misterrrr.....?

"Heggarty, Charles Darwin Heggarty, you can call me Charles if you so wish. I am known as the Elder here amongst my own brethren of souls. I first came here more than three thousand of your years ago, though I must say it feels like only yesterday that I arrived.

What we would like Marcus is that you fulfil the role a harbinger of important news to your planetary kith and kin. Your fellow mankind. We feel that now is the most opportune time for all to be made clear to everybody before it is too late.

Your civilisation is now sufficiently advanced to understand the concepts involved and our intentions, which of course are nothing less that altruistic. We come out in peace Marcus. We have no desire to hurt any of you, nor can you hurt us."

I was in a daze to say the least. I started to fidget in my pockets from nothing more nor less than a curious sense of nervousness. My fingers found the crystal I had been gifted by the Elder just about a week ago. The Elder seemed to sense the slightest movement of my concealed fingers.

"That crystal Marcus, is the key to all of this. Without it you would only have got past the end of that track through the woods, or copse as you like to call it, to find the scrubland you are accustomed to find on your daily strolls with your lovely wife. Indeed, you wouldn't have even seen the light to which you were so inexorably attracted. At the moment there is only you and I here, well, you and I and one or two nocturnal animals who go about their nightly business under cover of darkness totally unaware of our presence."

"Why me?" I asked bluntly.

"Because Marcus you are an intelligent man with a good soul and a wonderful ability to communicate with others. You have a talent, shall we say, a marvellous creative control of your language, and from what I hear one or two other languages as well. Perhaps one day you will learn our language."

For a brief moment I thought about my lovely wife at home in bed with another me. The Elder seemed to read my mind.

"Please, do not worry about your lovely wife. She's fine. In a short while, when you walk away from here, you will find yourself back inside your physical self and your lovely wife, having noted your absence, will be on her way to look for you in the woods."

"And what exactly is it you want me to write? Is there a message of some sort that you want me to communicate?" I asked.

The Elder began to visually scan around the area outside of the shop.

"You know, some people say that your race is nothing more than a plague of parasites. Others say your people belong to a wider system of organic neurotransmitters that regulate the health of the planet. It's a kind of duality of perception, you might say, or a quantum perspective. Rather like Schrodinger's Cat In A Box. Is the cat dead or alive, or indeed is it both at one and the same time?

It matters not, whichever way you slice it, some of your people are slowly but surely destroying the planet with your style of living. You cannot go on like this indefinitely. One day it will be gone long before its time. And then I'm afraid the cat will surely be dead.

The future of this planet depends upon people like you Marcus. You have some allies, of course. A certain Dr John Rose for example comes to mind. And Dr Mehmet Yildiz too. Two gentlemen who are more than alive to the situation, don't you think? You have to act now before it's too late.

The message Marcus, is " Change your ways now whilst there is still time."

"You can communicate that message any way that you like. Simply set to it right here, and then go back to your wife, your passion as a writer and write whatever you wish to your heart's desire. But whatever you do, you simply must get that message across. And, what is more, I want you to continue to put that message across Marcus.

You can write whatever it is you choose to write in the back room here. Come, I will show you. You have a desk and recliner for your comfort. I have some other matters to attend to, though I will pop in from time to time to see how you are doing. And when you are done, you can go.

Don't worry about the time. In here time is suspended. You can be here for hours and little more than a few minutes will have passed beyond the limits of this place. And with that the Elder, Charles Darwin Heggarty, stood back in the doorway.

“It’s time. It’s time to tell them how it is.”

“Yes sir, I’m doing it now,” I said to the elder as I set to work.

“Make sure you tell them everything. They have to know.”

“Yes sir, I agree. I’m on it.”

“Right then, I’ll leave it in your capable hands. Use your imagination Marcus.” I started to type the first thing that came into my head.

My father used to tell me things that made me laugh......

.......a nightmare or a dream.

After a while the elder lightly tapped my door and ghosted back into my room.

“How is it going? Are you making any progress?” he sagely enquired.“Yes sir, I have made a good start and now I am about to move on,” I replied.

“Excellent. May I be so bold as to ask you the title of the piece?”

“Yes indeed sir, you may. It’s called ‘Where There is a Light,’ I think it’s a good title, don’t you agree?”

“Indeed, it is. I’ll leave you to it then. Don’t tarry Marcus.”

Where There is a Light.

Sometimes late at night......

.........like a couple of giggling kids.

Eventually the Elder returned.

"Ahhhh, I see it is done. Excellent Marcus. I knew I could depend on you. Now, you may go back to your lovely wife and your fulfilling life. Please be sure to start the ball rolling by having this piece published far and wide. Of course, some will write it off as the mumblings of a deluded science fiction writer. But you and I know different, do we not?

You may keep the crystal rock in your pocket, I did say it was a gift. I am a man of my word Marcus. However, it will be de-activated the moment you cross back into the woods. We may re-activate it at some time in the future when we decide to use you eminent abilities again. Please, be careful as you pass through the woods to your lovely wife."

I stood and slowly passed the Elder. I was going to pull on the front door of the shop when, but a few feet from it, it opened for me automatically. I went out and strode across the scrubland back to the copse, just in time to see my lovely wife dressed in her kimono robe peering into the woods from the other end of the double track.

As I crossed off the scrubland into the woods, I stopped briefly to fish the pinky, purple crystal rock out of my pocket and I was astounded to see that it had changed. Now it was totally devoid of all those beautiful prismatic hues of colour that made it stand out when I first set eyes on it. It had been de-activated, just as the Elder had said it would be. Suddenly my wife was upon me.

"Darling.....what happened to you, where have you been, what are you doing?" she said to me all concerned.

"I'm fine darling, don't worry. Come on, let's go home." I said as I put a comforting arm around her. "I'll tell you all about it later. Come on, you can make one of your special coffees and we can sit in the kitchen as always and I'll tell you a story." I looked briefly back towards the scrubland and saw only darkness and soft moonlight.

"Is it a good story?" she mewed.

"It's an amazing story darling, one that for sure you will never believe. But I know how you love so much me telling you an exciting tale as you doze in my arms."

"Darling.......I love you. I'm so happy with you."

"I know, me too huh. Come on, race you back to the house."

And with that we set off running to our little piece of heaven like a couple of giggling kids.

Stuart Englander Dr Mehmet Yildiz Dr John Rose Terry Mansfield Tree Langdon, CPA, CGA Myriam Ben Salem Dr. Preeti Singh Dr. Manishi Pallavi Tony Young, Jr. Lanu Pitan