Willy Wannabe's Perfect Performance

Tonight’s debate, Ladies and Gentlemen,
‘Should we open the alien escape capsule?’

Four teams of leading physicists discuss the pros and cons of attempting to open the aliens' emergency escape capsule so that we can finally be
‘face to face with our chums from space'.
With Special Guest speaker - your friend and mine the wonderful Willy Wannabe!

“Now Willy, I’m sure that by now everyone must know the story of how you happened to be the first man in history to discover not only a crashed space craft but also what the world hopes to be the first, and smallest, alien visitors to our planet.”
Laughter from the audience.

Willy smiled his famous Willy smile and said in his most sincere voice
“I guess God just wanted to make sure that them little men from Mars had somebody who genuinely cares about all living things to watch over them!”
Roar of approval from the audience.

“Okay, we’ll hear a lot more from Willy later in the program but for now let’s learn a little bit about what we’ve learned about the aliens and their ship. To tell us something of the great leaps that have been made in our understanding of space and spaceships… here is Professor Pompous.

“Amazing, utterly amazing, that’s all I can say about the alien’s technology.
We don’t understand it all yet but we are making fantastic new discoveries every day!

What we think we know so far is that the alien ship was controlled telepathically.
The thing that people have come to refer to as the ‘escape capsule’ is in effect the crew’s cabins.

The whole lot was suspended from the hull by some 'harness' made of an alien rubber like substance and artificial gravity was used to establish a down to allow the crew to walk around normally inside their capsule.

We believe that this ‘harness’ was also designed to eject the capsule from the ship if the hull is badly breached but some interaction with our atmosphere caused a malfunction and the capsule was only partially ejected.

However, this does not detract from the beauty of this design.
The crew are always cocooned and safe and should the craft hit anything it automatically fills with some red flame retardant powder which also helps to cushion the capsule.

A brilliant, simply brilliant, design.
Sadly the propulsion system seems to have been destroyed without a trace but we’re hoping once we open the ‘crews capsule’ we will find them alive and able to tell us so much more not just about their ability to space travel but also more about the secrets of the Universe itself!"
Rapturous applause.

“Telepathy, ha! That thing is a danger to the whole planet and we should get rid of it immediately.”

“Now, now, professor Paranoia, if you could refrain from commenting and wait your turn please…”

“Wait my turn, wait my turn. The planet’s is in imminent danger of destruction and all I get is ‘wait’!”

The shot returns to the Host who is obviously listening to someone through his earpiece.

“Alright, professor, it seems as if there are no objections to your being next.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Professor Paranoia, a leading expert in the field of Neutrino research.”
A muted response from the crowd.

“Right, first, there are no aliens! At least there are no aliens in that object!

That object is a remote controlled spy drone powered by neutrinos and the thing Pompous calls a ’harness’ is the antenna which transmits and receives signals to and from whoever controls the craft.

My team has examined the object and, subject to the limitations of not being allowed to bombard it with anything that might possibly hurt or destroy whatever is inside, we have ascertained that it is in fact a neutrino collector and mass inducer...
To the layman, simplified, it funnels neutrinos in at one end and causes them to gain a considerable amount of mass as they leave at the other end - this, naturally pushes the whole thing in the opposite direction, ultimately at speeds close to that of light.

If those who sent it choose to they could easily reverse the process and make the whole thing into a Neutrino bomb!
So at the very best they are spying on our planet and at worst they are ready to destroy it!”…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A few weeks earlier…

Willy was sure that no-one cared about talent any more, just how people looked.
If you had the right face and the right connections then you got the part, otherwise... Don’t phone us we’ll phone you!

In an effort to cheer himself up after his latest failed audition he was currently driving his camper in the general direction of a good fishing river he knew of and planned to drink a few tins and catch a few fish.

Suddenly, something flashed out of the sky and, with more of a bang than a boom, hit the ground somewhere up ahead. Following a small cloud of smoke that Willy guessed must be from where the object landed Willy soon came to the site which fortunately was not too far from the track he was driving down.

If there had been a fire, there wasn’t now, but still some smoke.
‘No smoke without fire.’ thought Willy ‘Must have burnt out quick though.’
He examined the scene and concluded that the big black rock in the centre of the hole in the ground must have broken open and that’s where all the red powder had come from.
The rock still seemed half full of red powder and the bit that had broken off lay a few yards away making it look almost like a dark chocolate Easter egg with the top chopped off and filled with red hundreds and thousands.

Willy was wondering who he ought to inform when a strange thought entered his head.
‘You want to make a name for yourself, be famous, here’s your chance.
Finding a rock that’s fallen to Earth is no big deal but if it had passengers…’

Willy seemed smarter than usual. The rock wasn’t very big so they would have to be small passengers.
Looking around his camper Willy spotted a very old can of beans.
He started ripping the label off and found it was very difficult due to the ‘used to be glue’ that had overtime absorbed moisture and caused the label to be discoloured with black, semi-sticky patches.
Using his thumb fingernail Willy managed to get most of the paper off.
Then, getting a knife he scrapped off the sell by date and any remaining stubborn bits of label or rust.

The glue gave him an idea. He got his giant tube of Super Glue and checked it was almost full.
Then he cut a length of nylon fishing line just slightly longer than the can and applying some glue to almost half the length of the line glued it from the rim, along the seam of the can. He waited a few minutes and tested it to see if it would hold. Miraculously it did. Then, he applied glue to almost all of the other end of the line and glued that from the opposite rim, again along the seam. Because the line was slightly longer than the can and because there was no glue on a tiny bit of the line at its centre, Willy had created a little loop to put his fishing hook through.

Once Willy had suspended the can from the loop he began to quickly cover it all over in glue.
Then using his ‘sit in the sunshine but fish in the shadows of the other side of the river’ super long fishing rod Willy slowly lowered the can into the red powder in the rock.

His plan was to cover the can in red powder and then reel it back in and remove the nylon line and then throw it back into the rock. If he missed it wouldn’t really matter so long as it was well within the area that was covered in red powder. The area covered with red powder and no footprints!

Everything went well as Willy lowered the can into the powder, it slowly disappeared and Willy gave the rod a few twitches to try and ensure that all the can would be covered in powder and then started to reel it back out.

The can appeared momentarily, seemed to catch on something and start to tip so that the furthest part of the can was higher than the nearest. Suddenly some of the nylon glued to the tin started to sizzle, the loop broke and the can fell back.

It settled with the furthest bit of the can sinking out of sight but the nearest part protruding above the powder...
There was still some sizzling.

The nylon seemed to have been affected by the glue and the red powder and, from what Willy could see, now looked more like a piece of red rubber band than fishing line.

Too late to worry that all had not gone as planned. Willy got his mobile phone and took a few photos of the can and the rock etc and then sent them to his agent.
Well, actually Sally was his girlfriend but she humoured him when he told everyone she was his agent.
He sent a text along with the pics telling Sally that he had chanced along just as the ‘thing’ landed and was amazed to see a little red capsule try to escape from the rock but seem to get caught by something.
Asking her to ‘Put it on the Internet!’

Now Sally reasoned that the best move would be to inform NASA so she transferred the pics and Willy’s text to her computer and then posted them to NASA.

It took a while but suddenly people were phoning and emailing Sally demanding to know where Willy was and asking her for his mobile number. So it was that Willy got his shot at fame.

The first people to arrive were army security of some sort and they gave Willy quite a hard time.
The cordoned off the area and waited for the boffins.
When the boffins arrived they were in seventh heaven. The technicians raced around with cameras, video recorders, Geiger counters and various gadgets that Willy couldn’t even begin to guess the purpose of.

Willy had imagined that the news people would be the first to arrive.
Yet when he thought about it, there hadn’t been more than a quick flash and a bit of a bang.
Still, Willy knew that he would get his chance in front of the cameras soon.

He had taken advantage of the time it had taken for anyone to arrive to write himself a nice little script and he was determined to get his performance on TV. He was convinced that this was his BIG chance and he was going to make the most of it.