Alien Flying Instructor

I was a flying instructor for the Area 51 flying school from 1911 to 1985. I was born in 1880 and have now retired. Our species lives about 150 years. Area 51 is a place in the Nevada desert where lots of pilots can be seen doing manouvres as they practice their basic training. We had an arrangement with the Americans, they let us have a base there as long as we let them investigate our technology. It wasn't particularly easy for the Americans to back engineer things that they got from us. In the same way, there were engineers in the 19th century who understood television but couldn't actually make televisions as you couldn't go down to Radio Shack in those days and buy a camera tube. They didn't have sufficiently good light sensitive cells, so television was actually invented by a Scotsman called John Logie Baird in the 1920s. The Americans can understand the principles of the quantum particle engine, but if they tried to build one it would be the size of a house and have as much horsepower as a 1979 Ford Fiesta.

In 1913 one of my students had an accident while low flying over a Siberian forest. You are meant to use your auxilliary motors while flying around a planet. They allow you to fly at up to 100 miles per second. You are meant to use your quantum particle engines when you're at least 1,000 miles above the planet. They allow you to fly at high speed. I had just taught my student how to use the quantum particle engines while we had been in orbit earlier that lesson and he thought he would try them again. So he turned them on, seventy feet above a Siberian forest. There was a great plume of radioactive fire and smoke hundreds of miles long. The trees caught fire. I said, 'It's a good job you weren't flying over the east coast of America when you did that. You would have killed millions of people.' The earth was knocked off its axis and some areas had continuous daylight for a few days.

In 1947 one of my students was flying to New York. He suddenly realised that I hadn't told him to go to New York, I had told him to go to Mongolia. The correct thing to do would be to slow down and hover over New York before taking off again. He was one thousand miles from the earth's surface and travelling at 85 miles per second when he decided to turn around. There was a flying saucer full of greys about 200 miles behind us. Seeing my spacecraft lunge towards them on what may have been a collision course, the pilot of the grey ship decided to take evasive action. That particular model of flying saucer can very easily go into an uncontrollable dive if you don't fly it very gently in a straight line. That is exactly what it did. It crashed in the desert at Roswell.

Apart from the obvious tragedy, the Americans were quite excited by this accident. Another alien species had fallen into their hands, and so had their spacecraft, full of new technology. The only thing they managed to back engineer was mica, the material in the microwave oven which is somewhere in between cardboard and metal. They spent some time dissecting the bodies of the greys. Greys' bodies are easy to dissect. They have a thin exoskeleton which, although quite strong, is penetrated easily by a surgeon's scalpel. You can see the surgeons on the film cutting open the grey's chest and pulling out its organs quite easily. It wouldn't be as easy to cut open the chest and pull out the heart of a human body.

In 1972, one of my students was sitting the final test for his pilot's licence. I told him to do a three point turn, a manouvre that involves slowing down over a particular point over the earth's surface and then flying close to another large object such as an asteroid or a moon to accelerate yourself with its gravitational field. There was an asteroid quite close to Earth that day, so we decided to do our three point turn around that. The student just caught the edge of the asteroid while he was approaching it at low speed, damaging the front lights on the spacecraft but not seriously injuring either of us. He didn't get his pilot's licence that day, but he had prevented a major disaster. The asteroid was 150 metres across and heading for the Atlantic Ocean. He knocked it off course so that it burned up in the atmosphere. The scientists of that era wouldn't have realised the danger posed by a relatively small rock and wouldn't have been tracking objects less than a few miles across. If he hadn't done that, there would have been a huge tsunami 1,000 feet high travelling up to 600 miles inland and devastating the east coast of America and Western Europe.