Confessions of a Blue

There are good aliens and bad aliens in the universe, although actually, most of us are bad ones. There aren't many good ones. But blues are bad, as bad as they come. People think we wear masks. We don't. We're actually pretty ugly, we don't need to wear masks. We visit planets that haven't made interstellar contact yet, where seeing a spaceship isn't an every day experience, and fly at low altitude just to frighten people.

Once we saw some chidren playing in the garden with their mother. We decided to come a little bit closer and hover right over their garden. I stared at them out of the window. You should have seen the look on their faces. Then we ascended rapidly into the sky, faster than an apollo moon rocket, but without making any sound. That's always a good thing to do after you've made eye contact. Go straight up, very, very fast. It makes you mysterious.

We have a tractor beam on the spaceship that's intended for towing another spaceship that has broken down. We used it to immobilise a family's car, and really scared them. The lights and the electrics went off. The engine stopped. Then we landed the ship and I got out to talk to them. I picked up a piece of stone I could see in the road. I said to the husband, 'You see this piece of stone? If I could make all the electrons in it go from one end to the other, you would have lots of electricity. Your scientists are stupid. They can't see this obvious solution to the energy crisis. Generate electricity by moving the electrons around in inaminate objects.' You just have to hope that you don't get one of those university types, someone who can argue with you about what you're actually saying scientists should do. Earth scientists thought of moving electrons around a long time ago. That's the only way you can generate electricity, to move electrons in an object from one end to the other. That's how a battery works, that's how a dynamo works. The trick is to find a way of doing it that doesn't cost any money, but that's another fairy tale that we invented. The thing is, the majority of people don't know anything about batteries or power stations. They will probably think that what you're saying is revolutionary. They're going to tell the local newspaper. They think they're going to change the world.

I took his wife up in the spaceship to fly her around for a bit. I went about a thousand miles up to where she could just about see the earth as a big round, blue ball. I asked, 'Do you want to come with us to our world?' She said no. I knew she would say no. She had children. Judging by the look of her clothes and the look of the car, I think the family had a reasonable amount of money. I wasn't really expecting her to say yes. I just wanted to see the expression on her face. By the way, if you're ever taken on board a flying saucer and somebody asks you a question like that, don't say yes. You have no idea where you will be going. If you go to Indigora, where the Indigo children come from, that's very nice. No poverty, very little disease, peace and happiness all the time. But Blutovin is absolute Hell by comparison. I recently received an email from an abductee in one of my spacecraft who said yes to my question. He is very, very angry about his present occupation.

'Do you want to come with us to our world?' you asked. I didn't expect to end up mining uranium on an asteroid. I couldn't get a job on Blutovin. There's no industry, everything's manufactured in the colonies. 95% of school leavers are unemployed and about 5% of them get a job every year. I went to college, I went to university. Getting a job was just as difficult. The only way I could repay my student loan was to get a job in one of the colonies. I tried to get a job as a farmer on a planet where they make tins of meat for export, I tried to get a job in a factory making pocket computers on another planet. I've never been any good at interviews. I didn't really understand questions about dealing with people and didn't see what they had to do with mucking out yaks in the morning or wiring together pocket video players. I ended up on this remote asteroid as a miner because they couldn't get anyone else to do it. They didn't tell me I was overqualified, I think the manager just felt lucky to get anyone out here at all. He'd been here on his own for twenty five years. He also has a degree. The money's not too bad, at least I paid off my student loan and it gives me enough money for my basic needs. There's not much to spend money on here, anyway. We're a long way from any night life. With the asteroid being so remote all the food we get is either dried or tinned. It takes years to get here. A typical meal would be pasta with tinned vegetables, nuts and corned yak, followed by tinned peaches in tinned custard or strawberry flavour rice pudding. If you ever get cancer they put you on chemotherapy for six months and the side effects are not so bad here. You can even continue working. I've had it once, the manager has had it three times. We spend our spare time looking at our pocket computers. My Vidicon mobile phone contains every book that was ever published on Blutovin as well as a few other planets. l'm presently doing another degree in Blutovian literature, and when I've done that I'll probably do one in Politics and History. You might wonder why I don't go back to Earth. I came from Barnsley in South Yorkshire. There aren't any jobs there either, and at least here I can be a miner like my father was. I also have a university education, which is more than I ever had back at home. But I imagined an alien planet that was all beautiful colours, with none of the social problems of our world and peace and happiness all the time.