She lives in a large township in what today we would call Northern Chile. She pre-dates the Romans, the Greeks and the Chinese. She lives about 200 years before Aristotle will begin the slow march forward towards the scientific method, 700 years before Jesus Christ will attempt to introduce emotional intelligence into organised religion and one and half thousand years before people fighting in his name will come across the ocean, bringing disease and slaughter to the world she lives in. She lives more than two thousand years before the concepts of modern medicine, antibiotics, painkillers and anti-depressants. She lives in a world without metal, without concrete, without glass, long, long, long before the birth of western civilisation, and she is losing her baby.
She’s no stranger to death. People die all the time, people
die when they are young, they die in their prime. Sometimes they die for no
reason at all. But to die like this, as you are being born, seems a cruel trick
for the gods to play.
She comes from a wealthy family, they would have given the
boy a good life. Her husband has power and resources, he has men that are sworn
to fight for him, who hold axes with granite heads and wooden handles edged with gold. They
garrison the walls of their compound against outsiders and enemies both man and
beast. He has women and boys who toil
under his protection, they age themselves, hand grinding maize; rock scraped
against rock, with life in the middle, the yellow white powder from which they
make their bread. They live a life of relative
security. And those in the fields too,
the adolescents and middle class women who tend the llamas and weed and pick
and sow corn…
All of them will talk about this as they work now.
About how this has happened because of
her.
‘What is grown and dried and smashed in rhythm with the
gods, shall rise and grow strong’, they’ll say. And they will tut and shake
their heads as if to imply that corners must have been cut, savings made, sacrifices
performed in the improper way.
Isn’t the bread and meat they eat it proof enough of his
worth. She loves him and she knows the truth. She knows he is a good man. Just
and fair. So why could the gods not have allowed his line to go on?
She looks at the lifeless body of her baby. Limp and soft
and swaddled in blood. Mistakes were made.
They should not have named him. They should not have allowed themselves to
believe he was even real until he said his first words. It’s just that they
were so excited. And late at night they would lie in bed together and make up
stories about the man he would grow up to be. He will slay giants, said her
husband, he will be kind to his wife and his mother she replied. He would have been their first.
He husband enters the red room chaperoned by the priestess,
and two elders. All three wearing the necklaces of their cast. Flat gold
circles designed to reflect light onto the face, making them seem to glow;
creating subconscious affinity between them and the face on the moon.
‘We have spoken, and everything is in order… He will be taken and dressed now.’ Says her husband.
For a moment she doesn’t understand, exhausted as she is.
But she can see the pain on his face. He isn’t angry, he is just distraught. 'To
be dressed…' Yes of course, it is bad luck for the first born to die, so the elders
will make him immortal. So that he will continue to live with the family. It is
a burden that the woman must bear, she will carry the body. Just as she has
done for many months, twinning his life force with her own.
The priests take her baby. Behind closed doors they scoop it’s brain from
its skull. They take and burn the internal organs. They bury it in salt, They use
Ammonia extracted from human urine to tan his translucent skin to leather. Then finally at the end of the process, they carefully
they wrap him in cedar-bark and woven bandages until he looks like child’s doll. It will take them three months to do this, to
turn her baby into an object.
When they hand it back to her, it is lighter than she
expects, but once around her neck it
hangs heavy with the remembered effort and sadness. As a penance and a tribute,
she will carry him with her for the rest of her life. In the years that follow,
she will have other children. There will be happiness and sadness, and like
everyone else in her community, her teeth will become worn down by particles of
stone chipped from the grinding stone and into in the cornbread. Eventually she
will no longer be able to eat at all, and she will die, and her first great
failure, her son, will be buried along with her. Only to be discovered and exhumed by a team of
men and oil-powered machines, looking for water deep in the desert soil.
***
“That’s just not how it happened” says the kid next to me
the queue. I say “kid” but he is probably 25 maybe 26 years old. He wears a Baseball cap, and knee-length
shorts that hang above legs that don’t look like they’ve ever seen the sun. He is a little over weight and sporting the
beard of a man that should shave, but only really does so if require to by
work. On his T-Shirt is a picture of her mummified foetus.
“What kind of deformed-ass baby has 9 sets of ribs, man…
Scientists say that thing lived for a minimum of seven years! And he’s six fricken inches tall! No human ass
6 six inch baby is living to see it’s seventh birthday, running around,
stealing food probably… that shit ain't
no baby foetus… that’s a human alien hybrid, this is like the human WOW signal,
man! We need to take notice…So hell yeah
I wanna see it.”
The wow signal he is referring to was collected by a volunteer
at a radio telescope In 1977. A 72
second burst of information, spelled out in six letters that bore all the
hallmarks of being contact from an alien world.
SETI (The search for extra terrestrial intelligence) was its infancy
then, barely even born it was largely a focus of derision and ridicule. The ‘wow
signal’ excited the scientific community and lead indirectly to official
sanction of the programme and greatly increased funding.
We’ve heard nothing since.
In 2012, on the 35th anniversary of the signal, we
attempted to reply… transmitting 10,000 crowd sourced twitter messages into
space, directly targeted at what has been calculated to be the signals point of
origin. It will take them several hundred years to get there.
SETI doesn’t think the mummy is any kind of proof of
intelligent alien life. In fact even in the Bristol museum the Chilean foetus, is
not labelled as a human Alien Hybrid. It’s simply part of an exhibition of
Chilean artefacts , on loan from an unnamed private collector, that thanks to
the happy coincidence of being staged in the same month as an online
documentary citing many of the artefacts as extra-terrestrial in origin, is
garnering rather more interest than they were expecting.
Some cynics have criticised the museum for knowing exactly
what they were doing and demeaning
themselves by lighting a figurative ‘woo signal’ above what should be a
scientific institution. Woo signal is not actually a reference to the Wow
signal, but rather the Bat Signal, with the exhibition serving as a beacon for
“Citizen Journalists” and amateur UFOlogists from across the land.
Whatever their motivation, it’s been good for business.
“We haven’t had
queues like this since Banksey” says, Jeremy Deller, the
museum’s current curator, in a recent Bristol Post. “These people have
all just come out of the woodwork, I mean I imagine they are among us all the
time, passing themselves off as normal… it’s just now they are out and about, in
the sunshine, wearing X-files T-shits, and
making Spock hands at each other”
According to the people I meet in the queue, his comments
haven’t gone down well with growing community of believers making their pilgrimage
to the Bristol Museum. Though it is a true fact, that the nearby Sci Fi
megastore ‘Forbidden Planet has more than doubled its business. Earlier on… before the queue actually started
moving, I noticed several people were sat cross legged on the pavement playing
‘Magic the Gathering’ to kill time. Just two rows in front of me in the
queue is a man wearing a full Sylvester Mackoy, pre-cool era, Dr Who
costume and next to him is a girl in a patched black bomber jacket... which
from the recesses of my memory… (and a later check on google) I identify as his
sidekick Ace.
‘I used to listen to
the Dave Barrett phone in on GWR’ says a man next to me. He’s about my age, but
in far worse shape… like a slightly younger George R R Martin. To those too
young to remember or who don’t know Bristol, the reference to Dave Barrett
might seem like a non sequitur … but it
isn’t.
I too used to listen to the Dave Barrett phone in so I know
what he’s talking about. In fact years later I worked with the man as his
Broadcast Assistant and ‘second voice’.
Dave was a radio DJ who loved all things paranormal, in order
for him to be happy we would book him at least one “woo” guest a month. Psychics,
mediums and Telekinetics. Very often it was to do with UFO’s. By the time we
worked together I was no longer drinking the cool aid, my eyes had grown weary
from watching the skies, and I was pretty much done with it. Years of inexplicably blurry camcorder
footage of aeroplanes, blimps and other hoaxes had taken their toll, each one a
brick in a wall of cynicism, realism or science that I built around the wide
eyed child of my youth that basically took everything he was told as fact. Now
he’s completely entombed, dry and lifeless, he lives on only in my memory, curled
up under a duvet listening to radio in the same way kids who aren’t dyslexic
read comics. The volume is only just audible so that my parents have no idea I’m not asleep at 2.30 in the morning on a school night. I am wide awake and dreaming of
small grey-bodied men with tiny mouths, almond shaped eyes and skinny little
arms that reach out and grab people as they wander back home from the pub. My
god how I wished to be one those people. One of the 0.0001% who know for
absolute certain if the infinite skies above us contain life, and not just
fucking microbes either… but real life, Life in the goldilocks zone of
intelligence! Smart enough to get here,
dumb enough to interested in the naked, flightless apes of Earth.
Bristol has a rich tradition of Astrobiology, in a wide spectrum, all the way from amateur
to professional. From lights filmed over Dundry that according to the Sun
newspaper, dropped laser-beam pulses into the houses below (4th of
Nov 2008). To circles dancing in formation over Hartcliffe and Withiwood
(8th Oct 2003) UFO sightings were apparently so common for a time
that, the police issued a writ asking for prior warning from anyone intending to
send up one of those floating Chinese lanterns, in order to
prevent the inevitable raft of calls that would come flooding into local law
enforcement, GWR, BBC Radio Bristol and of course the Dave Barrett phone in.
At the other end of the scale there is Collin Pillinger who
in 2004 masterminded the construction of the Beagle II, a failed mission to
Mars designed to search for the signs of life on its red and dusty plains, once
sea beds and river deltas or so it was believed. Beagle II was part funded by
pop musicians and other romantics, but it carried with it the hopes of the
scientific community too, who like proud parents believed it had the potential to
make history. Instead, unable to communicate with earth after touch down, it
left nothing but small crater in a landscape already full of them.
But it wasn’t a total failure, Collin died this year and in
response to his death, the powers that be, named the western rim of Endeavour crater,
Pillinger Point, in honour of his enthusiasm, energy and drive.
It seems that all children are destined to be a
disappointment to their parents in one way or another, but who would have thought
that a sizable chunk of Martian real
estate would carry the name of a gas fitter’s boy from Kingswood.
The Queue shuffles forward. I am curious to know if there is
anyone here because they actually hold a genuine interest in Chilean Artefacts…
I start asking around. “is anyone here
because they love Chile?” The response is unenthusiastic. One guy asks me if there is going to be a
‘cook off’.
This crowd is apparently all Woo.
“You ever seen one man?”
Says the kid in the baseball cap and terrible beard. ‘I thought I did
once… ‘ I say, ‘but it turned out I was wrong.’ As he nods in commiseration, I immediately
I realise that this is a lie. There have been three occasions when I have been
wrong about spotting UFOs and actually
I’m not totally sure I was wrong about one of them although I was on my way
back from a pub.
Weirdly it’s not that last unconfirmed sighting, the shifting stars that seemed to move an make turns in the sky, that moves my memory the most, but a 100% confirmed un-sighting that took place in 1993.
I was 13 years old, my parents marriage had just broken down
and my father had moved out of the house only a couple of months before. He was 40 years old and he’d bought himself a
cheap motorbike and by way of bonding he used to put me on the back and take me
bowling and sneak me into movies that I was legally too young to watch.
One night on the way home from ‘Demolition Man’, I spotted
something in the sky, a glowing cigar shaped object, with a central bar of light
that flickered and changed and was hard to make out. I pointed it out and in
excited amazement and to my absolute delight and surprise, my dad decided we
should follow it on the motorbike, and see if we could chase it down.
We accelerated towards the distant object through a flicker
of streetlights, all the way up Gloucester Road, up through Horfield and beyond, towards
Aztec west and out past the MOD, until if finally dipped below the skyline,
somewhere in the vicinity of Filton Airport. Throughout the whole chase, I felt alive and
part of it all, like something in a movie.
My dream of a life less ordinary was sadly short-lived, as when
I told my class mates how we had followed the UFO and that it may be being
stored in Filton… and that we should go and investigated it like we were the
Goonies or something, I found out pretty
quickly that, to the non-dyslexic kids, who were not going to find out in a few
years time that they also needed glasses, the strange pulsing bar in the middle of the cigar
shaped object was an LED display that read ‘Hutchinson Telecom’ and referred to
the name of the company that had hired the airship. They never let me forget
it.
At first I was mad at my dad for humouring me, but since then I have
decide that that one night, speeding through Bristol when the dream was still alive,
was worth all of the weeks of humiliation that followed.
My other sighting, my first, was over much faster. I was in the back seat
driving with my family towards the Severn Bridge on route to camping in Wales.
Around the Severn Bridge they have these very tall streetlamps which look a bit
like a wagon wheel mounted on a pole but with a light at the end of each spoke. Coming
from the service station, we were going around a roundabout, and as I looked up
from my copy of Tim Good’s ‘Above Top Secret’ it happened that a tree was blocking my view of the vertical
section of the street light at the exact same time that motion of the car
around the roundabout gave the illusion that the waggon wheel section was slowly
spinning in the air. It was the most alien looking thing I had ever seen. I
believe that I already mentioned that my eyes were bad, and also that my brain
has trouble reading visual information sometimes…. Let me also add that I
wanted it to be true. And so my first instinct was to yell ‘UFO!’ without a moment’s
thought or hesitation. Instead of proof and
vindication that my faith deserved, I was once again rewarded with playful
derision.
My sister still brings that one up at almost every Christmas.
Back in the queue the kid in the baseball cap doesn’t care
about my stories. He says he was abducted and that he has a mind control chip
in his leg. I don’t believe him at all. What kind of a mind control chip would
allow the person wearing it to make reference to it.
Eventually we are at the end of the line, I hand over my
suggested donation and make my way through the crowd, I’m not a tourist, and I
didn’t come here to socialize… I came to find the Alien baby that clearly isn’t
an alien baby, I came to look at and debunk what I’ve read about on the
internet… I have driven here and braved the insane risk of parking semi-legally
on Whiteladies road, all in order to be close enough to touch it, prevented
from doing so by only a force-field of glass, and the staring eyes of everyone
else who wants to believe it’s real.
For some reason, most people are just milling around below
the “Bristol Biplane” so it’s easy to
brush past them. The plane is a fake, a replica of the real thing, just a film
prop made for the 1963 motion picture ‘Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying
machines'. Donated to the museum by the studio, it now lives suspended from the
roof by clearly visible wires.
I’ve seen it before.
There is a buzz around the container. Like sperm around an
egg, people constantly coming and going.
Little gaps forming in the human traffic and then closing up again. I look for
a way in… I wriggle forward, and I am industrious
yet patient and eventually I get lucky and I squeeze my way through.
And I am face to face with disappointment.
It’s so small, just six inches tall. I’ve lost the kid in
the baseball cap and but I’m still surrounded by people who seem like carbon
copies of him, all of them acting aloof or knowledgeable , cracking wise over the desiccated viscera of a deceased child.
“Look at how the neck enters the Skull”
“I’ve seen video of this guy called Dr Green saying this
thing isn’t human and then like two day’s later he tried to take it back.”
“I’ve seen better” says a very skinny man in his twenties who
looks like a starved and broken version of Frank Zappa, “This thing is a fake for sure”
“They took it to Stanford university… they could only find
91% human DNA and they had no idea what the rest was…”
And then suddenly I have a moment where I see this whole
scene from outside of myself. An my mind’s
eye has left me and is looking from above. Looking down on myself watching this
deformed and aborted foetus on a bed of white cotton, something sacred, the one
time hopes and dreams of a prehistoric mother and father, made immortal by
misguided priests. And where has it
ended up, dug up and dusted and surround by people from another world.
Examining it, prodding and poking it, analysing the data. Later laughing at it and comparing it to beef
jerky.
But still it has lived a life that they could not have
imagined. Bought and sold, placed in a private collection and flown through the
sky at incredible speeds, moved on rivers of rock in gigantic machines powered
by the petrified blood of the dinosaurs.
I back away from the display… half stumbling I have to
apologise to a couple of people on my way out of the museum. There are a group
of people on the steps vaping nicotine through virtual cigarettes with LED’s
lighting up as they do so. A guy rides past on a Segway listening to MP3’s
through a pair of oversize Beats Headphones.
I turn away and proceed along the Clifton Triangle, dazzled by the sun
glinting from the neon plastic signs of the shops… carried along by the tide of
humanity, dressing in bright colours and communicating across distances large
and small via palm sized computers more powerful than those used to calculate a
safe route to the moon. It is all of a
sudden… too much. A Sci-Fi world of aliens, alive and well and so similar to
that which I dreamed of when wide awake beneath the sheets in 1993.
I walk as if against a wind made from a blur of faces, as
close and pressing as deep flowing water… I am alone in the city, surrounded by
an indifferent crowd. And for a moment feel like perhaps I can no longer breathe.
Until I am safely back in my car. The door closes with a
satisfying thunk and the world falls back into perspective. And as I place the
key in the ignition, and the sun beats down from space, I am glad that I parked
in the shade.
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