My Brush With E. T.

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My brush with E.T.was not the sort of dignified, scholarly encounter one might expect from a man who once tried to explain Beowulf to a room of Year 9s who thought it was a new Marvel villain. 

No, this was the sort of incident that makes you question your grip on reality, your relationship with the cosmos, and most urgently your decision to buy discount antihistamines from a man in a car park.It began, as these things often do, with a noise. Not a normal noise like the boiler threatening mutiny, or the neighbour’s dog rehearsing for Britain’s Got Talent. 

No, this was a cosmic hum, the sort of sound you’d expect if the universe had indigestion. Naturally, I assumed it was my stomach. But then the garden lit up like a budget remake of Close Encounters, and I realised something was afoot.Now, I’m not the sort of man who panics. I’m the sort of man who narrates his panic in a calm, documentary voice. So as the light intensified, I found myself saying, “And here we observe the homeowner, moments before he regrets everything.” 

Because there, hovering above my lawn my freshly mown lawn, I might add was a craft. Not a sleek, futuristic marvel. No. It looked like someone had welded together a colander, a caravan, and a child’s glitter project. It wobbled. It hummed. It was, in short, deeply unimpressive.Then the hatch opened.Out stepped a being who looked like he’d been designed by a committee who couldn’t agree on anything. He had the eyes of a startled owl, the posture of a guilty toddler, and the skin tone of someone who’d lost an argument with a bottle of PVA glue.

He raised a hand in greeting or possibly surrender and made a noise somewhere between a hiccup and a yodel.This, I felt, was my moment. My chance to represent humanity with dignity, grace, and intellectual poise. So I stepped forward, cleared my throat, and said the immortal words: “All right, mate?”He blinked. I blinked. We shared a moment of mutual confusion.Then he produced a device. A glowing, pulsing, humming device. A device that looked suspiciously like a remote control from the 1980s. 

He pointed it at me. I braced myself for disintegration, enlightenment, or possibly a mild tingling.Instead, he scanned me.The device beeped. He frowned. It beeped again. He frowned harder. Then he tapped it, shook it, and finally gave it a whack that suggested interstellar technology is not as robust as advertised.At last, the device spoke in a tinny, robotic voice: “SPECIES: QUESTIONABLE.”I would like to state, for the record, that I found this deeply rude.He tried again. The device recalibrated. “INTELLIGENCE LEVEL: PENDING.”

At this point, I began to suspect he was not an ambassador of a great galactic civilisation, but rather the extraterrestrial equivalent of a trainee on his first solo shift.He gestured apologetically, pressed a few buttons, and the device finally announced: “HUMAN. MOSTLY.”Mostly. I’m still offended.Then, in a flurry of panic his, not mine he scrambled back into his craft, slammed the hatch, and shot off into the sky with all the grace of a startled pigeon. I stood there, illuminated by the fading glow, wondering whether I had just experienced first contact or been the victim of the universe’s least competent census.

And that, is how I came to be evaluated by an alien and found only mostly human. 
I’ve been trying to live up to the remaining percentage ever since.

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