The real Little Green Man from Mars is alive and well and living in Appalachia.

The Truth Is a Lone Assassin by Jonco Bugos


Sunday, June 1, 2008

Proof of Life

So, before I was an Earthling living in the Pennsylvania Appalachians, I was a little green man living on the planet Mars and I have almost total recall of that past life. One of the things I remember about Mars and other Martians is that we weren’t green, of course. That was a figment of imaginative and rather diminished Earthling minds. We Martians were of several racial origins and none of them were green. Or red or black or yellow, for that matter. And I won’t tell you what colors we were or what we looked like, depending on our race and national origin, of course. That’s right, Mars was made up of many nations and cultures. We weren’t just one big happy green family roaming a dusty red planet in search of food and water. But I will tell you one thing. We Martians believed in life on other planets. We even believed in life on Earth, even though none of us had ever been there to see it for ourselves.

But now that I live on Earth in my Martian afterlife, as a full-blooded Earthling, I am shocked and bewildered by the fact that, until very recently, most Earthlings didn’t believe in life on other planets. For eons, most people on Earth thought the stars were just there for them to look at and could not possibly be suns with other planets encircling them. Planets with other people on them. But Earthlings did believe in ghosts.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered as a boy that my fellow Earthlings believed that the spirits of the dead lived on in spooky old houses and missing ships and graveyards and things like that. Right here on Earth. They also believed in every kind of thing that went bump in the night that you could possibly imagine. Like goblins and gremlins and demons and poltergeists and so on. But they didn’t believe in little green men or women from Mars, or even in Martians who were sand-colored or salmon-colored and who stood well over seven feet tall on the average. But there I go, giving away privileged information that is reserved for the next time around for most Earth folks. At least the ones who will actually make it to the afterlife.

But the biggest shock for me was finding out that grown-up Earthlings, even parents and school teachers and doctors and nurses and such, believed in a creature called the Devil who made everything go wrong for them and for the entire world. A major bad guy, if you will, who has nothing better to do than to mess with Earthlings on a daily basis. Earth people never gave a thought to the notion that most of their woes were actually caused by the wrong choices made by themselves and other Earthlings. Hmmm.

But then, why should I have been so surprised to find out that out? During most of my short Earthling life my fellow Earthlings blamed the Devil, an unseen being whose existence has never been proven, for everything that was bad while never pausing to consider that it would be an incredible waste of space if Earth was the only inhabited planet in the universe. So, seeing is not the biggest requirement for belief in anything on planet Earth. The biggest requirement for proof of life seems to be the collective need for a scapegoat. And Earthlings already have theirs.