Close encounters

For the last two days, Bhopal has been abuzz with flying saucers. The usual topics of conversations here are politics and cricket but not so now. Even the TV is all out giving a complete history of UFOs from the earliest recorded sightings to the ones seen here two nights ago.
Flying saucers! Of all things. Its not as if we had run out of normal things of interest.
And we have as many opinions as there are mouths. In office today, one of the machine operators was story-telling that his grandfather was abducted in his youth. He was delighted because today he had everyone’s attention. No one laughed at him like before when he tried the same tale. The office manager was convinced that he had seen small humanoid creatures several years ago in a graveyard he was taking a shortcut through to his house. They had supposedly leapt over tall trees and fled when they saw him there. He has not taken that shortcut since.
The news network carried a full half-hour report detailing all the major milestones in UFO history. From the Aztecs to Roswell to Tunguska; all with ‘undisputed’ photographs and shaky videos. All the classic photos so familiar to those interested in this genre were there. They had even managed to commission cheap 3D Max renderings of aliens and what their ships looked like throughout recorded history. It was amusing to say the least. A lot of the material came from the multitude of chain-mails about secret autopsies of aliens by paranoid governments around the world. Most of us have received these over the years with the usual claims of ‘proof’ of alien existence and visitations to our world. But the news networks didn’t show them as the hoaxes they all were but as background info during lengthy narratives on UFO civilizations.
Many of the elderly who saw the report, including my own neighbors, are convinced that the end of the world is coming and soon we are all going to be attacked by aliens with much greater powers than we can defend against. They even went as far as to suggest that there is a world below our feet underground and with all the over-population, their living space is getting crushed. So now they are coming to take over the surface! Neat.
The Hindu mythology is so full of fantastic creatures and tales that UFOs don’t seem all that extra-ordinary to the religious here who have read similar stories all their lives. Only the names and the mechanisms have changed. They can cope with that.
So what do I think? Mathematically, there’s bound to be life elsewhere in the universe. There’s no other way. The universe is just too big for us to be alone. Like Einstein had once remarked that if we are the only life-form in this universe, it’d be “such a waste of so much space” in the universe. But I don’t think that these sightings are what they are cut out to be. It just seems so cheap that the aliens with greater technology (they did get here) and intelligence (implied with technology) would need to resort to abductions and games of hide & seek with our planet. If we ever get around to going to their world, I think we would make it a grand affair and announce our arrival long before we ever get there. As a whole we are a friendly, social race. Individually, we are pretty good; as a community, we suck; as countries, we are at our worst; ah! but as the human race, we are at our grandest. We can be nobler than anyone else in the universe, as long as we are not cornered or deceived. Surely, all ETs know that by now.