Proof

         

         I used to work for the government. I was just a cop in Kansas City, but they recommended me after I helped bag some of the biggest names in gang warfare in the ‘Lil Georgie heist. You probably saw that episode of Biography.

         Anyway, I wound up working for the CIA. Did field duty for a few years, thenI got pushed to desk work after getting shot in the hip. Almost wound up paralyzed.

         I liked my job; turns out I had a natural talent with computers. One day, my boss heard they needed help with IT out West, and he brought my name up right away. I probably should have realized what I was getting into when I found out where I was going: Roswell.

         I remember, when I first got there, they led me into this small room. Three men, all really intimidating-looking guys, sat at a table waiting for me. I sat down and they told me, over the course of an hour, that if I saw anything strange, unusual, or inhuman, I’d say nothing to anyone on the outside.

         Of course, I agreed. You learn to accept that sort of deal when you work in government.

         One day, I saw him. He was sitting in a glass enclosure. Just sitting there, doing nothing. He was tall and grey, and he looked up at me with dull black eyes. I felt really weird, like he was reading me or something, something more than just looking.

         I then heard a voice, his, say, in the manner of the most boring convention speakers, You and your world are doomed. He was speaking to me in my head.

         I stepped closer to him. I don’t know why. I just knew he was telling the truth. “How?” I asked.

Then he told me everything.

They’re coming, he told me, his people. They’re out there, watching us through the stars. But they’re not sitting in ships hovering over us. They watch us from their home planet, a long way off from here, with telescopes and scanners in observatories.

         Sometimes they send us messages. But not the way you’d think, not with crop circles. And they don’t do probes. Instead, they use meteors and comets. They have these generators, see, that allow them to manipulate physical matter up to great distances. They use these to strike a meteor into a planet or send a comet whirling around a sun.

         Don’t believe me? Look at the moon’s craters. Now they were made by meteors, that part is true. But the aliens sent them there. They did this because, when they sent a probe down the Milky Way, they mistook the moon for us. Weird, I know, but it’s true.

         Anyway, they sent a few rocks down and waited to see how the natives reacted, and if they were worthy of learning that they were not along. They didn’t receive any sort of reply, so they tried again. And again. And again and again and again until the moon was the way it is now. Y’see, they hadn’t perfected telescopes then (by telescopes, of course, I mean powerful ones, not the piddling things Galileo invented).

         Anyway, they pelted the moon with rocks until they determined that there were, in fact, no signs of intelligent life there, so they set their sights on the blue and green orb beyond it. Our little marble.

         This time, they sent a satellite. It swept over, zooming in on Pangaea, and saw the dinosaurs in the steamy jungles.

         They were really impressed, must’ve been. I mean, come on, big lizards with horns, spikes, and all that? You’d have been blown away too. They figured this species looked intelligent enough to decipher the meaning in a flaming hunk of space rock.

         They chose the largest one they could find. The better to make a good first impression with. It was big and burnt wonderfully when they sent it down. Unfortunately, they aimed a little too close to some fault lines, so everything was wiped out. The dinos were killed, Pangaea split, everything.

         Naturally, they were mortified, so they abstained from contact.  Instead they watched as we and our rodent like bodies rose from the ashes. They watched us in the Garden and in the Flood. They witnessed the Fall of the Roman Empire and the Battle of Hastings. They monitored the Plague’s spread, the Crusade’s bloodshed, the Renaissance, WWI, WWII, Chernobyl. Everything.

They watched it all and they learned. Learned how to deal with us.

         They know all our flaws as a species and how to expose them. They know how we fight, about our missiles and tanks. They’ve got better.

          They have whole surveillance units set up. These guys run by every so often disguised as a meteor shower. Hailey’s Comet is one of their probes, relaying back information every time it swings by.

         Lately, they’ve become upset with us for all we’ve done. They’ve seen our land squabbles, our wars, and our wrecking of the environment, and they can’t believe that an intelligent species does such things, instead of living in utopia. That’s why they’re on their way to destroy us.

         Mind you, it will take them a while. They’re a long ways away, far beyond Andromeda and the Magellanic clouds, and there’s no such thing as warp drive, so it should take them at best about 75 years.

         The one that told me this, well, he was part of one of their units, but some feedback caused his ship’s thrusters to overload, and he crashed down in New Mexico. It was 1947 when we captured him.

         I quit my job and picked up all my pension money the very next day. What he had said shook me right down to the very core of my being. And I just knew that I had to stop them.

         Sure, we’ve done some bad things, but I know how to fix it. We just have to stop. Stop fighting, stop killing, stop conquering. We have to trust each other and the nations of the world have to come together. Sounds pretty foolish, doesn’t it?

         But I know I’m right. I have to warn everyone, convince them to change so that we might be spared. And I will.

         Just as soon as I get out of this nuthouse.