“Where’s dad?”

“Outside.”

“What’s he doing?”

“I think he’s trying to call down the aliens again.”

I would peek out into the dark night and see my father standing at the top of the hill in our backyard, looking up.  He always seemed so small against the sky.  I was usually too scared to go out after him.  I don’t remember if I was more afraid of the dark, or of the aliens.  My dad wanted to go away with them, so he tried to call them with telepathic signals.  I believed that they might come, and I didn’t want to lose my dad.

“Would he really go with them if they came?” I asked my mom fearfully one evening.

“I don’t know, honey.  He says he would, but I don’t really think he would,” she replied, without much confidence.

I knew that she was just trying to make me feel better.  She was afraid that he would go too.  One day just after he came back inside, my mom, my brother, and I confronted him.

“Tom,” she started, “do you have to do that?  You’re scaring the kids.”

“What are they afraid of?”

“Dad,” I burst in, “I don’t want you to go away with them.”

He tried to reassure me. “They probably won’t come.”

“Tom, don’t tease her.  You wouldn’t go, would you?”  My mom tried to mask her fear with concern for us.

He thought about it for a second and answered, “Just for a year or two.  It would be a vacation.  I’d say ‘Hey, just spin me around the galaxy once and then take me home.’”  He grinned.  “Beam me up, man.”

“How do you know they’d take you home?”  My mother bought into it for a second, then saw the looks on our faces.  “Tom,” she snapped, “you’re scaring them.  Tell them that you wouldn’t go.”

He looked at Tommy and me.  “Okay, I won’t go.”

We knew he was just saying that because Mom made him.

***

The closest galaxy to us is twenty-five thousand light-years away.  The distance to the center of our local group of galaxies is five million light-years.  The center of our Local Supercluster is sixty-five million light-years from us, and it is only one of ten million superclusters in the universe.  Think of all the stars.  Think of all the empty space between them.

***

My parents have an ongoing debate about the nature of humanity.  My mom thinks, or wants to think, that human beings are inherently good.  My dad, on the other hand, believes that we are evil by nature.

My mom was a high school nerd who lived in the suburb she grew up in for her entire life.  My dad was a hood in high school.  He ran away from home and became a cowboy, then a truck driver.  He got into a few bar brawls and finally joined the service.  He’s seen more of humanity than my mother.

Although he has little faith in humanity, my father believes that the aliens are wise.  He has explained to me that they “know what’s going on.”  If they ever did take him on his joy ride, he’s convinced that they’d tell him how to create world peace on Earth.  The aliens are much smarter than us.  They think of us as silly animals.

***

In a universe with trillions upon trillions of stars, there exist an even larger number of planets.  Since all stars burn hydrogen and helium, the basic elements of the universe are spread throughout the cosmos.  Of all the planets, a great number must have atmospheres which are conducive to the development of life.  In a universe as old as ours, some of those creatures must have been evolving for billions of years, many times longer than us.  They may have technologies that we cannot conceive of.  Of course, all of this is hypothetical.

They’ve found organic molecules in empty space.  This is not hypothetical.

***

The aliens came.  Twice.

The first time, as my father tells it, he was outside walking the dog and figured that he might as well try to call down the aliens.  He had just started to send out his telepathic signal when a weird feeling came over him.  He got scared and returned to the house.  The next day the papers confirmed that at about the same time my dad was walking the dog, a bunch of people in a neighboring suburb claimed ot have seen a UFO.

“They just came to the wrong place,” my father explained.

The second time they came, my whole family was in the house.  It was a summer night at about 1am.  We were just sitting in the living room watching TV when the power went down.  All the lights went out, but the TV continued to flicker.  A bright light flew past the window.  Then the power came back on. 

The phone rang.  It was the neighbor across the street.

“Did you see that?”  He sounded shaken.  “A glowing ball flew around your house twice and then shot into the sky.”

As soon as my dad heard that, he ran outside.  We waited in horror.  He returned minutes later, looking disappointed.

“I missed them,” he said.  “I tried to call them back but they’re gone.  I missed my chance.”

The next day another neighbor called to tell us that the electric company had no explanation for the blackout.  It had only occurred on our block.

***

We’re contacting the aliens right now.  We have been ever since the discovery of radio waves.  In about two million years, the intelligent life in the Andromeda galaxy will be trying to decode Gilligan’s Island.  We’ll be making a great first impression.  Two million years after that, we may receive a signal back from them.  The skipper will have been dead for a long time.

The only way that we could really interact with aliens is by meeting them in person.  To do that, we would have to send small communities into space.  Those little societies would have to thrive for millions of years before coming into contact with other life.  They would shoot, isolated, through cold empty space, unable to communicate with their home.  Once they contacted other beings, they may be unable to understand them.  How unlike each other the two species would be.

The universe is full of life that is alien to itself.  Not only that, the distances that separate us from each other seem vast and insurmountable.  But we don’t want to be alone.  Our only hope is to take risks, and extend our reach.

***

My dad continues to think about the aliens.  Since their second visit, his efforts at calling them down have diminished into a few running jokes.  He may have given up.

But he still has theories.  Last year he decided that when people hear a ringing in their ears, it’s really an alien signal that no one has been able to understand.  He’s been working hard to decode it.

As Tommy and I said goodbye to my parents after our winter break from college, my dad came up with his latest alien story.

“Goodbye Pa,” I said, and hugged him.

“I may not be your father, Molly,” he replied grinning, “I may just be a clone that the aliens sent down to replace him after they took him.”

“But you wouldn’t tell me that if you were.”  I had gotten good at finding the flaws in his plans.  It made me feel safer.

“I may just be malfunctioning.”  He started to twitch, “Good… Good… Gak… Bye.”

I laughed.  “Goodbye Pa.  I love you.”

“Goodbye Molly.  Your father loves you, wherever he is.”

–An essay written for Tom in the early 90s by his daughter