There was an interesting story in the Saturday Star today in the Entertainment section by Vinay Menon called "Pop Culture's Encounters of the Alien Kind." In the article, Mr. Menon talks about how Television and Motion Pictures have portrayed Alien beings in a negative light.

Actually, according to Mr. Menon, the popular media culture portrays aliens as bumbling imbeciles or as planet hungry invaders and if I read it correctly, Mr. Menon takes the opinion that both of these characterizations are inherently wrong.

So, the question becomes what are aliens who visit our planet like? Are they hell-bent on conquering us and taking all our strawberry ice cream or are they so out of the loop that what they think would be the correct way to act on our world is nothing more than some farcical comedic stereotype that can be found on most sitcoms?

Now one of the things that Mr. Menon mentions in his article is the macro-series 'Taken' and how it reflects a lot of the alien mythology. Now, think about that for a second. If there is a mythology associated with aliens, then there has to be a reality associated with aliens as well. One cannot exist without the other. The question is... what is that reality?

If we are to believe the stories told to us by people who have supposedly encountered alien lifeforms, that reality shows us a group of beings that don't seem to be bent on conquest and from the stories that we have heard, the aliens are anything but funny men. Since the aliens that are visiting our fair planet have not shown up at any of the tourist information kiosks scattered around our nations, we have to ask the question, why are they here? My own pet theory is that we make great Strawberry Ice Cream_relax, it's just a joke.

The fact of the matter is, if we believe that aliens are visiting our planet, we can only assume what their intentions are. The aliens are so far removed from us that there is no real way to determine exactly what they want from here. So, we have to impose our concepts on what we would want and what we would do.

Imagine for a moment that we were to encounter a planet that was occupied like our planet is. A world where there are concentrations of various life forms and one where we can identify which organism is the dominant species. A world where there are large groups of the dominant life form living in small areas and the rest of them are scattered in rural areas.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that perhaps we would be very interested in this planet. I'm also suggesting that perhaps, we would be interested enough in this to probably make a full comprehensive study of this planet and life form. Matter of fact, I'm really going to go out on a limb here and suggest that perhaps we would have entire generations of scientists and anthropologists who would spend their entire careers studying these people. Much the same as we have people who have and are spending their entire lives studying Dolphins, or Eagles, or Gorillas. Some of these people are also trying to catalogue those that they're studying. Determining how many there are and what different characteristics the creatures have from each other. And let's take that a step further. For every person that studies and catalogues a species like the gorilla, we have poachers who kill the beasts for nothing more than sport or to provide a client with the head of the animal because that person thinks it would look good in their den.

Mr. Menon is right. The aliens aren't here to take us over and they're not here to provide us with some comic relief. The aliens are here simply because they've discovered us and now they've discovered us, they're studying us, cataloguing us and probably_some of them are even poaching some of us.....

But that's just my take on it.....