Last night the Russian lover and I were sitting out on the fire escape when we saw something in the sky that looked like a flash of lightening.  At first.  Except for the strange way that it flickered and glowed behind the clouds just above us, with no thunder to be heard.  First it appeared behind this cloud, then that one and that one.  Finally the glow pulsed between two points in the same cloud, going off and on and back and forth for a few seconds before disappearing entirely.

Neither of us could identify what exactly it was to our satisfaction, and one of us has an advanced science education.

One time when I was a kid, riding along in the car with my mom, we saw something streak across the sky overhead.  It was bright and almost green, seeming to explode on the horizon.  Given the global tensions at that time (is there ever a time without global tension?), we were completely freaked out.  An object like that could only be a missile or an alien spacecraft.  Since nothing in the Western hemisphere blew up that night, we decided we’d seen a UFO.

A few years later, sitting in Astronomy 101, I learned that what we’d actually seen was a bolide; ie, a fireball meteor.  Nothing extraordinary, just something not often seen over the mIdatlantic.  I was quite disappointed to realize that my UFO was now an IFO.

Stephen Hawking is right about aliens, of course.  Wanting aliens to show up in their super-awesome spacecraft with their super-advanced technology and totally foreign biology would be like Native Americans wanting the Europeans to show up with their guns and their smallbox and their disingenuous swagger.  The clash of civilizations always has winners and losers, and  human civilization is in no position to emerge victorious in an encounter with anyone capable of crossing the vast reaches of spacetime.

We are so pleased with ourselves for putting that robot on our neighbor planet, but as far as potential civilizations in the universe go we haven’t even reached the milestone of rolling onto our belly.  If some alien race showed up, it would be like a meeting between a diapered week-old infant and Einstein.  If we’re so lucky. In which case the worst that will happen is that they’ll coochy-coo us, maybe play peek-a-boo for a bit, and then hand us back to ourselves when they get bored.

Unfortunately, it seems far more likely that such a meeting would resemble Genghis Khan encountering a squalling infant in the course of a terror campaign, in which case we would simply be put out of our misery and snuffed out of existence altogether.

Or maybe the aliens would be like democrats, benevolent would-be dictators who just want to push us around for our own good and keep us in line for the collective good.  We’d even be allowed to try and contribute in the advanced realms, the recipients of some sort of galactic affirmative action.

Not to worry. I’m sure there is some entirely rational, dull explanation for those lights we — and everyone else who sees such things — saw in the sky.  But in the meantime I’m being fitted for my tinfoil hat.