Interview Number 14
by William Kitcher
Transcript of Interview Number 14 (H-08-401-1527276-Int14), conducted May 15, 2136, by Emma Watts, Researcher, University of British Columbia Point Grey History Department. We are fortunate to have Mr. Kitcher, now 101 years old, as a participant in our survey as he was one of the first to make contact with an alien.
Mr. Kitcher: Someone at the History Department at UBC contacted me about this whole alien business. I don’t know why. Let things be. Why do you care? Surely you have enough to go on from the net or wherever.
Emma Watts: We wanted to get personal reminiscences. What we already have is factual and historical, although we clearly don’t know exactly what happened or why.
Mr. Kitcher: OK. That doctor who visited me last week, he was a nice fella.
Emma Watts: Dr. Sivakumaran.
Mr. Kitcher: Yeah, that’s it. He sure asked me some funny questions.
Emma Watts: He was just testing your memory.
Mr. Kitcher: I guess I did pretty well.
Emma Watts: You sure did.
Mr. Kitcher: Well, for what it’s worth, this is what I remember. I remember the day distinctly because it was my birthday. It was an odd day all around.
Emma Watts: What day was that, Mr. Kitcher?
Mr. Kitcher: Wednesday, I think.
Emma Watts: No, I mean, can you remember the date?
Mr. Kitcher: Oh, right. Well, that’d be September 14th. In ’70. Anyway, it was an odd day because I remember waking up feeling happy. That’s a pretty weird feeling for me, as lots of people, including my wife, could tell you. I’m definitely not a morning person, so I’m glad you’re visiting me in the afternoon.
Anyway, at the time, I was never very happy having birthdays. It just reminded me of how old I was getting. Now, at my age, I don’t care, but back then, turning 35 was a pain in the ass. But that day was different. There were none of those minor hassles that aggravate someone who isn’t a morning person or perhaps there were, but they didn’t bother me like they usually did. The dog didn’t wake us up too early to be let out. Jean, my wife, didn’t chatter away as she usually did, because she was a morning person, and our kids didn’t complain about anything at all.
Emma Watts: What are the names of your children and how old were they at the time?
Mr. Kitcher: Erin and Sam. I guess Erin would have been about 14 and Sam about 12. Anyway, they weren’t arguing as usual. So I went to work — I remember the crossword puzzle on the subway came really easily to me — and at work, everyone was in good spirits. Unusually.
At some point that morning, someone noticed that above the city, from horizon to horizon, were thousands of spaceships, hovering. All different sizes and shapes. Thousands! Flying saucers, they once called them. Did you ever see the movie Earth vs. the Flying Saucers?
Emma Watts: No, I haven’t.
Mr. Kitcher: Pretty good if you like that kind of thing. Anyway, we looked at all those spaceships. You’d’ve thought that at least one person would start panicking, and go out and buy a gun or something. Or go get provisions and hole up in a sealed bunker, but no one did. Everyone was very calm, and we just stared at the spaceships.
As we found out later, no one panicked at all. Anywhere. We also found out later that the armed forces’ jets had been scrambled but rather than attacking, they merely flew around and between the spaceships and just watched. That was weird for the military.
We went on the net and turned on TVs and radios, and we learned that the spaceships had appeared all around the world in the millions, and that no one had panicked. Not a single person! It was as if the aliens had launched a peaceful beam at the planet to make everyone calm.
Jean was home that day, and I called her, and asked her if she was watching the spaceships. She said she was, and that one of the little ones had landed in our backyard!
It knocked down part of the fence and completely ruined my green beans. Where was I? Oh, yes.
For a few days, maybe a week, I’m not sure now, nothing happened with the spaceships; they just hovered there, all around the world and, as nothing continued to happen, or not happen as the case may be, we Earthlings just returned to our regular lives, doing what we would normally do, except that everything had changed in that people got along. The crime rate dropped to almost nothing, there were no fights to speak of, and even some wars just stopped!
No one argued because it seemed there was nothing to argue about. No one complained about poor service or poor food in restaurants because there was no longer any poor service or poor food. People were polite to each other, letting other cars in front of them in traffic, holding doors open for everyone, giving up their seats on subways to elderly and disabled people and pregnant women.
Emma Watts: Was there any response from governments?
Mr. Kitcher: Good question. I’m not sure. I don’t think much. I remember that the United Nations designated the Swedish ambassador to the U.N., Matthias Nilsson — I remember his name because he used to be a hockey player — Nilsson was supposed to be the Earth’s contact with the aliens. As usual, no one could figure out why the UN thought they were so important, why Nilsson would be the representative, or how they were going to achieve contact with the aliens, and consequently nothing happened.
I think various people and organizations beamed messages at the spaceships, in all kinds of languages, even Esperanto and Morse. Not sure what they thought that would do. People put up “Welcome” signs on their roofs but the aliens didn’t react as far as I know. I think our government was pretty useless at the time, much like they are now.
Emma Watts: What did you and your family do during this time?
Mr. Kitcher: Not a hell of a lot. We’d sit in the backyard looking at the little spaceship. Occasionally, we’d go over and touch it, looking for some kind of door or portal but we never found one.
Emma Watts: Can you describe what the spaceship was like?
Mr. Kitcher: Yeah, it was a little disk, about three meters in diameter, a couple of meters high in the middle, silver-coloured, and it felt kind of silky and metallic at the same time. Weird. Soft and hard at the same time, you know? So we’d just sit there on our back porch, feeling peaceful, enjoying each other’s company. I remember we laughed a lot.
(At this point, a nurse came to Mr. Kitcher’s room, and gave him a Scotch.)
Mr. Kitcher: Ah, that’s lovely! Are you sure you don’t want one? Anyway, where was I?
Emma Watts: The disk was in your backyard.
Mr. Kitcher: That’s right. This went on for months. Nothing happened. And it was the same for everyone else in the world. The aliens made no effort to contact anybody. Perhaps they decided that their influence on us to clean up our act was enough.
And it turned out to be that. People just stopped fighting wars. It wasn’t as if any of them started to agree with what the other side was fighting for; it was just that the effort it took to keep fighting just didn’t make any sense anymore. Peace treaties were signed, armies disarmed, some of them even disbanded entirely.
Even the most repressive and regressive of governments, like those idiots in... Ah, it doesn’t matter. They diverted the military funds to environmental issues, social services. And they even fixed potholes. Granville was finally a good road to drive on!
Corporations talked to each other about creating the best possible products at cheap prices. No more competition; they all co-operated. Things were good.
Emma Watts: Did you wonder why the aliens didn’t directly contact anyone?
Mr. Kitcher: Oh yeah, sure. We all wondered, of course, but somehow it didn’t seem important. You know, you’d think that the uncertainty about the aliens and why they didn’t show themselves to us would have created some restlessness among people but that never seemed to happen.
Some people speculated that there were no aliens inside the spaceships, that the disks were all there were, perhaps sent by an alien civilization to bring peace to Earth, or perhaps the disks were the aliens themselves — a species that evolved in a completely different way than on Earth. We know now that wasn’t true.
Emma Watts: When did things change for you?
Mr. Kitcher: Well... one night many months later, I was lying in bed, thinking about how good things were, but I couldn’t sleep, so I got out of bed, went to the backyard, sat in the swing on our porch, and looked at the disk.
And I heard a slight hum coming from the disk. It began to shimmer and then slowly a type of door opened, more like a ramp than a door, and out came something.
It’s hard to describe what it looked like. It was humanoid but not humanoid. It was animal but not. It was distinct but not. What I remember is a shape that didn’t appear to have any form at all, but of course it must have had one.
It seemed to be surrounded by a kind of mist but yet a mist that had clear lines to it. Weird. It appeared to have a head and arms and legs but, as I say, I couldn’t really be sure of that. It was about five and a half feet tall and, if it had been human, would have weighed about 110 pounds.
It walked or perhaps glided down the ramp, then came over and sat beside me on the swing. It had features on what was its “face” although, even now, I don’t know what they were. An even stronger sense of peacefulness came over me, and I felt — don’t laugh — I felt love from the alien and, what was weird, I felt lust towards this amorphous blob. I sensed it was a female, though why I thought that, I have no idea.
Copyright © 2021 by William Kitcher
