Harlan Ellison's Watching...

Harlan Ellisonr Sometimes I think we should just turn it over to the cockroaches a nd to hell with it, ya' know? On other days, something really fine will happen, and I'll think, 'Yeah, give us another-another-another few centuries.' But I don't understand this Roswell thing; I just don't understand it.

I mean, there's a lot of things in this life I don't understand: I don't understand Garth Brooks, I don't understand 'Hot Pockets', I don't know how anybody can eat those things-- but listen to this, this is off the Reuter's News Service.

This just came in today as I'm doing this. It says that they have discovered, that for a few seconds, there's a burst of gamma radiation that comes from a star 7 billion light years away, 7 billion light years away, in other words, what we're seeing, this energy, which is, which is according to the people at the Kit's Peak Observatory in Palomar, they were able to pin down the location of this radiation source, and it's 7 billion light years away, and it says that these radio signals are unlike anything that they've ever seen before, but it produces more energy than is radiated in a century by the billions of stars in the Milky Way. That we're talking about some source out there, that they are able now to quantify, that produces more energy than all the stars produce in a century in our Milky Way, and I look at that and I say, ‘What an astonishing species we are. How incredibly bright we are. How smart, how clever we are.’

I get Science News every week. I look at this, they found Philadelphia last week an audience of showmen gasped as paleontologists unveiled a six-foot long model skull showing Gigantasaurus caroloni, a dinosaur that surpassed T-Rex in size. Lived hundreds of millions of years ago in the, in the, in the Jurassic-Mesozoic, and I look at this stuff and I say, ‘Why do people really believe that in 1947, a flying saucer fell in Roswell, New Mexico, so that, so that 150 thousand people, a low guestimate of how many people this year are going to go to Roswell, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of this delusion?’

Now 1947, it’s two years before my dad died, I was in, I was in Junior High School, and I remember when Kenneth Arnold, this pilot, said he had been buzzed by an object; the word flying saucer didn’t even exist at that point, been buzzed by it. Comes 1949, 1950, early sixties, we get these books by George Adamski, and Donald E. Keho. Flying Saucers are Real. The Flying Saucers Have Landed. And now 150,000 plus people are going to go to Roswell this year, and in fact, this channel whose name I refuse to speak on pain of having my fingernails yanked out, they’re going there to cover this.

Cover this?! Cover what?! You don’t go to Palomar to cover the fact that they’ve discovered this burst of incredible gamma ray energy, from billions of light years away. Sci-Fi Channel doesn’t go to Philadelphia to cover the opening of the Gigantasaurus caroloni. No, what it covers, is craziness. It covers the kind of crap that we saw in "Independence Day". You people really got me spooked. I mean, I feel like an outsider.

People say, "What is your opinion of the human race?"

Well, as an outsider, let me tell ya, the cockroaches are starting to look good to me.

You guys gotta wise up. Pretty quick, time is running out on us. We haven’t got time for the dancing madness of the Middle Ages. We haven’t got time for the Tulip Festival, where you’re going to, ya know, lose all your money. We have not got time for all these people who believe in all of this childhood regression crap; that they were molested and don’t seem to remember it. I mean, I remember any time I got the crap kicked out of me when I was a kid.

There’s a lot of strange mass hysteria stuff going on, and Roswell, Roswell is the king of it all, or the queen of it all, or the transvestite of it all, I don’t know what. But it is a weirdness that I urge you people, please keep it in context.

We can watch "The X-Files," and we can enjoy it, it’s fiction, it’s just fiction. And when poor, deluded people who have no contact with the real Earth, want to talk to you about alternate Earths where they’ve been taken by flying saucers. I told you what happened to those people at Rancho Santa Fe. I keep warning you.

I keep talking to you, not because I’m such a terrific person, but because I’m the voice of sanity, and I’m the last one on this planet.

From Sci-Fi Buzz, episode unknown

Publishing Rights to 'Harlan Ellison's Watching' copyright 1996 the Killimanjaro Corporation.


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