How To Survive An Alien Uprising

"Do aliens talk like this (high pitched squeal), or do aliens talk like this (low rumble)?"



Ainsley asked this at dinner last night, one of only about 500 questions about aliens we've gotten since Halloween. What do aliens eat? How do they sleep? Do they get cold? What does their skin feel like? And on and on and on.



Part of this is due to Ainsley watching a few minutes of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind before bed on Halloween, and part of it is due to her winning a little green alien figurine in a school game at her Halloween party. She has named the little green dude, "Ale-Wee" and carries him around from after supper until bedtime. She washes him at bath time and covers him with a Kleenex at night. For a cheap toy from Oriental Trading Co., he's getting a lot of mileage.



So since she's so curious about aliens, I want to give her an education about them. The following is everything I know about alien races courtesy of years of watching The Twilight Zone, The X-Files, Close Encounters, Alien and Aliens, John Carpenter's The Thing, and E.T., among others. Ains, it's time you learned the truth about your leetle green friend.



1. Most aliens want to take over your body, either via black oil, a worm placed carefully into the ear, or some other way which will enable said parasitic larvae to later pop unceremoniously from your torso and slither across the floor.



2. Even the ones who don't want to snatch your body and hatch a parasite there may want to further study you. Even the nice aliens have been known to use tractor beams to suck children up into the mother ship.



3. Some aliens are super nice, and mean you know harm, and just want to get home. But even those have been known to steal your toys to make elaborate telephones and to scare the bejeezus out of little sisters.

4. If Ale-Wee ever gets out of control, you can try a couple of different known alien-immobilizing tricks: stick a sharp instrument into the area where his head meets his spinal cord; throw a glass of water on him; aim a flame-thrower in his general direction (under parental supervision, of course.) One of these must do the trick.

Okay, kiddo! That pretty much covers it. Don't worry, though. If aliens do exist outside of movies, they probably wouldn't try to hurt us or take over our planet or laser-beam the White House. Probably. So have fun with your little alien, and enjoy the fact that your parents have thus far not allowed you to watch scary alien movies that forever scar you against short creatures with oversized eyes and overlong arms. Not that I know anybody whose parents did that or anything.