Chapter 1 (Now)

At the age of 34, I feel older than I am, or look. Its a vague sort of tiredness. I'd crammed too much living into too few decades. This tiredness does 2 things to me: it makes me flaky, and it makes me lazy. 

Tonight I was supposed to help my oldest child with a report. He chose to do his report on the 4 kinds of alien encounters. I don't know where he gets his tenacity for the strange. Oh, wait, yes I do. I myself am strange and unusual. (High five if you get the reference.) That being said, at 9 I don't think I was that weird. Weirdest of all is that he's also crazy popular, one of the cool kids. I never was. But when you have children, you learn 2 very important lessons about other humans that tear their way out of your body. You learn that you actually know nothing about who you are as a person. And you learn that these tiny creatures that you feel absolute possession over are not, in fact, you or yours to possess. 

I've spent the last 2 and a half hours pouring over every kind of alien conspiracy theory I can find on the internet. Yes, it started out as basic 4th grade sort of research on alien encounters. But that flaky, lazy chick I told you about has a touch of what can only be described as Task Onset Procrastination Based Attention Deficit Disorder. The advent of the Interwebz has only exacerbated that condition. Pregnancy brain, that tendency to literally forget how to be a person while growing another person, basically rounds out the trifecta of reasons to browse alien conspiracies for a ridiculous amount of time. Have you ever read about aliens for 2 and a half hours? You start to wonder what planet you're even on. Or in, if the theory of concave Hollow Earth hold any water. In case you didn't know, that is a theory that we are actually living inside of a Hollow Earth looking out into the outside of the world which to us looks like space? 

It is somewhere between the Ananuki, or angel aliens, and the subterranean lizard people that I first encounter the term hybrid. And it send deep shivers through me. I chalk it up to tile floora and an often too cold central AC unit. I don't think much past that shiver. Not yet. But what I do, is finish my son's research and then pass out on the couch during the evening news. I don't even wake up when hysteria starts to set in around the globe. I don't even wake up when my kids are all sitting in the living room watching TV, having been stirred from sleep by the noise on TV. My oldest wakes me up when my youngest, my 3yo, is crying in fear. When I wake up, I think a sci-fi movie is playing. But it's reality. And we have officially been visited.