Letter Never Sent

I was thinking about alien abductions the other day while I was driving around. It has always puzzled me that abductees seem to report similar accounts, especially when it comes to physical descriptions of the aliens themselves. Basically, these nocturnal, body-snatchers are always strangely humanoid in appearance: laterally symmetrical, bipedal, possessing large craniums, large stereoscopic eyes, and slender limbs with articulated hands and fingers. This has always seemed strange. After all, why would a being from another world possess a similar appearance to our own? It could easily look like a giant crab or something. It seems unlikely. Yet, this common description also suggests that there is some shared dimension to each individual abduction story. Either the abductees are making up or remembering similar experiences, or, the aliens, if they exist in any fashion manufactured or otherwise, are humanoid in appearance. There are two basic possibilities: abductees are wrong (for whatever reason) or these abductions occurred in some sense.

If we break it down further, these abductions, if based on memories, could be explained in order of increasing strangeness or practical likelihood by different theories. The reasonability of each theory is determined by your particular world view. For example, assuming the abduction memory is based on an actual experience you could posit multiple scenarios:

Scientific explanations:

• Psychological explanation: Repressed and recovered memory An alien abduction experience could be the outgrowth of a repressed memory of an actual physical molestation by a human being, either in sleep or during childhood. The abductee could be ‘remembering’ the repressed memory of the experience in a more psychologically comprehensible way. These memories could also be faulty as is the case in many instances of recovered memory. “An experiment conducted by Harvard psychologists suggests that people who believe they have been abducted by extraterrestrials, when they try to recall a word list, make the same kinds of errors as people with recovered memories of childhood sexual molestation. The psychologists conclude that these two experiences have common roots.”
• Psychological explanation #3: Sleep paralysis One of the most prevalent and compelling theories for abduction narratives is the possibility that alien abductions are dream-like hallucinations induced by episodes of sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis occurs when the brain is awakened from a REM state into essentially a normal fully awake state, but the bodily paralysis is still occurring:
  

  In a typical sleep-paralysis episode, a person wakes up paralyzed, senses a presence in the room, feels fear or even terror, and may hear buzzing and humming noises or see strange lights. A visible or invisible entity may even sit on their chest, shaking, strangling, or prodding them. Attempts to fight the paralysis are usually unsuccessful. It is reputedly more effective to relax or try to move just the eyes or a single finger or toe.

  Spanos et al. (1993) have pointed out the similarities between abductions and sleep paralysis. The majority of the abduction experiences they studied occurred at night, and almost 60 percent of the “intense” reports were sleep related. Of the intense experiences, nearly a quarter involved symptoms similar to sleep paralysis.

  I found this especially interesting because I did experience an episode of sleep paralysis about ten years ago. The details here are very similar to my own experience. I did awake with fear into a semi-conscious dream state and did sense the presence of someone else, although in my case I thought someone was jiggling the handle of my front door and found myself unable to rise out of bed to investigate or fight them off. I struggled to move, but could only barely move my lips and a finger on my right hand. This inability to move while you think someone is breaking into your apartment is very disconcerting.

  Since I’m reading Moby Dick, here’s an episode of sleep paralysis depicted in the book:

  At last I must have fallen into a troubled nightmare of a doze; and slowly waking from it - half steeped in dreams - I opened my eyes, and the before sun-lit room was now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, s%emed closely seated by my bedside. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be broken. I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from me; but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very hour, I often puzzle myself with it.

  Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg’s pagan arm thrown round me. But at length all the past night’s events soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to the comical predicament. For though I tried to move his arm - unlock his bridegroom clasp - yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain.

Unscientific explanations:

• Science-fiction explanation: Real aliens Although prudence dictates otherwise, it is possible that aliens exist and, for reasons unknown, delight in kidnapping earthlings for a few hours of licentious and/or scientific probing. Never long enough for anyone else to notice.

  From a “Kids in the Hall” skit: Alien: “We’ve been abducting and anally probing these humans for decades now, and the only thing we’ve learned is that one out of ten enjoys it.”

• Science-fiction explanation #2: Hypersapiens My personal favorite (I swear I came up with this before The Tick episode: “Tick vs. Prehistory, The: (Episode 35 [34])). Alien abductions are being performed by evolved descendants of humanity who need something from modern humans. In The Tick, the hypersapiens need waiters for their restaurants, but if aliens are evolved humans maybe they seek ancestral DNA or something else they can only get by traveling to the past. This would explain why the aliens look humanoid. If we evolved along with our development and use of advanced technology we could become large-headed, skinny dudes due to the lack of intense physical exertion and interaction with the environment.
• Conspiracy theory: Secret authoritarian plots. Conspiratorially-minded people sometimes attribute UFO sightings and abductions to secretive government programs. This seems more plausible for UFO sighting since these could be explained by secret test flights of new military technology.

One last thing, how do you reconcile the common alien descriptions with the sleep paralysis / recovered memory theories? One way is to attribute the common physical descriptions of the aliens to depictions in popular culture of alien lifeforms that may influence memory and recall in the group who report alien abduction memories. This is very plausible. However, what if another factor affecting these descriptions is related to how our own minds process the senses, especially vision. We know that our minds are attuned to faces and hands more so than other parts of the body like knees, etc. What if when we have to make up a person in our mind, we use a descriptive, visual shorthand: eyes, face, hands, and the rest that connects it all together?

What if when our minds are storing/creating these memories they focus mainly on information related to the face and hands? Human aspects that our brains are attuned to (see sensory homunculous). I don’t think most of us are internally creative enough to completely create a new type of creature completely foreign from experience. We use what’s nearby, our shared cultural / media experiences, and our normal shorthand for remembering people.

My voice mail at work is set up so when I get a message it’s sent to my email as an attachment. When I get back to my desk I just play the file on my computer to hear the message. No need to navigate the voice mail system via the telephone. It’s easy.

The only problem with this is if I’m on my Blackberry I can’t just open the .wav file from the email and listen to the message, although I can open other attachments. Wav files just don’t work that way in Blackberry OS 4.1. The Blackberry 8800 will have this ability supposedly, but the 8700 does not. Since I’d much rather open the recorded file on the handheld than call my corporate voice mail, this is not fun.

Ironically, you can play .wav files from the web browser. So, we can use a workaround. If you want to be able to get your voice mail .wav files to play on the Blackberry do the following:

1. Create an Outlook rule or email filter to automatically forward the email from your voice mail system to your Gmail account.
2. Go into your Blackberry Browser options and set the Emulation to “Microsoft IE”. You have to do this to get the normal Gmail interface, otherwise Gmail will try to serve you the mobile version of Gmail.
3. Now when you receive a voice mail notification on your Blackberry, open up the browser and log in to your web mail.
4. Open the notification message and use the link to download the attachment. It should start playing in the media player as soon as it downloads completely.

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The Blackberry is the best smartphone currently available. Period. If you’ve ever used a Treo, Motorola Q, and a Blackberry, you know this. There’s no point in even debating it. That being said, there are a few things that have been missing from the Blackberry that everyone else has, like a built-in camera, for example. There’s a reason for this, however. Since Blackberry is the dominant platform among big business and government they’ve been reluctant to include anything that could compromise security or even create this perception…like a built-in camera or removable storage.

One of the biggest selling points for the Blackberry is that it’s an integrated hardware-software solution. In other words, Research in Motion develops both the hardware and the software, rather than just making the device you could run Windows Mobile on a la the Motorola Q. This makes the Blackberry very stable and usable. Another cool thing about the Blackberry from the standpoint of large organizations is that they can be remotely wiped (like if you lost it) and each functional piece of the device can be locked down by the admin. In some organizations, you might disable web browsing or copy/pasting, for example. Even though each piece can be locked down, Blackberry couldn’t just release an enterprise-level version that came ONLY with a camera as they did with the prosumer-targeted Pearl. This could potentially alienate large, security-conscious customers who want mobile email, but don’t want anyone taking photos and leaking stuff they shouldn’t. So, with the Blackberry 8800 slated for Spring 2007 release they came up with the perfect solution: make two models of the same device. One with a camera, one without. Genius!

This makes me very glad since I want both a camera and the full-qwerty keyboard available on the 8800. And as someone who owns a few shares of RIMM, I also don’t want them to drive off large government contracts.

As an aside, I have to say that RIMM’s management has really been doing a great job. They’re crushing the competition and releasing great products.

Last Wednesday started out like any other day. I went to work, stayed a while, then I got in my car and went home. I drove about three blocks when I heard the telltale woof-woof-woof sound of a flat tire. Flats always suck, but it’s not a huge biggie to change one. I had run the rear tires bald hotrodding and driving all over creation so it was not a total surprise. I did chastise myself for my usual stupid procrastination. I’m apparently motivated more by necessity than a desire to avoid potential catastrophe and aggravation.

I limped into the nearest parking lot, took all the necessary crap out of my trunk, stripped down to my undershirt, and got to work. I had a couple floor mats in the trunk so I took one out to have something to kneel on as I changed the tire. A cold front started to blow through as I popped the hub cover out of the wheel. I noticed that in addition to the usual lugs, I had a locking lug in place. Locking lugs are a common anti-theft measure for alloy wheels. They cannot be loosened without a lug lock key. I had the same thing on my Saturn, so I started looking in the usual places. Glovebox, trunk, ashtray, console. Nope. Then I started looking on the ground around the car in case I had somehow dropped it out while removing everything from the trunk. Nope. Without the lug key, there was no way to change the tire. I was stuck.

I decided I’d better drive the car back to the parking garage at work, so I wouldn’t get towed from where I was. That’s where I left it. The next day I borrowed Jody’s car and drove around to various Ford dealers around Dallas to see what I needed to do. The consensus seemed to be that I had two options: order a replacement key and wait for it, or have the car towed to the dealer where they could remove the lug locks with a master key set or by brute force. The second option would have required getting the car towed and paying for a new lock set and the labor to remove the lugs. Ugh. I was going to try finding another key first.

At Bankston Ford off loop LBJ, I told my story to the older gentleman in the parts department. He nodded sympathetically and pulled a cardboard box out from under the counter and said I was welcome to look through all the spare lug keys he had. I had a digital photo of the lug in the event I had to find a key, and I ended up finding a couple that looked like they might work. He said I could take them with me to try out. There was an unspoken understanding that I would bring them back when I was done, but it reminded me that there are still people in the world who honor strangers with their trust. Almost as if my magic, my view of the situation brightened and I even started to think better of Ford as a company, since they must be alright to have such good people working for them. There’s a lesson there for business.

Even though the keys didn’t fit I was on the right track. I found out that instead of ordering through the dealership I could order directly from the manufacturer, a company called McGard, who specializes in lug locks and other forms of asset protection. This was a painless process. All I had to do was take a photo of the locking lug, email it to their customer support staff, and they would match it and overnight a key out to me. They got it to me in less than 24 hours. Once I got the key I changed the tire and went out to get all new tires and a full-size spare. The cost of the key and overnight shipping came to $30. Much better than a tow to the dealer, a new lock set, and an hour of labor to remove the locks.

Obvious lessons learned or remembered:

1. Don’t be too cynical about people. They will surprise and shame you with their generosity.
2. Necessity and thriftiness will motivate you to find optimal solutions. Don’t settle for what a few people tell you.
3. Make sure you know where your lug lock key is before you need it, especially if you’re buying a used car. Keep it in safe place and make sure you get it back any time you have work done. Also, don’t keep it in your glovebox like everyone else. This is the first place thieves look.
4. The price of tires and assorted services (balance, warranty, alignment) can be negotiated. My favorite negotiating tactic is to not say anything when I hear the price. Just try to seem silently unsatisfied like you’re thinking. I saved about $100 this way, but who knows how much mark-up there is on tires. All I know is I didn’t pay what I would have had I just went along.