An Athenian Diary

37

Aliens in Athens -- Terror at the American School

They will tell you with a straight face that aliens do not exist. The secret experimental laboratory at Area 51 is just a myth. No saucers have ever been captured by the American military. Our skies harbor no alien spaceships. Our minds are not subject to control by the rays projected from directed-beam devices. Our astonishing technological advances over the last sixty years did not result from the back-engineering of dark machines scavenged from crash sites in New Mexico, Arizona, and California. No secret negotiations, treaties, understandings, threats, or communications have ever passed back and forth between NORAD command headquarters in Colorado and bases on the moon. No artificial objects demonstrably not of earth origin have ever been detected in orbit. No astronaut has ever reported an alien face studying him with calculated coolness across a few meters of trans-earth space.

That's what they will tell you. But now the truth can be revealed -- it is all lies. They are here. We do not know precisely what they want, but we have clues. Their central interests revolve around a little-known American research facility in Athens, Greece. This so-called "American School of Classical Studies at Athens" feigns an innocent mission as trainer of new generations of classical archaeologists and transient home for researchers from America looking into such harmless diversions as Greek inscriptions and tholos tombs. But they always make the telling mistake. What does that "at" mean, anyway? It's not English -- it's the kind of little detail you miss when English isn't your native language. But then, what is your native language? What language would work like that? Perhaps an alien language?

Now the truth can be told, for they have made a big mistake. One of their number, temporarily immobilized by the time differential (the so-called "rocket lag") between there and here, was captured on camera. We hesitate to expose the public to the awful face of alien invasion, but public duty compels us. Look on the face of those who would be our masters, and tremble -- your fate is being written even now, as you read this, somewhere in the heart of Kolonaki, outpost of invaders from space.

In the last days, February 24, 2004

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