Abducting Aliens
A SubGenius Pastime Examined
by Rev. John Shirley
Church of the SubGenius

From The Excluded Middle #6
P.O.B. 1077, Los Angeles, CA 90048

"Shouldn't we be videotaping this?" I whispered.
"Fuzzes out on videotape. I did manage to get a few seconds of one of these little visits to come out," he said, barely audible, as he moved out the hole of the bunker. "Tried to sell it to Santilli. He got scared. Said the real stuff gave him the willies. Schnabel might report him to the Company. Asked me if I couldn't fake up one for him instead..."

There was no sense of being watched; WE were, I thought with a jolt of exhilaration, the watchers. WE were the researchers; WE were the experimenters; WE had turned the tables, like Lab Rats escaped from their cages to gnaw the faces of their white-coated tormentors.
 

Reverend Deathmonkey, he weighs about 300 lbs, he's got a big black beard matted with hamburger juice and twined with razor wire; when he's really partying he calls on Blackbeard, his ancient piratical ancestor, calls him for guidance the way an Injun calls on the Bear Spirit, and he puts thirteen little birthday cake candles in his beard and lights em up and his black eyes burn right through his shades. He's got most of his teeth but a lot of them got the crowns busted off when he did that "I can eat a whole damn Harley Davidson piece by piece" act that landed him in the hospital.

Today he's wearing overalls festooned with the butts torn from Barbie dolls, hung from safety pins. He's wearing snakeskin cowboy boots; he's wearing lipstick under his black mustache. He's missing three fingers, I should mention, from his left hand, something to do with "me and Survival Research getting too ambitious with them explosives one Saturday."

He smells like ... I veered my senses away from it. Some things man was not meant to know. Hell, he's Deathmonkey, and even "Bob" is in awe of the size of his willie.

Reverend Deathmonkey spotted the fire road through the Nitrous haze at the last moment and wrenched the vehicle hard to the right...

The Fugs first album -- thirty some years old -- was raving offkey in the tapedeck; he switched it off. And he cut the lights, rumbled the Buick through starlight and shadow between the mighty firs and acres of stumps, till we got to "Area Zero" -- a cow pasture.

He stopped the car, killed the engine, we clambered out and stood shivering in the October mountain air. I was shivering anyway -- Deathmonkey didn't seem to feel it. I mentioned three hundred pounds, did I mention that they're stacked up to six foot five? And when, like now, he puts on his high crown ten gallon hat, brought from back home in Dallas Texas, he's a living edifice close to seven feet vertical. Towering over me, he led the way through the brush along the edge of the cow pasture, outside the fence, muttering to himself as he went. Only thing I could make out was, "I'll make their succotash suffer..."

Then he vanished; three hundred pounds -- gone. Or he seemed to. I'd looked away, at the cattle milling in a sleeping group in this high mountain pasture (gov land provided free to a cattle outfit of course.) The animals should've been in a barn, at this hour, I'd have thought, but some were awake, and even grazing, and I started to ask Deathmonkey about it and ... he was gone.

Then I heard his voice coming from the ground. "Getcher ass in here. You want 'em to seeya, Harry Dickinbutt?" I've tried to persuade him for years not to call me Harry Dickinbutt, but he won't quit, damn his eyes.

I looked around and saw the hole in the hummock of earth to the right; glimpsed a bearsized figure moving around in there.

"DM?"

"I said getcher ass IN HERE." This is not an expression a bear would use, so I deduced it was Deathmonkey. I entered the bunker as he called it. It was actually a sort of duck blind of mud and sticks and shrubbery cuttings, something he'd erected a week before. The smell...

[...]

That's when the saucers came.

They were just bright stars at first, like satellites skating the ionosphere; then they got brighter, and closer, and took on shape. Two of them ... they were classic ET frisbees, maybe fifty feet in diameter, metallic, rims throbbing with a dull, inner light.

"Oh shit..."

"Quiet, Dickinbutt, Complete quiet."

The saucers danced like fireflies, for no damn reason I can imagine, then ... merged. They sucked into one another, like two blobs of mercury becoming one; yet the process looked as mechanical as it was fluid. And when they were combined they'd become a silvery hockey-puck shaped object, not glowing but somehow quite visible ... hovering about sixty feet over the cattle.

The cattle had stopped moving -- completely. They were like statues frozen into the field.

I watched. Not a tail twitched.

Rev. Deathmonkey was puttering with some of the equipment I couldn't clearly make out, cursing under his breath when he clanked a piece of metal.

The Greys...
 

What an alien might look like

They rode a shaft of light down like humanoid snowflakes, drifting to the edge of the clutch of cattle...

There were shiny instruments in their hands...

"Shouldn't we be videotaping this?" I whispered.

"Fuzzes out on videotape. I did manage to get a few seconds of one of these little visits to come out," he said, barely audible, as he moved out the hole of the bunker. "Tried to sell it to Santilli. He got scared. Said the real stuff gave him the willies. Schnabel might report him to the Company. Asked me if I couldn't fake up one for him instead..."

The night air outside the bunker was poignantly sweet, pregnant with electricity. We crept along through the brush, on hands and knees, to a place where a ditch ran under the wire. Icy water trickled through the ditch; I know it was icy because I followed Deathmonkey into it, crawling like a couple of scared GIs on our bellies, elbows and knees, fingers sluicing through the creek slime as we slipped under the wire into the field, the smell of cowpies, and another smell, burnt ozone, and that acrid, otherly scent of ... greys?

One of them was just up ahead, I could see his outsized head and scrawny shoulders just above the edge of the ditch. I though of that movie I'd seen as a kid, teenagers killed by cat-eyed, big-headed little men from outer space, the little men with alcohol-injecting claws... The Greys weren't cat-eyed. They were the Roswell aliens; they were Strieber's aliens. They were the very creatures whose likeness giddy saucerettes wear around their necks at Psychic Fairs -- creatures now using an impossibly prehensile dull grey metal instrument to ream out the ass of a paralyzed bovine.

Deathmonkey could move with astonishing quietude for a dude his size and stonedness. He slipped a little closer, a little closer to the nearest Grey ... who stood at a good distance from the others... As DM went he took a net out of his duffel, and his own metallic instrument: handcuffs. He handed me a ballgag.

I looked up at the slowly rotating hockey puck overhead; surely it must be aware of me? But perhaps it discounted me, I was just one more "cow," on an interstellar scale, and not to be taken seriously. Or perhaps our being in the ditch, below the level of the surface dirt, with the distracting vibes of the cattle around us, confused it's surveillance. There was no sense of being watched; WE were, I thought with a jolt of exhiliration, the watchers. WE were the researchers; WE were the experimenters; WE had turned the tables, like Lab Rats escaped from their cages to gnaw the faces of their white-coated tormentors.

And as this thought rippled through me The Reverend DM positioned his net, whipped a hand out like a bear slapping a fish from a river, and jerked the Grey by the ankles -- both of 'em -- off his feet, and backwards into the ditch ... and into the net. It made ONE squeaking sound before I jammed the ballgag into the little fucker's mouth. The alien cattle-mutilating instrument fell into the creek and spat a few sparks and then lay still; Deathmonkey shoved the instrument into the duffel, slung that over one shoulder, the struggling Grey over the other, and ran, hunched over, back along the ditch to the wire. He handed me the gear, slipped through the wire; I passed him the squirming alien, and followed, back to the bunker.

We kept it tied up good ... until the saucer left. "They'll be back for it," I said.

"Not for awhile. They're strange, socially. The ones we abducted in Arizona -"

"You did this before, in Arizona?"

"Oh sure, me and Stang and Sterno and Philo and Dr. Howl ... We did some of that toad squeezin' stuff, and went'n hung out at cattle mutilation sites ... took us three or four tries but we caught some of the little bastards ... took the saucers a while to come lookin' for em... We let 'em go. But not before. It's better'n cowtipping. Better'n putting gerbils up a Bobbie's ass. It's BIG fun, son. Watch this... Peel off that tacky silver suit it's got on there..."

"What if it sends a telepathic message?"

"It can't -- cause you got me here. America takes drugs in psychic defense. The stuff I took creates a sort of psychic backwash -- it's like white noise to them. They can't get their signals through for a good five yards around me.

"Do they bite?"

"No, they're wimps once you take away their damn gizmos... Lordy, this one's got some fine piece of rump there... You see that? They put on their interstellar ruling class airs, but they got butt-holes just like the rest of us... Mostly atrophied though because they don't eat solid food no more..."

The gag popped out of the creature's mouth while I was stripping it. It spoke ... with MY VOICE. Then with DM's. "You please can tell: what you do with me is?"

"Got my voice but not my diction," I muttered.

I jammed the ball back in and duct taped it in place.

It's skin was so slick, almost like balloon stuff ... under the silver suit I found no navel, and something that might be atrophied female genitals, and might not have been. It's four fingers had little pads on the end, sort of like tiny little blisters. It's eye coverings pulled off easy; it's eyes rolled with fear. I almost felt pity, but then I remembered all those cored out animals, all those hybrid human babies, all those abductees, poor Whitley getting things shoved up his butt...

Remembering that, I found the nearest appropriate instrument, which happened to be a crescent wrench, and shoved that up the creature's butt. It squeaked through the gag and writhed. But it seemed intrigued somehow.

Well, we did what SubG's do when they abduct aliens. We shoved things up their butts, we took samples of skin and Deathmonkey, who had experience with this, used a syringe to suck some kind of fluid from the little fold at the creature's crotch. He squirted this into a rubber-plugged test tube. We pretended to do all kinds of things to the critter, with Dustbusters, electric toothbrushes, blowdryers and rubber bands, but we didn't actually hurt the Grey physically.

I figure it got the point.

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