The chances of anything coming from Mars...

 I was cooking dinner the other night, and thought, yes, why not, I will grab out my almost mint copy of the Jeff Wayne concept album and settle it down onto the turntable, nice and smooth and careful, and drift the needle over into the first groove and listen to the deep silken tones of Richard Burton, before those amazing, never forgotten opening chords ring out from the speakers.

It is one of those stories that grab you, hold you, and carry you through to the end when, sorry spoilers, the Martian's get what's coming to them.

"No one would have believed ..."

And yet they did. They believed when Orson Welles kicked off his now infamous radio programme on October 30, 1938. Welles started the broadcast in similar tones to the Jeff Wayne album. Personally I think Richard Burton's intro is so much smoother. When you listen to the Orson Welles recording, freely available at Archive.org, you wonder why people went into hysteria. However, if you missed the first couple of minutes of it, then what you find yourself listening to is a program of dance music, that is interrupted by a news flash.

Now for breaking news ...

"Ladies and gentleman we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At twenty minutes before eight, central time, Professor Farrell of the mount Jennings observatory, Chicago Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving toward the earth at an enormous velocity. Professor Pearson at the observatory at Princeton confirms Farrell's observation and described the phenomenon as quote "Like a jet of blue flame shot from a gun," unquote. We now return you to the music ..."

And the show goes on, and people went nuts, believing that this was something that was really happening.

But it wouldn't happen now ...

No?

How often have you seen on the news, on social media the claim that there is a meteor heading straight for earth? Except, when you delve a bit deeper into the over hyped reporting, you discover that the meteor, or perhaps it's an asteroid, will pass by earth by a factor of millions upon millions of miles, and even though astronomers might call it a "near miss" none of us were in any real danger except perhaps as victims of journalistic zeal.

It's interesting isn't it, that even though we don't see Mars as any particular threat, not these days, there is still a deeply entrenched fear in us that we will be destroyed at any given moment by forces we do not and cannot understand. What is the cause of our fear?

Are we afraid of what will kill us, or is our fear intrinsic in death itself? I like my life, I don't want to die?

Some would argue that we are perpetuating the fear that was instilled in us by the cold war. The aliens became not Martian's but Communists. They are different from us. They must want to kill us so they can invade and take over, because where they live sucks.

They are so miserable they want to be us.

I am reminded of the pod people in the Invaders of the Body Snatchers, perhaps the ultimate alien invasion movie. (I am referring to the original movie here, not the disaster of a remake.) It was made in 1956, the same year as the now famous War of the World movie, and captures much of the post war paranoia that was peculating through American society at the time. At the end of the day, it wasn't the Martians that worried us, not really, it wasn't the monster from the deep abyss that scared us, no, although those were the personifications of what mattered to us. No, our fear lay in what we would lose, our lifestyles, our homes, our families, our identities, who we are and who we want to be. What would be taken away from us was our freedom.

Do we come to hate the aliens? I am not sure. We don't understand them, so we are afraid of who and what they are? We are afraid of what they will do to us, the pain and anguish they will cause. But do we hate them? We know that they hate us, otherwise why are they doing what they are doing? But we are the ones who have to stand above the moral quagmire of alien-ness, even if what we do and say and think aren't squeaky clean.

So the Marians are still there, they are still in our collective imaginations, they still observe us and draw their plans against us.

And here is my thought, this happens only because we let it.