Is There Anybody Out There? - Alien Encounters

Personalised Calendars are one of the greatest underrated presents. No, really they are! When you open yours up, probably along with a selection box on Christmas morning, you might scratch your head, but by January the 3rd, you've already added so many important things to your 12 identical personalised calendars that you can barely contain your excitement.

Okay, that's silly. Maybe not 12, maybe 3, but still, personalised calendars are a popular gift for a reason. They're useful and unlike their tacky, plain, impersonal counterparts, personalised calendars are just that, they are personal. They speak directly to the person they're intended for and they say something meaningful. If, however, your gift recipient is a UFO chasing, Sci-fi loving, obsessive conspiracy theorist, a personalised calendar probably won't say anything meaningful to them. Apart from their name and of course 'keep looking, the truth is out there.'

Picking up an Alien Encounters personalised calendar for your mad Alien-fan friend, is a good idea for a few reasons. He or she cannot forget important dates this way (Birthdays, Anniversaries, Funerals) and he or she can also make a mark on the calendar whenever there's a new UFO sighting to see any possible patterns emerging!

UFOs and UAPs
The truth is out there and according to some theorists, as long ago as 467 BC, Chinese astronomers recorded some odd aerial phenomena. This nowadays would likely be referred to as 'UFOs'. These ancient astronomers would log the information on their personalised calendars (no, seriously!) and they wrote at length about the strange objects which they would see in the sky. One Chinese astronomer even described an object looked like a giant pearl. He went on to say that this opened up and shone a bright line of light down on to the earth.

UFO only really stands for Unidentified Flying Object, but because in recent years it has been used as a synonym for spacecrafts, the military tend to use UAP to describe the odd flying things they can't identify these days. UAP stands for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, which means exactly the same as UFO, but it doesn't carry the same stigma.

Being that the main part of UFO is the word 'unidentified' most rationalists' say that Aliens are not out there and that really most UFOs could be anything from wayward children's balloons to gas pockets.

Swamp Ghosts and Space Crafts
Did you know, for example, that ghostly lights often hover over marsh and bog land in the night? These are called 'will-o'-the-wisp' and they're believed to be made of swamp gasses. The scientific explanation for the lights is that a combination of chemicals such as methane gases produced from rotting organic matter and hydrogen phosphate create the floating lights.

Italian chemists have actually replicated the process by adding chemicals to the gasses made from rotting meats and vegetation and proven how easily these ghostly lights can occur. So that might account for floating things which light up, but what about abductions?

Alien Abductions
People who are abducted by Aliens are named 'abductees' or 'experiencers' in UFO enthusiast circles. In the rest of the world, they're known as crackpots! However, some crackpots have made very strong cases over the years that support the existence of extra-terrestrials.

The first ever widely publicised Alien Abduction was of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961 and they claimed that they were able to communicate with the Aliens who abducted them. Betty famously said that she asked where the Alien examining her was from and that it showed her a map of the Zeta Reticuli star system which would take about 1 billion years to reach from planet earth.

Both Betty and Barney Hill were holding respectable jobs as a Social and Postal Worker. They were on local community boards such as the NAACP and the U.S Civil Rights Commission. They claimed to be abducted while driving home from a vacation and reported seeing lights in the sky followed by an odd flying object. They stopped the car to let the dog get some fresh air and to see if they could identify it.

Soon they were driving again and frightened because the car began to shake oddly, as if an electrical current were running through it. Both Barney and Betty then reported a period of lapsed consciousness before they remember driving again and getting home a full 7 hours later than they should have. Following the experience, Betty began to have bad dreams, which she regarded as flashbacks of an Alien examination, and soon the couple was famous.

If you decide to give your loved ones the Alien Encounters personalised calendars this year, they probably won't get famous as a result, but they can certainly be a little more 'out-there'…