Alternative Fun Facts: Legal Aliens
No Sequel to This One | Fiction | Fresh Soup
When I was a kid, I loved sci-fi movies, especially ones with aliens. The first encounter with the aliens is a permanent fixture of those movies. Sometimes, like in E.T. or Alien, it’s face-to-face. But often, the first encounter is through a communication from space, which – depending on the film – might announce that the aliens are on their way and they come in peace, or that they’re coming to annihilate the human race. These encoded messages always struck me as a little bombastic. I've always imagined that in real life, our first transmission from an alien race would be more like an unboxing video of a flying saucer, or a selfie shot in a black hole. Unlike the B movies I watched in my childhood, real life is a complex web of hangups, desires and agendas. If any aliens do turn up in our part of the galaxy, it’ll probably be because they heard we have great dumplings, or because they’re just looking for a parking space.
On February 4, 2026, exactly three months after the longest screenwriters’ strike in history ended, the James Webb Space Telescope picked up what appeared to be the first documented extraterrestrial transmission in human history. After intensive decoding efforts by a team of linguists and mathematicians from top North American universities, the transmission was found to be a cease-and-desist letter from an alien attorney answering to the name of ‘Asa-Zurg.’ Zurg said his law office had been following the American film industry’s representation of aliens since its inception, and was appalled by the overwhelmingly negative portrayal of aliens as bloodthirsty killers. The lawyer claimed this constituted incitement against an entire population, and argued that the stereotypical, demeaning onscreen depiction of aliens was related to the fact that they were consistently played by human actors.