Alien-A-Day

I began this Fun-a-Day project just wanting to draw some interesting creatures or monsters and thought that using aliens as a theme would bring with it some fun and interesting results. For a long time now I have been interested in supernatural and paranormal experience. I find it interesting how it relates to different cultural phenomenon like our mythologies and folkloric traditions. in my month long odyssey into the world of UFO and alien experience, I discovered that it is no less rich a genre of human experience than that of any other more widely excepted form of strange and unusual adventure storytelling throughout the ages.

I get the impression that most people's perception of aliens and UFO's is that it is a phenomenon whose origins are rooted in the 20th century, especially the years following World War II. The case seems to be, however, that it is something that has been with us since humanity's beginning. It is true that encounters are much more highly documented these days but that is most likely because we have the technology with which to do so and the ever growing ability to share information more widely and rapidly. There are those who argue that some prehistoric cave paintings document early human encounters with extra-terrestrials, which seems as good an explanation as any for the eons old artwork (I think it is the popular belief that this art is based in prehistoric religion and hunting rites but the truth is we just can't know what they were for, it could be storytelling, amusement, scientific, etc). UFO encounters were documented in medieval and renaissance period writing and artwork. The occurrences have always been worldwide, with sightings ranging from early china, japan, the middle east, africa, the pacific islands, the americas, and so on.

I think it highly probable that there is other life in the universe, the odds are in favor of it. There are just too many billions of stars, and astronomers are finding more and more solar systems all the time. Going by those odds, the chance of there being at least one civilization technologically advanced enough to be able to reach out to other worlds seems quite possible. Some make the argument that what aliens are supposedly capable of: faster than light travel, or inter-dimensional travel, among many other feats, is impossible based on physical laws. I would argue that we, though advancing rapidly, are very young scientifically. And after all, our own science strives towards achieving these same seemingly impossible goals, working on cracking everything from invisibility to time travel, who's to say some other culture hasn't achieved what we are trying to do every day. Relatively speaking, we just recently realized it possible to send a person to our own moon, and people have always dreamed of much more!

Out of any event that deals in paranormality, in my observation, the study of UFO/alien experience has yielded the most credible evidence (once you weed out the obvious and admitted hoaxes). This comes in the form of video, photography, and eyewitness accounts. It is hard to say whether these things are true or not, but something does seem to be happening. In any case, there are many thousands of people who have seen things they can't explain conventionally and have had nothing to gain (in some cases quite the contrary) from sharing their experiences. I for one am not prepared to call them all liars, or argue that psychological disturbance, physical affliction, or misinterpretation can account for all instances of what people have claimed to experience.

The following are my interpretations of thirty one different aliens, based on eyewitness sketches and testimony (I referred to other artwork based on accounts used for newspapers and other media when eyewitness sketches weren't available and i found the subject too interesting not to cover).

NOTE: the main sources I used for research include the following websites: ufoevidence.org, abovetopsecret.com, ufoinfo.com, and noufors.com (Northern Ontario UFO Research and Study) other places are linked through these sites or got lost in the shuffle!