The 2016 film Arrival that I reviewed here involved the sudden arrival of a fleet of alien spaceships at many locations on the Earth and had as a central plot the efforts by a linguist to overcome the language barrier and learn how to communicate with them.
But if we examine a map of all the reported UFO sightings over time, we see that almost all of them are in the English-speaking world, primarily the US and UK. This clearly shows that aliens also worry about communicating with us and have chosen to visit just those regions where the natives speak a language they understand, and that is English.
This is a map of all reported UFO sightings, 1906-2014.
(Image: ESRI.) pic.twitter.com/Eq7xSflHzE
— Quite Interesting (@qikipedia) July 4, 2021
“The” means “please invade us” in alien. (And happens to clearly show the link with various N.Germanic languages, e.g., Frisian.) Some scholars maintain it is the “th” sound, not the word “the”, which requests invasion.
Mano, I just noticed there is a second link to cartoon at this blog, dated today (22nd November), titled Doonesbury-UFO, which is the link in the Doonesbury cartoon image in this OP. That version of this same posting happens to have a comment. Something seems a bit confused here (in addition to the flying saucers crowd!)…
blf,
I usually provide a link to any cartoons that I use.
On a more ominous note a researcher in Australia has linked Wind Turbine Syndrome to the English language. Almost all cases of this terrible syndrome have been reported in the anglophone world.
I wonder if they are connected.
if i flew light years to the southern USA, i would at least duck across the border and get some tacos
The ship Arbitrary visited Earth in the late 1970s. It was rather amused.
(“The State of the Art”, ISBN 0-929480-06-6)
I’m skeptical of that map. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of sightings aren’t included because they never reached the English language press/UFO fandom. As well for much of the modern UFO era a lot of places had governments that probably would suppress or ignore reports of supposed UFOs.
Many Germans in the Third Reich were also English speakers, eg
If you can track down a copy, the short novel “His Master’s Voice” by Stanislaw Lem is about the difficulty of meaningful communication with real aliens. So is his final novel “Fiasco”.
Even if you prefer Star Trek, Lem is one of those must-read authors like Olaf Stapledon and H G Wells.