Alien Life

This is a collection of stories all of which are true in that they are taken from real events.Names of the living have been changed and identities disguised for reasons that need no rehearsal. Truth resembles beauty, though not in the way that Keats imagined, because it is often not beautiful. Where the two ideas coincide is that they dwell in the eye of the beholder, which is why specialists - historians, scientists, clerics, philosophers - spend time and energy refuting the work of their fellows past and present. As many truths exist as there are people to express them. They are ways of seeing and being in the world. Had someone else encountered the experiences and the people that appear in this book, they would have written of them differently, or perhaps not written them at all, merely buried them in memory. So the sense in which these tales are true is necessarily mine; and I offer them to you in the hope that you will discover in them some truth of your own. As Thoreau astutely observed: "Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to a man as his own thoughts."
We are alien first to ourselves.