had by that time become fully aware of the miraculous healing powers of the aliens. Many individuals who were dying of incurables diseases and many who weren't were willing to become hosts. The real change came about because of the outcry from foreign countries. Other countries said that the United States should not have sole custody of the aliens and that it should be a matter resolved by the United Nations. Now an 18-month fight started between hard-liners in the U.S. saying "finders keepers," soft-liners willing to let the matter go to the U.N., mainly to get it out of their hair, and those in the U.N. wanting control of the aliens. The U.S. really never had a chance, and I believe that, deep down, we knew this was something that concerned the whole human race. The matter then passed to the U.N.
Talk about déjà vu. I was called to testify with a plethora of others involved in the case before all the different U.N. committees that thought they should be in charge. It was a mess. Finally, like Congress, the U.N. had to appoint a special committee to oversee the flow of information and to arrive at a decision concerning what to do about the aliens and their requests for more hosts.
The one very important problem that kept getting in the way of resolving this issue was the fact that there was no way to determine the effect of the alien on the host's psyche. We could confirm the host's health, but all we could do on the mental side was to study the brain waves and ask the host lots of psychological questions. The negative reasoning was that, if the alien did have access to the host's memory and thoughts, then it could be pulling the strings mentally. It would be capable of having the host say whatever it needed to say in order to put our minds at rest. As suggested earlier, the host may have his consciousness held prisoner with no means of communicating with the outside world.
Because of this one serious drawback in our technology, many individuals considered the aliens an invasion force that could conquer the entire human race by taking one person at a time. The positive reasoning was that, if this was a subtle invasion, then the manner in which it was started was not very smart because the landing resulted in the deaths of over 50% of the aliens. If invasion was their goal, they could have landed in a quiet manner and done their work surreptitiously. Their technology was obviously superior to ours or they wouldn’t be on Earth now. Plus persons closest to the host humans could not detect any appreciable difference in the hosts' mental states after taking on aliens.
As one may guess, this argument went back and forth with the tally somewhat in favor of the negative view. There were groups on each extreme: ones that wanted to irradiate all the hosts, destroying all the aliens, and others that thought this was the dawn of a new age for humans with the end of disease and war. I decided it was safer not to have an opinion and to avoid both groups.
One additional way to determine if the host was under the complete control of the alien was to interview a host that had once had an alien, but the alien had died and the host managed to survive. It was important that the alien be at a stage advanced enough to be in contact with both the host and other aliens. The problem with this was that the host was usually severely depressed after the death of the alien and could only vaguely remember what it was like when the alien was alive. This first-hand testimony proved to be inconclusive.
The U.N. committee finally came up with a compromise solution. Twenty-three volunteers, each of whom was dying of some incurable disease, would be allowed to host an alien. This was to be done under very strict laboratory conditions. A group of twenty-three alien hosts and the dying volunteers were taken to a laboratory in Geneva. The aliens in the host bodies each produced one larvae, my word, not theirs. The larvae exited the hosts' bodies, usually from the abdomen. The larvae were then placed on the skin of the volunteers, who were not inhabited by an aliens, and, within a few minutes, had borrowed into the body cavity. The growth of the alien in the new host was closely monitored by visual observation and by life signs. The results were the same as with the original hosts. Their health improved within a few days, resulting in a complete recovery from whatever condition they were suffering. Then, after about seven days, they began to hear voices. By the eighth day, they were in complete communication with the alien. This provided valuable information on the development of the alien in the human host but did not provide any additional insight into the mental relationship between the alien and host. We still did not know who was running the show.
This experiment proved to be a tactical error. Once word had gotten out that all twenty-three individuals went from certain death to perfect health, the interest of the public was engaged. With a world population of 10 billion, even one percent interest constitutes 100 million people, and a lot more than one percent of the public were interested. There were immediate calls in the U.N. to treat the aliens as a world resource to be shared among member nations. Governments began clamoring for access to the aliens in order to improve their population's health. Though these governments were in the minority, they had a major impact because they were united in their goals, whereas the opposition did not know quite how to handle the situation.
Almost all the world's religious organizations came out against the idea of having an alien host, but even this could not stop the clamor for access. There were individuals in every country of the world volunteering to become hosts. This began the destabilization of governments across the globe with governments against its citizens, governments against religious groups, individuals against religious groups, and individuals against individuals. This controversy still rages today, though now it is somewhat of a moot point.
Luckily, the U.S. was spared most of the destabilization that occurred in other countries, but the debate raged in all levels of government, from local to federal. We thought pornography and abortion were tricky issues, but they were cut-and-dried compared to this. Consider the legal questions. What if a host says the alien or its presence caused him to commit a crime? It has never been proven that an alien has ever made anyone do anything against the host's wishes, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. If someone is sentenced to die, that sentence applies to the alien as well. Do the aliens have any rights in Earth courts? If so, are their rights separate from the rights of the host, or are the two considered one unit? A surgical way has never been found of removing an alien without killing it and doing substantial damage to the host. And what kind of responsibility does a host have toward the alien? What if you kill an alien by having an x-ray? Is that "alien murder," or just freeing one's self of an unwanted guest? Of course, no one has ever intentionally killed an alien once he or she became a host. But, of course, lawyers are continually coming up with recommendations for situations that never occur. These questions, along with a plethora of subtler ones, have been battered around in the courts ever since the alien presence became widespread. But the one overriding question that dominated the controversy was "Does someone have the right to become a host for an alien of his own free will?"
After the pressure had became intolerable, the U.N. agreed to release some hosts to their respective countries, but only under very strict conditions. This attempt to keep a reign on the release of the aliens by doling them out like a precious resource was unsuccessful. Once hosts were back inside their own countries, the alien presence spread faster than AIDS, especially in third-world countries. By having more perfectly healthy people in a country, a type of arms race of aliens started, in which each country tried to have the largest group of alien hosts. This did not mean there was a majority of hosts versus non-hosts in any country. Even today in countries where the alien presence is accepted, the percentage of hosts is only about 30% of the population. Of course, in some countries, mostly those with strong fundamentalist religions, just the opposite happened. There was a backlash, and thousands of people were killed and thousands more forcible irradiated. I am sure this was done to lots of people who were not hosts. Why pass up a chance to settle a grudge?
I was doing very well during this controve
rsy thanks to the aliens. Jenny and I were very happy together; actually I would have to say that this was probably the happiest period of my life. Due to my early expertise, I was called up for a number of assignments around the world pertaining to them. I was finally made Deputy Director of OSI and did have my eye on the top slot. Of course, OSI's mandate had changed over the years due to the aliens. We did a lot of our investigations in matters concerning the aliens, including trying to determine how they got here and from where they came. Due to my expertise, I became something of a celebrity and talking head on news programs. Jenny and I didn’t have to worry about money, and I could do all the things that I had wanted to do but either didn’t have the time or money to do. After Jenny’s father was finally released from his comfortable imprisonment, we would spend vacations at his residence, even though it had become something of a tourist attraction. Most of the evidence of the crash had vanished. The groove and crater were still there, but vegetation had pretty much covered it over, and weathering