To These People We Are the Aliens

“To these people we are the aliens, intruding into their world.”  Every media, print, television, radio and social began their story with those words, or a translation thereof. They were repeating what had been reported by Pierre, one of the first two human scientists to encounter ‘these people’. The earth would never be the same again.

A Boy Falls in Love with a Mountain

The path and purpose of Quebecois scientist Dr. Pierre Aroussen’s life began with his first excursion into full-length novels with his reading of Jules Verne’s epic Journey to the Centre of the Earth, which he read in the original French under the title of Voyage au Centre de la Terre.

The idea that the earth was not just a hunk of rock inside, but had ever-changing dynamic forces that could change the face and future of the planet inspired him as a precocious child, and as a young professional geologist.

           When asked at 10 years of age where he would most like to travel to, he quickly said “Iceland”, and then he would very slowly and carefully say Snaefellsjökull, the name of the inactive volcano that provided the path to the centre of the earth in the book.

His First Visit to the Mountain

It wasn’t until he was in his twenties that he got to see his dream mountain. He was a graduate student at Laval University in his hometown city of Quebec, and given a grant to go to a conference on geology at Reykjavik University. Like the mountain, it was on the west side of the island country. Fortunately, most of the people he spoke with, and listened to presenting papers spoke English, and some French, so he was able to learn much about his dream mountain, and eventually could pronounce the name properly. The conference trip to Snaefellsjökull did not disappoint the eager young scholar. His doctoral dissertation was all about the mountain.

A Change Takes Place in the Mountain

One thing that Pierre learned about geology, was that the earth, and hotspots such the mountains in Iceland were ever changing. And the shifting climate was now a player in that change. So he wasn’t totally surprised when he received a call from an Icelandic colleague talking about how the glacier that had lay for a long time on top of the mountain, was fast melting, giving opportunities to interested scholars to learn more about what was inside the inactive volcano.

That summer, Pierre booked a flight to Iceland, and was housed at his colleague’s place, who was returning a favour for when Gunnar attended a conference at Laval. They were soon at the mountain. It looked so different to Pierre with much of the ice stripped off of it. The hole that reached up to the surface from the depths was much wider. Pierre wanted to get inside, but he was not a very experienced or skilled climber. Gunnar had a solution. His older brother owned a big construction company, and could lend them the services of a crane and a crane operator. He could lower the two scientists safely into the depths of the inside of the mountain, and bring them back too. Although he did not understand why they would want to do such a thing, he co-operated. He was getting paid to do it.

Inside the Mountain.

For Pierre this was a childhood dream come true. He would be taking his own journey much closer to the centre of the earth than he had ever been. He just did not know how far that would be.  It wasn’t much time before they were surrounded by darkness, pierced only by the battery-powered torches that they had brought with them.

But as they descended deeper, they began to catch glimpses of other lights. They knew that those lights could not be lava, as they would have been able to feel the heat. And the lights were too far away from them, and too bright to merely be reflections of the torches that they were shining downwards. Their sources were independent.

Pierre and Gunnar communicated to the crane operator with their phones that they wanted to stop their descent for a few minutes. Not long afterwards they made two more discoveries. The first was that while they were still, the lights were moving towards them. Secondly, rays of light of different colours were being sent between the various light sources. 

Now Pierre’s wife Shona was a deep sea biologist, and both of them were more than willing to talk and, what’s more listen to the specialized knowledge of the other. She had taught him about bioluminescence, that the ability of marine animals she had studied to give off  and control chemically produced light. Was that what the kind of light they were seeing now? He thought so.

Did the different colours have meaning? He noticed that certain sources would give off blue light, to be ‘answered’ with red. After about three or four such communications were sent and answered, both would be sending each other blue light.  There were a few exceptions. In those cases the red light sender would appear to move away. What did that mean?

Pierre would soon learn in a way that he would never have expected. He saw a blue light cover Gunnar’s face, and then saw him smile. Then he, too, was struck by the blue light. There was a great calm that he felt, like someone had assured him that there was nothing for him to be concerned about. This was followed about a minute later by a brief red flash, first shading Gunnar’s face, then his own. At about the time that he saw Gunnar’s look of anxiety, he began to feel the same emotion himself This did not last as long as the previous emotion, as the blue returned, and with it a sense of complete calm. 

He felt that he was being instructed in the nature of the thought patterns of the deep earth creatures they were in company with. He even wondered whether the one he now thought of as the leader had known about Pierre’s question concerning the meaning and functioning of the different coloured lights. He wished that he could beam blue at this moment, to communicate to them what it was that he was feeling. But somehow he felt that it was already known.

The deep earth creatures drew nearer. Pierre got a good sense of what their bodies looked like. They were about four feet long and very thin. Rather than skin, they had a shell or crust like a crayfish, but had hands and feet, not claws. Their eyes were huge, their ears quite small.. These were what gave off the light. Pierre soon learned that there were other colours to their communications, a combination of emotions, directions, agreement, and disagreement, and, more complicated, signature shades for names.

And the people that Pierre and Gunnar encountered, were just explorers from of one community of a widespread network inside the earth. This they would learn when the two groups managed to establish a form of communication that mixed together words and thought colours. It was from that makeshift ‘language’ that Pierre was able to know enough to be able to say, “To these people we are the aliens, intruding into their world.”