Essay- My Friend the Alien

[auburngrad82]

During the late 1960s my family and I lived in Columbus, Georgia. I was a seven year old with a fertile imagination and a hole in my life. My father was fighting a war more than 8000 miles away in the Cu Chi province of Vietnam, so, in an effort to fill the void left in my father’s absence, I turned to another figure for companionship and guidance. Every afternoon I would drop what I was doing and run home, turn on the television, and tune into Blast Off, hosted by a masked alien named V-Man.

V-Man would sit at the controls of his spaceship, turn in his seat and give us an overview of where we would be travelling on that particular afternoon. He had complete control over my life. He would take me to worlds where Buck Rogers battled aliens, where fifty foot tall women battled the Army, and where a long-frozen alien known only as The Thing could thaw out and terrorize the residents of an Arctic outpost. According to V-Man the movies he was showing to us on his monitor were real events and we were simply bystanders watching as events unfolded. He was right. To a seven-year-old boy the movies were real.

I spent virtually every afternoon glued to the television with V-Man as my companion. Then, in the spring of 1968 my father returned from his tour of duty in Vietnam and, as often happens to military families, we were transferred to another city and I had to leave V-Man behind and find friendship as most kids do, among the schoolmates and neighborhood kids in the next place that we were to call home. But during that short, magical time in Columbus, Georgia I had enough adventures to last a life time and even now, forty years later, I can still see V-Man in my mind, I can still picture his spaceship’s control panel and the tiny little black and white monitor that allowed us a glimpse into worlds that were sometimes fantastic and sometimes terrible. And I sometimes miss my friend.

V-Man has long disappeared from the airwaves of this planet, no doubt to travel to another universe where other lonely children wait for him guide them on daily journeys into dark and unknown worlds of fantasy. Maybe one day he will return to our world. But until then I am left to end this broadcast in V-man's place and as my friend would have done, with words that he used to end every broadcast to our planet, “Peace to the Universe.”

[mitchtv]

1. Thanks, auburngrad82

I nice, well though out tale. I enjoyed reading it. I loved The Thing ( the original)