The Extraterrestrials! In an Adventure with the American Army

About the Book

­­­Bored with the usual cattle mutilations and earthling abductions, The Alien Captain and his daring, gray explorers head to Kansas to participate in a crop circle contest. Unfortunately, due in part to a gray navigator’s poor self-esteem and hereditary earwax problems, another crewmate’s random Tourette’s-driven outbursts, and The Alien Captain’s obsession with meeting William Shatner at an upcoming Star Trek convention, the grays unintentionally pilot their flying saucer into The Shite Black Hole. Transported back in time the hapless travelers crash in a remote spot in America’s southwest. Having no other options, the grays accept an offer from the Roswell Airfield intelligence officer, Major Marcel, to stay in the base’s plush, underground quarters. It soon becomes apparent, however, that Marcel’s seemingly generous offer comes with a condition: the U.S. Army wants the grays to build a working flying saucer. Initially, they accept this offer, but soon find they are not up to the task of constructing an interstellar spacecraft. The grays also quickly discover they are not actually guests, but prisoners. Their host’s promise of free room and board and all the bowling they can handle is not everything it is cracked up to be. Wanting to return to their home planet of Gliese 581 c., the grays feign the need for a break from spaceship building. They convince Major Marcel to take them on a day trip to Carlsbad Caverns, where they commandeer an army air corps bus and escape to Santa Fe in hope of contacting Gliesean kinfolk manning The Emergency Earth Operations Center for Stranded Graynauts. This is a story of what happens when a happy-go-lucky space trip turns into a not-so-happy-go-lucky road trip. It is the story of barbecuing under a million stars with a ray gun. It is the story of visiting a roadside museum in the desert where sometimes visitors are put on display. It is the story of what it is like to make a mailbox that looks like a UFO. In short, it is the story of what it is like to be an alien in an alien world. But most of all, it is the story of what really happened at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.

About the Author

Ken Patterson has a BA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. He has published two other books, ADD and Me, Forty Years in a Fog, and The A to Z Poetry of a Stay-at-Home Dad. He has won various literary awards from fiction contests for several short stories and a novel excerpt. Ken and his two children live in Connecticut.