Art imitates Life
Recently my husband Ed and I have been watching Resident Alien, a comedy/drama TV series which is currently streaming on Netflix, although it was originally made for the SyFy channel. The series is about an extraterrestrial who is disguised as a human, and is living in a small Colorado town.
A recent episode introduced a new character, an intelligent and respectable bearded man called Peter Bach, a UFO expert who hosts a very popular podcast called "Alien Tracker".
I should now explain that my husband Ed and I first met in 1988 when we were introduced to one another by John Keel, who was a very famous UFOlogist. John Keel wrote several books including one called The Mothman Prophesies. John Keel was also the person who first introduced to popular culture the concept of Men in Black as an UFO-related phenomenon. John Keel's book The Mothman Prophesies was subsequently made into a movie starring Richard Gere, who I also met and got to know a little bit because he and I both had the same Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Khyongla Rato Rinpoche.
I happened to know John Keel before I met Ed, because I had gone to a few meetings of The Fortean Society, a society that studies paranormal occurrences. Via the Fortean Society I had been given a VIP ticket to a fund-raiser at the nightclub "Tunnel". Ed was also invited to that same fundraiser by Larry "Ratso" Sloman, who at the time was the editor of National Lampoon Magazine. Ed was about to be featured on the cover of the magazine, and Ratso had brought along a dummy of the cover so that Ed could see how it would look.
So although Ed and I find Resident Alien very funny, including the character of the "Alien Tracker", I realized that Ed and I had been introduced to each other by someone so similar to the "Alien Tracker" that I suspect that character was probably originally based on John Keel.
And so without our own "Alien Tracker", Ed and I might never have met and might not still be together all these years later. So, when we watch "Resident Alien", do you think we are we laughing at ourselves and our own life, or not?
