Signals From Space (Part 3)
PREAMBLE:
Report 2 was Sunny’s last report. They voluntarily stepped down after a fiasco which I will soon get into. My name is Kitten and I will be continuing these reports.
My predecessor failed to mention a certain transmission during Dirt year, 1936. It was overlooked by we scholars as merely another repeat of the Olympics. The Olympics was a training routine humans had performed since ancient times to honor their leaders on Mount Olympus (Humans are extremely loyal to their leaders and regularly gather to honor them).
The 1936 Olympics, however, was popular amongst the masses on our planet, Fire. This is because it was a particularly powerful transmission, able to be picked up on any EM device on Fire.
One human in the video had become particularly popular, perhaps due to his stylish* facial hair and the pleasant* geometrical shapes on his upper clothing. Infernan children would greet each other with his peoples’ signature salute and speak to each other in English or German, while young adults would decorate their “lawns” with figures of him.
Territorial decorating was just one of the many new practices that we had adopted from the humans. Over the last twenty Dirt years, we began broadcasting our own talk shows as well as video recordings, though the latter were never as popular as human video recordings.
Many of the human training routines had become popular as well. The old folks didn’t understand it, but we found them fun*. We even began holding our own Olympics every four Fire orbits.
*These are untranslatable human words. They describe qualities which are not useful, yet we have paradoxically deemed them to be successful.
All of that said, I must now get into the source of our great shame. The beloved figure of the 1936 Olympics, in fact, turned out to be the most brutal and evil human who ever lived. His name was Adolf Hitler.
DATA COLLECTED FROM DIRT TIME, September 1939 - 1945
When the Second Planet War began, it was at first unclear which side were the aggressors. Both sides broadcasted information portraying the other side as evil. We were left scratching our heads.
But there was one thing we knew for certain now: Humans were geniuses of war. That became more and more clear with every battle broadcast. War was engineered to such a fine degree, as if it had its own science. (There is no better example of this than the sheer complexity of the flawlessly executed D-day invasion, but I'm getting ahead of myself).
The war raged on for a few years, until Hitler’s dark secret was revealed. I don’t think I need to write about what the allies found when they invaded Germany. Everyone, human or infernan, knows. Everyone wishes they didn’t.
Lawn Hitlers were smashed to pieces as all of Fire raged. Nazi flags and schwastika-emblazoned food containers were piled up and dumped into the Lava Ocean. People began greeting each other by extending their pincers downward and backwards, the opposite direction of the Nazi salute. Some of us never recovered from the psychological trauma of the Holocaust footage.
The war came to an end in a blaze of nuclear fire. That’s right. The humans were actually suicidal enough to use nuclear weapons!
It had long been clear to us that humans were creative and full of love, but now it was clear that they could also be infinitely destructive and genocidal. We hoped that in the end, their better nature would prevail, but we resolved never to visit Dirt nor attempt to contact Humanity.