From past experiences...

Okay, we are now 'backstage', facing the 'personnel' of the strandedufo. Intrigued? No?!? Okay.

The name Paul Juhasz (Shepherd in English), won't convey much, apart from geographic origin and gender. Well - a female version would be called Paula obviously. But that is where normality ends to reveal someone who has been thinking in hexa-decimal, with a logic based on bits - ones and zeroes, raised to the power of 2 - and a syntax to match. And not just since the 90s, when most of humanity was touched by the phenomenon, with graphical user interfaces bristling with help, but since the early 60s, when the inherent power was still raw and untamed, as direct and decisive as a logical AND or Exclusive OR can be. A program`s operation was in your mind, or you were facing a blank wall. Well, a blank screen, really, with a single green cursor flashing away to make you aware of its emptiness.

Times when mainframes with less power than a 286 still took up a large room, and single stepping through machine-code processes, with values displayed as rows of ON / OFF points of lights on a console was the way to go.

Instead of automatic debuggers following your high level source code, when one instruction crashed, we would update memory addresses manually, via dials, toggles and push buttons, inserting sub-routines into memory, and then pencill the changes on a listing, before re-stepping over those changes. Print-out was of course reserved for user data from your program, or the program listing from the assembler, while input was from punched cards or tape. And no multi-tasking yet.

Testing was usually done at night, when nobody else needed the machine, though that only happened with the smaller systems, like 360/20 or 30. At other times we didn`t even get to `see` a computer, just handed in our cards or tape, and worked from listings, which was the program`s output, and the occasional "core dump" - or memory and registers print-out - when a crash occurred. Only in `70-71 did I get to work from a remote screen and keyboard console attached to the mainframe, where logging in with my handle, I was given a private task running alongside others.

While on the PDP,, we had no music or games, but as it was a defence related electronics firm, we had an A2 sized flat-bed plotter. It had this roving arm that would pick up one of a bunch of coloured pens and then draw some random or other math related patterns. Some of these "paintings" were so good, people actually bought them. Untill the boss put a stop to it.

So while most times I was forced to follow a straight procedural route, my instincts led me down a different path, resulting in those less adventurous, tagging me strange or even weird. What people cannot understand, they are weary of, and try to belittle, to lessen this fear. So what is this "crazy" path?

In order to talk to aliens, humanity has resorted to using science - if you remember the gold plaque on the Voyager probe - it was an invitation to `someone out there`, so now "someone out there"" sent us an answer. It comes as two crop circles and internet text. Since I am not really a scientist by education, just a programmer, a shaper of artificial and virtual realities, it is that artificiality that will have to tell the full story. My take is that IF fake, I have only wasted a few minutes reading it, but if true, it IS the best thing that could possibly happen to get humanity further up the evolution ladder.

As for the old question of these "visitors" being here or not - if you still dismiss all historic references and the relatively more recent still photographs and camera footage as evidence of their presence, due to their possibility of being faked, perhaps the number of moving objects that change direction in these NASA videos should be convincing enough, since we are still not capable of faking such things in open space. The space station MIR or the Shuttle and a tether that it had extended, all surrounded by a fair number of what could only be intelligently piloted craft, apparently checking what we`re up to. The mysteriously lit up structures, almost, but not quite resembling our space station, or even the strange shaped buildings scattered around the surface of the Moon itself,. can not easily be dismissed. Trying to airbrush them out will only reinforce the mystery and our curiosity.

To be honest, I have to admit that I took this last test twice. The first time I was not too happy with the results, so I retook it - and it knew! Well, of course it knew, I should have known it would. Still, it just decided not to add the result to the comparison lists. All this shows is that test results get better the more one concentrates...

So if you feel you are suffering from destiny deprivation, remember that Truth is the kind of reality that most of us can share and that most of us can verify with most of our senses. For this to happen, we communicate and discuss matters as a two-way process. So maybe I will just leave you with this little self portrait I did in DPaint III - it is soo old, it has already faded, like some black-and-whites in grandad's photo-album...