Close Encounter

I have always been fascinated by Astronomy, Space Travel and the possibility of Alien Life. When Star Trek first aired in 1966 I was 13 years old. I was mesmerized by what I saw and could not wait until I heard those now immortal words of William Shatner; “Space... the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Later I couldn’t wait for the next episode of Lost In Space, and more recently watched every episode of The X files.

When I came upon stamps which portrayed Alien sightings I knew I wanted to use those images for inspiration for one of my designs. To see a South American country featuring an event that took place in North America captures the essence of celebrating and respecting something unique and cool in one another.  The Nicaraguan Postal Authority published a series of five stamps documenting close encounters of the third kind in North and South America. The image chosen for this t-shirt commemorates a close encounter which took place in North America.

A close encounter in ufology is an event where a person witnesses an unidentified flying object. This terminology and the system of classification behind it was started by astronomer and UFO researcher J. Allen Hynek, and was first suggested in his 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. He introduced the first three kinds of encounters; First kind; a sighting of one or more unidentified flying objects. Second kind; is an observation of a UFO, and associated physical effects from the UFO. Third kind; is an observation of what Hynek termed "animate beings" in association with a UFO sighting. An additional category added by others includes the Close Encounter of the Fourth kind; where a human is abducted by a UFO or its occupants.  Extraterrestrial life is life originating outside of the Earth. It is the subject of astrobiology, and its existence remains hypothetical. There is no credible evidence of extraterrestrial life that has been widely accepted by the scientific community.

November 7, 1969 Kansas, USA
While driving home slightly after midnight on Interstate 70, two women suddenly observed two bright lights in the sky. Under hypnosis, they both related similar reports of being taken aboard a craft by alien life forms. The extraterrestrials were described as being slender with large hairless heads, slanted non-blinking eyes, and four long slender fingers on each hand. Neither women had ever seen or expressed any belief in UFOs previously.