The Day I Taught Aliens About Pizza

Listen, I’m going to tell you about the time I got abducted by aliens. Before you start rolling your eyes, let me clarify something. My ex-wife used to do that when I’d explain why the dishes weren’t done. These weren’t your garden-variety, efficient, probe-happy extraterrestrials. No sir. These were the cosmic equivalent of the Three Stooges having a bad day in a hardware store.

It started on a Tuesday. Of course it was a Tuesday. Tuesday is the universe’s way of saying “Monday wasn’t quite disappointing enough, let’s try again.” I was walking home from my job at the accounting firm. Yes, I know, thrilling. Then, a thing that looked like a garbage disposal mated with a disco ball descended from the sky. It had all the grace of a drunk elephant attempting ballet.

The beam that sucked me up wasn’t even a proper tractor beam. It was more like being vacuumed by a cosmic Hoover that had asthma. I got stuck halfway up. I dangled like a question mark made of flesh. I heard what I can only assume were alien curse words echoing from inside the ship. Finally, I popped through the bottom of the craft. It was with a sound like someone stepping on a bag of potato chips. I landed in a heap on what appeared to be the control room floor.

“GREETINGS, EARTHLING,” announced the creature standing before me. I use the term “creature” loosely. This thing looked like someone had asked a committee of blind sculptors to design a life form. The design was based on a verbal description given by someone who had never seen one. It had seventeen eyes. They were arranged in what might have been a smiley face if you were having a stroke. It also had four arms that seemed to be playing an invisible accordion. Additionally, it had a mouth that opened sideways like a filing cabinet drawer.

“We are the Blorzakians,” it continued. It consulted what appeared to be a manual written in crayon. “And you have been selected for… for…” It flipped through several pages. “…for scientific examination and possible recreational purposes.”

“Recreational purposes?” I asked.

“We’re not entirely sure what that means either,” admitted another Blorzakian. This one was shaped like a traffic cone having an existential crisis. “The manual is a translation of a translation of something we found in a crashed Venusian garbage scow.”

The first alien—let’s call him Captain Disaster—pointed one of his accordion arms at me. “Please remove your clothing so we may examine your… your…” More page flipping. “…your ‘delicious meat tubes.’”

“I think you mean organs,” I suggested helpfully.

“Yes! Organs! We wish to study your organs!” Captain Disaster seemed pleased with this breakthrough in interspecies communication. “Please climb onto the examination table.”

The examination table was clearly a repurposed ping-pong table with some blinking Christmas lights duct-taped to the sides. The restraints appeared to be jump ropes. I was beginning to suspect these aliens had raided a community center.

“Now,” said Captain Disaster. He produced what looked like a salad fork attached to a flashlight. “We will probe your brain to understand human intelligence.”

“That’s not how brains work,” I pointed out.

“Silence! We are advanced beings from the Zeta Reticuli system!”

“You’re from the filing cabinet constellation?”

“It’s a very prestigious star system,” huffed the traffic cone alien. “We have three suns and two moons and a very nice asteroid belt with excellent mineral deposits.”

Captain Disaster approached with his salad-fork-flashlight device. “Prepare for cranial examination!”

He pressed the fork against my forehead. Nothing happened.

He pressed harder. Still nothing.

“Is it plugged in?” asked Traffic Cone.

“Of course it’s… oh.” Captain Disaster looked at his device. “Where do we plug it in?”

“Try his ear,” suggested a third alien who had just entered. This one resembled a giraffe that had gone through a blender. It seemed reassembled by someone with a serious drinking problem.

“THE EAR! Yes!” Captain Disaster moved toward my ear with his device.

“Wait, wait,” I said. “Before you stick that thing in my ear and potentially lobotomize me, can I know what you’re trying to accomplish?”

The three aliens looked at each other with their various arrangements of eyes.

“We…” Captain Disaster consulted his manual again. “We seek to understand the secrets of human… uh… ‘reproductive enthusiasm’ and ‘recreational food consumption patterns.’”

“You want to know about sex and eating?”

“Is that what those are?” asked Traffic Cone excitedly. “We weren’t sure! The manual just says humans engage in ‘mysterious pleasure activities involving friction and mastication.’”

“Okay, look,” I said, sitting up on the ping-pong table. “I can explain all this stuff to you without the probing. Humans aren’t that complicated.”

For the next three hours, I gave what was essentially a freshman-level anthropology lecture. Three aliens took notes on what appeared to be napkins from a cosmic Denny’s. They were particularly fascinated by the concept of pizza.

“So you take the grain product,” said Captain Disaster slowly. “First, you apply the fermented milk product. Then you add the preserved meat circles. Finally, you apply heat until it bubbles?”

“That’s basically it, yeah.”

“And this gives you pleasure?”

“Immense pleasure.”

The aliens conferred in what sounded like a combination of whale song and a garbage disposal eating a kazoo.

“We have decided,” announced Traffic Cone, “that you are too strange to study properly. We’re going to return you to your planet.”

“Just like that?”

“Our supervisor is coming by tomorrow to check on our progress,” explained Giraffe-Blender. “If he finds out we’ve been down here for six months, we’re in trouble. We’ve only discovered that humans voluntarily consume fermented beverages. These drinks make them stupid. We’re going to get demoted to asteroid mining duty.”

“So you’re just going to drop me off?”

“Well,” said Captain Disaster, “there might be one small problem with that.”

“What kind of problem?”

“We may have… forgotten… exactly where we picked you up.”

I stared at them. “You forgot where Earth is?”

“We wrote it down somewhere,” said Traffic Cone defensively. “It’s just that Gleep here,” he pointed at Giraffe-Blender, “used our star charts. He used them to clean up a spill in the cafeteria.”

“It was a big spill!” protested Gleep. “That synthetic coffee substitute ate through three deck plates!”

Twenty minutes later, I was standing in the transporter room. It was clearly a converted broom closet. Three aliens were arguing over which of seventeen different blue-green planets was Earth.

“This one has the right number of moons,” said Captain Disaster.

“But the wrong number of continents,” countered Traffic Cone.

“Maybe the continents moved,” suggested Gleep.

“Continents don’t just move!” I shouted.

“They don’t?” All three aliens looked surprised.

“Well, they do,” I admitted, “but very slowly. Over millions of years.”

“How do you know how long we’ve had you?” asked Captain Disaster suspiciously.

“Because I’m still wearing the same clothes! And I’m hungry! And it’s been six hours, not six million years!”

In the end, they made a decision. They decided to just drop me off on the planet that “looked the most Earth-ish.” They hoped for the best. The transporter hummed ominously. I’m fairly certain it was actually a microwave with the door removed. Captain Disaster entered coordinates. He was clearly making them up.

“If this isn’t Earth,” I said, “I’m going to be very upset.”

“Don’t worry,” said Gleep cheerfully. “If it’s the wrong planet, you’ll probably die quickly from atmospheric incompatibility.”

“That’s not reassuring!”

“We’re really more of a ‘learning on the job’ kind of species,” admitted Traffic Cone.

The last thing I heard before the world dissolved into sparkles was Captain Disaster speaking. He said, “Wait, should we have asked him about the thing with the friction? Should we have asked about mastication first?”

I materialized in my own backyard, right next to my garbage cans, on a Tuesday evening. The same Tuesday evening I’d left, as far as I could tell. My neighbor Mrs. Henderson was watering her petunias and didn’t even look up.

I stood there for a moment, processing what had just happened, when I heard a familiar sound overhead. The disco ball garbage disposal was back, hovering about fifty feet up.

A voice boomed down from the ship: “EXCUSE US, EARTHLING. WE FORGOT TO ASK—WHAT IS ‘PIZZA’?”

I looked up at the ship, then at Mrs. Henderson, who was still obliviously watering her flowers, then back at the ship.

“IT’S COMPLICATED!” I shouted back.

“CAN YOU WRITE IT DOWN?”

And that’s how I became the first human cultural ambassador to the Blorzakian Empire. The position pays surprisingly well. It also comes with excellent healthcare benefits. However, the commute is murder.

Kids, the moral of the story, if there is one, is this: somewhere in the galaxy, there are aliens. They are just as confused as we are. They are also as incompetent. And somehow, that’s both terrifying and oddly comforting. Also, always carry a pen. You never know when you’ll need to draw a diagram of pizza for extraterrestrials.