Do galactic aliens have gender issues?

A lady friend working at a law firm in Manhattan recently recounted how she had enjoyed leading "a bunch of law firm summer associates to this event entitled ‘How It’s Really Like to Practice Law in NYC as Women.’"

Hmm. Such a specialty topic. Was there a counterpart event for "… Man," we were led to mull. Or is it a series with follow-up come-ons like "How It’s Really Like to Practice as a Chef in NYC as Women"? Or "How It’s Really Like to Practice as a Chess Player in NYC as Women"?

If the forum series ever displaces itself from a Big Apple-centric worldview, why, a turn-away crowd of the fairer sex, or of the fairways set, might queue up for something like "How It’s Really Like to Practice as a Professional Golfer Anywhere in the World as Michelle Wie."

Oh, I don’t know. As I sometimes let on to feminist friends, gender profiling may only affirm a state of minority-hood. Why, in certain areas of artistic endeavor, equality appears to have been reached, or made manifest, by doing away with feminine language forms – such as poetess and actress.

Male or female, they’re poets and actors. Just like chefs, chess players, golfers and basketball players. For some reason, however, whenever a gender distinction is made, the terms for female take different usage routes, as with "lady chef" and "woman chess player." It’s "ladies’ golf" but "women’s basketball."

Is the level of contact with opponents a factor in the popular usage choice? Seems not. Contact in chess never goes beyond the initial and congratulatory handshake; if anything, contact is made with the game’s pieces. Contact with food items and ingredients, however, doesn’t preclude being billed as a "lady chef."

Ah, these gender distinctions. Only the sphinx, which is neither specifically male nor female, may be able to tell us if there’s any need for such at all.

Or perhaps we need to look further and deeper into the heavens, or the enigmatic spaces before us, for answers close enough to verity. As we’ve been told, the truth is out there.

A few days ago I caught a fascinating docu on Studio 23, a cable channel now made to occupy a different number (17: another prime!).

It was all about "rods" – the latest UFO phenomenon, as discovered and intensively promoted by Jose Escamilla (of course he just had to have Jose for a first name). "Rods" are flying objects that are shaped like, well, rods. Undetected by the naked eye, these images in super-speed motion can only be seen when they’re captured on film or videotape that is then played in slow motion or frame by frame.

Escamilla makes much of footage of a skydiving stunt into a very deep cave populated by tens of thousands of swallows, somewhere in old Mexico. Replaying the tape, the fellow must have said to himself: "Jose, can you see?! What the heck are those darting objects that almost seem to spear the diver’s hurtling figure?"

What his videocam crews caught, shooting from different angles, were various instances of the unexpected appearance of what he named "rods." For they looked exactly like long, thin sticks, which on certain frames appeared to have three to five blurry, lateral appendages believed to be some kind of wings rotating in hyper motion.

Debunkers have claimed that the images were likely of some insects flying close to the lens, but which only appeared longer with the false perspective of distance. Not so, huffed Jose. His view is reinforced by reputable scientists who have studied the footage, and calculated that the streaking, even U-turning, rods must be at least 30 feet long and moving at spectacular speed.

When Escamilla opened a website to share the images, the worldwide response was just as spectacular. Other people who had accidentally filmed "rods" came forward with their own accidental documentation – from as far as Finland and Japan and a host of other countries. Catching rods with home video equipment appears to have turned into a global exercise.

Of course, one can’t tell when they’ll ever appear. Only by accident does home video come up with the startling evidence, if one has the patience to watch footage in slo-mo. Jose’s crusade has since led UFO watchers to open fields with a frame of reference, such as a lone tree on a hill – there to point their videocams skywards, shooting an hour of tape at each random angle.

Escamilla’s fast-growing collection of images is quite impressive, inclusive of NASA footage of unexplained hurtling objects in deep space, as well as what is claimed to have been a 70-foot-long rod making a quick cameo appearance to steal the scene from a whipping tornado in the US Midwest.

Escamilla claims his government keeps what it knows from the public. He seems well qualified to make this charge, as he grew up in Midway, a small town only nine miles southwest of Roswell, New Mexico.

Remember the Roswell Incident – or what is alleged to have been a cover-up of an alien space ship that crash-landed? Roswell is to UFO believers what "Rosebud" is to Citizen Kane fans – the last word uttered by the young Orson Welles, dying as an old man in that film, and referencing his childhood memory of a bobsled.

On the other hand, it seems too appropriate, too close to home, to have Escamilla privileged as the first documentarian of the rods phenom.

In any case, Googling his name leads to his website that links up with theUFOmovie.com, which conveniently announces the imminent showing of the full-length film UFO: The Greatest Story Ever Denied.

Escamilla touts the docu to be a compendium of incontrovertible evidence. The lead-in blurb says, ever so enticingly, like a reassuring if two-syllable-short haiku: "Somewhere in the back of your mind/ you’ve always known/ it was true."

Rods are the centerpiece of the movie that also includes previous, purported UFO documentation, meaning of flying objects of all shapes and sizes. But it is with the newly discovered rods (in the late ’90s) – which Escamilla says may have been with us for millennia except that we couldn’t see them – that his film hopes to enter blockbuster territory.

Worldwide release is due next month, August 2006, with an online screening that is downloadable (presumably for pay-per-view subscribers), as well as localized theatrical release in certain cities in the US, England and Egypt, and Sydney and Dubai. Here’s hoping a Manila exhibitor soon links up with Escamilla, the film director, producer and distributor, before he opens the floodgates with the DVD release.

It’s an intriguing idea, of course, that alien life forms been playing around in our earthly environment, making a mockery of our laws of physics, darting in and out of our ken without saying as much as a hello to our vision and awareness.

This leads to other intriguing questions. An advanced galactic life form can’t be bothered by niceties such as we know or have institutionalized with our accretion of manners. They don’t have to have two legs or green skin and faces. They could just be swooshes in space, like super-swift if gigantic Nike logos, with whirring rotor blades or whatever they’re called on their home planet.

Why, they don’t even have to follow the sexual-profiling parameters we’ve developed through the ages. Where we may now classify ourselves as boys, girls, men, women, gays, dykes, butches, bisexuals, transvestites, transsexuals, cross-dressers, homophobes, virgins, spinsters, and Opus Dei celibates, alien life forms may either be beholden to a multiplex orientation when it comes to proclivities for procreation, or – think about it – may have already volted into a unisex tapestry of self-generating, auto-cloning beings.

They may not even have to rest on the seventh day, as their calendars aren’t necessarily gridlocked into workweeks and red-letter holidays, let alone boast of Tanduay girls of bolder and bolder shapes.

Those rods may be darting into that humongous cueva in Mejico because they don’t have to look for proper loo signs saying "Gents" and "Ladies," "Guys and Dolls," or "Rods and Roses." Hey, come to think of it, may we not also assume that the spear-shaped rods are actually screamingly masculine, and in avid search of alluring space, any space, that spells the name of the rose?

No way, Jose? Anything is possible, from swordfish changing sex to alien visitors still failing to transcend gender issues. Still, the notion of enjoying an entire gamut of sexes is so very sexy and not sexist. When they do settle in for invasion or recreation, these cute aliens may then make themselves visible, in one-size-fits-all T-shirts and unisex Havaianas. Make that flip-flops.

If they had feet, that is. Or any other extensions. Otherwise, they’re just hot rods, that go flap-flap-flap.