The microterrestrials are here!

When I come to the end of a semi-trying day, nothing recharges my batteries more than a really goof-ass UFO story.  The one I am about to relate to you certainly did not disappoint.

This article gives the harrowing account of what the people of the island nation of Malaysia have experienced: sightings of microterrestrials.  Or at least that's what the author of the piece calls them.

As the name implies, "microtrerrestrial" accounts describe humanoid beings that range between three and six inches in height.  They generally have larger-than-proportional heads and rounded eyes.  Eyewitnesses describe them as being dressed in flashy tunics and carrying "ray guns."  A few accounts even state that the tiny alien-like beings had two structures protruding from their heads much as antennae would.  In almost every case, sightings of these beings were also accompanied by miniature flying saucers that measured an estimated three feet in diameter.  It was at this point in reading the narrative that I started squealing like Flounder from Animal House: "Oh boy is this GREAT!"

The first report of these beings took place in 1969 when four students in a schoolyard told their teacher that they just saw a tiny, silver UFO land on the playground.  In utter shock, the kids watched as five, six-inch tall aliens in red uniforms emerged from the craft.  As they noticed the crowd of sweaty, short pants-wearing kids growing around them, the visitors popped back into their spacecraft and soon vanished.

That incident kicked off quite a UFO wave in Malaysia.  Ahmad Jamaludin, a local investigator who published his report of these occurrences in the November 1979 issue of MUFON UFO Journal, came to a startling conclusion about these cases.  He asserts that alien "humanoid encounters [in Malaysia] have been confined to only one type--tiny entities measuring three to six inches in height."  What is more, "...there has not been a single case of a UFO measuring greater than 3 feet in diameter landing on Malaysian soil."  This makes Malaysia utterly unique in all the world in terms of UFO sightings.

Oh, but it gets weirder.  As the sightings and encounters continued, they occurred almost exclusively in schoolyards.  One incident entailed a creature cutting through a school's wire fence with "an intense beam of light."  In a couple cases, the kids attempted to capture one of the little "spacemen."  This prompted the supposed aliens to draw their "laser guns" and fire off a few beams. One boy was said to have a tiny burn mark on his leg from where a beam hit him.  All the more reason that kids should not be allowed to wear short pants to school.  But I digress...

Another tiny UFO landed at a Royal Malaysian Air Force base sometime in 1975 or 1976 (don't you love how exact all the details are?)  A nine year-old schoolboy on the base later came across a three-inch humanoid creature.  This tiny being thwarted any attempts at capture and the kid ended up going to tell his teacher about it (tattle-tale).  When the teacher went looking through the undergrowth near the school, "There was no sign of the creature in the area, but I saw a Red Indian-like wigwam beautifully weaved out of grass."  (Man!  This is awesome!)

Yet another case involved three school kids and two adults in 1979.  The witnesses spotted a tiny UFO hovering.  Its gear was extended, so the observers speculated that it was about to land.  When they attempted to touch the craft's metal hull, it fired an intense beam of light that temporarily blinded them.  This allowed for the UFO to escape.  Given the size of the UFO, any occupants that might have been inside it could have been no larger than three inches tall.

While this reads like pulp SF and has entertained me immensely, we still must ask, "where is the evidence?"  Names and dates are hazy in the reports.  That, according to investigator Jamaludin, is due to the difficulty he had in tracking down the primary sources for interviews.  What physical evidence is there?  Admittedly, there were one or two circular burn marks where the small UFOs were said to have landed and there was the one kid with the burn on his leg, but those are all far from contributing to an ironclad case.  And why the heck are these tiny creatures so fascinated with school kids?

In the absence of solid evidence, these stories are explainable through a variety of means: child imagination, rumor and urban legend, group psychology, light from Venus refracted through swamp gas.  Okay, maybe not that last one but you get the idea.  

This is not to say that these events didn't happen.  I think it highly unlikely that they did but I certainly don't know everything.  So maybe we're looking for all the wrong things.  It's not massive motherships that we may find hovering over our largest cities one day, it might instead be fleets of tiny UFOs swarming about, their crews the handsel of invasion, avenging indignities thrust upon their scouts by Malaysian school children.  
Microterrestrials.  Heh! Awesome.

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