The great Italian writer Dino Buzzati has this very nice story about the priest of a little village who saw a UFO land on the roof of his church one night. He picked up his rifle and ran out to welcome them. Two creatures came out and said to him “we’ve been observing you for some time and we know more or less everything about you but there is one thing we couldn’t understand and we are here to ask you that: Why do you have these antennas everywhere?” They pointed at the cross on top of the bell tower. “You put them on top of buildings which we understand but you also put them indoors and sometimes you plant whole fields with many of them. We even noticed that you hang little ones on your necks. But we couldn’t figure out where they are connected to. So can you please tell us what these antennas are for?”
Seeing this as an opportunity to gain more followers even outside his planet, the priest invited them into his house and started to tell them about Jesus.
“God had a son and his son was here on Earth.”
The aliens started to giggle shaking their tentacles.
“God had a son? Really. And you had him here? Wow. So what did you do with him? Did you make him your king and follow every word he said?”
“Not exactly. There was a misunderstanding and that’s why he ended up on the cross.”
“God’s son was here and you killed him?”
Seeing that he won’t reach anywhere from here, the priest decided to change the subject a little.
“Let me tell you the story from the very beginning. When God created the first human beings, Adam and Eve, he put them in the Garden of Eden. In that garden there was the Tree of Knowledge and he told them not to eat it’s fruits.”
“Sure, you can’t eat them,” said the extraterrestrials.
“What? Do you know these trees?”
“Sure, the Trees of Knowledge, where we live they are everywhere.”
“And do you eat their fruits?”
“Never.”
“Why?”
“It’s forbidden.”
It suddenly dawned on the priest that these aliens were as pure as Adam and Eve in Heaven. They have never touched the fruit. After some silence their tentacles started to shake with more giggles. “Oh, you ate the fruits, didn’t you?”
“Yes we did and that’s why we are here on this earth.”
There was silence. Overcoming his first wave of awe the priest thought that God needed humans more than these pure aliens. We made mistakes, we made sins, and we had to follow the path of God and remember him all the time and pray and always strive to correct ourselves. But what good were these pure creatures of Garden of Eden for? God didn’t need them; they were just being; they were perfect and that was it.
The aliens asked his permission and went back to their spaceship. When the UFO lifted off and shot towards the sky the priest took his rifle and shot twice after them. Another threat had successfully been eliminated.
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Appear originally in Italian as "...e il disco si posò", in the book “Il Crollo della Baliverna”, 1954 and reprinted in other collections later, like "La Boutique del Mistero" (first print 1968, latest 2001), "The Mistery Shop" (1991).
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This is a humble summary of the original story. I apologize if I have made any mistakes but this is how I remember it and it always brings a smile on my face and some sparks in my mind.
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