Skip to main content

Is this book lame or laudable? Read my review and get the inside dope

Ceto's New Friends

Author(s)
Leah A. Haley, Lisa Dusenberry (Illustrator)
Publisher
Greenleaf Publications
Edition / Year
1994
In the section labelled

 

Leah Haley, a certified public accountant and UFO contactee, wanted to present a positive view of alien abduction to young children. Too much literature about the subject concentrates on the unpleasant side of this phenomenon, such as the forced insertion of anal probes, rather than the more fun aspects, such as are described here.

Ceto, who "lives on a faraway planet" is depicted as a classic "grey", short in stature with huge blank eyes. Two children, Annie and Seth, live on Earth. They, too, have big staring eyes, which may explain why Ceto crossed the galaxy to meet them.

Annie and Seth

On his arrival on Earth, Ceto saw Annie and Seth playing with a ball. He wanted to play with them, so he "floated through the air" to get closer. Unable to talk with his mouth, he spoke with his eyes and said "I want to be your friend. May I play with you?"

Annie and Seth, who clearly have not been properly alerted to Stranger Danger, smiled and invited him to play ball, then take a turn at marbles. After a while he said "Would you like to go for a ride in my spaceship?". Perhaps reassured by the naked alien's lack of any visible genitalia, they agreed, whereupon Ceto turned on a tractor beam and they all three were sucked up into the waiting craft.

The light took them up into Ceto's spaceship

He taught them how to float in the air and talk with their eyes - alien skills that it would seem can easily be mastered in short order if only one has the right teacher. He let them stab randomly at the controls of his spaceship and "watch wavy lines" on the screen. Now, even in 1994, the electronics of Ceto's interplanetary craft would have seemed pretty underwhelming to most kids. But Annie and Seth - perhaps kept in ignorance of the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog by controlling parents - were properly impressed. The moral seems to be that you can keep your kids away from games consoles and cable TV but you can't stop them from being abducted by aliens.

Ceto returned them to earth and in exchange for one of their marbles gave them "a purple rock" which we are left to presume is not radioactive or thought-controlling, but who knows? His spaceship flew away, but he will "come back soon to visit his new friends on Earth", perhaps after they have enslaved all their neighbours and set them to work mining Vril or whatever Ceto was really after. 

What an irresponsible book this is! Who knows how many innocent little ones have been tempted to waft willingly into interstellar vessels having been told that aliens are big softies who just want to play marbles?

Beware, children, it should have said: beware of Greys bearing gifts!

Leave a comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

Comments