There is a huge, white egg-shaped thing between the trees of the forest: an Unidentified Non-Flying Object for sure. Georgina Verbaan has just arrived in a dark-colored camper, hits the white plastic a few times and finds a hatch. She enters the sphere and finds screens, photos, lights and two men: Alexander Griffioen and Bram Roza, administrators of ufomeldpunt.nl.
Am I here alone? is called the NTR-reportageserie which actress and writer Georgina Verbaan made about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Or more precisely: the human desire for companionship in the universe, because according to Verbaan, fantasy is at least as important as the possibility of actually stepping on an alien’s tail. “Is there still a folk like that bobbing around on a sphere, just messing around?” Verbaan wonders. It is certain that no nation has so perfected the clinging as the inhabitants of the globe. “If aliens come here that are like us humans, it’s not good,” someone says in the first episode.
Verbaan hears from the UFO watchers that their environment is skeptical about extraterrestrial visits and UFOs, but that “at a party everyone will come around you if you tell them about it”. As a child, Verbaan could not imagine “that we were alone. And I was also in the mood for a nice kidnapping.” Relatively speaking: “I also wanted to live with Michael Jackson or the Cosby family.”
Professor Heino Falcke uses light balls to explain how vast the universe is. It makes it very likely that there is a form of life elsewhere as well. It also reduces the chance that it will ever come into contact. “We’ll never find out,” he says gently. Dennis Meenderink says that while fishing he suddenly saw a yellow-white light and how out of the corner of their eyes (they looked at their floats) he saw a window-shaped colossus with wings below and above. “Take the camera,” Meenderink shouted, just before he was knocked to the ground by an unknown force.
People who ‘just ask questions’ are often on the road to sell their own undoubted truth, but Verbaan consistently sticks to her questioning attitude. In a street interview she addresses two friends, one of whom believes in life elsewhere and the other does not. The second turns out to believe in God again. When a (in itself fatal) discussion between heaven and earth threatens to develop, Verbaan suddenly points to a thick-packed motorcyclist: “We don’t know what they look like, do we?”
Ode to the imagination
There it becomes clear where Am I here alone? is really about: this program is an ode to desire and imagination. Because why shouldn’t the motor mouse be an appearance of the Martian? Elsewhere in the episode, we see Verbaan, wrapped in a foil suit, petting a cow in a meadow. The animal sniffs at her hand, then recoils brusquely. In the next image an animal approaches her threateningly. Verbaan runs away from the cows and jumps into a ditch. Some people have the courage to make remarkable television.
Why do we look up so little, Verbaan wonders. At the end of the broadcast, she peers over the Zandvang in Diepenheim with some UFO spotters in the evening. For a moment a moving light can be seen, but that turns out to be the disco light of the village pub. Then Verbaan calls out: “Hey, I saw something there. I saw something else. I saw…. zwp! Or seriously.. Yes, there he went again. Oh! New! Yes! There! New. Oh yeah. It’s thunder. Or not?”
I don’t know how many aliens watched NPO3 on Thursday, but they must have been deeply impressed by the human ability to desire.
Newsletter NRC Viewing Tips
What should you watch this week? Tips for exciting programs, series and movies