THE ADVANCED AVIATION DEPT. AT
BETELGEUSE CORPORATION
Proudly PRESENTS to you…
HAIL! The URAEUS!
HAIL! The URAEUS!
HAIL! The URAEUS!
HAIL! The URAEUS!
And now a word from our CEO, Lennon BeTELGEUSE:
“I often find the vassal staring up at the sky at night. It asks me, Can you see them, Lennon Betelgeuse, CEO and Great Advisor on Reality? Can you see them flying about? And I can, but they’re planes for the most part, quite clearly nearly always planes. We live under a flight-path, and we live in a city, so if they’re not planes they’re helicopters and if they’re not planes or helicopters they’re balloons reflecting sunlight with anomalous strength. Yet it won’t give up. I know what I saw, it tells me as I yawn and nod in a placatory fashion. It asks, What about the ones that come in threes? The fool doesn’t understand that there are these things called satellites. What about the string of lights that the clouds revealed last year? The head-case was drunk at the time, hardly a reliable witness. What about the orange orb that floated across the sky and then hovered in place for hours over South Manchester? I’ve already mentioned the anomalous balloon. But it glowed so bright, it tells me. Shut up and work, you rat, I tell it, but it continues, What about the thirteen orbs that shot out from the same point in the sky? What about the ‘plane’ that became a ‘star’? What about this? What about that? By this point I don’t have the energy to respond so I leave, gather my strength and think on how best to channel this madness into something profitable other than one paltry A4 oil on board painting.”
HAVE I, Lennon BeTELGEUSE, CEO, EVER SEEN A UFO?
“No, because they aren’t real, and anyone who thinks they are, regardless of their views on the provenance or nature of whatever phenomena or misinterpreted sighting of aeronautical machinery or equipment that they’ve seen, is dishonest, mentally unstable and needs to be sectioned.”
How much WOUld I, Lennon Betelgeuse, PILOT WITH THE RIGHT STUFF and PRAGMATIC DISBELIEVER, sell this painting for?
“Well, I imagine there probably is some crackpot lunatic out there who would want to buy it, and just because a person has money doesn’t mean they have taste, so I will go out out on a limb and say, hmm… a lot! I know you adherents to the formula will be asking, So where is this one hidden? Well, I don’t know and frankly I don’t care, I have more important matters to consider. If you ask the vassal it’s probably rolling across the sky with the Wheels of Ezekiel, or… I don’t know… beaming messages back to Clonkley-Boogley-Fairy Land from the upper stratosphere. Utter tripe!”
THE ORIGINAL IS FLOATING AROUND IN THE ENDLESS COSMOS BUT PRINTS OF DIFFERENT SIZES ARE AVAILABLE IN THE SHOP.
Now tell us what and why, vassal?
“Does it annoy you when I hide the paintings?”
Yes, now before I get one of my many small but ferocious Betelings to burrow into your ear canal and start eating the last bit of sense from your ruined brain, tell us what and why vassal?
“Sounds like it does. Anyway, this is a painting of my mates, they might all be the same but I only ever see them separately one after the other and in different parts of the sky.”
And is this what they actually look like, or do they look like what you usually point out to me, i.e. completely indistinguishable points of light that are most likely planes, satellites or stars?
“This is what I saw when I first made friends with them. There was one or possibly three, but one - the last one - was an octahedron and inside writhed the Uraeus.”
It’s actually like talking to a gibbering hermit. Did you eat those red berries from the pyracantha again, you crusty derelict? Can you explain this in normal words for the dear Perusers?
“Not really.”
Do you need some sort of mental health intervention?
“Not as much as you do.”
I give up. Go on then, you raving nutter, what are they?
“I wish I knew, Lennon. I wish I knew.”
