Darkening Sky (2010)

Rider Strong: Eric Rainer

Quotes 

• Eric Rainer : [from his thesis]  We've always had these stories. Legends of being taken away by fairies, or monsters. They've always been with us. There's a need, built-in, human need, for these stories. It's just where our brains seem to naturally go. Taken, against our will, to some place special.

• Eric Rainer : [from his thesis]  Nearly one million are reported missing each year in the U.S. That's more than two thousand people every day. The majority eventually turn up, alive or otherwise. Statistics on alien abductions are understandably less precise. Even if every single experiencer was willing to come forward and be counted, that would still only represent the number of people who returned from the experience to describe them.

• Eric Rainer : We're all story tellers, every one of us. It's another part of our nature, to explain things, find meaning. Look at a cloud, see a face. Show us a series of random images, and a pattern will emerge, a story. Give us a tangle of dots, and we'll find the straight lines connecting them. It's hard-wired. Instinctive. And like all instincts, it originated as a means for survival. The ability to identify relationships and to detect patterns operates independent of conscious thought. Free from the constraints of logic and reasoning. Life of its own.

• [last lines] 

  Eric Rainer : The Milky Way is estimated to have more than 100 billion stars. Some put the number as high as 500 billion. That's just in our galaxy. There appears to be at least 100 million more galaxies, just in the portion of the universe that we can observe today. So making the case that we're not alone makes sense, statistically speaking. Which is just as well. No one wants to be alone.