This column is from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE. Subscribe to get 4 print issues of the mag each year here. Read the previous instalment of THE WOO here.
Jobs, bank loans, women—rejection is not an alien concept to me, and you know who else it isn’t alien to? Aliens. Imagine this: You are selected out of billions to participate in an occurrence so beyond the realms of all human lived experience that in an instant your entire life has a new center of incredibly fucked-up gravity. That’s right, you’re being abducted by aliens. Then, just as suddenly as it started, it abruptly ends. No tour of the solar system for you. No warnings about atomic bombs, no hybrid breeding program with full-bosomed Greys, no ancient wisdom of the cosmos, and absolutely no anal probe. A voice whispers to you: “We thought you were what we wanted, but we fucked it—you are absolutely not.” What would you do? Drink some tea from your Thermos and carry on fishing?
August 12, 1983. A balmy night in Aldershot, United Kingdom. Alfred Burtoo, a 77-year-old British Army veteran and his terrier Tiny, are moonlight fishing at their preferred spot on the Basingstoke Canal in North Town. Burtoo has his usual setup: rod on its rest, a Thermos of tea, and Tiny leashed to his fishing umbrella. It’s a beatific vision of small-town serenity. The nearby Buller army barracks—the same barracks supposedly terrorized by that old timey Cockney cryptid Spring Heeled Jack in 1877—sounds the 1AM alert and then 15 minutes later, as Burtoo is slurping from his flask, he sees a brilliant light descend towards the main railway line up ahead, “like a falling leaf.” The light fades momentarily before reigniting and landing nearby. Accompanying the illumination is a throbbing whine like an electric generator. Burtoo puffs on his fag, unafraid but curious. The bright light beyond the trees is probably a helicopter from the nearby Ministry of Defence installation, he thinks. But the movement of the light and this noise don’t match any helicopter he’s ever seen. Tiny growls. From along the towpath, two diminutive figures approach, a proper pair of weird little lads.
“They were about 4 ft high, dressed in pale green coveralls from head to foot,” reported Burtoo at the time. “They had helmets of the same color with a visor that was blacked out.”
One of the beings makes a come hither motion—apparently a genuinely universal gesture—and turns to walk back down the towpath. Burtoo abandons Tiny to the carp and follows on, with the second being falling in behind. “I was 77 and didn’t have much to lose,” he later reasoned. Fair fucks, Burtoo. Putting that military training to good use.
As they reach the railings by the bridge over the canal, the first being simply passes straight through them like a ghost, leaving Burtoo to awkwardly haul his clumsy human frame over the top like a confused pensioner flashmobbing a rodeo.
“From along the towpath, two diminutive figures approach, a proper pair of weird little lads”
Up ahead, jutting out onto the path from the undergrowth, Burtoo sees what he later claims was a saucer-shaped craft the color of burnished aluminum. It’s approximately 45 ft long, rests on two ski-like runners, and is pocked with portholes. Stepping inside, Burtoo notices no bolts, no joints, just one strange, sleek industrial glob of a room, filled with the characterful aroma of decaying meat. (Anyone with passing knowledge of reddit UFO chatter will note echoes here of claims about 3D-printed alien craft made by the “4Chan Whistleblower.”) This is the kind of situation that would unnerve most people yet standing in a bleak-as-fuck transdimensional abattoir we can add to the list of things that fails to defeat Burtoo’s resolve. (Truly, they were the Greatest Generation.)
Burtoo reports seeing “two more forms similar to those that walked along the towpath with me,” and is then ordered to stand beneath an amber light. In this he basks for several minutes, before a voice he will later describe as a mixture of Chinese and Russian with a sing-song quality asks from the darkness: “What is your age?”
“Seventy-eight next birthday,” Burtoo replies. The room falls silent.
After a dramatic pause, comes a slightly awkward response.
“You can go,” says the voice. “You are too old and infirm for our purposes.”
Brutal. Who’d have thought that 40 years before the invention of Feeld Burtoo would be getting rejected in exactly the same way you are today, dear reader. Most who’d suffered such a crushing blow to the ego would keep this story to themselves, but Burtoo is happy to share it with anyone who asks. Once his ordeal is over, he simply returns to Tiny and his position on the canal to resume fishing, and at 10AM—by which point the craft has long since ascended into the Heavens—he is approached by two jolly military police officers.
“Any luck mate?”
“I’ve had three roach, five rudd, and a tench of two and a half pounds,” Burtoo replies, “and lost a big carp, which took me into the weeds.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, as it happens…”
It’s important to note that Burtoo didn’t seem to suffer any of the classic aftereffects of alien abduction. For him, there was no sense of missing time, random nosebleeds, or scars where foreign bodies might have been secreted. In all recorded accounts, he seemed pretty upbeat, free even of the vague psychological trauma that persists even after the typical alien mindwipe.
He wasn’t the first man to be rejected by aliens. There’s quite a shameful list of individuals who were asked to rep humanity but didn’t make the grade. The most notable perhaps was Carl Higdon, who was out hunting when he says he was led onto a spaceship by a floating humanoid calling itself “Ausso One” only to be told, “We’ll take you back; you’re not any good for what we need” and dumped unceremoniously in the wilds of Wyoming.
Burtoo described that night out on the canal as “the greatest experience of my life.” Incels take note: This is how a real man deals with rejection. That said, it is hard to imagine that a pack of extraterrestrial, time-jumping oddbods who’ve mastered traversing the cosmos in a manner that mocks all human understanding of physics couldn’t tell he was an ancient codger just by glancing at him. I’ve seen photos of Alfred Burtoo and he looks like a piece of old wood.
Still, then again, I guess it was dark.
Stay Weird.
This column is from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE. Subscribe to get 4 print issues of the mag each year here. Read the previous instalment of THE WOO here.
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