E.T. go home!

- Bumper sticker in New York City

When I was a child in primary school back the early 1970s, there was an alien invasion in my school, Sekolah Temmengong Abdul Rahman, Johor Bahru. A spaceship landed. It was a UFO.

During recess, hundreds of kids ran around the soccer field screaming as if they were hearing the last 10 minutes of the broadcast of Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds'. There was total chaos.

I recall falling on my face as I jumped across the huge monsoon drain that separates the field from a building leading to the classrooms. I tried to run away from being attacked and taken into the spaceship, into a world of weightlessness in which teh tarik becomes teh terbang .