Centuries before the Roswell UFO Incident, Native Americans had their own stories to tell about alien visitations — for example, about the “Sky People” who traveled from the Pleiades star cluster to Earth and have a special bond with the Cherokee Nation.
In a newly published novel titled “Hole in the Sky,” Cherokee science-fiction author Daniel H. Wilson blends those stories with up-to-date speculation about UFOs, now also known as unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAPs, to deliver a fresh take on the classic tale of first contact with an alien civilization.
Wilson says the typical alien-invasion tale tends to parallel the real-life story of European settlement in the Americas.
“I love robot uprisings and alien invasions, and the more I thought about it, you realize that in an alien invasion, the aliens show up, and they usually want to extract our resources, take our land, our water, destroy our culture, enslave us,” he says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “That’s kind of a really thinly veiled fear projection that what colonizers have done to Indigenous people will be done to our society. And so I started from there.”
