COLUMN: The purpose of mountain letters: self-esteem booster, guide to aliens
The first thing I noticed when I was plucked from a sound sleep by aliens and we started flying around was that all the western towns and cities were conveniently labeled. Lifting off from Logan I could clearly see the big mountainside “SV” get smaller as we went skyward. It only took a few minutes in hyper drive before we were over the big “C” near Carlin, Nevada and then another few minutes until we settled over the big “B” for Berkeley.
I wondered aloud to my pointy-eared pilots; “Is this helpful?”
They replied that it did indeed help with their humanoid catch and release program. My orb-headed tour guides explained that the hillside letters were taken as sort of an “open for business” sign for alien-abduction-friendly towns.
Maybe that wasn’t the real reason the townspeople put the letters there. No matter. That was a logical interpretation. The telepathic messages emanating from their huge throbbing brains told me that if the people believed that mammoth letters on the sides of pristine mountains was a good idea, they would likely be receptive to almost anything; including abductions.
In the universal time scheme, mountainside letters have only been around a few alien minutes. Before these letters were laid out, these cosmic scavengers just spent most of their time in abduction-friendly states such as Arkansas and South Dakota. That all changed when students at the University of California -Berkeley put up what is believed to be the first hillside letter in 1905. Brigham Young University put up a monstrous “Y” the next year and soon every school and town in the west started monogramming their mountains.
Apparently western states are just begging to be sucked up by zero-gravity rays because now you can’t drive 50 miles without seeing a mountain or hillside festooned with letters of some sort.
I know you may not believe me. I have no real proof that aliens flew me around the west. There is something about their warp drives that renders digital cameras functionless. So, let’s just say for the sake of argument that the letters weren’t really put there to guide advanced life forms to willing supplicants. If not, why are the letters there? Why would every town I saw from Arcata to Las Cruces have some kind of markings?
You drive or fly Air Alien through the Midwest or South and you don’t see any of this. Globally speaking, many perfectly fine towns around the world have no letters whatsoever plastered on their hills and mountains. Humans and aliens alike must rely solely on maps and signs to find each town.
Though I’m not ready to totally dismiss my alien suspicions, it is possible that this phenomenon has something to do with the west’s abundance of mountains coupled with low self-esteem. Even the smallest mountains in the west would be recreation destinations almost anywhere else. Westerners, however, have so many that they feel the need to use them to draw attention to their towns and universities.
“Look at us. We’re not really hicks. We have an institution of higher education here!” the letters seems to say.
When you mix university letters with those of towns and high schools, you have an alphabet soup of big letters. It must look like something readable from low orbit. Why big letters at all? If you are going to plaster something on a mountain, why not a logo or an artist’s rendering of the mayor? Or, cities could have something more symbolic. Logan, Utah, where I live, could have a big wedge of cheese to symbolize its most prominent agricultural product. Berkeley could most aptly honor its counter culture heritage with a big “LSD.”
And what about Boise State? Wouldn’t those make interesting initials to see from the air?
Dennis Hinkamp does not believe in either aliens or the need for mountainside letters.