I stopped talking about aliens, but I started making notes instead - recording as many details as I could about when and where I saw an alien and what it was doing. Maybe the notes would come in useful some time in the future, or even if they didn't, I felt I had to make an effort to do something! I had no idea what extra powers the aliens had, if any, but I knew enough about human hacking to be wary of putting anything on my computer. I wrote everything down in an old fashioned paper notebook and kept it in my underwear drawer.

Even though I knew they were all around us, I still got a shock the first time I saw one on the television screen. He - it - was talking at a climate change conference in Bonn, Germany. I don't know how he appeared to everyone else, but to me he was a small grey alien in a dark grey suit. When I stared at the screen, I could see that he wasn't the only alien in attendance. I realised then that this was the first time I had seen one as a public figure. All those I had noticed up until now had been in very ordinary jobs.

A smokescreen? Was this their plan, then? To manipulate humanity through occupying key positions?

Rather frantically, I called up all the important people I could think of on my computer screen, our Prime Minister, the US President, even the Queen, but they all looked human to me.

What about Hitler?

The thought popped into my head. What if aliens had been controlling us for years, causing wars and massacres? I searched back through historical records to find an actual live photo of Hitler, not an actor, but no - he looked human, too. Gripped by this new theory, I searched back through records of other key events in history. I found the occasional alien caught up in a crowd scene but never again one as an active figure. I sought the oldest film of a crowd I could find, it was taken in 1897 at the opening of the San Francisco baths, and sure enough, I spotted an alien in the background.

How long had they been here? If they had been here a hundred years ago, why not more? I imagined them appearing on the planet millennia ago, when humans were still huddling in their caves.

I sat back in my chair. Although I had learned a lot that day, I still had no idea what they were doing here, and more importantly, what sort of threat they posed to our species.

~~~

I kept up my observations and rigorous note taking for almost a year, before - well to be honest, I grew bored. Nothing unusual happened the entire time, nothing to distinguish the aliens from any of the humans they mimicked. I finally took the plunge and started a thread on Twitter "Have you ever seen an alien?" Boy, did it bring some weirdos out of the woodwork, but nothing that rang true to me. I even grew complacent enough to post a short story on wattpad, an amateur writer's site, about how I could see the aliens that nobody else could.

I turned eighteen.

Then came New Year's Day, 2016, and everything changed forever.