Where no lawyer has gone before?

All that stuff about warp-drive is just science fiction. Future spaceships will employ a litigation drive. From Der Spiegel:

A lawyer from the eastern German city of Dresden got bored with handling jobless benefit claims. So he decided to represent people who claim to have been attacked by aliens from outer space . . .

The Dresden lawyer recently advertised his services in the mass-circulation Bild newspaper under the headline: "I'm Germany's first lawyer for alien victims." The hobby astronomer represents people who claim to have been harassed by extraterrestrials.

People like Ms J., for instance, who claims she was "plagued" by a green light. She also says that her tormentor "jabbed me in the shoulder." If this wasn't bad enough, there was also "a smell of coconuts and there were little white dots on my back."

This bizarre incident didn't require any legal action. It was an open-and-shut case for the disappointed Lorek. "Highly psychotic woman ... urgently needs medical attention ... nothing I can do," he wrote in his notes on their conversation.

Always clad in black, with a wide-brimmed hat, bat-like leather coat and cowboy boots, Lorek looks not unlike a being from another planet himself, at least compared to his lawyer peers.

The specialist for employment and social law decided to branch out because he wanted a change from covering benefit claims cases for the unemployed. Germany recently implemented reforms known as "Hartz IV" which dramatically reduced welfare benefits, reportedly increasing the suffering of the jobless.

So what does the lawyer propose to do with the crowd of clients who come to him with strange and curious tales of encounters with beings from outer space?

Unsurprisingly, Lorek has reached the same conclusion in each of the alien cases he has reviewed to date: "No trace of extraterrestrials."

Instead, he has been investigating whether supposed alien encounters can be attributed to mistreatment and traumatization at the hands of very real earthlings. This could allow him to sue for compensation from the state under a so-called "victim compensation law."

Nevertheless, a surprisingly large number of people regard attacks by aliens as perfectly conceivable. An American study found that almost 4 million US citizens think they have been abducted by aliens at some point. And a recently published poll by the Emnid research institute on behalf of Reader's Digest Germany found that 37 percent of Germans believe Earth has been visited by beings from other planets.

The large number of self-proclaimed victims has attracted the interest of scientists. Even though reports of encounters invariably sound far-fetched, Bremen sociologist Michael Schetsche found that many cases are astonishingly similar.

The victims often claim to have been subjected to "a variety of very painful examinations and experiments," he says. "Blood or tissue samples are taken, thin probes are shoved in various bodily orifices or through the skin, and sometimes implants are inserted."

He says the accounts may be explained as a "specific case of so-called false memory syndrome," in which people's memories are distorted through questionable medical treatments such as hypnosis.

Lorek used a similarly cold and rational approach to explain Ms P.'s alien molestation experience. He found out that on the day of her trauma, Dec. 24, 1949, the planets Venus and Jupiter were close together in the night sky. The young girl probably mistook them for glowing eyes, he thinks.

Combined with the possibility that a bird of prey was flying toward her, she probably had the illusion that she was being attacked by an alien. Case closed.

That wasn't enough to secure compensation from the state, though. In fact, Lorek's alien attorney service hasn't exactly proved lucrative so far. He hasn't earned a single cent from it yet.

He can't compete with extraterrestrial lawyers.

Tags: litigation, aliens, Germany