CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE: PATHFINDER SPURS MEMORIES OF MOON LANDING, `STAR TREK'

So, was anyone else hoping we'd actually see little green men when Pathfinder touched down?

When the Apollo 11 mission touched down on the moon, I was watching it on TV, right along with the rest of the world.

It was 1969 and I was only there because my parents made me stay up late enough to watch history happening right there in our living room.

For once in my 5-year-old life, I was ready to go to bed. Go figure.

Brother Jim, however, was bouncing all over the room, hardly able to contain his excitement, and my sister, Liz, was doing her best not to look too thrilled by the whole thing.

She was 12, going on 13, and obliged to be much cooler than the rest of us. Jim was almost 9 and wide awake.

My parents just kept shushing us so they could listen to Walter Cronkite, or a reasonable facsimile, do the play-by-play.

For some reason, I don't remember Apollo 13, although I loved the movie, which proved every all-American father's maxim that you can, indeed, fix anything with duct tape.

I do remember "Star Trek"; in fact, there was a time I could recite most of the episodes line for line.

I was 10. I didn't get out much. And syndicated TV means a lot to a geeky kid.

The final frontier continued to loom larger in movies and television, the stuff of fiction that was always very close to becoming fact.

A good number of us stared at the screen for an hour or two, then stared up at the stars and wondered who, if anyone, was out there, and whether we'd ever get to meet them.

Beamed right there to the living room.

Well, in my case, it was actually the newsroom, but it's a very homey newsroom.

What we got to see didn't look a whole lot different from the pictures NASA beamed back from the moon.

Rocks. Lots of rocks.

No Neil Armstrong, either, but give it a few years.

I remember reading an article a few years back that suggested that if we had run into aliens while exploring the moon, the space program probably wouldn't have been shelved for so long.

I watched most of the Mars footage; no aliens were visible, but Sojourner hadn't gotten far.

Was anyone else disappointed when no little green men waved for the camera?

By the way, "Aliens 4" is due out in August, which is amazing since Sigourney Weaver died in the third installment. Science fiction's first rule is that no one ever really dies; otherwise there couldn't be sequels.

That's a flagrant violation of the Prime Directive.

Today is, of course, the anniversary of the UFO crash at Roswell, N.M. Pathfinder should be sending back more photos of the Martian landscape for us to stare at and wonder about. In a few months, scientists will be studying Martian rocks, looking for signs that life may once have existed there.

We keep taking baby steps with giant consequences out into the stars to find out who might -- or might not -- be out there.

Personally, I wouldn't mind an entire race of Keanu Reeves clones, but I have a feeling that's being unrealistic.

In the meantime, there's always "Star Trek" reruns.

Peggy O'Farrell is a copy editor for the Southeast Missourian.