When I think of aliens, I think of a man named Siggi. A wiry fellow with the weathered face of an outdoor laborer and nicotine-stained fingers, he was a fixture in the Studentenstadt student housing complex in the north of Munich, a place where I lived during my early twenties. There was a small pub on the 20th floor, and while we students sat at the cheap tables cluttered with glasses of Augustiner, Siggi would lurk quietly at the bar, chain-smoking Gauloises and contributing the occasional wry comment in a raspy voice. He wasn’t German, but I’m not sure where he was from; English was his preferred language and he spoke it well, with an accent.
The assumption was that he was subletting from one of the students, but nobody ever saw where he lived. To someone with an overactive imagination, Siggi was good daydream fodder: immigrant drifter, or alien quietly biding his time here among us Earthlings?
