While my parents were honeymooning in Brighton, England, they found an unusual bottle on the beach. My father turned it over, and molded into the bottom were the Words "Made in Japan". Fascinated by the mysterious object, they took it home with them, and one evening, as they left their flat to go out to the cinema, the wind caught the front door and slammed it shut. The vibrations that the slamming door created shook the house and the bottle fell from the matle above the fireplace and shattered on the hearth in front of the dampened fireplace, and the contents bubbled and fizzled. When they arrived later that night, they were amazed to find a fully formed baby lying before the dying fire. They called that baby Richard, and decided to raise it as their own.

Well, at least that's the story my father told me. Of course he also told me that it became dark at night because the clouds covered the sun, and that elephants made their nests in rhubarb trees, both of which I disproved at the age of five, by direct observation in a single night waiting under the rhubarb patch for elephants under the light of the full moon. Though I could never disprove the story of my creation, I was convinced that I was actually an alien child switched at birth for whoever these strange people had actually conceived. I look forward to the day when my true parents will return and take me off this strange planet. It is with this hope in mind that I joined the search for extra-terretrial life.