By William Kitcher

Firstly, I would like to address the source material of my personal story. Jack Finney’s non-fiction account, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, didn’t tell the entire truth; I suspect Mr. Finney had metamorphosed by that point. The subsequent documentary of the same name that featured Kevin McCarthy then altered the reality in a different way.

While the documentary suggested this was more an analogy for the evils of Communism than the blandness of American society and consumerism, the non-fiction of Mr. Finney didn’t suggest either way while hinting at both. As an intelligent person, I could see both sides, and I could see neither side because, well, because this happened to me! There was no metaphor here! They were pods from outer space that took over the bodies of human beings! I mean, how much more obvious could it be??? There were literally truckloads of pods! Why do you want to make a bigger deal out of it than it already is? I despair for humans.

Because I, Dr. Miles Bennell, am a medical doctor, I have access to a lot of drugs. I’d taken a lot of amphetamines to stay awake throughout the horrific night so I wouldn’t turn into a pod. I probably took more amphetamines than I needed to, but I was young and it was kind of fun.

I refused to become a pod as Becky and Teddy did (although Becky never changed in the book; I guess the documentary filmmakers wanted a little more negativity). By the way, as opposed to what was portrayed on film and in print, Jack Belicec did not transform into a pod person at the time. He survived by running away. Jack was always a brilliant and serious writer. His books didn’t sell for obvious reasons. I don’t know what happened to Jack; perhaps he did transform and that’s why we have so many romance novels being written these days.

(I never did figure out why Becky, Jack, and Teddy ever fell asleep in the film. You’d think that the adrenaline generated by the thoughts they might lose their humanity would keep them awake. Not to mention my amphetamines.)

This is what actually happened: as dawn ascended (“dawn” being that sun thing and not my sister Dawn), I went down to my basement. The seed pod that had split earlier in the darkness of night and turned into an almost-perfect replica of me, was now recognisably me. But, because I hadn’t gone to sleep, it hadn’t fully transformed into me. I picked up a pitchfork that I kept in the basement instead of in my backyard shed for no reason I could understand, and jabbed the pod person repeatedly. I had no idea if I’d killed it, so I set it on fire. I didn’t think that through; I didn’t realise that would set my whole house on fire so I had to run.

I tried to drive my car out of town, but the roads were blocked in every direction. Unlike the film in which all the “converted” people are loading pods into trucks for dispersal, they were just standing around doing nothing, which makes me lean more toward the “average American” analogy.

But there were so many of them, I couldn’t drive my car through. Yes, I know I could have driven right over them, but my personal sense of humanity didn’t allow me to do that despite the fact I knew they were all pods.

Oh! Now I get the metaphor that Finney’s analysis and the documentary were trying to get at. It had something to do with “humanity”. You’d think they could have been more overt about what they were trying to say, but it was the early-mid-1950s so the censors would have had their say, and the planet’s people weren’t that bright anyway, so I get it.

I got out of my car and ran. The pod people spotted me and tried to stop me, but they were dull and slow and conformist and had no idea how to fight (Americans and Soviets in the 1950s, think about it...).

In both the documentary and the book, it says that I tried to talk to citizens I knew to warn them about the invasion, but that never actually happened. If you knew that some people had already transformed, would you really take a chance that your Uncle Ira hadn’t?

I fought through the crowd and ascended into the hills around Santa Mira/Mill Valley (take your pick as to what the name of the town was. It wasn’t actually either of those two, and I don’t think one is a translation of the other.) As I mentioned, I’d done a lot of amphetamines so I could run. I realised I was still wearing a jacket and tie, as everyone did in 1950s movies and occasionally in real life, so I took them off and threw them into bushes where I thought homeless pod people might find them and be able to make use of them.

As I climbed the hill, I remembered that the worst thing you can ever do while being pursued is to go UP. Have you ever seen a movie where that worked out? No, of course not. You’re going to get stuck. You have to go DOWN. So I ran across the hill until I found a trail that went down. This was good, because the pod people kept going up (likely because they were pod people who generally watched pod movies — Charlton Heston, John Wayne, etc., and therefore didn’t have a clue about how Earthlings actually behaved.)

I descended through a field where horses and cows were standing around. It occurred to me that they had been taken over by pods as well. Maybe that had happened many years ago. Have you ever noticed how blank horses and cows are?

The documentary says I ran onto the LA-SF highway, and started screaming, “You have to listen to me! You have to believe me!” You’re not going to get positive feedback saying things like that. Further to that, it said I was subsequently picked up, taken to a mental hospital, and no one believed my story.

That didn’t happen. I stopped a truck on the highway, the driver let me in, and he drove me all the way to LA.

I told him my story and he believed me. He said something like, “You know this has been happening all across the country, right?”

I didn’t know that. But when I got to LA, and spent a few weeks there, I realised that the pod people had taken control of Hollywood early on. I mean, have you ever tried to watch a Harry Langdon movie?

You may not believe me but look at it this way. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Jr., Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump again! Would any non-pod-person ever vote for any of them? (I understand that Ford was never elected president, but he was the first president to be obviously a pod person.)

And that’s just one country. Look around the planet. Pod countries, every one of them.

I went back to Santa Mira/Mill Valley and was able to resume my medical practice because everyone there assumed I’d transformed into a pod. (I was awake but mentally sluggish; it made me just like them.) This was fortunate because it allowed me to continue ordering amphetamines for myself.

I’ve survived all these years — I’m almost one hundred years old now — and haven’t slept since 1957. Amphetamines are still really good in my opinion. I’m a little out of my brain sometimes, but at least I’m not a conformist.

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