I've never been a fan of sci-fi and I believe I never will, but this really basic and stereotypical alien story actually has a purpose behind it. To Serve Man was the title of this episode of the Twilight Zone, which by the way I found really amusing and well thought of.
The story is about nine-feet tall beings from a different dimension that come to visit us humans in our humble little earth. They promise not to have any harmful intentions and hand over a little black book with symbols for a title (later on known to read ‘To Serve a Man’) to the little, yet seemingly powerful fat man behind the desk. It all seems pretty sketchy, until he mentions that their kind could hand over their knowledge on weapons and solutions for our main issues (including our absolute fear of atomic bombs and missiles for which they have designed a force field). At this everybody smiles and shakes hand with the tall creature without thinking it over twice.
Human greed had already shone in all its glory merely a minute and a half into the clip. Because we think we know it all, when greater intelligence is approaches we immediately think it must be some kind of trick, that is, until they offer what we hadn’t been able to achieve: answers. Without giving it second thought, Earth’s humans have made deals with the aliens and even set up and airline for them, everything is just fine until the little black book turns out to be a cook book and an innocent man is aboard a space ship getting fattened to later on be “an ingredient in someone’s soup”.
It all comes down to this one little quirk people have that makes them hurt themselves over and over again…
