This is an article in the continuing series on alien weapon systems.

It’s a warm summer evening as Pete and Chloe walk hand in hand to the movie theater. Safely ensconced in the back row, all by themselves, they sit companionably in the darkness as the opening credits roll. Heart pounding, Pete makes his move – which is swiftly intercepted and his hand briskly batted back. ‘Watch the film!’ she hisses in his ear. A chastened Pete sits for an hour nursing rejection, disappointment and a visceral frustration.

A few days pass and Pete is taking lunch at the local Starbucks. He sits outside watching the park, the people and the pigeons. His peaceful contemplation is disturbed by a girl leaning across from the other side of his table. She looks him in the eye and asks in a soft, teasing voice, ‘Would this seat be free?’

Pete can’t help noticing how astonishing beautiful she is, and how appropriately she’s dressed for such a hot day. His savoir-faire deserts him as he stutters that, yes indeed, the place is vacant.

Soon they’re chatting away. It turns out that Yi-Min is from China and has just arrived in Pete’s town on vacation. Would he have any time to show her around? It turns out that his calendar can easily be rearranged.

It’s amazing how well Pete and Yi-Min get on, they seem made for each other: poor Chloe recedes into history. They are soon sharing an apartment and a life together. Pete is surprised at how many fine-looking women there are in the neighborhood. He jokes to Yi-Min that he’d never realized there were so many beautiful orphans visiting from China. She says that back home they’re saying similar things about babes from the States. They both laugh.

Yi-Min and Pete never did get around to having children. As the years passed, her beauty became more luminous: he had never loved her so much. Finally, on his death bed as she held his hand, he asked her the question which had bothered him all these years: ‘Yi-Min, where do you really come from?’

She didn’t answer, but simply held his gaze for a while. Then she closed his eyes and walked out into her world.

Sterile insect techniques involve the raising and sterilization of millions of insects in a specialised ‘factory’, which are then released into the wild to mate. The result of such matings is that naturally no descendants are produced. The techniques have been astonishingly effective against disease vectors such as the screwworm fly, the Tsetse fly and the malaria mosquito.

According to the Wikipedia article, “In 1954, the technique was used to completely eradicate screwworms from the 176-square-mile (460 km2) island of Curaçao, off the coast of Venezuela. Screwworms were eliminated in a span of only seven weeks, saving the domestic goat herds that were a source of meat and milk for the island people.” Sterile insect techniques were hailed by former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman as “the greatest entomological achievement of the (20th) century.”

There is no reason to believe such techniques would be any less effective against humans. To those who argue that ‘the authorities would do something’, one can only respond that ‘the authorities’ have been singularly unsuccessful in the war against drugs, and that men will fight for their loved ones with even more tenacity than for their favorite narcotic.