Space Invaders Speak Squonk at Seton Hill
By Jennifer Reeger
The message spread like wildfire across the Seton Hill University campus.
“I was coming in late for class and all of a sudden I heard people talking about aliens and spacecraft,” said sophomore Sheri Hale of Altoona.
Then, in the cafeteria, Hale heard a student screaming about aliens.
“That piqued my interest,” she said.
So she and other students headed to a hillside on campus to see what all the commotion was about.
They found a saucer-shaped UFO crashed into the hill. An unnamed “government official,” dressed all in black, was telling them it was simply a weather balloon.
But, in reality, the “spacecraft” was an art exhibition produced by Squonk Opera, a Pittsburgh-based multimedia performance troupe, with the help of Seton Hill students and faculty.
“They’re making it very believable,” Hale said.
Steve O’Hearn, artistic director for Squonk Opera, refused to divulge any knowledge about how the “spacecraft” came to crash in Greensburg.
“We don’t know where that came from,” he said, adding that Squonk Opera has been “responding” to “crash sites” all over the region and even in New York and Maryland since the first “crash” at the Three Rivers Arts Festival in June. “This is obviously a hotbed of activity.”
O’Hearn anticipates another UFO will crash at Schenley Plaza in Oakland and that’s where Squonk Opera will premiere “Astro-rama” — a large-scale musical event that will include a four-story radio tower and performers on scissor lifts and cherry pickers beaming a message into space.
“We’re going to send a message from humanity,” O’Hearn said. “… It unifies us as a species in a time of great polarity.”
The free show will be held Oct. 15-18 at 8 p.m. at Schenley Plaza.
As part of yesterday’s “crash,” Seton Hill students created artistic representations of aliens and alien artifacts to be “discovered” at the crash site.
Throughout the day, students played characters in roles related to the “discovery.”
Art students Molly Huffman and Alexandra Naples spent part of the day in HazMat suits, scaring other students and “investigating” the crash scene.
“I think it says have fun with art,” Naples said of the exhibition. “It’s a way of just cutting loose.”
But for people traveling by the Seton Hill campus along Route 130 yesterday, the sighting really did seem like a close encounter.
Some, including Vonnie Miller and her boyfriend, Chuck Johnson, who live across from the “crash site” stopped to see what was going on.
“Right outside our house — I knew they’d come back for you,” Miller joked to Johnson.
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