At least, it won't likely get a mention in the Pentagon Report
The aliens may be here already, but it’s cool. They brought weed! Image by Anja from Pixabay
I used to know someone who believed aliens kidnapped her and her young daughter at night.
She was a good friend, but, I privately thought, someone with a Fantasy-Prone Personality. FPPs have a fuzzier intellectual boundary between what’s real and possible and what’s not, and prefer, in my experience, supernatural explanations to rational ones. She wasn’t the only one I knew. We were Pagans with New Age overlap and while not all spiritual people are FPPs, you’ll find a fair amount in religious cultures.
I won’t claim anyone with a belief in divinities or afterlives is an FPP, since the human race shows an amazing capacity for self-delusion, and if you dig deep enough, you’ll find even atheists believe in something far-fetched, sans divinities. My favorite faith-based belief system is the widespread multi-partisan political belief in the mythical Bottomless Well of Operational Efficiencies. It holds that if we only cut government ‘waste’ enough, we can have whatever ridiculously expensive projects, upgrades, treats and glorious prizes our little hearts desire without raising taxes a penny.
Personally, I don’t believe anyone’s been kidnapped by aliens, particularly the ones fascinated by our buttholes and sexual organs. It was a ‘thing’ from the sexually repressed 1970s through the ’90s and now it either gets less attention or that particular delusion has moved aside for QAnon.
Carl Sagan once noted that aliens observing us because we invented something new is akin to us being fascinated with the Andaman Islanders because someone invented fishnets. How interested are any of us in sticking butt probes up, say, salamanders, to, what, learn more about how they poop? Or as the alien Paul put it in the movie of the same name, “What am I doing here? Harvesting farts?”
With 36 intelligent alien civilizations Out There, not even including theoretical parallel universes and mini-universes or sub-universes hypothesized by scientists, what I do believe in — as any self-respecting critical thinker would — is the existence of extraterrestrial, and likely intelligent life, Somewhere.
Just not here.
Are we about to learn The X-Files Truth? Are aliens actually visiting? Walking among us? Buying kiwifruit on sale, the requisite six feet away from us in the Stop & Shop? The kind that can scale any wall by, like, walking through it if they wanted, or touristing in from the Big Three Dozen?
It’s June, the month in which the Pentagon must release a longstanding report on UFOs and the weird shit military and aviation personnel have reported for years, especially the last few with several so-called provocative videos. UFOlogists await breathlessly on tenterhooks while some of us wait with bored facial expressions for the Google news alert indicating where we can download the report, which we’ll promptly do before we forget about it, so we can read it when we have time, and promptly forget about it. Or where we put it.
Who needs to read it anyway? It will headline and summarize everywhere, and probably be more boring than the Mueller Report. Especially if there are no juicy bits — no butthole porn, no alien collusion with the Russians, no extraterrestrial golden showers. And especially no aliens. The final evidential answer may still be, ‘We ain’t got none.’
Here are a few reasons why I don’t give much of a rat’s patoot beyond mild interest:
Video photography clearly hasn’t evolved since the 1950s
I’d embed a few of the more ‘provocative’ videos if any were even remotely interesting, but I can’t tell the difference between the ones shot last year and the ones from 1955. The camera on my new Android is higher-resolution than anything the military has. No wonder the Russians bought our last President so easily. The U.S. military wouldn’t have recognized Vladimir Putin marching into the White House with the Russian Army behind him until Trump fell to his knees and buried his face in Vladdy’s crotch.
When UFO debunkers like Mick West can still offer easy this-worldly explanations for the most recent shitty videos, I have to wonder whether we should be arming our armed forces with Androids and iPhones rather than my dad’s old Super 8 movie camera.
Stunningly convincing photo of sophisticated alien intelligence — or maybe a low-flying bird — by Assnogholeo on Wikimedia Commons
If the U.S. government had anything new on aliens, the Republicans would have scared us into voting for dictatorship last year
Maybe it’s because The Orange Menace was already so divorced from reality he couldn’t conceive of losing the 2020 election, but get real: If the American government possessed any evidence of aliens, Donald Trump would have trotted them out of their meat freezer in Dayton or pulled out the Pentagon equivalent of Anthony Fauci to give a press conference to warn we were under imminent attack. “If you elect Joe Biden and KaMAHla? Camly? Camellia? Campbell’s Soup? Harris they’d turn your teenage daughters over to their tentacled terror and U.S borders would be overrun by aliens the likes of which would make you long for the days of Mexicans and Dominicans!”
Notably less demented former President Barack Obama received no interesting response from the government on the evidence for alien visitation. That’s either evidence of the Deep State at work, or the aliens have more important things to do than fuck with our farm fields.
Yeah, there’s just no way this could have been created by humans. We don’t have the sort of advanced technology required. Hell, we can’t even get our iCrap to stop pushing annoying notifications on us. Photo by Hansueli Krapf on Wikimedia Commons
Even if those ARE aliens, they’re probably really tiny and too damn cute
The videos of some tiny little object (the GOFAST) speeding over water, we’re assured, moves too fast for any similar human object, unless you’re familiar with some of the world’s fastest drones, clocking in speeds of 200km per second or more.
Anything small enough to be in those will have all the nightmare-inducing terror potential of a newborn kitten.
We imagine aliens will be like us. One camp holds that aliens are Jesus-like Klaatus come to save us from our evil selves. Another holds the aliens show up to ass-rape the earth and raid its people, rather a lot like conquerors from foreign lands or the tribe beyond the hill over the course of human history.
The Judaeo-Christian undertone is unmistakable. Either Alien Jesus scolds us and tries to get us to stop sinning, whether it’s killing each other or preparing for nuclear war, or Extraterrestrial Yahweh goes all Biblical lasers-postal on the human race’s collective ass for reasons we’re initially unclear. In the Tom Cruise version of War of the Worlds the aliens harvested human blood and tissue as fertilizer for their terraforming project. In Independence Day, they were after our natural resources. In 1979’s long-forgotten trash-horror Phantasm, an alien mortician kidnapped humans and turned them into dwarf zombie slaves for his planet. In one Twilight Zone episode aliens came To Serve Man — literally.
Armie Hammer is smacking his lips in anticippppppppation.
How much like us, or not, will eventual First Contact aliens be?
They won’t likely be humanoid, especially not with oversized heads and big puppy manga eyes. Carl Sagan noted the extreme unlikelihood that life will have evolved as it did on earth and Stephen Jay Gould has noted that if you rewound the Earth ‘tape of life’ and let it evolve all over again, evolution would likely take a radically different path. There are no guarantees humans would evolve again.
According to the Kardashev scale devised by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in the early 1960s, it measures (theoretically, of course) the different levels of intelligent civilization. It’s theorized no life has advanced to Type IV, although we wouldn’t likely detect it anyway.
Type <1 — That’s us, kids. We’re estimated to be around .73 on the scale now, expected to reach Type I in 100–200 years.
Type I — We can harness all the energy from a nearby star, and be able to harness all the available energy on Earth. We’re not even close to either.
Type II — We can control, not just transform a star, and exploit nearby gas stars, siphoning off the hydrogen. If we mastered fusion power we could build a giant reactor for all our needs, and bonus! Nothing currently known to science could waste our superlatively clever asses!
Some place way cooler than where you live right now. The chicks are always hot, and naked. Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay
Type III — Now we get to do some exploring. We travel the galaxies and are masters of energy knowledge. We might be cyborgs after many hundred thousand years of human evolution, and regard the Homo Sapiens of today with the same sort of casual dismissal with which we regard our earliest human ancestors. We’re likely colonizing as much of the universe as we can reach.
Of course, we don’t know what the repercussions of any of this will be. What happens when we deplete a gas giant? What if we did harness the Sun’s energy for ourselves? What would be the consequences? And of course, most of all, can we stop killing each other and cooperate enough to pull any of this off?
Good questions all, and I doubt any aliens will provide the answers. We confront the same problem Christians do if they’re honest with themselves: No one’s coming to save us from ourselves. Not Jesus, King Arthur, the Overlords, Godzilla, Maitreya, Quetzalcoatl, the Jedi or even Harry Potter. We got ourselves into this mess, and we must pull ourselves out of it.
Maybe the real reason we’re hoping for alien visitations is we’ll have someone new to hang out with who’s perhaps immune to Earth virii and haven’t yet annoyed us to the point of divorce.
The good news is despite reports to the contrary, things are getting better, not worse — at least in some ways. We still have the capacity to destroy ourselves and we might. But cognitive psychologist and popular science author Steven Pinker painstakingly notes how the world today is far less violent than even a hundred years ago. His brick-thick tome The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is tough but fascinating reading. Some parts you might want to skim, like the descriptions of medieval torture of humans and animals, for ‘fun’ and punishment, but it’s un-put-downable.
As for the aliens, I don’t expect much out of the Pentagon’s forthcoming Pinker-rivalling doorstop. On the other hand, if they surprise me, I’d be happy to foster a temporary pandemic support alien, as long as it’s furry. And cute.
What the hell is that thing? As long as it’s not actually the size of an 18-wheeler and doesn’t try to poke anything up my butt, I’ll take one off your hands for a few months. Image by Andrew on Flickr
This first appeared on Medium in June 2021.