Katie Bar the Door

Stephen Hawking has just done the world a great favor. With his comments published today in the London Times the so-called smartest man on earth has just made it so of official that aliens exist and are lurking somewhere nearby. OK, he claims this on the basis of math and probability, but this is his area and he seems quite confident in his statement.

Which means we can now get down to the real issue: Do we greet them as space brothers or Help! Murder! Police! and Katie bar the door and tell grandpa to get out the shotgun!!!!!

These have always been the two main schools of thought on the matter. Kind of limited and certainly very simplistic, but this is about the best anyone has ever come up with concerning the issue. Each view is driven by obvious human needs. The aliens must be feared school is obviously rooted in human fear of the unknown. Well that, and our own long history of treating other cultures in various nasty and brutal manners. Gee whiz, why wouldn't an alien race do to us what we did to the American Indians (and the Africans and the Asians and on and on).

Likewise, the Space Brothers school is a strong extension of the I-Love-You-And-You-Love-Me childlike need for "adult" approval. We want them to be space brothers because we need their acceptance in order to bolster our own sense of low self-esteem.

Either way, we are hopelessly focused upon our own nightmares and dreams and want to project that upon the alien "other." Too bad. Since they are aliens, they may not be all that incline toward either enslaving us or patting our heads. Most likely, they will be rooted in their own psychology and social values and we can only hope to figure out what any of that means. They will operate according to their own needs, social values, and cultural traditions. It may or may not be good from our viewpoint. It will be up to us, as humans, to try and figure that out as fast as possible.

We will have no reasons to believe that any alien visitors love us. Nor do we have any reasons to believe that they are here to enslave us. The truth will be somewhere in the murky middle. It will be up to us to establish the means of handling contact and analyzing the intent of any such visitors. Each case will be different and every instance must be approached in a manner that is neither friendly nor hostile.

Hawking seems to suggest that we should turn off the lights, bolt the door, and not answer the phone. Tempting thought. Too bad this is a completely pointless notion. They already know that we are here and if any body out there is interested, they will find us quite quickly. So we need to be dealing with the best ways to prepare for global contact. The hiding option is no good.

And by the way, so is the hostile option. It's a safe bet that any alien race that is capable of getting here (and undoubtedly, there are some) will also be advance enough to blow our butts off if they are so inclined. No matter how advance some of our weapons may be, we will still end up looking like a pack of cave dwelling nitwits waving some sticks in their face (if they have one).

So what we need is less hardware and more rational, clear-headed thinking. I suspect we need to do this now. Actually, we should have been doing this many years ago.

Strange Days Indeed

Once, when I was working on an article about UFOs, I sent a letter to Jacques Vallee regarding any comments he wished to make concerning his current thoughts on the subject. A few weeks later, I received a photocopy of a newspaper article entitled "Kooks, Nuts and Weirdos" with a handwritten note that this is what he thought.

Maybe I was missing something, but I kind of got the impression that he didn't feel like talking about it. I have long admired much of his writing (and still highly recommend most of his books as essential reading), but there was definitely an attitude. At the time, I figured he was looking to drop the whole subject.

Then again, maybe not. Over at the BoingBoing.net web site, Vallee has posted several interesting pieces on the subject of crop circles. They are both a quick read but very concise and sort of thought provoking. Kind of. Actually, the theory that crop circles might be the result of some super secret microwave weapon has been kicked around over the years. Not a bad theory. So far, impossible to prove in any way. Doesn't help that the only obvious use (thus far) of such a mysterious weapon is to spend every summer zapping the English countryside just to jack up the locals. By the way, the complex and extremely well developed artistic quality of many of these circles seem beyond the skills of the U.S. Army. So it must be a Navy project.

But what is most interesting about Vallee's work is the reactions he is getting in the comments posted at BoingBoing. Basically, many of the comments seem confused by most of the statements Vallee makes concerning the known qualities of non-man made crop circles. A lot of people have very strong opinions about the subject backed up by no information what so ever. So it would seem that many of the known facts listed in the piece by Vallee is a major surprise to a lot of readers.

So maybe Vallee has actually done a public service. He quickly lays out the main proven facts before moving into his theory. It has been known for quite a few years that at least some amount of crop circles are produced by some type of high energy process and, most likely, does not have a human origin. Sure, there are also a lot of them that are produced by people who have embraced the concept as an art form. Some of them even do some mighty pretty work. But some are simply not handmade, if you know what I mean.

Where I do split from Vallee is with the secret microwave weapon theory. OK, granted that the U.S. military has some really weird project going on and, most likely, got some weapons stashed away that are pretty far out (e.g. the laser cannon). But blasting at farm fields for no rational reason just doesn't seem to make any sense. Besides, we have lots of secret bases and test zones all over the globe just for that purpose.

I am also curious as to why Vallee seems to ignore the research that has been done in attempting to decode crop circles. No, I don't mean the New Age trace induced stuff. I'm talking about the work that was being pursued by Gerald Hawkins before his death a few years ago. Best known for his decoding of Stonehenge back in 1963, Hawkins became increasingly convinced that some of the crop circles were a form of code closely related to both math and music.

Maybe he was on to something, or maybe not. He died before he completed the work. But his theories were extremely interesting and his approach would seemingly be of interest to someone like Vallee. Then again, maybe not.

Seems that Vallee is more focused on a bunch of G.I. Joes whizzing around in their saucer-shaped jets blasting microwaves at the cows.