If They Ever Come From Outer Space

Once again, the anniversary of the Roswell Incident has come and gone and nobody has gotten a day off.  You would think that folks in this country would get a lousy day off for something like an alien crash but no...we don't even get any stupid greeting cards.

Oh well.  However, it is a good time to reflect on the ever popular notion of alien invasion.  Due to a wide variety of factors, the concept is becoming faddish in some mighty strange areas as a solution to world peace (the novel Impact by Douglas Preston) and  to economic policies (Paul Krugman and his fake alien invasion proposal).  Oddly enough, these ideas are almost starting to sound half reasonable.

What isn't reasonable are the various scenarios for such an invasion.  Despite some recent interviews and news programs (such as the NBC Today Show story), we don't really know what the folks at the Pentagon really have up their sleeves in the event of a real War of the Worlds.  Unfortunately, it is probably deeply rooted in traditional military concepts.  After all, you often get a standard form of thinking from the Pentagon like you get the same type of burger from every McDonald's.

Likewise, the history of the U.S. Military cooperation with certain movies would suggest that the key concept of the film was acceptable to the brass.  It doesn't mean that the government is trying to send covert messages to the audience (beyond the usual: 1. We look good; 2. We got lots of neat equipment; 3. Don't worry - if anything happens we can handle it; 4. Why not join?).  But it does mean that the core ideas are considered half OK.

So certain Hollywood movies do suggest some of the thinking and basically, it all seems to be rooted in the central concept of total full frontal attack as found in such classics as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and War of the Worlds.  Lots of aliens with lots and lots of ships that come screaming in until it becomes a pitch battle waiting for something that tips the war to Earth's favor.

From a film producers viewpoint, this is the way it ought to be.  Major tourist sites get blown up, mass carnage and speculator displays of destruction followed by a nice moral message and a sweet surge of optimism about the human spirit.  But to be honest, I doubt if an alien invasion would ever happen in this manner.  For one thing, the sheer cost in material needed for a global invasion (even of a smallish planet such as ours) would have to be mind boggling.  Even with superior weapons, alien invaders would have to expect a protracted and costly fight.  

Of course this type of invasion is also remarkably human in its planning.  Presumably this is how we would do it...oh yeah, we are not talking about humans are we.  For all I know, we could be talking about methane breathing jellyfish critters from a moon of Saturn.

Which is why I would argue that the real starting point for exploring alien invasion (at least in theory) is best found in the TV scripts of the British writer Nigel Kneale.  Especially the four parts of the Quatermass trilogy (long story but it is sort of a four part trilogy).

The most important of the original stories would be Quatermass II  and  Quatermass and the Pit (better known in the U.S. by the title of Five Million Years to Earth).  Quatermass II answers the question about methane breathing life forms (most likely they would deal with invasion through a radical change of our atmosphere - which would deal with the human issue pretty quickly).  As for Quatermass and the Pit, well if you have read Nick Redfern's book Final Events then you can kick back and watch the so-called Collins Elite's worse nightmare.  Even more bizarre, Kneale has an incredible skill at making the fantastic seem strangely logical and highly plausible. 

Along with the work of Nigel Kneale, I would also highly recommend the novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham.  This tale of an attempted invasion involving a small band of alien-hybrid children is profoundly precise, rational, and deeply disturbing.  Good grief, it also sounds modern.  But if you cannot find a copy of the book, the original British film version titled Village of the Damned does a good job of conveying most of the book's key points (minus the references to Hegel).   Skip the American version.  It is extremely weak.

This is merely a short list, but these would be the key works to start any serious study on the subject.  I just hope the Pentagon is playing attention. 

Four Stooges of the Apocalypse

Gosh gee whiz, 2012 fever is hot out there.  I know because I recently made a passing joke about 2012 and the end of the world in a film finance blog piece (sort of my day job) and got various responses from assorted religious types who were stocking the bunkers.  Guess they were not sure how solid they were with the Lord.

Of course, the ancient Mayans did not predict the end of the world in 2012.  They only predicted the end of this current age.  Maybe, depending upon your interpretation, the end of this period of civilization.  But that is about it (except for a little detail we shall get to later).  But that hasn't stopped the true believers from bracing for everything from Rapture to alien invasion (and lots of stuff in between).

For example, take the recent buzz on various UFO and end of the world sites concerning the report of Strange Metal Boxes on the Coast of Oregon (I put it in caps so you can quickly run it through Google).  The story started around Feb 8 as the boxes began appearing up and down the Pacific shoreline.  Continued on Feb. 14 as Dr. Bill Hanshumaker of the Hatfield Marine Science Center arrived to examine the boxes and announce that he had NO IDEA WHAT THEY WERE!  Then, the boxes began to glow and buzz and you would think that they would all be running for the hills.

OK, maybe there are some problems with the story.   Little details like the fact that Dr. Hanshumaker has never seen the so-called boxes (I know, because I asked him via email).  Sure, he sent some young volunteers over to Bray's Point to look at the boxes but there were no boxes.  In fact, nobody could be found who had a clue what they were talking about.

OK, maybe this story has some really big problems.  Considering the fact that the tale is just a single source story, completely lacking in any basic form of confirmation and the one and only expert witness quoted in the piece is telling everybody that he hasn't seen anything, we might just have to suspect a hoax.  A really, really big hoax.

Though the stupid tale doesn't hold up under the slightest scrutiny, it has traveled across the internet like lightening.  At some sites, UFOs have been added to the story with dark hints of an impending invasion.  At others, these boxes are clear signs of the 2012 Apocalypse (though I can't recall anything in the Book of Revelations that referred to the Holy Gift Boxes of God).  Increasingly, as the bogus reports pump up the tale with a buzzing sound, a few bold folks have linked it to the strange sky sounds that are a major hit on YouTube.

At any moment, someone will decide that these boxes must contain President Obama's real birth certificate.  The assumptions mount.  And yes, assumptions can also make an ass out of you and me.

But notice the quick linkage between this completely bogus story and the sky sound reports.  These many reports are a trickier lot.  Some, such as the incident in Costa Rica are confirmable.  A few odd incidents even received national broadcast, such as the "noise" during several baseball games at Tropicana Field.   So there really is something going on, but it is hard to truly evaluate as numerous hoaxes have been uploaded onto YouTube.  It becomes a bit hard to see the forest due to all of the plastic Christmas trees.

I have a bad feeling that the many hoaxes are doing a major disservice to the general public.  Especially if I am half-correct in my hunch that some of these noises may be related to unique freak upper atmospheric winds caused by radical climatic change.  Who needs the Four Horsemen when you have that going on.  Unfortunately, the hoaxes simply make it easier for many folks to doubt the whole thing and that may not be a good idea.

Many of the YouTube videos are single source presentations and are lacking in any form of confirmation.  A few have voice overs that attempts to misdirect the viewer.  For example, in one tape that I've seen, a woman claims to have been awaken in the middle of the night by the mysterious noise and has gone out to her backyard to tape it.  At one point, she describes how her neighbors are also waking up to this scary noise and their lights are coming on.  In reality, the lights were already on at the start of the tape.  She is just claiming otherwise.  Oddly enough, there doesn't seem to be any sign of anybody stepping out to even see what is going on.  In fact, it looks like a pretty quiet neighborhood (except for the so-called racket from above).

I have noticed that many of the most suspect videos often share something in common.  They all have the same noise, the so-called Trumpet of the Apocalypse.  Many of these videos have virtually the same (or even the exact same) sound.  Most are presumably duped from the same master tape.  Ironically, they all resemble the climax from Kevin Smith's movie Red State (starting at the 32 second mark).  It is not the exact same sound (though extremely close), but it is the exact same idea (minus the explanation in the movie's wrap up).

Coincidence?  Yea, sure.  To be honest, I don't think God gets His ideas from Kevin Smith movies.  But if He does, then He must be a more fun fella than we have given Him credit (and I bet He loves comic books).

And by the way, what the ancient Mayans predicted for 2012 was the return of the heavy duty super god Bolon Yokte.  On Dec. 21, he is scheduled to descend from the sky and kick start the world into a new age.  Almost sounds like a job for The Ghostbusters.

Update: Email just received from Dr. Bill Hanshumaker:

The "boxes on the beach" are merely floats that were originally built to support docks. After a recent flooding event, some docks were destroyed and their floats drifted downriver and subsequently deposited on the beach. A colleague from a local state agency had the opportunity to examine one and confirmed this explanation.

William Hanshumaker, Ph.D.
Public Marine Education Specialist
Oregon Sea Grant Faculty

The Neverending Story

Leslie Kean's book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record is now a best seller. Various retired military men have gone public with their reports of UFOs disabling nuclear missiles . A growing list of countries are releasing documents confirming that alien objects are real. All in all, it seems to be pretty earth shaking stuff.

So naturally the national press is more focused on Lindsay Lohan's most recent arrest. After all, everyone is bound to be shock that she might be doing drugs.

So basically, aliens could launch a full scale attack, blow up half the cities on Earth, and generally wreak the kind of havoc seen mostly in Michael Bay's films and nobody will report it. Well, maybe a small report at the end of the news hour (mostly using another pointless interview with some debunker who will balance the story with another round of "it was only the planet Venus" jibber jabber).

I mean heck, most of Kean's book is packed with material that has actually been available for a few years, is pretty well documented (mostly by the U.S. military itself) and is widely known within UFO circles. But to the public at large, it is new and mysterious.

The attraction that UFOs have for nuclear missiles (both ours and the old Soviets) is also well known and documented (by both us and the Russians). Nothing exactly new. It is a topic that might be considered of some deep concern (at least if you are kind of concerned about global security and stuff), but it isn't actually new. Of course, a lot of the media isn't exactly paying attention because...well, just because.... Heck, this story is only going to get attention if you can someone factor in a drunk and drugged Lindsay Lohan (maybe doing wheelies around the silo while aliens shoot heat beams at her or something like that).

Heck, I just watched a news story on CNN about a farmer in Georgia trying to catch the mystery intruders who have killed and mutilated 20 of his cows over the past year. It is a classic "mute" case and it is also quite obvious that the reporters covering the story haven't a clue as to what they are chasing.

Despite ample evidence that these cases represent something extremely unusual (and there has been lots of evidence gathered over the years, mostly by honest-to-god police investigators - the FBI have even posted online the material), the cattle mutilations are still blown off as freak acts committed by elusive lone nutcases (I think they are second cousins to the equally odd lone gunmen types). Very little investigation has gone into these cases (and they don't even have to involve the UFO theory - in fact I have often leaned toward the "black op" notion). But the evidence strongly suggests something extremely serious is going on and it most likely involves something that just might be darn serious to public health and safety.

So obviously it is doomed to a small piece on the back page, surrounded by uninformed quotes from whatever dingbat the reporter can find on his speed dial.

After all, they have to save the front page for ol' Lindsay. She is about due for court again.

What If...

Let's say you are the president of the United States and you are having a pretty lazy afternoon, just hanging around the Oval Office catching up on your soaps or whatever. Suddenly, all the phones start ringing as everybody from the State Department to the Joint Chiefs and even the D.C. police are calling about a large saucer shaped craft that just landed on the National Mall. What are you going to do?

OK, after you have taken that stiff drink, what do you do next? It's a good question that doesn't seem to have an actual straight forward answer. Most likely, there is some form of protocol in place. Experience suggests that it will go something along the same lines as what happened in similar situations.

When NASA was about to present the possibility that they had found fossils in a Martian rock, the results were first taken to then President Bill Clinton in order to prepare him to prepare the nation for the shocking discovery of...well, of like maybe dead Martians (by the way, so far the world has pretty much been capable of dealing with this discovery - much more so than some geologists). Naturally, Pres. Clinton admittedly told the news to his main spin doctor, Dick Morris. In turn, Morris made a quick retreat to a hotel room and blabbed the whole story out to a call girl. OK, this isn't exactly much of a protocol. According to most reports, the call girl wasn't even all that impressed by the story. Guess she wasn't into geology.

In 2004, an asteroid appeared to have been heading toward the earth. President George W. Bush was immediately alerted and for the next nine hours the White House held phone briefings with various other foreign heads of state in order to prepare them for an impact. Oddly enough, while all of this chatting was going on, nothing was actually done that might have suggested any kind of attempt at the most basic level of public preparedness. The debate was kept secret and, I suspect, was mostly about who got to race for the bunker first. Screw the public.

So the known track record for certain types of events isn't exactly fantastic. One would hope that the current administration might do a better job. The current farce with the Gulf oil spill suggests otherwise. President Obama might be tempted to simply form a committee and then move on to something else.

Which is too bad. Alien contact is not such a strange possibility. It is even possible that it has already happen, the so-called Wow signal being just one of several distinct moments. Unfortunately, the known details of such events suggest that if it were left strictly to the scientific community, they would simply dick around with the issue for a few decades and then, maybe, publish a paper.

At the political level, the only known decision concerning aliens appears to be the infamous order by Harry S. Truman to shoot them down. Who knows, maybe the aliens need to be taught a lesson or two. But an itchy trigger finger doesn't exactly set the stage for a very productive greeting.

It also doesn't help that no real public effort has been made to prepare the world for this highly plausible moment. Sure, a long history of Hollywood movies and TV shows have sort of prepared the general public for alien contact. But the effort has been, at best, a little half baked and poorly defined. The main upside is that most of the general public is half-equipped to deal with the concept, contrary to the panic-inducing notions of the old Brookings Institute report.

Ironically, the general public may now be in better mental condition to deal with alien contact than most of the so-called intellectual class. For the past fifty years, the subject of aliens has been successfully treated with scorn and ridicule. A sizable amount of the intellectual class (academics, scientists, etc.) have largely treated the subject as a goofy idea and are extremely ignorant of the current situation. In turn, they are the people most invested in an intellectual understanding of reality that will be at best sorely tested (if not torn asunder) by the process of alien contact. They have the most to loose. In all likelihood, they will be the ones who will be least capable of grasping the issues if, and when, events unfold. In many respects, first contact will be the end of the world as they know it. Likewise, the higher the intellect, the greater the fall. Many of them will never recover from the blow and I suspect that an entire generation will go missing from the shock. The average person will most likely do OK, but the tenured faculty folks can simply cash it in the minute the first craft publicly lands.

Which is too bad. They are also the same people whose help in understanding the situation will be critically needed. But they are unprepared for this event. They have had a lifetime of denial and denial is a hard habit to easily break.

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.