Aliens Invade; Government Panics; Sinister Vats Appear; Film at 11

   
    Aliens Invade; Government Panics; Sinister Vats Appear; Film at 11

      Mike MacLeod and friends

This note is an enquiry into the nature of the "EBEs", or, now, "ALFs",
the allegedly extraterrestrial creatures mentioned in the John Lear
Statement (LEAR.TXT) and in a number of other files here on ParaNet.

I am not a UFOlogist, and neither are my friends who shared some of the
ideas herein. I'm not sure if they wanted their names attached to this
note, so I have not given them a auctorial credit.  I am a professional
technical writer, currently writing software manuals for a computer
company. 

My friends and I have looked at UFO materials for over 20 years, and
this set of data - from at least three camps - leaves a uniquely bad taste
in our mouths. 

When confronted with a situation like this, with a lot of hand waving and
an atmosphere charged with menace, there are a number of ways to look at
the proffered data. We are surprised by the lack of imaginative discussion
here; if this stuff is even remotely true, we're going to need all the
theorizing and ideas we can muster.

It may be instructive to look at some possible explanations and toss out the
least likely:

Theory 1: Everything posted is true, except where documents disagree - such
          as meetings taking place at two different times or locations, in
          which case one is assumed to be true.

Not likely.  Several files were prepared from memory and the authors were
careful to say so and to suggest that they may have forgotten details or
misremembered incidents. 

Have you ever read a set of witnesses' reports taken by police from the
classic "scene of the crime"?  They vary considerably - so much so, that
they often seem to have been observing something completely different.
The reports about EBE activities seem disturbingly similar, sometimes
seeming as if an ounce of data were fluffed up with a hair dryer into a
pound of descriptive prose to please adrenaline junkies.

Theory 2: It's all bs; none of it's true.

We don't think this is likely, either, though it's probably a safer bet
than theory 1.  We have been reading reports of one kind or another for 20
years and this one gives us a very odd feeling.  There is a kind of
strangeness to it that is much more characteristic of reality than
fiction.  I know this is an insubstantial subjective feeling, but there
is a good deal of truth to the cynical comment that "Of course life is
stranger than fiction - it doesn't have to make sense".  It is difficult
to write a realistic tale without the puppeteer's strings showing; in my
opinion, these reports do not show a great deal of fabrication;
opportunistic lying, perhaps, to merge details from one incident into
another.

Theory 3: The EBE story, as posted here, is a cover for something even
          >worse< that the EBEs are doing.

Mr. Lear muses that "What could be worse than being eaten"?  Well, let's
see...the aliens are currently held responsible for mutilations and
abductions; perhaps we can pin AIDS on them.  It may be that the EBE
presence has crippled the US Space Program and otherwise interfered with
events, but our information is simply inadequate.  Still, this merits inquiry.

Theory 4: The EBE story is a cover for covert >government< activities,
          again, worse than we suspect.

Unfortunately, a good case can be made for this. There is considerable
evidence that the Nazis never really surrendered, but went underground and
also infiltrated most of the world's intelligence agencies.  Certain
crimes of the aliens remind one of Nazi atrocities during WWII.  Some
reports here claim that the Germans seized a crashed saucer in the late
1930s.  Suppose they had already cut a deal with the EBEs, then the EBEs
extended their reach to the USA, along with top Nazis?  It's an open
secret that Project Paperclip brought over dozens, if not hundreds, of
Nazis, installed many of them in scientific or intelligence posts, and
even forged fake documents to let them get on with the Thousand-Year Reich
unmolested.   And where were the U-boats when the Allies captured their
pens?  Mostly gone; some say to secret bases in Neuschwabenlandt in
Antartica; with EBE technology they might make a go of it.

Hard to believe that the Nazis really didn't lose WWII?  Not any harder
than accepting "highly evolved" aliens with degenerated digestive tracts.

Rather than consider a number of other scenarios on their merits, one at a
time, perhaps a deductive approach will bear fruit, now that some of the
wider-ranging theories have been looked at. Let me bring up several issues
in the story we have trouble with. 

We're surprised that the presence of humanoid aliens has been accepted so
blandly by the community of researchers.  From a standpoint of locomotion
in gravity wells, a quadruped is a pretty simple, stable configuration.
There are few upright bipeds, fewer still as large as men.  We do not see
six-legged higher animals on Earth, so, by the only analogicial reasoning
we have at our disposal, we cannot assume them to be that common.  However,
I would not be surprised to see centaur-like aliens with four legs and two
more manipulating leg-arms. 

Animals built low to the ground are in no great danger from falling, but
humans can die from just falling down. So it takes some good motor control
to be a big, heavy biped.  Like other predators, men have binocular
vision, which is most suitable (of eye placements) for fine motion
detection.  Preyed-upon creatures generally have eyes on either side of
their heads, the better to check out leopards making their midnight creep.

In Elaine Morgan's thoughtful book, _Descent of Woman_, she hypothesizes
that our hominid ancestors underwent a >partial< adaption to the sea, as
did seals and such, but reconsidered and returned to the land.  She
postulates about 10 million years of seashore living and adaption.  And
she makes a good circumstantial case; she points out that the other
primates are either fearful or at best indifferent to water - chimps
supposedly will not enter water above their waists.  Anybody who has seen
human babies swimming happily long before they can crawl cannot doubt that
humans are comfortable in water. 

She lists a number of items:  the rotation of the human arm is adapted for
360 degree motion, unlike other primates; the placement of human nostrils
(unlike other primates) keeps water away from the nose when diving
headfirst into water; we lost our body hair in the sea; we communicate
mostly verbally, which would be more effective in the intertidal zone,
rather than by body language, gestures, and facial expressions, as other
primates do.

Like the other sea mammals, we lost our hair, developed larger bodies and
breasts, and greater intelligence, presumably from having to cope with
two radically different environments.  Above all else, humans are
gloriously >generalized<.  We swim, climb, run, and eat almost anything;
with the addition of brains and thumbs, we won the Pleistocene War Games,
when competitors like sabre-tooth cats and cave bears, as the books say,
"mysteriously" disappeared.

Contrast this admittedly Nietzchean scenario with the EBEs.  They are
right out of the feelgood school of SF movies: the New Age Space Brothers
like ET and the CE3K Stay-Puft types. (The other school - and it's
interesting how cleanly they fall into the two archetypes - is the
Supercompetitor out to eat our niche's lunch, and us for dessert, best
shown in the movie _Alien_.) 

The obvious inconguity is the nonfunctional digestive system.  On Earth,
nothing more complex than a mayfly has evolved without a digestive system,
and the success of omnivores suggests that such adaptions - and the
sophistication such adaption requires - has survival value.  It's possible
that, as was suggested, the nonfunctional digestive tract is an artifact of
genetic damage from environmental causes or genetic warfare. If the EBEs
have genetic engineering sufficient to do the damage, why don't they fix
themselves?  If they don't have genetic engineering, why not?  It's in
>our< immediate future, certainly within the next few decades.

In fact, the EBEs only - so far as these sketchy reports go - manifest
something like an imitation of '50's science fiction projections of future
science.  In the old National Lampoon Bruce McCall used to draw hilarious
sendups of the "1935 Popular Science" version of life in 1985, where Pop
commuted to work with his helicopter back-pack and Mom ordered loaves of
Wonder bread from the grocer and had them delivered by underground vacuum
tubes like the ones in old (now demolished) department stores.  He makes
the point that future technology is always taking new twists and turns;
straight-line extrapolation is virtually always wrong.  Even SF writers,
who get paid (in part) based on the believability of their futures, have
a miserable track record.  The one thing we know for sure about the future
is that it will be other than we expect it to be. 

The aliens do not (except for the report about the nanomachinery attached
to the genes in a woman's egg) demonstrate the use of Nanotechnology,
which is bearing down on us (refer to K. Eric Drexler's _Engines of
Creation_ for an overview of the implications of molecular and atomic
engineering).  Even relatively simple uses of nanotechnology, such as the
use of clouds of floating horticultural nanomachines to doctor and prune
forests and wilderness areas - an intelligent fog, as it were,  would
invoke Clarke's law and look like magic.  The EBEs show no such
technology; the closest item is a rather mundane recording-displaying
crystal that shows Earth's history. On top of that, it is said to
reproduce poorly.  Come now.  Any spacefaring race is going to have - at
the very least - digital imaging to display important data in a way
readily perceived by eye-using creatures, unless they have bigger magic.
Simply put, the EBEs' technology is a >straight-line extrapolation< of
'50's technology, not even of >today's<. 

What does all this imply?  That it's all faked?  Perhaps.  But there is
another explanation that fits many of the observed facts, and is
sufficiently grim to please the paranoids out there:

The EBEs showed up in numbers sufficient to leave crashed saucers around
shortly after we began setting off atomic weapons.  It's not too far
fetched to theorize that fission explosions have some sort of undetectable
(to us) superluminal signature which they received.  The hypothetical
probe orbiting in the Trojan point, responsible for the Long-Delayed Echo
effect (and investigated by Duncan Lunan in the '70's) stopped echoing
back signals about the time we started A-bombing.  Gave up in disgust?
More likely it decided that there were no survivors, or would not be in a
relatively short time.

The EBEs are themselves artifacts, designed and built to conform to a
general picture of what humans expect "saucer people" to look like and
bearing the "correct" level of Visible Wierd Space Technology, as if the
designers got hold of a copy of "Earth vs. The Flying Saucers" and tried
to realize Harryhausen's work.  Even the recorded sounds of Billy Meier's
beamships sound like the EVTFS craft!  Compare the two some time.  In this
scenario, the aliens' actual level of technology is very carefully
concealed and is considerably higher.

The "Greys" are temporary mock-ups of human beings >never intended< to
live independently for long periods; this explains the lack of sustenance
in the craft and the vestigial digestive tracts.  They were designed to be
as non-threatening as possible; not only are they tiny compared to adult
humans, but thin even relative to their size, and no doubt as weak as
kittens.  However, they do have oversized heads and big eyes.  Remember
those ghastly Keane paintings from the sixties?  They sold like hotcakes,
because the painter knew that >infant mammals< all have large heads
proportionate to their bodies and >big eyes<.  Not only are the EBEs
"harmless"; they need to be mothered!

So perhaps somebody is giving us a handjob to allay our suspicions.  If you
were designing an alien body to appear harmless, what would you create?
ALF?  Spuds McKenzie?  Garfield?  PeeWee Herman?  Sean Penn?

We get a queasy feeling when wondering if the creators of the pathetic
little Greys were really trying as hard as they could to copy men.  How
truly alien they would then be.

Given that the Greys have:

- Technology close enough to ours to be understandable

- A physical makeup and demeanor clearly designed to allay suspicions

- Picked a fight with us by murdering and torturing innocent humans and
  animals

what sort of picture appears?

Remember in "Zulu" where the first wave of the attacking Zulu are cut down
by the British, then withdraw, and the wise old strategist remarks, "They
were just counting your guns"?  Suppose you were thinking of invading but
wanted to expend the least effort possible - perhaps you were invading
several hundred civilizations at once, and had to economize (hey, things
are tough all over).  You'd send in a fleet of constructs like these with
barely enough firepower and support to keep them going while they surveyed
the scene in depth.  If the locals couldn't shake them off, nothing more
was needed.  If they did, you could either 1) send in the heavier stuff,
or 2) give up and write it off and look elsewhere.  As Dr. Bennewitz
remarks, "They totally respect force."  If we don't want to be the Rodney
Dangerfields of this sector of the galaxy, we'd best get our asses in gear.

The stubborn point is that the EBEs themselves are obviously intelligent.
So they are, but did they create their saucers and their crystals? They
could still be the authors of the whole program, but the "plot device"
required to really make this scenario work would be a way to insert and
remove beings from bodies.  Back in EBE city the locals decide to go to
Earth, slip out of their natural bodies (which look like four-legged moray
eels with a clump of wormlike tentacles extending from their snouts), and
put on temporary Space Brother bodies. No wonder they move "slowly and
deliberately"; it'd be a whole lot worse than strapping on ice skates for
the first time. 

It is still tough to explain why an advance guard of an invasion force, as
we posit the EBEs to be, whether in their correct bodies or in the
equivalents of "recvees", was not fully functional and capable of eating
Earth food, or at least not requiring a strange fresh-squeezed nutrient
broth of some sort, unless they were truly temporary bodies only intended
to function for a short time.  Again, we can produce nearly complete
artificial food today - not cheaply, but well enough.  Why can't the EBEs
do likewise? There is nothing special about tissues in the areas taken in
mutilations, except perhaps for the genital glands; the taking seems more
of a terror-causing activity.  But the true answer is not known and hard
to guess. 

Is there any collateral material that supports this hypothesis, tenuous as
it is?  There is, but it could hardly be less reputable if it came from the
CIA itself.

Although the face the public sees is the odious semi-military cult face of
the Church of Scientology, buried in the Church are dozens of volumes of
L. Ron Hubbard's writings, much of it "confidential" and guarded zealously
by (appropriately enough) zealots. When you get into the shadowy "upper
levels" of the Church, you become privy to greater and greater portions of
L. Ron Hubbard's description of the big SF novel we're living in.  This
worldview shares some ground with the EBE scenario.  To our mind, one of
the striking features is a similar feeling of "weirdness", as if it were
too strange for anybody to create.  Hubbard makes an interesting
distinction between bodies and spirits, claiming that there are races of
spirits as different as races of bodies from different planets, and that a
kind of mix 'n match is possible, so that the same "family" of beings
could wind up in wildly different bodies - or that different "races" of
spirits could be inhabiting genetically similar bodies. 

Anyway, Hubbard claims that we have all been around as immortal beings for
incredibly long times, and that there are indeed alien races roaming
around out in space, many of whom are aware of us here, and some of whom
are involved in our affairs.  In particular, some pernicious aliens are
here on Earth, and have machinery to trap beings as they leave dying
bodies.  Once trapped they can be subjected to a program of brainwashing
and indoctrination and finally forced amnesia, so that all memories of
past lives and between-lives manipulation is erased.

The premise of all this is immortality and reincarnation.  Hubbard claims
that coercive, technological civilizations will inevitably develop
mind-control techniques, because only a mental-spiritual control mechanism
is useful and efficient to dominate immortals living in body after body.

Hubbard makes much of "doll bodies", which are small, possibly inorganic
bodies animated by beings and used, among other purposes, during space
flights.  He claims that they are also less subject to damage from sudden
acceleration.  His descriptions, which date from the late '50's, sound
disturbingly like EBE portraits.

Hubbard insisted that the human race was on the brink of several types of
disasters, which often involved the intervention of aliens or the collapse
of Earthly civilization from the weight of between-lives assaults and
great advances in chemical and hypnotic mind control.  He pushed rank-and-file
Scientologists, via his endless streams of letters, advices, issues, and so
on to get "processed" into a state where one could resist the between-life
"implants" and retain one's memory from one life to another (and much more,
but this is the basic scenario).

So far the stream of documents about the EBE situation sketch a most
minimal picture.  In particular, the sequential releases of files seem to
first merge one researcher's information with another's, then another's,
until we finally view a pointellist picture built up from a thousand
minute bits of data: unknown metals, undrivable craft, strange elixirs,
Tibetan music, and of course strawberry ice cream.

I remember several interviews in which Steven Spielberg asserted that CE3K
was about "a government coverup".  That seemed strange to me at the time.
Now what seems strange is how closely that movie fits the Big Picture.
Bill Cooper even tells us that the inner area in the "Luna" base is
called the "Far Side of the Moon"; in CE3K the base where the mothership
lands is called the Dark Side of the Moon. 

Perhaps all this is nothing more mysterious than a big ball of string
given to a crew of playful, paranoid kittens to occupy us while the real
powers go about their real business, like trashing the Bill of Rights by
implementing unlimited preventive detention (a recent Supreme Court
decision), fines and penalties without trial (the recent Drug War bill
that passed in the House), and the US Army as a law-enforcement agency to
crush seditious dope smokers.  Even J. Edgar Hoover said that he hated
using the FBI on drug cases, because there was so much money involved that
it practically guaranteed corruption.  Corrupt feds are one thing; corrupt
Colonels with tactical nukes are something else again. 

For my part, the most depressing scenario is simply a continuation of the
mystery.  In a recent PBS special on the controversy surrounding the
assassination of President Kennedy, Walter Cronkite wound up the look at
the dubious and equivocal evidence presented (mind you, there is evidence
considerably less equivocal and dubious) with the gloomy conclusion that
we will probably never know what happened; too much time had gone by, too
many loose ends petered out into nothingness, and finally there was too
much left open to several different explanations. 

There is a lot more evidence afoot for the presence of aliens on Earth,
and even the Greys From Interstellar Hell scenario is pretty well
documented as far as the numbers of CEs go.  The skeptics, with their
"Extraordinary assertions demand extraordinary proof" canard are wrong;
the mental state associated with constant attention to simple, repetitive,
monotonous events is called hypnosis.  The skeptics think that because the
aren't stumbling around bumping into walls that they can't be hypnotized -
that is, entrenched in a reality tunnel where odd phenomena are tossed
out as noise.  As many researchers have pointed out, in any other field
the weight of evidence would be more than adequate, but no amount
of testimony can remove the "mind-forge'd manacles" Blake saw his
contemporaries set in.

For better or worse, though, I think that the truth about the MAJIC story
will finally come to public knowlege.  In the meantime, I'd like to see:

- A coherent plan for fighting back!  I want one of the little
  bastards' heads on my wall.  They are ticks with delusions of grandeur.
  I was raised on Heinlein novels; like he says, if I have to go down
  fighting, I want to take a dozen or so to hell with me.  I was excited
  by the take-charge optimism of Dr. Paul Bennewitz's postings, but they
  were chopped-up (by whom?), incomplete, and tough to read.

- Some plan for protecting us as individuals from abduction or mutilation.
  There must be >something< that they can't stand, like maybe a tape of
  Metallica turned up to 110 decibels.  Tibetan temple bells my ass.

- A little less cynicism and resignation on the part of the crew here.
  These things are >things<, not people; they don't create art, or have
  faith, tend gardens, love each other, empathize with other life forms,
  or display any of the glories of the human spirit.  Like earthly
  parasitic, totalitarian, cultures, they are obsessed with control and
  death and with utterly materialistic conceptions.  If we fight them with
  their tools we will probably lose.  If we fight them with our own
  virtues and talents they will not be able to deal with them and we will
  win.  Men - fewer each year, but still some men - value freedom more
  than life, and will risk the latter for the former, and this they will
  never understand.

Utulie'n Aure,

Michael Sloan MacLeod