Stranger Dangers
Nowadays, it just seems intuitively obvious that any direct contact with an extraterrestrial civilization could be fatal to ours. Instincts buried deep in our genetic code from countless disasters make us naturally aware that doom comes from the sky. But the reason why we are so sure that any contact is dangerous nowadays is likely due to humanity’s recent past.
The collective experience of the human race over the last half-millennium taught the entire species time and again that it is generally far better to be the discoverer than the discovered. The tragic history of this planet has largely been shaped by the bloody working out of that simple truth all around the globe since 1492.
The historical effects of the accidental contact with the New World by Europeans who then colonized most of the planet – even dominating China, India, and Islam for awhile – is deeply written into our DNA and our culture. For much of the world, however, contact with the white bearded strangers was the death knell of their proud and accomplished civilizations just as it was the also the announcement of the birth of the modern age.
The results of these impacts between societies were decidedly mixed. They included conquest, genocide, enslavement, oppression, spreading of diseases and addictions, the collapse of traditional social orders, ecological devastation, cultural destruction and appropriation – along with increased trade, higher standards of living, improved nutrition, technological and scientific progress, vastly enhanced communication across distances and cultures, the spread of literacy and so on.
To have any chance of survival, understanding the true nature of the discoverers they were up against was imperative for those discovered. Yet the greatest civilizations of the New World failed to realize who they were dealing with in time and were utterly destroyed. The fall of the Aztec Empire in the early sixteenth century is a perfect example of how their own spirituality tripped them up.
It is not known how ready the Aztecs were for contact in 1519, but they could have heard rumors of the growing Spanish presence in the Caribbean for over a quarter of a century. Most importantly, the Emperor Montezuma had great faith in his priestly experts’ interpretations of prophecy and heavenly signs. The prophecies specified the time and the omens that would precede this apocalyptic event, and they all checked out.
So he had excellent reasons to believe that these bearded white men were the long-awaited divine Quetzalcoatl and his servants finally returning to their people from the east as promised. And of course, he was tremendously impressed by the unmatched technologies of steel, guns, and the horses wielded by the strange newcomers, who were even as pale and hairy as expected.
Would history be different if Montezuma was certain from the start that the conquistador Hernando Cortez was not a god, but just a vicious foreign marauder intent on despoiling his realm? Could anything have prevented Europeans from conquering the New World?
Maybe not, because it was the unstoppable diseases the Spanish unwittingly brought with them that wiped out the most from the first moment they set foot in the New World. Yet, despite his own misgivings, Montezuma reluctantly welcomed the conquistadors as divine messengers. It was a fatal miscalculation for him, his empire, and all Mexico for he was soon betrayed. Almost an identical scenario was played out in the Inca Empire in South America by other conquistadors a few decades later, dooming Andean civilization as well.
What is alarming is that the early pattern of contact between Europeans and Native Americans that preceded this clash is eerily similar to what has been going on over the last eighty years with UFOs and us. And it comes just at a time when so many are looking for the return of our god, too.
Coincidence, karma, or history repeating itself? Consider the similarities:
Even before Columbus, the indigenous natives’ first awareness probably began with sightings of distant sailing ships cruising along the coast. At first, supposedly they could not even recognize the vessels as ships, but saw them as some kind of floating clouds or moving islands. Only slowly did they realize that these were craft intelligently directed by people, but people who were not like them. Shipwrecks and castaways likely gave them the first real proof of the strangers. Then landings were reported here and there from these huge ships involving smaller craft piloted by strange-looking people with weapons and metals never before seen.
Accidental and intentional encounters with these foreigners sometimes ended in death but often with abductions and disappearances. Sometimes the visitors might trade trinkets or leave something behind. Finally, when a ship anchored right offshore where it could no longer be ignored, tribal elders would be sent out to make contact, or the strangers would land. And the rest of the history of Western colonialism followed, inevitably bloody and tragic.
If that sounds familiar, it’s not just because the same plot occurs in countless alien invasion sci-fi flicks. And it may not be just historical projection, for this scenario does appear to be playing out in reality. In fact, official contact with extraterrestrials has probably already happened decades ago and we still waiting to be informed.
It is no wonder that we haven’t been told, because it appears that we are all Indians now. Which is to say that the fate of humanity largely rests with powers at least as unknown and unimaginable to us as the splendid baroque courts and royal agendas of Versailles and London were to the happy indigenous inhabitants in the paradisaical wilderness of Manhattan. Our world could also end like theirs did for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with us but solely with the imperial ambitions of distant realms.
Yet even so, this is one of the most favorable first contact scenarios imaginable! At the time of Columbus, Renaissance Europe was barely a few millennia more technically advanced than the highest civilizations of the Americas, which had still not quite made it into the Bronze Age. What if the aliens are not merely thousands, but hundreds of thousands, millions, or even a billion years ahead of us?
If that is so, there is only one way available to us primitives to relate to such powerful, incomprehensible beings – worship. Arthur C. Clarke’s celebrated rule that “if a technology is advanced enough, it is indistinguishable from magic” can perhaps be better stated as, “if a species is advanced enough, they are indistinguishable from gods”.
Yet, like gods, simply depopulating the planet of pesky humans is apparently not what the aliens want. Otherwise it would have already been done relatively cleanly with a plague or messily by dropping rocks on us. And they don’t apparently want our worship, either, or there would be even more spectacular light-shows. Something stranger must be afoot.
Of course, we are no threat to anyone in the Galaxy until we get the means to reach the stars – though that might not be so far off if they keep crashing saucers here. In any case, our interstellar neighbors will probably want to act before we show up uninvited on their porch some day. Yet, even if the aliens neither fear nor despise us nor covet our lovely blue homeworld, there are still plenty of other reasons that could spur them to intervene in human affairs.
Any alien intervention would be radical, however, because their presence is so far outside our current model of reality. Because in order to keep God out of the picture, the basic foundational belief of science since the Enlightenment has been that humanity is not unique but is accidentally alone.
That’s why the lab coats seek other life and civilizations mainly if they are long, long gone or far, far away. Since science tries to distance the whole topic from our fragile egos, our singularity is thereby preserved while maintaining that there is really nothing special about us. Yet even that seems to threaten the paradigm too much. So scientists might listen for signals from outer space, or hunt for signs of water on Mars, but somehow definitive proof of life always remains strangely elusive. But it’s obvious that mainstream scientists will never recognize that aliens are here until they are somehow forced to confront it.
Yet it seems that a certain amount of human ignorance and denial of their reality is just what the aliens ordered. The real truth could be that humanity has never been alone and is very special indeed… at least to our alien overlords.
Despite similarities to previous contacts, this might not be an alien assault like in the movies where they come in blasting ray guns, but rather, a quiet, non-military invasion. For the abductors are not just taking away people – they appear to be using us for genetic hybridization experiments. Though alien abductions seem a fairly recent topic, people have been reporting disturbing midnight encounters with non-human beings – often with a bizarre sexual component – for thousands of years. Yet we remain as utterly powerless to prevent them as our ancestors were, which demonstrates yet again that the aliens are in control.