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