Deliver Us, Oh Lord, from a Bad Sci-Fi Film

As I have said before, once one takes a first step into the preposterous reality of the UFO/UAP phenomena -- a step that our own government has taken already -- then the question is where to stop on the path to the land of the crazies, on the path to madness.  I think we should all be able to agree, for example, that the pyramids at Giza were built without ET engineering assistance.  When you have half a million slaves at your disposal, it's amazing how much you can get done.

David M. Jacobs is a Ph.D retired professor from Temple, whose field of study was 20th century U.S. and intellectual history.  By all accounts he is sober-minded and well grounded generally.  In the last book he has published, "Walking Among Us," from 2015, he attempts to summarize for us hundreds of interviews that he conducted with people who claim to have been abducted by aliens over a long period, most of the interviews under hypnosis conducted by Jacobs himself.  Like the first of the well-publicized "abductees" in American history, Barney and Betty Hill of New Hampshire, many of Jacobs' subjects report that they were taken aboard craft, where sperm or ova were extracted from them against their will.  Later, the abductees are visited repeatedly by beings that seem to be set in a fixed hierarchy, with so-called "insectalins" -- utterly cold-hearted creatures who look something like mantises -- apparently on top and in charge of the program.  Below them are the familiar "greys," but also and critically a series of more and more humanoid beings, culminating in creatures that Jacobs calls "hubrids," who are physically indistinguishable from those of us on Earth of more conventional origin.

The hypothesis is that, via genetic/DNA experimentation, the insectalins are creating a race of alien/human hybrids, with the ultimate goal of "appropriating" our planet for themselves, without a laser/taser having been fired.

This agenda is not made express.  It is inferred from the fact that Jacobs' human subjects are charged with teaching the humanoids how to "pass" in Western society.  One might think that this would not be necessary, because the aliens are all-powerful and all-knowing.  But they are not all-knowing.  What they don't know, and need great help in navigating, are the rules of our culture.  These rules are alien to them in part because their own culture is characterized by strict collectivism/authoritarianism and a complete void in the place where, in our own culture, the values that are dearest to us -- love, friendship, family ties, high culture and popular culture -- reside.

The humanoids expect their abductee assistants to lay out for them all of our cultural rules as if they follow simple algorithms, and the abductees get intensely frustrated with their "cascading questions" for the same reason that a father gets tired of trying to explain to his little son or daughter why the sky is blue:

He likes the carpet too -- that's got a lot of color.  We go upstairs and he stops me on the bottom step and he wants to know why the carpet changes color there and I told him they brought the upstairs carpet down the stairs, but the downstairs carpet is different.  It was like this when we moved in.  He tells me he doesn't like that, he thinks it should all be the same.  We go up the stairs and go into the kitchen.  He's asking me about different things in there.  The color changed on the floor again and he really doesn't like that -- that's like a whitish color and he doesn't like that at all.  He wants to know if I can put the blue carpet in there and I said "No, no, you don't put that kind of carpet in the kitchen."  I'm telling him you can have things spill on it and everything, and you wouldn't be able to keep it clean.

Thus these little lessons are mundane in the extreme, and the jarring juxtaposition is that this army of infiltrators who will take away our world, in the same way that our Manifest Destiny was destined to steamroll the native Americans, is made up of creatures who are plain stupid when it comes to human culture and values.

Professor Jacobs is now 79.  He says that the picture he has painted in all of his alien books has now more or less defeated him morally, and so, from now until his demise, he wants only to sit home and watch television.  Accordingly it is left for us to decide whether he is a great fabulist in the manner of Swift and "Gulliver's Travels," showing us our foibles from the point of view of a naïve witness to an imagined race or imagined races, or rather that he is somehow plugged into an awful secret, the most awful secret.  In this I return again to the chilling 2021 statement of Lue Elizondo, to the effect that it will be hard for us to accept when it is made clear to us, perhaps as early as 2022, that we are not zookeepers but inhabitants of the zoo.

 

When Nietzsche's Mind Began to Shatter

He could see it himself.  Or rather, he could hear it himself, as every sound took on a sinister cast, as if a demon's indecipherable whisper were embedded in it.

The buzzing of the bees in the sycamore trees, for example.

 

Sic Semper Tyrannis

Well, maybe not exactly thus.

It was in the summer of 2047 that the New Leader truly ran off the rails psychologically, which set in motion a chain of events leading to the long-predicted dissolution of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, or DPRK, and the proclamation soon thereafter of the new, benign Peoples Democratic Republic of Koryo, or PDRK.

The New Leader, known to his mother as Kim Il-Du, was not so new in 2047, having ascended the throne upon the death by natural causes of his father Kim Jong-Un in 2039.  By then, though, he was going over a rough patch, and already  being called, behind his back, the "Caligula of Koryo" for his ever more vivid methods of striking fear into the hearts of his people, and especially the hearts of the military and political cadres who might be in a position to threaten him.  So in that summer he instructed the elite construction brigade known as 2-12, which was attached to the Second Army Corps, to build a gigantic fondue pot, to a scale such that it had an aperture of 10 metres, in honor of his late father's favorite food, which was cheese.

The pot when completed looked very much, except for its size, like the crockpot in which one might bake beans, with a pale yellow patina on the bottom and a chocolate brown glaze above.  Kim had it installed in the center of the lesser of the two large gathering places in the Great Hall of the People in Pyongyang -- the one in which international and national championship basketball games were played.  Above the pot was built a complex crane and lift system so that miscreants standing on the floor of the arena could be put in harness, like Peter Pan on 42nd and Broadway, then lifted over and slowly dropped into 5000 gallons of bubbling cheese, with their arms and legs free to move for further theatrical effect.

The cheese, per the classic recipe, was a mixture of equal parts Gruyere and Vacherin Fribourgeois, imported discreetly into the port of Nampo from Shanghai.  Because it represented the entire importation into China from Europe of those two cheeses in the preceding year, securing it was a life-and-death priority for two senior DPRK diplomats residing in Beijing.  Also, once in country, the latter cheese was always to be styled per Kim's own order simply "Vacherin," to avoid any insinuation that the regime fancied anyone or anything that was either "free" or "bourgeois."

Senior party officials in the hundreds as well as family members to the third degree witnessed the executions that took place in the fall in the Peoples Hall.  Kim himself was not present, but he watched them live from his palace in the capital.  Usually two victims were boiled in the cheese at the same time, but they did not descend at precisely the same height.  Kim's logic was that the more reprehensible of the two miscreants should be slightly behind in the descent, so that his agony would include watching and hearing a bit of the denouement of his co-conspirator.

Of the ten people who perished in the pot that year, only one -- the New Leader's aunt, Kim Yo-Jong -- took her punishment silently and with apparent equanimity, until the moment, that is, when her black pump-clad feet fell into the cheese, at which point her screams were automatic and animalistic, incapable of suppression.

It is known that the New Leader, like the Great Leader and the Dear Leader and his father the Respected Marshall before him, held soirees for senior cadres almost every week that went deep into the night, in part to test out loyalties by putting people a bit off their guard via inebriation, which was required of all hands.  At these parties at this time, he would often make reference to the cheese torture, but only obliquely.  It was an unwritten law that everyone respond to such references "in a spirit of fun," as if supremely confident that they themselves were immunized from punishment by their ironclad, impregnable loyalty.

When the end came in the late spring of the following year, Kim himself was frog marched to the hall and up a set of wooden stairs constructed for the purpose, so that he could be tossed over the lip of the crockpot to his destruction.  (It took five men to do it.)  The cheese on that day was on a low simmer as always when the contraption was dormant, and at the temperature accordingly of a light sauna.  As a consequence, Kim died not from burns but from what had come to be known as the new phenomenon of "cheesephyxiation."  His yellow body was displayed to the people in Kim Il Sung Square, propped up in the same regal chair from which he liked to watch military parades, until the dogs did what dogs will do.

Dogmeat, of course, has always been a delicacy in North Korea, and especially favored for its apocryphal assistance in staving off the ill effects of heat in the summer.  But remarkably in that summer of 2048, no one partook of it, not even in the countryside, out of respect for the dogs of Pyongyang.

 

The Evolution of Our Cosmology

Every class in the history of physics makes the point.  The history of our cosmology is the story of man growing further and further from the center.

The earth stood literally at the center.  Then we realized that the earth revolves around the sun.  Then that each star represents a separate sun.  Then that there are more stars in our galaxy than grains of sand on the beach.  Then that this galaxy -- the Milky Way -- is but one dot among billions.  Then that the greater universe comprising the billions of dots is expanding, so that its scale gets larger with every day.  And then that the "cosmic inflation" right after the Big Bang represented a bubble, and that the math implies that such bubbles must arise repeatedly, an infinite number of times in fact, so that there must be a world identical to this one except that this blogpost was not written.

Is this the final frontier? Does this complete the picture? Not if other entire dimensions, heretofore unknown to us, are intruding on our own, and dimensions that are populated by higher intelligences.

This last step, though, would be different from the others from a philosophical point of view.  All of the others fed nicely into the strict materialism of a Daniel Dennett or a Sean Carroll or a Neil de Grasse Tyson insofar as they underscore for us our own insignificance.

With the last step, though, finally the two fingers at the pinnacle of the Sistine Chapel -- the Finger of God and the Finger of Man -- may at long last touch (or not).  The possibilities are endless you might say.

 

After the Tyger

In my new lexicon, "ET" does not stand for "extraterrestrial;" it stands for "extreme terror."  

Before we turn to the terror that may be induced by coming encounters with the perceived inhabitants of Unexplained Aerial Phenomena, or UAP, perhaps we should think about the variables that contribute to a feeling of extreme terror in less exotic circumstances, so that we can measure the visceral fear that is to come, as a consequence of the Big Disclosure, against ET whose sources are, in a literal sense, mundane.

Malevolence.  

Intelligence, perhaps in part as a proxy for power to do us harm, if harm is intended.  

Sheer Size.  

And Strangeness (the experts speak of "high strangeness" when referring to certain reptilian and insect-like creatures, for example).

And so, playing at being scientific, we might adopt a formula:

ET = MISS

What does it mean?  The level of extreme terror is proportional to perceived malevolence times perceived intelligence times size times strangeness.

The Tyger himself.  The terror can be quite extreme because the only thing missing from the equation is strangeness.  The creature is quite beautiful.

Compare coming into a clearing to see an elephant in the wild.  She is more intelligent than the tyger, she is huge, she is quite strange in her composition.  But the jury is out on malevolence.  She will probably live and let live if you don't come too close or threaten her offspring.

Compare the pretend creature seen in a viral video that some wit with time on his hands was able to construct.  He built a very realistic spider costume to be worn by his friendly and lovable dog.  When the dog runs, the legs of the spider bounce up and down in such a way that they appear to be propelling the spider.  Two young girls push the button to call for an elevator.  When the doors open up, what appears to be a two-foot-wide tarantula runs after them!  The terror is extreme.  It's only wildly funny because the malevolence is a mirage.

When people experiment with the powerful hallucinogenic drug DMT (which is said to be released routinely by the brain as death approaches), it is common for them to see "elves" or court jesters.  These creatures seem "more real than reality."  They also seem to know everything about the experiencer.  They often mock him or her, as if giving life instruction in the form of "calling out one's bullshit."  Having high strangeness and high intelligence, if only modest relative size, they will induce ET, or not, based largely on their perceived level of malevolence.

What about God Himself?  Well, one might want to ask "Which One?"  The Gnostics believed that the god who built all of creation, including us -- "Yaldabaoth" -- who is the same as the god of the Old Testament, was a petty tyrant -- jealous and downright evil.  It might well induce ET to find oneself face to face with him, in a way not much different than when Dorothy and her friends first encountered the Wizard of Oz.  (His malevolence, size and strangeness, and yes even his intelligence, are fabricated of course, and it takes less than a minute for the terror to evaporate once he is revealed to be the celebrated "man behind the curtain.")

On the conventional earthly plane, I might Eye Dee the giant squid as the creature who best proves out my theorem.  In a little storefront on the street in Manhattan outside the Museum of Modern Art this past summer, a fascinating video played out in a continuous loop.  In the video, a normal-sized squid investigated, then devoured, a chambered nautilus in his chamber, which was somehow shown in cutaway view.  (The film was not animated.)  The squid inserted one tentacle into the nautilus's shell all the way in a conventional spiral into its deepest interior.  There it found its prey.  The squid then compressed itself in such a way that its body could make its way halfway along the spiral path.  Then it tore apart at its leisure the poor animal hiding in the center, using its suckers to move little pieces to its mouth.

If we place ourselves in the posture of the nautilus, it is hard to imagine anything that could be more terrifying.  And if we place ourselves in scuba gear in an underwater cavern, with a hungry 30-foot giant squid coming upon us, well, there we are in solidarity with the nautilus.  Our terror is only rendered more extreme if we look upon the eyes of the Creature and remember, from our science books, that it is more intelligent than your average chocolate Lab.

By all accounts, the perceived inhabitants of UAP come in various sub-species, or perhaps in various put-upon guises.  Some, such as the crash victims of Roswell, are too helpless to pose a threat, so they can't be said to be malevolent in the moment.  They may induce wonder and bewilderment in us, but not terror, at least not directly.

But then on the other end of the scale there are the reported reptilians with anal probes, who may or may not telepathically communicate to us that "this won't hurt a bit."  There are also the perpetrators of cattle mutilations proximate to UAP sightings, fantastically strange and merciless operations that are too ubiquitous to be dismissed as nonsense.

How do these various species or guises relate to each other, and who is in charge?  Is anyone in charge?

Humankind in a collective state of ET for the first time in the history of the world, that's what I am thinking about.

 

Is My Question the Same as Blake's?

The question embedded in the poem that is --

Tyger, tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

We are asked to stand in awe of God's magnificent yet terrifying handiwork.  But beyond that we are asked what kind of God could leave us defenseless on this landscape with the tiger, who is wont to lie in wait when our wives and daughters take the trail down to the river, out of necessity, "in the forests of the night."

And how much more terrible, now, to look into the eye of the shape-shifting tiger and to see, in addition to cold malevolence, an intelligence that has evolved for millions of years beyond our own.  "This is not a beast but a demi-god!"  Do we really think that there is a benevolent Higher God who stands behind him?  What is the narrative that might explain this in a way that gives comfort?