Posthuman Blues

There's something alluring about the popularly conceived "Gray" alien. The image is appealing in a very real aesthetic sense. When "Communion" was published, with its now-famous cover portrait of a beige-skinned alien with glistening black eyes, many found the visage unendurably creepy, whereas I found it elegant and somehow portentous.

So what does this say about the way our minds react to the quasi-mythical "Gray"? Is it hardwired into our minds by millennia of evolution (i.e., do we somehow recognize it)?

There are other possibilities. Volunteers who have had their temporal lobes artificially stimulated by EM radiation hallucinate waxy figures that aren't entirely unlike the Grays. (They also sense an intangible "presence" that appears to mimic sleep paralysis.) It follows that some "alien abductions" may be neurological events triggered by ambient EM fields (Albert Budden's "Electro-staging Hypothesis"). So the Gray may indeed reside in our minds: a hardwired archetype that, like a genie, rouses from its neural slumber when the skull housing it is "rubbed" with the right wavelengths.





Maybe this is why ancient cultures placed so much importance on ley lines and geomagnetic anomalies. Such areas could have served as shamanic windows to altered realms. "Magonia" might be a built-in virtual reality amusement park for the psyche, a test-bed for embryonic mythologies that are subsequently "uploaded" into the infosphere in the form of pop entertainment and books like "Communion."

Skeptics who insist that "abductees" are simply recycling media imagery may be partially correct. But in my scenario, this "recycling" is an inherent part of the experiential process, not simply psychological white noise. Conceivably, each of us hosts a potential crowd of "aliens," in which case we're already outnumbered.

As Budden notes, abductions have been on the rise since the beginning of the continuing proliferation of telecommunications technology. Our brains are constantly marinated in radio and TV transmissions, the stammer of cellphone radiation, shortwave radio waves, and other potential neurological triggers. In "UFOs: Psychic Close Encounters -- The Electromagnetic Indictment" and "Electric UFOs: UFOs, Fireballs and Abnormal States," Budden implies that reports of hallucinatory abductions are evidence that our fragile brains (which are, after all, made of meat) are struggling to retain coherence under a new -- and dangerous -- electromagnetic onslaught.

But what if "hallucinatory" encounters with nonhuman beings are actually desirable to the collective unconscious? Our Jungian overmind may be exploiting our fascination with cellphones, satellite TV and wireless Internet in order to create an invisible ecology that facilitates heightened sensitivity to archetypal "aliens." As more and more of the world goes wireless, the faster our cybernetic Magonia encroaches on familiar material society.

The notion that there's any sort of underlying plan at work here seems ludicrous. But then again, we don't know what consciousness really is, or what it's capable of. Thinkers such as Rupert Sheldrake and the late Michael Talbot ("The Holographic Universe") offer tantalizing hints that awareness plays a critical role in defining reality -- which may, ultimately, be a consensual hallucination a la William Gibson's original vision of "cyberspace."

Again, I'm attracted to my idea that the universe (or multiverse) is a hyptertext filing system swarming with all manner of 'bots and conspicuous meaningful coincidences. Recently, a theoretical physicist postulated that everything is "mere" information, in which case we truly live in a "Matrix"-like environment in which "objective truth" is simply a convenient definition for certain uncollapsed quantum states. Nothing, it would seem, is "true."

But conversely, is everything permitted?