Posthuman Blues

On a postmodern note, I've realized my interest in tracing the origin of the "alien autopsy" (real or hoax) is similar to Cayce Pollard's fascination with inscrutable bits of digital cinema in William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition." (Cayce's search for the truth in turn resembles that of Pynchon's Oedipa Maas from "The Crying of Lot 49," who stumbles upon a strange world where conspiracy and synchronicity go hand in hand.)

On the UFO UpDates list, memes are flying like particles in a supercollider. One singularly paranoid theory (advanced by Nick Redfern, who's been weathering the barrage admirably) is that maybe the AA footage is a government-concocted hoax designed to resemble the dissection of someone with progeria. Nick's idea is that maybe the Air Force (or whoever), afraid that stories of radiation/aeronautical experimentation on deformed humans might eventually find their way into the public domain (as they now have), created a fake autopsy with deliberate anachronisms or absurdities that could be used to discredit it if the political situation began to look unmanageable.*

Or the agency responsible for human experiments in 1947 (or possibly later) could have craftily "outsourced" the making of the autopsy to public sector FX artists so that they could be conveniently "outed" as the culprits, thus defusing any interest in tracking down documents or personnel connected with unethical experiments.

To me, Occam's Razor suggests the footage is genuine, not a deliberate disinformation ploy. But Occam's Razor can cut differently according to one's biases; at this point, it's simply too early to know, and I'm perfectly aware that we may never know the AA's role in the controversy. One exceptionally dark possibility is that the military had managed to create expendable humanoids for use in top-secret test vehicles, possibly drawing on Nazi medical/genetic research. Unlikely? Certainly. But given the paranoid, desperate milieu that typified the first years of the Cold War, it can't be automatically discounted.

But if the AA is real, who's responsible for the "leak"? Just how long was the footage circulating before it was marketed as proof of crashed aliens in 1995? And if it's a fake, then to what intelligence-related use might it be put other than that described above? Perhaps the ranks of AA proponents and debunkers battling it out in cyberspace are unwittingly providing a detailed psychological portrait to some diligent intelligence outfit bent on utilizing the alien meme for unknown purposes.

I could go on, but I'm quickly reaching an intellectual cul-de-sac, an informational vacuum. But there's reason to hope startling new facts will emerge in the months to come.

*One such potential absurdity is the "debris footage," which features control panels with six-fingered indentations. But it's by no means certain that the debris was filmed concurrently to the autopsy. If the AA footage is authentic, the debris sequence could have been tacked on at a later date to strain credulity; while one can accept -- if grudgingly -- that progeria victims were subjected to cruel experiments in the name of national security, it's less easy to swallow the idea that government scientists were crafting instruments specially designed for humans with polydactyly . . .