Posthuman Blues

If the "cryptoterrestrials" I've been blogging about are real and indeed "living among us" (or at least secluded in enclaves), they must have a sense of ethics, a guiding morality. Or at least it's comforting to think so.

The simple fact that they haven't taken over the planet could be proof that they harbor no genocidal grudge. But it could just as easily mean that they need us, either for our genes or for esoteric reasons. But this kicks up its own share of questions.

If they're underpopulated and need humans to refresh their gene-pool, forsaking secrecy and claiming the planet on their own terms would allow their population to expand to viable proportions. We'd no longer be needed. So why are we allowed to continue to exist? By almost any ecological standard, we're terrible neighbors. Do they feel sorry for us? Are they convinced that, through careful psychological engineering, they can improve our "relationship" (albeit without our consent), thus steering the biosphere from the brink of collapse?

Or are they even now eyeing our endeavors with mounting alarm and suspicion? Will there ever come a point that brings the CTs out of hiding -- if only to turn the tables on their uneasy truce with our civilization?





Perhaps they'd like to but can't. The evidence suggests they're accomplished illusionists and insidiously clever strategists endowed with abilities once ascribed to the domain of magic. But they give little indication of violence, at least in a military sense. Perhaps their technology, remarkable as it is, isn't conducive to the kind of effort required to invade and conquer; indeed, with our nuclear missiles and arsenal of "black ops" aircraft, we might pose a considerable threat to them. Like the vampires in Whitley Strieber's "The Hunger," the CTs might be a race in decline. Stealth, it seems, comes with a price: the lack of infrastructure we take for granted.

Maybe the CTs have no real plans for overt colonization. We tend to project our own tendencies onto "aliens"; if we were in their place, we'd inevitably feel subjugated, even claustrophobic. Inevitably, at least some of us would choose to fight back, even if our efforts were desperate and feeble. But the CTs remain strangely pacifist. Either they really are at the mercy of our omnipresent postindustrial society or they have plans in store that we have yet to discern.

In "The Threat," David Jacobs argues that alien hybrids will ultimately reign, with humans reduced to a secondary role. One could reasonably argue that the CTs are waging a long-term war of attrition, slowly but methodically creating an army of hybrids to inherit and transform the human world. But folkloric evidence begs us to look in other directions. If "they" merely wanted the planet they could have taken it from us long ago, before the invention of doomsday weapons and modern surveillance technology. Instead, they seem to have left us to take our own route -- or at least leave us with this impression.

Given that they're content to remain marginal, we must consider that we're more than a reserve of DNA. The CTs must have other, less pragmatic, motives. Witness accounts offer tantalizing hints that the CTs are at least as intrigued by our minds as they are dependent on our genes. If so, we could be more than we think we are.

The CTs could be reaping an invisible harvest grown in the fertile soil of Mind itself. Limited to short-term agendas and materialistic obsessions, we wouldn't necessarily notice. But if the CTs' penchant for psychodrama persists through the next century -- and so far it shows no signs of stopping -- we just might catch a more expansive look at their goals.

But will we like what we see?