Posthuman Blues

Richard Dolan ("UFOs and the National Security State") is one of my very favorite speculators on the UFO problem. In his essay "Of Astronauts and Aliens," he recounts puzzling "test screenings" of footage depicting presumed aliens.

"Say that your job is to 'manage' this [ET/UFO] information," he writes. "You know that certain individuals in the military are more likely than others to encounter the reality of UFOs or non-human beings in the course of their career. Showing such a movie could be one method by which to screen potential candidates for special ET-related assignments. How do they deal with the information? Do they handle it professionally, or do they crack?"

Makes sense to me. And since the military appears to be taking extraterrestrials seriously, it's quite possible the mysterious footage shown to military personnel is authentic -- thus the justifiable concern. And why bother fabricating an autopsy (or similar scenario) when the actual event is already committed to film? Who will believe it if leaked?





All of which raises questions about the eponymous "alien autopsy" footage. I'm inclined to think the AA depicts an actual event. The problem is the alleged "alien's" very human-like anatomy -- hardly the sort expected of visitors from another star. The autopsy alien, if real, seems to be a biologically manufactured being, perhaps some sort of expendable drone custom-made by the "real" aliens. If true, then maybe we have a partial answer for the myriad distressing accounts of alien embryo harvesting that have surfaced over the last 50 years -- the "alien" in the infamous footage may be predominantly human, but brought to maturation under nonhuman supervision.

Whitley Strieber hit on a creepily similar answer in his Roswell crash-inspired novel "Majestic"; the UFO/alien oversight committee of the book's title discovers two distinct types of beings in the wreckage of a downed craft: a truly bizarre and decidedly unearthly "Gray" with only superficial human characteristics, and a modified human -- both dead. (The latter is so human-like, in fact, that the mortician who sees it accuses the Air Force of unethical human experimentation.)

Maybe the being in the autopsy footage is the equivalent of the biologically tailored human depicted by Strieber. Interestingly, when I emailed Strieber shortly after the AA's release in 1995, he replied that he'd seen beings just like the cadaver -- presumably alive.

Is David Jacobs close to the truth with his theory of an impending takeover by human-alien hybrids?

I wonder.