Weirdly enough, I've been made aware of declassified Air Force documents indicating official interest in (presumably) indigenous "little people." (It stands to reason that the AF would at least look into the possibility, just as it examined the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis and its bearing on the UFO question.) The "kidnapping" theme is -- once again -- prevalent. Whoever these people are (given that they're "real" and not enduring psychological projections), they have an explicit interest in us; in some sense we're a big part of their raison d'etre.
By virtue of Occam's Razor, the genetic angle -- that they need our genes to replenish their population and/or keep disease at bay -- strikes me as the most probable. Intellectually, this takes some getting used to. I'd long interpreted the succubus/fairy/alien reproductive theme as a persistent metaphor; after all, what better way to illustrate our collective fascination with the "other" than having sex with nonhumans?
Dr. John Mack
In "Passport to the Cosmos," the late John Mack takes this approach, although he's careful to use the term "reified metaphor." In other words, the encounters recounted by "experiencers" are real, but colored by sexual imagery in order for us to make sense of something otherwise incomprehensible.
All the more reason, in my view, to transcend meat-based biology. The "others" might utilize techniques we might label "transhumanist." As flesh-and-blood entities, our ability to interact meaningfully with a "transcended" intelligence is liable to be severely stunted and cluttered with neurological biases.
Our sensory organs are incompatible with reality; while we're able to function in the narrow consensus world we've created for ourselves, we've denied ourselves the landscapes just outside our walls. Augmenting our brains is one way we might reclaim this territory.
1 comments:
The problems I have with the genetic idea is that the meddling with our reproductive organs is only a subset of the behaviours reported.
Equally given the wide (and bizarre) diversity of entities wandering around I'd suspect genetic compatibility would be rare (except for the most obvious humans and possibly not even then).
If they are advanced enough to get around this then they are advanced enough to tinker with their own DNA (or what passes for it) and fix their problems - yet they don't seem to be advanced enough to stay stealthed or to erase our memories.
Equally the majority of the reports of intrusive medical procedures come from hypnotically recovered accounts which have to be considered as highly suspect unless one is writing a doctoral thesis on "Alien medical experiments as an expression of Post-Industrialised anxieties."
All the more standard sex I can picture (not literally) - we humans will pretty much have a go at just about anything (animal, vegetable or mineral). I'm just surprised their aren't more accounts of farmers checking their cows and finding some stranger creature in flagrante delicto - perhaps they do and don't report it. Perhaps that is the root of the cattle mutilation. Possibly ;)
I feel you may be on to something with the second part though - we may just not be able to understand what is going on (in some ways it may be arrogant of us to think we can), and what is reported (and there are an awful lot of waking/daytime reports that do seem to suggest that something is going on) could just be our best guess at what is going on in the same way that we previous ascribed inexplicable goings on to the workings of Gods. Which, always seems to lead me back to the Subanthropic Principle - from what I quote there:
Do mountain gorillas know that their ‘civilization’ is embedded in a larger ‘civilization’ corresponding to a much more evolved and intelligent species than themselves? Do they know that they are a protected species inhabiting a natural reserve in a country inside the African continent of planet Earth? The answer to these questions is certainly no, they do not know anything about our social structure, our countries, borders, religions, politics, ..... nor even about our villages and cities, except perhaps for those individuals living in a zoo, or adopted as pets.
In the same way, the human civilization of planet Earth could be immersed in a much larger civilization unknowingly, corresponding to much more evolved and intelligent species than ourselves.
Lets take that analogy a bit further - imagine what it must look like from the gorilla's viewpoint. They occasionally encounter tall creatures that are hairless but with very dark skin (lets not even touch on the pygmy or even the two different types of chimp). Sometimes these people are farming or going about their business which would be utterly inexplicable - sometimes these creatures hunt them for their meat, children or trophies. Sometimes very different creatures will appear - tall and short with much lighter skins. A while back they came with much more powerful weapons than the creatures usually encountered - sometimes one of the tribe would be whisked away thousands of miles. Now they appear with other unguessable items of technology. As these encounters are rare (although growing more frequent as the forests shrink) the gorilla can shrug it shoulders and go on back to doing whatever it is gorillas do with their day.
Sooooo perhaps we need to get smarter - this might just be a question of augmenting ourselves and applying greater processing power to the problem but it may be we are lacking the conceptual tools (see what I posted about the Piraha - I will also post a follow up looking at this specific angle) - although the tools and the processing may go hand in hand (as we might not be able to have one without the other).