Why Don’t Aliens Freak People Out?
In yesterday’s post, I described the story of an Atomic Energy Commission official who was told that the Roswell Incident was an actual crash of technology that was not our own. Did researcher Robert Hastings ask Chet Lytle what he thought about the matter? Did the fact that one of his close friends in the military admit that alien races did in fact exist and had made it to Earth bother him in any way?
A few years ago, a producer was working on a documentary about government knowledge of UFOs. He interviewed many former officials who said that yes, UFOs were evidence of someone else’s technology and that “aliens” existed in the way that most of us think (i.e. there are humanoid entities from other planets who have come here.) After a couple of months of this, he had a personal crisis in his belief structure because people whose backgrounds checked out and seemed reasonably sane had told him something he had previously thought was a myth.
One of the other producers had to talk to him for a couple of days before he calmed down a bit. There was no real proof of anything he was told, and even if there was, what difference would it make? Even if aliens are here from time to time, people still go to work, pay their mortgages, fall in and out of love and basically go on with life.
He was probably going through the same mental struggle as some of his interviewees had done. What is that dark journey? Why don’t countless government employees with supposed knowledge of an E.T. presence go completely nuts and start sending letters to elected officials, raving on websites, and standing on streetcorners clad only in sandwich boards with “THEY’RE HERE!!” printed on them in block letters?
Perhaps the reason for this is that they have been told that there is literally nothing that they or anyone else can do about it. This is the reason that I sometimes say that the government knows little more than the rest of us about this strange phenomenon known as UFOs. They may have much more data, but what do they do with it?
People have known for quite a while that there is very likely something non-human interacting with us occasionally. There have been attempts to explain this presence through the cultural lens of the time, but there has never been any way to control it or predict when it would happen again. All we know is that it does.
Of course, humans can get used to anything. Wars force us to deal with death as a shadow lurking just offstage. Those in war zones can adapt to near-constant bombing and shooting. We are quite adaptable to just about any situation. Homo sapiens has a great mental capacity for dealing with stressful living, even if it does shorten lives.
Those who claim abduction by aliens perhaps form a special group. There appears to be little proof, however that the abduction phenomenon is connected to the UFO question as a whole. People have told stories about being spirited away by strange entities for eons. Why this should suddenly equal aliens from other planets is an open and debatable question.
Most people don’t have to deal with anything of a paranormal nature in their lives. An occasional sensationalized report on UFOs and their occupants doesn’t really concern most of us. If the phenomenon decided (if it can to that) to make itself known to everyone, we would adapt to that too. For now, it’s just not something that people have to think about very much.
That goes for our government friends too. A personal encounter is usually a one-time event. Those with healthy psyches would integrate it into their worldview, mainly because it’s not a daily concern.
The “aliens,” if they exist, don’t seem to care whether we believe in them or not. Perhaps they don’t have an equivalent for the word. Things “are” and that’s that. There is no timetable for “disclosure,” no plans to reveal themselves, and no real concern over who sees them. Their existence likely appears as a cipher because of our perceptions, cultural conditioning and beliefs rather than any planned stealth on their part.
Perhaps this is what those on the “inside” are hiding from the rest of us. Disclosure would be admitting to ignorance and impotence. Those with special knowledge may know that doing something or doing nothing will ultimately have the same effect. It’s always easier to do nothing, and maybe neither us nor the “aliens” have any common ground except some level of intelligence beyond animals. Perhaps our non-human friends are simply “existing” like birds or even insects. “Purpose” may be something we have grafted on to the situation to make it easier to try and understand. How do we cope with something that is almost totally outside of our frames of reference?
There are of course many reports of UFOs interacting with the military, specifically stories of nuclear weapon malfunctions and shutdowns. Perhaps the non-human intelligences are grafting our meaning onto their belief structure, if they have one. There is ample evidence that human interaction with UFOs is a highly reflexive phenomenon.
In light of all these musings, perhaps we should accept things as they are and not worry too much about conclusions that fade almost as quickly as they appear. As the late John Keel said, “To hell with the answer. What is the question?”
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Sep 22 2009 
September 22nd, 2009 at 5:05 am
The “aliens,†if they exist, don’t seem to care whether we believe in them or not. Perhaps they don’t have an equivalent for the word. Things “are†and that’s that.
Indeed, if they’re there they don’t seem to care about what we believe. In the utter absence of any direct evidence as why, your conjecture’s interesting and no less provable than any other.
Isn’t it still kind of a Big Giant Step of logic? Wouldn’t the simplest explanation be that we’re too insignificant for them to care about at all?
One very cogent explanation for why aliens haven’t openly spoken to us - whether via SETI or landing on the White House lawn - may be found here: http://www.xkcd.com/638/.
September 22nd, 2009 at 5:25 am
Victor,
What I was trying to get at was what I thought was the simplest explanation: There may not be an equivalent for “care” in their psychology. It’s difficult to use language to explain something that may be a void as far as we’re able to understand. In other words, it is nearly futile to try and explain something that may be unexplainable in human terms, at least right now.
Perhaps a good analogy would be that we are trying to find a handle on a fogbank.
September 22nd, 2009 at 5:31 am
I often hear people say maybe we are as isignificant to them as ants are to us. That bugs “no pun inteneded” me to no end. For instance if an ant starts to gather and in groups and conduct expreiments and question the exisitence of God/Goddess/Universe/Darwin or whatever then I will be interested in them. What I am trying to say is that we are in no way as “ants” to them if there is a “them.” We may be as primitive savages to them. We may be a lower form of life to them but I (and maybe I’m ego centric here)don’t think we are as “ants” to “them.” I hope this is a little clearer than it seems to me as I read over it. I just think the mere alledged “interaction” between us points to some “kinship” or likeness.
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:18 am
tyder,
Good points. My argument is that there may be no implied hierarchy from their point of view. The concepts of “behind” or “ahead” may be meaningless to them, and maybe should be to us too. Their development may be perpendicular to what we usually consider in our models of evolution and intellectual development.
I’m trying to cheerlead other points of view. It may not bear any fruit, but may push the debate or ideas in a different direction that we may not have thought of yet.
September 22nd, 2009 at 7:30 am
I was watching a program on chimpanzees (Nova, I believe) and they said that chimps had a core family/tribal group of perhaps 30-50 that they immediately associate with. Any chimp outside that group especially males chimps were attacked immediately in a fear response. Gorillas have much smaller groups. Humans can recognize as ‘friendly’ or non-alien about 150 people. If geneticists are correct and we current humans have been developing around 200,000 years it took over 180,000 + years to overcome our hardwired biology to not kill on sight to develop civilization and the technologies that come with it. There’s nothing in the biological historical records that I’ve ever heard of where one species favored a lesser species’s well being over it’s own. While in recent human history some of our species have become bewildering attached to other species, for 99.99% of our history, animals were food or dangerous predators. An alien from another planet with extremely sophisticated technology more advanced than ours might view us in the same way as food or more likely as the ‘uber-predators’ of this planet. Given the biological nature of some of the abduction stories, they may be trying to figure out what our triggers for aggression are by studying our diet, social behavior and other factors. These ET behaviorists might find our forays into space extremely disturbing. If they are biologically compatible with life on earth, they might find our technological rise of the last 2 centuries a real threat to them as our cosmic neighbors. Especially if they have plans to use our planet for some purpose such as colonization. From our limited encounters with them, they don’t seem to care about our psychological state but they definitely seem interested in our health as species and definitely about our use of nuclear weapons. Does Mars need women? Or perhaps something else DNA related? If the motherships landed in some very remote and under populated area and they posted “No Trepassing” signs attached to their force fields, what could we do about it?
September 22nd, 2009 at 10:41 am
I am sure that many governments have much more data about UFOs and non-human contact in their possession, but I am also sure that they will do what they have always historically done in the past with this data — disclose it to the public. Just take a look at recent history: England, France, Brazil. These governments all have nothing to hide anymore and what they have all disclosed so far has insufficient to change the state of our knowledge of non-human contact nor has it been able to change our opinions of their governments. It at least proves those governments have nothing to really hide and what knowledge they have is inadequate to establish any scientific consensus. Neither the government nor any people have known anything about an alleged non-human interaction, they have only BELIEVED in alleged non-human interaction. To quantify this, only 64% of Americans BELIEVE we have had contact with non-humans, and only 7% BELIEVE that they have had contact with non-humans. Despite being only a belief, 91% of the people still confabulate all kinds of things about something they have never seen for themselves, something their friends and acquaintances have never seen for themselves, one of those confabulations being that non-humans will treat us as their enemies.
The ant analogy is cute but totally inapplicable. Ants will never gather together and discuss conduct experiments and question the existence of God/Goddess/Universe/Darwin or whatever. That would be interesting if they did but it would also be physically impossible. A better and more applicable analogy is that the human race is a bunch of mental retards in comparison to any non-humans able to travel to our solar system and visit us. And what does the average person have in common with mental retards? Nothing. A mental retard is unable to comprehend most of what we could ever want to discuss with them and any serious relationship — say like a lover, good friend, or mentor — would impossible. They would be untrainable because all those things depend on them having a high enough IQ, and maximum IQ is determined solely by genetics.
Some of the eggheads have this fantasy of the non-humans coming to our world and giving us all their knowledge and technology. If we pretend that we humans of an average, limited IQ of 100 could comprehend any of it, we would assimilate their knowledge and technology into the fabric of our society, and it would solve many of our problems and make the world a better and more marvelous place to be. Ha! That is sheer, ignorant fantasy, when you sit down and take the time to think about it. The benefits of any other world technology/knowledge would be overshadowed by the abuses. We would do what we have already done with technology — exploit it, misuse it, and find a way to perpetually profit from it. It would be no different than handing a caveman or three-year-old a fully loaded automatic machine gun with the safety off. It would be a disaster. They wouldn’t be responsible; they wouldn’t understand the consequences of haphazardly using that technology. We are no different, in comparison, to the more advanced race. Yet mental retards, no matter how violent they are, could never be a threat to us since we should be able to easily outsmart any threat they could ever think of to throw at us. And don’t worry about non-humans that are comparable to us, because if they are comparable, they are still stuck on whatever planet it is they evolved on, just like us. Until we evolve to the point where our IQs are high enough for us to figure out how to travel between stars, we will not be at the level where we can interact with non-humans on a one-to-one level.
I doubt if we would be appealing as food, I mean have you ever had chimpanzee, dog, or cat meat? Sure there are people who still do eat it, but if you research what kinds of people they are, you will find that they are of low IQs (80 average) and they also do not refrain from cannibalism. More intelligent and refined cultures do not engage in such primitive behaviors, they find it disgusting. If there are non-humans visiting us, they would logically have to be of very high intelligence and therefore logically not at all likely to desire humans for food — it would be disgusting.
Just like we have every reason in the world to avoid interaction with mental retards, the non-humans have every reason in the world to avoid interacting with us.
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:59 am
Now you all know why the grass in that AREA 51 baseball diamond is tended with such care and devotion…
Indeed, humans are capable of coping with terrible situations. To the American society, 9/11 was the cultural equivalent of child rape; 8 years later people are still flying on airplanes and travelling to Manhattan. I don’t know if American citizens are really expecting to experience another terrorist attack in their lifetime.
Would the hypothetical (and unlikely) disclosure be similar in cultural and emotional impact with 9/11?
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:27 pm
I am not freaked out by UFO’s, alien visitations, abductions just for the simple reason in my World, which is admittedly very small, these types of events are fictions. They happen in the movies, in TV shows, in comic books and from the imaginative minds of hundreds of writers Worldwide. I enjoy these kinds of fictions, I am a geek, Science Fiction is ace!
The entire Roswell phenomenon is just that a phenomenon, a mythological modern religion, almost, it has it’s high priests, the so called UFO researchers who make grand claims, contradict each other, produce honest to goodness eyewitnesses decades after the events, very much like the myth of Christ. The flock are naive, gullible and stupid, we Humans are not blessed with intelligence, contrary to popular belief. No alien bodies were recovered from Roswell in 1947, no Flying Saucer, it’s a lie, a fabrication, a fiction. Alien beings aren’t visiting Planet Earth. If they were, I would be a little bit worried that their technology is a bit rubbish, okay it can travel vast distances through Space, navigate dangers, such as asteroid belts, comets, black holes, strong gravitational forces from vast Worlds, Stars, glide elegantly through Earth’s atmosphere, then crash in a remote area of the US of A. Awesome. How many crashed Flying Saucers have there been in the US of A? Dozens? Hmm, UFO believers, followers are like people who believe in religions, believe in ghosts, life after death, which is a contradiction in terms, The Loch Ness monster, they want to believe so much in strange otherwordly happenings. They will believe alleged eyewitnesses, anecdotal tall tales, anything and everything to advance their religious notion, becasue that what it is. Vast sprawling conspiracies that are confusing, unbelievable. It’s the need to believe in something. I love it. I love that people can believe lies, can believe in crazy stories, can believe that technologically advanced entities interact with us dumb monkeys, that Science Gods zoom through the Heavens to alter our minds, toy with our reality. It’s fantastic to live in a World where fictions can cross from the imagination into our perception of reality. Mega!
September 24th, 2009 at 2:09 am
I’m no psychic, johnnyangle; but judging by your comment, I take it that this is the first time you have visited this site
If you think you’ll find a bunch of doe-eyed UFO believers here, I’m afraid you’ll end up a bit disappointed.
September 24th, 2009 at 5:55 am
And we know that ants do not philosophize how? We appear to have some accomplished animal psychics onboard.
Meanwhile science seems to be uncovering ever more evidence that ant “hive minds” can be unsettlingly sophisticated and powerful.
September 24th, 2009 at 6:03 am
I stand by my point. It isn’t difficult to conceive of aliens (which as far as I know is all anyone currently can do about them) so advanced - and maybe arrogant - that for all our experimentation and philosophical posturing they find us indistinguishable from mildew. Think about a million-year head start…
September 24th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Johnny,
Sweeping generalizations are less interesting to me than taking some of these “stories” with a degree of acceptance. I can’t see how so many people with no interest at all in the subject to begin with have been reporting strange things in the skies and elsewhere for eons. In my opinion, there are many accounts that can’t simply be put down to misidentifications, hoaxes, etc.
You are quite right that many of the hardcore UFO fans are so convinced by an unproveable belief that they don’t allow any rational thought into their brains. Many questions seem to remain open. Look around on the site and I’m sure you will find that Nick and I (and most of our commenters) are neither believers or fundamentalist skeptics with regard to the UFO subject.
September 24th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
The discussion on this thread seems to be concentrated on the idea that any non-humans we might encounter are “more advanced” than us. Once again, one of my main arguments in the post is that there may be NO points of reference for comparison. We continue to try and extrapolate our ideas onto something that may have nothing in common with us except some sort of self-awareness beyond primate levels.
Using our language (and the ideas that follow from it) to try and describe and comprehend something outside of our experience might be futile. Everyone can try, but it is probably a stab in the dark.
A reminder: I don’t take the “aliens” phenomenon literally, at least as something that can be counted on like a repeatable experiment. I am using accounts gathered over many years by myself and in the literature to play with concepts that may lead to some sort of better understanding as to what makes people report these things. Until some sort of breakthrough is made, I am reasonably certain that some reports are the result of an external, non-human source acting upon the witness. It’s more interesting to me to treat the subject in this way.
September 25th, 2009 at 4:25 am
I believe the entire phenomenon of UFO’s, Flying Saucers, alien contactees, alien abductions and other kinds of paranormal, supernatural experiences have more to do with the human mind than perhaps actual physical occurrences. In most scenarios reality doesn’t seem to be exactly what we assume it to be. If we are to believe, and there really is not enough research on these matters, probably because they do sound so damn fantastical, or outright delusional, that some sort of intelligence interacts with our World, it’s not an intelligence we can understand, maybe it’s so far beyond our understanding, people refer to us as ants in comparison, the intelligence so far beyond the ability of an ant to understand or perceive it, perhaps that is a good analogy. Perhaps we are all fictions, would a fictional being realise it is fictional? The subject is too complex, and I am too simple.
I enjoyed reading Jacques Vallee’s books on the subject, the entire strange intellect interfering with, manipulating us silly monkeys, though just as wild has otherwordly intelligences messing with us, it seems just as possible and again there’s not been enough, or any, research into this. From my point of view, paranormal experiences just seem bewildering, confusing, not just unbelievable. I personally hope, if there is anything happening, that it is a fictional reality, bleeding into our own, fuelled by our own imaginations. I do find paranormal beliefs akin to religious beliefs, they must originate from some area of the brain or mind that feeds these abstract concepts. Even just typing this, thinking about strange, weird experiences that do seem so outrageous confuses me, surely life, the World, the Universe is just not that complex. The idea that this life force, intelligence, is not more advanced as us, makes everything even more complicated, and yet, does make a kind of sense. Throughout the ages people have recorded meeting strange creatures, fairies, elves, beings from other Worlds, sometimes in another space and time, sometimes beneath our very feet, in the modern age these reports no longer continue (?) instead we have reports of little grey men in marvellous flying machines, but the parallels between historical and modern accounts do correlate (?) food being offered, predictions of humanity’s doom, threats of greater power.
If we believe people’s reported experiences with odd entities, then it would be an ongoing phenomena, a manipulation of our belief systems, perhaps even a way to control us, even cull us? Again, I am beginning to confuse myself with the possibilities, everything from a cultural phenomenon to real interaction with beings from outer space, it’s too complex a puzzle.
October 8th, 2009 at 7:46 am
The witness accounts I find most believable are the ones where the witness is scared to death. It seems like the most logical reaction. When Jackie Gleason’s wife says that even after he’d spent years reading UFO books that he was still shaken to the core to have the reality confirmed for him by Richard Nixon, that gives the story weight to me. Most people would be horrified to have undeniable evidence of extraterrestrials. However, I think just being told isn’t enough. Having followed the subject in a serious way for a long time, Jackie Gleason probably believed he was a believer. But, he didn’t become a real believer until Richard Nixon walked him into a base and showed him something he couldn’t deny. What he saw with his own eyes drove him to admit to a reality he’d only imagined was true. It was like a blow to the gut and it devastated him, haunting him for the rest of his life. Being told secondhand, even by someone you feel is 100% credible, is not the same as knowing. You might think it’s enough and you might say you believe, but it’s not real until you see it, touch it, know it for yourself. Then, if you’re human, you should be terrified. There should be an instance where you know that oh my God, nothing is ever going to be the same again. I will never be the same again. What was beyond practical belief becomes your new reality and you can’t ever go back to safety. It should drive you to the brink of madness. The monsters are real. The horror! The horror!
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:05 pm
Firstly, they may see us as parents see children - petty annoyances with questions that are pointless and actions that only distract them from what they came here to do (’I'm making the tea dear - go ask your father!’/ ‘Don’t get in the way I’m building a thingummy bob, Tommy’). In other words why ask where they came from if we’ve no ability to get their ourselves (totally irrelevant chit-chat as with the dentist on a visit).
Yes, I too believe that officialdom’s attitude is that creatures that can walk through walls, pilot craft that defy every human aircraft’s capabilities or ground supports ability to track them or bring them down, plus kidnap people under everyone’s noses without hindrance - can’t be dealt with or interacted with, so leaves you as individuals and societies, with the comment ‘So what do you expect me to do about it?’
As for the connection of UFO’s and Aliens - if these are manned craft, why travel all this way here and not get out to investigate where they are (’If this is Thursday, it must be Earth - galactic tourists)? If unmanned, why send them here in the first place? Don’t create mysteries where there are rational answers in existence already but do seek answers to those things we ‘think’ we do understand already (our prejudices).