May 24 2007

Alien Evolution, Alien Motivation

Neoteny

On a promotional tour for Star Trek IV, director Leonard Nimoy was asked if he thought that whales (who play a major role in the film story) were “ahead or behind” us on the evolutionary continuum. His answer provides a good model for looking at the “alien problem.” He said that cetaceans may have evolved “off to the side”–from our point of view. My interpretation of this statement is that other sentient beings on this planet have evolved strategies that provide for their comfort and survival, and that a homo sapiens-centric view of their “intelligence” is probably not the best way to assess their motivations. When someone declares (with almost no evidence to back it up besides their preconceptions) that “aliens” are “thousands of years ahead of us,” they may be on the wrong track from the start.

The non-human entities reported by abductees resemble giant human fetuses, or at least that is the reigning paradigm at the moment. This form is most probably whatever we expect to see at this point in history. Unless I am mistaken, there were no reports of anything resembling this sort of being before the 1960s, Roswell witnesses notwithstanding.

Throughout history, the extra-humans reported by witnesses have almost always been humanoid in appearance. Do we need to assume that all intelligent life looks like us? This seems awfully presumptuous. Perhaps this is the only way our minds can comprehend other sentient life who can communicate with us. If we take this a step further, we can also guess that their motivations would need to be comprehensible in human terms. It has also been pointed out by many others that these beings may control our perceptions of them and our environment when we are in their presence. Perhaps the situation is a symbiosis of our expectations and their projections. Perhaps.

Today I saw a group of dolphins jumping around in the ocean just off shore. They were launching themselves completely out of the water, sometimes landing on their backs. Knowing nothing of dolphin behavior (since I am not a marine biologist) I could make many guesses about reasons for this behavior, and I would probably be wrong.

Ufologists routinely assume that aliens are coming here from other planets to gather biological and emotional information and “samples” from us to improve their race. There are a host of indefensible assumptions in that philosophy, but many researchers defend their point of view with unreasonable fervor.

Of course, I cannot begin to comprehend much of what these Ufologists have seen and studied, but I still think that whatever it is that is making an appearance in our reality (our mental reality anyway) is so far removed from ordinary waking consciousness and our rules of what is “real” that we don’t have the psychological, scientific, or conceptual tools to grasp its true nature. Our friends in the “other” may be so far off our mental map that we can’t see them for what they are, whatever that means.

We only have the concepts that we have made, and that already puts us in a bind when something so vast and pervasive as the UFO question occasionally and fleetingly pokes itself into our perception.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 12:29 am and is filed under Abductions, Alien Encounters, Close Encounters, UFOlogists, UFOlogy, Wake Up Down There. You can follow responses via RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is not allowed.
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