The Game UFOs Play

Whoever is flying these UFOs is playing with us, and you can take that to the bank.

A decade into the modern era’s experience of UFOs, it would have been logical to conclude that our little planet on the galactic edge was being scouted. Perhaps we were being slated for military or economic exploitation. Perhaps we were being considered for contact – inclusion in some kind of galactic United Planets. Perhaps we were being tasted, in order to determine whether or not we belonged on somebody’s menu.

The only problem with all of that is the fact that these are assumptions.
Assumptions are trouble, but often in the field of speculative assessing (aka “paranormal research”) we have only assumptions to work with. It’s the nature of the game.
The other game that requires us to use our heads as hard and as fast as we can manage is the UFO game. Oddly enough, the idea that UFOs have been hidden by governments who secretly know the truth has fed into paranoia alongside rational fears about government authority. The fact that the USAF has long considered UFOs a convenient smokescreen for black projects hardly helps matters. In a world where the mainstream is heavily influenced by skeptical opinion, we are supposed to accept that every major scion of the Kennedy family who was in a position to be President (or was the President) has died. And we are expected to believe that those scenarios directly involving assassination were the work of lone madmen, rather than the result of political infighting between the great families of the Republic cum Empire. In such a world, it is easy too to believe that the government knows about UFOs and keeps the truth from the public.

The UFO game is a powerful tool, used by someone to manipulate public opinion and perhaps even to control popular will and the outcomes of policy decisions in ways unforeseen.

It has also served to undermine faith in religions and caused some to focus on the idea that all myths are based in alien encounters. It has brought about changes in human collective consciousness and altered the thinking of countless persons regarding the possibility – and the likely fact – that we are not alone in the universe. It has sparked debate and encouraged a widening of our notions and an expansion of our considerations.

The UFO game may mostly be a function of human agendas, but this does not ultimately account for the oddities and encounters that are simply too numerous to all be hoaxes, identification errors and/or misguided attempts at fame and fortune. The UFOs and their apparent occupants often behave oddly, and this is no surprise. After all, how does an alien think? What does an alien civilization look like, and how is it organized? What are the customs, traditions, sciences and religions of extraterrestrials?

Take, for example, the notion that an alien civilization would engage in reconnaissance. This is a human concept, an outgrowth of an epoch of internecine war amongst varied factions of our species. It is a function of our terrain, our modes of organization and our philosophies of knowledge, exploration, discovery and the establishment of advantage. All of these things depend upon our humanity. It’s just as likely that technological differences (readable – but not always definable – as superiority) would mean that all reconnaissance could be accomplished without ever placing a vessel in our skies. In fact, the more we consider what a future earth military might be capable of in 500 years, the less we can believe that we might even recognize an alien assessment of our world – much less catch them at it.
What if the alien species is something even science fiction hasn’t imagined? What if they are based on a gas, rather than a solid element? What if they exist in ranges of temperature, pressure and volatility such that we would consider them more forces of nature than actual living creatures? What if the Ancient Aliens who are the basis for our Gods were nothing more than a kind of morality play, or else the prehistoric equivalent of an instructional video? What if the Bible is a form of highly advanced warfare? In this case, perhaps the technology deployed against us is the complex of laws, teachings, examples and prophecies – all of which serve to generate confusion, discord and chaos. If so, is this “cognitive weaponry” designed to cause a species to wipe itself out on a specified time scale, partially determined by random chance, natural forces and the fundamental need for an animal like us to develop independence and individual identity? As we throw off the yoke of such a faith system (in some quarters), we trigger reactionary events that bring about the End as We Know it.

This last proposition is one of the scariest, because it would mean that something akin to a Time Lord has been here – or is still here and always has been – and has manipulated us for nefarious purposes. It could well be that this is the simplest and simultaneously the highest form of warfare: Get your enemy to kill himself, without ever realizing that you were present and a threat in the first place.
It would be very easy to start a global war of proportions previously unreached simply by making it seem that Jesus had returned in a way too obvious and profound for any atheist or unbeliever to challenge – and all of it broadcast on international live news feeds to radios, televisions and computer screens everywhere. And with highly advanced technology, the appearance of miracles would be indistinguishable from the real thing. The global Christian community would be instantly galvanized, and the fake alien Jesus could rely upon unthinking obedience from billions of people. What if he ordered genocide carried out against all unbelievers?

A host of “what if” style questions might lead us into the weeds, but they can also liberate us from our preconceptions and lift us out of the mire of theoretical muck. It is always an open possibility that our Science is only a new Dogmatism, and as such, it is insufficient to address the true nature of reality. This is an underlying tenet of Athena’s Men, a guiding principle of our work here at the Vicar’s Lamp, and an eternal, unresolvable proposition that irritates hard scientists to no end.
Irritating the scientists is one of our primary goals. Like Socrates before us, the importance of playing the gadfly to the horse of institutional and presumptive thinking is not lost.
If a cosmic warrior race descended upon us, would we be able to form a resistance? Humans – primarily Americans – have already developed shockingly effective forms of near-absolute mind control, without even resorting to brain implants and memory manipulation. Well, we haven’t resorted to these things publicly and en masse, as yet. Given time, things will no doubt change. As we wrote in How Superman Will Destroy Democracy, the pendulum that swings between offense and defense throughout history and determines the degree of individual freedom via the limited range of human styles of government has swung again to the side of power. Authority will soon be unshakeable, and revolution will be virtually impossible.

A basic rule of open-mindedness is the recognition that skeptical responses are motivated by unease, fear and an unwillingness to accept human limitations. In truth, the whole of reality may be totally different from what we see as a species and even more differentiated on the individual level. It may be that nothing we perceive is true and valid. “Row, row, row your boat… ” as the three primary Star Trek characters once sang around the campfire.
Is reality as we see it? Consider the case of the UFO that landed so it’s occupants could briefly abduct a man and then pull out pieces of his hair. That strikes as a bit bizarre, but there again, the case was ultimately labelled a hoax. But there are two problems with the hoax moniker in any case and especially in these types: First, every case is a hoax in the minds of those who automatically discard the possibility of alien interaction with our world. Second, the concept of a hoax is typically tied to the capacity to find supporting evidence. In the absence of evidence, skeptics are quick in most cases to insist that the mundane has been disrupted more by imagination and a desire for profit or fame than by any abnormality. But absence of evidence has not ever been and in fact likely never will be evidence of absence. And when what is described as having happened is utterly weird, why should we be surprised if no evidence that we can recognize turns up?

Based upon Vallee’s insights, we must consider the fact that many UFO and “alien” encounters actually just end up looking weird and making no sense. We read of aliens landing to offer bland pancakes to farmers, or diminutive aliens landing so they can march, single file and in shiny suits, to a well into which they promptly disappear. Three things are of significance in these kinds of events, but first, consider this:

The equation between the humanoids of the flying saucers and the elves of folklore has become something of a truism.

The similarities between the UFO phenomenon and the European, and even extra-European, fairy cult is strong, especially in the subtexts of sexuality, abduction, rape, and the substitution of otherworldly changelings for human babies.

That’s not alone the essence of the argument made by Vallee and others, it’s also the crux of the whole UFO issue. Why are there incidents throughout human history that neatly escape being fully verifiable while also often enough leaving tantalizing little bits of evidence to suggest that something happened, even if we have no idea what it was, exactly?
Something – or a group of Somethings – is playing with us. But there are many kinds of games, some leisurely and others dastardly. The precise nature of this game is yet to be determined. Only time and further revelations will tell.

In the UFO encounters that are super-weird, it was mentioned above that there are three things of significance. They are as follows.

1. We can never know that what people are seeing is what it appears to be. We don’t know that a ship is really a ship, the beings are really beings (as they appear or otherwise) and we don’t know that how they interact with the environment isn’t fundamentally a deception, be it intentional or the result of some mechanism casual or fundamental to whatever is causing the incident in the first place.
2. We can never know that what we are taking to be technology of a sort we recognize is not a function of some other kind, be it “magical” or mystical, “psychic” or otherwise rooted in interface and interference with human cognition. We cannot know that a spaceship is not actually a wizard’s abode or a fairy castle. To some extent, the variance in these concepts does not matter, since it is fundamentally of human origin and based entirely upon our own preconceptions. If the Gods were Ancient Aliens, it is important to remember that functionally, it makes absolutely no difference what we call them if their operation and behavior is godlike. We can only kneel, if that is the case.
3. We cannot truly understand the point of these interactions. Are they lessons? Jokes? Rare glimpses into the lives of the true rulers of the earth? We cannot know if we are slated for destruction fifty or sixty times a day by civilizations sinister and vastly more advanced, only to be saved by an invisible alien super species who defend our world out of a sentimental attachment of the sort we make with our pets.

Indeed, as Porno for Pyros once mentioned, We’ll Make Great Pets.
Or perhaps we already do.