Aliens Invade; Government Panics; Sinister Vats Appear; Film at 11

                            Mike MacLeod and friends


    This  note  is  an enquiry into the nature of the  "EBEs",   or,   now,
    "ALFs",the  allegedly extraterrestrial creatures mentioned in the  John
    LearStatement  (LEAR.TXT)   and  in a number of  other  files  here  on
    ParaNet.

    I am not a UFOlogist, and neither are my friends who shared some of the
    ideas herein.  I'm not sure if they wanted their names attached to this
    note, so I have not given them a auctorial credit.  I am a professional
    technical  writer,   currently writing software manuals for a  computer
    company.

    My friends and I have looked at UFO materials for over 20  years,   and
    this  set  of data - from at least three camps - leaves a uniquely  bad
    taste in our mouths.

    When  confronted with a situation like this,  with a lot of hand waving
    and  an atmosphere charged with menace,  there are a number of ways  to
    look at the proffered data. We are surprised by the lack of imaginative
    discussion here;  if this stuff is even remotely true,  we're going  to
    need all the theorizing and ideas we can muster.

    It  may  be instructive to look at some possible explanations and  toss
    out the least likely:

    Theory 1: Everything posted is true,  except where documents disagree -
              such  as  meetings  taking place at two  different  times  or
              locations, in which case one is assumed to be true.

    Not  likely.   Several files were prepared from memory and the  authors
    were  careful  to  say so and to suggest that they may  have  forgotten
    details or misremembered incidents.

    Have you ever read a set of witnesses' reports taken by police from the
    classic  "scene of the crime"?   They vary considerably - so  much  so,
    that  they  often  seem  to have been  observing  something  completely
    different.  The reports about EBE activities seem disturbingly similar,
    sometimes  seeming  as if an ounce of data were fluffed up with a  hair
    dryer into a pound of descriptive prose to please adrenaline junkies.

    Theory 2: It's all bs; none of it's true.

    We don't think this is likely, either, though it's probably a safer bet
    than theory 1.  We have been reading reports of one kind or another for
    20 years and this one gives us a very odd feeling.   There is a kind of
    strangeness  to  it  that is much more characteristic of  reality  than
    fiction.  I know this is an insubstantial subjective feeling, but there
    is  a good deal of truth to the cynical comment that "Of course life is
    stranger  than  fiction  -  it doesn't have to  make  sense".    It  is
    difficult  to  write a realistic tale without the  puppeteer's  strings
    showing;   in  my opinion,  these reports do not show a great  deal  of
    fabrication;  opportunistic lying,  perhaps,  to merge details from one
    incident into another.

    Theory 3: The EBE story, as posted here, is a cover for something even
              >worse< that the EBEs are doing.

    Mr.   Lear muses that "What could be worse than being  eaten"?    Well,
    let's  see...the aliens are currently held responsible for  mutilations
    and  abductions;  perhaps we can pin AIDS on them.   It may be that the
    EBE presence has crippled the US Space Program and otherwise interfered
    with events,  but our information is simply inadequate.   Still,   this
    merits inquiry.

    Theory 4: The EBE story is a cover for covert >government< activities,
              again, worse than we suspect.

    Unfortunately,  a good case can be made for this. There is considerable
    evidence that the Nazis never really surrendered,  but went underground
    and  also  infiltrated  most  of  the  world's  intelligence  agencies.
    Certain crimes of the aliens remind one of Nazi atrocities during WWII.
    Some reports here claim that the Germans seized a crashed saucer in the
    late  1930s.   Suppose they had already cut a deal with the EBEs,  then
    the EBEs extended their reach to the USA,  along with top Nazis?   It's
    an  open  secret  that Project Paperclip brought over dozens,   if  not
    hundreds,    of  Nazis,   installed  many  of  them  in  scientific  or
    intelligence  posts,  and even forged fake documents to let them get on
    with  the Thousand-Year Reich unmolested.    And where were the U-boats
    when the Allies captured their pens?   Mostly gone;  some say to secret
    bases in Neuschwabenlandt in Antartica;  with EBE technology they might
    make a go of it.

    Hard to believe that the Nazis really didn't lose WWII?  Not any harder
    than  accepting  "highly  evolved"  aliens with  degenerated  digestive
    tracts.

    Rather  than consider a number of other scenarios on their merits,  one
    at a time, perhaps a deductive approach will bear fruit,  now that some
    of  the  wider-ranging theories have been looked at.  Let me  bring  up
    several issues in the story we have trouble with.

    We're surprised that the presence of humanoid aliens has been  accepted
    so  blandly  by the community of researchers.   From  a  standpoint  of
    locomotion in gravity wells,  a  quadruped is a pretty simple,   stable
    configuration.   There are few upright bipeds,  fewer still as large as
    men.  We do not see six-legged higher animals on Earth, so, by the only
    analogicial reasoning we have at our disposal, we cannot assume them to
    be that common.  However, I  would not be surprised to see centaur-like
    aliens with four legs and two more manipulating leg-arms.

    Animals  built  low to the ground are in no great danger from  falling,
    but humans can die from just falling down.  So it takes some good motor
    control  to be a big,  heavy biped.   Like other predators,   men  have
    binocular vision,  which is most suitable (of eye placements)  for fine
    motion detection.   Preyed-upon creatures generally have eyes on either
    side  of  their heads,  the better to check out leopards  making  their
    midnight creep.

    In   Elaine  Morgan's  thoughtful  book,   _Descent  of  Woman_,    she
    hypothesizes that our hominid ancestors underwent a >partial<  adaption
    to the sea, as did seals and such, but reconsidered and returned to the
    land.    She postulates about 10  million years of seashore living  and
    adaption.    And she makes a good circumstantial case;  she points  out
    that  the  other primates are either fearful or at best indifferent  to
    water  -  chimps supposedly will not enter water  above  their  waists.
    Anybody who has seen human babies swimming happily long before they can
    crawl cannot doubt that humans are comfortable in water.

    She lists a number of items:   the rotation of the human arm is adapted
    for 360  degree motion,  unlike other primates;  the placement of human
    nostrils  (unlike other primates)  keeps water away from the nose  when
    diving  headfirst  into water;  we lost our body hair in the  sea;   we
    communicate  mostly  verbally,  which would be more  effective  in  the
    intertidal zone,  rather than by body language,  gestures,  and  facial
    expressions, as other primates do.

    Like the other sea mammals,  we lost our hair,  developed larger bodies
    and breasts,  and greater intelligence,  presumably from having to cope
    with two radically different environments.   Above all else, humans are
    gloriously  >generalized<.    We swim,  climb,  run,   and  eat  almost
    anything;   with  the  addition  of  brains and  thumbs,   we  won  the
    Pleistocene War Games,  when competitors like sabre-tooth cats and cave
    bears, as the books say, "mysteriously" disappeared.

    Contrast this admittedly Nietzchean scenario with the EBEs.   They  are
    right  out  of  the feelgood school of SF movies:  the  New  Age  Space
    Brothers like ET and the CE3K Stay-Puft types.  (The other school - and
    it's interesting how cleanly they fall into the two archetypes - is the
    Supercompetitor out to eat our niche's lunch, and us for dessert,  best
    shown in the movie _Alien_.)

    The  obvious  inconguity is the nonfunctional  digestive  system.    On
    Earth,   nothing  more  complex than a mayfly  has  evolved  without  a
    digestive  system,   and the success of omnivores  suggests  that  such
    adaptions  -  and  the  sophistication such  adaption  requires  -  has
    survival   value.    It's  possible  that,   as  was  suggested,    the
    nonfunctional  digestive  tract is an artifact of genetic  damage  from
    environmental  causes  or  genetic warfare.  If the EBEs  have  genetic
    engineering sufficient to do the damage, why don't they fix themselves?
    If  they  don't  have genetic engineering,  why not?    It's  in  >our<
    immediate future, certainly within the next few decades.

    In fact,  the EBEs only - so far as these sketchy reports go - manifest
    something  like  an imitation of '50's science fiction  projections  of
    future science.   In the old National Lampoon Bruce McCall used to draw
    hilarious  sendups  of the "1935  Popular Science"  version of life  in
    1985,  where Pop commuted to work with his helicopter back-pack and Mom
    ordered  loaves of Wonder bread from the grocer and had them  delivered
    by  underground  vacuum  tubes like the ones in  old  (now  demolished)
    department stores.  He makes the point that future technology is always
    taking  new twists and turns;  straight-line extrapolation is virtually
    always  wrong.   Even SF writers,  who get paid (in part)  based on the
    believability of their futures, have a miserable track record.  The one
    thing  we know for sure about the future is that it will be other  than
    we expect it to be.

    The  aliens  do  not  (except for the report  about  the  nanomachinery
    attached  to  the  genes  in a woman's egg)   demonstrate  the  use  of
    Nanotechnology, which is bearing down on us (refer to K. Eric Drexler's
    _Engines of Creation_ for an overview of the implications of  molecular
    and   atomic   engineering).     Even   relatively   simple   uses   of
    nanotechnology,   such  as the use of clouds of floating  horticultural
    nanomachines  to  doctor and prune forests and wilderness  areas  -  an
    intelligent fog,  as it were,   would invoke Clarke's law and look like
    magic.   The EBEs show no such technology; the closest item is a rather
    mundane recording-displaying crystal that shows Earth's history. On top
    of that,  it is said to reproduce poorly.   Come now.   Any spacefaring
    race is going to have - at the very least - digital imaging to  display
    important  data  in  a way readily perceived  by  eye-using  creatures,
    unless they have bigger magic.  Simply put,  the EBEs'  technology is a
    >straight-line  extrapolation<   of  '50's  technology,   not  even  of
    >today's<.

    What does all this imply?  That it's all faked?  Perhaps.  But there is
    another  explanation  that  fits many of the observed  facts,   and  is
    sufficiently grim to please the paranoids out there:

    The  EBEs  showed  up in numbers sufficient to  leave  crashed  saucers
    around shortly after we began setting off atomic weapons.  It's not too
    far  fetched  to  theorize that fission explosions have  some  sort  of
    undetectable (to us)  superluminal signature which they received.   The
    hypothetical  probe orbiting in the Trojan point,  responsible for  the
    Long-Delayed  Echo  effect  (and investigated by Duncan  Lunan  in  the
    '70's)   stopped  echoing  back signals about the time  we  started  A-
    bombing.  Gave up in disgust? More likely it decided that there were no
    survivors, or would not be in a relatively short time.

    The EBEs are themselves artifacts,  designed and built to conform to  a
    general picture of what humans expect "saucer people"  to look like and
    bearing the "correct"  level of Visible Wierd Space Technology,  as  if
    the designers got hold of a copy of "Earth vs.  The Flying Saucers" and
    tried to realize Harryhausen's work.  Even the recorded sounds of Billy
    Meier's  beamships sound like the EVTFS craft!   Compare the  two  some
    time.  In this scenario, the aliens' actual level of technology is very
    carefully concealed and is considerably higher.

    The "Greys"  are temporary mock-ups of human beings >never intended< to
    live  independently  for  long  periods;  this  explains  the  lack  of
    sustenance in the craft and the vestigial digestive tracts.   They were
    designed  to be as non-threatening as possible;  not only are they tiny
    compared to adult humans, but thin even relative to their size,  and no
    doubt  as weak as kittens.   However,  they do have oversized heads and
    big  eyes.    Remember those ghastly Keane paintings from the  sixties?
    They sold like hotcakes, because the painter knew that >infant mammals<
    all have large heads proportionate to their bodies and >big eyes<.  Not
    only are the EBEs "harmless"; they need to be mothered!

    So perhaps somebody is giving us a handjob to allay our suspicions.  If
    you  were designing an alien body to appear harmless,  what  would  you
    create? ALF?  Spuds McKenzie?  Garfield?  PeeWee Herman?  Sean Penn?

    We  get a queasy feeling when wondering if the creators of the pathetic
    little Greys were really trying as hard as they could to copy men.  How
    truly alien they would then be.

    Given that the Greys have:

    - Technology close enough to ours to be understandable
    - A physical makeup and demeanor clearly designed to allay suspicions
    - Picked a fight with us by murdering and torturing innocent humans and
      animals

    what sort of picture appears?

    Remember in "Zulu"  where the first wave of the attacking Zulu are  cut
    down  by  the  British,  then withdraw,  and the  wise  old  strategist
    remarks,   "They  were  just counting your guns"?    Suppose  you  were
    thinking  of invading but wanted to expend the least effort possible  -
    perhaps  you were invading several hundred civilizations at once,   and
    had  to economize (hey,  things are tough all over).   You'd send in  a
    fleet of constructs like these with barely enough firepower and support
    to  keep  them going while they surveyed the scene in depth.    If  the
    locals couldn't shake them off, nothing more was needed.   If they did,
    you could either 1)  send in the heavier stuff, or 2) give up and write
    it  off and look elsewhere.   As Dr.  Bennewitz remarks,  "They totally
    respect force."  If we don't want to be the Rodney Dangerfields of this
    sector of the galaxy, we'd best get our asses in gear.

    The   stubborn  point  is  that  the  EBEs  themselves  are   obviously
    intelligent.  So they are,  but did they create their saucers and their
    crystals? They could still be the authors of the whole program, but the
    "plot device" required to really make this scenario work would be a way
    to  insert and remove beings from bodies.   Back in EBE city the locals
    decide  to  go to Earth,  slip out of their natural bodies (which  look
    like  four-legged  moray  eels  with  a  clump  of  wormlike  tentacles
    extending  from  their  snouts),  and put on  temporary  Space  Brother
    bodies. No wonder they move "slowly and deliberately";  it'd be a whole
    lot worse than strapping on ice skates for the first time.

    It is still tough to explain why an advance guard of an invasion force,
    as  we posit the EBEs to be,  whether in their correct bodies or in the
    equivalents  of  "recvees",   was not fully functional and  capable  of
    eating  Earth food,  or at least not requiring a strange fresh-squeezed
    nutrient  broth of some sort,  unless they were truly temporary  bodies
    only  intended  to function for a short time.   Again,  we can  produce
    nearly  complete artificial food today - not cheaply,  but well enough.
    Why can't the EBEs do likewise?  There is nothing special about tissues
    in  the  areas taken in mutilations,  except perhaps  for  the  genital
    glands;   the taking seems more of a terror-causing activity.   But the
    true answer is not known and hard to guess.

    Is there any collateral material that supports this hypothesis, tenuous
    as it is?   There is,  but it could hardly be less reputable if it came
    from  the CIA itself.  Although the face the public sees is the  odious
    semi-military  cult  face of the Church of Scientology,  buried in  the
    Church are dozens of volumes of L.  Ron Hubbard's writings,  much of it
    "confidential" and guarded zealously by (appropriately enough) zealots.
    When you get into the shadowy "upper levels"  of the Church, you become
    privy  to greater and greater portions of L.  Ron Hubbard's description
    of the big SF novel we're living in.  This worldview shares some ground
    with the EBE scenario.   To our mind, one of the striking features is a
    similar  feeling of "weirdness",  as if it were too strange for anybody
    to create.  Hubbard makes an interesting distinction between bodies and
    spirits, claiming that there are races of spirits as different as races
    of  bodies from different planets,  and that a kind of mix 'n match  is
    possible,  so that the same "family"  of beings could wind up in wildly
    different  bodies  -  or that different "races"  of  spirits  could  be
    inhabiting genetically similar bodies.

    Anyway,  Hubbard claims that we have all been around as immortal beings
    for  incredibly  long  times,  and that there are  indeed  alien  races
    roaming  around out in space,  many of whom are aware of us here,   and
    some  of  whom  are involved in our  affairs.    In  particular,   some
    pernicious aliens are here on Earth,  and have machinery to trap beings
    as  they leave dying bodies.   Once trapped they can be subjected to  a
    program  of brainwashing and indoctrination and finally forced amnesia,
    so  that all memories of past lives and between-lives  manipulation  is
    erased.

    The  premise  of all this is immortality and  reincarnation.    Hubbard
    claims  that  coercive,   technological civilizations  will  inevitably
    develop  mind-control  techniques,   because  only  a  mental-spiritual
    control  mechanism is useful and efficient to dominate immortals living
    in body after body.

    Hubbard  makes  much  of "doll bodies",   which  are  small,   possibly
    inorganic  bodies animated by beings and used,  among  other  purposes,
    during  space flights.   He claims that they are also less  subject  to
    damage from sudden acceleration.  His descriptions, which date from the
    late '50's, sound disturbingly like EBE portraits.

    Hubbard insisted that the human race was on the brink of several  types
    of  disasters,  which often involved the intervention of aliens or  the
    collapse  of  Earthly  civilization from the  weight  of  between-lives
    assaults and great advances in chemical and hypnotic mind control.   He
    pushed  rank-and-file  Scientologists,   via  his  endless  streams  of
    letters,  advices,  issues,  and so on to get "processed"  into a state
    where  one could resist the between-life "implants"  and  retain  one's
    memory from one life to another (and much more,  but this is the  basic
    scenario).

    So  far  the stream of documents about the EBE situation sketch a  most
    minimal picture.  In particular,  the sequential releases of files seem
    to  first  merge  one researcher's information  with  another's,   then
    another's,  until we finally view a pointellist picture built up from a
    thousand minute bits of data: unknown metals, undrivable craft, strange
    elixirs, Tibetan music, and of course strawberry ice cream.

    I  remember several interviews in which Steven Spielberg asserted  that
    CE3K  was about "a government coverup".   That seemed strange to me  at
    the time. Now what seems strange is how closely that movie fits the Big
    Picture.   Bill Cooper even tells us that the inner area in the  "Luna"
    base is called the "Far Side of the Moon";  in CE3K the base where  the
    mothership lands is called the Dark Side of the Moon.

    Perhaps  all this is nothing more mysterious than a big ball of  string
    given  to a crew of playful,  paranoid kittens to occupy us  while  the
    real  powers go about their real business,  like trashing the  Bill  of
    Rights by implementing unlimited preventive detention (a recent Supreme
    Court decision), fines and penalties without trial (the recent Drug War
    bill  that passed in the House),  and the US Army as a  law-enforcement
    agency to crush seditious dope smokers.  Even J. Edgar Hoover said that
    he hated using the FBI on drug cases,  because there was so much  money
    involved that it practically guaranteed corruption.   Corrupt feds  are
    one  thing;   corrupt Colonels with tactical nukes are  something  else
    again.

    For  my part,  the most depressing scenario is simply a continuation of
    the  mystery.   In a recent PBS special on the controversy  surrounding
    the  assassination of President Kennedy,  Walter Cronkite wound up  the
    look  at the dubious and equivocal evidence presented (mind you,  there
    is  evidence considerably less equivocal and dubious)  with the  gloomy
    conclusion  that we will probably never know what happened;   too  much
    time had gone by, too many loose ends petered out into nothingness, and
    finally there was too much left open to several different explanations.

    There is a lot more evidence afoot for the presence of aliens on Earth,
    and  even  the  Greys From Interstellar Hell scenario  is  pretty  well
    documented as far as the numbers of CEs go.   The skeptics,  with their
    "Extraordinary assertions demand extraordinary proof" canard are wrong;
    the  mental  state  associated  with  constant  attention  to   simple,
    repetitive,  monotonous events is called hypnosis.   The skeptics think
    that  because the aren't stumbling around bumping into walls that  they
    can't be hypnotized -that is,  entrenched in a reality tunnel where odd
    phenomena  are tossed out as noise.   As many researchers have  pointed
    out,   in  any other field the weight of evidence would  be  more  than
    adequate,   but  no amount of testimony can  remove  the  "mind-forge'd
    manacles" Blake saw his contemporaries set in.

    For better or worse,  though,  I  think that the truth about the  MAJIC
    story will finally come to public knowlege.   In the meantime, I'd like
    to see:

    - A  coherent  plan  for fighting back!   I  want  one  of  the  little
      bastards'   heads  on  my wall.   They are ticks  with  delusions  of
      grandeur. I was raised on Heinlein novels; like he says, if I have to
      go down fighting,  I  want to take a dozen or so to hell with me.   I
      was  excited  by  the take-charge optimism of Dr.   Paul  Bennewitz's
      postings, but they were chopped-up (by whom?), incomplete,  and tough
      to read.

    - Some  plan  for  protecting  us  as  individuals  from  abduction  or
      mutilation.   There must be >something<  that they can't stand,  like
      maybe a tape of Metallica turned up to 110 decibels.   Tibetan temple
      bells my ass.

    - A little less cynicism and resignation on the part of the crew  here.
      These things are >things<, not people; they don't create art, or have
      faith,   tend gardens,  love each other,  empathize with  other  life
      forms,   or  display any of the glories of the human  spirit.    Like
      earthly parasitic,  totalitarian,  cultures,  they are obsessed  with
      control and death and with utterly materialistic conceptions.   If we
      fight them with their tools we will probably lose.   If we fight them
      with  our own virtues and talents they will not be able to deal  with
      them  and we will win.   Men - fewer each year,  but still some men -
      value  freedom  more  than life,  and will risk the  latter  for  the
      former, and this they will never understand.

    Utulie'n Aure,

    Michael Sloan MacLeod