I Would Like to Invite the Peaceful Aliens of Outer Space to Do an Interview with Paste Magazine

Here’s what we’ve learned since Friday, courtesy of the New York Times and Politico:

1. There are almost definitely aliens. Harry Reid allocated $22 million for a Pentagon program to study UFOs, and while part of this may have been shady kickbacks to his alien-obsessed pal Robert Bigelow, it also seems to have uncovered some actual evidence of really strange spacecraft like nothing we’ve seen before on earth. Here’s one video captured by navy pilots:

And here’s an interview with the navy pilots who witnessed the craft firsthand.

2. The program discovered certain “alloys” that apparently came from these crafts, and stored them in Las Vegas. In a piece appropriately titled “Someone explain to me the alien alloys before I fucking explode,” Tom Ley at Deadspin points to this video, where one of the Times author, Ralph Blumenthal, says that the alloys in question are “being studied.” When the interviewer asks what kind of material they’re talking about, Blumenthal says they don’t know. “It’s some kind of compound they don’t recognize.”

That’s absolutely insane. 2:20 mark below:

It’s going to take a long time for people to accept this new reality, because we’ve always been taught that the existence of extraterrestrials is okay to speculate about in the abstract, but that when faced with the reality of it, we should treat the notion with ridicule. Which is an enormous contradiction—it’s acceptable to say something like “considering the size of the universe, the odds are overwhelming that we’re not alone,” but totally verboten to say “UFOs have visited earth.”

It is, in fact, distinctly uncomfortable for many of us to consider the existence of aliens. It may violate our religious notions, or just scare the bejesus out of us—not least because our media and popular culture has constantly portrayed aliens as resource-hungry marauders who are both rapacious and cruel. Basically, we lack imagination—this is how human beings would behave with spaceships, and so we assume the aliens are the same.

The film Arrival is a rare exception—an artistic production that reckons not just with the space travel half of the equation, but also with the heightened intelligence, and therefore empathy, with which the beings might be endowed.

To stay within the human framework, let’s take a look at the arc of human history. I’m not here to say that it bends toward justice, necessarily—recent events even in America would make that a naive notion—but I will say that there are impulses in society and government that have never before been present on such a grand scale in human history, and that those impulses are directed toward the general well-being of all citizens. I know these systems aren’t perfect, and they are certainly limited in scope, but the desire is there.

Is it so much to imagine, then, that if mankind were to survive and last for the thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of years needed to acquire the technology for interstellar travel, that our communal, empathetic, loving impulse would also have outpaced our tribal instincts? That, in fact, evolution improves not just bodies, but also brains?

I bring this up because in almost every credible account of extraterrestrial life documented by pilots (and not the yahoos hellbent on relating their anal probe anecdotes to credulous talk show audiences), the aliens are explicitly avoiding us. Perhaps they want to be seen, initially—for a purpose we can’t possibly understand—but they quickly vanish each time.

This does not jibe with our popular conception of aliens. First off, consider the simple fact that their craft are infinitely superior to ours—so superior that it totally undermines the notion that this might be Chinese or Russian stealth technology probing our defenses. If you believe the many accounts, our best and most advanced jets are like slow-witted toddlers trying to catch a squirrel. In other words, these aliens have total air superiority, and could destroy us at seemingly any point. Yet they don’t—they observe, and then they leave.

I posit that these aliens, if they exist, have evolved past the destructive tribal impulses inherent to modern and historic man. I don’t want to sound too hippy-dippy, but I believe they are creatures of peace. It’s possible that they’re not “visiting” earth in the strictest sense, but that they’ve been here the whole time, and maybe even created the planet. Or, to explore another possibility, maybe they’re our relatives—the ones who originally populated the place. I can also see them being creators, of a sort, if the simulation hypothesis is true and we’re living in either a digital or complex analog simulation.

This is all total speculation from an ignorant standpoint—obviously. It’s meant to hint at the mystery of our existence, and the mystery of extraterrestrials, rather than explain it. But if the aliens are out there, and can read this, please here me: I’d like to offer myself as an intermediary between your kind and the rest of humanity—a conduit for your benevolent message—provided no harm will come to me. I believe in your message of peace, and would be pleased to broadcast it here on Paste Magazine. And frankly, landing the first exclusive interview with extraterrestrial beings would do wonders for our web traffic.

That said, if I’m wrong, and you’re just like mankind, that means you’ll either annihilate or enslave in the pursuit of natural resources. Or—if Douglas Adams had it right—you’ll simply blow up the planet to make way for an interstellar highway. In that case, I encourage you to beam me up before the big bang, along with select friends and family, to serve as your court jesters. I will be your abject mascot, and maybe if I earn your affection over time with my obsequious manner and humiliating dances, you’ll eventually show me some small kindness, and deposit our small remaining tribe of humans on some far-off oxygenated planet, where we’ll fight for survival and dominance over the native species, and eventually, over millennia, build up a civilization that produces technological marvels, including air travel, to the point that one day our governments cannot suppress the truth anymore, and our people realize, collectively, that holy hell, the UFOs are real.