Devil Worshipping Aliens From Dimension X

A new theory of origin.

Mark Bisone of The Cat Was Never Found is, in my opinion, one of the best writers on Substack. He weaves together his beautiful prose with the binocular parallax of an engineer and an artist, communicating an absolutely unique perspective on subjects as diverse as AI and the unseen realms. He’s a joy to read, and it’s impossible to read him without walking away and looking at the world in a whole new light.

Recently he sent me a draft of this essay to get my feedback, since I’ve written about UAPs before. I was blown away by it, and immediately asked him if he’d like to feature it as a guest post. This essay is a wild ride, by turns funny and frightening, advancing a fascinating and deeply disquieting hypothesis for the origin of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and the grey homonculi that crew them, and connecting all of this back to the nature of reality, our purpose within it, and the role played by spiritual evil. Enjoy. - JC

While it might sound like clickbait, the title of this article is a direct quote from the Tonic Discussions podcast linked below.

We’d been discussing the possibility that the globalist regime’s ultimate motive might be directly “anti-human” — i.e. mass murder and destruction being deliberate ends in themselves, not merely the means by which some other mundane goal or state is achieved. In this model, the Enemy is trying to eradicate humanity to serve a purpose that’s incomprehensible to the human targets themselves.

While exploring this concept, the prospect of interspecies conquest was raised: what if alien conquistadors have already invaded our world, and much of the insanity we’re seeing is the byproduct of their particular format of conquest?

As you can probably tell, I got a little frustrated at certain points during this thought experiment, because I was worried we were just moving the goalposts.

John Carter: What would they be after? It wouldn’t be physical resources, because space is full of… you want gold? Go mine a fucking asteroid. So it’s not going to be that. Is it our DNA? I don’t think so, because if you want our DNA you could just go take a few samples from the local biosphere. You don’t even have to say hello to anybody, so I think we can rule that out. What is it? Dude… I don’t know…

Mark Bisone: Exactly! This is my point. You still haven’t gotten rid of your devil problem. If there are aliens from dimension X and they're coming to conquer us slowly by this very mysterious and intricate method... well then, the devil is in control of them too, you could say, because it’s still evil. You have devil-worshipping aliens from dimension X, that’s all! You can’t escape it.

In retrospect, I apologize for being so… excitable. I’m not sure anybody heard me say that last bit. In this case, the inescapable “it” I was referring to was the motive of “Evil Itself” — meaning the root desire to bewilder, impoverish, abuse, degrade, enslave and otherwise torment, murder and destroy the human race. As some of you know, investigating such a motive was the impetus behind starting The Cat Was Never Found in the first place, and the subject of its very first article.

I’ve since completed five articles in the series, which focuses on potential manifestations of Evil Itself. These would be the Enemy’s visible and “rational” extremities — corrupt networks, destructive egregores, simulated intelligence, bioinformatics, cybernetics, etc. But the root cause — the seed — remains incomprehensible to us, impenetrable by human reason.

Harrison Koehli of Political Ponerology has done invaluable work in trying to track down and describe this seed in scientific terms. At the very least, this helps us to recognize its patterns, to detect its fingerprints on crime scenes past and present. And because those crime scenes are global now, the stakes couldn’t possibly be higher. We need to see through certain masks, point out the chinks in the armor.

But I think we also shouldn’t confuse the various costumes and shields for the Thing itself. When I said of our prospective alien invaders “the devil is in control of them,” I didn’t necessarily mean direct control, like a puppet operated on strings. While I do sense that such finetuned possessions happen (and are maybe even accelerating, as of late), the kind of control I meant was more along the lines of how an emperor is “in control” of his empire.

Those closest to him — his counselors, generals, spymasters, scribes, court eunuchs, harem slaves — are aware of his literal existence, and carry forth his will to ever more distant circles and nodes. By the time these commands begin to reach the outermost nodes of empire, the subjects who inhabit those may only be vaguely aware of the emperor’s existence. To most, he’ll be little more than a theoretical concept, a face stamped on a coin. Many of these distant subjects will even begin to believe the emperor doesn’t exist at all, that the figure is merely an avatar or metaphor for the imperial egregore itself.

But even this structural explanation is a little too rational and pat. Do some people literally speak with the emperor? “Probably” would be my answer, if only because such conversations are embedded in too many of our stories to be wholly false. But again, I think it would only be a few, positioned near the very top of that sinister food chain. And even then, how would you be sure you were talking to the emperor himself, and not one of his agents in disguise? Or if you do speak with him, would you even recognize him as the emperor? The Enemy has so many names, after all.

So how does this pertain to our “alien invader” experiment?

Before I give my answer, consider the current sociopolitical frame regarding UFOs/UAPs and extraterrestrial lifeforms. In the span of a couple of years, that has turned hilariously bonkers. Consider that we now have whistleblowers testifying in open Congressional hearings about aerial footage, vehicles stored in secret hangers, and even the recovery of “non-human biologics” from crash sites (which translates roughly to “little green grey men” for the rest of us). Perhaps the weirdest aspect of this new, anti-skeptical framing has been our collective yawn of a response.

Maybe that’s partly due to the ongoing lack of “hard” evidence. In a way, nothing has changed, except maybe the external vicissitudes of governments with regards to the various recordings and accounts. But what will the downstream consequences of these claims be, if they are ever convincingly verified?

One of the general observations, which I’ve heard trotted out my entire life, is that the proven existence of alien life would radically alter — if not outright destroy — most or all of humanity’s religious understandings of reality. It’s said that the Abrahamic religions in particular would be fatally wounded, given they center Man as the imago dei and (only) child of God. The same crowd claims these voids will be promptly filled with fresh musings of the techno-progressive cult, natch.

After all, what could alien visitors possibly signify, other than the ultimate triumph of incremental progress? They are obviously much more ancient and powerful than we pitiful humans, superior to us in every conceivable way! The existence of a starfaring alien race would not only prove there’s nothing special about us, but that we basically suck as a species. Humanity’s already tattered picture of itself would shrivel and disintegrate even more.

Let’s stipulate for the moment the existence of alien visitors, more or less as they’re depicted in the popular imagination (and now, in official government testimony). Let’s also stipulate that the tales of people like David Grusch, David Fravor, Bob Lazar, Luis Elizondo and others are accurate depictions of phenomena, including the various alien crafts and corpses being secretly studied by the U.S. government.

One of our core assumptions is that their technology tree evolved in much the same way as our own, but is much more advanced due to a lengthier and/or more volatile development process. The difference would be similar to European explorers of sub-Saharan Africa, who encountered technologies that had been radically improved upon or rendered obsolete in their societies long ago. Yet the shape of the technological slope in both socities was largely unchanged. That’s because all humans encounter many similar problems, even within highly dissimilar environments. So while the Zulu’s spear was inferior to the Boer’s firearm, they shared a common lineage on the tree. The difference is one of degree, not of kind.

If we apply this technology model to our UFO theory, we would expect the vehicles to be merely an extension of the same branch from which our own aerospace industry sprouted. That’s not to say they’re powered by the same propulsion mechanisms (they clearly aren’t), but the underlying principle of controlled, gravity-defying high speed travel is the same: we are here; we want to go there, fast.

And in order to “go there fast” we need to construct a delicate system of highly sophisticated, interoperable components. The system’s fragility and expense are inherent in its complexity. By necessity the resulting products are riddled with failure nodes. If something goes wrong, everything may go wrong (“Houston, we have a problem.”).

Now, consider the way Lazar describes one of these recovered alien crafts:

(emphasis mine)

ROGAN: So, at the time, you having a firm knowledge of the periodic chart and knowing what was real and what wasn't real, what was your reaction to having this stable element 115 that wasn't even supposed to exist?

LAZAR: Well, everything was impossible, right? I mean down down to the metal. I did get a chance to look inside the craft on only one occasion. And this was important, because where the reactors sat might have been critical to how it operated, since everything operates without any interconnections. So the placement of components might be critical. So they allowed me to go inside and and look at it again. I forgot where the hell I am.

ROGAN: So you're going into this craft and what are you thinking when you're inside of it? Like what are you seeing?

LAZAR: It's a very ominous feeling because it's… there are no… First of all, everything is one color. It's like a dark pewter color and there are no right angles anywhere. It's as if somebody took — I've said this before — somebody took a model and fashioned it out of wax, and then heated it just for a short time so everything melted. Everything looks like it's fused together. Everything is a radius of curvature where two items meet. It's a really weird looking thing. There was almost nothing other than a small foldable hatchway that looked recognizable. Everything was really unworldly, to pick on a way to describe it.

Lazar goes on to describe experiments with this so-called “element 115.” The way he tells the tale, it’s eerily reminiscent of Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

But is “technology” even the correct frame to apply here?

For instance, suppose I stumble upon a weird-looking rock beside a riverbed. When I pick it up, I find that I can now levitate my body at will. Is that a technology? The only technique that seems to be involved is my own conscious mind, and the only developmental process required was dumb luck. If there are any other structural dependencies involved — the peculiarities of my biology, the molecular composition of the rock, etc. — they are totally obscured. With apologies to Clarke, I think the more apt description is that I’ve found a magic rock, that can help me fly.

No such thing as magic rocks, you say?

While the origins of the compass¹ are complex and varied, what’s clear is that using lodestones for navigation — as well as for divination, fortune-telling and other woo — predates all scientific theories of their mechanics in the cultures that spawned them. No one knew how they worked, they just knew that they worked.

The same could be said of all early magnetic products on the tech tree, and of many metallurgic tools and techniques as well. We have been tricked into thinking that theory always precedes innovation, when in most cases the opposite is true. The primary mode of the intelligent observer is exploration. When humans found a substance that could assist, they were free to theorize anything from ancestral spirit guides to spells cast by horny sirens off the coast of Norway. Whatever “genius” they possessed was rooted in application, not in theory.

With that in mind, let me propose a different potential explanation for our alien visitors.

Orientation

First, consider that virtually all reports of UFOs place them in the troposphere or lower stratosphere, with the highest “credible” report sighting the object at ~24 km (80,000 feet)².

In other words, the ceiling seems to be capped right around the altitude limit for our own manned military aircraft, where supplemental heat and oxygen is required for a human pilot’s survival.

Second, consider retired Cmdr. David Fravor’s account of his team’s 2004 “Tic-Tac” encounter:

As they were looking around for the object that appeared on the radar, another aviator spotted something. "I was like, 'Dude, do you see that?'" Fravor recalled saying.

“We look down, we see a white disturbance in the water, like something's under the surface, and the waves are breaking over, but we see next to it, and it's flying around, and it's this little white Tic Tac, and it's moving around — left, right, forward, back, just random," he said.

The object didn't display the rotor wash typical of a helicopter or jet wash from a plane, he said.

The planes flew lower to investigate the object, which started to mirror their movements before disappearing, Fravor said. "As we start to cut across, it rapidly accelerates, climbs past our altitude and disappears," Fravor recalled.

Now, consider this prospect:

Aliens are real, but they do not come from outer space.

In fact, why on Earth would you ever assume that they do?

It’s true that we get hit with stuff from space from time to time. Rocks, mostly, and trash from our own orbital experiments. Strong evidence abounds that the planet may have been smacked by a comet in the (relatively) recent past, triggering the apocalyptic flood that Genesis and other accounts describe. But by and large, not a whole lot of extraterrestrial macromaterial makes its way into our gravity well, let alone lands intact. Whatever else the universe might be, it’s big. And — lacking auxiliary propulsion — most of the material moving through it is very, very slow, from our perspective.

That’s why almost every extraterrestrial theory involves FTL or wormholes or so forth. We pave in the gaps with assumptions about where our own mathematics and tech could potentially lead us to distant solar systems. Because we want to go and seek, we naturally imagine other goers and seekers extant in reality. That notion in itself isn’t crazy.

But I ask again: Why do so many of us insist such a seeker must hail from a distant Earthlike planet, rather than the genuine article? And why do we claim their conveyances are the result of advanced tech-tree scaling, instead of magic rocks?

Forget crap like the Drake equation for the moment. In fact, leave aside whether or not you personally believe that alien lifeforms — intelligent or not — exist on distant worlds. Even put aside the question of whether such lifeforms might potentially exist, or may once have existed, even if they aren’t actually extant here and now. If all of the curtains were thrown back tomorrow on secret government facilities and their contents, and all of the stories we’ve been told validated, the question will still remain.

Why would you assume these “non-human biologics” originated on a distant planet, instead of on Earth itself?

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The Vacant Heavens

My buddy John Carter is a fan of science fiction³. I’m also a fan, though usually not of the “hard sci-fi” genre. I tend to go more retro, into that artistic terrain of his namesake that leaves real scientists laughing or screaming.

Pew-pew blasters! Sexy spacesuits!

Dogfights in nebulas, at ludicrous speed!

Yeah, baby, yeah!

Image Credit: Avi Granov

In other words, I’m more a fan of space-magic than space-science. That’s not to say the latter doesn’t interest me at all. But the impression that my (admittedly lay) reading has mostly made is that space exploration would be at the very least punishingly difficult, expensive and dangerous. Some scientists claim it’s physically impossible for humans to explore deep space and colonize other worlds (On the other hand, Man is the Impossible Creature. So even if that were in some sense “true”, I still wouldn’t rule it out entirely).

That said, the seed of intelligence is exploration. And because Homo sapiens are the smartest nerds in the biosphere, we’ve done quite a bit of that over the course of our shockingly brief existence. We trekked over mountains and through forests, forged oceans and deserts, wriggled our way into every nook and cranny that could remotely support a human life. We also crafted ever more detailed maps of what we found in those strange lands, and used the Sun and stars (and magic rocks) to guide us through them.

In our current technological state, we are practically a panopticon of orbital cameras and global positioning systems. Nowadays most people barely glance at street signs to navigate, let alone at maps or the position of heavenly bodies. That’s the boss’s job.

So apart from watching pretty sunsets or aimless stargazing, those bodies have been rendered obsolete as practical tools. In fact, exploration itself seems obsolete; everything on planet Earth has been seen and known.

Except that this latter claim isn’t true. Not even close.

But before we investigate that gaping hole in observation/knowledge, let’s consider why we still bother to look at the sky at all. Leaving aside the practical implications (Will it rain?), why do we sometimes find ourselves just gazing into it? We say it is beautiful, and it is. But we also call it “the heavens” for a reason.

By “we” I mean virtually all humans, in every place and time. For almost all of our existence, we have seen the sky as our spiritual home, the dwelling place of the gods. But starting a few hundred years ago, that near-universal insight began to change.

When the modern material-atheist looks into the heavens, he sees the name as just another childish mistake, born of gaps in our scientific knowledge. There are no gods for him, up there or anywhere else. Instead he sees a cold and airless vacuum littered with hotspots and rocks. If he’s equipped with a progressive’s version of imagination, he might also see possibilities for endless expansion and mechanical growth, but nothing more than that. Sagan is their only poet, Dawkins their only priest. At best, the heavens and their gods are mere metaphors for the infinitude of the cosmic sprawl.

Let’s consider the inverse proposition. In this telling, the infinitude of the universe — all those galaxies and planets scattered across unimaginable lengths — are “mere metaphors” for the heavens and their gods. Or, to put it another way, neither are metaphors for anything, but rather are real entities that happen to be poetic analogues of each other. We might borrow the term “dimension” here to describe the divide. We inhabit dimension X, they inhabit dimension Y. Our two dimensions operate by different laws, but are in enough alignment that we can’t help but notice similarities.

But just because they are equally real does not mean they are equally interactable or perceivable to all agents that dwell within them. There is also the hierarchy to consider; human observers are largely — but not totally — limited to our own local domain of speeds and lengths. We are the child dimension, which is why we so often use familial terms to describe the gods. Using the analogy of the tech tree: X is the spear, Y is the laser-guided missile.

Yet we’re still born with a mysterious capacity to sense this other dimension of reality (and that nerdy desire to explore it, of course). So when we look up into our X version of the heavens, this meta-organ can notice the similarities to the supernatural or “otherworldly” version in Y. The warmth and light of the Sun, the awesome power of the storm, the enchanted mystery of the stars. We sense these have analogues in parts of reality we cannot normally see or touch.

We see the birds up there, too: lithe and delicate aliens who break the surly bonds of gravity with ease and grace. Because of this power, they strike us as more than mere “animals.” Our meta-eyes notice they resemble the angelic avatars of freedom incarnate. And not only the angels of Abrahamic traditions; even the Valkyries were winged (and regularly spoke to birds, as well).

The point is, we tend to notice all of these resemblances. Artists in particular can see the interdimensional connections vividly, and try their best to describe them to dimension X residents with their pictures, poems and songs.

The beings they describe inhabit not only the higher planes of the heavens, but the planes below.

The underworlds.

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The Bird of the Water

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

— Genesis 1:7, KJB

We are sitting on a beach together. The sun is shining in a cloudless sky. We notice one lone bird, a gull, gliding languidly above the waves. We know the anatomical quirks that allow for this, the hollow bones and such. But it still looks like a kind of magic.

We know he was once an earthbound dragon, red in tooth and claw. But he has since been transformed by the miracle of God’s love. The dragon has become a beautiful dream of himself: a weightless skydancer, his gracile body honed into a perfect tool of his will.

Yet some of the dragon remains. See the bird transform to a darting dagger, plunge beneath the ocean’s foaming skin. This veil is pierced, then pierced again, the instant katabasis having summoned a very different kind of bird into his beak.

This second bird looks like an ugly mockery of the first. His feathers have been stiffened to rubbery scales, his wings cropped short and batlike. Two round, unblinking eyes are fixed in a perpetual state of surprise, stupidity, terror, or all three. There’s something almost comical about his lips, too, like the most hideous and deranged woman pouting for a kiss. It’s as though God is reminding us he has a sense of humor.

Akin to the Bird of the Sky, he may have his own flocks and dance partners. Their dance steps and aerial stunts are no less spectacular in his watery home. Some might even call them more spectacular, given the relative frictions and strengths involved. And though he’s ugly, he’s not perfectly so. In fact, he exhibits an almost blood deep beauty from certain angles. It’s the beauty of the simplicity of spirit, which is why Faulkner and others have compared him to a soul (“My mother is a fish.”).

Perhaps this is why he puts himself in such mortal danger. He lives in the underworld, but yearns for the heavens above. And like Icarus, this strange bird from the Upside Down has flown too high, strayed too close to the sun’s light and warmth. A tragic mistake, but the order of reality demands the Sky Bird’s authority.

Both the Bird of the Water and the Bird of the Sky are alien forms. Their homologous structures and behaviors aren’t totally unrecognizable, but are still strikingly different from our own. In fact, we might say all animals are “aliens” to varying degrees; even dogs have a few exotic appendages (dewclaws, tails), and occasionally exhibit behaviors that bewilder us (“What the heck is he sniffing that thing for?”).

But as when we plunge into the darkest, coldest depths of dimension X’s own underworld, we observe alien beings who remind us that God’s angels aren’t the only inhabitants of Dimension Y.

Perhaps you see the beauty in these creatures. I see a bit of that too, if only the beauty inherent in all Creation. These denizens of the sub-photic deep live and die as others live and die. That means they must prey upon and devour other aliens, and have built bodies sufficient for these tasks. Survival ain’t always a beauty contest, after all. And even if parts of it are, what do we know about alien beauty standards? Who are we to judge?

All that said:

Look at them.

Don’t just focus on the strange aesthetics of these Birds of the Deep, which look suspiciously like our artists’ most profitable nightmares. Try to extrapolate their anatomical functions into the kind of lives these creatures must lead. Imagine millions upon millions of years spent trolling the silent dark, with nine-tenths of the air squeezed from their lungs to withstand the crippling pressure. A spartan life of maximal efficiency, where not one single movement is wasted on play or pleasure, since each of those could mark your last. A life spent in a freezing shadow realm of strobe-lit murders, where death is always hovering an inch away.

The similarities to traversing the voids of outer space should be obvious. And as in space, it’s impossible for a human to survive at these depths. But try to imagine doing so, even for a single hour.

First, we shall shrink you down to the size of a Nordic prawn, to help you conserve energy. At the same time, we will radically enlarge your eyes, so that you won’t be operating fully blind in the abyssopelagic zone. As a bonus, your new anatomy will also help you to achieve the full experience of this alien world.

Next, we sink you, down and down, until the Sun and sky is just a distant memory. When you hit bottom, you begin to explore this brave new world, just as your nature impels you.

The first thing you notice is that the darkness isn’t absolute, even without your supersized eyes. You see the searchlights of a bioluminescent squid on patrol, revealing a craggy seabed crawling with undead snails, centipedal crabs, and other wriggling things. But the squid is far from the only light bearer here; like your own night sky, this one twinkles everywhere with streaking comets and nebulous glows.

As you slowly move across this phantasmal nightscape, you happen upon a series of dark wonders which threaten to crush your sanity like a bathysphere out of depth. You spot an underwater lake that mocks your paltry physics education, a factory row of hydrothermal vents vomiting endless black clouds. You stumble across a field of eyeless, limbless blobs that might be flora or fauna, or something in between.

But some are very clearly fauna, rapacious children of the eternal night. Scenes of their sudden, violent deaths are flickered into your eyes, bodies thrashed and shredded by jagged fangs from a child’s crude drawing. The murderers are snakes and spiders and flying goblins and Spielbergian spaceships and demonic fiends from LV-426, all loaded to the tits with trimethylamine N-oxide to stop their proteins from being twisted into overcooked fusilli.

If it isn’t murder, then it’s a bizarre sex crime. You watch one mating ritual in horrified silence. The sad little males have been shrunk down and simplified to little more than parasitic phalluses, if not animate sperm. They swim to the belly of their gargantuan wife, gnaw and burrow their way into her flesh. She literally becomes the devouring mother, absorbing her idiot husbands into her anatomy and blood supply. Even the black widow shudders.

Everywhere you look you see the stark horrors of their existence. You are surrounded by shapes that move but do not breathe, do not sleep, do not dream. You tell yourself they’re only animals, but an ancient voice inside you whispers a different word.

That’s not the worst of it. You’re surrounded not only by alien monsters, but by deadly illusions. For example, the birds that fly down here appear to do so very slowly. But the moment you try to swim away from one, you realize the trick. It’s the same fatal trick the Dragon Hunter fell for. He had mastered the dragons of the land with his powers, but foolishly thought those powers would follow him to sea. The dragons of the sea were not impressed.

You begin to panic. Then you begin to hope and pray.

And moments later, your prayers are answered. In the distance, you spy a brilliant white headlight. It’s a submarine! It’s James Cameron, hellbent on some fantastically expensive rescue mission!

That must be what it is, because now it’s changing its bearing, heading right for you. You swim towards it as well, wanting to end this nightmarish space adventure as soon as possible.

But instead of hope and freedom, the light leads to a certain kind of mouth…

Surprise, suckers!

Like the supernatural underworld, we cannot observe these beings directly. We’ll instead sink down ROVs and other mechanical spies into their realm. And even these exceeding rare and limited expeditions are a recent phenomenon. In a way, deep sea exploration is even more difficult than space travel — for humans, at least. Our physical bodies (and even most of our machines) cannot possibly survive such underworld journeys into those crushing pressures and freezing temps. Even our proxies are prohibitively expensive for most people, to say nothing of manned vehicles. And given the brevity and fragility of their life support systems and their slowness of movement, the ranges of even well-funded deep sea expeditions are extremely limited. Because of these obstacles and more, we have very little idea of what’s actually down there.

And since our oceans occupy 70% of the Earth’s surface, that means we might have very little idea of what’s happening in general, on this little ball of spit and dust. That general ignorance dovetails neatly with the latest UFO/UAP chatter; if any of the panic these government agents are exhibiting is even partially sincere⁴, then it stands to reason their speculations about the origin of these phenomena would include intelligent, alien life.

What doesn’t necessarily stand to reason is that they would always point to our heavens instead of to our hells.

Image Credit: Chris Cold

Getting pretty good so far, isn’t it? I told you you’d enjoy it. By now you have a pretty good idea of where it’s going, but the best of this essay is still very much to come. So why am I interrupting the pleasant flow of your reading experience with this annoying aside? Why, to annoy you, of course … specifically, to annoy you into heading over to The Cat Was Never Found, right now, and

Of course, if you wanted to go the extra step, and support Mark with your wallet as well as your email, he would not be cross with you. A lot of work went into this essay, after all … and Mark, like all of us, is a human being with landlords to pay and whiskey that doesn’t buy itself. If he can’t at least get a few people to buy him drinks, he might stop writing. And that would make me rather cross indeed.

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The Eyes Have It

If you take a moment to ponder it, the ocean depths make for a far more logical point of origin — and not just because there’s a lot of crazy shit down there.

For one thing, we know that complex “non-human biologics” can and do survive in those deep sea environments. For another, the distance and technical requirements from that origin point are massively less complicated and dangerous than interstellar travel. For a third, nearly everything already flies down there. Omnidirectional flight is the observable norm, not the exception, for conveyance, and is complete with the sudden stops and hairpin turns that UAPs/USOs are said to exhibit both above and below the waterline.

The fact that our own oceans don’t constitute the default theory of origin for this species is a conundrum that haunts all art, science, and our mediated understanding of reality.

I think the answer leads back to our “hidden emperor” and its playbook of strategic illusions. During my weird journey of the past three years, the key conclusion I’ve come to is something like this: The most pernicious and destructive of lies is the one that looks closest to a truth, but has been inverted at a node too distant for most of us to see.

And so — when we discuss aliens — we are persuaded to look up instead of down.

Let’s do another thought experiment.

It’s similar to the last one, where an intelligent observer is placed in the abyssopelagic depths. Except this time, the observer is not a human being, but is similar to a human in many respects. For instance, its morphology looks close enough in shape and size that we might even suspect a common ancestor in our lineages.

Before we describe the physiology of this hypothetical humanoid in depth, let’s take a closer look at another one that we know for sure existed, in an age when orcs were real.

Image from Them and Us: How Neanderthal predation created modern humans

As Tree of Woe puts it:

According to Them and Us, Neanderthal and Human were predator and prey — and we were the prey. The Neanderthals came upon hapless humans by night, slew our men, and carried off and raped our women. (How did you think the Neanderthal DNA got into our genome?) And they kept doing it, generation after generation. Not only were they stronger, faster, and tougher than Homo Sapiens, the Neanderthals were just as smart and as well-armed.

Under assault by these flesh-eating monsters, the human race almost went extinct. Only by becoming an apex predator ourselves did we survive. We became the greatest killers the world has ever known, because if we hadn’t, we’d have died out.

The reality that this theory describes is even more terrifying then the snippet above suggests. If this portrait of Neanderthal is accurate, our earliest ancestors were stalked by nocturnal humanoids equipped with nighttime vision, unholy strength, and tools of war. They visited us in the dead of night, tore us to pieces, ate our remains. These were “monsters” by any sensible meaning of the word, right down to their horrifying visage. And, like Tolkien’s monsters, they almost wiped out the entire human race in its crib. Any signal born of that period must have been thunderously loud, the screams echoing down through the ages. Maybe that’s why many artists still hear it clearly, and remember.

I mentioned that Neanderthal likely shipped with “nighttime vision”. That theory is born of certain skeletal and environmental features:

Neanderthal skulls had extremely large eye sockets, suggesting very large eyes. That, in turn, suggests that Neanderthals were nocturnal. However the large eyes pose a problem, as Ice Age Europe would have presented Neanderthals with blinding sunlight reflected off the snow. Vendramini suggests that the Neanderthals had vertically-aligned slit pupils, which enabled them to use the full diameter of the lens in low light, while shutting out bright light by day. Nocturnal primates such as the rhesus monkey and owl monkey all have large eyes with vertically-aligned slit pupils. Vendramini suggests Neanderthals also had a tapetum lucidum (like a cat) that made their eyes shine in the dark, and had dark sclera like all other primates.

So here we have a manlike creature with eyes that are larger than our own. We might call this an adaptation or a design feature, but either way the result translates to something like, “The better to eat you with, my dear.”

Yet while the creature’s eyes are relatively larger, they wouldn’t be declared freakishly so. Letting too much light in would cause even worse day-blindness, without offering significantly more advantage by night. That stands to reason: as dark as night might seem to us at times, the light of the Moon and/or stars alone affords us at least some degree of visibility.

But what if your night sky held neither Moon nor stars? And what if it held no Sun either? What if, in your world, it was always the blackest of midnights? How might this alter the size and shape of your eyes?

“Grandmother! What big eyes you have.”

And perhaps even more importantly than your physiology, how would this environment shape the development of your mind and soul?

But let’s leave that question aside for the moment, and return to our “intelligent observer” — this non-human humanoid of the inky depths. In order for a hominid (or adjacent) species to survive, we might assume you will share certain traits in common with other creatures who survive down here.

For instance, you’ll probably be packed with enough TMAO to stroke-out a herd of elephants. As far as respiration is concerned, we could also assume you have gills, lungs or both. But no matter the solution, it’s highly probable that you can survive for extremely long periods without respiring.

You would also exhibit a native resistance to hypoxia, hypothermia, and starvation that would line up well with other creatures in your ecosystem. These innate survival adaptations might be physically expressed in a number of ways, including:

• lowered heart rate

• decreased metabolic activity

• minimized movement

• completely compressible lungs

• lack of nitrogen absorption

Your body would almost certainly be pale, hairless, and streamlined, equipped with the bare minimum of skeletal muscle required for movement. For the same reasons of efficiency and mobility, you would also likely be a nudist, and probably wouldn’t bother with adornments of any kind.

But given your particular morphology — bipedal vertebrate, opposed digits, binocular vision — you would still be quite the marvel in your environ, a freak among freaks. If you are a macrobentho — a seabed walker — you are likely both extraordinarily dense and strong compared to topside bipeds. Or perhaps you inhabit something like an epic sinkhole, either naturally formed or specifically engineered to support your maladapted anatomy. All we would know for sure is that your structure looks superficially similar enough to ours to be ill-suited for its environmental circumstances, and so one or more X factors must be determined to fill in the gap. We could claim that gap is a yawning chasm — but only if we agree it’s at least as wide for bodies built for interstellar travel.

Your morphology might provide us with some clues. For instance, your large cranium and huge, predatory eyes imply an existence in which detail of sensory data and complexity of thought are paramount. The structure of your hands imply at least intricate material interactions, if not complex fabrication or tool use. For efficiency’s sake your body is also smaller and more compact than Homo sapiens — not too small, however, since some of your monstrous neighbors are large and deadly. You need to be big enough to either pose a threat or be judged too large to digest. But we can assume that your greater intellect constitutes your best weapon and defense, given that our own species achieved dominance by similar means.

In the human mind, this naturally translates to the development of tools and techniques (i.e. technologies). There’s a problem though: the human tech tree is fundamentally Promethean, with the controlled use of fire and friction at its core. But your environment is impossible for fire and ill-suited for friction. So if you are to enhance your survivability with tool use, you’ll need to find other methods of fabricating those.

While fire is impossible, heat and pressure isn’t (recall those hydrothermal vents, for instance, which can produce temperatures as high as 400°C). And given the extreme scarcity and other hardships of your circumstances, it’s even possible you have unlocked other mental powers such as telepathy, telekinesis, or sonic manipulation that would look like magic to the topside world. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all (and we already know that minds physically effect matter).

Let’s stipulate that you have enough observational/intellectual horsepower to at the very least scale your resolution and deconstruct manifolds in your mind’s eye. You can, in other words, notice useful patterns in objects and phenomena, and their similarity to others in the local environment.

Given the state of maximized efficiency required for your survival, your fabrications would probably be minimal in components and starkly utilitarian in aesthetic. In fact, it may be that you have no capacity for aesthetics whatsoever. You just notice that some shapes move more efficiently than others.

Given that framing, what kinds of shapes would you make?

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Chariots of the Clods

So we potentially have a species that can fabricate vehicles capable of “spaceflight” (from their abyssal perspective), which they then pilot with their thoughts.

Does any of this mean you must be a genius by human standards? A member of a technologically advanced species, with an intellect that dwarfs our own meagre gifts?

No.

In fact, your mind might be quite primitive compared to ours, or too alien to even quantify at all. Maybe you were just lucky enough to find a magic rock, which serves to amplify or enhance some learned ability or biological trait you already possess.

Recall Lazar’s description of the vehicle’s interior:

It's as if somebody took — I've said this before — somebody took a model and fashioned it out of wax, and then heated it just for a short time so everything melted. Everything looks like it's fused together. Everything is a radius of curvature where two items meet. It's a really weird looking thing. There was almost nothing other than a small foldable hatchway that that looked recognizable.

No controls. No furnishings. No components at all, unless you count a “foldable hatchway”, which doesn’t sound so hi-tech to me. A craft that looks melted and fused, perhaps by a concentrated application of heat and pressure. One with no visible propulsion systems or byproducts. Instead we see objects that look like discs, jellyfish, oblong pills, and other simplistic forms that our distant human ancestors could also perceive and render in material.

Flying pottery, essentially.

The question isn’t so much, “How do these things move so fast and freaky” as it is, “How do they move at all?” The aerodynamics of many reported shapes are dubious, at best. And with no visible energy exchange or exhaust signature, it’s difficult to believe they were engineered for “flight” as we know it.

One theory is that they’re powered by some unknown element humans never discovered, because its deposits are found in a places we could never survive. This element might be your race’s version of our Promethean fire, the root of your tree. What it amplifies might be sonic, bioelectric or, as mentioned, even thought itself.

And if your craft’s motion is powered by thought, what would you most likely think about when contriving your movements? What would your baseline frame of mimesis be? Recall their impossible, frictionless maneuvers, all those hairpin turns and mid-air reversals and sudden vertical leaps.

Just like the birds of the sea.

(excerpted from NARCAP article: “A Preliminary Examination of the Flight Dynamics of Four Profiles of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, UAP, Commonly Associated with Aviation Safety Incidents as Reported by Pilots”)

UAP/Objects, generally, present as simple, solid (based on cases involving radar reflection and other data), geometric forms that are variable in size, general shape, and external details. Discs, Cylindrical forms, Spheres, Triangles, Squares and Rectangles have been reported. There are other shapes that are reported less often. UAP/Objects can range in size from less than a meter to several hundred meters or more in size. Three UAP/ Objects most commonly reported by pilots, disc forms, cylindrical forms, and spherical forms, are discussed in detail.

1.       UAP presenting as disc forms have been described:

a.   Maintaining level flight at very slow speed
b.  Executing sudden acceleration
c.   Executing angular changes of directions
d.   Executing 180 degree reversal of direction
e.   Executing sudden full stop/ Hover
f.    Hovering
g.   Complex maneuvers including curving or arcing turns or spiraling
h.  Maintaining level flight while continuously turning or spinning on the vertical access
i.   Maintaining level flight with no spin on the vertical access
j.   Level flight base or top forward (steep Pitch)
k.  Level flight edge on the horizontal axis
l.   Level flight edge on the vertical axis

2.       UAP presenting as Cylindrical forms have been described:

a.  Maintaining level flight at very slow speed
b.  Executing sudden acceleration
c.  Executing angular changes of direction
d.  Executing 180 degree reversal of direction
e.  Executing sudden full stop/ hover
f.   Hovering
g.   Complex maneuvers including curving or arcing turns or spiraling
h.  Maintaining level flight end forward while rolling continuously
i.   Maintaining level flight end forward without roll, pitch, or yaw.
j.   Maintaining level flight while turning on the vertical axis
k.  Maintaining level flight while in a vertical attitude
l.   Maintaining level flight while broadside to the direction of travel
m. Maintaining level flight while end on to the direction of travel

3.       UAP presenting as Spherical forms have been described:

a.  Maintaining level flight at very slow speed
b.  Executing sudden acceleration
c.  Executing angular changes of directions
d.  Executing 180 degree reversal of direction
e.  Executing sudden full stop/ hover
f.   Hovering
g.  Complex maneuvers including curving or arcing turns or spiraling

Our own mimetic baseline of the birds of the sky comes packaged with limitations, particularly when it comes to hovering and sudden directional changes. That doesn’t mean we haven’t tried (and in many cases, succeeded) in overcoming the sky bird’s limits. That’s partly due to magic rocks like helium, partly due to observing other creatures that flutter (hummingbirds, dragonflies, etc).

Your submerged race's flight baseline will not only be very different, but encompass a wide range of locomotive techniques that would look quite alien when compared to most terrestrial species.

What about your craft’s other “alien” properties? These would be the features that are typically ascribed to advanced technology (by believers) or cited as evidence (by skeptics) that much of the UAP phenomenon is really just an epiphenomenon of instrumental failures and/or noise.

At a certain point, the excitable Mr. Corbell makes the claim that the object’s invisibility to radar must indicate a “technology” that is “actively jamming” our systems. He makes this claim without evidence, as per usual. He is of that class that prefers to see gods instead of monsters. But I think another reason he makes the claim is because he can’t imagine a material that might produce such effects autonomously, without the involvement of fire-forged components and specific intent.

Yet for all Corbell or Fravor knows, the pilot isn’t doing anything more complicated than our Neolithic ancestors. Perhaps what he’s doing is even much less complicated; the process of capturing, breaking, training, and riding a horse constitutes a far more difficult and complex technology than thinking “up” to move upwards. The same could be said of so-called “tractor beams” that appear to levitate objects and people via mysterious tech. Maybe he’s just thinking something like, “Gimme that.” Even the reported lights of certain crafts may not require component-based mechanisms, when you consider the ecosystem of glowing birds they hail from.

Fravor’s Tic-Tac account is hardly the first to suggest an undersea origin. Maritime encounters of USOs (Unidentified Submerged Objects) are common, and may even occur more frequently than UAP sightings. These include visual reports that align with Fravor’s, describing amphibious crafts that both descend-into and emerge-from bodies of water.

Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough confirmed that U.S. Navy personnel did capture the footage that Corbell posted, The Debrief reported on May 14. Gough told The Debrief in an email that the footage was included in "ongoing examinations" by the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), a U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence program that investigates reports of unexplained aerial vehicles, according to The Debrief.

However, Gough did not comment on any of the other UFO details that Corbell included in his writeup, The Debrief reported. The footage is not classified, and stills of the spherical UFO were previously included in a UAPTF intelligence briefing from May 1, Corbell wrote in a tweet on May 14.

Unfortunately, U.S. Navy policy limits our ability to guess the number and identity of instrumental USO detections per year. It’s not necessarily a “coverup”, but the resulting picture is a sea filled with literal speed demons, invisibly rocketing through the depths within range of military sonar.

We talked with a number of sources during our investigation. What we learned is that yes, unexplained noises and even tracked contacts do pop-up on submarines' sonars, some of which seem to move at incredible speeds, but it is rare and the data is often inconclusive as to what was actually detected. But maybe most interesting, and peculiarly so, is that the Navy doesn't actually have a way to classify these strange sounds as unknown and tag them for further review.

I asked Jive (retired Navy Sonarman Aaron Amick) if strange encounters do occur and how they are handled if so. He told me that they do, although they are rare and there is no way to really classify them as strange:

“I don't know what they are...  We usually logged it as seismic or biologic. We were instructed that nothing is ever 'unknown.' 

That's the thing, it's so quick you can't measure the speed. In the examples I am thinking of, it is a detection that lasts a few seconds on the towed array. There is no way to measure the speed accurately because there isn't enough data...

I agree it's odd. There are a lot of odd things in the ocean.”

The other strange thing about USO reports is how the descriptions of their size, speed, maneuverability, and material composition all line up eerily well with those of UAPs sightings, whether civilian or military.

In 1970, biologist Ivan Sanderson published the book Invisible Residents. Sanderson, a noted student of unusual phenomena, devoted the book to sightings of what were later called Unidentified Submerged Objects, or USOs. USOs are defined as unknown craft that are sighted in the water, sighted rising up out of the water, or diving into the water. Sanderson catalogued scores of reports of USOs:

On the 19th of April, 1957, crew members aboard the Kitsukawa Maru, a Japanese fishing boat, spotted two metallic silvery objects descending from the sky into the sea (original emphasis). The objects, estimated to be ten meters long, were without wings of any kind. As they hit the water, they created a violent turbulence. The exact location was reported as 31° 15’ N and 143° 30’ E.

Sanderson also reports an incident that reportedly took place off the coast of Puerto Rico in 1963 during an anti-submarine warfare exercise.

The maneuvers were conducted off Puerto Rico in the Atlantic some 500 miles southeast of the continental United States. All reports seem to agree that there were five “small” naval vessels concerned, but in more than one account the aircraft carrier Wasp is stated to have been the command ship…

A sonar operator on one of the small vessels, otherwise listed as a destroyer, reported to his bridge that one of the submarines had broken formation and gone off in what appeared to be pursuit of some unknown object. This operator did not, of course, know if this was a “plant”, since the maneuvers they were engaged in were exercises designed to train personnel in detection of enemy craft...However, this operator’s report was not all within the limits of any such simulation. Trouble was that said subaqueous object was traveling at “over 150 knots”!

That’s a lot of knots! But incredible speed doesn’t necessitate advanced intelligence or technology. After all, I’m pretty sure I could whup a cheetah in a game of chess.

Yet despite no evidence apart from “they move fast-and-funky” most UFO/USO researchers and gadflies still insist on a complexity of design that is more advanced — superior — to our own. And I suspect the primary reason they do that is the same reason so many humans have lost their religious faith. It’s because we have been manipulated from birth to perceive Mankind a certain way.

In short: since the Enlightenment kicked off the era of scientific rationalism, a vast number of humans have lost their spiritual identities. It’s not just that the demystifying lens of science turned the majestic aliens of Nature into a game of Latin Scrabble. With each successive generation, that disintegrating lens — that Eye at the End of Time — has been focused ever more directly and ruthlessly on humanity itself, which its masters have found sorely wanting.

As a result, even small schoolchildren are trained to see and paint a self-portrait that’s deconstructed down to the atoms, lashed for all its supposed ecological sins and prejudicial crimes, demeaned and diminished and stripped of all intellectual, moral, and spiritual worth. And so, we’re told to gaze upward instead, and to admire the Great Intelligence from the stars. We’re trained to marvel at their ingenious hi-tech wonders, even if our evidence that such wonders exist is slim-to-none.

Meanwhile what we might be looking at instead is a bunch of amphibious, bug-eyed humanoids, who stumbled across some local resource that can convert their Stone Age dwellings into magic carpet rides.

---

The Sea Sleuths

None of is to say your species is necessarily stupid. Even if the “spacecraft” turn out to be little more than flying caves, driven by psychic cavemen, there at least seems to be an element of intentional Platonic shape to their forms. On the other hand, the same could be said of ancient architecture.

But the survival instinct is something inherent to all life forms. So is the exploration instinct, if the being has ambulatory structures. It doesn’t even require some vast intelligence to explore. It could be as simple as bumping into walls and turning right.

If you are sufficiently intelligent, however, you may find the urge to explore your environment in more strategic ways. Your motive might be strictly the product of wistful imagination and yearning. You gaze into the dark loveliness of your heavens and decide to ascend into them — and perhaps to see what might lay beyond them.

But there are other, far more practical, survival-based motives for strategic exploration. You might be scavenging for resources, for example, or trying to find new territory to expand into. In the latter scenario, the impetus might be some political, demographic, or ecological shift that makes your current whereabouts less habitable or desirable (e.g. a sudden change in temperature or chemical compositions, pilgrims being persecuted in their homelands, etc.).

Now consider an amalgam of these motives.

Let’s say that, after countless millennia of a basically quiet existence in the abyssal zone, you suddenly begin to pick up on several alarming signals from the heavens. Over a period of less than a hundred years, these signals have gotten increasingly numerous, varied and disruptive. You suspect something big and dangerous must be going on up there. So what do you do about it?

The obvious answer is you send scouts and survey teams up to investigate, using your own version of the tech tree to plan and execute the mission. Compared to manned spaceflight, the parameters are pretty simple: You go up, up, up. Eventually, you go up far enough that you encounter the partition between sea and sky — Dimension X’s version of the Veil.

What they found on the other side would be sure to shock and confound them. The fruit of the fire-and-friction component tree would look utterly bizarre, especially given our tendency towards adornment and style, including in our architecture and machinery. Even voyages made a hundred years ago would introduce them to external mediums like billboard signs and other logomaniacal surfaces. In fact, few if any of our constructions would look unblemished by the artist’s unseen hand. Even our land, air, and sea vessels sport letters, numbers, colorful flags, and other strange symbols.

But given that maximal efficiency is an innate quality of your psychology, it’s likely your explorers would quickly become immune to these shocks and get down to business. And the “business” part of their expeditions could very well be similar to those of our own military forces. They would be sent to investigate alarming signals — sonic, thermal, kinetic, chemical — that they believe might threaten their own ecosystem and survival.

They’d find plenty of those too. Even if they’re only about as sophisticated as the average cargo cult, they would encounter sources of great danger and ruin looming everywhere they looked.

By that I don’t just mean military vessels and weapons testing (although that certainly would account for the spike in naval UAP/USO encounters over the past quarter century, given the increased size and mobilization of fleets and their war exercises). For example, what might they make of something like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, crawling with strange creatures that feed on the rot? Or of China’s CNOOC981 offshore rig: a 31,000-ton monster that operates 3,000 meters underwater, and can drill up to 12,000 feet into the seabed?

If your race had any “scientists” to speak of, they would be hounding you for samples, and running all kinds of tests and analyses in their abyssal labs.

But there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of such sample-taking. Kidnappings, yes (and horrifying ones at that, but we’ll get there), but not much in what we’d recognize as methodical scientific inquiry and process.

Let’s assume your race has no comparable praxis to our version of the physical sciences whatsoever. You aren’t even a cargo cult, since those require a genuine cohabitation with, if not occupation by, a more advanced civilization (i.e. Mankind). The dangers you would see/sense beyond the ocean’s veil would more likely be perceived in mythic or religious terms.

Me go up-up. See bad thing many.

Giant many ride dragon many. Dragon some swim dumb in lightwater. Dragon some spit exploding rock. Dragon some have long tail that make world bleed and shake. Dragon some poop great glob on world cap, full with hard stink and worm.

— mission report of Gl’ub’glu’b’gahh, Exalted Deacon of Bl’aab’lab’la’bla

If that sounds like a stretch, consider the many alternative theories that are bandied about (e.g. interstellar FTL voyagers, time travelers who exist outside linear causality, rift-crashers from an alternate universe, etc).

By comparison, the strength of “psychic cavemen from the ocean depths” is found in William of Ockham’s scalpel.

---

The Devil’s Home

Over the course of my life, the Bermuda Triangle has been the source of much research, speculation and journalistic accounts, all of which can perhaps be summarized by the following statement:

It’s got a lot of weird shit going on.

I’m not just talking about the disappearance of planes and boats. I’m talking about sea serpent orgies, man!

No one knows why these ancient, snakelike monsters travel thousands of miles to get busy, or even the precise mechanics of how they do the dirty deed. But it must be quite the party, since they all kick-the-bucket by the end.

One of their most popular hotspots for this suicidal fling is the dark depths of the Sargasso Sea, part of which overlaps the Triangle. Speculations abound about what attracts them there, but with little in the way of supporting evidence (as per usual). But to my knowledge, no theory to date has proposed something akin to “The Call of Cthulhu.”

We already assume this race possesses some form of uncanny ability or trait — sonic manipulation, telekinesis, ESP, etc. — which capacitates a method of material interaction that would appear strictly magical to topside observers. If this trait is situated in the core of your tech tree, I suspect it will probably intersect with your mythopoetic/religious tree as well. In this context, the bizarre and mysterious mating ritual could literally be the result of a ritualistic practice. As a spiritual avatar for a race of intelligent amphibians, you could probably do a lot worse than a silvery eel.

How might this theory correlate with the Triangle’s key source of infamy? Could all those mysterious disappearances of human-piloted vehicles also be the result of strange religious rites? My guess is they might be related, if only in the sense that we’re dealing with a species that views reality in magical terms instead of scientistic/reductive ones.

I speculated previously that your levitation of external objects is the result of you thinking “Gimme that.” Now: imagine hundreds or thousands of such minds collectively thinking — or praying — “Gimme that,” all at once. We could even view such a mass invocation in security terms. From your perspective, you and your church fellows are casting a counteroffensive spell, designed to confuse, ward-off, or destroy any heavenly intruders detected.

To evaluate this theory, let’s take into consideration a few common elements of Triangle incidents and reports:

• Instrumental malfunctions: Compasses, radios, sonar, GPS, etc.

• Oceanic anomalies: Rogue waves, giant methane gas bubbles, unpredictable magnetic field disturbances, fireballs, etc.

• Corpus delecti: Unrecoverable evidence (vehicles, wreckage, bodies) and lack of eyewitnesses to the moment/mechanism of disappearance.

What’s interesting is how well these elements align with the traditional apologia of the UFO crowd upon demands for solid proof: aliens (from space) don’t want us to know they exist. A variety of reasons for this secrecy are proposed, but there’s a general agreement that the visiting species is actively (and strategically) covering its tracks in a number of ways.

But if that’s the case, what do we make of alien abductions? Why leave such eyewitnesses behind? An assumption that these abductees wouldn’t “talk” or “be believed” seems ludicrous on multiple levels, all of them rooted in a meta-assumption held by the apologists themselves: the alien mind is a more advanced version of the human mind. In that frame — as the story goes — these super-intelligent aliens not only understand the dynamic complexities of our cultural and sociopolitical systems, but comprehend them well enough to predict their movements with near-perfect accuracy.

I have a different theory about the “catch-and-release” aspect of reported abductions, which I think correlates well with all those vanished air and sea crafts.

To reiterate: your species inhabits a world where maximum efficiency is both the practical reality and its emergent ethos. Effort is therefore reduced to that which minimally gets the job done — including in your prayers and spells. If a vehicle can be warded off by a magnetic disruption, so be it. If the intruder persists, additional effort and/or tactics must be applied.

Alien spellcraft at DEFCON 2

This isn’t all that different from the way humans and many other species will escalate our response to threats: a shout becomes a shove becomes a bite. In fact, it doesn’t even require an intelligent attempt at a coverup. If you pull an object down to the depths of your maximally-efficient homeland, I can imagine your people might treat it the way American Plains Indians treated the buffalo.⁵

So in this model, we see not a glistening city of Atlantis, but a network of melted sea caves filled with hypersensitive Spartan psychics screaming spells into a thundering sky that — not so long ago — was relatively peaceful and quiet. That, if nothing else, would be something we humans could relate to.

In other words: your lives and traditions are alien to us, but not so completely unfathomable that we couldn’t recognize some cultural structures. If you are sufficiently intelligent observers of reality, these would logically include art and religion among them. And specialists in these cultural forms would also almost surely develop among you: those who see deeply not into X or Y, but into their uncanny confluences.

What might their artists and shamans see, when they gaze into their own black misty version of the heavens?

Moreover, what might their religious-minded explorers and missionaries observe about our terrestrial world, when they soar high enough to breach the Veil of X?

“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

— H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

The Children of Abaddon

So far, I’ve made a string of X-Dimensional speculations, in the context of that part of reality which is readily observable and measurable by a human mind. But we also might be simultaneously glimpsing the completion of a certain Y-Dimensional journey, presented in such a way that inverts multiple truths at distant nodes. Among these inverted truths is the truth of angels and demons, and their hierarchical order within Creation.

Predestination by M.C. Escher (1951)

Physical exploration isn’t the sole concern of intelligent beings. For instance, if your mind is in any way similar to a human mind, it will probably also be the kind that generates forms of language, social organization, metaphysics and, eventually, one or more religious stories that explain the structure and inhabitants of Dimension Y.

Now imagine the kind of religions that might arise down here in the freezing dark of Dante’s final circle, trapped for all eternity with its deadly monsters and illusions. What beliefs might you acquire about reality’s structure, purpose, and author?

And if your race possesses anything like the kind of meta-organs that humans do, and includes its own artists passing along their visions of Dimension Y, what might you see when you gazed up into your own inky version of the heavens?

Most importantly: What is your conception of the Veil, and of who might be powerful enough to pierce it?

Image Credit: Cthulhu by Andree Wallin

I mentioned earlier that the terrestrial explorers of your species would find an alien world filled with puzzling phenomena. But it’s possible that puzzlement wouldn’t be your only reaction, because what you’d find waiting for you across that veil is Hell.

An agonizing place of blinding lights and deafening sounds. A world of demonic shapes which seem to mock your spare, efficiency-driven fabrications. A world controlled by actual demons, too: our forms are judged to be ugly and ridiculous beyond all reckoning. From our shrunken, hairy skulls and beady eyes to the dangling bits and wounds between our legs, we look like walking, talking sacrileges committed against your underworld gods.

I don’t claim to have any specialized knowledge about alien abductions. But from what I have read, more or less the same crimes seem to be repeated.

So let’s talk about anal probes.

And not just those. The more terrifying accounts of abductees include many elements of sexual abuse and torture. Skeptical explanations for such reports usually run straight to Freud and Jung, with victims conjuring alternate memories to cope with some “real” form of trauma. Others will claim hypnosis, or some other technique that serves to install false memories. Meanwhile, the UFO “believer” races headlong to scientific experiment. Assuming the aliens to be scientifically advanced, they claim that we’re essentially lab animals being studied and/or tagged by curious researchers.

Here I’ll propose a different possibility:

What if the purpose of torture is torture?

Consider this passage from Whitley Streiber’s abduction account:

On December 26, 1985, I was raped, and yesterday I made yet another visit to the doctor to be treated for the consequences. The injury has long healed, but the body remembers, and every few years, the excruciating pain of it returns.

At the time, it was mentioned in passing in a hypnosis session with Dr. Donald Klein as a “rectal probe.” This sparked years and years of laughter, and I found myself to be the only publicly admitted rape victim in modern history whose suffering turned him into a laughingstock.

This added greatly to the anguish, I can assure you. It is devastating to a person’s well-being to suffer such a humiliation and then be laughed at for it.

When I went to the doctor and told him what had happened, he examined me rectally and immediately said, ‘you’ve been raped.’ That was in 1985. It was not until 2004, almost twenty years later, that I was able to say these words to anybody: “I’ve been raped.” I said them to my wife, and now, four years later, I have said them a few times publicly. I am recording them again in this journal, largely because it’s therapeutic to do so, and I think that it will help others who have suffered similarly. Anne recorded my admission to her in her diary of August 30, 2008.

I do this even though I know that it will elicit another round of sneering and jeering from sexually insecure and incompetent males. Let them jeer. It hurt, once. Now it causes me to feel only contempt.

On that night in 1985, a device called an electroejaculator was forced into my rectum, tearing it on the left side.

At the time, I had no idea what was happening to me, or why, in the context of such a horrific experience, I would suddenly have an erection. I then experienced ejaculation and watched helplessly as what I can only describe as a monster collected my ejaculate and took it away.

Occam’s solution is bound to upset a lot of ufologists and skeptics alike. We want them to be either gods or figments, not depraved monsters addicted to the sound of our screams. But if we stipulate my new origin of the species, this notion doesn’t seem far-fetched at all.

So allow me to take this theory a step further. What does our physical underworld look like beyond the Veil, in the ultimate reality of souls?

In this model, the conscious supernatural patterns of Y are lured to the material of X. The simpler souls are lured to simple structures, which they then electrically build from available resources. Patterns with higher levels of complexity will likewise build out more complex bodies that are suitable to inhabit. For instance, structures for enhanced memory, observation, and physical interaction allow the being to more effectively explore.

What’s often missing from this model is the element of choice. I think that’s because as our intellectual powers and stores of memory expand, we tend to think of “choice” as a language-based process of selecting from a set of well-formed and explicable options. Part of the daftness of gene theory is that it assumes the ultimate automation of biological selection — factories that spit out factories — rather than a pre-language selector, making choices that help to shape the final form.

This string of choices would begin the instant the potential for a manifest form existed (e.g. “conception”) all the way to the end of that being’s life. This isn’t to say we aren’t limited in our selections, both by beings who chose before us (ancestors) and the circumstances into which we’re born (environmental factors, incidents and accidents, etc). The suggestion box isn’t bottomless.

Some choices occur at the species level. As land dwellers who were born and bound to the firmament, we humans chose forms that would best serve the kind of lives to be lived there. Pretty cool ones, too! I say that not only as a figure painter, but as a general observer of happiness and sorrow.

For instance, while we can’t soar like the Birds of Sea and Sky, we can splash and play in the surf, swim in the warmth of the Sun. And because our magnificent hands and eyes and brains can partner up on essentially any mission, we were eventually able to “soar” as well (as long as you could afford the ticket). We also ditched the fangs and claws, the shaggy pelts and scales, all the weapons and armor. In return, we got the softness of beloved skin against our own, and lips seemingly designed for noble speech as well as kissing. I’d make those tradeoffs any day (and, apparently, I did).

Now, let’s consider similar choices made in the Abyss. What kinds of souls might be lured to that nightmarish realm? A dark, cold void where breath is crushed from lungs, where sex is a murder more gruesome than cannibalism, where every light may be a siren, luring you to your final doom. And suppose it’s also a world that happens to harbor some awesome power resource, magically enhancing the faithful’s ability to enact their will upon the material world. Consider how access to such immense power might transform your own moral picture of reality.

What forms might you be tempted to build? Would you build grim, lipless, androgynous skeletons with the pallor of the grave? Bodies that are efficient to the point of biomechanical horror, built for nothing more than survival at any cost?

In light of this, what if these abductions aren’t “scientific” at all. Suppose they are instead religious rites, performed to honor the deities of their upside-down faith? We certainly have recognizable versions of such rituals and gods, even in the context of our softer, more forgiving and more readily abundant topside world.

What might you call the supernatural pattern of such a being, as viewed within Dimension Y?

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Final Thoughts

At this point, I expect many UFO researchers and enthusiasts will have serious objections to this theory. That’s understandable; I’ve heard just about every claim about the origins of the so-called Greys, but never ran across one that says: “Aliens are underwater psychic cavemen who worship demons.” Novel theories are always going to get hammered by familiar ones, even when the subject matter lacks anything like conclusive evidence to support either. After all, one popular theory remains: “Aliens don’t exist at all, you fools.”

Don’t take this theory as evidence that I am against space exploration, either morally or intellectually. I don’t know if it’s possible, but I don’t think it is immoral or undesirable. In fact, depending on which side of the bed I woke up on, I sometimes think it is part of our mission as the Children of God. On the other hand, the pragmatic part of me senses that we have some unfinished business to conclude here on Earth before we can reach for the stars.

But when I uttered the phrase “Devil-worshiping aliens from Dimension X”, I wasn’t talking specifically the UFO/UAP/USO phenomenon, or about the prospects of space travel in general. I only meant that evil isn’t necessarily the sole product of human hands and brains, but a moral quality that is elemental to the structure of reality. It would therefore not shatter my view of reality or of God to discover there were other “intelligent beings” in the universe, because the question of what is intelligent isn’t the same as the question of what is good.

In fact, what I’ve come to realize lately is that one is not in any way related to the other. For one thing, the world’s never short on smarty-pants villains or simpleminded saints. For another, the goodness and beauty of God’s creation can be observed in a slender blade of grass. But what intelligence may provide is a measure of moral responsibility for the choices we make — especially when those choices involve the harm of other living creatures.

So if “aliens” are shown to be part of that Creation, does it really matter if they came from Alpha Centauri or from the Mariana Trench? What would matter is what they were actually doing when they got here, the choices they would make.

As usual, the outcomes of these choices may serve God or the devil, but never neither or both.

“You can’t escape it.”

And neither can they. Whoever they are.

Photo by Alex Rose

I told you that was going to be a wild ride.

Lest you think Mark is purely a loony conspiracy nut, you can find him pushing back against my Caesarian revisionism of the Gospel stories, in the most intelligent and creative fashion possible, here:

The Imaginary Past

Mark has informed me that he’s within spitting distance of joining Substack’s checkmark aristocracy. It’s almost criminal that the man who wrote this absolute gem

The New Knighthood

has not yet joined the Order of Orange Check Knights. Mark tells me that whoever puts him over the top as his hundredth supporter will earn his undying gratitude in the form of a lifetime subscription.

Actually he told me no such thing, but now that I’ve put him in this awkward position he’ll have no choice but to follow through. Heh.

Who knows, maybe he’ll be motivated to finish telling us about that time he accidentally summoned Beelzebub by designing an AI chatbot for a horror game.

The Harm Assistant (Part 4 of ?)

There’s an easy way to motivate him.

Since Substack gets annoyed with me if I don’t include a Subscribe button:

But as I’ve said, what I really want is for you to go subscribe to The Cat Was Never Found.

1. The idea for lodestones as the primary example magic rocks struck me while readingJohn Carter’s brilliant article,The Permittivity of Free Thought:

Historically, the scientific paradigm that explains why a technology works is frequently preceded by that technology. The smiths of the bronze age did not understand the atomic theory of matter or the periodic table of the elements; the engineers who built the first steam engines believed in phlogiston, not thermodynamics; the compass was used for navigation long before Maxwell formulated his equations of electromagnetism..

2. I could be wrong about this being the highest sighting, or of its relative credibility among researchers.

3. He’s also a writer of it. And I, for one, can’t wait for him to finish and publish his masterpieces in that tradition.

4. Of course I realize it might not be.

5. Somewhat apocryphal, but you get the gist.