By Chris Churchill

I know there are all types of people in the world. I know there are types that believe in weird stuff, who don’t believe in weird stuff, who want to believe in weird stuff and can’t and who don’t want to believe in weird stuff but do. I know you’re out there. I have made contact with each of your kind.

I happen to be one of the types that wants to believe in weird things. So I do. I like the idea of ghosts, aliens, the mysticism of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions, quantum physics and all the other nonsense we fill our mind with now that we’re no longer in immediate danger of being eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger. It’s good mental and even emotional exercise. And Lord knows we all need that (“Lord” being the name of a really smart homeless guy I met once).

Here’s the exercise I’d like to consider right now. I’m not saying there are aliens, but, if there were, would they visit? Would they try to remain space incognito? I know about the Drake Equation, which suggests, via a weird kind of math that puts "maybe" into algebraic variable form,  how many alien species should be out there? According to Drake, it’s a lot. A lot a lot. I am also aware of the Fermi Paradox, which suggests, considering the Drake Equation, that it’s pretty odd that we haven’t met anyone yet. The Fermi Paradox makes you wonder what’s wrong with this universe anyway. I mean, it really is kind of weird that out of all the possible places where planetary matter globbed into a rocky planet in the Goldilocks Zone where climate and chemical makeup would allow life to arise naturally, that, so far, we have no real solid indication that anyone else is out there.

I’m not saying there are aliens, but, if there were, maybe they, like us, have decided to leave the lower life forms alone to develop on their own. All the Trekkies know about the Prime Directive, which prohibits fictional people with fictional spaceships from tampering with fictional lower life forms. It’s a solid premise. So why are we surprised that we haven’t really met any aliens, at least not in an official, shake hands with the president on network television, sort of way?

I’m not saying there are aliens, but, if there were, maybe they don’t play by the above rules. Maybe they’re somehow deeply invested in what goes on down here. Maybe, as some have suggested, (mostly social outcast, pseudoscientists with funny hair, really) the aliens seeded the DNA of some ancient ape species to create a hybrid and are always on hand, guiding the development of all of us anemic apes. I mean, why would we be so weak and so smart compared to the other animals? All the crazy people agree, it was aliens.

I’m not saying there are aliens, but, I’ve been to a zoo and I’m not so arrogant to think that the idea that we all might be part of some outer space race’s idea of a zoological preserve. Or maybe they’re harvesting stuff from us. I’ve heard theories about them harvesting our spiritual energy, like our passion, our pain, our love or loss. All these things get siphoned off into space and get enjoyed by…oh let’s go with Andorians (is that a kind of alien?) They love it. It’s like tacos to them.

Let’s say they are here. They hide in plain sight. They run the governments of the world. You know, all the great YouTube theories that help kill your drunken evenings. If they were here and they were running things without making themselves widely known, wouldn’t they choose to manipulate the media? Wouldn’t they try to pit us against each other? Maybe they’d tell a bunch of people that a bunch of other people are not completely human after all. Maybe they’d make us believe that those guys over there are actively plotting our demise. That tribe I heard about on television is inhuman and angry and selfish and mean and they’re coming over here right now to make sure we don’t get what we deserve out of life. Maybe they’ll even kill us. Obviously, if the aliens were able to accomplish that, they’d have no problem running the world without raising a space laser pistol in anyone’s direction. Maybe, it’s a lot easier to exploit us, the have-nots and the have-just-enoughs, if they convince us that we are not all one people, one planet, one Love.

I’m not saying there are aliens but what I am saying is that there are people here on Earth right now that are as alien to unity and peace on this planet as any invading species could be. And they aren’t some other ethnicity or part of a red state or a blue state. I don’t mean those people. I mean that we were invaded long ago by our own people. Specifically, the powerful people who fear losing power. The powerful people, who don’t see the rest of us as equals. They may as well be in space ships, hiding in their mansions and towers, watching and guiding trends, hoarding riches based on some idea that they deserve it somehow, even though most of these people were born into their extreme wealth and power.

I’m not saying they’re aliens but they may as well be. In fact, maybe we need some help from over their heads to help humanity survive being exploited by the greediest of it’s own. Or we could just be aware, even a little paranoid, about what the medias overriding messages seem to be. And why is it that there are now so many media outlets that don’t simply offer different points of view but actually pit all of us against each other? Maybe we can’t do anything about the aliens but at least we shouldn’t delude ourselves.