NASA is not content with merely looking for aliens visiting Earth or sending us messages from their home planets … now it’s creating alien DNA on its own. What could possibly go wrong … and how can you get in on this ground floor opportunity and make alien DNA at home for fun and profit?

“For a long time we’ve had hints that life evolved from G, A, T, C, not because they were exactly the right raw materials but because they were simply available. Steve’s four letters [S, P, Z, B] are, at least in terms of stability, in every way equivalent to nature’s four letters.”

No, that’s not a strategy for winning the National Spelling Bee but a simple description of how Steven A. Benner, a synthetic biologist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Florida, doubled the number of chemical building blocks (adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T)) or nucleotides that make up all DNA by adding the synthetic chemical pairs purine (P, B) and pyrimidine (Z, S) to make an 8-letter synthetic DNA Benner’s team named “hachimoji DNA” from the Japanese words for eight (hachi) and letter (moji). The research was published recently in the journal Science and funded by NASA, whose press release touts this as a really big deal.

“Life detection is an increasingly important goal of NASA’s planetary science missions, and this new work will help us to develop effective instruments and experiments that will expand the scope of what we look for.”

Lori Glaze, acting director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, explains that this essentially proves that there can be other forms of DNA on other planets or moons in our solar system and beyond. And yes, Benner’s team created real 8-letter DNA which can line up with RNA and transfer its genetic information into proteins essential for life. And that brings us back to the question: “What could possibly go wrong?”

“We’re starting to think of it as ‘cryptogenetics’. An expanded alphabet gives you the opportunity to make bigger, better, stronger, faster things in general.”

Things like what? University of Texas biochemist Andrew Ellington, a co-author of the study, reveals in Nature that he evolved the enzymes to turn hachimoji DNA into RNA in his lab and made a strand of synthetic RNA that resembles a sequence found in spinach. The synthetic spinach that got loose in the environment, destroyed the world’s crops and drove humanity to extinction? Not yet, but Benner has more noble causes – he’s made hachimoji RNA that can find and bind to liver tumors and breast cancer cells in a petri dish and foresees a day when it could help detect viruses or environmental toxins.

Is this really alien DNA? If your definition of ‘alien’ is ‘not found in nature on Earth’, then the answer is yes. And it’s just the beginning. Floyd Romesberg, a chemical biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, was not part of the study but told Nature that this opens the possibility to create DNA with ten or 12 letters, requiring the need to learn more Japanese numbers. But eight is already a really big deal.

“It’s already doubling what nature has.”

Something nature doesn’t have, while funded by NASA, is in the hands of corporate entities who could easily keep it to themselves. If it’s happening here, it’s happening elsewhere too.

What could possibly go wrong?

Or has it already?

For years, scientists have recognized the limitations of radio astronomy in the search for extraterrestrial life. Utilizing the electromagnetic spectrum to search for alien signals is problematic partly because it relies on searching for quiet areas in an otherwise noisy medium, as viewed from Earth. To be able to search for possible signals from far off places, astronomers have had to rely on finding regions where natural noise is minimized; and although such a “quiet” region exists between 1.42 and 1.67 gigahertz, affectionately known as the “Cosmic Water Hole,” one might compare this to trying to examine an entire ocean while peering through a straw.

Because of these obvious limitations, astronomers have been looking at new ways to engage the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and this includes forms of optical SETI that search for the presence of laser pulses that might originate from other places in our universe.

The prospects for such technologies have been exciting, but perhaps nowhere more than with the discovery of KIC 8462852 or “Tabby’s Star, an unusual star whose odd behavior has raised questions about everything from cosmic particulate that may encircle it, to the unlikely (but not impossible) supposition that it may represent an alien “megastructure.”

One group that has been exploring such possibilities is the SETI team at UC Berkeley, which garnered attention last year for one of its project leaders: David Lipman, who is now a student attending Princeton, had still been in high school at the time he began working with the project. In their most recent published study, the team has been sourcing data from the Breakthrough Listen Project “in an effort to detect potential laser signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.”

Lipman and his team decided to observe Tabby’s Star for evidence of laser light sources greater than 24 megawatts, which marks the lower regions of light a telescope would be able to detect at the distance between Earth and KIC 8462852. The survey relied on source data mined from the Lick Observatory’s Automated Planet Finder telescope, part of the Breakthrough Listen Project and one of the many systems that scientific organizations–some of them on the civilian level–have been using to scour the cosmos for signs of life.

The team’s paper, submitted for peer review in December, relates that they analyzed 177 high-res spectra of KIC 8462852, of which they say the “top candidates from the analysis can all be explained as either cosmic ray hits, stellar emission lines or atmospheric air glow emission lines.” Although they did not find evidence of any anomalous light sources, a number of insights were made into how future studies may be conducted to search various promising regions of space.

As advanced as laser SETI and its potentials are, varieties that have been developed in recent years have their own limitations, which have led SETI researchers to consider ways that more complex arrays that incorporate larger data sets might be instituted.

According to astronomer Seth Shostak, the SETI Institute has its sights set on incorporating just such a system. In July, 2017 the astronomer wrote, “The SETI Institute has developed an instrument that, at relatively low cost, could continuously survey the entire night sky for brief laser pulses. This is completely unlike the optical SETI efforts that have been made in the past, and continue to be made today: experiments that use sensitive photomultiplier detectors, but are limited to one star system at a time. That’s akin to a radio SETI search able to only monitor a single frequency channel. Extremely limited.”

Whether or not Tabby’s Star and its unusual characteristics ever prove to be the “smoking gun” in the search for extraterrestrial life, new technologies that will continuously search for laser pulses emanating from distant planets, as Shostak describes, could eventually be a game-changer as far as finding evidence of life on other worlds. As such, the future for SETI research looks very promising, indeed.

No TV show has so effectively blurred the boundaries between UFO fact and fantasy as NBC’s Dark Skies, which ran from September 1996 to May 1997. Created by Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman, the series presented an alternate history of 20^th Century America. Its tagline read: “History as we know it is a lie.” In this case, it was a lie sprung from and built around a covert extraterrestrial presence on Earth and the US government’s quiet efforts to understand and control the alien threat.

J.T. Walsh as Agent Frank Bach in ‘Dark Skies.’

The narrative begins with the Roswell Incident (here a deliberate military downing of an alien craft) and the establishment of the top secret working group, Majestic, which, as in the UFO literature, is tasked with overseeing the rapidly escalating flying saucer problem in the United States.

We then jump forward to 1961 when the show’s protagonists, John Loengard (Eric Close) and Kim Sayers (Megan Ward), a young couple with political aspirations, find themselves drawn into the shadowy world of Majestic 12, headed by the imposing Frank Bach (J.T. Walsh). Whereas in The X-Files’ Fox Mulder was forever on the outside of the cover-up attempting to look in, in Dark Skies, John Loengard was on the inside looking out.

Each episode saw John and Kim attempting to understand and combat not only the Gray aliens, known in the series as “The Hive,” but Majestic themselves, whose motives and actions are morally dubious at best. All of this plays out against the backdrop of real historical events of the 20^th Century, including the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of JFK, the death of Marilyn Monroe, the Watts riots of 1965, and the north-east black out of that same year. Numerous cultural icons show up throughout the series, including The Beatles, Jim Morrison, Ed Sullivan, and Timothy Leary, as well as real-life figures from politics, science, and UFOlogy, such as Harry Truman, Allen Dulles, Nelson Rockefeller, J. Edgar Hoover, J. Allen Hynek, and Carl Sagan.

So, how did such an ambitious UFO show come to be? While researching my book, Silver Screen Saucers, Dark Skies co-creator Bryce Zabel shared with me the intriguing and, at times, creepy production history of his show.

Zabel and Friedman pitched their series to networks in the form of a faux “Top Secret” briefing file, modeled on the MJ-12 documents. The thick, ring-bound file, which they referred to as the “Dark Skies Bible,” contained enough rich UFO lore intertwined with official history to comfortably fuel five full series of the prospective show, which had been the original plan. The file was fronted by a one-page letter “written by” the show’s fictional hero, John Loengard. It was dated 2 January 1995 and was addressed to his real-world creators. It read:

Bryce and Brent,

The truth must be told. You have been chosen as instruments to achieve this objective.

The truth, however, must not be represented as truth. Too many people who are needed in the struggle will die.

The cover of fiction must be used to present this truth. Those who fear the light will not want to bring attention to you by allowing your death.

This is the only way.

Do not be afraid.

The fight for humanity demands your courage.

[SIGNED]

John Loengard.

The Dark Skies Bible, and the Loengard letter in particular, exemplified the now complete inseparability and symbiosis of UFOlogical “fact” and Hollywood fantasy. Loengard’s statement to his creators that they had been chosen as instruments to tell the truth about UFOs under the cover of fiction, would later ring disturbingly true for Zabel and Friedman, as we shall see.

Official Denial

Before we delve into the weirdness that went on behind the scenes of Dark Skies, we first need to mention Brcye’s previous production. A made-for-TV movie, Official Denial was an ambitious exploration of modern UFO mythology, featuring MJ-12, UFO crash-retrievals, and aliens in the custody of the US government. It even anticipated reports to follow of military abductions of UFO experiencers (known in UFOlogy as “MILABs”). Indeed, it seems fair to say that Official Denial was perhaps the most explicitly UFOlogical movie ever produced at that point. Unfortunately, its ambitions greatly exceeded its limited budget, and its special effects were severely dated even at the time of its broadcast. It was not widely seen and has yet to receive a DVD release.

Official Denial was a passion project for Bryce, and so its less-than-perfect onscreen realization disappointed him greatly:

The sadness of my life is that I didn’t sell the script to a large film studio who would have spent 30 or 40 million dollars making the perfect version of it. Instead it got sold to a small company, which sold it to the Sci-Fi Channel [now The SyFy Channel], which made it for around $2 million. The result was that I couldn’t even watch the finished product. The alien was a twelve-year-old ballerina in a plastic costume, and the effects were bad, and the acting was bad. It just wasn’t on film what it was in my mind.

It was the partial failure of Official Denial that prompted Bryce to embark on his next UFO-themed project. “I just felt I needed to sell something to somebody who had more money so that we can do these aliens right,” he recalled. The development of Dark Skies began in late-1994 while Bryce was working at Universal as a writer on M.A.N.T.I.S, Sam Raimi’s short-lived TV show about an African-American super hero. “My assistant on that show introduced me to her husband, who was Brent Friedman. Brent and I started talking UFOs and it turned out he had been told certain things by a government insider.”

‘Dark Skies’ co-creator, Brent Friedman.

Friedman has described this incident as follows:

A good family friend of ours when I was just getting out of high school was working at a very high level in the Reagan administration. One night he took me aside and told me some of the things he was doing in the government, and he ended up telling me some pretty shattering stories. He knew that I’d always been into science-fiction, fantasy, and comic books, and he very casually just threw out there that ‘aliens are real, they’re here, and I’ve seen them.’ At the time I was just absolutely shocked. This was a person that I grew up with and absolutely trusted, and it just rocked my world.

With their mutual interest established, Bryce and Brent set about developing what would become their Dark Skies Bible. “Our show was really about blending the UFO phenomenon into documented, accepted world history,” Bryce told me. “Everything I had read in UFO literature ended up in Dark Skies, from Betty and Barney Hill to Majestic-12, you name it. I tried to weave it all in there.”

Here come the Men in Black

The inclusion of such intricate UFOlogical detail in Dark Skies apparently attracted the attention of real government UFO spooks. The series pilot premiered on NBC on 21 September 1996. That same night, Bryce threw a wrap party at his Los Angeles home for his cast and crew—some 200 people in total. They would watch the pilot live together. It was a private party, invitation only. All invited guests were issued in advance with a faux Majestic-12 ID badge (loosely modeled on Bob Lazar’s Area 51 ID badge) which they were required to wear throughout the evening. One man at the party that evening wore no ID badge.

“A guy showed up here,” Bryce recalled. “Nicely dressed, young. Nobody recognized him. He approached Brent and myself and he told us, “We’ve seen your pilot.” This was strange, because at that point in evening the pilot had yet to air. “Nobody else had seen it, other than a few people in Hollywood,” said Bryce. The man stated again, “We’ve seen your pilot and we think you get a lot right, but we want to help you with the rest.”

The mystery man suggested to the producers that their show could benefit from inside information on UFOs, and that he could provide them with this information. Here, then, was John Loengard sprung to life from Bryce and Brent’s fictional letter, choosing them as conduits to share the truth disguised as fiction. The producers initially suspected a prank, but their Dark Skies pitch had been private. No one had seen their Loengard letter but for a handful of network executives in Hollywood. What’s more, based on his detailed knowledge of its plot, the mystery man seemed to have really seen the unaired Dark Skies pilot, as he claimed. He even knew details about episodes that hadn’t been filmed yet.

“Who are you?” the producers asked. “That’s really not important right now,” came the reply. “But I work with people who have an interest in what you’re doing and what you’re putting out.” The mystery man then proceeded to grab a napkin and scrawl something on it. “It was a bunch of symbols and stuff,” said Bryce. The man handed the napkin to Brent, who naturally inquired as to its meaning. “The secrets of the universe,” said the man, enigmatically. “Sound, light, and frequency.” I asked Bryce where the napkin is now. “I haven’t seen it in years,” he told me. “Brent has it locked in a safe some place.”

The man and his napkin were undeniably intriguing, but this was bad timing. Bryce was playing host to 200 people: “I didn’t really have time to stand around talking to this guy. But Brent invited him to our office at NBC to come and talk to us some more at a later date.”

That meeting happened a few days later, and it would prove both confusing and unsettling.

Bryce described the meeting to me:

The guy from the party shows up with two other people, older men, who he said were his bosses in Naval Intelligence. They sat around a table with us and they spoke for around two hours. They certainly had a well-constructed alternate world. They had lots of details, and they weren’t shy. Actually they were a little condescending to us, saying things like, “You guys think you’re such hotshots because you’re in Hollywood, but the truth is that you don’t even know what you’re playing with. Yes, you’ve stumbled into getting most of it right, but there are some things that you haven’t got right.”

Cemetery at midnight

Things were about to get even stranger: “At one point the guy puts a little vile on the table and says ‘you don’t have this in your show.’ And we’re looking at it and we say ‘what is this?’, and he says ‘this is what this is all about.’ It was a vile of gold, or fool’s gold, I’m not sure which.” Were Bryce and Brent meant to infer that aliens were after our gold, like the Anunnaki of Ancient Astronaut lore? Or were they supposed to think the vile contained some alien element, perhaps used to fuel a flying saucer? It is impossible to know, but certainly the mystery men were intent on confusing and provoking the producers. “Their whole tone was like, ‘You fucking idiots! This is what it’s about! You don’t even have the truth!’ It was just weird.”

Bryce asked again precisely who these men were. “So one of them said, ‘look. we’re with Naval Intelligence and if you really want us to read you in you’re going to have to meet the big guy. There’s a ship down in Long Beach right now and we can arrange for you to meet him. But you can’t meet him on the ship.”

One of the men then provided Bryce and Brent with the location of a cemetery in Long Beach, where they could meet the big guy at midnight on a given date. Bryce was now thoroughly perturbed. He’d heard enough. “That’s when I pushed back from the table and said “Okay, I’m done. I have a show to run, and I have three children, and I am not meeting you or anyone else in a cemetery at midnight. Good day.’” That was the last Bryce heard from them.

What can we make of these events? Certainly they would appear to be neatly in line with disinformative strategies employed previously against UFO researchers and through entertainment media. Did intelligence operatives get wind of a new X-Files-style TV show utilizing factual UFOlogical detail and see it as great new opportunity to sow its content with self-serving UFO conspiracy mythology, or even simply to manage and guide the show’s existing mythology? “It was very intricate,” said Bryce of the whole affair. “It felt like it was staged for us. Like it was all built around us. It seems to be that we had been targeted for some elaborate disinformation job.”

I asked Bryce if he felt the men were the real deal, and if there is any chance it was all just a prank by some amateur tricksters:

Do I think they were really going to read us into a secret UFO program? No. But it did seem like they really were part of some official organization. One of the guys said he was a SEAL, and, I have to say, all of these guys looked like veryhardcore military guys. They didn’t look like soft fanboys pulling a prank on us. They didn’t look like guys you’d see at Comic Con. They looked and spoke like military guys.

I asked Bryce if he believed in UFOs at the time of Dark Skies’development and if his intention with the show was to educate and inform the public about the subject. He replied:

Did I intend to inform? No. I intended to entertain. But did I believe in UFOs and alien visitation? Yes. I believed strongly at the time of Dark Skies that Roswell was a real event and that it was probably unearthly in nature. I still believe that today. Whether or not I believed the Majestic 12 documents were real or faked was irrelevant. I just used the name because it was on people’s minds. But I did feel that if MJ-12 didn’t exist, then another group like it by another name probably did. Somebody had to be working on the UFO problem.

Dark Skies arrived on TV in 1996, and comparisons to a certain other UFO conspiracy show were inevitable.  Bryce said:

People accused us at the time of ripping off The X-Files. But actually we didn’t like what The X-Files was doing, which was teasing everybody. We wanted to do the opposite. We wanted to say ‘we’re not going to tease you about the cover-up. We’re going to take you inside the cover-up and let our character be your tour guide through these events of history.’ It was more direct than The X-Files.

A 1996 issue of ‘Starlog’ magazine.

Dark Skies was cancelled before the end of its first season due to low ratings, which may have been a result of its inopportune weekly scheduling. The show was dark in name, dark in themes, and dark in visual content, with violent and intense scenes in most episodes. Despite this, Dark Skies was broadcast at 8pm on Saturday evenings—peak viewing time for families (for whom the show was not entirely suitable), and peak going-out time for teens and young adults. Today Dark Skies retains a cult fanbase, and Bryce is proud of what he and Brent achieved with the show. “It’s about 90 percent faithful to what I set out to do back in 1994, and it certainly succeeds in twisting UFOlogy and history and tying them into this knot. It’s one of the most subversive TV shows ever produced.”

If you’re a fan of science fiction, and of UFO conspiracy shows in particular, you owe it to yourself to check out Dark Skies… the real Men in Black did.

A very common trope of science fiction literature and film is that of the alien invasion. In books and on screen we have spanning epics in which human beings bravely do battle against these mysterious intruders with their wits and whatever weapons they have at hand. In the end, they send the alien invaders back to from whence they came or destroy them outright. Go humans, right? This is all good fun and very entertaining, but have you ever thought of whether aliens might actually invade for real, or what would happen to us if they did? Here we will delve into the possibility of a real alien invasion, why they would come, what they would do, and what it would mean for us all.

The first thing to consider is why aliens would even want to attack or invade us in the first place, and this can be a bit tricky, with numerous theories on why they would even bother, and different possible outcomes to an invasion based on what they are after. One idea that has been thrown around is that they would be after our water or other resources, and that seems to make sense on the surface, but looking into this possibility more deeply brings about some problems. First of all is that it is believed that there are vast amounts of water frozen and locked away within asteroids, comets, and uninhabited planets, moons, and planetoids, so it seems a bit odd that they would want to use so many resources to travel all of that way just to pry the water from our cold, dead hands. Wouldn’t it make more sense for them to just mine nearby systems for all of that unused water floating about in space without any objection? And say they really do need us for our water, even if they did, there are numerous logistical problems involved with stealing it from us, and the same can be said of other resources as well. This is very well explained by astronomer Phil Plait, host of the Discovery Channel’s science show Phil Plait’s Bad Universe, who says of all of this:

In movie after movie, aliens come here for our precious resources, usually water. At first glance that makes sense; after all, 70 percent of Earth is covered in water. But on second glance that logic falls apart. For one thing, water is pretty inconvenient for packaging and shipping. It doesn’t compress, it’s heavy, and it’s hard to pump quickly from one place to another.

Worse, it’s sitting way down deep in our gravity well! Plunging into the inner solar system to Earth is hard enough, but then landing, grabbing all that water, and then taking off again? That’s a huge amount of energy wasted just to wet your whistle (or whatever mouth parts aliens have). And it’s worse when you look at the solar system as a whole. Orbiting the sun out past Neptune are gigantic repositories of water, essentially comets hundreds of kilometers across, in the convenient form of solid ice. Why would aliens blow right past all that prepackaged water to get to us way down here? The same is true for a lot of other natural resources; asteroids have minerals and metals that can be used for all manner of things, and you can mine them to your circulatory organ’s delight, again with no pesky humans to rise up and kill you.

OK, well then maybe they want something else? Another idea is that they might want to use us as a food source or as slaves, which also doesn’t make sense considering that even evolving on the same planet we are actually pretty limited with what is edible for us or available for us to eat. With aliens with totally different evolutionary histories and physiologies it seems highly unlikely that they would find us edible are all that good-tasting, especially not enough to come all of that way, and we could actually even be poisonous for them. There is also the same problem with water and other resources. How would they ship and store us all, then drag us back to their home world? Is prime grade A human steak really worth all of that effort? The same thing goes for if they came here to use us as slave labor, and why would they need slave labor anyway? With all of that technology at their disposal couldn’t they just make machines to do the work for them? They came here from light years away in order to get cheap manual labor? Really? It just seems like it would be way more trouble than its worth.

There is also the idea that these aliens might want to colonize this planet because it is similar to their home world and they have exploited their own to the point where it has become uninhabitable. This might make a bit of sense, but the odds of this planet being similar or compatible enough for their particular physiologies in this universe of billions of planets seems infinitesimally small. It would likely require some sort of terraforming, and if they can do that then why Earth?

Getting into more sinister territory is that they just might want to wipe us out. That’s it. End of story. This could be for a variety of reasons. Maybe they were passing by and do it for kicks, just as a kid might check out a weird bug before squashing it. Maybe they have been monitoring us and our violent past, watching our rampant destruction of our environment and either want to put us out of our misery or see us as an actual threat in some capacity, a scourge to be ended. Whatever the reason is, in this scenario they don’t need anything from us and don’t even need our world in any capacity, they just want to destroy us. This is quite an ominous concept to ponder, but it is a distinct possibility, and would likely be the easiest option for them.

For argument’s sake, let’s assume that the aliens really are coming, and have decided to invade our world, for whatever reasons. If they merely wanted to destroy us, as in that last option, then let’s face it there is very little we would realistically be likely be able to do against them. Indeed, if they really do want to just wipe us all out they would not even have to come down to us, they could just sit up in their spaceships and pull down asteroids to crash into our planet, causing tsunamis and mass destruction on a scale never before seen, or use some other type of weapon of mass destruction from orbit. Why would they have to come down and fight in the streets or even see us if they have all of that technology and their only desire is to obliterate us?

Well, maybe they do need something from our planet. If we assume that there is some resource they need or that they really do want to move in and evict us, then they would be more likely to need our planet at least somewhat intact. Maybe they do need to engage us in a military way, and let’s just put aside the fact that they could probably easily engineer a virus that would just kill all humans and assume that a fight is going to go down. But would it really be a fight in any appreciable sense? With their mind-boggling technology beyond the likes of anything we’ve ever seen, would it be a war between humans and aliens any more than a sadistic child with a magnifying glass burning anthills is a war between kids and ants? One very interesting comment left on the site Quora pretty well explains what would probably go down:

The late, great Iain M. Banks gave us the term in his book Excession. An Outside Context Problem works like this: You’re the king of the most powerful tribe in the history of your land, which, as far as you know, is the most important place in the world. Your people have a better standard of living than any before, your palaces and temples are bedecked in gold and precious gems, and your armies of warriors have destroyed any who stood up to you. You are worshiped as the physical incarnation of God on Earth, and it is well known that your people cannot be defeated.

Until a small group of large, completely unknown sea vessels appear on the horizon. They have what look like sheets suspended by tree trunks, and are so large that they can’t land on the beach but have to send small boats to the shore. The people on these boats are clad in drab metal chestplates and strange helmets, and speak a language unlike any ever encountered. They carry strange metal tubes and some of them are waving around a book with a cross on it that they seem to think is very important. Worst of all, they don’t seem to recognise your godhead.

A small scuffle ensues, and some of your warriors are killed as if by magic. You decide that you should make an example of these impertinent, outlandish savages, and you muster your army to crush them utterly. But it all goes wrong. Their dull metal clothing is impenetrable to even the finest obsidian blades, they carry tubes that contain the very fire and thunder of the gods, and, worst of all, from out of nowhere spring these half-man, half-beast creatures, that race through your lines, slashing with metal blades and blasting with smaller magic tubes.

This small group of heathens goes on to rout your army, capture you as king and plunder your cities. With the diseases that now ravage the land, they are unstoppable and your eternal kingdom is reduced to rubble and your people slaughtered or enslaved. This, more or less, is what happened when the Aztec Empire encountered Hernan Cortés and his relatively small group of conquistadores. It’s pretty much the textbook example of an Outside Context Problem.

The Aztecs simply had no conception of the Spanish, no idea how to deal with their massive technological advantage, no context with which to even consider these invaders. And they lost. Really, really badly. That’s what would happen, realistically, if Earth were invaded by hostile aliens. We wouldn’t stand a chance.

The simple fact is, if aliens don’t want us alive, the overwhelming possibility is that we won’t be. These would be beings far beyond us in terms of technology and intellect to have been able to come here in the first place, and if they came here for a fight, they’d be ready and would likely know far more about us than we do about them. The technology difference would be substantial, and would be akin to throwing rocks versus nuclear weapons. Nick Pope, who used to run the Ministry of Defense’s UFO project in the United Kingdom, has said of this:

In a universe nearly 14 billion years old, the chances of invading aliens happening to be only a hundred years or so more advanced than us is vanishingly small. The likelihood is that we’d be dealing with a civilization thousands or millions of years ahead of us, and as sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke once said: ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ If they are hostile, it would be like Bambi meeting Godzilla if we ever had to fight them…we would present no military challenge to such an advanced civilization…We would be a pushover for them. Forget all the Hollywood movies.

If we were to have any chance at all, we’d have to hope that the attack was not completely obliterating, with them wanting to keep us mostly alive for some reason. This would allow Earth governments to try to put aside their differences, gather intelligence, and assess the threat, find a weakness, and hopefully reverse engineer alien technology, although this would be akin to a medieval scientist trying to reverse engineer an iPad, probably impossible. We could try nukes, but this is a sloppy, poor strategy, and would cause almost as much damage to our own planet as anything the aliens would dish out.

With all of this talk of alien invasions, you might be thinking right about now that the government must have thought about this at some point. I mean, surely they have some sort of plan in effect if it ever comes down to this. Right? Guys? Well, yes and no. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has a plan in effect for what to do when alien signals are received, although these are more guidelines than anything else, and NASA has protocols in place for preventing the contamination of other worlds by us, but as to actual government contingency plans, especially against hostiles, not really. There have been sort of mental exercises and thought experiments drawn up for everything from alien invasions to zombie outbreaks drawn up by the government, but nothing really official or taken very seriously. Other countries are no different, as the The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) and their Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (CUPUOS) is apparently not geared for such possibilities, with UNOOSA director Simonetta Di Pippo saying:

UNOOSA and COPUOS Member States consider a range of space science and space exploration topics, fields in which the topic of astrobiology sits. However, the Office for Outer Space Affairs has been given no mandate by Member States to consider the question of potential advanced or intelligent extraterrestrial life. For this reason there is no protocol or process for any contact by extraterrestrial life.

Even the set SETI guidelines for assessing and dealing with possible alien communications are flimsy at best, and not particularly official. As astronomer Seth Shostak has said:

There are some protocols, but I think that’s an unfortunate name, and it makes them sound more important than they are. They say, ‘If you pick up a signal, check it out … tell everybody … and don’t broadcast any replies without international consultation,’ whatever that means. But that’s all that the protocols say, and they have no force of law. The United Nations took a copy of the early protocols and put them in a file drawer somewhere, and that’s as official as they ever got. Some people asked me at a conference last week, ‘What plan does the military have to deal with aliens should they land?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know … but to the best of my knowledge, they don’t have a plan.’

So there seem to be very few official concrete plans in effect for meeting alien life, period, let alone if they come roaring down out of the sky with guns blazing and malicious intent. We’d probably be left in a state of complete chaos, on top of our woefully inadequate technological weaponry, although many are convinced that there actually are secret contingency plans kept by world governments that we simply don’t know about. As the founder of UFO and paranormal hunters Strange Phenomena Investigations, Malcolm Robinson, says:

They won’t publicly admit it but I believe that they have a program up their sleeves for the lukewarm possibility of an alien invasion – and I completely believe they have something planned for the event.

Does that make you feel any better about our chances in the event of an alien invasion? Yeah, me neither. The main problem is that it is a lot of money and effort to spend on something that the vast majority of people sees as a very faint possibility at best. Part of the problem also lies in the fact that we have no way at all to know what to even expect if aliens came, no way to know at all what context to perceive them within, and thus virtually limitless possibilities that can’t all possibly be planned for, and their capabilities would be far beyond what we can comprehend anyway, making it an impossible venture. As Shostek explains, “It would be like the Neanderthals having a plan in case the U.S. Air Force showed up.”

In the end, we have good news and bad news. The good news is that there are few rational reasons for why aliens would expend the resources necessary to come here en masse for the purpose of wiping us out, and if they are here already, as many suspect, then they probably would have done it by now. The bad news is that if they do come, and want us to be dead, then our chances don’t look too good at all, and there isn’t even any plan in effect for it if they do. It’s basically see what happens and hope for the best. So while an alien invasion scenario on par with anything in the movies probably has a slim chance of happening, if it does it also will likely not play out like the films in that we won’t have any chance at all. Let’s hope that if they are out there, or are already here, then they are benevolent or indifferent. Sleep tight.

A few months ago, NASA held a conference on ways to detect artificial “technosignatures” of alien life, byproducts of civilization like radio waves, pollutants, and garbage. They seem to be taking the search for extraterrestrials seriously and have announced the creation of a new department dedicated to the search for alien life.

The department, called the Center for Life Detection Sciences (CLDS), is composed of scientists from inside NASA and from outside institutions including Georgetown University and Georgia Tech. The goal of CLDS is, in their words, to answer the question “are we alone?” CLDS principle investigator Tori Hoehler says:

“We now have the scientific and engineering expertise to address this profound question with the clarity of scientific evidence — and we have a great community of scientists ready for that grand challenge.”

Acknowledging that alien life probably won’t look like a spacier version of life on Earth, the CLDS says it aims to investigate all possibilities of alien life, noting that extraterrestrial life may not look like anything we would even recognize. According to Hoehler:

“The search for life beyond Earth cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach.

To give ourselves the best shot at success, we need to develop tools and strategies that are tailored to detecting life in the unique conditions of other worlds, which are very different not only from Earth but also from each other.”

Another CLDS investigator, Sarah Stewart Johnson of Georgetown University, defines the goal of her team as finding “life as we don’t know it.” It’s good to know that scientists are finally coming to grips with the idea that alien life might be far weirder than we can imagine. That’s a long ways from the earlier attempts at contact that included things like launching a gold record into space with an avant-garde sound collage on it, hoping that it made sense.

That weird alien life may be closer than we think too. Recent surveys of the planets and moons in our solar system have shown enticing leads in the search for life. The subsurface oceans of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter are the most likely candidates, but other work has shown that there may still be life on Mars, or even on the boiling hot surface of Venus.

The Center for Life Detection Sciences will start small, with only a few teams to lay the groundwork, but they say that as the project matures, more scientists from broader fields will be added.

NASA is still operating the SETI project which scans the skies for radio waves of unknown extraterrestrial origin. Alien radio waves have been in the news again lately as the second anomalous “fast radio burst” was observed coming from the same source in January of this year. The website TechnoSearch archives the data from SETI and is open to the public and allows users to submit their own searches and keep the data updated.

It seems NASA is actually invested in the search for alien life. Perhaps they have some leads they haven’t shared with the public yet. Or perhaps it’s all just a red-herring. Either way it’s exciting to be living in a time when the search for alien life is treated seriously. Who knows, we might get a picture of a weird space whale sometime in the near future.

Some cases within the world of cryptozoology, UFOlogy, and the paranormal have managed to become almost legendary in their fields. These are the rockstar cases that seem to have defied all attempts to dispute or debunk them, refusing to die and managing to live on and even transcend mere eyewitness reports to become legendary. One such case that is as well known and persistent as it is mysterious is that of a very strange creature that appeared one evening in a small U.S. town amid stories of a UFO landing, and would go on to catapult itself into the annals of great cases of the paranormal.

The setting for this very bizarre tale is the small rural town of Flatwoods in Braxton County, West Virginia. It is a quiet town pretty much in the middle of nowhere, where everyone knows each other and not much typically happens, but on September 12, 1952, all that would change, and the peace would be disrupted by a world changing event for them. On this evening, at around 7:15 PM, brothers Edward and Fred May were outside playing a friendly game of football when they were surprised to see what looked like a pulsating, blazing ball of fire go streaking across the sky to come down and seemingly crash in some hilly woods at a nearby farm owned by a G. Bailey Fisher.

Not quite believing what they had just witnessed, the excited boys ran to the house of a neighbor named Kathleen May, to whom they breathlessly told of what they had seen. May gathered up a flashlight and called together a group of people composed of local children Neil Nunley and Ronnie Shaver, as well as 17-year-old West Virginia National Guardsman Eugene Lemon, to go investigate the area where the strange ball of fire had gone down, along with Lemon’s dog. As they followed the beam of the flashlight out into the night past the dancing, flickering trees they still had no idea what they were dealing with or what to expect out there, and there was a sense of apprehension and even fear as they stumbled along up a hill on the farm. Little did they know that things were about to get very bizarre indeed.

When they reached the top of the wooded hill they could see through the trees what seemed to be a pulsating red light, and they were overcome by a sudden, nauseating metallic stench that they would later describe as a “pungent mist.” In the meantime, the dog snarled and barked before retreating with its tail between its legs, leaving them stabbing about in the darkness with the flashlight beam, searching for whatever it was that he chased the animal away. As they peered through the darkness trying to make out just what the light ahead was and what lie out there in the gloom, they could see glinting in the light of the flashlight what looked like the shining eyes of some nocturnal animal, but it soon became apparent that this was no animal any of them had ever seen before.

The mysterious eyes seemed to be set within a massive humanoid figure standing around 10 feet tall, with a round, fiery red face with glowing yellow eyes set within it, framed in some sort of hood or cowl shaped like “the ace of spades” embedded with flickering lights, and possessing small clawed hands, and a dark green, possibly black cylindrical body with what appeared to be folds upon it like some sort of draped fabric or molded metal, the whole of which was wreathed in some mist or fog. None of them got much of a chance to examine it for too long, because after a few moments whatever the entity was emitted “something between a hiss and a high-pitched squeal,” and then glided right towards them with a “thumping, throbbing noise” to send the terrified witnesses running for their lives down the hill, dropping the flashlight in the process to send them into near total darkness. Upon returning home they would all experience severe nausea, swelling of the throat, and even convulsions, compared with the symptoms of mustard gas by the doctor who examined them.

The next day, local law enforcement checked out the site of the purported incident, but were unable to find any corroborating evidence for anything the group said they had seen. There was no trace of any pulsing light, no sign of the creature or its odiferous stench, and nothing at all to suggest anything out of the ordinary. That was the official consensus, but of course word got out and it was not long at all before the media was stoking the fires of UFO rumors by claiming that signs of a landing, such as “skid marks” and an “odd, gummy deposit,” as well as strange pieces of a plastic like material, had been found at the scene by a reporter named A. Lee Stewart, Jr., and it was also discovered that numerous people in the area had also seen an object streak across the sky on the night in question. The case took off as a real UFO landing, and the media went with it, splashing it all over newspapers as various UFO enthusiasts and paranormal investigators descended on the area as well, including esteemed Fortean writers Gray Barker, Ivan T. Sanderson, and John Keel arriving to investigate.

Various strange accounts began to come out of the woodwork at the time, such as one woman who claimed to have seen the same monster that had been described just a few weeks before, and another witness who said that her house had reverberated and been shaken by some mysterious force on the night in question. Another report came from a couple who claimed that just hours after the original sighting they had been driving down the highway when they had noticed a horrible metallic smell and been assaulted with what felt like an electrical charge, before witnessing an otherworldly reptilian creature float across the road in front of them.

There were other odd accounts as well. Mrs. May would claim that the day after the incident she had been approached at her home by two mysterious men who said they were reporters and had asked to be shown the site, after which they would emerge from the trees with strange oily stains on their clothes. In later years even more strange accounts would surface, such as a commander of the West Virginia National Guard named Captain Dale Leavitt, who in the 1990s would say that he had examined the area with 50 Air Force personnel after the “crash” and find an oily substance and a mysterious “6m circle of depressed grass.”

There would also turn out to have been numerous other sightings of UFOs on the night of September 12 across several states. Indeed, in an account compiled by investigator Frank Feschino, Jr. in 2004, there would be hundreds of reports of unidentified flying objects and landings reported on from the same night as the incident. Adding to all of this were the odd physical symptoms reported by the witnesses and their doctors, as well as the subsequent strange death of the dog who had been with them, which allegedly began vomiting uncontrollably and dropped dead for no clear reason. All things told, the weird incident sparked UFOmania in the small rural town, and many were convinced that what had been seen was an actual alien spacecraft landing and its unearthly occupant. Indeed, Ivan T. Sanderson was sure that this was the case, and that the numerous other UFO reports from the same time frame implied perhaps a whole fleet of the objects passing the area.

In the years after the Flatwoods encounter the original witnesses would stick by their story, insisting on what they had seen, and it became one of the most famous alien encounters in the annals of the paranormal. So what was it they saw out there? What was that light, the noxious odor, and indeed that looming, glowing eyed beast? What connection did this have to the lights that so many people saw shooting across the sky on that same exact evening? Just what is going on with the case of the Flatwoods Monster? That depends a lot on who you ask.

A very persuasive skeptical argument is that the whole mysterious event is the result of a unique convergence of a mixture of misidentification and coincidence. In this theory the light, or lights as the case is often described, was perhaps a meteor, which was mistakenly thought to have crashed behind that wooded hill by the witnesses. There were indeed many people who reported the light seen as not a UFO, but as a meteor, so perhaps the witnesses saw this celestial event and jumped to a different conclusion. They then warily went up that dark hill in a state of fear, the atmosphere made more ominous by a blanket of fog that was covering the area at the time. In this state of dread, they saw one of the three aircraft warning hazard beacons in the area visible from that hill, and considering the meteor they had seen mistook it for a UFO.

But what about the horrible monster they saw, you ask? The skeptical take on it is that this was no monster at all, but rather a large barn owl perched atop a high branch. In the murky darkness, with fear pervading the air and low visibility and that sinister light visible through the trees, the witnesses misidentified the owl and its perch as being part of a single entity. The owl, just as startled as the witnesses, had then flown off past them into the night, letting out one of the bird’s distinctive shrill cries in the process. In their panic and surprise, the witnesses had mistaken it for an alien entity flying towards them, sending them running. Many of the features of a barn owl match up with the description of the creature, and looking at artistic representations comparing the monster and an owl it is easy to see the similarities, especially considering that they had only seen it fleetingly for a few moments in dim lighting before fleeing in terror.

This all seems to make sense so far, but then we are left to ask just what about the other evidence found, such as the oily residue and the strange track marks? Some have pointed out that these tracks could have been caused by a tractor that was in the area at around the time of the sighting, the oil perhaps leaking from it, or even from the truck of a local man who had gone driving through hoping to see the creature. The foul odor had been suggested as being exuded by a type of grass native to the area with a distinctive smell. And the negative physical symptoms are claimed by skeptics to have been simply caused by deep fear and over exertion. Skeptic Joe Nickell wrote a whole deconstruction of the case for the Skeptical Enquirer, which you can read here, and it is so convincing that even many paranormal researchers and UFOlogists have conceded that this is probably what actually happened.

Joe Nickell’s sketch comparing a barn owl and the alleged “monster”

It certainly seems to be open and shut when looking at all of the clues and evidence that this may have just been one big misunderstanding seen through the lens of anxiety and fear, later sensationalized by the media and embellished with countless books and articles in the lore of the paranormal. Yet there are many who think that the case is far from solved, pointing out that there are still aspects that don’t fit in neatly with the skeptical theory, such as the pulsing quality of the “meteor” and the fact that a whole group of people saw the creature and maintained that it was no owl.

Whatever the answer may be, whether this was some alien entity or the product of misidentification and overactive imaginations, the tale of the Flatwoods Monster still gets plenty of play in paranormal circles, and is still talked about and debated to this day. It has become such a legendary case that the town of Flatwoods has a museum dedicated to the creature and an annual weekend festival to commemorate it called “Flatwoods Days,” which features live music, and food and craft vendors. There is even a sign on the road leading into town that reads “Welcome to Flatwoods / Home of the Green Monster,” so it seems that whatever the Flatwoods Monster was or wherever it went, it has been ingrained in the town’s culture and in the world of Forteana, and in a sense is here to stay.