Schneier on Security

Richard Steven Hack • July 4, 2011 4:00 AM

I wouldn’t entirely dismiss the “alien abduction” stuff either. There are a number of UFO researchers who suspect a lot of that stuff is being done by the government for its own reasons, and has nothing to do with aliens.

Personally I subscribe (partially) to John A. Keel’s theories that UFOs per se have nothing to do with aliens and everything to do with the human mind. Which doesn’t preclude it being more along the lines of “The Matrix” than just purely human mental dysfunction.

But yeah, I read that 100,000 figure and went WTF?

The real problem is the size of the “black budget” variously listed as $50 billion or more per year.

With that kind of money, I could take over the world by Tuesday before lunch. So what ARE they doing with all that money besides burning it up on nonsense? Is it just like the rest of the defense budget – pissed away to corporations for crap so some general or ex-spook can get a board seat when he retires at half a mil a year?

If I was a taxpayer I’d be ticked off that with $50 billion a year they couldn’t find bin Laden for ten years…Really, it took $500 billion plus an estimated three trillion for the Iraq and Afghan wars to “protect us”?

Give me an equal share of that money and I’ll protect myself, please.

Richard Steven Hack • July 4, 2011 7:06 AM

Clive: And good morning to you. I just haven’t gotten to bed yet – getting caught up on Web browsing after a long day messing with broken client machines. Although I did get to see the latest “Pirate of the Caribbean” movie.

As I said, I doubt “aliens” are involved at all.

As for the human motivation, John Keel and others have pointed out the very close similarities between so-called “alien encounters” and similar encounters with “fairies” or “demons” or whatever throughout history. The stories are remarkably similar when you get down to the details. The question is whether these events arise from some need of the human mind or whether they arise from external phenomena impinging on the human mind.

There’s a theory by a fellow at a university up in Canada – see “God Helmet” in Wikipedia – that it’s all caused by magnetic field influences on the human brain.

My theory is both more mundane and more fantastic. I believe that before humans achieved conceptual processing ability that another proto-human species did it first. They advanced rapidly in the space of a few tens of thousands of years (a drop in the bucket in prehistory) to the level we are at today, discovered nanotechnology and, as K. Eric Drexler predicted, jumped thousands of years ahead in technology within the space of a few tens of years – probably before humans even developed the earliest civilizations (which would explain various human legends about advanced civilizations predating human civilizations.)

The reason you don’t see any evidence of that past civilization is simple: nanotech reduced it to dust scores of thousands of years ago. Once they achieved Transhuman status, they didn’t need it. Transhumans wouldn’t need anything but 1) matter, 2) an energy source, 3) nanomass, 4) computing power, and 5) knowledge-bases.

By now, fifty or a hundred thousand years later, their technology is so advanced they are essentially godlike and can do whatever they want within the limits of the laws of physics (and they can probably bend some of them.)

But they originated here and they still hang out here (and probably all near interstellar space) on occasion, doing whatever they like with the capability of completely controlling any human who happens to wander by and forcing said human to either see nothing or see some fantasy dredged up from the human subconscious.

This theory has the benefit of merely relying on two known facts:

!) We know there were multiple proto-human species before us – why assume we were the first to achieve reasonable intelligence?

2) We now know nanotech is possible. And the implications of ubiquitous general assembler nanotech are so powerful that the end result of its applications would be a species pretty much capable of doing anything the laws of physics allow.

It would be theoretically possible for such a species to embed nanotech computers of the type described in Drexler’s “Engines of Creation” in every cell of the human body, creating a massive AI hive mind that could control and edit the human brain and nervous system in real time. Total control – like “The Matrix” – when desired. I mean TOTAL control over every sensory input and every brain neuron firing.

It would be easy. And that could explain absolutely everything about so-called “UFOs” and “aliens” as well as every other paranormal phenomena humans experience. It’s just “smoke and mirrors” to keep humans out of the way of the Big Dogs. Otherwise, these Transhumans couldn’t care less about humans, just as advanced “aliens” wouldn’t.

Of course, it’s as unprovable a hypothesis as every other. 🙂 But it doesn’t rely on breaking any physics limitations such as the speed of light or explaining “alien psychology”. Nor does it rely on “extra-dimensional beings” or mysticism or religion or anything else – just two simple known facts and a hypothesis linking the two.

I used to be involved in UFO research way back in the late ’60’s and early to mid ’70’s. I hung out with John A. Keel and some others at that time. Keel was the main guy challenging the alien hypothesis about UFOs. He was a journalist with a very pragmatic bent and like you he really didn’t buy why aliens would be doing what they were alleged to be doing. So he went looking for patterns and similarities. He went literally door-to-door in places where UFOs were being seen frequently and he found all sorts of alleged paranormal phenomena occurring on the ground, not in the sky. He discovered that it was all linked together in some weird, unfathomable way. There was no doubt it was linked, but none of it made any sense. So he theorized that it was more an effect of the human mind being stimulated externally somehow by some phenomena, perhaps intelligence, perhaps not.

The guy in Canada has proven that he can produce a similar experience as an “alien abduction” just by putting people in a chair hooked up to a helmet that manipulates magnetic fields around the brain. So it’s absolutely proven to be doable.

Add nanotech to that and it becomes an easy explanation.

But today the UFO talk is the same as it has been for the last fifty years – all about “aliens”. It hasn’t moved on at all except among the more conspiracy or mystical bent followers. And it probably never will because the alternative theory – that Transhumans are the real owners of this planet – is even more frightening.

That’s why “The Matrix” was such a great movie – it proposed a physical explanation for things like poltergeists, werewolves, and odd feelings like deja vu that came out of the blue. “The Machines did it.” Dues ex Machina for real.

I came up with my theory before The Matrix movie came out. And I think The Matrix is probably closer to the truth than any other theory (although I don’t think humans are sitting in tanks somewhere hallucinating while machines harvest them as batteries – that whole bit was ridiculous – worst part of the premise.)