Futurenauts

JENNY RANDLES has always wondered why aliens look so much like us – here’s an explanation.

In the study of UFOs, the origin of the phenomenon has been the subject of much debate. After all, this has never been just one mystery and numerous different possible causes have been put forward. The most challenging cases involve ‘ufonauts’, beings seemingly in control of the UFOS, which are usually perceived as craft that they ‘fly’. These are relatively uncommon, as most sightings are lights in the sky and easily resolved. But when a controlled object is seemingly tied to the presence of nonhuman entities, we enter a whole new level of bafflement.

For almost the entire history of the subject the presumption has been that the ‘pilots’ of these UFOs are visiting aliens bent on exploration or conquest. Given that they were seemingly flying craft beyond our current level of technology, that seemed obvious. But it never was.

There have always been bold (or improbable) alternative interpretations. I recall when briefing a committee in the House of Lords in 1980 being told that these ‘craft’ came from inside the Earth via a hole in the Pole: in other words, they were innerterrestrials, not extraterrestrials. Another theory seems even more ludicrous: that UFOs are the product of a secret cabal of scientists, whose deaths were faked and lives extended, who built a Shangri La-type haven during WWII to preserve mankind from the inevitable apocalypse of WWIII. Instead of visitors from Alpha Centauri, close encounters emerge from an invisible sanctuary where a 150-year-old Einstein seeks to protect humanity from selfdestruction.

However, there is an even more outlandish possibility: that the aliens are human (as above), but don’t look exactly like us because they are travelling not across space but through time, coming from centuries into the future when technology has advanced to allow backward time travel to be possible. The beings reported appear not to be little green men, but humans – if perhaps taller or smaller or with skin of an unusual pallor.

The most thought-provoking conception of aliens appears in the film Arrival , based on a remarkable tale, “The Story of Your Life”, by Ted Chiang. The movie softens the deep philosophical arguments, but still captures some of story’s depth. It is, in my view, the best UFO movie ever made in terms of how it tackles ‘what’ is going on in anything but the expected stereotypical sense.

For those who have not seen it or read the original story, I won’t spoil the ending. It’s not, I should stress, that these ufonauts are really humans coming back from the future; the idea is far more challenging than that, but it does involve time and is seeded throughout the story by subtle clues.

Arrival also succeeds on another level in that it eschews all the usual tropes of both science fiction and close encounter narratives, in which the aliens are just a version of human beings. No, the beings in

Arrival follow a maxim I accidentally noted 30 years ago when I wrote a book about the variety of alien entities and promoted it on TV and radio. One listener was musician Captain Sensible, who soon afterwards created a fine concept album on the subject of UFOs and the Ministry of Defence and their impact on one worker:

The Universe of Geoffrey Brown. I was honoured that he chose to sample an interview in which I made the not exactly Earth-shattering comment that “aliens, by definition, would be alien”, which serves as the lead-in to the album.

Arrival knocks that idea out of the park. I remember being wowed as I read the story on a train journey, coming home from doing yet another interview about aliens, and grasping the truth of what the word ‘alien’ really means. Chiang got that. So did the Captain a few years earlier. Aliens should be alien, and nothing like what most of our storytelling envisages. Visualising the alien beings in Arrival is hard, emphasising that our need to connect their form to human perception is probably key. It may be why science fiction overuses humanoid imagery – just think of Star Trek aliens who are just humans in make-up (nothing like what we see in Arrival). And if science fiction needed to do that, then so too did the human collective unconscious that dreamed up the beings we see emerging from UFOs or abducting us in nightmares. I suspect this is a profound revelation we must take on board: we are not seeing aliens – we are creating them in our own image.

Our aliens are, by definition, not alien. Aliens had to look like us, even if we imagined them, because humanoids are relatable and knowable and we can accept their presence without freaking out. But if aliens really have to be alien, then where are they? If the biology and evolution and failed pathways of other dominant species on Earth are anything to go by, then it’s clear that alien worlds almost certainly would create lifeforms nothing like us.

So, if the ufonauts that we report are real, then we should look closer to home for their origin: not Alpha Centauri, but Earth. Which brings us back to time, not space. Humans evolve, as all species do, but even hundreds of years from now would still be recognisably human. The objection that our ufonauts are too much like us is eradicated if they are us, coming here to observe from a future where technology makes that possible. Quite possibly, they are playing to what history teaches actually happened. Fulfilling expectations is much easier if you have libraries full of material telling you how ‘primitive’ locals described the very trip which you are set to make.

It’s cheering to note that as interest in UFO evidence grows in the USA and data are finally being taken seriously, that such questions are being asked. It’s easy to assume that craft buzzing US warships are ET on a reconnaissance flight, but it is worth asking if they come from here rather than out there.

If we ever do invent a technology to travel back in time, then it would look like UFOs: we already know what time travellers to Rendlesham Forest in December 1980 would do, hundreds of years before they were born. Because the witnesses who saw them told us.

Stories like this either happened or not. If they happened – with the caveat of human misperception or deliberate misdirection – then the witnesses saw what the visitors wanted them to see. And that is not necessarily what was actually happening.

Aliens should be alien, and nothing like what most of our storytelling envisages