18 October 2017

Space case

In a recent post on Canada, Pinku-Sensei looked at the colorful background of that country's Governor General, Julie Payette, which includes two trips into space as an astronaut.  He ended by wishing that we in the US could have a former astronaut as President.

Bah.  Why think small?  We'll soon be able to elect a leader -- well, a Congresswoman -- who has actually been in regular contact with aliens and has even ridden in an alien spacecraft.

Miami Congressional candidate Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera (a Republican, naturally), claims that she was abducted by aliens at age 7 and that they have been in telepathic contact with her several times since then.  There were three aliens, "blond" and "big-bodied", who reminded her of the famous Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro (though I assume they weren't actually that "big-bodied").  Their spacecraft had "round seats" and some "quartz rocks" which "controlled" it.  Fellow bloggers PsiCop and Hackwhackers have posted about Rodriguez's claims.

Apparently these aliens spoke English, since Rodriguez reports that they gave her the following information:

- There are 30,000 non-human skulls in a cave in Malta.

- The world’s "energy center" is in Africa.

- "God is a universal energy".

- Florida's "Coral Castle" is an ancient Egyptian pyramid (it was actually built by a local eccentric less than a century ago).

Curious how the celestial wisdom imparted by advanced aliens sounds exactly like a series of National Enquirer headlines.  Also curious how their grasp of English includes the maddeningly nebulous New-Agey misuse of the word "energy" which is so common among scientifically-illiterate people these days.  One would expect aliens qualified to pilot a spacecraft to have a better knowledge of physics.

In fact, the whole story typifies the annoying inanity of the alien-visitation schtick as we've come to know it.  Rodriguez describes the aliens as essentially humanlike -- suspiciously like a child's concept of angels, in fact -- and most such tales do the same, or describe creatures like the "greys", just an unimaginative slight modification of the human form.  Considering the vast variety of forms of animal life which have developed here on Earth, it's vanishingly unlikely that evolution on another planet would produce a species so similar to ourselves.

Then there's the matter of those pearls of advanced knowledge which these superior beings convey to their contactees.  Like the examples above, what the aliens have to say is almost always dull, trite, tabloid stuff, often with religious undertones, reflecting the ignorance and foggy language of the contactees themselves, often linked to fads popular at the time.  They couldn't drop off some blueprints for a planetary anti-meteor defense system or a primer on their theoretical physics?  Even a few landscape photos of their home world would be nice.  In fact, none of these revelations ever contain any clear, testable information outside the (usually meager) knowledge of the contactee.

(Similar nonsense ruined the ending of what would otherwise have been one of the all-time great science-fiction movies, Contact.  After Earth spends hundreds of billions of dollars building an alien-designed machine to send Jodie Foster to Vega, all she gets to see is an alien disguised as her dead father who spends a couple of minutes reciting platitudes out of some mediocre psychobabble book from the "spirituality" aisle, then sends her home.  Worst return on investment ever!  Earth should have sued.)

One also wonders why beings advanced enough to have achieved interstellar travel would spend decades abducting random obscure people, reciting clichés at them, maybe inflicting a "probe" or two, and then returning them.  I'm fairly sure that if NASA became aware of an intelligent alien race technologically inferior to ourselves somewhere in the Solar system, this is not the procedure they would propose.

Oh, well.  I see no reason to doubt that Rodriguez can secure the Republican nomination and even be elected.  The scientific ignorance inherent in her story is nothing compared with that shown by global-warming denialism or creationism, both of which are pretty much mandatory for Republicans these days.  Where idiotic delusions in government are concerned, boring aliens are the least of our problems.

[Image at top from here.]

8 Comments:

Blogger Shaw Kenawe said...

Add to this depressing story the fact that there are still thousands of Americans who believe the Earth was populated 75 billion years ago by billions of aliens who escaped their doomed planet and landed at the base of a volcano and then were killed by a galactic organization, which turned those billions of "thetans" into something. I can't remember the rest.

Anyway, alien abduction stories have been around for quite a while, but not as long as stories about talking snakes and dead people coming back to life and floating into space/heaven.

18 October, 2017 08:34  
Blogger W. Hackwhacker said...

Now that was a thoroughly enjoyable take down! One almost wishes her alien abduction hallucination would actually occur, and take her and all of her fellow reactionary cranks off to the other side of the universe and deposit them there for further study (or "To Serve Man?")!

18 October, 2017 10:47  
Anonymous Zog said...

"One also wonders why beings advanced enough to have achieved interstellar travel would spend decades abducting random obscure people, reciting clichés at them, maybe inflicting a "probe" or two, and then returning them."

On the other hand, if these are the alien equivalents of Beavis and Butt-Head taking a spaceship on an unauthorized joyride, this behavior makes perfect sense. However, being the equivalents of Beavis and Butt-Head, they would say the skulls were in someplace like Lake Titicaca or Dildo (an actual town in Newfoundland) instead of in Malta, so we can discount the story.

If aliens were to use the clichéd "Take us to your leader line," should we direct them to Washington or to Moscow?

18 October, 2017 21:58  
Blogger Shaw Kenawe said...

Your post reminded me of a poem I wrote years ago.

19 October, 2017 06:18  
Blogger Infidel753 said...

Shaw: The alien-contact stories are even older than that, if one accepts that medieval stories of encounters with demons and angels and suchlike were probably the same kind of psychological phenomena, just filtered through a different set of cultural imagery (people hadn't thought of space aliens yet). And of course religious tall tales have been around, probably, as long as humanity.

Thanks for the poem. A lot of modern alien-abduction stories, like medieval demon encounters, have elements of barely-sublimated sexuality to them. I'm sure that's significant.

Hackwhacker: Thanks! And good idea, except I'd hate to think of aliens getting their whole picture of the human race from studying Republicans.

Zog: Good point, although I suppose "Malta" might sound like the word for "dildo" in an alien language.

The way things are going, give it twenty years and we'd send them to Tokyo.

19 October, 2017 09:04  
Anonymous PsiCop said...

Re: "Curious how the celestial wisdom imparted by advanced aliens sounds exactly like a series of National Enquirer headlines."

Well, yeah. Of course! They made that clear in Men in Black where K and J checked the "hot sheets" (aka tabloids). "Best investigative reporting on the planet," I believe was K's assessment.

Check it out on Youtube.

19 October, 2017 20:52  
Blogger Pinku-Sensei said...

I'm flattered to have inspired you to write this. You have indeed found a colorful candidate who has already been elected to office. The Miami Herald article reported "Rodriguez Aguilera was a Doral councilwoman from 2012-14 and served as the city's first economic developer." As for her earning the Republican nomination, I'd bet against it. That same article lists Miami-Dade Commissioner Bruno Barreiro and former school board member and Miami-Dade County mayoral candidate Raquel Regalado as also running in the Republican primary. The ex-political journalist in me thinks that Barreiro is the favorite, at least on paper. Now I'll have to follow this contest to see if he's good in person, too.

20 October, 2017 17:39  
Blogger Infidel753 said...

PsiCop: True -- at least Men in Black was intentionally funny.

Pinku: I suppose you're right. Oh, well, Bannon will keep the Republican field awash in loonies of all stripes.

21 October, 2017 16:11  

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