A.D. After Disclosure: When the Government Finally Reveals the Truth About Alien Contact

by Richard Dolan

  Comic readers will also not have a problem accepting it if the reality turns out to be that there are multiple races of the Others interacting with us. Whereas films tend to see the human-alien interaction as binary—us and them—comic books see the universe as us and them, and them, and them. With hundreds of alien races in those fantasy universes, humanity is portrayed as just another race. However, we are not completely knocked off our pedestal, because all life in the universe is connected. Usually, too, all roads lead back to Earth in some fashion.

  Stan Lee’s Point-of-View

  Stan Lee’s name is almost synonymous with comic books. He was the man in charge of Marvel’s creative output during its heady rise to fame during the 1960s. Almost all the characters being turned into movies these days—Iron Man, Hulk, Spider-Man, Captain America, Thor, X-Men, the Avengers—were created, co-created, or re-invented by Lee during his days as the company’s patriarch. Through the years, Lee has given a great deal of thought to aliens. “I always try to go against the grain and use them as the starting point for the story and try to twist it,” says Lee. “If they’re introduced to us as being good, then they’re actually bad. If we’re told to fear them, then they’re probably here to help us.”

  As for real ETs, in contrast to the comic book variety, Lee thinks they are “out there” for sure, and maybe even over here. “There must be other intelligent life in the universe—living, sentient beings,” he said. “Whether they have come here in UFOs or not, I don’t know. But I figure there must be something to them because so many people have seen them.”

  Indeed, Lee had personal testimony to that effect. His “right-hand man” at Marvel was his operations director and artist Sol Brodsky. Lee describes him as being very “level-headed,” so he was shocked to hear from Brodsky about a car trip he had just made to Las Vegas. “When we were driving, I think we saw a flying saucer,” Lee quotes Brodsky as telling him. “It was fast, it didn’t have any wings, stopped right over our car, hovered, then zipped away faster than anything I’d ever seen.” Both men wondered if it was a government test of an experimental aircraft, but Brodsky believed it was more than that. In the aftermath, Lee developed his own theory that flying saucers were not from other planets but from the future.

  On the subject of a panicked population, Lee has played it both ways through the years as a writer, doing what suits the story and his telling of it. Personally, he believes Disclosure would stimulate an “incredible amount” of curiosity from the public, that people would be “intensely interested” in the news. He predicts panic only if the aliens are portrayed as dangerous and hostile. Otherwise, he feels that people will accept them and continue on with their lives. In his view, the group that should feel panic most would be the people who have kept the secret—because the rest of us are going to feel anger and annoyance regarding their decision to withhold information.

  What would happen to the aliens of Lee’s imagination, as well as to that of other comic book writers, once we know aliens are real, and we have confirmed photographs of them? Lee thinks that comic writers will adapt and assimilate quickly. They will soon be telling stories starring the Others, trying to help their readers work out their own feeling about them.

  Contact as a Laughing Matter

  The revelation of first contact with an alien intelligence is a serious matter. Still, like almost everything else in the world, it will be treated by someone as the inspiration for a joke. Whether it is a riff on “To Serve Man” being a cookbook, to an alien fixation with probing and crop circles, Disclosure may well usher in boom times for joke-telling.

  Chris Rush is a New York comedian and an original contributor to the National Lampoon series. When he spoke with the authors, he was in the final preparation for a one-man comedy show called Reality: The Myth. He is a devoted “verbal cartooner” who revels in the art of the ad-lib and could see himself immersed in the coverage of Disclosure. Then, he would get himself down to a comedy stage, armed with three or four premises, and let loose.3

  Maybe they won’t be little gray guys with Jiffy-Lube and anal probes. Maybe they will be advanced cow-like creatures who have come to our Earth to arrest Ronald McDonald for war crimes. Or maybe their IQ level compared to ours would be like a human trying to talk to yogurt—armed and violent yogurt. So maybe they will sterilize the Earth, turn the Moon into a gigantic mothball and store their winter clothes there. Even so, you’re still gonna have some shit-kicker with a shotgun on the New Jersey Turnpike aiming at them.

  One of the reasons Rush thinks people will need to laugh is that the most potent comedy comes from things that, underneath, are scary to the audience. He thinks Disclosure will create a climate where people need to laugh more than ever.

  Rush was friends with comedy great George Carlin, and the two had spoken at length about the nature of reality. As Rush notes, “The UFO thing just naturally falls in there.” In their discussions, Carlin expressed his opinion that the “planet’s owners” have known about the Others for a long time, but have not confessed their knowledge because they never felt they could control what would happen if they did. Carlin thought that knowledge of how complex the universe is and how other life has come here would “put us in our place and make us think.” Also, that “the them and us thing here on Earth might disappear.”

  Visions From the Future

  Every artist in the world—whether they be American or Chinese or Iranian—will have something to say about humanity’s changed circumstances. Trying to imagine this explosion of content is nearly impossible, given that there will be hundreds of millions of minds trying to express it when the time comes. By way of example only, here are a few possible turns in this coming story:

  A traveling museum containing exhibits of alien artifacts and bodies that will generate lines like the earlier King Tut exhibit, times 10.

  Competing stadium rallies, pro and con for increased contact, will force singers, actors, and politicians to choose sides.

  More than 1,000 new books about contact will be available for purchase within two years AD. Entire sections of libraries, real and virtual, will be devoted to the topic.

  Apple will release a new laptop/tablet computer hybrid, incorporating design elements from recovered alien wreckage and our own technology, known as the iFusion.

  As it always does, art will draw from life. In many cases, it will create new forms of commerce around its expression. All this is unpredictable, except that it will surprise us.

  But what art will the Others bring? Will we get to see their culture as they have seen ours? Or is it possible that among their great works of art is humanity itself?

  The Next Great Healthcare Debate

  Consider the state of biotechnology today, independent of any interference or assistance from the Others. Humans stand on the verge of dramatic breakthroughs in genetic engineering, synthetic biology, anti-aging drugs, stem-cell treatments, body implants, and regenerative medicine. By 2020, it is likely that the human genome will be understood, meaning that the ability to manipulate human DNA will be vastly greater than it is today. This means that a genetic transformation or beneficial remodeling of humanity will be possible. A more frightening thought is that it portends the possible temptation for a genetic transformation of some humans into a kind of Master Race.

  What if the Others already began this process?

  Abduction reports suggest that our reproductive systems and DNA are of interest to them. There is belief among many researchers that some form of hybrid species has been the end goal. There has also been ample speculation that the Others have manipulated the human genome in our ancient past. We may be their creation, or been biologically influenced by them.

  If it turns out that the Others have played God with our biology, it would shake us as much as the basic confirmation that we are not alone. It not only would make us feel less unique; it would shatter any perception of equality we might have with them.

  The debate would then move to m
otive. We would look for evidence—in abductee reports, DNA study, the revised historical record, and from the Breakaway Group—as to what the Others hoped to get from this. Do they think of us as their children and are simply trying to make us better and healthier? Or do they think of us as livestock, put here to populate the planet for their return and colonization?

  If anyone wants a scenario for panic in the streets, it will come from this. This discussion may not start immediately on Day One. It may take years, as new information is released and discovered.

  Although the shock from such a revelation would be deep, its effect may be greater still on our current debate about using genetic tampering to create everything from clones to healthier humans. If we have already been manipulated, one might argue that it removes a key obstacle to further tampering. Some will undoubtedly argue that it is better for humans to manipulate their own genes than to have another species do it for them. Our own scientists, now armed with public support, may work to accelerate human evolution in order to make us stronger to a dangerous interloper from elsewhere.

  Conversely, it may turn out that the knowledge and help of the Others will enable humankind to live longer and healthier lives.

  Whatever the motivation, if Disclosure creates scientific conditions where human DNA can be altered without a great morality debate to hold it back, our children or our children’s children may grow up in a world where they have been given a bonus allotment of years. This might give the individual much more time to experience the glories of being alive but, for society, it may be a mixed blessing. Our population is already testing the carrying capacity of the Earth. If we live longer and die less, Earth’s resources may simply exhaust that much faster.

  There is no doubt that the state of medicine today is changing rapidly and great advancements are coming, contact or not.

  Dr. Jeffrey Galpin specializes in Infectious Disease Medicine, Molecular Biology, and AIDS research, and was the principal investigator who applied the first gene therapy for HIV/AIDS. He also contracted polio when he was 8 years old, something that changed his life, and gives him pause to consider what an advanced intelligence could offer us, if they wanted to. He held out hope that “there would be a sharing of intellectual properties between our civilizations.” This could lead to better treatments and preventative measures for our most feared illnesses. Still, humanity needs to beware of such gifts. The molecular genetics of life is tied to and dependent upon the universal clock of aging and death. All manipulations, therefore, will have consequences.

  Such changes could affect the economy, expanding the number of productive years that people would want to be in the work force and lengthening the years they would live in retirement. If such gains come with a need to have our bodies tinkered with like a car getting a replacement part, some of us will sign on and others will not.

  Ultimately, besides simple life expansion, the Others could conceivably help us achieve immortality by mapping the chemistry of the human brain like a hard drive, and facilitating its implantation into a new cloned body that is younger, healthier, and yet still the same person. Sort of.

  Still, nothing is more likely to fan the flames of paranoia and hostility more than the thought that the Others have been messing with our bodies, for whatever reasons. This returns us to our premise that the decade after Disclosure will borrow some inspiration from the 1960s.

  The Next Generation

  Today, as our world is observed and acted upon by unknown intelligences, humanity is mostly asleep at the wheel. Disclosure will rouse many of us. That deeply felt shock, the presence of Others, will cause great masses of people to question their values, to question how they had been living their lives. The knowledge that there is another species operating here on Earth, a species that lives and thinks in ways that may well be beyond what humans generally reach, will be sobering and liberating at the same time.

  Imagine that billions of people, upon considering the presence of beings that are exceptionally intelligent and maybe telepathic, possessed of magical technology, and possessing a cosmology of far greater sophistication than our own, are here now. Many will ask a basic question: Have I been wasting my life?

  This feeling, aggravated by political assassination and misguided war, is what triggered the change that started in the United States and spread globally as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s.

  Reliving the Sixties. Peace, love, and understanding won’t be any easier to find this time. Photo courtesy of Jacom Stephens, iStockphoto.

  Wherever we are going as a society, as a world, we will not arrive there on the Day of Disclosure, nor even 10 years later. The changes inherent in such a mind-expanding way of seeing life will create ripples of hope and fear for many years. It may be unclear for decades which emotion will prevail.

  We remain optimists. Eventually, humanity will find its way home. New ways will take root, and life will go on.

  Most change—to become firmly entrenched—requires the arrival of a new generation that no longer remembers the old ways. This will be true of Disclosure.

  This time around, perhaps the new incarnation of the 1960s really will usher in a time of peace, love, and understanding.

  Chapter 7

  Paradigm Shift: Our New Place in the Universe

  The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the Earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.

  —Daniel J. Boorstin

  There are times in human history when new information and new revelations can transform the world. Ideas that had been held as timeless truths can shatter overnight. In our world, Disclosure will be that trigger. It will usher in a time comparable to the era of Copernicus and Galileo, when humankind first realized that the universe did not revolve around the Earth.

  The word paradigm was coined by the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, in his 1962 study, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He used it to describe a coherent theory of reality. When scientists obtain data that fails to conform to the dominant paradigm, the data are considered anomalies and normally discarded. Kuhn agreed that sometimes this is reasonable to do, but when too many anomalies litter a paradigm, something is wrong. Every now and then, a great thinker comes along who sees the world differently. This new vision makes sense of the anomalies and incorporates them into a larger, more complete, more accurate paradigm. Newton was such a thinker, said Kuhn. So was Einstein.

  In this chapter, we discuss how the impact of Disclosure will affect the dominant paradigms in scientific thinking, as well as that other great interpreter of reality: religion.

  Five centuries ago, it was the religious institutions that resisted the paradigm shift. The issue was whether the universe was Earth-centered or Sun-centered. The Polish astronomer, Nicolas Copernicus, was so fearful of Church reprisals to his great work on this subject, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, that it was published only after he died in 1543. It was an important theological issue, because the Catholic Church had taken a stand on the matter. The Church maintained that, as God had made humankind the centerpiece of his Creation, mankind’s world was at the center of the universe. Science, however, made it clear that this was not so.

  Incidentally, the issue of extraterrestrial life was raised at around the same time, and received even greater resistance. The Italian scientist and free-thinker, Giordano Bruno, had the audacity to believe that the stars were in fact like Earth’s own Sun (he was the first known person to argue this). He believed in the existence of other worlds and of other beings created by God. In other words, Bruno said that there were extraterrestrials in our universe and that they, too, were God’s children. His reward was to be imprisoned for seven years, then burned alive for heresy in the year 1600.

  During most of the ensuing centuries, Christianity in general has been silent on the matter of extraterrestrial life. Since the modern UFO era began, however, we have seen interesting developments on the matter. Christianity is a large umbrell
a, encompassing an impressive number of branches and sects, and its adherents have expressed every position on ET life and UFOs one can imagine.

  Today, the greatest blind-spot regarding Disclosure belongs to the scientific community. Despite the evidence, it has steadfastly ignored the UFO mystery. Indeed, establishment science has hampered the search for truth by joining the chorus of naysayers who have made the experiencers of extraordinary events feel shunned, ridiculed, and possibly insane.

  The situation regarding religion is different, if for no other reason than there is such a variety of them around the world. People’s spiritual beliefs may have certain things in common, such as the existence of a reality beyond the physical one of our five senses, but beyond that, almost anything goes.

  Yet we should distinguish the science and religion from their institutions. Science, despite its institutional shortsightedness and conformity, is ultimately based on empirical observation and testing. That is why so many scientific conclusions, no matter how firmly believed, are called “theories” (Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution). As the philosopher of science Bertrand Russell pointed out, scientific conclusions are always provisional. They are subject to change when new evidence is presented. This may be an emotional drawback for those who demand certainty in their lives, but Russell argued that it is an advantage over the long term.1