As scientists dispute whether the bodies discovered in Mexico are aliens or just our ancestors, the interest in other humankinds is piqued even further
Published Date – 11:59 PM, Sat – 7 October 23
By PRAMOD K NAYAR
Bill Watterson’s Calvin would declare, not without reason, that proof of intelligent life elsewhere is the fact that they have not tried to contact us. Years before Calvin’s brilliant insight came Arthur C Clarke’s in his novel, Rendezvous with Rama:
They [aliens] had used the Solar System as a refuelling stop — as a booster station — call it what you will; and had then spurned it completely, on their way to more important business. They would probably never even know that the human race existed; such monumental indifference was worse than any deliberate insult.
We are, as a race, very keen on knowing our neighbours, whether they want to become permanent residents, passing through, or indifferent to us.
Contemporary cultural imaginations revolve around alien life forms in two modes: an interest in aliens invading Earth, and our own ancestors who are more or less alien to us
While life on other planets has not yet been found (Calvin would say, they don’t want to be found), although trillions have been spent by respectable institutions, aliens on Earth have had two moments recently. At the July 2023 US Senate hearings, former military veterans stated under oath that aliens have indeed come to Earth and that there have been human-alien encounters. Soon after Newsweek carried a report on ancient, nonhuman alien bodies found in Mexican mines. The UFO-logist and journalist Jaime Maussan stated before the Mexico Congress that ‘the [mummified bodies] are beings, non-humans who are not part of our terrestrial evolution and that after disappearing we do not think there is a subsequent evolution’. These reports bring together contemporary cultural imagination’s two key themes: alien life and ancestry.
We love the aliens, but are also worried about them, even hate them a bit, as Neil Badmington, the posthuman theorist, notes in his book Alien Chic.
Extra-terrestrial Interests
While immigration and citizenship documents in many countries have a category ‘alien’, the term has its greatest currency in popular culture. In Euro-American literature, Karl Guthke notes in his classic, The Last Frontier, the “idea of a plurality of worlds appears …in one form or another in antiquity” in Anaximander (6th century BC), certain Pythagoreans (6th-4th centuries BC), and the Atomists Leucippus, Democritus and their followers Metrodorus of Chios (4th century BC), Epicurus (4th-3rd centuries BC) and Lucretius (1st century BC).
During the Middle Ages, the speculation over another cosmos inspired thinking about other humankinds, notes Guthke. Lucian’s True Story first appeared in English translation in 1634. Texts wondering about the possibilities of life outside of the Earth were rife from the Early Modern period, enabled principally by the invention of the telescope which allowed humans to peer into space and ponder if there was intelligent life out there. Very often, this interest in extra-terrestrials took the form of anxieties.
The anxiety about alien life evolved out of the parallel-worlds theory of Giordano Bruno (who was burnt at the stake as a heretic), for thinkers asked: if we assume new worlds and new civilisations, we will have to assume the existence of different gods. The Renaissance and Early Modern cultures in Europe were exposed to multiple cultures on Earth itself, thanks to the grand travel narratives of the time.
Sci-fi and travelogues are not just about other worlds, but also about humanity’s status in the universe, and hence our keen interest in encountering the Other
As the critic Mary Baine Campbell has noted, the travelogues enumerated variety, difference and the exotic of the new worlds they were “discovering”, although the “foreign” came to be conflated with the “monstrous” in the imaginings of distant lands. In those lands, the travellers met people unlike themselves, and very often (as Lemuel Gulliver does in Jonathan Swift’s classic novel) used the encounter to reflect upon their own home countries and cultures.
Indeed, the travel account and the sci-fi text about other worlds, alien life forms and different intelligences, right from Bruno and Copernicus to Hollywood’s Area 51, ask to settle one question, as Brian Aldiss, the sci-fi novelist, argued: “Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge”. Thus, humans have always been interested in the encounter with the alien because we want to know our place in the world: whether this is in terms of different races entering my country, alien life forms arriving on Earth, or our often unsettling engagement with fellow humans whom we see as alien.
And hence we turn from speculating on other humankinds to alien invasions.
Alien Invasions
Originating with HG Wells’ science fiction The War of the Worlds (1898), the alien genre subsequently built up through literally hundreds of pulp and popular texts ranging from invasion-horror narratives in fiction and film (Alien, Species, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers) to more thoughtful explorations (Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, Arrival). Then there are the narratives of alien intelligence elsewhere and human attempts to inhabit — colonise, terraform — these other planets (Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy). Arguably, there are also less-threatening encounters (Spielberg’s E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Finally, we also have aliens — particularly humanoids and cyborgs — from the future Earth in the Terminator series.
Sci-fi’s obsession with alien invasion, argues the critic John Rieder, stems from an anxiety over colonisation:
The plot of invasion and subjugation by a technologically superior alien race … can be traced in both its continuities and its moral and political fluctuations from the Victorian era to the present
But tropes of alien invasion narratives are equally explorations of the limits of the human condition. As sci-fi demonstrates, the anxiety is about the loss of human features. This transformation is most often cast as a disfiguration of the human body John Rieder where the alien, usually a hideous creature, has broken the boundaries of the human. The ontological fragility of the human is repeatedly emphasised, as also the human way of life. The critic H Bruce Franklin noted in an early essay that most alien invasion films “display future societies ruled by some form of conspiracy, monopoly, or totalitarian apparatus”, and thus implicitly signals America’s worries over the form of government. Worries over aliens undermining, even destroying, the American way of life have marked cinema and TV series (including the celebrated X-Files), as the critic Paul Cantor notes in his book The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture.
A related fear was that the alien would transform the human mind and we would be serving them, behaving oddly: in short, doing what we did not want to do. In Clay’s Ark (Octavia Butler) and The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (based on Jack Finney’s 1954 novel), the human personality is transformed due to an alien within. This theme of mind control was dominant during the Cold War period and reflects the anxiety that communist ideology — equally alien, from the Anglo-American point of view — was brainwashing the young.
Alien invasion films signaled that humanity needs to stand together — led naturally by Americans — in order to ward off the threat from “out there”. But other texts, especially in the 1970s and 80s depicted the alien as messianic rather than threatening. With superior technology and powers, they were god-like, although the messiah could also be a human from an advanced extra-terrestrial culture (Star Wars, Dune), as the critic John Rieder pronounced of the Martians in Wells, whom he called ‘a version of the human race’s own future’. (Though it is not clear why a culture with superior intelligence and technology cannot create alternative fuels, medicine or slaves — robots — in their own worlds, and instead need to invade Earth for all these.)
Humanity also ponders on the multiple routes of its evolution: would our evolution be different if we incorporate alien DNA – and why should we not accept a species cosmopolitanism ?
In other words, these texts ponder on the future course of human evolution: will we one day be (like) gods with advanced technology, or have we reached the pinnacle of our evolutionary process? Relatedly, the texts also ponder whether a change in the human form is a reversal of evolution: would we be lesser than what we are if we were to incorporate alien DNA? The entire oeuvre of Octavia Butler is an exploration of this species’ cosmopolitanism: if humans were to cohabit with aliens and a new hybrid form emerges free of cancers and bodily limitations, and with better virtues like empathy, would that be a bad thing?
But another dimension of this sustained interest in the alien appears parallel to the invasion narratives.
They are Already Here
Tracing origins to ancestors who could slay six before breakfast — to parody Lewis Carroll — has been an abiding, decidedly political, concern for all cultures.
Richard Dawkins in The Ancestor’s Tale noted: ‘It is hard to deny our human temptation to see this one species [ie the human] as “on the main line” of evolution, the others as supporting cast, walk-on parts, sidelined cameos’. Humans tend to work our way backwards into history. What, we ask, came before us? Were they ‘human’ as we define, classify and understand the term? When does hominisation — the process by which we believe we became the humans we are today — begin?
Discoveries of fossil remains, archaeological sites and possible Neanderthal relics achieve celebrity status because they appear to fill in the gaps in our evolutionary history. When William Golding published his The Inheritors (1955), he was attempting to fictionalise precisely this prehistory, casting the characters, their belief systems and their language in English and yet-not-English, especially trying to align the language with their immediate sensory contexts rather than in speculative/imaginative forms that later-day humans developed in fields like literature. That said, Golding does indicate that the prehumans had a complex system of communication — sharing images across individuals without enunciating words.
Texts wondering about the possibilities of life outside of the Earth were rife from the Early Modern period, enabled principally by the invention of the telescope
The ancestors we seek to claim are as alien as extra-terrestrials — separated in time by thousands of years. They have been here, wherever they came from or in whatever manner they evolved.
Evidence such as the ones cited in the Mexico Congress provide the ‘scientific’ inputs for sci-fiction or palaeolithic fiction (pf) as posthumanist critic Stefan Herbrechter calls it. It relies on speculation — because the Neanderthals left no narratives — from our current perspectives. Herbrechter observes that both sci-fi and pf demonstrate a “fascination with time travel, both forward and backward”.
However, as Herbrechter notes, the interpretations of the Neanderthal and prehuman are imbued with our own notions of race. He writes:
The ambiguity and unease that provokes either a strong emotional defence of the Neanderthal or an equally strong sense of modern superiority lies in the fact that the Neanderthal is not only ‘our’ primary, primate and primal racial other but also our ontological other more generally.
We are, then, prefigured, in strange and unknowable ways, in the prehuman who is at once our “primitive” Other and the source of our many traits. We deride their primal natures and are proud of our achievements.
NASA has appointed Mark McInerney as director of UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) research, the term it now uses for UFOs (unidentified flying objects). The new director will develop and oversee the implementation of NASA’s scientific vision for UAP research, including using NASA’s expertise to work with other agencies to analyse UAP and applying AI and ML to search the skies for anomalies.
The alien is our legitimate antagonist. Since we cannot legally, or without danger to ourselves, maim or kill another human, we have found a surrogate: the alien. Yet, we now know if we watch our current primal behaviour — human inhumanity towards others because they dress differently, speak a different language or eat a different cuisine — that the primitive Other is within us, and that we are hunting aliens among our own.
(The author is Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and The English Association, UK)
