If we cannot communicate forth and back with a stone, or the wind or any particular shade of the color blue, we will likely never communicate with otherworldly life. Think of all the Star Trek episodes where aliens are portrayed as basically bipedal, carbon-based lifeforms only with some added coloring and/or prosthetic to make their brows different than homo-sapiens. When we cannot even communicate meaningfully with crows or mushrooms or plagues of locusts, what makes us think we could communicate with beings not of this world? Different climates, atmospheres and gravitational pulls would likely result in vibrantly differing evolutionary pathways, maybe to extents that our concepts of church, state and industry one and all would be wholly alien to their own cultures holding other priorities. They may not physically exist in our limited visual spectrum, their home-world being here all along.
I’m no stranger to cosmology. Throughout its own existence, the bible has never gone 5 minutes without script-doctoring and copy-edits, as what unites terrestrials is the unvoiced belief that all of reality is itself as subjective as love, inhabitants feeling burning desire to make fan-fictions of time and space. And asserting their fantasies are more stable than the universe, provide the skeletal framework for the universe to adorn or indeed are the universe rather than just lonely scribbles beside the margins. Gabriel’s horn, falling on deaf ears.
Here’s my tuppence.
What if Armageddon is mere wishful thinking, a myth, and for all our history humanity is still early in its infancy. Maybe life begins here on Earth, but quintillions of years from now we will have branched out and evolved to populate each and every planet of each and every solar system. Millions of generations separating human denizens of Alpha Centauri from human denizens of Pluto into alien distinctness. What if there is no intelligent life to be found elsewhere in the universe in the here and now of the present, animate or not, carbon-based or not, and there are no inhuman aliens waiting in the wings or lurking in Lovecraftian thresholds to trade with us, to fisticuff us or to fuck us. Space is emptiness, the forever void.
There is more evidence for alternate realities with worlds running parallel to our own. Like radio waves using different frequencies to pass through the very same airy points in space and time unobstructed. The intense experiences to be gathered from naturally psychedelic hallucinogenics such as ayahuasca, mushrooms or even marijuana, an enhanced version of our minds ignoring the calls to not touch that dial.
But what if time is not quite so absolute. What if time is a closed loop, like a Moebius strip, vortices everywhere with time raveling and unraveling itself into and out of knots aplenty alongside the inhales and exhales of serendipity. Ghosts as temporal anomalies, shadows of beings who lived before, or have yet to live at all. Disembodied voices heard by schizophrenics, simply projections from some-when else. Yeti or other cryptids as things fallen through from long, long ago. UFOs as things fallen through from far, far ahead. Or versa vice! The Bermuda Triangle as a vanishing point. The 10,000-year-old Dire wolf spotted at Skinwalker ranch, a thoroughly lost pup. The Nazca lines greeting flying, confused gods wondering where in the hell the goddamned tarmac went off to.
Modern archaeology has a terminology for out of place objects, sampled by the inexplicable Antikythera mechanism. If your car-keys are not to be found in the clothes dryer or the freezer, then perhaps they are on the Aboriginal plains of thousands of years ago, inspiring a shaman to begin constructing his or her own jingle-jangle ornamentation of bound baubles, charms of dried bones and seashells colored with ground berries. And maybe oddities like Bigfoot and Chupacabra prove so elusive because they are scared to death and back, for they are simply not from the here and/or now.
I suspect the folks responsible for the Hellier series seem open to such possibility. The things sharing communications with them, unknowable patterns and all, may in fact not be originating from angels or demons, from half-forgotten fertility gods or aliens, but from ourselves, from long, long ago or long yet to be.
But I don’t however, believe in the notion of a disclosure controlled, that cinema and the rest of artificial cultures gradually prepare us for some big unveiling of truth by the government or any other apparent authority. People tend to fight tooth and nail just to perpetuate the most infantile prattles of fantasy. If there’s recurring themes in mass-marketed products, it’s due to the derivative nature of any for-profit medium far more than Jungian archetypes being explored. And if there is distinctive messaging, it’s distraction, the essential purpose of artificial cultures generally. In reality and throughout history, after the fact opportunists are much more prevailing than foresighted conspirators. It’s easy to outgrow the X-Files upon noticing real conspiracies never ever stray from basic greed and gluttony. Conspiracy is never to protect the masses, but to save some power-monger’s ass from the guillotine. Always always always.