How Alien Contact Occurs

If aliens exist, why don’t they land on the White House lawn? It’s probably the most commonly used retort to reinforce the argument that we’re all alone.

Fortunately, the answer to that question can be found on our own planet.

Recently The New York Times and other media outlets ran a tragic story about a young missionary who was murdered, trying to help spread Christianity to North Sentinel Island.

Part of the Andaman Islands, lying at the intersection of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, in between India and the coastline of Burma, North Sentinel is roughly five miles long and wide.

The inhabitants, the Sentinelese, represent one of the last groups on this earth living untouched by modern society. The majority of the islands in the Andaman group technically come under the jurisdiction of India, whose navy patrols the seas and prohibit any outside contact or even approach to North Sentinel within five nautical miles.

Decades earlier, rules about contact had been enacted in policy, called the ‘Andaman and Nicobar Islands: Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation 1956.’

The regulations “provide for the protection of the interests of socially and economically backward aboriginal tribes in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.”

John Chau, the idealistic young missionary who wanted to transform the island’s beliefs, co-opted local fishermen to get him close so he could sneak ashore. He made a few visits before those same fishermen, from afar, spotted his dead body dragged along the beach by a rope and left there.

Those that promote contact with isolated tribes say that left alone they invariably perish and need some form of saving, particularly protection against disease epidemics. The opposition says that indisputably, indigenous races suffer from forced contact and the best protection is leaving them alone.

The Sentinelese live on a speck of land in the middle of nowhere that no outsiders seem to want. Zoom out far enough, and the rest of us are on a little blue speck on the fringes of nowhere too.

Would aliens face the same dilemma? Would we also qualify as socially and economically backward? Would they only intervene if our extinction looked certain? Are they involved in disease epidemic prevention?

In our case, we’ve decided not to land a huge Chinook helicopter right out front of the chief’s hut on North Sentinel. That doesn’t stop us from going about our business in the far distance all around it.

We don’t hand them our essential items like cellphones and cars, construct shopping malls, an electrical grid, or erect a burger place. Instead, we respect their sovereignty, their culture, the distinctive, precious and fragile characteristics of their life and society.

To expect aliens to force themselves on us, and hand out their essentials, a contradiction in evolution needs to exist; that the more an ET society advances technologically, the more retrograde their approach becomes to ethics.

Not only that, if we conducted a worldwide poll, not all of us would want contact. It’s unlikely there would be a consensus.

On the affirmative side lies our species’ stratospheric self-aggrandizement. We’d understand and accept anything ET’s got and assimilate it into our society seamlessly, a new Shangri-La for all.

For the dissenters, self-importance contains an equal measure of fear. They’re sneaking around to undermine us or eat us. We have “souls,” and they don’t. We have emotions, and they don’t.

They’re after our DNA because they covet it and inexplicably can’t replicate their own, going to any lengths to ruthlessly abduct us to snatch it. (On a tangent, I’ve seen horses separated from the team for immunization. I wonder how the horses view that?)

They’re so insanely jealous of us they create hybrids so they can morph into us. And of course, in the fearmongering camp, ET must also commandeer our fabulous planet.

Let’s forget for a moment that they somehow can traverse unimaginably great distances in space and time, could have their choice of almost infinite, deserted paradises, or terraform others, but they want ours. That’s like sitting on a beach, and someone wants your grain of sand. Really?

But not only that, instead of them using their supreme technology and soulless, emotionless, ethical bankruptcy and jealousy to wipe us out in the blink of an eye; instead they utilize some ridiculously long-winded, passive-aggressive stealth approach to lever us off our grain and take it without us realizing what’s happening.

That’s like we dress up as coconuts on North Sentinel, dropping out of trees and rolling one inch closer to the main hut every week.

Broadly there are three trains of thought. One is we’re alone in the universe because we’re so special; the second is the aliens want to rob us of everything because we’re so special. Spot the recurring narcissism with those two.

A third possibility is we’re a primitive, little, evolving ecosystem of our own, worth respecting and protecting.

So what clues exist as to how contact could occur?

Credible academics and researchers have expressed views that this may have already happened, via “experiencers,” sensitive, anonymous humans amongst us. It makes sense, and a logical hypothesis behind it could be this:

Imagine if you could see the rocks surrounding the North Sentinel shore in the Bay of Bengal. Every day a Sentinelese girl goes and sits on those rocks and gazes out across the ocean. Occasionally she looks up high in the sky and sees a speck; a jetliner, which to her is an unfathomable, glimmering, metal bird.

Out on the horizon, the container ships look like giant sea monsters.

Ever since she was born, she’s had little investment in the ways of her tribe. Their rituals, their priorities, what they deem essential, how they live their lives day to day doesn’t fascinate her like the sea monsters.

She dreams of another world. To her, despite what she’s told, there’s something worthwhile out there. There’s some other way of living, something bigger. There’s more to this, more to reality, and more to her life. If only she could get there.

If you could see inside this girl’s mind and if she had no real anchors to her world, no real commitments, but a yearning for adventure, exploration, and connection, you might consider a cultural exchange.

You wouldn’t bother organizing this via the chief, landing your Chinook at his house, putting up with all the misunderstandings, defensiveness, power games, arrows whizzing at your head. Let alone upending the whole society overnight.

You’d go to the girl direct, whichever gentle and subtle way you’d do it.

You’d bypass the squabbling, controlling, rest of them, all trying to one-up themselves, and with that girl, if she was brave and willing, over time pull back the curtain on the other world. She may not even have to leave the island.

Today, cultural exchange is a positive for us, and that’s a reason to believe that ET would do it as well. The alternative is cultural assimilation, but an exchange of ideas is cultural understanding.

Our problem is that humans crave validation and feeling really (really) important in our current look-at-me culture.

A lot of people seem to be shoving others out of the way to establish their brand, their identity, collect their labels, their credentials, their importance. The current chief of America seems obsessed with wanting the media to worship him, or that the former chief has twice as many Twitter followers, and had more people at his inauguration.

So if an advanced being came to you tomorrow, could you resist telling everyone, posting a selfie on Instagram, gathering 7 billion “likes” and making you look exclusive?

Cultural exchange candidates might be rare; it’d be those who aren’t interested in monetarizing it, weaponizing it, patenting it, padding their ego, their CV, their fifteen minutes of fame, attracting more “views” or “hits.” That might eliminate 99.9% of the planet.

Otherworld communication is unlikely to be the sole domain of humans in pursuit of power, status, who seek to stage-manage and control it; who believe that’s the endgame; those who have staked out those boundaries, wrapped up in that worldview so tight they can barely breathe. World leaders, or the CIA, the NSA, the Communist Party of China or the KGB might find themselves powerless.

Contact might very well be something accessible to the uncomplicated, and be genuinely egalitarian, particularly if there is a connection to all consciousness.

John Chau, the murdered missionary who carried a bible everywhere, and tried to impose himself and his Christian religion on a group of hostile others, dreaming of importance, should have been familiar with a 2,000-year prophecy: “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”

If an advanced species come, it may not be for all of us, but some of us. For those sitting on the rocks, or in the mountains, in solitude; calm, the dreamers, the anonymous; a place where the ego dissolves into connectedness with the whole; the ones who believe there must be something different, something more.