Degringolade

It feels like every member of my family believes in some kind of wild, crazy shit: my sister believes crystals have healing powers, my brother believes psychedelics can unlock some latent third eye in the mind, I believe that maybe possibly reincarnation might be real, my grandma believes extraterrestrials are walking among us, and my mom believes in trickle-down economics.

All these things seem ridiculous to me. But wouldn't it be a little arrogant to just dismiss them outright? Like, who am I to pretend to know which things are true or false, right or wrong, plausible or implausible, and so on? After all, I'm only human. I don't know everything. I'm not some bastion of knowledge. I just kind of go with my first impression, based on the information available to me and, admittedly, my preexisting biases. I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I've solved problems of epistemology that philosophers have been debating for centuries. I’m not that full of myself. So I'm willing to admit that maybe, just maybe, my eccentric family members have tapped into some esoteric knowledge that I have just not tapped into myself. Who knows? The universe is vast. Anything is possible.

Yet, for some reason, I can’t help but think that some of my family members’ wild claims are just flat-out wrong, that perhaps their own limited knowledge and preexisting biases are leading them astray, leading them to believe some crazy, unverifiable shit.

Take, for example, my sister, who believes that certain types of crystals can treat certain types of illnesses, corresponding to the astrologically adjacent color of the crystal. My sister has been dealing with hypothyroidism and various muscle pains for her entire life. And she refuses to go to a doctor, thinks they're all money-grubbing shysters, so she's been treating her ailments with what she calls crystal therapy for years now: wearing necklaces adorned with crystals, meditatively squeezing crystals, sometimes sprinkling crystal dust on her food, that sort of thing. Yet she's not getting any better. Actually, the opposite, she's getting worse. One would think that if the crystals aren't alleviating her suffering then she'd stop believing in the so-called “healing powers” of these crystals, but no, she continues to believe, persisting with this ridiculous crystal therapy. I imagine her thought process is something like, “Well, I'd be much worse off if I didn't use the crystals at all,” or something like that, which, to me, is some self-serving circular logic, some post hoc justification, like she's unwilling to face the fact that she's been wrong about the crystals her whole adult life and is now simply doubling down on the bullshit, like some sort of psychic self-defense mechanism that keeps her from feeling like an idiot or something.

And my mom, as another example, with her trickle-down economics, this idea that cutting taxes for the wealthy will somehow result in financial prosperity for the little guy, which seems to fly in the face of everything we know about basic human behavior, which is mostly driven by greed, an inclination to accumulate and hoard wealth for self-serving purposes. I mean, Reagan and Bush tried this, they tried cutting taxes for the wealthy, and various post hoc analyses showed that this produced no significant increase in overall economic growth or job creation, instead just widening the gap between haves and have-nots, because the wealthy simply pocketed the extra cash, buying themselves more yachts and mansions or whatever. Trump also tried this with the 2017 U.S. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which dropped corporate tax rates by about 10%, and we’re not really seeing any of that trickle down. Instead, we’re seeing CEOs spend those savings on dividends and stock buybacks, while our national debt increases exponentially and job growth remains pretty much stagnant. This stuff is all publicly available information, yet you’lll never hear about it on Fox News, which is where my mom gets most of her information, so she continues to persist in her fantastical beliefs.

But I didn't really want to talk about crystals or economics here. What I actually want to talk about here is big-headed gray aliens, which might just be the only claim here that’s even remotely plausible, surprisingly.

My grandma has always been a staunch believer in extraterrestrial life, not only that life exists on other planets, which seems reasonable to me, but that aliens have traveled to Earth and, in some cases, have infiltrated world governments, which does not seem so reasonable to me. In 1947, when that unidentified flying object crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico, dominating the news cycle for months, Grandma Susu was an impressionable teenager, and this event left an impact crater on her brain about the size of the one left in the desert by that mysterious UFO. The government’s response certainly didn’t help dissuade her from believing it was aliens, if anything it reinforced it, because at first the government acknowledged it was a UFO crash, but the very next day they retracted this claim, instead saying it was a weather balloon. And the reports of strange aluminum-like material found at the crash certainly didn’t help dissuade her either. This material, when crushed, would instantly return to its pre-crushed state, supposedly, which, to Grandma Susu, meant that of course it had to be of extraterrestrial origin because anything not immediately understandable must be aliens. Forget “God of the Gaps,” we’re in “Aliens of the Gaps” territory now. And of course, the government has no reason to lie about this incident unless it was truly aliens. Surely there was no top-secret aircraft that the government might have been hiding in order to protect their secret from enemies of the state, and surely this would not have resulted in some sort of mass disinformation campaign in which the government might first claim that the crashed top-secret aircraft was actually an alien spacecraft but then turn around to claim that it was actually a weather balloon, just to confuse people into not knowing what to believe or whatever, thereby tricking people into camps of alien-believers and non-alien-believers, and in this way, whether someone believes it’s a weather balloon or an alien ship, it doesn't really matter either way, because both camps are now serving government interests, because if people believe the bullshit then they won’t be poking into potentially sketchy government secrets, but of course neither the UFO community nor the National Association of Weather Balloon Enthusiasts care about this dynamic, both just choosing to believe whatever narrative reinforces their preexisting biases.

I’ve found that the truth is often hidden in places people least want you to look. So it seems more likely to me that whatever crash-landed in Roswell was some sort of experimental aircraft that the government was trying to keep hidden, evidenced by the massive disinformation campaign around the whole thing, which only served to distract people from what was really going on. But of course Susu doesn’t see it that way. She wholeheartedly believes that whatever crash-landed in that desert was actually of extraterrestrial origin, and she hasn’t stopped talking about this since 1947.

When I was a kid, I would spend the summers with Susu, and back then her media diet consisted almost entirely of ufology, and this rubbed off on me in a big way. I absorbed alien mythology like some sort of intense background radiation, which both frightened and intrigued me. When she was playing solitaire in her room, she’d have the SyFy channel on, watching some documentary about aliens. I remember one time she was particularly excited about a new Roswell documentary, one which showed so-called “new unearthed footage” of the autopsy done on the quote-unquote “alien bodies” supposedly recovered from the Roswell crash site. This footage was reportedly taken in 1947, right after the crash, yet, as independent researchers pointed out, none of the film equipment used in the footage could have existed in 1947, and there were a number of other little oddities, all of which eventually forced the filmmaker, Ray Santilli, to admit that the whole thing was actually a staged recreation of some footage he saw that he swears on his mama’s life was actually real, genuine autopsy footage that, as of the creation of the recreation, was so deteriorated that it can no longer be watched, hence the recreation, which he only admitted after being called out, go figure. And of course, the aliens in the footage resembled the classic Gray alien variants found in all sorts of science fiction media, which gets another go figure from me. And of course, the SyFy documentary did not cover any of this recreation stuff at the time, instead presenting the autopsy footage as bona fide proof that aliens crash-landed in Roswell, which just served to validate and solidify Susu’s preexisting belief that aliens did indeed crash-land in that desert on July 7th, 1947, which also served to scare the shit out of me as a 10-year-old child with an overactive imagination who was easily spooked by the unknown.

I remember being so scared of aliens that, whenever I was outside and it was dark, I would always feel that primal pressure, that atavistic self-defense mechanism, on the back of my neck, my brain always telling me that something was behind me, stalking me, as if some sort of big-headed Gray was going to snatch me up and take me to the mothership for forced mating and probing or whatever. I was so scared of aliens that, sometimes, at night, when I had to come home from a friend’s house, instead of simply walking home, which would have taken like two minutes in most cases, I would instead call Susu and have her pick me up in her car, and those car trips only served to scare me further because Susu would always be listening to some paranormal radio program on the AM band, and they’d always be talking about fucking alien abductions and shit, which would just further freak me the hell out. But I never told Susu any of this because, despite aliens scaring me, there was something exciting about the whole thing, something gripping. The tinge of fear coupled with the unknown, like something more was out there in the vastness of space, was enthralling to me, and honestly, I couldn’t get enough of it. I would watch the UFO documentaries and listen to the AM broadcasts just as closely as Susu would, absorbing it all, totally entranced, even though it scared the living hell out of me and made it so I couldn’t sleep in my own bed at night, seeing aliens behind the darks of my eyelids.

And Susu wouldn’t just listen to paranormal radio on car trips, she would also listen to it while sewing in her garage, at full blast, with the door open, meaning aliens and ghosts surfed the invisible waves within the airspace of her small home at all hours of the day. I could not escape the alien invasion, nor did I want to, because learning about aliens was like uncovering some deeply esoteric knowledge that only a privileged few could know. I remember one radio show in particular, called Coast to Coast AM, hosted by Art Bell and sometimes George Knapp, was Susu’s favorite. She would never miss a broadcast. Based out of Nevada, land of the aliens, these guys lived and breathed extraterrestrials. And they had an “Open Lines” portion of the show in which people would call in and tell their own alien stories, most of which involved abductions, lost time, UFO sightings, crop circles, all the standard alien shit. And, I remember, when George Knapp was hosting, he would introduce each broadcast with this poetic paranormal ramble, and this ramble stuck with me, intensified my youthful romanticization of the search for the unknown.

“Good evening, everyone. You're in the right place at the right time. This is Coast to Coast AM. Tonight, we're coming at you, blasting out of the Mojave Desert like a scirocco, blazing across the land into your town, into your home, slamming into your radio like a supercharged nanoparticle of dark energy. You've arrived at a nexus point, a crossroads of shadow and light, a phantasmagorical marketplace of ideas and blasphemies, where together we prowl through the wilderness of smoke and mirrors in the collective psyche. We are Coast to Coast AM, a grand melting pot of cultures and subcultures, from the benign to the bizarre, all on the same path, searching for breadcrumbs of cosmic understanding, hoping we'll be able to follow the trail back to where we started.”

Of course, back then, I didn't understand what half of those words meant, but it sounded cool as hell, so I was hardcore into it. Susu and I would dim the lights, gather around the radio, her operating the sewing machine, me operating the Game Boy Color, and we would listen to those crazy callers tell crazy stories about shadow people in the sewers of Las Vegas, technicolor lights in the Phoenix night sky, time travelers traveling back in time to collect old IBM parts to save their future timeline from some robot takeover, secret government mind-control projects using LSD and remote viewing, people claiming they’re the reincarnation of some old war hero or something, and, of course, alien abductions which often involved probes inserted into places they should never be inserted into. And, after those late-night broadcasts, I would fall asleep curled up in Susu’s bed, equal parts frightened and fascinated.

Recently, feeling like I had become too close-minded and rigid in my worldview, I thought it would do me well to revisit some of those old Coast to Coast AM broadcasts, relive some of that frightening adolescent fascination, get in touch with my inner child, a version of me that was less cynical, less arrogant, more open to otherworldly wonder. I was in serious need of phantasmagorical ideas and blasphemies being blasted right into my brain like supercharged nanoparticles of dark energy. And so I went searching for the Coast to Coast AM archives, and, lo and behold, I found it online, a huge repository of the old broadcasts, and I’ve been listening to them for the past few months, entrenching myself in paranormal mythos and hardcore extraterrestrial lore, dissolving myself into the grand melting pot of bizarre cultures and subcultures, inhaling the smoke that swirls before the mirrors of the mind, all in search for breadcrumbs of cosmic understanding.

But I haven’t found any breadcrumbs yet. I’ve only found rumor-fueled speculation, already debunked pseudoscience, supposedly top-secret information relayed by quote-unquote “Ex-Area-51 employees” who won’t use their real names or produce their credentials due to “personal safety reasons,” fervently told accounts of UFO sightings that are most likely just misidentified swamp gas or ball lightning or literally the planet Venus, stories that amount to nothing more than fiction because there were literally no witnesses other than this one guy who’s basically saying “just trust me bro,” and a number of other tales that, while entertaining as hell, are totally unverifiable and quite possibly made up by unhinged people starving for attention, their fifteen minutes of fame, made possible by Coast to Coast AM.

I imagine the average Coast to Coast AM caller’s everyday life is so mundane that they involuntarily come up with fantastical stories, see things that aren’t there, slot their sensory experiences into some paranormal narrative that they already buy into, all to alleviate their own boredom.

But here I am, being cynical again. Maybe I'm just too old, or maybe I've been indoctrinated by the mainstream science narratives, or maybe I'm just too close-minded to believe in all this shit. I listen to all these far-fetched stories told with approximately zero backing evidence, and I find myself becoming slightly annoyed, like these Coast to Coast AM callers are searching for cosmic breadcrumbs in all the wrong places. They see something they don’t understand and immediately attribute it to the paranormal, like shadow people or aliens or fucking Bigfoot or whatever, and this line of thinking offends me on some level, like the natural world is already full of mysteries without having to make shit up. For example, many UFO sightings are explainable by ball lightning, a mysterious and barely understood phenomenon, yet these so-called “ufologists” are not interested in studying ball lightning, which is super cool and interesting. Instead, they come up with fantastical stories about discs in the sky and big-headed Gray aliens, thereby ignoring the wonders of the natural world.

Ufology is basically like a religion, a belief system with no tangible evidence behind it, yet ufologists like to pretend they’re legitimate scientists practicing the scientific method, though they don’t actually follow the scientific process. They see ball lightning, don’t understand it, and instead of developing a testable hypothesis, they immediately conclude it’s aliens and therefore don’t have to investigate any further. They work backward from a conclusion formed by science fiction media and preexisting biases. I think my point here is that the universe is already full of mysteries waiting to be solved, but by focusing on imaginary Gray aliens and fucking Bigfoot, they are doing themselves a disservice almost, depriving themselves of a deeper understanding of the world around them.

But I am sympathetic because I do actually believe that aliens exist. I really do. Like I said in the sixth paragraph up there, “big-headed gray aliens … might just be the only claim here that’s even remotely plausible.” That's because aliens make sense to me, and this is not a hot take by any means, it’s actually quite basic. Depending on the scientific spacetime model you subscribe to, the universe is either infinite or really really fucking big and expanding. Personally, I don’t think the universe is infinite, otherwise every inch of the night sky would be covered in starlight due to the infinite number of stars, meaning there would be no night at all, but I do believe that the universe is really really fucking big and expanding, and I think physicists have done some math or whatever to sort of verify that. Either way, infinite or not, both scenarios imply that there are lots of galaxies swirling around lots of supermassive black holes within which lots of planets are swirling around lots of stars, “lots” being a gross understatement here, to the point that it would be absurd if aliens did not exist on one of those planets out there. And, based on measuring cosmic background radiation, the universe is something like 13.8 billion years old, and the Earth itself is only 4.5 billion years old, meaning a lot of time has passed for life on other planets to pop up. In fact, I would argue that, based on our current understanding of the universe, aliens are pretty much a given, like 100%, they are out there, they have to be. There is another Earth-like planet out there in another galaxy that has life on it. I am wholly convinced of this. Now, whether or not aliens can get to our planet is another matter entirely, one that I'm skeptical of due to our current understanding of the seemingly hard-coded rules of light-speed travel, but nevertheless, I believe they are out there somewhere. Otherwise, young-Earth creationists are right, and our entire scientific model of the universe is just flat-out wrong, and that's not something I'm willing to accept right now based on the available evidence, because, frankly, I trust modern science over ancient desert scribbles. And aliens don’t even need to exist on Earth-like planets. They don’t even need to be carbon-based like us. There’s nothing stopping life from being silicon-based or nitrogen-based or phosphorus-based or whatever-based. It would be arrogant and naive to think that all life in the universe has to be like us. Life could even exist outside of the human-visible electromagnetic spectrum, like within weird space waves and shit, and we’d never even know it. The thing about science is that we’re literally always learning new things, so it would be insane to think that, right here, right now, we have cracked the code of the universe, as if there’s nothing left to discover.

So, again, I am sympathetic toward believers in the paranormal, because they have the right idea. The universe is vast, and there are many unknowns. They’re searching for cosmic breadcrumbs just like everyone else, they’re just doing it the wrong way. They’re kind of starting with a whole loaf of bread instead of breadcrumbs, beginning with a conclusion and working backward, as if they already have everything figured out and just need to prove it to other people for some reason, which is not how proper science or even logical deduction should work.

And this line of thinking also does a disservice to yourself, as it’s a close-minded worldview, because if you immediately jump to “it’s aliens”, then you’re not really open to any other possible explanation, and those other explanations could be really fucking cool, yet you’d never know it, because you’re not really following the cosmic breadcrumbs, you’re following a story that you’ve already convinced yourself is true.

But maybe that’s just me being cynical again.