You did it.
You were one of the thousands who took up the challenge of raiding Area 51, insisting
that the government “show us dem aliens”.
Your Naruto-running skills proved to be too much for the security forces stationed there,
and you managed to make your way inside the top secret facility.
Deep in an underground bunker, past all sorts of physical and electronic security measures
you found him- or her, to be honest you're not really sure- a real, live alien.
Now what?
The public has been claiming that the US government knows about the existence of aliens for decades,
with the 1947 Roswell crash and subsequent admission by a US Air Force officer to the
discovery of a flying disk igniting a firestorm of controversy and conspiracy theories.
On multiple occasions the government has put forth several explanations for the Roswell
crash, but the fact that the secrecy of the real object involved in the crash forced the
government to constantly tweak false explanations before releasing the real one did not help
matters at all.
An extrapolation of the official explanations gives us this account of the truth behind
Roswell: On June 14th, 1947 William Brazel, a foreman working on the Foster homestead,
noticed several clusters of debris about 30 miles (50km) north of Roswell, New Mexico.
The debris was initially described by brazel as a “large area of bright wreckage made
up of rubber strips, tinfoil, and rather tough paper and sticks.”
Initially Brazel paid little attention to the debris, until he heard stories about flying
disks- this piqued his interest and Brazel wondered if he had discovered the wreckage
of a flying disk for himself.
After contacting the US military about the debris, public information officer Walter
Haut put out a press release stating that the military had recovered a flying disk-
a fact that has been largely misconstrued as an admission of a UFO, when in fact Haut
was merely describing a disk-like object that very clearly hung below a balloon- this would
be the balloon's 'kite', or an object made up of radar-reflective material which would
make tracking the balloon easier.
The object was then described as a weather balloon by the military, which claimed that
it was merely a weather-research balloon that had crashed- as these so often do at the end
of their flight lives.
Years later though the military was forced to amend that explanation, at last making
the truth known: the balloon was actually part of a top secret project known as Project
Mogul which used extremely high altitude balloon to monitor nuclear testing by the Soviet Union
by sampling and recording disturbances in the upper atmosphere.
Remember, this was a time before spy planes or spy satellites, and there was simply no
way to get good recon inside the Soviet Union itself.
The admission that the military had initially lied however led many to believe that it was
still lying, and now today a sizable portion of the population believes that the US government
recovered a crashed saucer and alien bodies in Roswell New Mexico.
Thanks to the Roswell incident and many others like it, today almost half of Americans believe
in aliens and 39% believe in UFOs, up from a third in 2012.
This is an interesting development, though perhaps the propagation of science fiction
in our culture and the ease of faking UFO videos and posting them online is only fooling
many people into believing something exists that doesn't.
Whatever the reason, what's clear is that many Americans believe UFOs are real, and
naturally enough if UFOs are real then Area 51 seems like the most logical place to hide
them.
For you though, you no longer suspect or believe that aliens are real- you know for a fact
they are, because you got yourself a real-life alien rescued from the depths of Area 51.
Or at least you better hope you're rescuing it, and that it in fact did not want to be
there, or you'll be charged with the Earth's first case of Alien-napping.
Either way, now's the big question: what do you do next?
First, you're probably going to want to worry about your immediate security and get somewhere
safe.
Logic says that if aliens are real and the US government is keeping their presence a
secret, then it's for a pretty good reason.
Perhaps we really aren't ready to discover that we're not alone in the universe, or perhaps
the aliens are hostile, and are secretly pulling the strings and dictating humanity's fortune.
More terrifyingly, maybe the alien really did crash land here on earth, and the government
took it prisoner, leaving its compatriots to believe it died in the crash.
Let's see what you might do in each one of these scenarios, and the consequences you
may run into...
Maybe the government is keeping aliens a secret because internal testing has shown that we're
simply not ready to accept the truth.
As humans we tend to not do very well when our world views are challenged in any way,
shape, or form- for proof of this just take a look at the modern anti-vaccination movement...
every credible doctor and scientist in the world says that vaccinations are safe and
do not cause autism, and yet millions of First Worlders routinely place their children at
great risk because of the way they feel about the truth.
As modern American politics has taught us, what we feel is true is more important to
most people then what is actually true, and now we live in the age of alternative facts
that fit your preconceived notion of reality.
The discovery of advanced alien intelligence visiting our planet though will be a fact
that will be irrefutable.
Your aunt Karyn can disbelieve that vaccines are safe because she lives in a comfortable,
safe first world bubble where measles and other horrible diseases probably can't get
to her- thanks to the millions of us who agree with science.
The consequences of her terrible choices will never be real to her, so she'll never have
to confront the false reality she lives in.
However, an alien presence will be in our face in a rather big way, and the sudden reveal
of advanced super intelligent aliens whizzing through our skies as they please will be impossible
to explain away- especially if they decide they want to start moving in next door.
Such a dramatic shift in the perceived reality of billions of humans- a reality where we
are not alone in the universe- could be too much to bear.
Big questions such as what is our place in the universe, what do these aliens want with
us, and how will they judge us for the things we do to our environment and each other, could
all prompt a very real panic.
Needless to say, it would be a lot more comfortable to live inside our bubble where we are alone
in the universe, and if aliens exist then they are safely far away from planet Earth
on another star system entirely, where they can remain an idea and not a reality that
affects our daily lives.
The conclusions to what might happen in scenario one dovetail nicely into the reality of scenario
two: what if aliens are here and they rule over us, dictating the fate of the human race?
In this case, then the worst fears many conspiracy theorists have held for decades have finally
come true: we are nothing more than puppets, and beings infinitely more powerful than us
are actually in charge of our society and planet.
In the movies the big reveal that aliens secretly rule the earth typically leads to a plucky
resistance movement that bravely fights against all odds to free humanity.
In the real world this would remain nothing more than fantasy.
A species intelligent enough to cross the galaxy to get to us, and then to be able to
move enough personnel and hardware here from their planet to keep us under their grip,
is a species that frankly is far too advanced for us to ever rise up against.
Consider that it takes humanity somewhere on the order of two to three thousand dollars
to put a single pound of material into orbit.
That means that putting a 60 ton Abrams tank into orbit would cost us about three hundred
million dollars.
Of course, that's only to put it into orbit, now you need to actually fly that across the
galaxy- and of course you'll need more than one Abrams tank to dominate an entire planet.
The point we're hoping is being made clear here is that if aliens can afford to move
so much hardware across the galaxy to threaten our species, then they are hopelessly more
advanced than we are.
Maybe though we could simply learn from them, or secretly develop our own advanced technologies,
X-Com style.
Well, sure, the government could probably secretly run labs somewhere hidden even from
alien prying eyes and covertly acquire some technology from the aliens, then reverse engineer
it in order to boost our own tech.
But consider the explosion in technology our own species underwent during the information
age, and then consider how slowly technology moved before it.
Between 1980 and 2019, the average computer increased from a storage capacity of 10 megabytes
to several gigabytes- an incredible explosion in capability and technological development.
Yet for thousands of years before that our best computer was the abacus, and that had
pretty much a single version for its entire lifetime.
I guess what we're saying is that aliens would be so far ahead of us technologically, that
our own pace of development, even helped along by secretly stealing bits of their tech, would
be like a snail going up against the space shuttle in the hundred meter dash.
As the Borg famously said, resistance really is futile.
What about the third scenario though?
What if the alien you discovered in Area 51 was secretly being held there against its
will by the US government.
What if the government was running all sorts of tests on it, perhaps pressing it for information
on its alien technology, while keeping his or her's existence a secret so that its alien
buddies thought it had died in the original crash?
Well, for our own humanity's sake we hope that's not true, because it would be a terrible
thing to do to another living being and we really like to think we've evolved past that
type of behavior.
But for the rest of humanity's sake, then we really hope that if that is true, that
you very promptly return that alien to where you found it.
Or at the very least keep it away from a phone or a working radio.
If an advanced alien species was secretly visiting the earth, and one of those craft
crashed here, well it would stand to reason that the other members of its species would
send in search and rescue parties.
After all, we do the same whenever one of our own goes missing.
In fact we're unique amongst every animal alive on earth today in that we will gladly
endanger and even sacrifice dozens of other people just to rescue a single individual.
Just consider the massive response that follows any announcement of hikers going missing,
or mountain climbers stuck on a mountain somewhere.
For all our faults, humanity can be noble to the point of getting ourselves killed over
it when we feel like it.
Aliens will likely be very... well, alien, to us, but there's no reason to think they
also wouldn't value the lives of their own people as much as we do ours when they go
missing.
Now consider what might happen if these very advanced aliens were to discover that their
dear brother or sister had crash landed on our backwards little planet, and us stupid
apes held him or her hostage for decades, trying to get the secrets of advanced technology
out of him or her.
Holding a member of an alien species against their will would probably be tantamount to
humanity signing it's own suicide letter, and we could expect a pretty harsh response
from a civilization capable of wiping us out with but a thought.
Perhaps we were nothing more than a scientific curiosity, being studied the way we study
animals in the wild- but this one act proved our savage nature, and now we're going to
suffer the consequences of our own greed.
And it's all your fault, so maybe do us a favor and keep your alien away from any methods
of communication, so it can't tell its people the horrible things we've been doing to it.
Or better yet, just give it back to the government because we really don't want to go extinct.
What would you do if you discovered a real life alien?
Think the government is really hiding aliens in Area 51?
Let us know in the comments, and if you enjoyed this video check out our video why raiding
Area 51 would be a bad idea!
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