Sep
25
They Are Here and They Call Themselves Politicians
“What one man can fantasize, another man will believe.” — William K. Hartmann
A couple weeks ago, I shared from Stephen Webb’s book (2015), citing one solution to the Fermi Paradox. This week, I present a follow-up of sorts. It might sound like a joke, and in a sense it surely is. But, as we shall see, there have been people who seriously proposed this idea….
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“Many of us, at one time or another, must have expressed the opinion that our political leaders aren’t quite normal. Some of them, indeed, we’ve probably condemned as being downright weird. In the case of a certain type of English politician, I’ve always held that their weirdness must be the product of overweening ambition crossed with an eccentric public school system (and for the benefit of readers who aren’t based in the UK it’s perhaps worth pointing out the ‘public’ schools are private). In other countries there are doubtless other explanations for the abnormal behavior of politicians. But would you say that any of them are alien?
That’s precisely what David Icke — an ex-soccer player and one-time sports presenter on the BBC — argues. According to Icke, a race of alien, extradimensional lizard-people project their identities onto key US and UK politicians. (It’s not just politicians: Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and Prince Charles are all shape-shifting reptilians. Although Princess Anne is a reptilian, she apparently has never been seen to shape-shift.)
Icke (the name is pronounced ‘ike’ not ‘icky’) isn’t alone in his belief that some of those in power are not human. Paul Hellyer, a respected Canadian public figure who became his country’s Minister of Defence in the early 1960s and who served in Pierre Trudeau’s administration as the Senior Minister in the cabinet, believes that extraterrestrials currently walk the Earth. In particular, in testimony given to the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in May 2013, Hellyer stated that two members of President Obama’s administration are aliens.
One politician has even confessed to having repeated intimate encounters with aliens: Simon Parkes, who serves on the Whitby Town Council, claims to have fathered a child with an alien he calls the Cat Queen. (I have to concede that Parkes’ political career is not at the same level as those mentioned by Icke and Hellyer. Parkes represents a small community in the north east of England; his 2012 local election success was in a ward with an electorate of 2758, of whom 648 bothered to vote.)
The ‘Hungarians are extraterrestrials’ story was always intended as a joke; Icke, Hellyer and Parkes are serious. To people such as these, then, there clearly is no Fermi paradox: extraterrestrials are here and they are our overlords or lovers or something. It’s easy to dismiss these as crackpot ideas — so I shall; these are crackpot ideas — but it’s not purely for the sake of completeness that I’m presenting this as a solution to the paradox.
It’s quite likely that of all the solutions in this book (with the probable exception of Solution 4) this would be accepted by the largest number of people. Certainly, more people will read Icke’s books that will read mine, and a remarkable number of online reviewers see Icke’s meanderings as anything but crackpottery. Hundreds of thousands of people have watched Hellyer’s testimony, and much of the feedback on various YouTube recordings of the Disclosure Hearing are supportive. When Parkes appeared as a guest on breakfast TV the follow-up phone calls were generally encouraging and sympathetic. The notion that aliens have abducted certain unfortunates and subjected them to a bodily examination seems to be treated seriously by a significant section of the community.
Now, I can understand how an individual might come to believe that the Queen is a lizard shape-shifter, or that a government minister is an extraterrestrial in disguise, or that aliens visit them for regular sex sessions: ultimately the only experiences that any of us can truly know are those that go on inside our heads and, for people such as Icke, the thoughts that bubble up are perhaps taken to represent an external reality. (Far subtler minds than Icke have followed the same path. John Nash, an outstanding mathematician who built on von Neumann’s work in game theory, suffered the debilitating disease of paranoid schizophrenia. Someone asked him how he, a mathematician, could believe that extraterrestrials were sending him messages. He replied that those ideas came to him in the same way as his creative mathematical ideas — so he was forced to take them seriously.)
What I can’t understand is why so many other people would choose to believe the statements of Icke, Hellyer, and Parkes. Although the notion that politicians are extraterrestrials might be a popular hypothesis (and admittedly it does have the virtue of explaining Tony Blair) we surely need to look for a more plausible solution to the paradox.”
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My money’s on George Soros being an evil alien. Also, in accord with Phil Morrison’s tongue-in-cheek theory, Soros is “Hungarian” and plays the long game. Just sayin’… 😉
