what has been happening sincethe mid-forties seemed more than just a little different from the fairy lore. Now there were brain probes and flying disks involved, abductions and grey creatures with staring eyes.… Another thought was that the visitors might really be our own dead. Maybe we were a larval form, and the adults of our species were as incomprehensible to us, as totally unimaginable, as the butterfly must be to the caterpillar. Perhaps the dead had been having their own technological revolution, and were learning to break through the limits of their bourne.
Or perhaps something very real had emerged from our own unconscious mind…coming forth to haunt us. Maybe belief creates its own reality. It could be that the gods of the past were strong because the belief of their followers actually
did
give them life, and maybe that was happening again. We were creating drab, postindustrial gods in place of the glorious beings of the past. Instead of Apollo riding his fiery chariot across the sky or the goddess of night spreading her cloak of stars, we had created little steel-gray gods with the souls of pirates and craft no more beautiful inside than the bilges of battleships. 1
Despite one’s own feelings regarding Strieber and his claims, credit must be awarded not only on account of his artful prose, but also for his ability to reasonably contemplate the various potentials surrounding him at the outset of his ongoing “transformation.” Fascinating though his ideas and ponderings were up to this point, he thengoes one step further, and puts forth something that, with direct relevance to our present discussion, is quite novel indeed:
Or maybe we were receiving a visit from another dimension, or even from another time. Maybe what we were seeing were human time travelers who assumed the disguise of extraterrestrial visitors in order to avoid creating some sort of catastrophic temporal paradox by revealing their presence to their own ancestors. 2
Visitors from our future, he asks? Could such a thing even be possible, when considering all the other sorts of factors surrounding the UFO mystery? Perhaps, to be fair, this futuristic hypothesis is really as solid as any other, when weighing the multitude of potentials before us. And yet, despite the promise that emerges with it at conception, the burden of providing some kind of empirical evidence for visitors from our future—or virtually any other idea in the realm of the evasive and elusive UFO—seems next to impossible.
In
Communion,
Strieber highlights several of the immediate problems with the “time traveler” premise for us right at the outset. He supposes, for instance, that there could be some element of deception at play beneath what was apparently meant to appear to be some sort of abduction experience. Engaging in a thought experiment where his kidnappers might have donned an extraterrestrial disguise, Strieber then suggests that they could have done so in order to protect against “some sort of catastrophictemporal paradox,” as outlined in the previous excerpt. But would an element of careful deception even this elaborate really allay the sorts of “temporal paradoxes” that Strieber supposed might emerge? In other words, could hiding behind the façade of an alien presence do enough to prevent the potentially harmful tampering of a future humanity, whose attempts at engaging with their past might yield destructive side effects in the chronology of human history?
Aiming to rectify the potential disasters associated with hypothetical “grandfather paradoxes,” where human travel backward in time could alter the future in dangerous ways, scientists have again found themselves caving to the damnable temptation of speculation. Even with no proof yet that time travel does or does not exist, the philosophical debate alone that has erupted around how it may be achieved has led to the creation of a host of remarkable new scientific theories. Arguably, one
Or perhaps something very real had emerged from our own unconscious mind…coming forth to haunt us. Maybe belief creates its own reality. It could be that the gods of the past were strong because the belief of their followers actually
did
give them life, and maybe that was happening again. We were creating drab, postindustrial gods in place of the glorious beings of the past. Instead of Apollo riding his fiery chariot across the sky or the goddess of night spreading her cloak of stars, we had created little steel-gray gods with the souls of pirates and craft no more beautiful inside than the bilges of battleships. 1
Despite one’s own feelings regarding Strieber and his claims, credit must be awarded not only on account of his artful prose, but also for his ability to reasonably contemplate the various potentials surrounding him at the outset of his ongoing “transformation.” Fascinating though his ideas and ponderings were up to this point, he thengoes one step further, and puts forth something that, with direct relevance to our present discussion, is quite novel indeed:
Or maybe we were receiving a visit from another dimension, or even from another time. Maybe what we were seeing were human time travelers who assumed the disguise of extraterrestrial visitors in order to avoid creating some sort of catastrophic temporal paradox by revealing their presence to their own ancestors. 2
Visitors from our future, he asks? Could such a thing even be possible, when considering all the other sorts of factors surrounding the UFO mystery? Perhaps, to be fair, this futuristic hypothesis is really as solid as any other, when weighing the multitude of potentials before us. And yet, despite the promise that emerges with it at conception, the burden of providing some kind of empirical evidence for visitors from our future—or virtually any other idea in the realm of the evasive and elusive UFO—seems next to impossible.
In
Communion,
Strieber highlights several of the immediate problems with the “time traveler” premise for us right at the outset. He supposes, for instance, that there could be some element of deception at play beneath what was apparently meant to appear to be some sort of abduction experience. Engaging in a thought experiment where his kidnappers might have donned an extraterrestrial disguise, Strieber then suggests that they could have done so in order to protect against “some sort of catastrophictemporal paradox,” as outlined in the previous excerpt. But would an element of careful deception even this elaborate really allay the sorts of “temporal paradoxes” that Strieber supposed might emerge? In other words, could hiding behind the façade of an alien presence do enough to prevent the potentially harmful tampering of a future humanity, whose attempts at engaging with their past might yield destructive side effects in the chronology of human history?
Aiming to rectify the potential disasters associated with hypothetical “grandfather paradoxes,” where human travel backward in time could alter the future in dangerous ways, scientists have again found themselves caving to the damnable temptation of speculation. Even with no proof yet that time travel does or does not exist, the philosophical debate alone that has erupted around how it may be achieved has led to the creation of a host of remarkable new scientific theories. Arguably, one
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