Fake or not, these are still pretty interesting.

Highlights

• In the 2005 UFO Conference, the exposition of crop-circle images bearing binary messages (begining at 1:14:18m)
• In the same video, the photographs of alien beings (YouTube excerpts 1 & 2 but you also want to see the photos from England in the '05 Conference Video' which begin at 56:39m)
• In the 9 May 2006 video, the claim that SETI has uncovered numerous alien signals which are being repressed (at 1:01:27m)
• The Mérida video is amazing and has inspired spoofs which can be found on YouTube (here and here)

John Taken oil on canvas, 8 x 10
Timothy Comeau 2003 ------------------------------------------

Some thoughts
on a definition of aliens

aliens: the idea that beings similar to ourselves could live on other planets is very old, but in the 20th Century took on new meaning as God and his angels disappeared from the imaginations of many Western people. The appearance of unidentified flying objects in the mid-20th Century created new understandings since any flying object of a century earlier would have been by definition the unidentified object of a non-human intelligence. However balloons had been used since the late 18th Century and so when confronted with this supposed invasion of extra-terrestrial explorers, humans who knew what was really happening tried to confuse these objects with balloons, revealing that their imaginations had been formed in a 19th Century context.

The crash of a UFO in 1947 may have resulted in the recovery of the craft and of alien bodies. The pre-television American population of that time was still largely homogenous and Christian, and in the process of recovering from the shock of World War II, and so a cover-up orchestrated by the military and US Government is supposed to have occurred, which can be seen as the most successful in history, since they exploited the willingness to believe of the few and the skepticism of the many.

This has created the paradoxical situation of having the best cover-up in history and the world's most open secret at the same time. This was accomplished through careful dissemination of misinformation, a skill honed during the Cold War and practiced not only with information about aliens but with information about the Soviet Union. (This highlights the capacity for apathy as the most secure form of information-security).

Millions of people know about the Roswell incident, and few believe it actually occurred, and those who are skeptical probably wouldn't care too much if the US Government actually opened all the files and declared the whole thing to be absolutely true. There would be a buzz for a few days, a whole new aspect of publishing would open up, a flurry of academic papers would be written, but it would have little influence on daily life because the papers and the publishing about this are already old hat.

The existence of alien beings who have visited and studied our civilization for centuries will probably be confirmed as fact sometime within the 21st Century. The revelation will undoubtedly bring the profound re-orientation to our lives that we seem to crave in many ways. One also suspects that the aliens may have remarkable historical documents and may be able to show us such wonders as video of great historical figures and events from the pre 19th and 20th Century worlds, which would usher in a new age of understanding about ourselves.

Yet, like all superstitions, to believe in aliens is to think there are unrevealed mysteries left for human beings to experience. Meanwhile, the practicalities of life make such ideas an indulgence of the imagination.