Page 45 - Extraterrestrials, Foreign and Domestic

Anthropic Fallacies

the orders we received—as long as they did not threaten our
national interests.”
“So you just let them run wild all over the countryside,
terrorizing everybody?” Upchurch wasn’t giving up without a
fight. “Is that in our interest?”
“The UFO scare was part of Cold War hysteria,” said Professor
Heinzeit. “Part psychopathology, part nuclear fear. And just a tiny
bit of truth. People like you, either highly suggestible or highly
manipulative of those who are, provided an excellent obfuscatory
layer of crankiness and over-the-top tabloid nightmares; we hardly
had to do anything but pretend to look at the evidence and
pronounce it all false or inconclusive. Oddly enough, though, your
movement—for no reason other than the projection of your
fantasies—did hit upon the primary mission of the aliens: they do
want to use us for reproduction.”
“What!”
Ray Zorbach, who had been unconsciously bracing himself
against the table with stiff arms and tilting his chair on its back
legs, nearly fell over.
“That is perhaps expressed a little baldly, Professor,” said Buck.
“Dr. O’Day: can you explain this to our guests?”
“Yes, I believe a simplified explanation is comprehensible to the
average citizen, thanks more to science fiction than science
education.” Don O’Day was a sturdy man in his early thirties, but
he spoke in the same cultured cadences as his older colleague.
“The study of extraterrestrial life existed as a laughable
oxymoron until the starship arrived. Thanks to the imposed
security restrictions, the field remains theoretical in most
universities today. We cannot suppose that the aliens have
revealed everything about themselves to us; it would not be in
their interests to do so. But we do know this: somewhere
unimaginably distant they evolved from simple organisms into
complex intelligent beings and developed a civilization, just as we
have. Their technology advanced to a level of sophistication
several orders of magnitude beyond ours. It could not, however,
prevent the ultimate extinction of life on their planet when its sun
started dying. To perpetuate their race, they sent forth self-
maintaining capsules, like seed-pods, in every direction. These

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