The Canadians are getting ready for the aliens. Are you?

Recently, a former Canadian Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister named Paul Hellyer made a controversial speech about the need to develop a coherent policy for interacting with extraterrestrial civilizations. A long-time opponent of the weaponization of space, Hellyer has recently become more outlandish in his stance:

Hellyer warned, “The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. He stated, “The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide.”

Hellyer’s speech ended with a standing ovation. He said, “The time has come to lift the veil of secrecy, and let the truth emerge, so there can be a real and informed debate, about one of the most important problems facing our planet today.”

Hellyer added, “I’m so concerned about what the consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just think I had to say something.” (Here is a video file of Hellyer’s thirty minute speech, but I haven’t checked it out yet.)

Though speculation abounds online that Hellyer is either growing senile or has perhaps “finally lost it,” I find a moreimaginative approach the subject might just be in order. For me, this weird public revelation triggers a series of connections which I’d like to detail here. First off, I wonder if we couldn’t connect this to another bit of weird alien-warfare speculation which has made the rounds of conspiracy theorists very heavily in the past year.

The bit I’m referring to is Carol Rosin’s testimony before Congress in 2000, regarding her former associate, Wernher Von Braun. On Von Braun, Wikipedia brings us up to speed:

Originally a German scientist leading Nazi Germany’s rocket program before and during the Second World War, he entered the United States at the end of the war through the then-secret Operation Paperclip. He became a naturalized US citizen and worked on the American ICBM program before joining NASA. Today he is generally regarded as the father of the United States space program.

Anyway, Rosin’s testimony details some assertions that Von Braun made to her in the early 1970’s:

“He said the strategy that was being used to educate the public and decision makers was to use scare tactics That was how we identify an enemy. The strategy that Wernher Von Braun taught me was that first the Russians are going to be considered to be the enemy….Then terrorists would be identified….Then we were going to identify third-world country “crazies.” We now call them Nations of Concern. But he said that would be the third enemy against whom we would build space-based weapons. The next enemy was asteroids. Now, at this point he kind of chuckled the first time he said it.

Asteroids- against asteroids we are going to build space-based weapons.

And the funniest one of all was what he called aliens, extraterrestrials. That would be the final scare. And over and over and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving speeches for him, he would bring up that last card. “And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens, and all of it is a lie.”

Given his unique position within the government, you have to wonder if Von Braun had access to plans and information which normal people do not. And if there’s any truth to it at all, what form would it finally take when the government reveales to us our next illusory enemy? Would it look something like Paul Hellyer’s bizarre and intriguing comments? Is he part of some advance guard initiating us into a new paradigm of government reality? Or maybe it’s Hellyer who has accurate information, and Von Braun who was the stooge. Or maybe they’re both nuts. Or maybe there’s something seriously weird going on here.

Aramchek & the Universal Adversary

After his mystical experience of 1974, Philip K. Dick wrote several novels which attempted to frame or perhaps explain his experiences within a fictional form. Radio Free Albemuth is one such novel from this time period. In it, the protagonist receives mystical communications from beyond, prompting him to take covert action against the tyrannical regime of President Ferris F. Fremont (modeled after Richard Nixon). Fremont at one point goes on a crusade against a possibly imagined subversive group called Aramchek:

The pinko capital of the world was not surprised when Senator Fremont was named to a committee investigating un-American activities. It wasn’t surprised when the senator nailed several prominent liberals as Communist Party members. But it was surprised when Senator Fremont made the Aramchek accusation.

Nobody in Berkeley, including the Communist Party members living and working there, had ever heard of Aramchek. It mystified them. What was Aramchek? Senator Fremont claimed in his speech that a Communist Party member, an agent of the Politburo, had under pressure given him a document in which the CP-USA discussed the nature of Aramchek, and from this document it was evident that the CP-USA, the Communist Party of America, was itself merely a front, one among many, cannon fodder as it were, to mask the real enemy, the real agency of treason, Aramchek. There was no membership roll in Aramchek; it did not function in any normal way. Its members espoused no particular philosophy, either publicly or privately. Yet it was Aramchek that was stealthily taking over these United States. You’d have thought someone in the pinko capital would have heard of it.

Dick had a certain knack for writing fiction which becomes true. Consider the unusual information which came out earlier this year about an anti-terrorist simulation orchestrated by the Department of Homeland Security against a similarly imaginary threat, dubbed “The Universal Adversary.”

A recent Report of the Homeland Security Council entitled Planning Scenarios describes in minute detail, the Bush administration’s preparations in the case of a terrorist attack by an outside enemy called the Universal Adversary (UA).

The Universal Adversary, is identified in the scenarios as an abstract entity used for the purposes of simulation. Yet upon more careful examination, this Universal Adversary is by no means illusory. It includes the following categories of potential “conspirators”:

“foreign [Islamic] terrorists” ,
“domestic radical groups”, [antiwar and civil rights groups]
“state sponsored adversaries” [”rogue states”, “unstable nations”]
“disgruntled employees” [labor and union activists].

According to the Planning Scenarios Report :

“Because the attacks could be caused by foreign terrorists; domestic radical groups; state sponsored adversaries; or in some cases, disgruntled employees, the perpetrator has been named, the Universal Adversary (UA).

When I first heard the term “Universal Adversary” (via Fantastic Planet) the first thing that sprang to mind for me was Von Braun’s assertion of an eventual invented extraterrestrial nemesis which the whole earth could rise up against together and fight off (a la the movie Independence Day).

A search on Google’s government-specific utility reveals a surprisingly small number of hits for “Universal Adversary.” The most interesting one seems totally unrelated to the Department of Homeland Security usage of that term, but curiously links us back to Von Braun’s assertions above:

When I entered the Air Force as a new Second Lieutenant in 1968, the Vietnam War was raging but our universal adversary was Russia and the Soviet Union. All of our strategic effort and most of our training centered on containing and or/turning back the Soviets, most likely if they were bold enough to cross in what was then West Germany.

In those early days as a military officer, I occasionally imagined being part of that future great struggle. Fortunately WW III never happened.

But will it? Will World War Three not be a battle of country against country, but a veritable War of the Worlds, or in Hellyer’s terminology, “an intergalactic war”? Will this be a “real” war against flesh and blood entities from outer space? Or will it be a war of simulation and illusory images, designed to crack down on and wipe out perceived threats in our midst, such as Aramchek?

Or do all these things somehow connect under the banner of the Universal Adversary? The Department of Homeland Security site, which mentions the UA only briefly:

27. What is the Universal Adversary?
TOPOFF 3 utilizes a data source (Universal Adversary) that replicates actual terrorist networks down to names, photos, and drivers license numbers. The data enable exercise players to simulate intelligence gathering and analysis.

It’s also fun speculation to note here that they admit to fighting not a real enemy, but a “data source.” Or, to use a more phildickian phraseology, “sentient information” or possibly even an “AI”. In Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth and Valis (two tellings of the same tale), the Plasmate, or the Logos (the living information, the Word Made Flesh) communicates to and organizes members of the resistance (Aramchek, the Secret Gray Robed Christians, the Invisible Gnostic Underground, the White Lodge) by way of AI transmissions and secret codes.

Just who or what are we fighting or going to be fighting in the near future? Are aliens coming? Are they already here? Are they us? What are we going to do about it? Going back to the original news item which spawned this tirade, we find the following:

The Canadian Exopolitics Initiative, presented by the organizations to a Senate Committee panel hearing in Winnipeg, Canada, on March 10, 2005, proposes that the Government of Canada undertake a Decade of Contact.

The proposed Decade of Contact is “a 10-year process of formal, funded public education, scientific research, educational curricula development and implementation, strategic planning, community activity, and public outreach concerning our terrestrial society’s full cultural, political, social, legal, and governmental communication and public interest diplomacy with advanced, ethical Off-Planet cultures now visiting Earth.”

Canada has a long history of opposing the basing of weapons in Outer Space. On September 22, 2004 Canadian
Prime Minister Paul Martin declared to the U.N. General Assembly,” “Space is our final frontier. It has always captured our imagination. What a tragedy it would be if space became one big weapons arsenal and the scene of a new arms race.”

Maybe that’s what’s really at stake here somehow: a war on the very imagination itself, and all the weird entities and ideas that reside there and crawl back there when the day is done. Maybe any of us who exercises that willful weirdness becomes the authentic alien, the outrageous outsider, the Universal Adversary of the system bent on sameness and simulation. When the aliens do finally land, whose side are you going to be on?