This is why we fear ET. We have been predisposed, by design, to regard the extra-terrestrial as being our racial antithesis - our natural enemy. The mechanism that has been used: by those seeking to manipulate our perception of the world, to demonize ET in this manner is really quite easy to understand – they simply cast him in our own image and invest him with our own brutally self-serving motives and behavior.

ET, they would have us believe, is coming here to dispossess and destroy us in much the same way as European explorers went out to the New World - in centuries past - to inflict savagery and enslavement upon the indigenous populations that they found there.

This subliminal message is all pervasive - it even contaminates the intellects of some surprising individuals. Take, for instance, Professor Steven Hawking who: in a TV documentary program about the SETI project, said that we shouldn't be searching for or trying to contact alien civilizations because history teaches us that when a technologically advanced civilization comes into contact with a technologically backward society the latter always suffers, often horrendously, as a result.

The effectiveness of propaganda, for that is what we are dealing with here, depends – entirely – on its ability to engender and perpetuate prejudicial thinking within its target audience. To achieve this propaganda follows two basic rules: keep the message simple and keep on repeating it ad infinitum.

Now because the message must, by necessity, be kept as plain as possible it nearly always consists of one of the following: an over-simplification, a bald statement unsupported by any facts or a flagrant lie. Therein lies propaganda's main weakness – its basic message is always open to attack from academics and intellectuals (disseminating any counter-arguments widely enough to be effective is, however, another matter).

Lets take a look at this basic message – it goes like this: ET is coming here to take something away from us. This basic missive is then broken down into specific variants for delivery through the privately owned and controlled media system.

Before I examine these variants I would ask the reader to accept – as a 'given' – that the extra-terrestrial is much more technologically advanced than we are or, to put it another way, anything we can do (or conceive of doing) ET can do a whole lot better. This will avoid any undue repetition.

Variant 1 – ET is coming here (sometimes from a dying planet) because he wants to make our world his home world.

Scientists are actively researching methods by which an inhospitable planetary environment can be transformed to support human life. This process is called terra-forming; the first candidate for such treatment will be Mars.

Variant 2 – He is coming here to steal out resources/mineral wealth.

Planets are formed from the accretion disks that surround young stars. After planetary systems have become established, however, there is usually still a lot of stuff left over: in the form of asteroids and comets etc, that has not been incorporated into these systems. This stuff is identical, compositionally, to the stuff that makes up the planets - ergo it would be far more practical for ET to capture and mine this dangerous (ask any dinosaur) debris in his own backyard than cross the galaxy to come here and then have to truck it all back home again.

Variant 3 – ET is coming here to enslave us.

This is an easy one. We have factories chock full of robots - the evolution of which continues apace. They are stronger and have more stamina than us - before long they will also be smarter.

Variant 4 - The extra-terrestrial is a plant/parasite that needs to infect a host organism (us) to survive.

Bio-engineering is a science still in its infancy. So far we have only been successful with cloning technology. This will soon change: growing tissue in a laboratory is now achievable - this will be augmented by stem cell research which will, one day, allow us to grow specialized tissue (organs/muscle/bone/blood) and eventually (nightmare scenario?) complete organisms that don't require either donors or parents.

If ET (remember – whatever we can do he can do...) required a host body he would simply make one.

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