We won’t mention any names. But there are those researchers and various pundits out there who insist a world-wide cabal of amoral and greedy powermongers is preparing an imminent, global coup d’etat that will place all freedom-loving people under the yoke of social and economic domination. You know them; they’re the ones who warn that soon we will all be carrying national ID cards and have our entire financial histories and credit statuses stamped on our foreheads. I admittedly get slightly nervous myself when, for instance, I consider the sheer number of credit cards, and grocery store “club,” movie and video memberships that fill my own wallet, not to mention how eagerly lenders chase my business since I’ve remained at the same address for a number of years.

Taken a step farther, these trends shape a convenient backdrop for the frighteningly influential evangelical movement, reverently awaiting the Rapture, which, seen from another angle, might be the predicted time when the lovable ETs descend in their silver ships as the planet breaks apart during the cataclysmic pole shift—a shake-up that will kill many. Except those lucky few the highly selective ETs beam up and take to a safer planet, of course.All this belongs in the fiction category, for now. But it’s highly seductive fiction, the kind that fosters mass beliefs that cause whole cultures to revert to a kind of cosmic cowboys-and-indians mentality. You see it happening now, in the form of political firefights and near-violent conflicts over religious media (what Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ engendered, most notably).

Everyone wants to place their stamp on the historical truth, forgetting that human memory and continuity get shadowed and twisted by forces in place at the time and those that follow. Did the Jewish high priests of ancient times really fear Jesus of Nazareth that much? Did the Roman soldiers really flail, whip and pound a young Jewish carpenter into an unrecognizable, bloody mass before nailing his torn body to a cross?

Once again, into this arguably primitive debate comes the UFO entity, slicing through the dogma with its present-day ability to make such questions moot. UFOs don’t hold sway over modern political, religious or social discourse, but that’s only because their presence is unseen, kept secret, held back. Should they rise up in the mass awareness—and there are quasi-evangelical movements rallying for that—we’ll see a sudden distillation of all conflicts into a central standoff unlike any the world has seen before. It will be like the Second Coming. It will bring some powerbrokers to their knees. Others may rise up.This, too, belongs in the realm of fiction, for now.

Vicki Ecker