Conversations with extraterrestrials

By Papus von Saenger

It was a peaceful December afternoon. Claude parked to the side of a small road, and got out of the car to stretch his legs. He rubbed his hands together, breathed in the frosty air and exhaled to watch the cloud of his breath. The day was particularly cold, but the sky was clear, producing the winter light that has endlessly obsessed painters. He walked a few meters towards the edge of the forest when suddenly, he was blinded by a bright red light flickering between the treetops. He covered his eyes, and when he looked again, he saw a flat shape levitating a couple of meters above the clearing. A hatch opened, a small stairway unfolded to the ground, and he watched a child descend, walking slowly toward Claude, who couldn’t make out the shape because of a radiant glow. The small form stopped about 10 meters away from him and smiled. It was bearded, had shiny black hair, elongated eyes, and in a perfect French, said:

—“You are here today because I need to talk to you. Come with me to my unit, it’s a more comfortable place to have a chat.”

This was in 1973. Since then, Claude goes by the name Rael, “light of God”. And he has created an organization, which brings together around 100,000 followers around the world, who are preparing to welcome the aliens who are expected to arrive any time now. Rael, has obviously experienced further encounters with these beings, and even visited an observation station, which is close to Earth, where the beings revealed an essential message for our species.

A friend of mine that knows him well was going out to grab a coffee with him and invited me to join them. He was in town for one of the conferences he gives around the world. I had read that this “cult”—the raelians—is described as dangerous because it sponsors scientific research, artistic development, free love, non-violence, non-accumulation of possessions and universal brotherhood. My era has recently manifested concern about the course the world is taking; I accepted the invitation because the most eccentric theories about our future cannot be compared to the ridicule of the falocracies, the capitalocracies, the mafiocracies or the idiocracies that have been imposed as our everyday standards.

I arrived fashionably late to give them time to catch up, although curiosity made me check my watch every 10 minutes. When I entered the cafe, my friend raised her hand and I head towards their table. Rael was accompanied by a beautiful teenager I assumed was his daughter. Both wore white tunics with shoulder pads and a complicated neck, made of a shiny material, and with a strange symbol sewn on the chest, a kind of stylized Star of David with a spiral in the middle. We introduced ourselves, I ordered a coffee and he ordered another lemonade. He was an older charismatic man, you could tell that back in the day he had been quite handsome; I knew he had been a singer for a while, and then a race car driver until he became a messenger. He had the book of interviews with aliens with him and he handed it over to me.

“They are called Elohim.” He gave his lemonade a sip. “Elohim has been unjustifiably translated in certain versions of the Bible as God, but it actually means those who come from Heaven in Hebrew”. They are a group of extraterrestrials who came to Earth long ago. On their distant planet, scientists began experimenting with embryonic cells that were refined to create plants and animals of all kinds. But one day, one of their creatures escaped and killed several people, so the government banned them from their planet. The scientist looked a distant planet to continue their experiments. They came to Earth, made exploration trips, and set up several satellites to study the planet. At that time, the Earth was completely covered by water, and after several years of research, they were able to determine that “the light was good,” and they began working. They used explosives to remove parts of the seabed, which became a single massive continent. They used this huge mass of land as a lab, and several groups of scientists working with artists spread and created animals and plants according to their inspiration, and thus began populating the earth and the sea. Then the most capable scientists decided to create man artificially. They created a boy and a girl and raised them as their children.

Several passages in the Bible refer to them, the original pair created by them. “Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.” Genesis 2:19.

This new allusion to the Bible irritated me slightly. I wanted him to reveal to me the great mysteries of the universe.

“So we come from them?”

“Exactly, they are our ancestors.”

“Were we created exactly in their image?”

“No. They can’t live in our atmosphere, we have adapted to it. The Earth’s atmosphere has made us grow, and they claim our faculties are slightly superior to theirs, but we have two major hindrances: first, we ignore the possibilities of our mind, and second, our lifetime is very short. Men who study their whole life, begin to make discoveries when they are old, and then they die.”

“And why do we live less than they do?”

“Longevity is not hereditary. This information, like other information, was lost a long time ago.”

As he spoke, he was anxiously watching the beautiful little girl who behaved too well for her age, taking small sips of lemonade in silence, almost motionless, absorbed in her inner peace.

“And were you given this lost information?”

“Yes, and it is very straightforward. This information is that we are responsible for ourselves, that God does not exist, that the soul is a fiction, and that the end of man is scientific progress. The exhiled Elohim who created us were forced to return to their home planet, leaving their creatures behind, in a very primitive state. We tend to gravitate away from knowledge, so they have constantly sent beings sent to Earth to help us with our technical and moral progress. They did when we started space exploration, and some years ago, at the stage of cell research. From now on they will no longer intervene, for men to achieve this progress by themselves, just like they did before us.”

“So how come they don’t do public appearances?”

“Because of the panic this would create. A certain level of preparation on both sides is necessary for this to be a peaceful meeting. I have been asked to be the one to start this movement and to build an embassy in Israel, with a free air space and a venue for this exchange. A poorly organized meeting could have disastrous social and political consequences. But one day, when we are ready, they will come.”

“So what moral progress should we aspire to?”

“Both scientific and moral. Planets have a lifespan and become inhabitable over time. When the time comes, man will have to move to another planet, and only the most evolved people will be able to do so.”

“And who are they?”

“The Geniuses, people who are capable of escaping the rational organization of brutality which our society represents. Countries, governments, wars should disappear, and a universal government, language and common economy should be established. People with an IQ 50% higher than the average will rule, and only people with a coefficient 10% higher than the average may vote. We will enter a phase of humanism, where the use of contraceptives will be promoted, and no one can have more than two children. People will work less and make love more. The Elohim spend much of their time doing it, there is no sense of possession, women are free to sleep with whoever they want, there are no race taboos, age or gender.”

“We seem far away from that model, to say the least, considering what we live like today...”

“Not as far as you think.”

“What makes you say it?”

“She does.”

The teenager turned around and looked me straight in the eye with a blank gaze.

“Let me introduce you to Eva. In 1997 we created Clonaid, the first specialized human cloning company, and in 2002 an American couple in our organization gave birth to the first baby conceived technologically. We recovered the DNA of a woman who had died some time ago and reused it. We re-created her body with all its scientific knowledge and personality, but with new elements to achieve a longer life expectancy. This is immortality. Many bioethicists are against this, just like penicillin once had its detractors. Just look at this beauty.”

She smiled and Rael leaned over and kissed her cheek. I stared at the scene without understanding entirely what was going on.

“The end of the world is here. It isn’t going to be destroyed by a disaster, no plagues, no explosions; the end of ignorance and religions that have made man feel guilty is here. We are about to learn the truth about our origins. Many villages have disappeared from the universe, like the people who created the Elohim, and now it’s up to humanity take over. There are other worlds, we are the valuable link in a chain and we’ll thrive elsewhere in the universe.”

In recent years we have survived the digital apocalypse of 2000, the financial 2008, the comet Elenin 2011, the Maya predictions of 2012. The idea of an apocalypse seduces us first of all because, as good spectators, we always appreciate a great show, a grand finale, and because in a more subtle way, it confirms the resilience of our species. After a long period of stupor in which we wonder why we exist, why we are on Earth, we discover that we are a parasite in a vast universal body, and what matters is to create enough worlds for us to never become extinct. The future is then a franchise of humanity, an algorithm invented for us to stay.