Tip: it’s not our skin, gametes, organs or DNA they’re after. It’s much more perfidious and goes several levers deeper.
Have you seen the documentary where a crew of filmmakers encounters a tribe in the oppressive green of the Amazon? Impressed by something so trivial to the western world as a box of matchsticks, the tribespeople shy away at the sight of the pale humanoids, uncanny valley made flesh before their eyes. Yet curiosity gets the best of them and despite their visceral forbiddance, they apprehensively step forward to touch the skin of the strange being that might be a spirit, a ghost or even an emissary of the gods themselves.
This interaction generates an interesting reaction, one that becomes apparent when they see themselves recorded on a camera screen. Fear. Pupil-dilating, pit-in-stomach-creating fear that they’ve been subtly robbed of some intrinsic aspect of their humanity. “This magic mirror shows a homunculus with my face, a simulacrum mirroring my actions from a few minutes ago. This tiny clone is acting as I was, speaking with my voice made smaller. The evil device has stolen something from me and used it to raise a smaller me. It therefore must be born of devil metal with nefarious intent.”
Possessing no knowledge of the nature and intent of the strange invaders, a native Amazonian might conclude that this encounter conjures evil magicks capable of abducting a man’s animus. Retreating into the jungle, they would be determined not to have anything to do with the Pale Ones and their soul-stealing trickery.
In our own Dark Forest fairytale, the whole of humanity plays the role of the officially uncontacted tribe. Governed by physicalities like the charge of the electron and the universe’s lightspeed refresh rate, we hunt for our families, carefully craft loincloths for our junk and bonk each other over the heads with increasingly sophisticated implements. We’ve enslaved the hen, the cow and the sow and use the flesh of their endless children as fuel for the decadent Empire of Man.
And so naturally, we’re deeply afraid that someone or something might do the same unto us. But it would be childish and unimaginative to think that they were after something physical, a pound of flesh or another variation of a genome.
If we are to assess their technological capabilities by way of recovered materials from UFO crashes, these beings make use of molecular assembly to craft metamaterials we haven’t even begun dreaming about. Their craft elegantly rise above the laws of physics that keep us humans down. Piloting them telepathically are biological drones grown using local materials, in massive underwater facilities the size of cities but still perfectly capable of bypassing our official detection methods.
Most unsettling of all, many researchers, whistleblowers and people who were read into the Program suspect that this entire process is an automated one, being initiated on planets that harbor or will develop life at some point.