Just call the nice Spaceman “Daddy.”

I’ve been reading a fascinating book by Nick Redfern called On the Trail of the Saucer Spies, which is about covert government surveillance on UFO researchers and “contactees.” (If you’re not familiar with Redfern’s work, I suggest you start with the cheeky travelogue Three Men Seeking Monsters, which is a road story more in the vein of John Keel than Jack Kerouac.)

Anyway, as I read through the various descriptions of surveillance on classic 1950’s contactees like George Adamski, I started to realize something about the spacemen — and about their messages. Most human-type aliens encountered in the dawn of the modern UFO era (1947 – 1960) preached a message of peace and of the need to discontinue all nuclear programs. I’m pretty sure that this radical message had to be cloaked in an “alien” mind-frame, because the mainstream believed strongly that the bomb ended the war and kept us safe, and nuclear energy was our great hope for a future of ease.

Also, babbling about worldwide peace as the cold war began was probably about as smart a career move as walking into a movie mogul’s office and announcing that you were a dirty, dirty commie — and proud of it.

So all of that is culturally understandable, but I think there was another layer there.

One of the main tenets of our culture is that humanity is above nature. We’re not just King of the Jungle, you know — we’re not even part of the jungle. Obviously, I disagree, but culturally this is an underlying message to nearly everything you see, read, hear, or experience. As our modern age dawned in all of its pollution-spewing and community-destroying glory, a few sensitive people began to get a gnawing feeling deep inside, a little whisper in the back of their minds they could barely hear saying “This is not right.” But this message couldn’t come from us. We were the top of the hierarchy, so we had to subconsciously invent a new layer above us: The Goodly Spaceman, who travelled many light years (or possibly just from Venus) to tell us that we were being naughty, and we needed to cut it out.

Humanity was like an exhausted, spoiled child running ceaselessly from room to room howling, who needed terribly to be told to go to bed — and secretly wanted the discipline.

This message could be palatable only if it came from an authority figure — a stern parent — and someone from an “advanced” space culture could be seen as just that.

Of course, like many wild children, we didn’t listen. And sooner or later, we’re going to collapse from exertion. Maybe then those nice Nordic spacemen will come back and pick us off the floor, and tuck us safely into bed.

Maybe. But I doubt it.