SETI versus the Trickster Gods: Part Two

Life, the universe and everything is full of paradoxes, puzzles, anomalies, and just a host of other weirdness often seemingly deliberately designed to toss wicked curve and knuckleballs at us ever scratching-our-heads humans. SETI doesn’t seem to be immune from this mischievous wickedness. Is the cosmos, Mother Nature, just a real bitch, just naturally perverse, or is there some sort of intelligence at work here tossing us those wicked curve and knuckleballs? 

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

Let’s start off assuming that there currently exist extraterrestrials monitoring Planet Earth in their spaceships – call them UFOs.

Let’s further assume that these extraterrestrials have been monitoring Planet Earth for multi-thousands of years.

Let’s further assume that way back then those extraterrestrials were known collectively as the polytheistic gods.

Every culture had a mythology that had at its base a motley collection of polytheistic ‘gods’. At least one of those ‘gods’ was known as a ‘trickster god’. It might have been called Loki in Norse mythology or Raven and Coyote in Native American Indian mythology, or Hermes and Prometheus in Greek mythology or Krishna in India but tricksters they were. These trickster gods were mischievous practical jokers, but often not in a funny ‘ha-ha’ vein. In fact at one time or another most of the ‘gods’ liked to play practical jokes on their peers and on us lesser mortals too, again, not always in the funny “ha-ha – gotcha”  mode.

So, fast-forward to the present, I can well imagine some extraterrestrial(s) up there in orbit around Earth in their flying saucer(s) having a bit of fun. They’d beam down a quickie artificial radio signal, say to some radio telescope of other, and then turn off the signal. While the poor SETI radio astronomers were busy trying to verify this ‘wow’ event, the extraterrestrial(s) were laughing their antenna off at their trickster prank!

I’m sure humans aren’t the only intelligent species who like to play practical jokes and invent puzzles, paradoxes and riddles. The trickster ‘gods’ would perfectly fit the bill as cosmic jokesters.

Yet another trickster-related phenomenon could be the mystery of the LDE’s – Long Delayed Echoes. If you send off a radar pulse to the Moon say, you’d expect a return within a few seconds, not say a minute or an hour or a day later. If you did, an addition to the expected principal’s echo’s time interval, it would be a scientific anomaly of the highest order with the delayed echo having a decidedly unknown or uncertain origin. Well, such sporadic LDE’s have in fact happened starting in 1927 (through to the present) with no apparent consistency. It’s like sending a radar signal to the Moon at noon getting the expected few second echo and then another secondary echo one minute later; repeating the exercise at one pm with the principal few second delay echo received, but another unexpected delayed echo coming now five minutes later. In short, the phenomena is fleeting and non-repeatable and (shades of the ‘WOW’ signal) non-verifiable. Though various hypotheses have been suggested, none can adequately explain the sum total of LDE’s. An alien space probe (often termed a Bracewell probe) within our solar system is one of those hypotheses whereby the probe sends back a terrestrial radar/radio signal in order to attract attention to itself and therefore the existence of ETI. Of course the space probe could be a ‘manned’ spaceship, with at least one crewmember a trickster ‘god’.

Now I’m not making this LDE - sometimes termed long-delayed radar or radio echo - phenomena up. It’s well documented in the scientific literature.

But why stop there? If trickster ‘gods’ wanted to have a bit of relatively harmless fun with us humans, well perhaps they’re behind the crop circle business! Now the absurdity of ET coming across light-years of space away with a motive just to dabble in agricultural (crop circle) graffiti has been pointed out by others. I quite agree. But, if ET were already here (and agricultural graffiti wasn’t the motivation) and some ET’s have a wicked sense of humor and like to befuddle the humans, well that’s a motive!

Then too there are all those outrageous flying saucer tales spun by the ‘contactes’ mainly in the 1950’s though not confined to just that decade. Not only were they rubbished by the mainstream UFO skeptics, they were rubbished by most nuts-and-bolts UFO researchers. At best the ‘contactees’ were delusional; at worse fraudsters – though nobody was ever charged and convicted with any intent to defraud. So, are we to believe their tales of rides in flying saucers to the home abodes (like Venus and Saturn) of the angelic-like ‘Nordics’ – the Space Brothers whose cosmic message preempted those of  the 1960’s Hippies?  Probably not you’d say because the ‘contactees’ were obviously delusional or fraudsters. Or, might the ‘contactees’, and through them their readers, have been the victims of cosmic pranksters – our trickster ‘gods’? The ‘contactees’ could easily have been relatively innocent victims of a massive hoax. You can hear the tricksters now – “ha, ha – fooled you – again”.

And so not to discriminate here, there are also tricksters among the various mythologies’ fairy-folk that range from just slightly mischievous to downright malevolent. Depending on who or what you want to pin the blame on, well, there’s a vast population of the potentially guilty to point fingers at!