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Aliens to Earth: Heads Talking into Cameras, Please Stop!

Image by Amanna Avena.

Years ago, I made it to the big time and was interviewed for a segment on one of the primetime television “news magazines.“ I spruced myself up, put on a suit coat, combed my hair and beard, all that nonsense – trying not to look like the backcountry slob that I am.

My father saw the segment and called me up. In his old age – this wasn’t long before he died, in his 80s – he had become gruff and rude, oblivious to people’s feelings, saying whatever he liked when he liked (which I admired).

“You looked and sounded like a big fuckin phony,” he said. “That wasn’t you up there.”

He was right, of course. There is a fundamental law of human behavior at play here, and it has to do with pointing cameras at people. Just as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle shows that observed particles will be altered by the act of observation, so it goes with Homo sapiens when you stick a camera in their face. Actively observed, your gestalt changes. You become, instantaneously, a big fuckin phony. I don’t know why this is so – some system dynamic in human psychology – but it is so; I’ve observed it hundreds of times in others, and so have you; and my father observed it in me.

We live now in an age when everyone is pointing cameras, mostly at themselves, and the effect is at once sad, distressing, and, as the kids say, cringe. Millions upon millions of people, capturing their visages in the digital slipstream and yapping into and out of screens, have transformed into the talking heads of TV yore that even as a young child one knew to be a world of fakers.

Everyone knows what’s happening, because of the aforementioned inexplicable (it probably has an explanation, but I’m too lazy to look for it) programming of human psychology, which reveals to people even moderately self-aware that when you stick the camera in your face, trying to be real for your primetime moment, you know you are doing a disservice to your fellow humans by faking it.

(Countless online “journalists“ have gone this route, that of the talk show; I urge them to reject the glib and shallow inquiry which the medium by its nature compels, and go back to the written word, the only communication that matters and that will last through the ages.)

Which brings me to the point of this dispatch: it turns out aliens do exist (not news) and for years (here’s the news) they’ve been watching and reviewing in detail billions of hours of Homo sapiens’ bloviations into cameras on social media and other platforms (e.g. YouTube, Substack).

They have built specially for the human race what they call a Pleaidean Mendacitometer (these folks hail from the Pleiades) that can measure non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation produced from mashing together, in a single wave, the sight and sound of every talking head on Earth blabbing at the same time. When they isolated this frequency of keening bullshit, via the Mendacitometer, they realized it was extremely dangerous.

According to published studies, when directed at Pleaidean test subjects, the frequency produced stunning immediate reductions in cognition, and, in the worst impacted subjects, “a patterned buzzing autistic form of enunciation“ identified as “podcast speak.“ The pattern consisted primarily of using the word “I“ over and over.

Entrained thus in the frequency, test subjects not only became stupider but also, over time, more hideously narcissistic, and this effect continued even after exposure ceased, suggesting long-term brain damage.

The conclusion was that social media as a whole, which had led to the omnipresence of the podcast, the YouTube talk show, the selfie video and so on, constituted “an embarrassment to sentience everywhere and a toxic pollutant, which, if allowed to escape earth, could poison minds from Orion‘s Arm to the Galactic Center.“

It was decided, therefore, that the human race, having reached this level of mass communications, should be exterminated as a threat to intelligent life. At this very moment, Pleaidean death rays are powering up.

So there you have it: it won’t be nuclear fire or climate heating or eco-collapse that kills us out. It will be the endlessly growing chatter of the talking heads.

Christopher Ketcham is author of “This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West.”  He writes at his Substack, Denatured, and can be reached at christopher [dot] ketcham99 [at] gmail.com. 

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