The physical evidence on whether the Starchild skull is an ET is still inconclusive. The SC foundation needs to finish their genetic sequencing to professional standards. Skeptics have finally made a decent case here and here. However, after Pye’s death, the foundation has become more open with its data. This particularly helps the genetic case, clarifying that it is still inconclusive. Regarding the morphological debate, I lack the expertise and skull data to make a determination.
If the skeptics are right, the SC skull is an epically rare hydroencaphilac progeriac with head binding. If the SC ET proponents are right, it is history’s most important anthropological find.
Naturally, I’ve been wrong before. That Salvatori guy turned out to be a shallow-socket truth-challenged Mexican like Carlos Menstelia, not a deepsocket. I no longer believe the 9/11 building collapses had to be demolitions, thanks to Jim’s skepticism. (However, I remain convinced of the falsehood of the official explanation, as does anyone else with a brain.)
I don’t think Pye was deliberately dishonest, but he left something to be desired in his competence and domain knowledge, and he certainly wanted to believe. The establishment bears responsibility for the SC ambiguity as well – if they generally behaved with honesty and integrity, fringe ideas could much more rapidly be falsified.
Thus, this post is an exercise in 10th man doctrine.
If the SC skull turns out to be fully human, then my erroneous belief in the ET origin hypothesis led to the discovery of an anthropometric psycho-archetype as unique and distinctive as that of the melonhead and the Neanderthal. That is a worthwhile payoff. In general, properly managed heterodox thinking tends to lead to such payoffs, simply because the field is sparse. But you cannot get the payoff without actually believing for a while. Attempting to do otherwise is like buying clothes without trying them on.
** A problematic people
For the sake of worldview consistency, I would prefer that the SC skull turn out to be human. In that case, SC’s would simply be a degenerated version of the original melonhead, interesting in their polar opposition to the more common dolichocacephalic modern melons, and for what they reveal about the functioning of the temporal lobes, but of no real significance to human origins.
Unfortunately, due to the starkness and consistency of SC facial, skull, and psychological patterns, and the strength of their antipathy to melons, I cannot yet bring myself to accept this version of events.
Assuming the ET hypothesis is correct, then 900 years ago Earth was visited by aliens with super-gene splicing tech. Given the level of their bioengineering, and their non-Earthlike DNA, we must also assume they had the UFO’s described in South American Indian legend.
We are thus left to wonder what possible reason they might have for creating and then whisking away SC/human hybrids. And, how such an advanced race could possibly “accidentally” leave a few of those subjects behind.
To maintain clarity, we must distinguish between the original aliens, the first generation of hybrids they created, and the increasingly diluted descendents of those hybrids. I will refer to them as ur-SC’s, hybrid SC’s, and modern SC’s, respectively.
** Riddle me this
My goal in this post is simply to put together ONE explanation that fits all the data points. Almost certainly, this explanation will be overly stretched to fit some points that are false. Absolutely certainly, it will gloss over huge sections of history that are simply unknown unknowns. Nevertheless, I prefer having an hypothesis to indefinitely juggling unconnected and contradictory data.
The problem is that ET Starchildren are superfluous and fit nowhere. They disrupt the narrative without adding explanatory value.
I can’t put them on Earth, in any period, because their DNA is un-Earthlike.
If I put them nearby, I have to explain why they’re hiding and why they haven’t used their tech to dominate Earth – a tech advantage that still existed 900 years ago, and most likely persists today.
If I put them far away, in time or space, I have to explain how and why they came here in small numbers.
The story of the European colonization of North America provides an example of how a technologically superior civilization can fail to establish anything but a few quickly swallowed outposts. That might be useful.
The Bible, Apocrypha, and Babylonian legends speak of relations between gods and men, but these seem adequately accounted for by the melonhead narrative. The SC’s don’t seem to fit.
** The Forgotten Faction
Another problem is that it’s difficult to imagine modern SC’s as anything other than harmless goobers. They’re almost universally egalitarian feel-good eccentrics and all-around nice guys.
On the other hand, consider your impression of the average Japanese guy on vacation in America. He epitomizes harmless goober, yet not long ago the Imperial Japanese Army was blowing up the Russian navy, raping Nanjing, bombing Pearl Harbor, and torturing European POW’s. There is a great difference between a patriarchal Japanese man steeped in several thousand years of Malthusian warfare on a tiny island, and an isolated tourist from a defeated, demilitarized, feminized and Keynesianized US colony.
The Japanese racial character is capable of both. It is difficult to extrapolate the former from the latter, but not impossible. So, what is the SC racial character capable of?
Modern SC’s are egalitarian, positive, and constantly reprogramming and redefining – self and other, emotions and concepts, even down to identity.
The parietal builds hierarchical-symbolic pyramids, the occipital gradually accumulates an intuitive vision of a concrete organic whole, the frontal cortex builds ethical abstract universals… and the temporal rewrites. It has no bottom, up, down or sideways. Everything is fluid – always seeking a more perfect state of harmony.
This we must extrapolate backwards, not only in scale, but also intensity. We seek to envision not just an empire of modern SC’s, but an empire of ur-SC’s.
Frankly, this thought frightens me. I think I can envision the worst ur-Melon theocracy with relative calm. At most, I experience hostility and disgust. But the ur-SC empire sparks actual fear in my heart.
Why? Well, when the ur-Melons capture you, they may throw you in the dungeon or enslave you to build monuments. At worst, they’ll sacrifice you to the sun in a particularly gruesome manner. And that’s it; you’re free.
But the ur-SC’s don’t want to hurt you. They want to rewrite you.
That’s what I fear – the Void, the Hivemind; annihilation without death or end.
And that’s what I think the ur-SC empire was. Not isolated bands of altruistic brawny professors turbocharged with genetic memory like the Thals. Not grace-filled, golden-hearted emperor gods like the ur-Melons. The ur-SC’s were the pulsing dimensionless warm bliss of the Hivemind, in which identity is forever lost to the currents of an infinitely rewriting ocean. There is something cold and insectoid about it that makes me want to bite my suicide pill early.
Put a Thal and an SC in a room, and you get a conversation. Put a Melon and an SC in the room, and you get an asymmetrical power struggle. I think my reaction is an instinct from the melon half of my heritage. Thals don’t seem to have this reaction at all. And it’s the hierarchical part of me that’s most deeply offended, the fire. A Thal is too well shielded to be concerned about subsumption, or perhaps even understand the concept.
Paralells in sci fi would be the insects from Ender’s Game, or the Zerg, if zerging were based on spiritual ecstasy and benevolence rather than hatred and bloodlust, or the Vyriim from the Dossiers of Asset 108 (great series), if they were more sympathetically portrayed. In occult terms, the difference between melon and SC is the difference between obeisance to demons and “partnership” with spirit helpers.
Anyhow, the contrast between SC ocean and Melon pyramid reminds me of a forgotten nearly-Biblical faction – Chaos. Some see the Babylonian myth of Marduk slaying Tiamat in Genesis’s divided firmament. I don’t pretend to know. But we need a faction, and Chaos fits, so let’s roll with it.
** The Beginning – Chaos vs. Right
Thus the war of creation was between Yahweh – whose Son was a melonhead – and the ur-SC empire. We need a location, so let’s say Mars. In the aftermath, God stripped the Red Planet and used her materials to remake Earth.
Did Earth ever pass close to Mars? Astrophysicists, weigh in.
At this point, it would be a good idea to review our spiritual bestiary.
From the Bible, we get Yahweh and Jesus (a melon, according to the Shroud of Turin and New Testament psychological profile). Lucifer also appears strongly melon.
When Jesus returned, he sported a “glorified body”. While flesh, he could walk through walls, appear and disappear, etc. Thus, a transdimensional body.
(Readers of Flatland will easily conceive of “meatspace”, 3D c-space, as a shitty, cramped place where nobody cool wants to live. Incidentally, a transdimensional being could police meatspace as easily as a sphere could police Flatland – by hovering above the “board”. Not only could the sphere see around corners, he could also simultaneously see what all the squares, triangles and dodecahedrons had for breakfast. Spooky stuff.)
By contrast, other spirits in the Bible seem to lack bodies entirely, and are eager to inhabit any available, even a meatspace herd of swine. Now that’s poverty.
So we have gods and angels, embodied and disembodied transdimensional spirits.
Let’s assume that from Yahweh down to the angels, it’s all ur-melons with varying power levels. They all started off in “Heaven”, a clearly hierarchical place. Lucifer rebelled, lost, and got kicked out with 1/3 of the angels. They fell to Earth, and eventually got up to those shenanigans described in the Apocrypha, Epic of Gilgamesh and related tales – Enki’s escaped Thal experiment, the weak homo sapiens “lulu”, the nephilim, etc.
On the ground, the hominids evolve Earth-adapted bodies, and offer the raw material for the ur-Melons’ various experiments and interventions.
Where do the ur-SC’s fit in all this?
It’s already a busy scene. You’ve got two major factions – Right and Light, Yahweh and Lucifer. Demographically, you’ve got everything from meatspace-bound hybrids to interdimensional ur-Melon angels to low-IQ Earth hominids.
Well, I think the ur-SC’s are mostly wiped out. At least in this solar system. But I think they still managed to get up to a bit of creative sabotage. They never stopped hating melons – of either faction, most likely. So finally we have a motive for them coming here to make their hybrids. The SC’s would need compatible ambassadors to do their thing. They work by psychological syncing, and lacked combat power after their defeat.
After all, haven’t a lot of things gone wrong? The Thals getting loose, the collapse of the worldwide Melon empire, the lulus rioting and watering down melon blood… the inmates are definitely running the asylum on planet Earth. Even accounting for the ravages of time, it has been a long series of disasters for the Melon cause.
But a disaster for the meatspace Melons does not a disaster for the ur-Melons make. Lucifer may be banished from Heaven, but he’s clearly not stuck “in the meat”. Which means, the defeat and miscegenation of Earth’s melon houses may be perfectly ok with him. Is not the soul factory churning at full capacity? Moreover, the inevitable Melon tendency to unite under global governance has only been slowed by minor inconveniences such as the division of Pangea, Babel and the Flood. Perhaps those melon monarchies even represented an unwantedly conservative and benevolent influence.
So, with two melon factions slugging it out, and ur-SC’s adding a dash of chaos here and there, the current state of Earth begins to make sense. As confirmed when Lucifer offered Jesus the world on the mountaintop, Lucifer reigns. His transdimensional cops ensure no breaches of secrecy by keeping ET and/or supernatural activity out of the Western public’s eye. The ur-SC’s were last seen 900 years ago, and perhaps recently in the dreams of UFO enthusiasts. Possession is still kosher, but manifestation is strictly controlled.
And the Neanderthal, bastard child of this titanic conflict, keeps plodding along unnoticed, wondering when he’ll have the wilderness to himself again.
** Odds and ends
There’s plenty left to say, subpoints I forgot, details you could arrange one way or another. But before trying to resolve all that stuff, it’s important to get the place of the SC’s right.
Are SC and Melon like France, Britain and Spain, evenly matched for a time in the fight for a new continent? A hot naval war might explain the absence of any permanent ET landing parties.
I considered this explanation but rejected it, in favor of the melon-dominance theory. I think it fits best with the data points I’m trying to cover. Feel free to chime in.
At worst, this is a fun exercise in speculative fiction. We all like sci fi and fantasy, right?