Ancient Extraterrestrial Vultures; or, X-Files season 10

Thanks to our membership with Blockbuster on-line, my wife and I recently finished the last season of X-Files, causing us to become rather sad. I have caught myself saying, "Honey, did the X-Files arrive?" when what I should have said was, "Did Angel season 5 arrive?" It's not as if Joss Whedon is anything other than genius, so I should not be sad that it is Angel season 5 that arrived, rather than nonexistent X-Files season 10. Nevertheless, I am pining. I miss the high times and frolics watching tales of governmental conspiracies and humans with alien DNA.

Well, I was reading Plutarch's Lives the other day, and behold, it was like watching X-Files season 10! Plutarch was remarking about a unique feature of vultures when contrasted with other birds: "all other birds are, so to say, never out of our eyes;...but a vulture is a very rare sight, and you can seldom meet with a man that has seen their young; their rarity and infrequency has raised a strange opinion in some, that they come to us from some other world" (italics mine). Now, Plutarch was working for "the man"; he received the insignia of a consul and a post as Procurator of Greece under the Roman emperors Trajan and Hadrian. Given these governmental affiliations, it's awfully suspicious that he would go out of his way to mention this belief in extraterrestrial life only in order to to dismiss it as a "strange opinion." Now, Plutarch's Lives is a big book, so it's not as if he was stuck for material. He must have mentioned it because the matter was of grave importance. Therefore, the only explanation that makes sense for why he mentioned this observation in an already big book is that a large number of people claimed to have seen vultures transform into aliens, and it was imperative that he discredit them. Admittedly, we rarely hear mention of just how much of Plutarch's work was dedicated to perpetuating the governmental denial of extraterrestrial life, which confirms the effectiveness of the governmental authorities in conducting the cover-up.

It is somewhat sad that, with all of Mulder's desperate searching for confirmation in his belief in aliens, he never considered what was right in front of his face: vultures. Or rather, he never considered that vultures were not right in front of his face, because they were, in fact, from another world! To the best of my knowledge, vultures do not show up frequently in the X-Files, which should have been a clue to Mulder. In one episode, Mulder came to suspect that alien colonizers had taken the form of the everyday cockroaches (season 3, I think?), but this plotline was dropped--largely, I think, because that was never the aliens' plan at all. They were going to be vultures! What better way to get human tissue to experiment on than by pretending to be a carrion bird? So simple. So subtle. So avian.

Now, I am not saying that modern-day vultures are the same as their alien prototypes. The aliens are far too crafty to be using the same animals for several millennia. However (and don't miss the significance of this) their strategy is still the same, because they are still alien strategists. The ancient Greek and Roman humans were able to recognize an animal was an alien on the basis of their rarely ever seeing it. That is, the proof that something is an alien is that it appears to be an endangered species. That is how they trick you: they make you think that they are endangered ... when they are really endangering you!

Recognizing this connection between "endangered species" and alien colonization is paramount to stopping the alien threat and to calling the Bush administration to accountability. For too long, environmentalists have played right into the government's hands, saying things like, "We need to preserve these endangered animals from extinction." Instead, we need to say things like, "the government must destroy even more rain forests so that we can annihilate these aliens and preserve humanity from extinction!" Please, we need everyone to get involved. Do it. For Scully's baby.