A long time ago, back in the 60’s I got interesting in flying saucers probably because in early pre-teenage they seemed more accessible than girls. We founded a society at school and camped overnight on the top of Welsh hills to observe the arrival of the aliens. I was catering officer of the first expedition and made the mistake of stocking up for a long weekend on baked beans and bread alone. This had the one advantage of making sure that there were no shortage of volunteers to leave the tent for their watch: the air was fresher outside if colder, windier (sic) and wetter. We did disturb some poachers once (mysterious lights turned out to be torches) and probably kept some very accurate records on the lights of transatlantic planes. At our worst extreme we marched the tracks of Lay Lines across country regardless of terrain seeking to understand the ancient paths of wisdom. All of this lasted about a year and then good sense and an appreciation of “O” Level Physics brought us to our senses not to mention the fact that girls were becoming more accessible with a degree of maturity.

The problem is that some people don’t grow up, or experience some form of late onset schizophrenia. If you work in counter terrorism and weak signal detection you have to entertain some pretty crazy ideas. I’m not opposed to this, we know there is a scientific basis to intuition and I have always been interested in Shamanistic Knowledge. However but you can go too far and I think I have the ideal example. A colleague at the University here at Nanyang gave me a report from May 2002 marked as © The Washington Post Company which records a Washington Think Tank briefing to uniformed Military Officers to the effect that

humans are actually a slave race created 200,000 years ago to mine monoatomic gold that creates exotic powers for alien beings from the 10th planet, the overlords of which are now remembered by mankind as ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian and Hebrew gods.

I couldn’t find the web reference on a quick search, but I did find all sorts of nonsense associated with this idea involving at least one senior figure in the Intelligence Community. Also some fairly dangerous stuff on alien abduction and World War III (2007-2011 in case you need to know for planning purposes). The next thing we know someone will try and emulate Minority Report and set up a network of dreamers to predict the next terrorist outrage.