The Galactic Quarantine

"After years and years of observing us, now this relatively violent species called the human race is about to have free reign over the entire zoo."

In the past few weeks, there's been some discussion raised within the UFO community based on a post from an internet forum that has a less-than-stellar reputation for truthfulness, to put it mildly.

Posted to the nightmare of a hell site known as 4chan, an anonymous individual claiming to have been diagnosed with a terminal illness appeared to spill all his knowledge of his time working on a government UFO program to the trolls who frequent these forums.

After initially putting it off, I decided to check it out and see what kind of bullshit disinformation was being seeded into the consciousness of the UFO community this time. I was not disappointed. Surely enough, it was another "trust me, bro" story that drives so many in the community towards skepticism and distrust.

The theory put forward by this likely LARPer, however, is something I think should be explored outside of the fanciful claims on anonymous internet message boards.

In fact, the scenario at the core of his story has been posited by much more credible people. In light of the potential for disinformation, I find it beneficial to explore what they have said for the sake of steering this conversation in a more fruitful direction.

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Lock Them Up

The "zoo hypothesis" has been around for decades. At its most basic level, this is exactly what it sounds like. The theory is that some higher intelligence with more advanced technology has isolated — or, perhaps more accurately, quarantined — the planet, resulting in a dynamic similar to that of zoo animals and the zookeeper.

Gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo.

Luis Elizondo, the former director of the Pentagon's UFO program, expanded on this potential scenario in an interview.

Let's, just for a moment, suspend where the source of these things is from. Let's just say you go to the local zoo to visit the gorilla, the Great ape exhibit. Week after week you go to the gorilla exhibit, and the Silverbacks are sitting down eating their bananas and pruning each other, and they look really cute.

One day you go to the zoo, and it appears that a key has fallen from the zookeeper's ring on their belt. One of the gorillas is looking at it, and kind of putting it in his mouth and feeling it. Well the next week you go back to the same zoo and back to the same exhibit, and that same gorilla now is sitting a little bit closer to the enclosure gate, and he's got the key and he's beginning to play with the key.

Now the monkey hasn't yet figured out how to get out of the cage, but you know it's a matter of time before that that gorilla does. And the day you go to the zoo and that gorilla is no longer in the enclosure, you better hold on to little Johnny's hand because now you've got an 800-pound gorilla on the loose. The gorilla — that cute, little gorilla — can all of a sudden turn violent.

Maybe we're dealing with something very similar. Perhaps we are the monkey, maybe we are the species that has been relegated to its cage for millennia and we're now at the point, technologically speaking, where we're beginning to discover ourselves and discover technology that allows us to get out of the cage.

So after years and years of observing us, now this relatively violent species called the human race is about to have free reign over the entire zoo. Now that's a problem because we're not necessarily a peaceful species.

What happens when that monkey now learns how to get out of its cage and shows up on your front lawn with a 12-gauge shotgun? That's a problem.

It is a rather grim scenario if this indeed turns out to be the case. As we are on the verge of becoming an interstellar species, it would make sense for any possible neighbors of ours to become concerned about humanity's tendency for violence to spread to their doorstep.

The presence of UFOs would make sense in this context as being some sort of surveillance device, as they have been known to show great interest in nuclear assets around the world. The seemingly exponential growth in reported sightings would also be supported by this theory, as surveillance would most likely increase in tandem with our advancements in developing technology.

But perhaps this isn't anything new and our species is something a more advanced civilization would consider less of a threat and more of just a nuisance that comes around every so often.

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Rise and Fall

Stanford professor Dr. Garry Nolan has also speculated on the zoo hypothesis, comparing the human race to a bunch of "angry apes" and not blaming a more advanced species for being disinterested in our species based on our current cultural trajectory as a global population.

However, his inclusion of the idea that civilizations may rise and fall due to genetic selection adds somewhat of a curveball to our current conversation.

I've said this before, I think we're just a bunch of angry apes. I don't think we're ready for some of the answers yet. It's like you don't tell your children certain things until they're mature enough, and we've pretty much proven that we're still not mature enough yet.

You know, it's interesting that evolution as I said before doesn't care about time. DNA doesn't care about time. We're sort of the first level of civilization that was achieved out of competition.

The tribe that was more competitive than the other, and frankly more aggressive — and that frankly had narcissistic, psychopathic leaders that were willing to unite a continent at the expense of blood — we're the ones that succeeded. But as we're seeing played out in today's politics — without getting political— that's not necessarily a survival trait for a species, right?

So is the long-term play for evolution, the creation of a certain level of complexity that either realizes it needs to get rid of that aggression or there will be a collapse. A rise, collapse, rise until the genetics is selected for that.

Perhaps we're not as evolved as we'd like to think we are in relation to our primate cousins, at least in the eyes of a much more advanced civilization. This is especially true if they had seen this all before.

The adaptive cycle of civilization.

If cycles of civilizations on earth have risen and fallen throughout the millennia, as Tom DeLonge has suggested during a Q&A session at the release of one of his Sekret Machines books, then this may just be another inconvenience to be dealt with in the eyes of the Others.

Sitting on stage along with his co-authors AJ Hartley and Peter Levenda, DeLonge spoke about what we may learn once the full reality of the UFO phenomenon is disclosed to the people of the world.

There’s a very specific way this is going to be framed for you guys, and the world in the coming years, that is understandable. But there is an element that is unknown that is really tricky with this stuff. There are really smart people in very secretive places debating if the whole thing is steered to prepare us for the universe at large. Or, this whole thing is some type of farm. 

It could be for energy, it could be for the resources of another nature, it could be whatever. There are also really smart people in secret places that are saying “Is this where consciousness and quantum mechanics cross over?”

Do our brains have the capacity to create these things in the sky by making matter develop? It’s like when the Native Americans would do rain dancing, and they all concentrate and meditate together, and then it rains. Well, is that happening when we all just go, “bug-eyed green aliens,” and all of a sudden they start to appear? 

They don’t know about some of this stuff. But we do know it has the power to direct how mankind evolves over a very long period of time, potentially in cycles. Because when you look at the Giza pyramids and some of these other places, there are some grand cycles that we’re starting to discover with mankind. We’re kind of going, “Okay, maybe we’re a little bit older than 3000 B.C.”

The idea of the earth being some sort of farm is even more grim, implying that humans may have some sort of desirable use. On the other end of the zoo spectrum is the idea of a nature preserve, where a species can live freely in the wild with limited geographical constraints.

So where does humanity sit on this spectrum of possibilities?

If these UFOs are meant for surveillance, what are we to make of their reported occupants?

And what does that mean when it comes to the phenomenon of reported alien abductions?

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Home on the Range

All over the world, there are countless reports of encounters not just with UFOs, but with beings that seem as if they are not from this planet. Whether or not they are indigenous to Earth is another conversation, but the behaviors they exhibit could also make sense in the context of the zoo hypothesis, as well as the theories about farms and nature preserves.

Could Earth just be the equivalent of a national park to a more advanced species?

Humans abduct and study free-range animals all the time to learn more about them. We put tracking devices on them to study their movements, actions which line up almost exactly with reports of alien implants. For the purposes of sparing the reader from even more distressing possibilities, I will refrain from exploring any analogies to farm animals, but the unthinkable implications of that theory are pretty clear.

The occupants of these seemingly impossible craft may not be what they look like, however. Perhaps they are just a physical manifestation of what the intelligence behind the UFO phenomenon feels is the best way to interact with our species.

Professor Nolan has postulated that the portrayal of the stereotypical "Gray alien" may just be the phenomenon doing its best to appear as something different enough to be understood as non-human, but not so different as to shatter our reality.

Elizondo speculates about this similarly in the context of the zoo hypothesis.

Mimicry is something that is common in nature, and it’s even common in what we do, to defend ourselves in the animal kingdom. Let’s take a coral snake versus a king snake. The coral snake is very deadly. The king snake has the same colors, except for the color arrangements that are in the opposite order, and these animals mimic other animals for protection.

Now, let’s look at it from a humanistic perspective. We have something that we call light deception on Navy ships that, in the old days, we would string lights in a way that would try at night to make a large destroyer appear to be a fishing boat, a troller. Light deception is part of camouflage, part of survival. So if there is a species that is far more advanced than human beings, it’s not inconceivable.

Look, we can go to the panda exhibit in the zoo in China and see that zookeepers will often wear these — and it appears quite ridiculous to us, but not so ridiculous to the pandas — the zookeepers are required to wear a panda suit. Big, furry teddy bear suits.

They do that so when they go into the enclosure to clean up the enclosure and whatnot, provide food, they don’t disrupt the panda population, at least as much as possible. Of course, it’s entertaining to us as humans to see a bunch of people walking in furry suits, but at the end of the day, it’s effective.

So I don’t think it’s inconceivable. The problem is that when we start going down the road, you say shapeshifting and things like that, immediately we start going into the world of “woo” and paranormal. There is nothing wrong with that, I’ve written articles on the paranormal. Everything in science, by definition, is paranormal until it becomes normal, frankly.

So the problem is that we don’t have hard evidence, we have a lot of anecdotal evidence. A lot of people report seeing things, that these UAP can look like an aircraft. Sometimes it disguises itself as a 747, or that the occupants can, you know, make themselves look like human beings.

Recall, in his 60 Minutes interview, Robert Bigelow said he was certain that a non-human intelligence walks among the people of earth and is "right under our noses.”

Automeris egeus moth displays its eye spots, a form of Batesian mimicry.

Are these beings able to disguise themselves and pass as humans themselves?

Have they developed technology that can be used in a similar way as the panda suit Elizondo describes?

Or have they evolved to the point where they can mimic other lifeforms in a highly advanced form of biomimicry?

If the zoo hypothesis is correct, and we dwell somewhere in between a farm and a nature preserve in the eyes of a more evolved species than our own, humanity will have to take a serious look at where we stand in the universe.