There is danger in this notion of “ultraterrestrials.”  Not the usual dangers one would associate with a dangerous creature or being, but the dangers of any maladaptive delusion.  This may impress you as a bold statement to make about the sincerely held belief of many otherwise apparently sane individuals, but an exploration of the dangers mentioned below will hopefully put the lie to that impression.  So what are these dangers?

1) Inhibiting the development of rational reactions to serious human problems.

Culprits: angels, demons, the “Fair Folk,” deities.  By providing a culturally entrenched but utterly irrational explanation for human suffering and methods of relieving it, the legends told of these beings discourage careful examination of causal relationships which might yield solutions.  The “Fair Folk,” mentioned above, stood as an explanation for the deaths of infants, sickly infants and children, unruly or disobedient children, and unusually intelligent children.  Such children were labeled “changelings” and believed to have been stolen for the armies of Fairy kingdoms, replaced either by an enchanted inanimate object or a fairy or similar creature, who considered it a luxury to be brought up as a human child.  There is considerable overlap here with the second danger, which we’ll discuss next.  The problem here is that, in the case of infant deaths, for example, the methods used to prevent this from happening were all based on appeasing or warding off the “Fair Folk” so the children wouldn’t be stolen.  There was no reason, then, to examine other possible causes of infant death, such as sleeping position.  The “Back to Sleep” method could have been discovered in the West centuries earlier than it was.  Likewise, psychology as a discipline has evolved over many, many years before reaching its current form.  Much of that growth could have been accomplished a great deal earlier in human history, were it not for the ready explanation of mental illness by means of demonic possession.  Who knows what current problems could be solved more quickly if people would abandon unfounded superstitions?

2) Exposing innocent people to persecution and even death. 

Culprits: demons, the “Fair Folk,” reptilians.  As mentioned above, many children in centuries past were accused, for a variety of reasons, of being “changelings,” malignant creatures which had “replaced” their “real” children.  Such children might be killed, abandoned, or driven out into the wilderness.  Occurrences of what we now know to be a common phenomenon known as Sleep Paralysis led to people of many ages being accused of involvement with demons and witchcraft and brutally murdered.  Thankfully, the accusation of being a reptilian is made only by those on what is considered the very fringes of conspiracy thinking, but imagine the pogroms if such a view were common!  Even today, many children in Africa and elsewhere are accused of witchcraft and demonic possession and tortured or killed.  The US, bastion of civilization we might like to think it is, still sees many cases each year of children accused of possession being brutalized in terrible “exorcisms.”

3) Shortchanging the real accomplishments of human beings. 

Culprits: “Ancient Astronauts,” Atlanteans, deities, various aliens.  The implication that the Mayans, the Egyptians, or other cultures from our past could not have accomplished the feats of architecture and culture attributed to them by anthropologists is among the most racist, bigoted, and hurtful beliefs propagated on the fringe of human discourse.  Those who hold their own lack of imagination as evidence of humanity’s incompetence need mental help.  The ones who take that line of reasoning further to suggest that our greatest thinkers, artists, and scientists have been aliens, or that visitors brought us our most hard-won advancements, like the microwave, integrated circuit, and digital information storage spit in the face of hard working dedicated people that still live today.

There are other dangers I could name, but I submit that no reader who is not moved by those already listed would bat an eye at a few more.  We are very lucky, very clever animals who have it within ourselves to write our own destiny, create our own meaning, and struggle—sometimes successfully—against the bonds placed on us by nature.  Each of us is a fragile, extraordinary creature deserving of respect, dignity, and love not possible in world full of imagined visitors, especially of the “ultra” variety.