why you’re probably not an alien descendant, redux

Sometimes, you have to go out of your way to look for post material. Sometimes, ideas brew in the back of your head until you have a complete thought that works. And sometimes, the exact blog fodder you didn’t even know you sought until you saw it arrives in your inbox on its own. In the years this blog has been up and running, the number and the frequency of posts while I am actively writing, gave plenty of journalists and PR agents the idea that this is my full time job. It’s not, as should be clear from my short bio, but nevertheless, unsolicited press releases, offers to do interviews, and review copies of books get sent to me on a regular basis. Most of the books in question won’t be blockbusters flying off the shelves at your local bookstore, or on back order from your favorite online retailer, i.e. Amazon, so I seldom mention them. But this one, while not destined for the bestseller list as well, is actually noteworthy in its own, very bizarre way.

Across the ufology and ancient alien theory community, there’s a pervasive idea of human-alien hybrids either living among us, or being with us in the past. When the whole idea was just being distilled into von Daniken’s books, the most popular alternative history of humanity held that we were all of alien origin, engineered to be slaves to an extraterrestrial civilization known to us as the Anunnaki. Compared to other species on this planet, the theorists argued, we were way too smart for our own good and biology alone can’t explain the sudden leap in intelligence. Until the alien part would’ve come up, you could’ve sworn you were reading a creationist tract. But as of late, there’s been a bit of a refinement along the lines of David Icke’s ideas. Humans evolved on their own, just as we were taught in a proper science class. It’s just that some humans had very unconventional families in which mom or dad was an alien from the otherwordly ruling caste. I’d like to think of it as a classic fairy tale but the prince or princess is a lizard from Tau Ceti.

Problem is that the original theory makes more sense than the emerging one because we can’t possibly hybridize with an alien life form, even if we consider the implications of panspermia for some sort of common origin for our species. No matter how closely the organic compounds that gave rise to human and any hypothetical alien life would match, the entire hereditary machinery would depend on the chemistry of their home star system. Even something as basic as DNA on another world could look familiar, but have radically different fundamental elements. Usually, an evolutionary path which took place on the same planet, forking fewer than a million years ago is a requirement for even the idea of successful hybridization, though the degree of success could vary wildly, and most offspring would end up sterile a few thousand generations into it. Should a spacecraft in our far future ever land on a planet around another star where other humans with whom we’d successfully procreate live, a lot of very interesting questions will need answers, but that’s pretty much the only way we could reproduce with any functionally alien species.

But you see, the theorists have thought of that. No matter how radical the differences in DNA or underlying physiology are, a sufficiently advanced civilization could manipulate it to produce the desired effect. We’re already starting to get a good handle on genetic engineering, so shouldn’t star-traversing aliens be even more adept at the technology? And that’s pretty much the vein in which ufologist and cryptozoologist Nick Redfern argues in the aforementioned book, that rare, complex human blood types called Rh negative are the result of Annunaki genetic engineering, and that pregnancies in which the mother is Rh+ and the fetus is Rh- are a telltale sign that the incompatibility isn’t a quirk of biology, but of alien tinkering. He goes even further to attribute the blood group to Rhesus monkeys and posit that by the theory of evolution, an Rh- human would have had to deviate from our normal evolutionary past. After all, how would you possibly argue with the forces of evolution and genetics without denying a century of scientific progress?

Well, you do it by pointing out that pretty much everything underpinning Redfern’s idea is a very drastic oversimplification strapped to the Hyperbole Rocket™, and blasted into space, fueled by a pseudoscientific word salad on its way into orbit. There is nothing so terribly mysterious about the Rh blood group that any deviation from norm could only be alien in origin, the Rh+ and Rh- designation is actually just a flag as to whether the blood cell proteins have something typically known as the D antigen, one of some 50 other antigens in the Rh group. The group was named after the Rhesus monkey because chemical reactions with its blood were used to help scientists study the group and find out how to treat Rh factor incompatibilities during pregnancy. It’s really kind of a misnomer to bring up these monkeys, according to the NIH. To say that about 10% of humanity lacking a single antigen in about 50 during a single test can only come about through alien intervention sounds somewhat absurd in this light. While we’re at it, what about the CCR5 mutation which renders less than 1% of us immune to HIV? Is this proof of aliens as well?

Rather than only being logical that every human should share the same evolved traits, that can only happen through cloning. Should you look hard enough at the 0.5% of the genes making us unique individuals created by sexual reproduction rather than budding or self-fertilization, and a whole lot of differences emerge. For example, those living in the Andes and Himalayas evolved completely different ways to cope with living at extreme altitudes. Native Africans seem to have less in common with each other than with Eurasians, genetically speaking. And one in as many as 8 million children may suffer from progeria, a genetic mutation that accelerates aging. Using the same logic as Redfern, we could point to any rare or peculiar fact in human genes and then claim them to be a side-effect of alien genetic engineering because they’re rare or peculiar. But that would make just as little sense. So should you ever find out that you’re Rh-, don’t worry, an investigation into your genetic lineage won’t uncover a great-to-the-500th-degree-grandma who came to Earth in a flying saucer. Chances are that every ancestor you had was very human.