Thought Experiment

What if an Alien A.I. Watched 60 Minutes?

The question isn’t only what are we going to do now about these Others, but what are they going to do now that we’re starting to recognize them?

The historic May 16, 2021 episode of 60 Minutes has aired. The “UAP” segment, reported by correspondent Bill Whitaker, went out of its way to not use the word “alien” or extraterrestrials and focused instead on the reality and unknown quality of these objects and their incredible capabilities. The report made clear that these objects are not U.S. technology but focused more broadly on the possibility that an adversary like Russia or China flies them. For the purposes of this article, however, we choose Door Number Three — ET.

Imagine This…

For the sake of argument, as a thought experiment, assume that the UAP vehicles being talked about by 60 Minutes, and the UFOs and flying saucers going back for 75 years, are from someplace that isn’t here. In other words, they are, most likely, extraterrestrial or extradimensional.

Let’s imagine that some or all of these visitors, these Others, used some form of A.I. or artificial intelligence to cross these vast distances, or even to cross these alternate dimensions, or whatever they have had to do to get here from there.

Since most observers agree that the advanced technology we are seeing is a lot better than ours, and since we are actively pursing A.I. as we speak here, let’s also assume they have employed some sort of artificial intelligence and that it is robust, advanced and, more or less, as good as it gets.

That leads to one conclusion.

They Know Us Better Than We Do Ourselves

We know so little about these UFO visitors, but with A.I., they might already know us better than ourselves. How so?

For starters, some or all of them have been here for a very long time, but at least going back to World War II. That’s over seven decades of observation by likely some very unique and effective methods.

Given how our technology works, they’ve also had access to every radio broadcast, every television show, every email, every phone call, every book, every magazine article, every scientific journal. What they have been able to scoop up makes the NSA look like the Little League of espionage.

Here’s where it gets interesting. We have access to all that ourselves but there is no human brain that has absorbed it all, and there isn’t a computer system we’ve built that has done that either. And even if a human brain or a computer we’ve built could absorb it all, that doesn’t mean either humans or our current beginner attempts at A.I. can sift through it or comprehend it all, let alone make sense of it.

Yet what if this hypothetical ET/A.I. could hold all this information at once and, more importantly, look it over at the same time; that it could gather, sort, consider, deep think, draw conclusions, and create plans from it?

Well, in that case, there is the very real possibility that this A.I. would know humanity better than humanity knows itself.

What Would This A.I. Know?

Everything. It sure would not require Amy Adams hand writing words on a tablet to establish communication like she did in The Arrival. This alien A.I. could know how to communicate instantly in every language the Earth has produced. So the fact that it has chosen not to communicate would be a tell.

Again, we know it could have scooped up virtually everything that exists digitally. Since we know so little about it, however, it’s possible that it has other methods on putting “boots on the ground” so to speak that allow it to collect valuable humint or human intelligence. Maybe that’s the so-called hybrid program or something equally bold and/or insidious.

The question probably isn’t whether it’s possible for an A.I. to find and store this vast amount of data (it is not infinite no matter how much we generate). Why wouldn’t it be? The question is can it intelligently sort it and digest it so that it is, as they say in the military, “actionable intelligence”? Since the answer to that is probably yes, then humankind may very well be in a potentially threatening situation unlike anything we’ve ever imagined.

Just going back to World War II, think about the effort in treasure and lives that was expended to know more about the enemy. The Allies did it and the Axis did it. Information was everything. Everything. Why would it be different now?

Of course, this all depends on whether an alien A.I. even cares enough about us to gather this info. On the other hand, they’re here and that shows some interest. Unless (as pointed out by @Jocro) it turns out that “this A.I. is only here to study the inception of what it considers to be ‘real’ life, i.e. terrestrial A.I. It may view biologics as nothing more than necessary precursors to ‘real’ life, kind of like how we look at amino acids or proteins.”

In any case, this near God-like knowledge of Earth and its inhabitants would have allowed the alien A.I. to understand well (if it wanted to) how this planet operates. It would know about our politics, culture, society, economy, government, science, military, you name it.

The ET/A.I. would know virtually everything and it would know how it all relates. So it would be well aware that there is growing talk about the subject of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena on this planet, and it would know to pay particular attention to a unique public investigation into the same.

What Would This A.I. Know about 60 Minutes?

It would know all the small data points. 53rd season. Top program on Nielsen. Averages over ten million viewers. It would roll all that together and understand that the show is the most successful American television broadcast in history. In other words, after studying humans for as long as it has, it would know that what happened Sunday night literally meant a clock was ticking.

Some people reading this might say, “Well, wait, no aliens give a damn about that stuff.” Let’s remember this is about gathering Big Data. It’s made of Little Data. And every little bit of data matters somehow. An all-powerful alien A.I. would know how to gather everything and curate it to its best analytical advantage.

Basically, though, such an A.I. would know by the collection of so much data that 60 Minutes is influential at a macro level. It would know that in those 53 years it has never covered the topic of UFOs and that this current broadcast was the first time ever. This A.I. would clearly be smart enough to know this means something and when cross-correlated with just this month’s output from The New Yorker, The New York Times, NBC, Fox, etc. that the idea of the existence of craft associated with the alien A.I. was no longer the secret it once was.

It would also have absorbed and quickly digested this most recent segment on 60 Minutes. Simply from these few minutes, it would know that the most powerful government on the Earth is talking openly about UAP, leaders within that government are demanding answers, and the nation’s military is paying strict attention now.

In other words, an all-powerful, alien artificial intelligence, would now know that the planet it has been visiting had inhabitants that are finally getting wise to the fact that it (the A.I. and/or its masters) existed.

Of course, it would have known and predicted this all along as writer Coleman Luck III points out:

If a vast AI exists, it would have planned its gradual unveiling in a manner to lull the population into complacency and then acceptance.

Next Steps

The first question to be asked is the easiest one. How does something like the 60 Minutes report change what’s happening in the world?

It’s clear that it advances the day of open admission that we humans are encountering another intelligence besides our own right here on Earth. We can all feel this one happening and, to a certain degree, see how the world is going to accommodate this new information.

Which leads to the second question; as an alien A.I. realizes that the inhabitants of this planet are waking up to seeing this new reality, what plans might it be making for itself or for its masters?

Will it leave or recommend leaving the Earth? Will it now move into the next phase of its visitation? What might that be? Does it serve the alien masterplan for humanity to know about it? Has the time frame been altered? What’s next?

We can’t really answer these questions now, particularly those of us who have not been privileged enough to be briefed into the classified world of secrecy. Even those insiders, though, may not have much more information than the rest of us. We really don’t know.

We don’t know who these Others are. We don’t know what they want. We don’t know how they got here. We don’t know if we’re safe or threatened by them.

What we do know is one thing. Whoever is here knows everything about us and we know next to nothing about them.

That’s not a good situation to find yourself in. We simply can’t allow that to continue. Can we?

Trail of the Saucers is published by Bryce Zabel and Stellar Prodctions and focuses on UAP news, history, culture and analysis. Here are more articles from our archive —