Review of
Alien Psychology
by Roderick R. MacDonald

Alien Psychology paints a scenario for an alien arrival that wouldn't include faster-than-light physics, a staple of various other discussions about alien mindform. Rather than sort through a mountain of ex-official reports and witness testimonies about now-familiar kinds of aliens and off-world thinking, the author begins from a simple premise: the speed of light can't be violated; hence, any aliens who might arrive here would be cold and pathetic drifters.

The author begins with fairly taut reasoning, but, just when I was expecting him to discuss the most credible of human-alien encounters, he dismissed most, including Roswell, as nonsense and began, instead, with a fictional idea of aliens who travel between stars by hiding themselves within propelled asteroids. Despite the fact that every several generations brings a seemingly impossible breakthrough in physics and our view of the universe, MacDonald seems to think that the Einstein limit is definitive, that no alien will ever surpass it.

In his speculative scenario, aliens bio-engineer humanoid robots with neither soul nor emotion – to do their menial work. He doesn't anticipate that aliens will try to make themselves obvious in order to nurture human awareness toward a higher form of cosmic awareness. Instead, he assumes that aliens would try to avoid human detection. MacDonald says he knows that if aliens were known to our military in the 1940's, we'd be hearing the military's anti-alien harangue by now and wouldn't have bothered with the Soviets. In concluding, he suggests that alien longevity may be a degrading experience and discusses ways to both detect and defend against an alien incursion.

--George LoBuono

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