We Will Destroy Your Planet Read online

  NO BATTLE PLAN SURVIVES FIRST CONTACT WITH THE ENEMY

  No planetary conquest goes without a hitch, either. The business of conducting a military campaign is incredibly complex, dangerous, and requires astronomical time and energy devoted to making sure that attacks, strategies and logistics all come together to carry a force forward to ultimate victory. The business of travelling away from your homeworld, hurling your fragile bodies into the stars with no idea of what you might find there, while handling all the formulae of mathematics and science necessary to travel to a whole other world, is immensely and insanely complex. The business of understanding and interacting with species so alien to your own, and correctly interpreting how they live is another massively difficult demand.

  Invading the Earth combines all of those stupendous difficulties, and multiplies them. The complexity and difficulty increases exponentially with each requirement. It is therefore inevitable that things will go wrong at some point.

  You must understand this. There is no such thing as a flawless campaign, and it is not a matter of if something goes wrong, but when and what will go wrong. Overconfidence in your racial or cultural superiority will be a far bigger threat to your campaign than anything that the human resistance forces will be able to throw at you. You must understand that this is a fact, because when you understand that, you will be able to accept it, and deal with it. That is when you’ll be able to recover from such failures and setbacks.

  There is a tale told on Earth about a warrior named Miyamoto Musashi, who lived in 16th and 17th century Japan, and was regarded as that culture’s greatest warrior. One day a farmer came to him and asked his advice. The farmer had been challenged to a duel by another renowned and deadly warrior, and had accepted rather than be seen as a coward and killed anyway. The farmer was no warrior, so he asked Musashi what he should do. Musashi told him, ‘Firstly, accept that you will die tomorrow.’ Then he showed the farmer to hold his sword above his head, and said, ‘When he kills you, bring your sword straight down on his head, and he will die with you.’

  Not exactly reassured, the farmer went to the site of the duel and took up the position Musashi had shown him. When the fearsome challenger arrived, he drew his sword and made to kill the farmer, but then held back at the last moment. He studied the farmer’s position, and paced around him. All day he paced, occasionally trying to find an angle that would result in him killing the farmer without dying himself. At sunset, he threw down his sword in disgust and walked away.

  The farmer had won his duel by accepting that it could only go wrong. So you must accept that something will always go wrong. And always expect the unexpected, because that is what will happen.

  IN THE EVENT OF A CRASH LANDING

  Unfortunately, no matter how experienced the pilot, or how advanced and/or reliable the technology, things do sometimes go wrong, even without enemy action to cause it. Storms, solar flares, collision with other craft, and simple wear and tear are all possible reason for one of your ships to crash on Earth, killing or stranding any occupants. Whatever the circumstances of such an incident, you will have to take steps to minimize the damage it will do to your plans.

  If the accident occurs before your presence is known, you must act immediately to prevent it from giving away the fact that you are taking an interest in the Earth. This is the case regardless of the size of the ship that crashed. Ideally, you should always have a search and rescue plan prepared for any expedition that visits the planet. All ships and individuals should have homing equipment that will lead a rescue mission – but not the humans – to them. Emergency life-support systems should be available for all occupants of your craft.

  If your intentions are peaceful, or at least stealthy, or if you have reason not to mind whether or not the local authorities know that you are visiting the planet, then it may be in your interest to ask for their assistance. It will be in their immediate interests to give their help, if only to help quarantine the site in case of any biological contamination, or to prevent the populace at large from finding out about you under uncontrolled conditions.

  If your intentions are hostile, you should ensure that all your vessels that enter the atmosphere are fitted with remote-controlled self-destruct systems, so that if the craft should prove impossible to recover, it can at least be destroyed in order to prevent it from being captured and reverse-engineered by human scientists. Additionally, it is wise to make sure that there are multiple systems in place to wipe any onboard computer memory and navigational data. All the occupants should have a means of doing so, there should be an automated system, and you should be able to trigger such a memory wipe remotely. This is very important because you will not want the indigenous population – soon to be the resistance – to gain access to your scientific knowledge, tactical and strategic plans, weapons details, or (especially if there’s a chance of the ship being repaired or reverse-engineered by them) the location and directions to your homeworld. You do not want humanity being able to bring a revenge war to you.

  If the crash is of a small ship, such as a scout vessel small enough to go unnoticed or at least undiscovered for a little while, you should send a recovery ship to attempt to remove the downed vessel from the planet. Aside from not wanting to let humans capture it, every piece of logistical equipment is incredibly valuable when you are so far from home, and it may be reparable back home, or aboard a mothership with proper engineering facilities.

  If the crashed vessel cannot be recovered, it should be destroyed, either by shipboard weapons on the rescue vessel, demolition charges fitted by your recovery team, or the onboard self-destruct system you should have installed. If your intentions are hostile, and the humans have noticed the crash, your stealth plan is blown, and you should begin your asteroid bombardment immediately.

  In the event of the crash of a large ship, one big enough not to go unnoticed, or which does major damage to a terrestrial population centre, then if there are no survivors you should either begin an immediate attack before human resistance can be mustered, or simply leave the planet, your chances blown.

  If there are survivors, you may try to rescue them, but, again, beginning an attack would be the most sensible option at this point, especially if the survivors are troops or are aware that you are planning an attack. Any survivors who fall into human hands may, however long it takes for translation and contextual understanding to be developed, give up vital information about your forces, your society, and your plans.

  The occupants of your craft should be trained in escape and evasion techniques before ever being allowed to pilot a vessel into Earth’s atmosphere. Even if your plans are not overtly hostile, your personnel should be prepared to hide as much as possible, and avoid detection by native civilians and the terrestrial authorities, because, unless your species can pass as human, they may provoke a hostile response from surprised natives, however unintentional that hostility.

  Depending on your species’ appearance, they may frighten or repulse the natives, and humans have a tendency to respond to fear with hatred and aggression rather than rational thought. It’s also equally possible that your pilots may not even be recognized as an alien species, and harmed by mistake or misidentification.

  Before any descent into the atmosphere, suitable rendezvous points should be agreed with other units, and your search and rescue teams made aware of those locations. That way, stranded pilots can make their way towards a location at which there is a much greater chance of being quickly found by a rescue ship, and picked up.

  If you are not already in conflict with humanity, and especially if they are unaware of your presence and interest in their world, your downed personnel should avoid all contact with humans, if at all possible. If, however, you are already in open conflict, then it can be left up to the individual pilot to determine whether to take hostile action on the ground if targets of opportunity present themselves.

  If you do not recover or destroy a downed ship in time to prevent its ca
pture, then you should at the very least ensure that all its systems are wiped and shut down. Once it has been installed at a human military or scientific facility, the facility should be taken out with a meteor strike. This will destroy both the captured vessel and the human scientists learning too much about it, as well as preventing that facility’s further use in reverse-engineering other technology captured from you. If you are not yet in open conflict with humanity, this meteor strike can be made as part of an overall bombardment or left as a single incident, which the humans will attribute to natural causes.

  ACCIDENT BLACKSPOTS

  Over the past century or so, there have been several reported crashes of alien vessels on the Earth. Although none have yet been proven to be the demise of extraterrestrial craft – quite the opposite, in fact – they have become ingrained in human culture as proof of the concept that such things can happen.

  LAKE BAIKAL, TUNGUSKA, SIBERIA: On 30 June 1908, an object exploded south of Lake Baikal, the largest body of fresh water on Earth. The blast has been estimated to be in the ten to fifteen megaton range, well capable of flattening a city if it had struck one. As it is, the airburst 5 miles high flattened something like 800 square miles of forest below. Although scientists today are pretty much convinced that the object was a comet fragment, it did not take that long for speculation about an artificial origin to begin.

  Witness statements described the course taken by the object in the sky. It turns out that the object changed direction several times, before heading towards Lake Baikal and exploding. This led Soviet scientist Alexander Kazantsev to suggest in a book, Burning Island, in 1946 that the object may have been spacecraft in trouble, heading for a source of fresh water. He suggests that the ship was nuclear powered, hence the apparent atomic blast when it finally gave up the ghost.

  Many subsequent writers, both in Ufology and science fiction, have followed up on this idea, ensuring that it remains one of the most popular theories about the event today. Most of these theorists, however, are simply convinced by Kazantsev being a scientist, and are unaware that the book Burning Island is a science fiction novel, and that he became an SF writer alongside being an engineer.

  NEW MEXICO: This US State is, at least according to Ufologists, a full-on accident black spot for flying saucers and alien craft in general, with no less than three famous cases in a relatively small area.

  The most famous is the Roswell case, in which the then US Army Air Force announced that a flying disc had crashed on a ranch 75 miles from the town of Roswell during a thunderstorm in early July 1947. The Air Force was then forced to make an embarrassing apology, claiming the flying saucer was really a weather balloon. They’ve since spent the past 60 years coming up with occasional new explanations for what the Roswell object was. This is counterproductive, as it just means everyone who has followed the story will never believe the current version.

  Although modern believers tend to associate the crash at Roswell with the recovery of alien bodies – the ‘Grey’ types that began to become prominent after the Betty and Barney Hill abduction case in 1961 – this was never actually a part of the original 1947 reports, but was added to the mythology in the 1970s by writer and part-time CIA prankster, William Moore. The US Air Force has done itself no favours in recent years by buying into this later retroactive continuity, and trying to explain away the bodies in their more recent Roswell case reports.

  It is most likely that the Roswell object was a different type of balloon, one of Project Mogul’s high-altitude observation balloons designed to monitor the upper atmosphere for signs of Soviet nuclear tests. This project actually belonged to the US Navy, and, due to compartmentalization of information for security reasons, the Air Force at the time was completely unaware of it, hence their original confusion.

  That said, the evidence has long since disappeared, so we will never know for sure. However, if it was a genuine alien craft that crashed, it is ironic that something designed to cross interstellar space and survive the heat of atmospheric re-entry should be downed by a mere thunderstorm.

  So, where did the idea of there being alien bodies come from?

  Actually, from another reported crash shortly afterwards, at the town of Aztec, in New Mexico. This crash supposedly occurred in 1948, but was reported in a book published in 1950 by writer Frank Scully (presumably no relation to FBI agent Dana Scully). This described the recovery of several alien bodies from a crashed silver disc 99 feet across just outside the town of Aztec. The bodies were reported as ‘child-like’ and about three feet high, which is the other obvious trait of the so-called Greys. When this height and build is added to the facial description from the Hill abduction case, we have a marketing classic that went viral before there was such a thing as viral.

  Anyway, over the years, many people have come forward claiming to be witnesses to this recovery, some of whom are even mentioned in the book. This is rather odd, because in 1953 the two conmen who had given the story to Scully in an attempt to sell their ‘alien-made’ prospecting devices (which claimed to find gas, oil, gold, etc) were convicted of fraud.

  It was too late, the story was out there, and could not be recalled. Then again, perhaps the hoax story is itself the hoax, cleverly designed as a double bluff by the shadowy cabal who wishes to keep their dealings with aliens a secret.

  There is also another story related to both of these, which suggests that the Roswell crash was caused by a collision between two alien craft in the thunderstorm, and that while one craft disintegrated into fragments, the other crashed more or less intact near the town of Corona (which is actually closer to the ranch in the Roswell case than Roswell is). This craft was supposedly recovered by human military forces, as were the bodies of occupants, who were reported as the familiar Grey aliens.

  At first glance this sounds interesting – a pre-1961 appearance for the Greys, and a more plausible reason – a collision – for a sophisticated interplanetary craft to crash. Physicist Stanton Friedman co-wrote a book on the case, Crash at Corona, in 1992, and it has been claimed that material recovered from the ship and reverse-engineered was the source for some current Earth technologies, such as microchips.

  Unfortunately, the reports of this incident all date from 1986 or later, and came along with the supposed revelation of the existence of alien-monitoring group Majestic 12, which itself has long since been proved a hoax.

  There is, however, a fourth New Mexico case which you may find both interesting and reassuring. On 24 April 1964, near the town of Socorro, a policeman named Lonnie Zamora saw what he thought was a fire near a building used to store dynamite. Investigating, he came upon a landed egg-shaped craft on three legs, which was in the process of being repaired by two child-sized beings in apparent space suits. Some of the brush around them was smouldering. Startled by his appearance, the pair quickly finished up their repairs, boarded their craft, and took off, never to be seen again.

  When Zamora investigated the site, he found that sand underfoot had been fused into glass where the craft’s exhaust had hit it. Despite further investigations by the police and Air Force, no explanation has ever been confirmed.

  At the very least it suggests that repairs in the field are more than possible, if you have the correct equipment and procedures. If the pilots of that craft are reading this, consider yourself congratulated on a job well done.

  It may be worth asking why New Mexico in particular is thought to have been an accident black spot for extraterrestrial craft, especially in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The explanations are simple, both from the point of view of motivation for visiting aliens, and for the perceptions of the humans who reported these events.

  In 1947, the USAAF base at Roswell was home to the world’s only nuclear bomber fleet. The areas around the state, such as White Sands, were for many years used for nuclear testing, and the testing of orbital rockets and ballistic missiles. If you were a human living in that era, the location was surely a troubling one, filled with the
promise of future technological change and possible global nuclear holocaust.

  If you were an alien observing the Earth at that point, the area was the place with the most potential technological threats to your plans. Either way, it’s no real surprise that strange events would be thought of as taking place there.

  RENDLESHAM FOREST: Rendlesham Forest is an area of woodland in Surrey, best known in the media today for being the scene of a UFO landing or crash (nobody’s quite sure which) report from 1980. In December of that year, several USAF personnel from RAF Woodbridge, on the southern side of the forest, spent several nights investigating an object they believed to have come down nearby.

  The incident sparked headlines across the UK, and questions in the British government’s House of Commons, but, despite the existence of a tape recording taken by the deputy base commander, all the witnesses tell slightly different stories, so it is impossible to be sure what actually happened. Interestingly, from your military campaign’s point of view, the British Ministry of Defence decided that the event was of ‘no defence significance’, despite the fact that either a) aliens were flying around a base filled with US nuclear warheads and F-111 fighter/bombers, b) unauthorized humans were flying around a base filled with nuclear warheads and planes, or c) the people in charge of looking after nuclear warheads and their warplanes were drunk and/or crazy.

  Even the latter option surely ought to have been of extreme significance.

  This wasn’t the only time Rendlesham had been associated with UFO activity. In 1956, another airbase, RAF Bentwaters, had had to repeatedly scramble interceptors to check out radar tracks of approaching craft.

  IN THE EVENT OF CAPTURE

  In the event that any of your forces are captured by humans, you will have some time to decide what action to take. You, after all, will have been monitoring Earth’s broadcasts into the universe over the past decades, and studying captured specimens. You will therefore have the advantage in being familiar with human communications and psychology.