Copyright 2011, John Manimas Medeiros

1950, Destination Moon excites viewers in theaters. This is a "science fiction" story, something like Jules Vernes' From the Earth to the Moon (1865), but this time the rocket is propelled by its own engine instead of a cannon and the project is completed by military-industrial corporations, not a gun club. Same good old boys, perhaps. Who knew it would actually occur only nineteen years later? We did know, us kids, that science fiction did come true, like Verne's submarine Nautilus, in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1874). The first long range nuclear submarine was built in the United States and launched in January, 1954, named Nautilus, not far from my home in Southern Connecticut. I assembled a plastic model of the Nautilus and displayed it on the headboard of my bed. I enjoyed the Disney version of 20,000 Leagues also, starring actor Kirk Douglas in 1954. Another science fiction story, The Time Machine (1895) by H. G. Wells foreshadowed the future destruction of human civilization by its own hands. The Time Machine was also made into a science fiction film in 1960, a "cult classic" with actor Rod Taylor. What the time traveler encounters in this "science fiction" story, is a future world in which the single human species somehow divided into two separate and hostile species -- one lives underground in the dark, another on the lighted surface. Very interesting. Will that particular "science fiction" also come true? One could say that From the Earth to the Moon (1865) was followed by the film Apollo 13 in 1995, but Apollo 13 was real in 1970. The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896, H. G. Wells again) suggests genetic engineering gone bad. Seen any two-headed dogs lately?

And, furthermore, are you worried about these things?

With so much science fiction coming true, one might want to run a little inventory of the science fiction world, and think about appropriate preparations. Consider for example, another interesting sub-genre of "science fiction," the alien invaders genre.

1953, Invaders From Mars invades movie theaters. Us kids thrilled at the terror of human beings rendered totally cold and devoid of emotion by a tiny metal pin being inserted in the back of their necks. How weird the newly-wired captives became, like robots, obedient to some strangely heartless consciousness that was executing a plan to replace human beings with something more efficient and mechanically controllable. No more wacky and messy human emotions, just everything under control. We all went home glad that we were still emotionally wacky and "normal" humans. I may have checked the back of my neck before I left the theater. I may have looked at my friends more closely, watching for a blankness in the eye, soulless emptiness sensed in a stilted, mechanical tone of voice. But they were still my regular old nutty friends, full of messy human personality.

Then in 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This time the alien soul-suckers came in the form of giant pea pods, only we were to become the peas. Peas in a pod, just like us, emerged to replace each of us, with new forms of humanity devoid of humanity, cold robotic bodies inhabited by simple robotic brains. They were all so happy to have been freed from the tyranny of human emotion, the pitiful feelings that got in the way of a truly organized, controlled and logical life. Do you hear the footsteps of the logical Mr. Spock approaching? The Star Trek television series debuted in 1966. The good Federation needed to be defended by good old-tyme emotional (and heroic) humans, but they occasionally benefited from the assistance of "pure Spockian logic." Was Gene Rodenberry trying to tell us that we would need a little more logic in our future? Brrrr! Do I have to trade in my fun emotions for boring and practical logic?

This sub-genre of "they've come to take us away" is never-ending. The Matrix film trilogy (starting 1999) is a fascinating variation. This story includes the device of having humans penetrated by a device through the back of the neck, just as in Invaders From Mars of 1950, but this time the device is good. It's purpose is not to neutralize the human soul, but to transport the human brain to the real dark subterranean world below, where young human bodies are used to generate a form of battery power. The neck device also reveals the deceptive apparition of life on the lighted surface. The "matrix" that is the false apparition of life on the surface looks just like us, going to work, coming home from work, thinking that we live in reality when in fact we are once again "secretly" having our life-force, our power, sucked out of us for nefarious -- though possibly practical -- purposes. The world is not what we think it is. We are deceived, used, monstrously and totally deceived. Isn't that awesome! Would you like this type of science fiction to be like the Nautilus and come true?

Probably not.

But what do we have to prevent it from coming true? What if it has come true already? Dum da dum!!! Don't think I am trying to create the popcorn-flying atmosphere of kids in a humid movie theater, circa 1955. I am thinking about World War II, the real war, not movies about the War. How much of World War II was science fiction that became real? Maybe the science fiction movies were made after the real thing already occurred. The Soviets sent the first man into space, but the Germans sent the first rocket into space, a V2 that reached the lower edge of space in 1942. They also built the first jet-powered airplane, the Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwalbe, or "Swallow." The Nazi war industries were moving underground after allied bombing started to seriously damage the factories above ground. During the last year of the war, both V2 rockets and Swallow jets were being built in underground factories. The Allies had bombed Germany enough to bring about a German surrender, but with a few different crooks in the paths of history, the Nazis might have been able to build enough jets in time to stop the allied bombers by shooting them all down. The Nazis might have gained enough time to send far more destructive missiles all over the Island of Great Britain. They were working on a rocket with enough power to cross the Atlantic ocean. They were experimenting with anti-gravity craft, the famous "bell-shaped" UFO. Another element of science fiction come true was the awesome killing machine of the gas chambers, together with the railroad of human cattle cars and human corpse processing plants, managed by heartless and soulless military officers, and operated by emotionally paralyzed slaves. Were the people who burned other people like trash, and who mined their teeth for gold and their ashes for minerals, really "normal" human beings? Or, had the science fiction of "invaders from Mars" and "body snatchers" already occurred? Had some of the German people been replaced by robots who had replicas of human bodies with the souls sucked out? This may seem like an unfair assessment. Humans had been murderous before. War was like a popular hobby during the Middle Ages in Europe, and was also popular in Asia since ancient times. But one could make the observation that there was something different in the historical occurrence we call the "holocaust." There appears to have been something new come into our world. Some people acted like they had lost their emotions, a human heart. The sensitivity and humanity that philosophers had often said separated the human species from lower animals, a reverence that showed itself in burying the dead and nurturing an injured hunter back to health, seemed to set us apart from the animal world where the injured and sick are promptly discarded. Were there in fact people on Earth who had been "replaced" by cold robots who treated other human beings like trees to be cut down and sawed into boards, like rocks that needed to be crushed in order to extract minerals and the slag processed for use as fertilizer? Is that what happened, soulless humans leading a nation, before the science fiction stories were written and the movies shown in theaters? Could such movies be a secret assignment to Hollywood, to try to convey to the ordinary people their worst nightmare, in a way that would not cause mass hysteria and the collapse of social order? Consider the supporting body of information that we find in the "UFO literature."

What we are looking at here is the question as to what are the similarities among science fiction horror movies -- invaders who either eat people, use them as parasitic hosts, or remove the emotional heart and soul in order to re-populate the Earth with robotic slaves -- and the UFO literature. Of course, some science fiction presents aliens who are fantastically different from us, and who regard us as a form of pest or disease. They have no real use for us, and so the "plot" of such science fiction is that the alien visitors have come to annihilate us. We usually fight back, and defeat them, with superior morality or precious things such as teddy bears, ice cream, and good old fashioned bravery, love, and determination. Right.

The major portion of alien encounter stories, and investigations, including investigations of alleged alien abductions by employing hypnosis, suggest first that we are being observed, second that the aliens have some interest in us, and thirdly, they have a medical or genetic interest in us. That third and highest order of interest that goes far beyond simply observing us suggests that we are a subject of study, an interesting animal. This is analogous -- many have concluded -- to our study of large cats in the wild, the rhinoceros, or exotic plants and small mammals in the rain forest. It is similar to our fairly recent accelerated interest in the animals that live deep under the sea. We may have always wondered about the life forms in the deep sea, but we have only recently developed technologies that enable us to study them. Closely associated with this medical and genetic interest in us is the perception that the "aliens" might not consider themselves to be "alien" in the sense that we have. This is a life-supporting planet, and we happen to have evolved and come to be a major influence over life on this planet Earth. Both our ecological history and our self-image tells us that this planet is "ours." We belong to Earth and Earth belongs to us. However, it is certainly possible that if there are beings in the universe who are far superior to us in technology and intellect, it may very well be that life-supporting planets do not have owners, or, if planets do have owners, our Earth may have been "owned" long before we came to inhabit it. This being a possibility, those who become immersed in the "UFO literature" definitely remain aware that the aliens may have been living on or in the Earth as long or longer then we have been here. That would mean that they do not recognize any ownership relationship between us and planet Earth.

So… Beyond observing us, their craft, usually shaped like a disc but also like a cylinder or cigar, and sometimes like a triangle, clearly display a capacity or velocity and invisibility that we cannot duplicate. Further, they appear to travel through the air with no discernible technology that resembles ours. We do not hear or see engines. We do not detect any form of "exhaust." The UFO craft do not appear to travel by means of aerodynamics but rather by some technology that neutralizes the force of gravity.

The "tall greys" appear to be female and exercising the highest or higher authority. There are sometimes assistants that are shorter and not grey. Some abductees report seeing assistants in overalls, some in blue overalls. I believe it was Whitley Strieber who suggested that (Communion, 1987) in German folklore, cobalt miners used to encounter "dwarfs" or elves who wore blue overalls. That would be consistent with the blue color that is manufactured using cobalt salts and is called "cobalt blue." In the 18th century, the people of Nimes, France, developed a method for making overalls and "pants" for men out of sailcloth. They sought another color for their off-white canvas clothing, and they chose a form of "cobalt blue." Their popular clothing fabric came to be called "de Nimes" which in English became "denim." This clothing was also made in Genoa, Italy, and in French, the name for "Genoa" sounds like the English name "Jean." In the twentieth century, blue pants or slacks came to be called "blue jeans" in America, and "blue denim" the name of a color that the youth of America wanted to be wearing all day, every day, and possibly while sleeping. Blue denim became symbolic of something, but what it became symbolic of is hard to define. It was and is a cultural phenomenon that is still with us. Blue jeans became associated with American youth, and probably with a worldwide perception of American freedom and American rock and roll music. Hence, youth and young adults in many other countries became interested in "blue jeans" and bought them. What does this have to do with anything? Well, I am reminded, through my studies of Native American history, that there are two things that the European colonists wanted the Native Americans to do -- in the process of adopting European culture -- become farmers and wear European clothing. So, I was thinking, if the story I just told that begins with alien "dwarfs" in cobalt mines wearing blue overalls, and moves on to the youth and young adults, as well as older adults, wearing "blue jeans" throughout the world, then that could mean that we humans, who live here on Earth and think it is our planet, have adopted alien clothing. That's funny, in a way, but also suggests something else from France, a philosophical remark: "The more things change, the more they remain the same."

Another fascinating phenomenon we find in the UFO literature is the pervasive and disconcerting set of effects that we can only conclude arises from an extreme field of magnetic and or electromagnetic energy. This has been depicted in many documentaries attempting to illustrate a UFO report, and in science fiction films. This phenomenon was illustrated quite explicitly in the famous film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), in scenes where the proximity of a UFO causes all electrical systems in a motor vehicle, including the clock, to shut down, and can cause a metal traffic sign to wave in the air as though it is being shaken by a gorilla. And by the way, that same year of 1977 gave us Star Wars, the space-war fantasy that tells us how after thousands of years of further cultural and technological development, human beings still fight over who's in control and they still fight like cowboys and Indians. The "good guys" are still Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy. The "girl" or "love interest" is Dale Evans with attitude. I remember thinking that the movie was very entertaining, but it was depressing to think that thousands of years from now human beings, if they still existed, would still be cretins.

Another UFO or alien abduction phenomenon is the way that abductees are paralyzed, and though sometimes wildly afraid, they are somehow calmed down and controlled as though in a dreaming sleep. The abductee apparently remains conscious, or at least partially conscious, but cannot exercise any muscle control in order to physically resist being laid on a lab table and thoroughly examined. An additional report, of course, is that sometimes a small object, which one guesses is a locating device like the tags we put on bears and birds and fish, is inserted so that the particular abductee can be relocated and re-examined later. Those "unschooled" in the UFO phenomenon may not understand that a significant percentage of UFO abductee reports do not end with a single abduction, but involve not only multiple abductions of the same person but also abductions of other family members. This would be consistent with the kinds of biological studies that are conducted by human biologists on mammals, birds and fish. We learn far more about anything we study when we study it, or them, over extended intervals of time and physical development.

The powerful effects of high energy magnetism on electrical devices naturally raise the question of what would be the effect of intense magnetism on a human brain. There is some possibility that the hypnotic and paralyzed state of human beings in the presence of an intense magnetic field is natural and incidental, and not necessarily caused by an instrument that was specifically designed to "capture" humans. What UFO abductees report caused me to think of what it must be like for a rhinoceros, when a small group of white or grey ape-like animals chase after them, and as the white apes approach closer, the rhinoceros feels a sting followed by a whooziness, slowly losing muscle control and then falling into a full or partial sleep. Later, the rhinoceros slowly awakens and the white apes are gone or they are fading off in the distance. There seems to be some kind of pesty, persistent insect latched onto my ear. I can't shake it off. Later, that rhinoceros meets up with another rhinoceros, and says, "Guess what. …"

The UFO literature tells us that what we call "UFO reports" or alien encounters are not new. Some form of "alien encounter" has been reported by human beings throughout history and all over the world. The vocabulary used varies according to culture and religious beliefs. For example, in Europe during the Middle Ages, such a report would be along the lines of "I had a dream in which an angel took me by the hand and spoke to me." But today, such a report is more likely to be "I thought I was dreaming but it seemed far too real to be a dream. Two greys came into my bedroom and they picked me up and carried me out, through the wall of my house, as though I was no heavier than a leaf. They examined me and were very curious about my sexual organs. I was frightened to death at first, but when the tall grey looked into my eyes I felt calm and safe." To a person like myself, and anyone who studies the UFO literature, there are simply many cultural variations on what is essentially the same kind of report: a superior being or team of superior beings came to me and there was some kind of communication and sometimes the reporter has a memory of being examined. Sometimes the reporter has a memory of being told something regarding the future, or a warning about what not to do or what humans should do. It can be regarded as a religious experience, or a frightening experience, or a traumatic experience, or all of these. If an alien-encounter reporter, or those who listen to such reports, are disposed to take a negative view of what is being reported and what actually occurred, especially with reference to reports of humans being examined, probed, and having some object inserted into some part of their body, we then have the "Invaders From Mars" of "Body Snatchers" or "Matrix" phenomenon. Some superior species is deceiving us and doing something that is intended to exercise control over us or over our development. Are they trying to change our genetic traits and make us "less emotional"? Is their goal to make us more susceptible to being controlled, more obedient? Suppose, in pervious centuries, people had such experiences and became mentally disturbed afterward. Then, such people might have been seen by their neighbors as persons who had "become possessed by a devil," or whose body was "taken over by Satan." Whether in old times, or modern times, we humans are not happy with any suggestion that we can lose our autonomy to an alien force. This threat makes us afraid, angry, defensive, and capable of extreme violence.

That brings me to the 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast of a script based on War of the Worlds (H. G. Wells, 1898). Because some people -- this occurred in New Jersey -- did not hear the beginning of the program, they thought it was a real news broadcast. They panicked and packed their bags and started out for the countryside. Many people, including government officials, were not pleased the next day. But this true event is used as evidence as to why our government would not want us to know if there really were superior alien beings interested in life on Earth. It is guaranteed that many humans would be traumatized because of the sudden revision required in our history, our religious beliefs, our identity, and our place in the universe. The argument that society would be damaged by such sudden news is a good one, convincing. The point I am trying to make is that we have a set of closely related phenomena clustered around the idea that human beings might be rendered helpless by a more advanced species with a superior technology. The element that is new to me, and that I am describing here, is the possibility that alien control over human beings may have already occurred and is not "science fiction" about a future possibility. I consider this possibility because of my recent review of World War II and the cold cruelty of the holocaust. There is, I will explain shortly, a point in the human record where the story of the holocaust intersects with the stories of an advanced species getting involved in the business of humans on Earth. But first, the Philadelphia Experiment, extreme magnetism and human attempts at "advanced technology."

Those who study the UFO literature, and stories of humans abducted by aliens, are naturally people who suspect that important truths are hidden from "the masses." But there would be, of course, a selected group of "leaders" at the top of the human hierarchy, certainly including members of the armed forces, who are found eligible to receive and "classify" this privileged information. This view of reality sustains what has come to be known as "conspiracy theories" about important realities hidden from us. According to such conspiracy theories, we are living in the darkness of Plato's cave -- described in The Republic -- seeing only shadows dancing on a wall, and have not yet come out into the light (The Time Machine, The Matrix, A Boy and His Dog, etc.) of truth or reality as it really is. One popular conspiracy theory is that Freemasons have been controlling human development since ancient times. Their mission involves ongoing contact with "God" or the superior species that we have perceived as "gods" since pre-historic encounters. That is why the dollar bill of the United States includes a Masonic motto in Latin that means "He favors our endeavor." This is a message to all the Masons of the world, and to anyone who can accept the hidden meaning it conveys, that "God" or the superior beings guarding our planet and managing our development support the project that we call "the United States of America." What the distinctive elements of the "American experiment" may be is subject to debate, but it must involve something to do with freedom for the people in a democratic society, or a profoundly artful illusion of it. It should be of great interest to anyone considering such conspiracy theories that prior to modern experiments with democracy, the majority of humans lived in societies that believed decision-making authority resided only in royal families or an elite genetic line. Our leaders were in some way descended from the "Gods" or otherwise appointed, called or "anointed" to their positions of power by a divine or spiritual authority. This was superior authority whose extreme and allegedly absolute power was occasionally demonstrated to us, but whose persons we never "see." In many religious traditions, including the Jewish religion that is the origin of Christianity and Islam, God is not to be named or looked at, just obeyed. This tradition of absolute authority to be respected but never questioned, is what we had prior to the British-American "He favors our endeavor" and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789, final version 1793). One who explores human history cannot help but notice that it can be described as a long and bumpy conflict between a conviction that people should rule themselves and the conviction that people are "rabble" who are emotional, irrational, addictive, irresponsible and incapable of making intelligent decisions for society as a whole. This debate is not over.

In 1933 the people of Germany elected to have a Fuhrer rather than cope with their troublesome and clumsy system of "democracy." In the United States of America today, a substantial portion of the population rejects democracy and desires a theocratic and possibly racist form of government. The "two-party system" in the United States is hardly more democratic than the Communist Party of the former Soviet Union. It may be generously described as "benevolent" but that is not the same as "democratic." The American political process does not involve ordinary citizens in any decision beyond choosing the toppings on their pizza, and they are skillfully distracted by bogus moral issues and contrived financial problems in order to obstruct the people from participating in any of the meaningful decisions that would be theirs to make in a real democracy. In the United States there is, to be fair, some professed intention to protect people from cruel and unusual punishments, but this protection does not apply to those who threaten the "two party system" by getting involved in politics and proposing serious opposition to the plutocracy. As a natural born American citizen, both of my parents born in the United States, having lived in the United States all of my life except for ten months in Italy, and having been exposed to the body of ideas known as "political science" and "history," it is my perception that the United States of America has the world's most successful fake democracy. The pretend democracy will continue to be used so long at it is effective as a tool to keep the "two party" plutocracy in power without any serious challenge. To develop insight into how the "two-party system" works, one needs to study the history of elections in the United States, and what happens when there are "independents" or "third party" candidates.

Then let's look at the Philadelphia experiment of October 1943, upon the good ship USS Eldridge that was volunteered by the United States Navy to see if we could, like aliens who had not yet made their appearance in popular science fiction, make an entire ship invisible. The story of this experiment may be true, or not. The story of this experiment has several versions. The truth then, is like a science fiction buffet dinner. You take what you want, but what you take might not be real. It is alleged that Albert Einstein knew of the experiment, provided the mathematics and theoretical physics for it, but recommended it not be attempted due to risks of unintended harm. Supposedly, there were elements of relativity theory suggesting that a strong magnetic field, controlled by some method of course, would cause the ship to become invisible. Giant coils on the ship were pumped with large quantities of energy in order to generate an extreme magnetic field. The basic electromagnetic force was created, but not controlled according to plan. There are reports that the ship was rendered invisible for a few seconds, but there are also reports that the ship was actually relocated and seen at a significant distance from Philadelphia. There are also reports that when the magnetic experiment was over bizarre changes had occurred that were not predicted, not understood, and most certainly not to be treated as news for the general public. The worst of these alleged "unintended consequences" are that a couple of sailors disappeared permanently, several were extremely nauseous and disoriented, a few had been relocated in the ship without their voluntary participation, and a few had parts of their flesh and blood bodies fused with the metal hull, deck or superstructure of the ship. Those fused with metal parts of the ship died within minutes or had to be killed to relieve them of their insane terror and the impossibility of any acceptable solution to this "science fiction" problem.

So, in addition to the argument that our fearless leaders are foolish leaders who should not be entrusted with power, the story of the Philadelphia Experiment suggests to us that a strong magnetic field may have a lot to do with advanced and dangerous technologies, and may have complex effects on the human organism, including effects on human consciousness and sensory perception. This looks something like "being controlled" by an alien force. This alleged experiment occurred when Germany, Japan, and the United States, regardless of the "varieties" of their political institutions, were all trying to do the same thing: figure out how to vaporize a million people with an atomic bomb. Nice. This is us. Or, is it us under the influence of "them"? While this was going on, and we thought we were all the victims of unplanned events, this may have been a point in the human record where the story of the holocaust intersects with the stories of an advanced species getting involved in the business of humans on Earth. Because, after the end of World War II (which was perhaps only the end legally, but not culturally or technologically), the coldly efficient German scientists were divided up by the Russians and the Americans. And when they were discussing their possible futures, if they had a future, a few of them were asked how the German scientists had produced technology far in advance of the Russians and the Americans. Some of them responded by saying that they had help from extraterrestrials. This was not reported in Look magazine because the "royal family" did not want us to have a look.

Now we are ready to look at the real and astounding intersection of "science fiction" and reality, which occurred at this same time as part of the same phenomenon of World War II. While the Germans were developing their awesome technologies in the fields of warfare and weaponry, jet planes and rockets and experiments with anti-gravity, they were also developing another form of interesting technology: how to dispose of enormous quantities of human bodies in the shortest possible time, using a minimum of energy and labor. Like any business, we need to control costs. This is the story, according to German home movies, and American and Russian military photographers, and historical documentation unsealed only after 2000. This story is included in a DVD production of the British Broadcasting Corporation and Arts and Entertainment Network, entitled The Nazis, a warning from history, but not considered suitable for showing on American television. The narrative was written and produced by Laurence Rees. What occurred is that the Nazi government, in its mission to maintain a Nazi society, was bound to extreme persecution of the Jews in Europe. They associated the Jews with communism and regarded all of them as communists who were not capable of patriotism or good citizenship. The Jews were the enemy and they had to be controlled and stripped of any economic and political power. The Germans generally supported this plan, but they may not have all understood how far it would go. As German military victories gave the Nazi state power over vast populations in Poland, the Slavic states and parts of Russia, the "Jewish problem" took on cosmic size. The Jewish problem often easily incorporated "the retarded problem and the gypsy problem and the disabled problem and in some cases the Catholic problem or the Jehovah's Witnesses problem." The inescapable doctrine for the new, genetically-planned German society was that anyone who presented a threat of disagreeing with Nazi "science" was in the way and needed to be removed. Jews were taken captive all over Poland and those parts of the Ukraine and Russia and the Slavic states that the German military controlled. All of their possessions were stolen and they were shipped to "concentration camps" in Germany. Birkenau and Auschwitz are two of the most famous of these camps because of their large size and the scope of their mass murders. At first, those selected for elimination were ordered to dig a long ditch, then stand in it and wait to be shot, which they were. Other enslaved captives were then ordered to bury those dead. The captives were not to be immediately and simply executed, because they could be useful, at least for a time. The German military received orders to use captive Jews and other civilians selected for elimination as slave labor. That method was more efficient. There were lots of weapons and war materials and supplies needed, and the cost of these was significantly reduced when they were produced with slave labor. That slave labor was starving, sick, slave labor, deprived of sufficient food, water and clothing. The life expectancy of most of the Jews and other undesirables used as slave labor was sixty days.

The shooting and burying in a ditch was painfully slow and a traumatizing experience for some of the German soldiers, especially the younger ones. Somehow, shooting trembling woman and children in rags, and bent, wrinkled elders, who possessed no weapons and no motives other than to find a piece of bread and live another day, did not feel like the glorification of German civilization and perfection of the German Man. So, one of the officers who was burdened with a lot of wretched Jews to be killed, wrote to the Nazi headquarters asking for some kind of alternative to the "shoot-in-the-ditch-and-bury" system. This was clearly low technology for such an advanced civilization. The SS was then ordered to develop a better, faster system. There had been some experiments with a form of cyanide and one German soldier developed an improvement that allowed a kind of solid substance to be dropped into a sealed room which would vaporize quickly and kill any living thing in the room. He was promptly recognized as a technological hero, a creative type, kind of like an artist of the new Germany. This enabled the development of the gas chambers, accompanied by the ovens and vast fields to be fertilized by the ashes of deceased Jews. No need for funeral services or graveyards or memorials. The Nazis did not want any Jew to be remembered or mourned, just disposed of. They were processed in a manner the same as trash. The ovens were incinerators. The German military experienced this process essentially as a brilliant success. Hundreds of thousands of innocent and law-abiding civilians, who had forbidden religious or political beliefs, were used efficiently as slave labor, and died in a kind of manageable, natural sequence, so that their dead bodies could be processed in an efficient death and disposal factory. Their were far more slaves than could be employed on the spot, so hundreds of thousands, later accumulated to millions, were eliminated without the preparatory period of lethal slave labor. This is what happened. Human beings, German soldiers and German civilians, organized and implemented a death factory. This too, was the awesome technology of the civilization that viewed itself as "most advanced" and most scientific and most deserving to rule the world. These were the captive robots of the "invaders" from somewhere, or the "bodies snatched" by something, to lead Earth into a brighter future without the distracting influence of heart and soul. And it all occurred in the past, not the future. Our history is "science fiction."