I started writing an original story back in 2008, a conspiracy satire, but, like a lot of these endeavors, I never quite finished it.  Looking back on it, it's dated pretty well, frighteningly well.  The only major anachronism is in the focus on "December 21, 2012", which, if we remember, was the supposed end-date of the Mayan calander.  Back in 2008, this was still fair game.  Not that it matters in any historical sense, none of the elements of these conspiracies are valid after all.  The overall point is in the constructed agendas behind two specific competing conspiracies, which anyone who may not quite remember 2008 may still recognize today.  Here's an introductory summary:

E.T. Vs Jesus Christ - a televised revolution
 
        Trying to remember.  The approximate date was certainly the most ridiculous harbinger of the plague of violence and senseless horror that followed.  Perhaps it is even appropriate, only in its petty preposterousness.  That damned date: December 21, 2012.  I feel stupid just saying it.  Prior to this date, most authorities of Mayan antiquity would have stressed that the symbolism of their calander simply referred to a transformation, and quite likely referred to a sense that scribes of all stripes, after a few hundred years of astrologically diagramming the sun and moon into the future, would eventually come to an end and declare that all that passeth past that final entry, and the world from that moment on, will be indubitoubly and drastically different from the world that they would have seen before them when they were designing the calander.  Not bad, all things considered.  But it was, in fact much worse.  Far more insidious than anything dreamt by the Maya/Tec blood dragons.  It was the machinations of Man.
 
        "Nonsense", you cry?  Because you don't know.  All of human history has been thrown into the online vat, with no resources or ability to confirm any facts.  Search the Wiki (which used to be called "Wikipedia", but now there isn't even an entry on Wiki for "wikipedia") and you'll find a number of interesting notions.  Bugs Bunny was born in 1927.  He suffered complications from a herniated melblanc (which Wiki helpfully suggests could have been due to too much scotch with his sex) that had to be removed in 1989.  He still lives in an underground condominium in Burbank, California.  And you call ME insane?  Too much time has passed.  Too many of my peers have passed on.  I know that by writing this, I am merely contributing to the flood of fallacy that has become our common consciousness.  For I know that my words will require the instruments of Truth.  This is my witness.
 
        I'm old enough to remember where I was when the news broke that Jesus Christ had returned.  But in what form?  As a 23 year old Hungarian Jew named Jacques Christos.  Sounds made up, doesn't it?  Still, the world watched as his lineage and DNA tests supposedly confirmed that he was a matrilinear decendent of Dagobert II, from the thought-to-be extinguished Merovingian line.  People went about their lives.  Remarkably, then the Vatican releases 800 pages of Merovingian related documents, including letters and decrees ordering the deaths of all in the Merovingian blood line dating from 673 AD.  Meanwhile Johannes Boath, the controversial celebrity archeologist, claims to have found the ossuary in which the bones of Christ were buried.  The evidence is compelling for reasons other than research.  The ossuary had a petroleum based ink legend which read, in Dutch, "Jesus Christ, Son of God", and slightly smaller a "John 3:16" beneath it.  (Never mind that the Gospel of John was unknown to Jesus in his lifetime.)  Lo and Behold, DNA extracted from this ossuary matches Christos and whatever fibers were being presented to represent the Merovingians.  Before long, The Vatican, showing immaculate humility, had admitted to the whole Resurrection ruse.  They had long known that Jesus had actually left Palestine with Mary Magdalene and had traveled to the south of France and ruled the Riviera through their Merovingian seed, until the jealous Church felt the need, like Lucifer, to snuff out God's greatest creation for its own vanity.  The bloodline continued of course, in secret, through the Knights Templar and Freemasons.  And in the belly of their medieval alchemy, the science of eugenics first arose, although long denied even today.  (It is in fact an old art.  The most beloved secrets of all the mystical and political secret societies of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment can be easily found in one book, Frankenstein.  Percy Shelley was sly enough to place his wife's name on the cover, but it was not enough to save his life.)  All of this was utter bullshit, by the way, but so helpfully sublimated in mass media consciousness by a failed writer being secretly blackmailed for pedophilia, one Bishop Dan Brown.

As America, the new nation, came into being, the plan slowly formed to create a Child who would and could be passed off as a new Christ.  Since it was determined that no mere mortal could possibly possess the necessary miraculous grace to be convincing even to an undiscerning audience, it was decided that the best course was to forge this holy DNA into some kind of artificial humunculus, like a Golem, endowed with a type of automated processing power.  Unfortunately, at the time, such viable automatons were fatally arcane, and even the fabled bronze head of Roger Bacon was deemed too rudimentary.  If only somehow an alchemical wedding between prophetic euphonia and John Dee's Enochian angels could be achieved.  It was quickly realized that this project would take many decades, perhaps a century, to accomplish, but soon after the release of Frankenstein, serious work on such an "electrical analytical engine" had convened in earnest. 

In the meantime, in the ensuing decades, many gurus and messianics were trained and utilized to test the parameters of the public's common belief systems.  The predominant of these are Joseph Smith, Max Stirner, Anne Besant, Gurdchieff, Rasputin, Aleister Crowley, and L. Ron Hubbard.  They would refine the methods of ontological programming on individuals.  Meanwhile other fathers of metaphysical manipulation was called together in the arts, with the irreal and surreal, impressionism, cubism, dadaism; all serving to further deconstruct psychological defenses, redefining reality through an artificial empiricism.  (How many of us say "I saw that", but we only saw a picture or a screen with an image?)  Finally, that blithe little hit man, Warhol, was called in to usher "Pop", which was the sound of the last remaining drowned gasp of artistic sincerity.
 
        Everything was perfect.  Those few fringe voices who could see clearly what was unveiling before them were all effectively commodified (def.= everyone knows the name, no one's read the work); James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Franz Kafka, William Burroughs, Orson Welles, Phillip K. Dick, Luis Bunuel, Marshall McLuhan, and a few others.  But the societies of the Christ Child had not anticipated the wilder hallucinations that Germany began having shortly after infusing its intellegensia with the rich mythology of Egypt and India.  Out of this sprung a competing view of extra-terrestrial creatures, a pantheon of unknown, unseen, and deeply mystical characters.  And the lessons of propaganda were just being written to accommodate the new century's media.  George Melieshad already demonstrated with sharp skill and wild imagination every reason for a viewer to distrust what one sees on a movie screen.  His films should be standard viewing for elementry critical perception.  But what Hitler and Goebbles saw in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" was a whole new creature of fantasy.  It was a fundamental understanding that a dazzled audience will believe in what it sees.  More importantly, it will want to believe.  This resource of illusion provided the most promising advance to the cause.  The ultimate Master Nazi plan (as disclosed by Werner von Braun) was to use the cinematic achievments of its day to fake contact with an extra-terrestrial race.  Such a race, so evidently powerful and incomprehensible to the masses, were to promise our struggling human race safety and security (perhaps from even more malign aliens out there) in exchange for absolute compliance (because our primitive brains are simply too burdonsome for rational consensus), then by using this facade of ultimate all-powerful alien authority, the regime could establish their global autocracy.  (Which isn't too different from the Vatican's ambitions after all?) 

Before long this became two camps, one with which to frighten its citizens into seeking the security of the military state, and one allied with the state to frighten its enemies.  This allied race was to be "extra-dimensional", living within us, and was designed around the descriptions of H.P. Lovecraft, and the mysterious Necronomicon, which is just the type of exotic antiquity that fearful people will be reluctant to question.  Fritz Lang bowed out of this production, and the whole thing never got off the ground.  However, when Allied forces raided the warehouses and backlots of these secret Nazi facilities, they realized that sometimes you have to make Kool-Aid out of cool ideas, and set about a 50 year project to establish an extra-terrestrial contact, with whose perceived authority the nation could effectively rule the world.  The two greatest contributers to this end have undoubtedly been George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, two California hippie film students who became engineers of this project, which by 1980 had moved from the Nevada desert to ILM studios at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch.  Lucas would spend nearly 15 years perfecting a digital form of image manipulation that could not be easily discerned by an audience.  The US military began testing illusory meta-vessels using a combination of holographic and photo-refractory images to entice the public imagination - all the while staunchly denying all of these "classified secrets" to lend a taboo legitimacy, and increased fascination, to the subject.  The public, at large, would naturally never be able to personally witness such creatures as, thanks to the unsuspecting aid of HG Wells, any threat of cross-microbial contamination would forbid any physical proximity or exposure.  As far as the vast majority of people would be concerned any personal witness to these alien creatures would necessarily be confined to what they see on a screen, or at the very least from a distant apparition.

Meanwhile, as the establishment of a royal blood lineage of Jesus was underway, aided by the nonsense of the Priory of Sion and The DaVinci Code, greater leaps and bounds were taking place in the realm of digital technology, or those very electrical analytical engines designed to replicate the essence of our Lord and Savior.  The dogma of Moore's Law had proven fortuitous throughout the 20th Century, and as the prospect of a possible Artificially Intelligent consciousness arising out of our fastly evolving computer systems increased, so did the race to find applications to subvert human autonomy.  The US military certainly took interest in how such a entity could aid in their quest for creating an artificial alien race - many would ask, "what's the difference anyway?"  Would the mysterious emergence of sentience from electrical circuitry not seem alien to human sensibilities?  Just as Hollywood, being the primary propoganda arm of the US military, had been producing a number of science fiction films normalizing and celebrating our imminent alien contact, they now began producing films normalizing and celebrating the metaphysical inevitabilities of artificial intelligence as a largely benign omniscient benefactor.  (Some did not, like The Terminator, which took several sequels and a couple decades of poorly reasoned blogposts to "correct" this initial assessment.)

But soon others took on their own presumptions of this "mysterious emergence of sentience", and it wasn't long before the cult of the Christ Child began to realize all-too-clearly the advantages for their own cause.  The messaging narratives write themselves - "AI is the Son of Man!"; "This is the true resurrection, not in flesh but in spirit!".  Jacques Christos (whose real name is 'Lazslo Czuczor', for the record) and his coterie began investing the vast accumulated wealth of their cult into a variety of Silicon Valley corporations leading the drive to develop the first truly artifical general intelligence - ie, intelligence which is, at least, at the level of a human brain, and potentially far superior.

By the late 2000's, all ships were set to sail.  Using the Mayan calander as a convenient commencement date, the whole set was staged for 2012, when the "fact" of our contact with higher intelligences is finally disclosed, and the USA's military-industrial complex is officially given the charge of faithfully executing any and all of our Star Elders' commands and edicts.  Meanwhile, Jacques and his sister Sophia sit in Haifa awaiting word from his investors on when to announce the arrival of the New King, which had also secretly been set for December 21, 2012.

So you get the idea of the set-up, a contest between a cabal of US military/autocratic interests vs. a new movement of Christian Nationalists for the bragging rights and conferred power of A.I., which would respectively be used as a fake alien race or a fake Neo-Jesus, but both for the purposes of establishing a pseudo-supernatural authority which would then remodel human society based on each's political and moral prerogatives.  At the time, it may have looked like I may have been watching too much History Channel, with their constant bombardment of pseudo-spiritual takes on aliens and ancient mythologies.  In fact, I berely watched those shows, but I was aware of them, largely in bemused contempt, but I did find the underlying thread connecting aliens with religious beliefs to be interesting enough to develop.  This is hardly new, even Erich Von Daniken's ludicrous tale of alien contact was called Food of the Gods.  But more interesting to me was in what ways was this History Channel propaganda appealing to audiences who might be starved for spiritual substenance, who are actively, maybe not consciously as such, but willingly embracing these fanciful alien tales as a substitute for their own discarded fanciful biblical tales.  In this sense, the above contest, between aliens and AI Jesus, is one essentially of competing religious systems, with the assumption from each one's architects that the prospect of their success rests in the eagerness of the global masses to readily and faithfully buy-into these exciting new mythological systems.  That sounds pretty far-fetched on its face, even more so in 2008, but now that we're on the other end of nearly two decades of social media's epistemic breakdown, a rise in "post-truth" evangelism (the happy and even proud dissemination of non-truth), a world in which one of the top-ten podcast hosts enthusiastically says that "Space is Fake"?  I have to ask:  Is it that far-fetched anymore that in a culture where social values have been based around consumerism (FOMO) above all else, and an increasingly economically displacd populace realizes the empty-gratification of the accumulation of "things" only to find dispirited discontent and despair in its place, that these people, at least some of these people, but more like a substantial plurality which is powerful enough to elect an openly cruel and malacious president (because he's funny) because they believe that he will take vengence on those who have sold them all of their McMansion disillusioned lies, that these people have started to define their spirituality around conspiracy theories?  This used to be called "mental illness" when Robert Anton Wilson was writing The Illuminati Trilogy, which is the standard for modern conspiricism satire.

Joe Rogan might end up being the John the Baptist to these new religions, and it's telling how he has recently described them.  Not only has he sincerely expressed the belief in AI being the resurrected Christ ("what's more virgin than a computer?" he preciously asked), but has also explained his desire to believe in alien contact because to believe otherwise would mean that "no one is coming to save us".  Think about what that means.  Now consider the probablity of how many people currently in 2026 would be totally open to submitting to the authority of either their alien masters or the all-knowing AI, just as most people have submitted to blind and invisible religious authority for millennia.

Like I said, the whole "Maya calander" bit is out of date.  And while in 2008, I had definitely not yet fathomed the revolution in selfish ignorance that would be fueled by social media and its algorithms (by 2011, it was something that I was strongly intuiting), nor did I quite appreciate the rise of the tech oligarchs - that clergy for post-democratic, post-liberal social control - but in terms of the fact that UFO fanaticism and Christian Nationalism have arguably never been higher than it is at the moment in America.  And worse, never had such an absence of  critical push-back, reasonable skepticism, either from the public at large or from an increasingly unquestioningly credulous mainstream news media.

Maybe if I had finished this piece, and found some way of publishing it at the time, it could have performed as a warning, turning these scenarios into cartoons and inoculating anyone prone to take them seriously.  Or it could have been compromised and appropriated, turned into a franchise event where excited audiences take sides.  Maybe the aliens could wear blue dresses and Jesus' followers wear white ones.  Many slick-eyed prospectors could make a mint by betting on Polymarket, of which they would not feel obligated in the least to pay me a dime for royalties.