tell us the truth. Whatever the reason, they landed on Earth and could not get back home, at least not in their ship.
Another question that is still unresolved is, where in the galaxy did they come from? They consistently said in the region of the Crab Nebula, but that was as close as they would indicate. I always believed they thought it best to not give us an exact location because they suspected we would then try to build spaceships and visit their world. I guess they just don't want tourists, or they don't trust us. If they have been watching us for centuries, their attitude is not too surprising, but then they should also know that we are many decades away from having the technology to build interstellar spacecraft. They apparently aren’t willing to give us the knowledge that would allow us to build such vehicles and have decided to remain on Earth indefinitely.
When they landed on Earth, they realized that they would not be able to leave the same way they came and that they were on a world incapable of supporting their life form as it was. They were faced with the possibility of running out of time. They have told us that they had been studying our planet for at least one hundred years, so they were already very familiar with our physiology. Using this knowledge, the Civilli came up with a plan for survival. Since they could not exist as a separate entity on our world, they would exist as part of the dominant native species – humans, though they said insects were a close second, which may have been a joke. Interestingly, the original Civilli that landed are no longer around, having long since disintegrated into the remains of their ship. Before they died, all fifty of the Civilli on board produced a small offspring, measuring about one inch in length and one-quarter inch in diameter. In other words, the offspring resembled a larvae or worm. This asexually produced offspring would have essentially the same personality and memories of the original parent. This method of cloning was used to keep the particular Civilli alive but in a new form. The old body dies and disintegrates, and the individual in its new host body grows to maturity.
This meant that all the Civilli on Earth today came from 23 survivors of the original 50 who landed. In addition, the alien offspring had slightly modified their DNA to adapt to an existence in a human host, obviously something that was not normal for them. How they made these changes has never been revealed? It could have been done artificially, or the Civilli themselves may have the power to alter their own DNA. I find the latter somewhat disturbing, and there is considerable circumstantial evidence that this may be true.
How do these Civilli larvae enter the host, and what happens after they do? Quite simply put, they drill into their human host anywhere they can. They produce a local anesthetic, the way a vampire bat does, that keeps the human from realizing that something is conducting a mining operation into his or her body. Once in, the Civilli moves through the human to the region near the spleen and attaches to the diaphragm. Once there, it grows to maturity, becoming about the size of a hardball. Its amorphous shape allows it to fit into the area without displacing the organs to any great degree. During this growing stage of about seven days, the host is unaware that he now has an internal guest. The nutrients the larvae draw to survive are negligible.
How the mature Civilli operates inside the body has been very hard to determine for a number of reasons. First, the Civilli cannot tolerate any radiation, so attempts at x-rays, MRIs, and CAT scans all resulted in the deaths of the Civilli. Actually, six of the 31 that made it to hosts died this way, either through the host having an x-ray without knowing the alien was there or from early attempts to study them. About the only way to study the alien in-situ was to use ultrasound or intrusive fiber optics. Even this provided only limited information.
Of course, over the course of the last decade, many hosts have died due to accidents or old age. Even with perfect health, humans cannot live forever. Autopsies have revealed some of the physiology that the Civilli use while in the host. This has provided the most information, but, as with everything else associated with the aliens, the disintegration is fast and very complete once the host dies. The disintegration occurs at the molecular level and appears to thwart any attempt at preservation. You cannot go to a museum anywhere on Earth and see a Civilli in a specimen jar. As a matter of fact, 99.999% of the earth's population knows what a Civilli looks like only from pictures in publications. Only a very select group of people, including me, has actually seen a Civilli in any form.
The mature Civilli send out thousands of flagella throughout the body including the brain. It's through these flagella that the Civilli works its miracle.
Now comes the controversy. At this point, one would think the Civilli is just another parasite, albeit a very unusual and advanced parasite. Except for those who have never heard of the aliens, such as some Eskimos, aborigines, various tribes in what little rain forests remain, and some of my friends who have been heavy into drugs, every human on Earth knows that this is not the case. This is a symbiotic relationship because the Civilli cures all the ills of the host. This includes any disease known to man, from the common cold to cancer and AIDS; any physical condition, from a bum knee to blindness; mental conditions, from schizophrenia to most forms of retardation; and most birth defects. They cannot reconstitute a lost limb, though in some cases a finger or toe has grown back. The Civilli apparently do this by a number of methods. They can boost the immune system to attack specific viral or bacterial invaders that they have detected, even with diseases for which we have not found cures. They can make the body produce specific proteins that clean the blood of fats or increase production of specific enzymes that the body is not producing in sufficient quantity. They will let you know through cravings what minerals or vitamins your body needs. The typical human body is capable of living to be about 140 years old, but this almost never happens since there is always something or someone to polish you off before you get that old. The aliens cannot prevent their host from aging, but they can slow its effects considerably. About the only way you may be able to guess someone is a host, is to find out that he/she is twenty years older than he/she looks. In the days of the backlashes, I am sure that resulted in the death of some very healthy non-host humans. It must also cause a lot of havoc on the dating scene.
The host reaps the benefits of perfect physical health. He or she can still die by being run over by a bus or blown away by a spouse, but probably won't die from a heart attack or stroke or cancer or AIDS or a paper cut. And, if your spouse does not finish you off, you have a much greater chance of surviving the wound. This does not mean you are a better person, unless bad health was the cause of your bad attitude, just a healthier one.
Talk about a can of worms. As one might guess, this super health would sound very appealing to a large segment of our population. If you were dying a slow death from cancer, would you opt to have an alien guest and live a long, productive life or continue to breath and eat through a tube? What if you were not dying, but had painful arthritis or migraine headaches or hemorrhoids or acne or whatever? Would you choose the alien cure? What if you are depressed and suicidal? What have you got to lose? What if you are a drug addict, and you could have all the drugs you can afford, steal, or beg? You could still die of a drug overdose if you were careless, or of malnutrition if you did not eat properly, or of lead poisoning if you stole from the wrong person. Of course, the causes of your drug addiction may go away once you have a Civilli inside you. What if you are just old and want to feel better in your waning years, to be free of all the aches and pains associated with old age? What if you just don't give a damn one way or the other? This can have a tremendous appeal, especially in a society, which craves the quick fix.
I couldn’t decide what was really going happening because we had limited knowledge and no way of filling in the gaps with our current technology. It seemed that before one would jump onto the alien bandwagon to longevity, the consequences would have to be considered. Is there a downside, besides having an overcrowded body cavity? And, i
f so, what is it? Depending on whom you talk to, it's either nothing or your entire being.
Once most of these details were out, the alien controversy hit high gear. The host/aliens were called before several Congressional committees. The aliens made it known that they needed to have more hosts and that they were capable of cloning themselves. They said that, with only one host for each alien, each time an alien died due to the host dying or radiation, that alien individual was lost forever. It was important for them to reproduce themselves in order to survive. The clone, even though it would be an exact duplicate in terms of DNA, would still be different due to the effects of the host and the environment. Congress appointed a committee that included members of all three branches of government as well as noted scientists and sociologists. The Hatcher Committee deliberated for three months before coming out with the finding that it would be too risky to "endanger the existence of the human race by propagating aliens in human hosts."
This brought a tremendous outcry from the public, which, as one might guess,