The Wonder Screen

On one hand, you could take Chapa’s words to mean that humanity is not — and cannot be — an independent player in regional astropolitics. The reason? Our limitations, and the fact that the Outsiders want it that way. Even Adamic super-technology, we understood, is under their watchful eye — a condition written explicitly into the 1985 treaty that formalized relations between the “Adamites” and the Outsiders. From this, we assumed that the absence of a permanent knower (Yodea Kavua) was a fixed part of the human condition, and that Adamic technology would always remain capped well below the level where it could match, let alone threaten, the Outsiders.

But then came November 2007. In a living room crowded with both long-time regulars and fresh faces, Chapa announced that the Adamites were standing on the very brink of parity with the Outsiders. Only three months earlier — when "the Stolen" Stoli and I had visited to mark thirty years since we first met him — Chapa had warned that Chaos Aliens might soon replace the Outsiders we’d “gotten used to” over the years. Those Outsiders, the “puppet-masters” behind the 1985 treaty, would be swept aside by the newcomers, and, in his words, “all the high-tech and the internet” wouldn’t stand a chance against them.

Yet on that November night, he claimed that humans were also within reach of overcoming the great limitation of the missing permanent knower. What’s more, he said, they could already clone — and might have already cloned — alien beings, using DNA given to them by the Outsiders themselves.

That was the breaking point for eight long-time attendees. Without a word of warning, they stood, gathered their coats, and walked out of Shefa’s house — where Chapa held his lectures when he lived in Jerusalem. Their leader turned at the door and spat: “Up to now, you’ve been babbling. And you keep on babbling. No more!” For the first time, I saw Chapa stunned. The meeting continued, but the sudden vacuum left no trace of the occasional intimacy that sometimes blossoms in a smaller circle.

(Shefa would later claim the walkouts were MIB plants, people “with something burning on their heads” that night — or maybe they’d long suspected Chapa was starting to reveal more than just “stories from the depths of the universe” and had decided to shut him down. Zvi, to whom I wrote about the incident, dismissed the MIB theory and chalked it up to veteran jealousy over the newcomers, toward whom Chapa had recently been more attentive, perhaps even tailoring his narrative to pull them in.)

And then there was the list Chapa wrote on the “Wonder Screen” back in April 1979.

Every twelve years, he explained, humanity made a leap toward Übermenschness — becoming something more than human. In 1933, it was Nazism, which he described as an attempt to “overcome the Judeo-Christian element.” He also mentioned Pluto’s discovery, mistakenly linking it to that year as a step toward breaking the “consciousness ring” surrounding the Adamites of the Solar System. In 1945, it was the atom — giving humanity the power to destroy its own planet. In 1957, they left Earth’s atmosphere, and in 1969 came the first landing on another world.

None of us wanted humanity to turn into “the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team of the universe,” as Zvi likes to say (still a diehard Hapoel Jerusalem fan, though he insists they’ve “gone Maccabi” too). We believed part of Chapa’s role — and ours, as his students — was to keep a lid on such things. When it came to meeting other worlds (which, as hinted or so we understood, was due in 1981), we were firmly Team Aliens.

A month later, Chapa left. When he returned in the mid-1980s, his picture of the world had grown more tangled. Some humans, he said, were working with aliens — not his own space-friends — and had even signed agreements with them. Others, as before, opposed the aliens. He divided them into the “white-collar” and “blue-collar” wings of the “World Organization,” or “MIB,” as we called it.

And maybe that’s what untangles the contradiction. There exists a class of humans who’ve received knowledge from the Outsiders — enough to potentially put them in the same league. Them, not us. Not all Outsiders like this, and how they’ll respond remains to be seen — or not — in the years ahead. The rest of humanity will keep living in ignorance, unable to defend itself. Big Brother (the reality TV show) will never tell them anything about their place in the universe. Neither will the popular conspiracy sites, which, like most of “the media,” are just an arm of the ruling powers — perhaps the rule of the “Lords of the Farm” themselves.

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