Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
A gift or a Trojan horse
Diana Pasulka and Gary Nolan both call the recoveries donations. Certain historical retrievals did involve craft that landed perfectly, with no crash, and it is safe to assume someone assessed why. The theory is that the visitors want humans to find the technology and work from it or take inspiration from it.
One reading is throwing the gorilla a banana to see whether it can peel it. The more skeptical reading is a Trojan horse: humans figure things out and get addicted to a certain type of technology, which creates a control loop in which the visitors start handling us, for example because we need raw resources to maintain it.
How evenly the donations are spread among world powers is unknown, and so is the total number of retrievals and which countries took part. There are parallel programs, including in China. A statistical analysis may come out during the disclosure process.
Why would a religion scholar study retrievals?
Diana Pasulka is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her 2019 book American Cosmic argues that belief in extraterrestrial contact in some communities works the way religious movements do, with shared stories, rituals, and sacred objects. She interviewed scientists and technologists who described their own experiences. The book was published by Oxford University Press.
Where did the Trojan horse idea come from?
The story of the wooden horse appears in Homer's Odyssey and is told at length in Virgil's Aeneid, where the Trojan priest Laocoön warns not to trust the Greeks even when they bring gifts. Greek soldiers hid inside the horse, which the Trojans pulled within their walls. Virgil wrote the Aeneid in the first century BCE. The phrase beware of Greeks bearing gifts comes from that warning in Book II.
How do researchers test ape problem-solving?
In the 1910s, the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler studied chimpanzees on Tenerife and hung bananas out of reach. His chimpanzee Sultan stacked wooden boxes and fitted sticks together to reach the fruit. Köhler concluded that apes could reach solutions through insight, not only trial and error. He published the results in The Mentality of Apes in 1917.
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