Time to consider the reality of 'stargates'

The remaining members of the Hargreaves family are billionaire philanthropist Sir Reginald himself, his trusted chimpanzee assistant Pogo and the children’s robot-mother Grace.

The concept of robots assisting humanity is something mankind has aspired to since the beginning of the last century and finally the revolution has begun with automation now being introduced into every aspect of our society. But how far has the technology advanced regarding the creation of a synthetic humanoid robot capable of imitating our characteristics and actions?

Well, the answer is a long way, with humanoid robots already classified in two ways, androids that have male characteristics and gynoids that resemble females.

Perhaps the best example of the state of the art is the humanoid-robot Sofia, developed by Hanson Robotics, a Hong Kong-based company. Sofia is quite a sophisticated social humanoid with the ability to see, sustain contact, follow faces and identify individuals.

It was turned on in February 2016 and just a month later was presented to the world, even featuring on the Jimmy Falon show on American television.

Using a natural language subsystem, Sofia can have conversations and, according to its creators, can be extremely helpful in healthcare and customer service situations.

Other human-like creations include the Nadine Social Robot, developed by Kokoro in 2013, and Han, an expressive android that was activated in 2015 when it also made its debut at the Global Sources Electronics Fair in Hong Kong.

A gynoid, Nadine has a human form including skin, hair and hands similar to humans and can perform several functions such as to simulate emotions, interact with arm movements, answer questions in multiple languages and recognise individuals.

Nadine has a head and full body with a natural appearance and a software platform developed at the Institute for Media Innovation in Singapore's Nanyang Technological University.

Underneath his bald head, the Han android has masculine features and a sardonic smile… with a primary focus to serve by using voice recognition technology and multiple cameras to observe the environment and interact with it. Han, also a product of Hanson Robotics, can display facial expressions with his face covered with a strong flesh-like rubber.

Each of these humanoid examples are still within the development stage but they offer a peek at what has been achieved so far, although there’s little doubt that the future holds incredible new developments in the field. Sofia may not be as advanced as Grace Hargreaves yet, but the next generation of humanoid robots may well be.

As for Sir Reginald having a sentient ape assistant able to speak, express feelings and assist in the development of the children’s powers? Well, that would seem to be simply a question of medical ethics.

Apes are sentient beings and there are several examples that they have a level of intelligence not far below humans, which has enabled them to communicate through various types of sign language.

One example is a female western lowland gorilla named Koko, who began learning sign language in 1972 with the help of graduate-student Francine Patterson at Stanford University. According to the Gorilla Foundation, Koko mastered 1,000 signs and understood spoken English. It also claims the gorilla had an IQ somewhere between 70 and 95, with the average human IQ being 100.

But talking like us was not something Koko mastered, with apes thought to either lack the brain capacity to learn to speak like humans or the anatomical structure to achieve speech.

It’s an enduring debate among scientists: whether non-human primates could speak with a little more brainpower, or whether it would require adaptations to their vocal tracts to produce human-language sounds.

One interaction on the topic features Philip Lieberman, a cognitive scientist at Brown University, and William Fitch, an evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Vienna.

According to Lieberman’s research, which uses models of primates’ vocal tracts, monkeys and apes are unable to produce the range and succession of vowel sounds required for human speech because of the way their vocal tracts differ from humans, who have a longer tract in the form of an L-shape that evolved with upright walking.

Fitch and his colleagues, on the other hand, argue an L-shaped vocal tract is not necessary for vowel production. They concede that monkeys and apes don’t have the full range of vowel production, and that if apes could talk, it would sound quite different from human speech. However, they believe the speech could still function as a meaningful language.

Either way, Soviet-era cross-breeding experiments aside, both obstacles would not seem to be a problem to overcome using the gene-editing tools offered by CRISPR.

Finally we come to Sir Reginald, whose death reunites his adopted children. Originally said to be the result of a heart attack, it later becomes apparent it was an act of suicide to bring the children back together to prevent the end of the world from happening.

The story starts with billionaire industrialist Sir Reginald, an inventor and Olympic gold medallist, adopting seven out of 43 children born on 1 October 1989 to women who weren't pregnant when the day began.

The nurturing of the children is left to their robot mother, Grace, and his ape assistant, Pogo, with Sir Reginald himself being quite an enigma.

One of the first lines of intrigue about him is his membership of the Majestic 12, the secret organisation of 12 influential scientists, military leaders and government officials who allegedly acted as a shadow government in the United States in the 1960s and perhaps still do.

The story suggests Sir Reginald was convinced to join the 12 to provide the technology that would allow them to beat the Soviets in the space race, with his interests on the dark side of the moon being safeguarded in return.

But when the Majestic 12 carried out the assassination of John F Kennedy, after he began asking uncomfortable questions about extraterrestrials and wanted closer cooperation with the Soviets, Sir Reginald broke ties with the organisation and revealed his true identity, taking off a mask to reveal reptilian features, and slaughtered the other members of the Majestic 12.

Now the idea of reptilian extraterrestrials is nothing new, in fact statues and wall art depicting reptilian beings are common in most ancient cultures, with artefacts uncovered at the ancient Sumerian city of Ur being classic examples.

Ur was located in southern Mesopotamia, in the south of modern-day Iraq, and is the site of the tombs of Sumerian rulers dating back 4,800 years or more.

Beginning in the 1920s, the site was excavated by British archaeologist Leonard Woolley who discovered around 2,000 graves located in the ancient city. Sixteen of these were designated as “royal” due to the spectacular treasures inside, including gold beads, bronze relics, seals, musical instruments and ceramics, as well as many other artefacts.

The Sumerian civilisation is believed to have emerged during the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Ages between the sixth and fifth millennium BC, occupying the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The people are believed to have worshipped a set of giant deities known as the Anunnaki, descendants of the sky-god Anu.

These Anunnaki, according to historian Zecharia Sitchin and other researchers, are believed to have first arrived on Earth about 440,000 years ago to mine gold, a crucial resource to repair their planet’s atmosphere following nuclear war.

Their home planet, called Nibiru, is said to orbit the sun in a 3,600-year cycle and is set apart from other known planets in our solar system in that it is believed to orbit the sun in the opposite direction.

The Anunnaki are believed to have had widespread mining interests across the globe from the Americas to Asia and crop up in all the ancient religious texts, which often portray them as being reptilian in nature, with statues found in Ur showing them walking on two legs and nurturing children in the same way humans do.

These extraterrestrials are said to have created a slave race through genetic engineering to work in the mines and that humanity is the result of this genetic modification and the Anunnaki themselves breeding with mankind to create a hybrid ruling race.

One of the marvels of this ancient civilisation is the Great Ziggurat, near Nasiriyah, which is a massive rectangular structure that measures 64 by 45 metres and has three levels of terraces, standing originally between 20 and 30 metres high, with grand staircases leading to each level.

Thought to have been built during the early Bronze Age, the ziggurat was restored by King Nabonidus, the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, who ruled from 556 to 539 BC.

Today the remains consist of three levels, with the lowest layer corresponding to the original construction, while the two upper layers are part of the Neo-Babylonian restorations. The facade of the lowest level and the monumental staircase were rebuilt under the orders of Saddam Hussein, who believed himself to be the reincarnation of King Nebuchadnezzar, ruler of the Neo-Babylonian Empire from 605 to 562 BC.

Could Sir Reginald be a product of this Anunnaki genetic engineering… part of a “shape-shifting” reptilian order descended from these ancient aliens in the bloodlines of our planet’s ruling dynasties?

One proponent of this is former BBC presenter and author David Icke, who has been championing the notion for the past 30 years… with the theme carried forward today in many of the Ancient Aliens series produced by Prometheus Entertainment for the History Channel.

It’s also a common theme in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism through the Naga, a semi-divine race of half-human half-serpent beings that reside in the netherworld and can occasionally take human form. Rituals devoted to these supernatural beings have been taking place throughout south Asia for at least 2,000 years.

Seems far-fetched? True, but it’s a concept that has attracted a growing number of subscribers and even has associations with the United States’ warmongering in the Middle East.

These extraterrestrials are believed to have originated from the heavens or from other dimensions and there are those who attribute the Gulf War, led by the US in response to Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait in 1990-01, and the Iraq War, from 2003-11 which overthrew Saddam’s government, as being covers for a covert quest to locate a “stargate” that Saddam was thought to have uncovered in the desert ruins.

Dr Michael Salla, a pioneer in the development of the political study of the key actors, institutions and processes associated with extraterrestrial life, believes the “dodgy dossier” that George Bush and Tony Blair used as a pretext for invading Iraq was a cover for their true motivation – to find and activate a stargate, a device allowing instantaneous space-time travel.

The whole of the second series of The Umbrella Academy focused on time travel and Five’s attempt to stop another world-ending event resulting from the Hargreaves family being shot back in time to the years leading up to the Kennedy assassination at the end of the first series.

During the 1960s Project Pegasus (time travel) and Project Horizon (developing a US base on the moon) were two of the many black-budget operations being conducted by the CIA and related institutions into the phenomenon portrayed in The Umbrella Academy… so, with nigh on 100 years of research into these fields and the acquisition of Nikola Tesla’s secret papers, on everything from plasma “death rays” to “radiant energy” portals, after his death in January 1943, who knows what amazing discoveries have been made.

Science fiction is a tried-and-tested tool for preparing humanity for narratives that those in power fear could spread panic in the greater population… of course The Umbrella Academy script plays with these concepts, but how much is really being given away in such programmes?

Personally, I believe it’s a lot more than most people would credit them with… otherwise why would Netflix feel the need to have a former aide of Barack Obama, who some believe was one of 140 American children to participate in Project Pegasus, on their board of directors? It’s all about propaganda… conditioning for disclosure or disinformation to discredit ideas that are meant to be kept secret.

Even Gerard Way, creator of The Umbrella Academy comic-book mini-series, could have been "groomed" by national security operatives to develop the storyline. A graduate of the New York School of Visual Arts, Way is the lead vocalist and co-founder of the rock band My Chemical Romance and has battled with addiction and gender-identity issues for much of his adult life... just the sort of troubled soul the covert world's puppet masters prey on! Now, wouldn't that be strange?

But, whatever the origins of the story, it's been one of the more interesting diversions to emerge during the weird world we've been catapulted into since it's introduction to the small screen in 2019... roll on season three. there's precious little else to look forward to at the moment!