You can probably see that I was trying to get the 'real deal' in these questions, but, as usual, "no dice". BUT, that doesn't mean we can't speculate. So, how to reconcile these apparently opposing ideas of NO overt "alien invasion", but instead "via proxies", BUT there still being a generalized awareness of aliens (i.e. not proxies alone) AND "dramatic displays of power and control"?
So, what might it look like, taking into consideration that it appears it would be relatively "seemless", to us, like a "natural evolution" from one thing to the next until it's all out there and everyone takes it as relatively normal?
But... hasn't it been the case for as long as we have known that the first thing is programming? Programming, vaccines, etc. I see for example the mental construction that the woke have and for me it is totally alien, far from human. And we know that all that modifies the FRV or accommodates it so that the hyperdimensional entities can move around with less difficulty. Same concepts they have been throwing out since the beginning of the pandemic: New normal.
Yeah that's what I was thinking too.. It makes a lot of sense..
I read a lot of science fiction books (I just like spaceships 'n' stuff, always have :P) and there are lots about this kind of thing.. Even, think of Star Trek. I'm not much of a Trekkie, watched some of The Next Generation as a kid but that was all.. but the thing that always struck me was, since that show is from the point of view of the highly advanced space civilisation, it felt like you're "meant" to identify with them - "we are very nice space people who go around helping those less fortunate" - when actually, what we are is one of the primitive planetary societies which those space people contact (sometimes covertly) and interfere with/"help"/etc. *We* are not Captain Picard and friends, we are some dusty alien living in a little town on a little planet, only concerned with our local affairs...
In the "Culture" books by Iain M. Banks, the Culture spacefaring civilisation has a sort of governmental department called Contact, whose job it is to go around finding less advanced planets and possibly infiltrate them, possibly increase their level of technology, genetically manipulate them, interfere with their politics etc, with a view to inducting them into the Culture. In one book the main character is a shapeshifter whose job is to literally change his body to look like current world leader politicians, murder the real politician and take over.
In C.J.Cherryh's Alliance-Union books, like '40,000 in Gehenna', there are civilisations who genetically- and mind-program clones, experimentally and iteratively, to try to generate stable psychologies... then use them to seed planets, so that they can come back generations later and have a whole planet of people loyal to them, who live based on thought-patterns THEY originally programmed...
The best example I can think of right now is a pair of books by Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep and a Deepness in the Sky. In these books (extremely simplified summary - been awhile since I read 'em), a couple spaceships of humans are marooned near a planet, far from their galactic civilisation.. The planet is populated by an industrial-age tech level peoples (who happen to be in the form of spiders, but that doesn't matter).... The marooned space people think
"how can we repair our ships and get home? we don't have enough resources to do it... these local 'spiders' do, but they're too primitive, they don't even have space travel. Ok, let's gradually seed their culture with technology and propaganda, over multiple generations, in order to make them eventually able and willing to support us". With the humans' vastly superior technology, they infiltrate the spiders' telecommunications networks and basically start a covert information war, to gradually increase the spiders' tech level to where it can be useful to them... They don't reveal themselves - until the very end - but make it seem as if all these ideas are coming from the spiders themselves. Also in these books, there is use of a virus to genetically change people to make them, basically, autistic, hyperfocused on a specific thing, in order to use them as machines.. (There's a lot more to it which I forget).
In 'Lord of Light' by Roger Zelazny, the "gods" are really just the first humans who came and colonised a planet, who can body-swap via some kind of transhumanism style mind upload... and part of what they do is to
keep the technology of the plebs at a certain level, not let it get too advanced, in order to maintain their rule..
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The thing that makes this all work, in these kinds of stories, is that the advanced space people usually interact with TIME in a different way than the planetary people, whether it be artificially extended lifespans, ability to go into stasis, relativistic space travel mechanics, or immortality via body-swapping.. They operate on vastly greater timespans than the planetary people.
Of course it's always presented in a materialistic way (and the advanced people usually aren't EATING the primitive/resource/cattle people) because, sci-fi authors... At least in the books I've read so far.. But the idea is there, taking into account what the C's have said about time, 4D/hyperdimensional reality etc, you can extrapolate... I'm sure anyone can think of lots more examples of variations on this kind of thing from popular (or unpopular) fiction :) "V", Jupiter Ascending, Matrix etcetc....
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So yeah connect the dots...
Planet seeded, "D'Ankhiar" etc.. "Watchers", give people technology, agriculture, etc.. Ongoing genetic and cultural manipulation for all of history.. Religious visitations.. Printing press.. Industrial times.. Computer age (the first Intel Pentium ads heavily featured cartoon grey aliens).. Certain tech increases day by day, but somehow other better(?) tech gets buried.. Internet, AI, transhumanism, mRNA vaccines, new normal... Things change now so fast, suddenly everyone has to wear a mask and isn't allowed out of their house. We must accept genetic manipulation.. Our food sources will be forcibly changed.. Many people sick and dying, but don't pay attention to that... We are heavily shocked but get used to it quite quickly, sort of... C's say elites talk to aliens IN PERSON, but aliens are in the guise of "nordics"... Beautiful space brothers.. Meanwhile, anomalous astronomical observations go on all the time but are mainly ignored.. or have been for a long time...
I'm not saying the reasons FOR all this are the same as presented in this kind of fiction (I mean, I'm not saying anything really, this is all obviously wild speculation, it's just these sci-fi books have lead me to think about things this way... I'm sure there'd be a lot more to it!) But, if you were a people "outside of time" for whatever reason, who could run operations spanning hundreds of thousands of years.. and you wanted to alter another, much shorter-lived people, towards some particular end... maybe you can do it all via incremental information manipulation. Seed their culture with ideas that lead in the direction you want... And when the time comes to reveal yourself, the target population has already been programmed to accept it, even if they don't really know what it is they're accepting yet.... And it's probably all business as normal for 4D STS.
(Sorry for the incoherent-ish post, it was better in my head, but I have to go now, hope I made a bit of sense...)