Weird and Bizarre Earth Practices as Seen through Alien Eyes

In the 10-volume Mission Earth by L. Ron Hubbard, Earth is destroying itself through pollution. The Voltar Confederacy has a conquest plan for the galaxy spanning thousands of years—a bureaucratic nightmare to change. Since Earth, on its current path, won’t support life by the time Voltar soldiers arrive in the future to take over, the Grand Council decides to send a mission to Earth to surreptitiously inject advanced technology to save the planet.

This satirical story is told through the alien eyes of the villain, who works to thwart the hero. As such, we get an Earth-view as seen by an advanced race that knows nothing of the eccentric actions which you and I take as facts of life.

Street Drugs

In Volume 2 of Mission Earth, Black Genesis, our hero is helping a drug addict in desperate need of a fix. A hotel clerk explains with an accent:

“It’s the local Feds. They grabbed all the hard stuff in sight jus’ las’ week. They said they’s holdin’ it to shoot up the price afore they puts it back on the mahkut.”

In August 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published a series of articles alleging links between crack cocaine trafficking, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Nicaraguan Contras. The report claimed that a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold large quantities of cocaine to street gangs in Los Angeles and funneled profits to a Latin American guerrilla army supported by the CIA. The series ignited national controversy and ongoing debate about the role of U.S. intelligence agencies in the drug trade.

In Volume 9, Villainy Victorious, a depraved advertising man uses drugs to help an insane tyrant take over the Voltar Confederacy:

“He even had LSD available, a milestone of psychiatric success which had permitted it to capture no less than the head of the largest news magazine in America, make him an addict and convert him to the psychiatric cause … [and] had thus become a primary crusader for psychiatry and LSD and a relentless hatchet man for any other technology that arose that psychiatry thought might constitute a threat.”

In real life, Henry Luce, the influential publisher of Time and Life, was part of a generation of journalists intrigued by psychedelic research in the 1950s and 60s. The era saw widespread media curiosity about LSD’s potential uses.

LSD, like many other street drugs, has destroyed countless lives and has never delivered on promises of advancing humankind. Users often feel compelled to take more of the drug to re-experience the same sensations. Others suffer terrifying thoughts and feelings, fear of insanity or death, and deep despair. A “bad trip” can last up to 12 hours, and in rare cases people never fully recover from an acid-induced psychosis.

As viewed through the alien eyes of our hero, how insane is it for an editor of a mainstream publication to promote drugs that harm people?

In Volume 10, The Doomed Planet, the emperor—after seeing Earth drugs nearly ruin the Voltar Confederacy—wants to outlaw them. The hero points out that drugs are already prohibited on Earth and that it doesn’t work:

“They [the drug laws] are there to protect the real purveyors from the competition, and thus the governments help them to get wealthy. The answer is to decriminalize and to ignore drugs: they don’t profit people then and nobody is interested.… When you pass a law against them they become a profitable business.”

Modern research estimates that Americans spend well over $100 billion annually on illicit drugs. At the same time, the U.S. government spends tens of billions each year attempting to fight drug trafficking.

Also in Volume 10, the hero comments on drug use on Earth:

“They take them morning, noon and night. They feed them to the schoolchildren, the workmen and the aged. They even fight their wars with soldiers drugged to the hilt.”

Government health statistics show that a significant percentage of Americans take at least one prescription medication every month. Within the U.S. military, prescription drug use has risen sharply since 2001.

You don’t have to be an alien to see a huge drug problem on this planet.

United Nations

The United Nations has a lofty and knightly purpose:

To maintain international peace and security. To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.

In Volume 2, Black Genesis, our hero listens to his teacher explain the UN:

“The five permanent members—United States, France, United Kingdom, Russia and China—each have the right to turn down, individually, the anguished pleas of all the peoples of the Earth!”

No matter how high-minded the stated purpose of the UN, its structure ensures that these five privileged nations hold supreme veto power over all the rest.

The Guardian once summarized the UN’s contradictions this way:

“And yet. In its 70 years, the United Nations may have been hailed as the great hope for the future of humankind—but it has also been dismissed as a shameful den of dictatorships….”

It doesn’t take an alien to notice the problems with the UN—but the aliens in Mission Earth point them out to comic effect.

CIA

You don’t have to wear a tin-foil hat to recognize that the CIA has been involved in more than a few controversial operations over the years. The aliens in Mission Earth point out some of the problems with this clandestine organization.

In Volume 4, An Alien Affair, one of the bad guys traveled to Central America to handle a “problem.” He says:

“Somebody killed the Director of the CIA, and there was an outbreak of peace down here.”

Among many actions the CIA has undertaken, the 1954 CIA-backed coup in Guatemala replaced a democratically elected president with a regime that ruled through oppression.

In Volume 6, Death Quest, Soltan Gris (the villain narrator) says:

“I took my Federal credentials. If I was apprehended with a hit man, I could say I was on a government project and had hired him to execute a government contract, ‘in the national interest,’ like they had executed on Martin Luther King and President Kennedy and Lincoln and lots more that had gotten in the government’s road.”

Decades of declassified documents have revealed CIA covert operations and secret programs that fueled public mistrust. Hubbard exaggerates that reality for comic effect, presenting an alien who assumes such conduct is simply normal Earth behavior.

In Volume 10, The Doomed Planet, a clerk of the Coordinated Information Apparatus says:

“From the CIA in the United States, the Apparatus got the idea of having an independent military force that would fight wars without the approval of the government.”

Investigative reporter Nick Turse has documented that the United States has engaged in numerous “secret wars” over the past two decades, many conducted with minimal public knowledge or congressional oversight. Reports from the Brennan Center for Justice describe how covert military actions have become a routine feature of modern policy. Hubbard’s aliens, of course, assume such behavior is simply business as usual on Earth.

With so many controversies surrounding the CIA, it’s no wonder the evil aliens in Mission Earth found inspiration in its methods.

Newspapers and Media

It’s almost hard to satirize newspapers and the media when real life so often seems to do the job for you. The author did not spare this field in Mission Earth.

In Volume 2, Black Genesis, the villainous narrator says:

“Its purpose, of course, is to keep the public misinformed! Only in that way can governments, and the people who own and use them, keep the public confused and milked!”

From rushed reporting that later requires correction, to sensational headlines that oversimplify complex stories, the modern news cycle provides no shortage of examples where facts have been misstated or situations made to appear worse than they were. Controversies such as early claims about Dominion Voting Systems, years of conflicting reports surrounding alleged Trump–Russia collusion, the widely debated Nick Sandmann incident, and the initial reporting on the Gaza hospital explosion all demonstrate how quickly a story can be presented as certain before the full picture is known. Even to an Earth-man, it can sometimes seem that the media is more interested in drama than in clarity.

In Volume 4, An Alien Affair, the public relations expert says:

“Fact has nothing to do with PR…. Newspapers wouldn’t sell at all if they dealt in real data.”

In Volume 5, Fortune of Fear, an evil lawyer observes:

“When you combine the Madisons [Earth PR gurus] of this world with the media we have, even the Four Horseman would plead for an out-of-court settlement.”

That line may be comic exaggeration, but it touches on a real trend. In the United States today, public relations professionals outnumber working journalists by several to one. High-profile legal and celebrity battles increasingly play out as much in the press as in the courtroom. The widely publicized disputes between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard illustrated how powerfully media narratives can be shaped—and reshaped—by skilled communicators.

In Volume 7, Voyage of Vengeance, a mafia man explains:

“Well, that’s the way the media is…. Their whole business is bad news. That’s all they print. Any good news isn’t news as far as they are concerned.… all bad news, death and disaster. They got the insane idea that only bad news sells papers.”

The Guardian explored this very tendency in a 2018 article titled “The Media Exaggerates Negative News,” noting that daily coverage is dominated by crisis and catastrophe. Whether the world is truly getting worse or not, constant exposure to negative headlines can certainly make it feel that way.

To an alien observer in Mission Earth, all of this looks perfectly logical: a planet where information is filtered, spun, dramatized, and sold like any other product. If even the Four Horsemen would hesitate to face such a system, what chance does the average Earth citizen have?

Conclusion

We live on a planet where drugs that ruin lives can be easier to find than fresh vegetables in many neighborhoods, and where staggering fortunes are spent both buying them and trying to stop them.

We have a United Nations founded on noble ideals of peace and equal rights—yet structured so that any one of five powerful members can veto the will of the rest of the world.

We fund intelligence agencies meant to protect national security, only to discover again and again that their activities sometimes drift far beyond public oversight and into actions that later spark controversy.

And we rely on a media system, social media included, that claims to inform us, yet routinely spreads half-truths, distortions, and outright falsehoods. Speed and outrage have replaced accuracy and verification, turning news into a constant stream of manufactured crises and viral misinformation.

These are just a few of the curious Earth practices that L. Ron Hubbard so sharply skewers in Mission Earth. Seen through alien eyes, our planet can look not only strange, but downright bewildering.

What “normal” Earth habits strike you as particularly kooky or outright insane? Tell me below!