Catching the alien mind

You know, in every scenario of alien contact there is a prop. It has different ways of appearing, but basically it’s the landing zone. You have to build a landing zone, and every flying saucer cult worth its salt builds a landing zone. In a way, I think the new protean electronic Internet — the purpose of the Net is to catch the alien mind. The alien mind is within us. It will be coded by human fingers, but it will be truly alien. Simply because it is downloaded through the human neural network, do not think that the invoking of this thing — which is an artificial intelligence, a protean, non-human intelligence, a globally-distributed, self-learning, self-defining-teaching-integrating intelligence — is not going to be alien. And yet it is going to come through us.

-Terence McKenna,
http://terencemckenna.wikispaces.com/Surfing+the+Fractal+Wave+at+the+End+of+History