Nomad Codes

thing,” Firmage tells me. “We would not be having this conversation today if it weren’t for the Internet. Without it I would not have been able to cross critical mass in my own knowledge.” By its very nature, the net dissolves the formal distinction between truth and image, center and margin, rumor and news. The Web is a kind of conspiracy machine, a mechanism that encourages speculative leaps and dream-like links between tons of datafiles, linkages that in turn make whatever phenomenon you are investigating seem substantial. Just tap “zero-point energy” into your favorite search engine, and you too can slip into a strange world of tantalizing theories and amazing claims that would require years of your average layman’s brain to properly assess.
    For Firmage, the net is also a kind of harbinger of the technologies that he believes are just around the corner: revolutionary mechanisms that will fundamentally change the economy, culture, even consciousness itself. “In my opinion it is no accident that society develops an Internet before the types of things that I am talking about could ever become realized,” he says. “From my perspective, the Internet is very literally the mind of humanity, in every way you would call something a mind.”

    Firmage still holds onto his USWeb office, which lies at the end of a long corridor near the desk his assistant is forced to rent from the company. The shades are drawn against the bleached Santa Clara light, and his desk is a jumble of NASA videotapes, financial grimoires, and copies of the Journal of Religion and Psychical Research . There are boxes piled on the floor, giving the room the unsettled feel of a house whose occupants are halfheartedly preparing for a move they don’t really want to make.
    The man himself is slight but handsome, with sharp blue eyes and a close-cropped reddish beard, and he seems wound as tight as a spring. The moment he begins to speak, it becomes instantly evident that Joe Firmage is not some brain-baked abductee, or straw-chewing hick mumbling about funny lights over the cornfield. He is an astonishingly bright and articulate man, who enunciates crisply and treats every conversation as if it were a debate between gentlemen. “I assert to you,” he’ll say, before his razor-sharp mind starts pursuing some curiously logical proof of alien contact.
    Joe Firmage is hardly alone in his interest in things extraterrestrial. Ufology is full of kooks and hustlers, but it is also full of many men who are like him: geeky and deeply sincere left-brain mystics bent on nailing down truths which consistently elude the net of reason. But Ufology is only the tip of the extraterrestrial iceberg. Between alien rave logos, X-Files reruns, and Men in Black cartoons, aliens have achieved a pop presence not held since the days of 1950s B-movies or 1970s saucer cults. Alien abductees now run neck-and-neck with Satanic abuse victims in the race for the most outlandish psychological pathology, and even the Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John Mack is taking their claims seriously. Many hard-headed scientists who loathe UFO buffs are also increasingly open to the notion that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the cosmos. UC Berkeley recently announced the establishment of the university’s first chair for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the recent discovery of a planetary system surrounding Upsilon Andromedae, a nearby star similar to our sun, only bolsters the hunch that there are parallel earths out there.

    This is an exciting idea for a lot of folks, especially folks in Silicon Valley. The massive signal processing effort known as SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which uses arrays of radio transmitters to scan the skies for intelligent bleeps, is headquartered in the Valley, and receives much of its dough from Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and Microsoft gazillionaire Paul Allen. Though Firmage went deeper into the heart of weirdness than most, his journey can hardly be considered anomalous in a place full of technological futurists, freethinking nerds, and hardcore science-fiction fans.
    Nor is Firmage your average UFO buff. Unlike a lot of folks, whose idea of the big picture amounts to a 72-inch TV, Firmage thinks on a grand scale. As he makes clear in The Truth , which wends its way through a morass of theology, politics, physics, and natural history before it even gets to the Roswell goods, Firmage