Since the 'invention' of fire, there have been times when History was clearly diverted from a previous course by intervening events and the influences of people.  In this instance, I offer an example wherein an otherwise "free agent" has become ensnared in his own web of deception, by becoming a parrot of my own recruiting pitch to Time-travelers.  Apparently, he wants "out" of this Universe, entirely.  I can understand, to some degree.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/edward-snowden-says-alien-...

The fact that Edward Snowden tried to claim authorship for my "Encryptment Thesis" theory may tip the scales towards a guilty judgment... Passing off someone else's hard work as one's own is possibly indicative of a character flaw of selfishness.  Sometimes the scales of History are tipped by what seem very minor and trivial things at the time they occur, which later assume an enormous and entirely unexpected gravity.

Someone named nicholasmeyler (hah! me) wrote a book about aliens, time-travel and cryptography in two volumes called "The Encryptment Thesis" (note the the initials of Encryptment Thesis are "ET"). However, since his theory worked too well, he decided to keep it under wraps and encrypted it.

[ 32 ] Meyler, Nicholas, 1959- Letters and essays on time-travel : the encryptment thesis. TXu000676618 1995
[ 33 ] Meyler, Nicholas James, 1959- Encryptment thesis II : Letters from a chrononaut : foreshadowings of the 9/11 tragedies / by Nicholas Meyler. TXu001072182 2002

This is actually a theory I developed quite a while ago. It is not original with Seth Shostak (head of the SETI project) nor with Edward Snowden. I named the concepts involved "The Encryptment Thesis" (please note that the initials of Encryptment Thesis are "ET").  My theory also predates Stephen Hawking's latest revisions to his Black Hole Information Loss Paradox, in that I demonstrate, conclusively, that information is still preserved, but in an encrypted state that must be deciphered.  I use intuitionistic logic and concrete examples based on Kripkean "Naming and Necessity" and other methods of logical reasoning and deduction, entirely bypassing the need for complex mathematics*.

What Snowden doesn't appear to understand is that nothing is "hidden" by encryption of Alien messages. Rather, the Information itself exists in a state of passive "encryptment" which is not clearly intentional encryption in any way, state or form. "Encryption" implies intention and intension. "Encryptment" merely implies a "statal passive" encrypted-ness, which was my point, since the mechanism of the encryptment of Alien (faster-than-light) Information transmission is currently unknown.

The whole point of my theory "The Encryptment Thesis" is that Alien transmissions are not intentionally hidden, but are designed to be only decipherable using concepts of faster-than-light Information Transmission. Some of these codes have already been "cracked", by me... decades ago. A culture with faster-than-light travel would not think in the same linear fashions humans do, but would naturally communicate at infinite Information Transmission rates. Since the human mind doesn't think that way, we construe the communication as "encrypted", although it is no more encrypted than a very thick Scottish brogue, for example.

Parenthetically, perhaps I should explain that I am a professional with 26 years of experience in the industry known as "Executive Search." Search is what I think about all day every day, and the people I search for are mostly creative inventors. I once placed someone with over 391 awarded patents (in the top 30 list of prolific inventors worldwide). It is therefore a practical necessity for me to invent and develop techniques and methodologies of Search which are effective in finding and recruiting such people. Many of these techniques are relevant to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and indeed, I believe there has been a very fruitful cross-pollination of ideas.

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* If Hawking is correct in the latest revision of his theory of Black Holes, when he asserts that the boundary-sphere outside the Black Hole formed by Hawking Radiation (anti-particle pairs which correspond to the Information content of whatever 'falls into' the Black Hole) is actually a Hologram containing all information which enters the Black Hole, THEN shouldn't we conclude that nothing ever actually enters a Black Hole, since it would be annihilated at the surface/"firewall"?  Moreover, wouldn't this also imply that a person who enters a Black Hole would no longer be the same person, but instead be a doppelgänger of the previous Self?  Events that occur along the 4d/5d-axis of "imaginary Time" (iTime) do not correspond to human concepts and innate linguistic conceptual brain-structures or grammatical structures, do they?  The same holds true for any events of faster-than-light Information Transmission.