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Imagine if you will … the Leader of the Fifth Invader Force speaking to the Commander
in Chief.
— Introductory tag added to Terry Bisson's short-short story “They're Made Out of Meat” in the version widely disseminated, without attribution, on email lists and the Web during the 1990s. In “They're Made Out of Meat,” one alien tries to persuade a highly skeptical partner that human beings actually have intelligence while still being made of organic material, that humans are in fact “thinking meat.” The introductory tag — which most readers assumed was the title — is not part of Bisson's story, originally published in Omni in 1991, collected in Bears Discover Fire in 1993, and later available on his own website. One theory is that the tag was added by paranoid Scientologists, for whom the Fifth Galactic Invader Force is an insect-like species from Mars with horrible hands. And that's just a sample of the “intellectual property” that Scientology works so hard to protect. According to Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, mental health professionals or “psychs” are part of the Fifth Invader Force, bent on destroying the human race by turning us into zombies or cutting out our brains with “transorbital leucotomies.”
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