the "is this is or is this aint" question is not one to be answered, but TRANSCENDED. There is a real freedom in being able to transcend duality. Indeed, we must transcend duality for that is the only way this crazy endless board game of existence will ever finally end (at the beginning). This is why the only way to truly win a war, for example, is to make the enemy your friend. Patrick Harpur writes well on this subject in his Daemons book, and Pinchbeck reaches the same conclusion in 2012 as he tries to wrap his noodle around the abundant contradictions in crop circles. If we ask are aliens real we will never get an answer, since "real" itself is a term that will have to be thrown clear out the window if we will ever BEGIN to understand the alien/elf/magic city/spaceship dimension. Even admitting that all we have to go by is our sensory perception is not enough. I predict that as we spin closer to the big 2012 we will begin to grasp these paradoxes more clearly, as if by magic. The fludiity of identity, the transmigration of soul energy through the magnetic fields of space and time, the ability we all have locked away in our brains to create the tangible real world before us through sheer thought, these things and more await once we stop projecting one half of the whole on the wall and pretending we're just the other half and then wasting our last few years left on futile shadow boxing.