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A Single Photo Shows the Best and Worst of Humanity

By Skylar Baxter

There are photographs that are impossible to forget, searing themselves into our collective consciousness. One man standing his ground in front of a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Firefighters turning their hoses on civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama. This is such a photo.

A woman is planted on the ground, hands in the air as she uses her body as a shield. Behind her are two collapsed figures, and in front of her is the thing she is protecting them from, a man pointing his handgun straight at her. Her body is the only thing between the gunman and two incapacitated ETIs.

According to reports, the woman is Cora Sabino, advocate for alien personhood and daughter of journalist and The Broken Seal founder Nils Ortega.

The now-famous photograph was taken Saturday during a rally organised by the Third Party in downtown Los Angeles to protest misinformation allegedly propagated by the American government. The demonstration turned violent after the sudden arrival of two ETIs, both of whom were incapacitated by an EMP device smuggled into the protest by far-right group the Gadsden Line. The EMP also shorted out all mobile phones and digital cameras within a three-block radius. But photographer Amalie Marandet was lucky to have brought an analogue camera.

Marandet said that she came only to photograph the rally and was not a participant, but never expected it to be the first time the world saw a living ETI. “I don’t think I’d ever been as terrified as when it appeared. Even from a hundred feet away, it was just enormous,”

Marandet told BBC News.

Despite her terror Marandet stayed on the scene.

“[The ETI] was looking at Jano Miranda, but it wasn’t acting aggressively, and there were several other people interacting with it. One guy was even touching it, and it seemed to me that the ETI must have seen Miranda’s speech as a sort of invitation, and wasn’t there to hurt anyone. It didn’t seem to realise that this could be a dangerous situation.”

But the image of Sabino shielding the ETIs has become a focal point in the debate about alien personhood, with many social media users seeing the photo as capturing a moment that could have led to a disastrous beginning to humanity’s relationship with possible alien civilizations.

“Everything about her posture shows her humanity—her facial expression, the way she stands her ground. The gunman wants to destroy this thing he doesn’t know anything about or understand, and she is the only thing standing in the way. We see the best and worst of humanity in this photo,” wrote Facebook user Trystan Pease.

“This photo will be in history books.”