Every few weeks, it seems, another announcement appears
claiming that some authoritative group, usually involving
the pope, the president, Edgar Mitchell and whomever, is
about to announce that UFOs are no longer unknown, but are
alien craft. I've been hearing about pending announcements
like this for as long as I've had an interest in the
subject, and
they have always worried me. They worry me more than ever
now.
We are not in any way prepared for such an announcement,
but the reason is not as straightforward as it may seem.
There isn't likely to be any panic, at least not initially, but
later there is apt to be. This isn't for the reason that
Stephen Hawking recently suggested, that aliens might prove
to be hostile, but because our visitors, if they are aliens
in the conventional meaning of that word, are very, very
different from us.
One person who is never mentioned among those who might
be
involved in the disclosure process is me. Instead of
allowing one of the very few people on earth, or indeed in
its history, to have had much open contact to participate in
the process in any way, I'm not simply marginalized, but
carefully ignored on the theory that what I have to say
would be too bizarre for people to accept.
Personally, I don't much care, but I do know that without
even the virginal understanding I possess to add
perspective, contact, should it follow disclosure, is apt to
be a disaster for the human race.
So, it's fair to ask, what's wrong? Why can't they just
land, come out of their spaceships, and have a nice
discussion with us, perhaps about how to build a starship,
or engage in what some disclosure advocates
call "exopolitics?"
I can only speak from my own observations, but I do think
that there is a very specific difference between us that is
going to make communication, to say the least, both
challenging and dangerous. Understand, I am not saying that
our visitors are necessarily hostile. In fact, my own
thought is that Stephen Hawking's speculation that aliens
might be dangerous reflects the tragic lack of
sophistication with which even our best scientists are
addressing the matter.
Recently, for example, in Melbourne, the Astronomer Royal,
Sir Martin Rees, got a good laugh from his audience by
dismissing the whole UFO and abduction phenomenon, and
crop circles, for that matter, as ridiculous and calling people
like me "cranks." When I interviewed him for Dreamland some
years ago, he was quite polite to me, but at that time, of
course, he was selling a book.
In any case, let's put aside childish things for the time
being, and address the real issue. When I was in direct
contact with the visitors, it was clear that they were real,
but not in the same way that we are real. They were not
ghosts, spirits, or some sort of arcane aspect of the mind,
but actual, physical beings who were, it soon became clear
to me, far more elaborately embedded in reality than we are.
But what was the difference? It amounts to this: reality is
composed of information. What we see all around us is
basically the same thing that exists in a computer: bits that
are either information or not information. We know that, on
the level of the very small, the world unfolds in a
different way from what we see on the larger, or classical
level that we can observe directly.
In our reality, if you flip a coin, you get either heads or
tails. You never get both and you cannot get both. However,
on the scale of the very small, that's not how things work,
and not only that, recent experiments have shown that, even
at a classical scale, matter can be induced to be both a
particle and a wave at the same time.
Normally, however, there is a strong interaction that
prevents atoms from going into superposition and becoming
indeterminate?essentially everywhere at the same time. They
remain in the classical state because they are always in
contact with other atoms.
Experimentally, we can so isolate them from their
surroundings that they do go into superposition, but we can
only do this for a few seconds, just long enough to take
advantage of their indeterminate state to, say, do
hyper-fast quantum computing.
But what if we could control the degree to which we were, as
bodies, in superposition or in a classical, determined
state? And what if we could also control how information
unfolds at the very smallest level? And if we did not only
possess quantum entangled neurons within our own brains,
which we do, but were quantum entangled with all other
human brains, and therefore could each access the
knowledge and intellectual power not just of one brain, but of
billions?
We would be radically, fantastically different from what we
are. We would have the ability to spontaneously change our
appearance, or even become invisible. We would be able to
not only extend our awareness across the whole of reality,
but also to draw on our collective understanding to
interpret what we see.
We would, in short, be like our visitors. But we are not
like this. Because of the nature of our bodies and the
structure of our brains, we are welded to classical reality.
Only by the greatest effort, using advanced techniques of
meditation, can we even glimpse what our visitors always
see.
Not only that, we are entirely natural bodies. We're not
enhanced with any sort of designed biology, but from my own
observations, I can make a strong case that our visitors may
be a mixture of natural and artificial components that will
eventually compel us to stretch our definition of
consciousness to include what is, in effect, a machine
intelligence living in a biological foundation.
I have spent time with the visitors, not a lot of time, but
enough to say with confidence that they apparently have
another level of consciousness and probably additional brain
matter to accommodate it. This would account for their
larger heads, one might suppose. It would also account for
our profound emotional response to them. They see more of
reality, and we sense that, and it is viscerally
frightening. To experience this yourself, force a dog to
look into your eyes. Smarter dogs will become quite
uncomfortable, because they will see the chasm of the
unknown there: your vastly greater contact with reality.
Roughly speaking the human brain contains three levels: a
hindbrain that governs instinct and autonomic behaviors, a
midbrain where our emotions reside, and the neocortex,
which in human beings is grossly enlarged compared to other
animals. It is the neocortex, with its ability to reason,
that makes us human and gives us our vastly enhanced
understanding of the world around us.
I believe that our visitors have a fourth level, a
hypercortex, that mediates their relationship to the world
around them in the ways I am describing above. It gives them
vastly more access to reality than we have. It provides them
with the power to alter reality on the informational level,
meaning that, for them, physics is not a set of laws that
cannot be changed, but a tool that is easily amenable to
manipulation.
We see the world in a linear format that is imposed on us by
the structure of the human brain. They see it on the vastly
larger scale that a hypercortex with all of its additional
properties provides them.
I doubt that this hypercortex evolved naturally. I suspect
that it was designed, that it is, essentially, artificial,
which accounts for the surprising way that they function
with such shocking precision, but also with such a complex
and rich emotional content.
So, why would disclosure be dangerous? If it somehow leads
to immediate and direct contact, it is going to devastate
the human mind. Your dog will need to look away from your
eyes after a few seconds. But it is the nature of the
visitors to be essentially everywhere that their
consciousness is engaged. Thus, if they appear here in
numbers, they will not only enter our physical world, they
will enter our minds. And, I can assure, you, that kind of
contact is as hard a thing as a human being can experience.
It is an agony beyond terror. I know. I have been there.
It is also true, though, that it can be understood and
accepted. I never lost my visceral fear of the visitors.
But, as I came to understand its origin, I was able to live
with it quite comfortably. So we CAN achieve contact, but if
there was to be an attempt at mass interaction now, it would
certainly cause the collapse of the human mind. Just a very
tiny number of people would survive with their sanity
intact. The surprise and the intimacy of the apparent threat
would be too much to bear.
As I have said in these pages before, and as, in fact, I
have written John Podesta and others, there is a route to
contact that will work well for us.
This is the process that we need to undertake: first, there
should be a disclosure at the NASA level that there are
apparently unknown objects in our skies; second, the
National Academy of Sciences should encourage granting so
that research can be done into this area. In this way, we
will begin at the beginning to build a real foundation of
understanding on our own terms. If science shifts away from
the weakness that it now displaces and begins to address the
issue with the appropriate tools, we will soon form enough
of an image of our visitors and their capabilities to go to
the next step, which is to study, in a considered and
scientifically valid manner, the bodies and minds of people
who claim contact.
Initially, this part of the study should be confined to
people who have identifiable implants, or have had them
removed. Later, when we understand more clearly how the
mind
deals with the contact experience, we can extend the study
to include people whose experiences are not grounded in
physical evidence.
Right now, there are 12 people from whom identical implants
have been removed. That's correct, identical in physical
appearance. And all of these objects are available for
study, but not just now. At present, we have a government
frantically trying to hide the reality that it started a
shooting war with the visitors, which caused them to
relegate us to the level of animals and not to deal with us
on anything approaching an equal level. We have a scientific
community that is profoundly afraid of seeing more than it
can bear, which is, incidentally, the origin of Dr.
Hawking's concern. On a deep level he fears coming into
contact with somebody who knows essentially everything. And
he's right to fear that.
DBH Kuiper and Michael Morris offered the thought in the
April, 1977 issue of Science that anybody who could reach
earth from another star would probably keep themselves well
hidden, because they would be here in search of
innovation (something new) and would know that, if they
revealed themselves, our entire culture would be redirected
toward them, with the result that we would cease to
innovate.
It may be possible to gain all knowledge. Perhaps this is
why one of the visitors, when I asked how he understood the
universe, replied with a vivid image of a coffin. To come to
the end of innovation would be the most profound catastrophe
that could befall an intelligent species, and the quest for
the new would take on an almost mythic urgency.
So, disclosure is a lot more complicated than the chaps who
expect it to lead to a nice sitdown with the aliens might
expect. To understand why the visitors are probably here,
and why they might resist an open meeting with us unless we
are absolutely about to go extinct, it's necessary to recall
the words of Samuel Johnson: "Such is the state of life that
none are happy except by the anticipation of change."
I think that the visitors have lost this, and so have ended
up at the end of meaning but not at the end of being. They
are, in this sense, both alive and dead at the same time.
But they have a chance to regain the taste of life, at least
vicariously, by living again through the medium of being
fellow-travelers on the human journey.
It is this overwhelming need that will always prevent them
from revealing too much of themselves to us, and that will
stand as a profound and permanent obstacle to us meeting
them on terms that we might find congenial. Should we end up
subsumed into their much more powerful reality, we will
suffer the wrenching agony of having been hurled to the end
of the path before we have even begun to take baby steps,
which is a fate, quite literally, worse than death.
It would be nice if the disclosure community had the ability
to address some of these issues usefully, but without
including articulate close encounter witnesses, they can
only fumble along as they are doing now, a bare step ahead
of the scientists, who have not yet begun to crawl, let
alone walk.
But we could fly, if we do this intelligently. We could
make contact work, and take a huge leap forward as a
species, rather than remaining as we are now in the nursery,
or throwing ourselves off the cliff of premature contact.
