Are the Visitors ‘Real’?

Since my special has aired, I have been getting a lot of questions about whether or not the visitors are “real.” I put that word in quotation marks for a reason. It is because it seems quite doubtful to me that we are going to be able to determine that in the same way that we can determine whether or not a stone is real.

Look at the 1996 NASA video. It shows some seemingly real objects, including one that even appears to have running lights pulsating on it. But then something with a tail almost like a tadpole goes speeding out of the lights of a city. Subsequently, a doughnut-shaped object, appearing almost like a plasma, comes up out of the clouds and moves slowly past.

What, exactly, does this video represent? Real, solid flying saucers with aliens in them? Perhaps, in part. But it could just as easily represent living creatures, or some kind of projection along the lines of what C. G. Jung theorized in his book on flying saucers.

I have had very few direct, physical experiences of the visitors. I have never been face to face with one of them while I was in full, normal consciousness. The only person I know personally who has done that was Raven Dana, whose experience is mentioned in Breakthrough.

So I cannot say, personally, that they are real. I have had some very close encounters, such as the incident of the nine knocks, but it did not lead to real, physical contact. The closest I ever came to that involved the six-week period that I was in almost continuous contact with what appeared to me to be a small human being, very quick, who had all sorts of odd abilities, including the ability to appear and disappear at will and, I think, to become a ball of light.

Hardly identifiable as a creature from another species as essentially bound to reality as we are.

One of the things that I am always careful to do is to remind people that, when we try to categorize the close encounter experience as either alien contact or something more ‘spiritual,’ we do our own minds an injustice. To really begin to understand the universe, it is necessary to realize that thought is a process that rests in the indeterminate reality of the electron. It is an electromagnetic process mediated by the chemical condition of the brain in which it occurs. When we try to quantify things that really are not available to that process, we run a risk of descending into superstition.

So far, the visitors cannot be positively identified. I have been trying for years to do this, by pinpointing things like irrefutable video and implants that can’t be explained. For this, I’ve been called a magician, weaving them into our reality, making concrete something that has never been concrete before.

One of the most subtle thinkers I have ever read was John von Neumann, the inventor of cybernetics. His works on quantum physics and how the mind might mediate reality as observation draws particles out of superposition is amazing.

I often wonder if the question “where are the visitors from” has any meaning. Seems like they would surely be from somewhere in this vast physical universe of ours. But I can make a case that we might almost be alone in the physical world. It is a case that gets stronger and stronger, the more we learn about the universe around us.

My mind returns again and again to an experience described in Breakthrough, when I seemed to drive my Jeep into another reality with one of my son’s friends in it. We saw strange buildings of sandstone with serpents carved on them, set in an improbably lush environment. We seemed to be the only living creatures about.

What was this experience? Honestly, I just don’t know. But it was certainly something. We both saw it. And it really terrified me. I remember, afterward, just thanking God that I had gotten this kid out of there. Ironic that this journey through the Twilight Zone happened not so very far from the former home of Rod Serling.

Don’t make the mistake of trying to parse out whether or not the close encounter experience is “real.” This is the weakest method of approach available. Before we ask, ‘who are they,’ far better to ask, ‘who are we?’

My mind lives in a shadowland that has largely been abandoned by our culture. But I have found it a far richer, better and more productive place to be that the world of the yes and the no in which we are, in general, living out our lives. In my world, at least, everything is an adventure. Had I not been willing to enter it, maybe I would never have met the visitors.

To see what that means, look at the news item posted 2/12/99 on Mirror Worlds.

NOTE: This Journal entry, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.