Sims, All the Way Down?

Atlas Simulate

According to philosopher Nick Bostrom, the chances we are living in a simulation by either extraterrestrial forces or a future “posthuman” civilization are very high—given its possibility, when wedded with a few other conditional axioms.

Here’s Bostrom’s abstract from his 2003 thought experiment:

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

First, Bostrom’s idea of the “posthuman” parallels that of Ray Kurzweil’s result of a technological singularity: it is mostly unpredictable from our current, limited human standpoint, but definitely involving 1) an astounding improvement to human somatic functioning; 2) interface with technology, probably via nanobots that eliminate disease and the aging process and allow the brain unlimited access to data; 3) the use of “non-thinking” objects/substances/processes as a substrate within which consciousness or computation could exist.[1] When all these events occur, a bootstrapping effect could take over that sidesteps biological evolution altogether and turns humans into “substrate neutral” entities that could conceivably use light, interstellar dust or gas to copy themselves, compute, and travel the cosmos. Bostrom refuses to specify posthuman qualities, ethics, activities, etc., but suffice it to say they would have powers we think of associated with deities and even the creator God of the monotheist—if they so chose to actualize them.

His argument rests upon these contingencies: 1) that humanity survives to a level where technological singularity is possible; 2) that humanity achieves successful passage through the period of singularity; 3) that substrate-neutral consciousness/computing is possible; 4) that our posthuman descendants could, using technology, run simulations for research purposes or “what-if?” scenarios (possibly a near-infinite number of them); 5) that they would either declare them unethical outright and not do such simulations or grow bored of them.

Bostrom admits that there is no necessity to any of these possibilities. However he goes on with the thought experiment assuming that one of the three possibilities is true, and chooses as most likely number three because our descendants, not having blown themselves up, would most likely try to simulate the past, if it were possible.

The indifference principle is invoked to assign whether we today would find ourselves within one of their simulations or not. John Rawls used this idea in his famous Theory of Justice thought-experiment. It assigns to all agents in an imaginary society an equal probability of being born a pauper or a prince(ss), congenitally compromised at birth or a very healthy physical specimen, or at any position between the extremes. Given your own ignorance of knowing where you might fall in the social order (your “original position” as Rawls calls it) how would you design a society that alleviates, to the best of its abilities, the harms of your being born into the “lowest,” resourceless position (if you happened to draw that lot) while minimizing economic harm to the interests/resources of those at or near the top of the social hierarchy, who would be compelled under a principle of justice to help the less fortunate members of society? And vice versa: what would be fair for you, as one of the elite (one with access to vast resources), to sacrifice in order to help those at poverty/disadvantage of any kind?

Bostrom adapts this “blind lottery” scenario to the field of possible worlds we could potentially find ourselves inhabiting at any given known time. We can know nothing of the past beyond our births, and only speculate on the future. We must concentrate on the possibility that this world, today as we know it, is a simulation by ETs or post-humanity.

But what outweighs this probability?

By adopting the indifference principle, Bostrom says, nothing conceivably can outweigh it. Our insufficient information at present on the future of humanity can lead us only to determine what could probably be the truth, given the overdetermined unknowns in his severely restricted assumptions. Bostrom assumes things that he doesn’t exactly spell out or engage. He accepts it as a given that consciousness is computable, by using Eric Drexler’s formulations of the energy consumption necessary for bits-processing-per-second. To this he adds AI theorist Hans Moravec’s formulation for the processing power of the human brain, and his own formulations on consciousness+human memory to find an energy amount and cost for computing a simulation. The first objection any rational person would counter is that the energy cost to simulate even a single conscious brain in our world, much less a virtual cosmos for many “brains,” would be laughably high for us, even if it could be done for only a few seconds. There’s an astronomically high probability that the energy ET/posthuman simulations require would be finite, and that these limitations would be detectable to us. Glitches in the simulation would occur as a result, and we would already have noticed these glitches and know we were inside a program.

Bostrom sidesteps this in two ways. First he says the “machines” powerful enough to simulate a universe also could easily and instantly rewrite our memories if a game-giving-away error occurred (in other words, that a “smoothing over” algorithm is always at work). Second, he backs up this failsafe and underpins the whole problem of energy-use by playing with Drexler’s conjecture that the quantum energy “pool” of entire planets could be harnessed as power sources for nanocomputation in biological, silicon, or any available substrate.[2] Remember, we’re talking intelligences that are “indistinguishable from magicians” or gods, and can hack the “computation power” of molecules. By this reckoning, simulating entire worlds for billions of equally simulated conscious observer-beings (like us) would be easy.

That is one possibility. Another is that the rules of entropy that we perceive as the “arrow of time” and space-time physics are simply programming of this simulation. Like in The Matrix, they are ultimately unreal. If the simulators in fact have access to infinite energy sources, they could program a world to have any physical rules they want it to.

Ironically, this scenario implies the high probability of an afterlife. After all, we aren’t really living if we are simulations. We could be “deleted” but what would there be to that condition? Our forms, as energy patterns in “time,” could just as easily be resurrected, or even go on to a simulated afterlife.

In other words, all the conjectures of religion and mystics could in fact occur as “realities” inherent to the simulation.

Or they could have evolved spontaneously in our human minds as a part of glitches, “anomalies” involving, say, Muhammad’s encounter with a massive “spacetime programming error” that was interpreted by Muhammad’s “mind program” as the angel Gabriel.

And suppose a whacked-out theory such as the one claiming millennia-old sounds or images can be imprinted as “stone recordings” is true in this sim (that there are programmed rules for such a phenomenon to occur), or that ghosts are actually “etheric recordings” of people who once lived (that is, who once inhabited the “level one” program of a life on earth as a person)? Or that UAP actually are energy forms/craft not indigenous to this part of the earth-program? All the debunkers’ bets are off against the paranormal being real if we do in fact live in a simulated universe. The division between the normal and the paranormal are senseless in such a universe.[3]

If we are simulations, the chances of a near-infinity of parallel simulations that are slightly different that ours by a few electrons (the multiverse conjecture) means that one conscious “monad” (me or you, say) could conceivably cross over into a parallel simulation, or be moved from one to the other, without our ever being cognizant of it.[4] Bostrom acknowledges all this in his paper:

The possibility expressed by alternative (3) is the conceptually most intriguing one. If we are living in a simulation, then the cosmos that we are observing is just a tiny piece of the totality of physical existence. The physics in the universe where the computer is situated that is running the simulation may or may not resemble the physics of the world that we observe. While the world we see is in some sense “real”, it is not located at the fundamental level of reality.

            It may be possible for simulated civilizations to become posthuman. They may then run their own ancestor-simulations on powerful computers they build in their simulated universe. Such computers would be “virtual machines”, a familiar concept in computer science. (Java script web-applets, for instance, run on a virtual machine – a simulated computer – inside your desktop.) Virtual machines can be stacked: it’s possible to simulate a machine simulating another machine, and so on, in arbitrarily many steps of iteration. If we do go on to create our own ancestor-simulations, this would be strong evidence against (1) and (2) (remember: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof)};, and we would therefore have to conclude that we live in a simulation. Moreover, we would have to suspect that the posthumans running our simulation are themselves simulated beings; and their creators, in turn, may also be simulated beings.

            Reality may thus contain many levels. Even if it is necessary for the hierarchy to bottom out at some stage—the metaphysical status of this claim is somewhat obscure—there may be room for a large number of levels of reality, and the number could be increasing over time. (One consideration that counts against the multi-level hypothesis is that the computational cost for the basement-level simulators would be very great. Simulating even a single posthuman civilization might be prohibitively expensive. If so, then we should expect our simulation to be terminated when we are about to become posthuman.) (italics and emphasis added)

So Bostrom and others have spoken of simulating universes, and within those, its inhabitants run further simulations. We have the possibility of a simulation within a simulation within a simulation—sims all the way down.

This idea of simulation and levels of simulations parallels the ancient Gnostic idea of a corrupt, illusory cosmos created by an evil archon and policed by demons. Perhaps the simulators are looking for those “simpeople” intuitive or smart enough to figure and find channels out of the simulation to communicate with them, Truman Show-style, and they will be rewarded somehow, like a rat in a maze—perhaps with a continuity of sort after their “death.” This would be one of the primary reasons posthumans or ETs would want to simulate human life, or something like it: to see if simulations can become self-aware, cubed. In this case, we’d be like the most adaptable denizens of John Conway’s Life Game, and get to perhaps be kicked up a level (ascended) into a more complex “dimension” of the simulation.[5]

—————-

Bostrom’s simulation argument still minimizes the question of what biological forces created the simulators, if they were or are “natural” creatures—as we the simulated perceive biology to be, that is. If they are posthumans, and have designed the “initial conditions” of our Life Game differently than their own, then we can’t know theirs and thus our own “biological” origins. If they designed our simulation to mimic exactly their own past cosmic initial conditions, but run a multitude of iterations of them, we would still happen to find ourselves in the one in which we evolved into sentience (the standard “anthropic principle”) but we could never know and never will know the point at which our world-simulation diverged/diverges from theirs and led to their supernatural evolution. It may have occurred at any point from the beginning until this very moment, and far into the dissolution of this universe/multiverse.

What we could say with certainty is that if there is equality of form between our physical/biological rules and those of the cosmos “outside” in which they inhabit and evolved from, this equality could be discovered in principle.

Some (not Bostrom) say it’s pure AI that’s created the universe, or there is computational equivalence between this universe and that of an omnisupercomputer. So where did the AI come from? Is it just playing a game? Denying that it must have emerged from biological beings and processes is absurd in one sense…Can we export our frail stories of “chaotic-primordial-soup-to-ordered catalysts and evolutionary ascent” to the genesis of beings with such power? Did they create our world to embody our own discovery or creation of this narrative? If not, what are the alternatives to it? That we are prisoners of “Solid State Intelligence,” as John Lilly called it and The Matrix dramatized? This implies they have programmed our universe to appear as if biological beings exist when in fact they don’t exist at all. Neither would geology, physics, etc. or anything we call “natural.”

Again, all bets are off. Bostrom has come up with quite a memetic trickster in the aether.

I’ll go Platonic here: there must be an essence to the Idea “biological” and an essence to the Idea “artificial.” Computer simulations can model biological processes but are not themselves biological, no matter how much enthusiasm the AI geek imbues their design with details matching what is currently known about molecules and enzymes and catalysts, etc. Simulation means to create a copy, down to the last detail, of an original example that pre-exists the simulation. Perhaps this is why Bostrom foregoes the pure AI simulators for “posthumanity.” These simulators must know the rules of what we would consider biology, drawn from the Idea (which, under Plato’s philosophy, would precede any instantiations of it) in order to sim biological beings. Therefore, the simulators must at least be acquainted with real, instantiated biological entities.

Or must they? If not, what’s then the difference between the simulators and a creator God(ess)?

There is none, according to Bostrom.

If our universe is a wholesale simulated creation, we have nothing with which to measure the creator(s)’ ontological status against ours. Even Descartes’s certainty fails in Bostrom’s scenario; they have programmed the thinking and personality that I believe is me—and your thinking and personality, too. The simulators are beyond our categories of classification and capacity to grasp…Like Pascal’s wager, is it then best to just put faith in our biological reality and ignore the entire problem of simulation? Or should we, as Bostrom would have it, bet on the opposite? Or should we use Pascal’s wager in its original sense via Bostrom, that is, conclude it is better to believe the simulator “gods” exist and try to reach out to them somehow?

———

Wittgenstein asked himself about the possibility of eternal life in the Tractatus, and concluded with the question “what problem would it even solve that we live forever?” We can adapt this to say that, even if we are products of simulators posthuman or extraterrestrial, our grasping the “truth” of this would entail mysteries outside our conceptions of time and space, and as the TractatusWittgenstein would conclude, it is senseless to even consider; it solves none of our human problems—the facts of the world as we find it—to know whether we are in a simulation or not.

 


[1] For a short essay on this last-mentioned technology, see the next essay on this site: “Substrate-Neutrality, Nano Tech, and ET.”

[2] Again, see the following essay linked-to above.

[3] I’m certain some of the most rabid atheist debunkers will want to reject the simulation hypothesis on these grounds alone, even if Bostrom’s paper is a cogently-argued piece of rationalism, because it threatens to destroy their belief that ours if a steady-state cosmos amenable to their scientistic dogmas.

[4] Or our consciously realizing it as a glitch. Some people call this the Mandela Effect: when all the public evidence for something recollected from one’s past differs significantly from the recollection, and all evidence one might have except one’s personal memory has been altered to conform to the present representation. We could explain this as simple and cheap misrecollection, except for the fact that so many millions of people have experienced it with regard to the same representations, and a growing community is discussing and noticing more examples. I have one myself.

[5] Again, such a conjecture must constitute the horror of horrors for the scientistic fundamentalist.

Nick Bostrom’s Simulated Universe argument gives Descartes’s evil demon a headache–apparently, he, too, is a simulation in Rene’s imagination.

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The Metachorea, Chapter 1: Don’t Confuse me with the Facts!

PREFACE:

    DON’T CONFUSE ME WITH THE FACTS…

By the second decade of the 21st century it is clear that the “great conversation” of philosophy has exhausted all possible pretenses to explaining an “ultimate reality” and, via its general turn to critiquing institutional powers, has almost entirely penned itself off from policing the empirical sciences.[1]

One reason for this situation is due to a centuries-old belief: Science is not supposed to deal with morality and ethics. Morality was the one province left to philosophy,[2] but by now this defense has been virtually swept away by the secular humanism that informs the Enlightenment’s political program. Technocracy’s utilitarian foundations have for the most part trumped moral concerns; ethics, whether pragmatic or deontological, only impede the march of science in its goal to relieve the plights of humanity.

The ancient forms of holistic philosophy such as the Stoics’s, in which epistemology, ontology, and ethics were inseparable, are forever gone. With the exception of German “meta-narrativists” such as Kant, Hegel, and Spengler, the classical Stoic trio of disciplines lived on until the late 19th century, when epistemology and ontology were farmed out to the hard sciences of physics, biology, chemistry, and neurology. Ethics was in effect left to individual conscience and the rationalizations of religious mores.

While “hard” science appealed to certainty for its cosmic visions, its methods were eventually applied to government policy and public mental health regimes via the soft humanistic sciences of psychology, economics, sociology, and anthropology. The freedom of a sovereign conscience came to apply not only to belief as defined by the Abrahamic religions, but eventually to beliefs in general on the nature of reality; this was the creeping nihilism inherent in supposedly “value-free” sciences which Nietzsche, amongst others, railed against as both dangers and as opportunities for a type of conscious evolution.

Today this free-for-all has resulted in multiplying the cosmologies and beliefs to which a person could potentially subscribe. Despite the sciences’ pretentions to a singular reality of which scientists are the sole arbiter, we have been in an ontological bacchanalia for some time now.

If we are awake and open, we must attempt to process a confusing mélange of conflicting explanations for where we have come from and even what we are. Those who are absolutely certain of any truth—and hold a universality to their beliefs—are looked upon as suspect, unhinged, even fascist.

So what has this situation to do with “anomalous” experiences and the human imagination?

It turns out, everything. From the standpoint we will explore, anomalous experiences like ghost sightings, psychokinesis (PK), or seeing an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) are akin to the creative acts of the human mind; both human ingenuity and anomalous experiences are equally mysterious in their origin.[3] Both have been plagues on humankind, for very different reasons.

 

I’LL SEE IT WHEN I BELIEVE IT

With a fair amount of certainty one can predict a given person’s explanation for an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) encounter based only upon their opinion of what reality consists—whether they profess a belief in absolute idealism or materialist monism, for instance.

For example, if one believes the real world is ideal (whether it be thoughts in the mind of God, the veil of maya, a realm of Platonic Forms beyond our imperfect copies, or a holographic projection from a higher dimension) then there is a good possibility that they will come to believe the UAP and their “pilot entities” are made of the same insubstantial “mind stuff” as we and everything else in the universe—incorporeal thought-forms—but perhaps more powerful with regard to their controlling these illusions in the UAP percipient’s mind. If the universe is not physical, the UAP entities furthermore can be contacted directly on this mental-ideal plane. Distance and time are no obstacles if space-time is illusory and malleable continuum of Idea. This particular belief underlies many forms of occult practice, and historically is the bridge between modern UAP and the realm of ceremonial magic.[4]

A monist physicalist (materialist) on the other hand erects insurmountable barriers for UAP being either extraterrestrial or interdimensional or ideal, as we’ll explore shortly. A Darwinian physicalist would counter the explanation that UAP are manned by “hidden Terran race/cryptoterrestrial” by explaining that an unknown species of beings cannot have survived on this planet without human knowledge of them, if not depositing some kind of paleobiological proof of their existence. Their physicalist framework would render claims of evolved abilities to possess invisibility camouflage (as some cryptoterrestrialist theorists have suggested) and psychic powers in advanced, unknown homo sapiens occultum as unprovable nonsense.

A fundamentalist steeped in the Abrahamic religions will see the world as the product of a single act of creation whose physical laws are secondary to a moral informing of the cosmos. Angelic and demonic forces may exist in this worldview, but are necessary to their core beliefs only by which sect we are discussing. For instance, a Southern Baptist or Muslim Salafist may shrug off UAP as demons, or the activity of Ifritic djinn, respectively—which, as we’ll see in Book Two, basically amount to the same type of being.

Within the materialist/religionist dichotomy we have binary oppositions of belief amongst social groups. They have completely different methods of knowing of what truth consists, and how it is constructed. Sub-species of both belief-systems could be extended indefinitely. A Hindu may view UAP as the return of ancient vimana craft used by Krishna and Rama; an Azande will cognize them as evil witch lanterns; a Mormon might believe they are the signs of spiritually advanced angelic beings like the Angel Moroni who appeared to founder Joseph Smith…

The upshot is that these all are conditioned responses via a priori beliefs inherent in their religions’ cosmologies. The scientistic stance is no different in this regard: in their case, an a priori dismissal of Others’ existence as impossible.

The rational study of UAP remains an outlying pursuit in our society and is largely immune to policing of its method. Its pretense to scientific tractability is illusory. “Ufology” has nothing with which to grasp its target but anecdotes, patterns within the anecdotes, and deductive reasoning.

Today’s dismal state of UAP/encounter study is due to the psychological and philosophical factors noted above. The specific belief-system of the investigator determines categorization and the phenomenon’s essence. The groundbreaking work in UAP study, if it can even be called such, has already been done, and done long ago.[5] We now accrete myth upon myth; the parameters for the debate have supposedly been set. Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but in UAP study, every opinion is practically unfalsifiable.

It would seem at this point to be a hopeless pursuit, but it is not. Just like mainstream science’s explanations for UAP, this tract will not be so much an explanation as a detailed description of a process that occurs to individuals and groups who encounter—or rather enfold within—such anomalies, its parallels with psychophysical paranormal events, and how Imagination irrupts all norms.

THE END(S) OF PHYSICS

The particle/wave complementarity of energy shown by quantum physics has given us an uneasy contentment with many phenomena that seem logically divergent. The untestable ideas of string theory yield the same unease in both its proponents and dissenters. The limits of the directly observable, long ago transgressed in quantum experiments, have driven physicists yet further to conjectures with no falsifiability criterion to test them.

The anomalies we will examine present disparate interpretations that structurally mirror our seemingly dead-ending physics. The divergence of interpretation stems from the highly strange circumstances of the paranormal events themselves. Ambiguity is their very nature, into which Imagination cannot but be projected.

With this essay I hope to steer a course using neurological and psychological findings about the brain, some axioms regarding that elusive activity known as human creativity, and deductions about anomalous perceptions, and tie them together.

 

UPENDING THE DEBUNKERS’ TOOLKIT

In science, there are several types of evidence that may support a hypothesis but, theoretically, “truth” is a label to be avoided. As per philosopher Karl Popper’s criteria, there should be no positive statements asserting a general truth, but tentative ideas that have observable and predictable consequences that can then be falsified by an experiment—therefore, if a theory’s entailed test(s) is falsified, then the theory should be reexamined, if not scrapped.

When we’re considering evidence for concepts such as other dimensions or “otherworldly” beings, most scientists demand evidence that amounts to a type of irrefutable proof of their existence.

But as is historically demonstrated, apparitions almost always appear spontaneously, and therefore the conditions to study them are unrepeatable in the sense that an experiment can be replicated.[6] The Spiritualists’ experiments of the 19th and 20thcenturies, witnessed by some of the greatest scientists of the period, by and large failed scientific tests; only a small fraction of the paranormal phenomena were left unexplainable. The same percentage (10-15%) holds for “unknowns” in UAP reports and their reported pilot entities.

The burden then becomes foisted upon an anomaly experiencer to prove a positive—the physical existence of what they witnessed or are asserting they witnessed.

To assert grounds for their non-existence is easy enough for the debunker; they only have to state that the laws of physics as we understand them do not allow the existence of beings from distant worlds to appear here because space-time travel-lengths from distant stars are too great, or that the physical energies for “transdimensional beings” to fold/warp into our space involved are too intense—and their intrusions would easily be noticed by scientific/military instrumentation deployed throughout society at large.[7]

But these scientists are replying to specific (perhaps grossly misguided) hypotheses as to what was witnessed in the first place by the percipient and/or made it into the investigator’s report. That the Others are physical extraterrestrial or transdimensional entities are 1) human conclusions made after the fact of experience, or 2) admissions by the (usually) more anthropomorphic-looking beings. Skeptics suspend judgment about such ideas. Debunkers are another story.

The entities may very well be from another star system, but the chances of that are very slim, as we shall see. For the debunker, whose mind is already made up, a snap judgment is inevitable: the percipient has given us lies, hallucinations, mistaken memory.[8]

The “normal” and the “paranormal” are useless terms when one considers that the norm is a matter of a frame of reference relative to a body of knowledge in historical time. In other words, the paranormal is a part of the natural world from a larger standpoint we simply may not yet understand. To take just one example of a debunker’s irony, here’s a real corker from Michael Shermer, editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine: “It is at the horizon where the known meets the unknown that we are tempted to inject paranormal and supernatural forces to explain hitherto unsolved mysteries, but we must resist the temptation because such efforts can never succeed, not even in principle.”[9]

To what principle is he referring? It must be the axiom that the paranormal doesn’t exist because it simply can’t. This statement itself does not pass scientific muster. It’s a sterling example of rhetorically assuming total knowledge of what it intends to prove non-existent—that the paranormal does not exist, therefore cannot be investigated, simply because…it does not exist. It is circular. It rests on metaphysical assumptions about the ultimate nature of reality, that reality has no non-measurable aspects that may be responsible for the paranormal. Yet debunkers like Shermer are supposedly committed to eliminating metaphysics from any scientific discussion. The irony of his statement is completely lost on him.

It can’t be denied that debunkers neither prove or disprove any claim they make against the strange experiences anomaly witnesses report. Although many ufologists are masters at deploying logical fallacies in trying to prove extraterrestrials’ presence here on earth, there is no shortage of sloppy thinking in the debunker community either, in particular the use of the straw man, complex question, bandwagon, begging the question, ad hominem, “no true Scotsman,” subjectivist, and appeal-to-authority fallacies.

 

ET NULL HYPOTHESIS + 1

Astronomers Woodruff Sullivan and Adam Frank have tabulated figures using the first three parts of Drake’s equation and new information from the Kepler telescope, which has discovered 300 exoplanets. It turns out that nearly every star probably has at least one planet. In all likelihood billions of stars have planets in the “Goldilocks” zone where water and an atmosphere can form. According to their calculations there is a 1 in 10 billion chance that a civilization did not evolve in this habitable zone of some star. With the age of the universe, the chance that one that is at least as technologically advanced as ours developed at one time is 100%. Now multiply that by the estivated number of stars with planets in the habitable zone: 25%.

               The likelihood that advanced extraterrestrials exist, or existed in the past, is near 100%. If they exist at the level now, or have a say 100,000 year head start, it is very possible they could develop means of traversing vast interstellar distances. To say they have to pass through our exact technological phases to reach such a level is anthropocentric. Accident has played a huge part in scientific progress. Cognitive differences in their early evolutionary development could have led some of these extraterrestrials to possessing imaginative capacities far beyond ours; perhaps they could view designs for machines in 3-D solely in their minds, like Leonardo da Vinci was reputed to do. Perhaps they could see the finite and detrimental courses certain technologies would take (such as the use of fossils fuels). Perhaps after discovering mathematics, or a cognitive analogue to it, they could create in their minds many thousands of models for the composition and deign of spacecraft before even raising a finger to actually build them.

But these conjectures tell us nothing about them appearing here. Here is a syllogistic breakdown of the way things stand with regard to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) being extraterrestrial:

1. Standard ET hypothesis (ETH):
-Statistically, extraterrestrial life, perhaps technologically evolved many ten of thousands of years before us, must exist somewhere in our galaxy.
-Human-possible means of interstellar flight that approach/exceed light speed or that warp space have already been discovered by these extraterrestrials. Therefore,
-The ET civilizations that discovered it long ago could come here with ease, given the time-frame.
————
2. Conservative adjunct to ETH:
-Currently-known means of interstellar space flight make travel from elsewhere to earth nearly impossible for even one, let alone hundreds, of different alien races.
-There are hundreds of differing UAP forms and entities (“races”) reported; therefore
-Conventional means of interstellar flight are not used, or they are not here.
***Rejoinder: Unknown but human-possible means may be used for their interstellar transport, as in the first set of syllogisms; or multiple generations pass on the vehicle as it traverses space; or the beings are in suspended animation during flight; or grown artificially during flight; or they are very long-lived; or they are a form of artificial intelligences (drones).
Or…
These UAP and their pilot beings are not extraterrestrial but manifestations of something endogenous to earth.
———
3. Consensus ETH Qualification:
-5-10% of reported UAP and their entities are extraterrestrials.
-Different people have very rarely reported the exact same UAP and/or entity (prior to the “greys” seeming to dominate UAP lore 1980-present); there have been hundreds of types of “ships” and creatures reported, almost unique to each percipient, up to the present day.
-Statistically, to the best of our knowledge, it is probable that only one race would be able to perfect the technology capable as we currently envision it of making the journey, as in 2.1; therefore
Only one, or even none, of the UAP craft/entities are extraterrestrial.

***Rejoinder: We could conjecture that the single race that has made the journey here possess means to camouflage itself in a myriad of different forms, thus accounting for the hundreds of types and confusing humanity as to their purposes.

So the existence of UAP as extraterrestrial craft is suspect due to the numbers of different ships/beings that have been reported, and the vanishingly low odds of so many different “races” achieving the physical means to get here. And this even ignores the question of why they would be interested in our planet.

Still, the chance that an unknown intelligent force has interacted with the human race is very great, due simply to the astronomical numbers of reported events of “high strangeness,” revelations, contacts, epiphanies with otherworldly beings noted throughout history—all the way to the present age of UAP and aliens.

ANOMALIES AS NORMS

Another of science’s defining features is the strict classification of phenomena, a practice that stretches as far back (at least) to Aristotle. This Greek thinker also gave us the concept of the excluded middle, the axiom that any proposition must either be true or false. All existent beings either fall into one conceptual set or another. Their traits may overlap, but this results in the creation of a third set of predications. Thus could classification be extended indefinitely.

Together, classification and the excluded middle in practice allow no room for the existence for penumbral entities or experiences—that is, possibilities—where one must admit, almost everything in reality actually belongs. Plato’s “unveiling what is beyond nature,” wedded with Socrates’s technique of elenchus(suspension of any fixed beliefs in order to interrogate a phenomena) and Aristotle’s logic of classification bequeathed us the system that lives at the heart of science. This primal technology, this thinking method (or even a thinking ritual) has now changed the world, and especially how humanity regards its relation to religious experiences.

Regardless of the trappings, the structure of the anomalous phenomena still stands: an ethereal encounter begets the begats. The experiencers of Otherworldly beings and states have changed the world in ways that are socially primordial and more long-lasting than that of the modern science, its technology, and the epistemological stances associated with it.

When one examines human history, we should note that encounters with intelligent-seeming beings that seem evolved higher (or lower) than humanity, or are “from elsewhere” is a rule and not an exception. We may even venture to say that such encounters with Others are statistically ordinary occurrences over epochs, but extraordinary events in a sub-epochal sense—the span of a single week, for instance.

Another way of saying this is that spectacular anomalous events may occur unpredictably within the relatively short timespan of a decade or two, with clusters of events (or even none at all), but occur with a statistical consistency over long periods, such as two centuries—and by spectacular, I mean those events that have been recorded due to the presence of many credible witnesses, or devastating effects upon a small group of witnesses.[10] The Jansenist convulsionnaires movement (which we shall examine), the “Miracle of the Sun” at Fatima, Portugal in 1917 and the appearance of triangular UAP over the Hudson Valley in 1981-83 would be examples of mass anomalous experiences. In the 20th century, for instance, there were major worldwide waves of UAP encounters: 1947 (majority in USA), 1952, 1954 (majority in France/Italy), 1958, 1965-69, 1973-74, 1976-78 (majority in South America, UK, USA, and USSR), 1981, 1986-91.[11]

Every person who has lived has probably either 1) experienced an anomalous being directly; 2) known someone who has encountered one directly; or 3) has heard of someone by a maximum of two degrees of separation that has had an extraordinary encounter.[12]

The most important aspect of extraordinary encounters is that they almost always change that percipient’s outlook on life. The intense quality of their conviction affects people close to them; their family or friends may be converted by the sheer charisma of the transformed’s personality into not only belief in the experience, but belief in that force which ostensibly caused it as well. Obviously, such primary encounters are how religions begin: Pharaoh Amenhotep IV’s revelation of the Aten; Moses’s burning bush; the apostles encounter with the resurrected Jesus; Paul’s encounter with the resurrected Jesus; Gabriel’s appearance to Muhammad; Joseph Smith and the Angel Moroni, etc. Numinous encounters are also how the revelation of prophecy is forged: think of Ezekiel and Enoch and Elijah and John of Patmos. The communion of Saints Hildegard and Bernadette and Lucia with the “white lady” (AKA the Blessed Virgin Mary) has given way to alien contactees Betty Andreasson and Truman Betherum and Howard Menger encountering angelic-appearing beings. Each of these people had a meeting with some force that changed them—and through a subculture-to-cultural stealth, affected a not insignificant portion of our civilization.

Inside any socially stable group, individuals may be subject to an array of anomalous events but there are always limited vocabularies to describe and tame them. These anomalies transform the society, for good or ill—causing a spiritual solace in the experiencer(s), or causing a reactive force that comes to some powerful individuals or groups in vanquishing the irruption when it threatens the communal order (if we chose the late 17th century, for instance, by means of official exorcism or trials and murder of the “witch”).

It’s a simple fact that any arbitrarily chosen time-period/geographical area will possess its corresponding set of Otherworldly beings and associated phenomena. Their influences upon those populations’ thinking and, consequently, their histories are immense and unavoidable.

The bunk that arch-skeptics consistently retail is that a steady-state norm always exists from which there can be no deviation. If such a state of nature existed, all questions as to the universe’s structure and origin would be in principle knowable and probably satisfactorily answered by now. Scientific history is full of surprises that overturned everything known; it is how knowledge changes.

Arch-debunkers seem not to possess the reflective capacity to see the mechanisms by which the norms of accepted and acceptable scientific knowledge, for instance, have changed radically over the past century.[13] They are many times altered by noting and collecting anomalies in normal scientific practice, as Thomas Kuhn pointed out.[14] The norm is changing today at an almost alarming accelerating rate, and the scientific groundwork for postulating a falsifiable theory for anomalous experiences is being laid further each day. With this work, I hope to establish the skeleton and arrow pointing to such a theory.

 

THE EXPLANATORY IMPULSE

So how are such unusual experiences classified today? We know the judgments of the psychological turn (that psychoses or “hysteria” are responsible), and the “mistaken cognitive impression/hallucination” that neuroscience would offer us. These explanations are default frames of reference, and require no thought at all—and are especially poverty-stricken with regard to the content of the percipient’s “hallucination.”

The phenomenology of hallucinations is a crucial aspect pertinent to all mental experience and is amenable to analytic interpretation (Jung was one such pioneer) but on the whole neuroscientists minimize or ignore the significance of the imagery and messages that are present in “deviant” brain activity. Thus every day, inadequate explanations are wheeled out to explain strange experiences, as well as their extrapolation backwards in history to account for the otherworldly encounters of the past.

This is not to say that there aren’t valid psychological, sociological, and historical reasons explaining why people without a directexperience of an Other would come to believe these supernatural occurrences happened. A series of fortuitous strokes led an obscure Palestinian Jewish cult to ascend into the world’s most populous religion. A staunch Christian would likely disagree with that statement, or say that it was foreordained because it is the one true religion, with Paul of Tarsus being the historical lynchpin.

But there is a structure here that bears emphasizing: The important dynamic regarding a born-again Christian’s personal conversion-revelation is that Jesus’s resurrection aligns the “reborn’s” experience with that of Saint Paul’s. It places the percipient directly in the center of an/the originating divine experience. What to the born-again person is a divine tautology—“the grace by which Paul was saved is the same grace by which I was saved”—is echoed in the debunker’s tautology “temporal lobe malfunctions cause ‘religious-experience hallucinations’ that can only be caused by a temporal lobe malfunction.” The phenomenology of this supernatural grace or affect-soaked hallucination fail to account for the structural change to the percipient’s mental state and physical disposition afterward. For the rest of us, who try to dispassionately view the transformation of an individual’s life after an Otherworldly encounter—especially seeing that these persons have come into possession of personal qualities or talents hitherto minimal or non-existent—we are full of questions meant to break the circular logic.


THE DOUBLY-DAMNED

Mature “epistemological autocracies” such as our materialist worldview are ideologies that marginalize or attempt to erase human experiences that do not fit their framework. Charles Fort called anomalous experiences “the damned”—the events that are ignored, suppressed, or explained away by both secular and religious orthodoxies.

But it’s only fitting that they be damned to irrelevance, we say from our peculiar Darwinist way of thinking—for were there any reality to their existence, they would have gained scientific purchase and be recognized realities by now.[15]

There appear to be at least two reasons why this is so:

One: We simply do not adequately understand consciousness or the relation of consciousness to its substrate, the brain, to offer an explanation for them. But, science assures us, in the future we will. This is called promissory materialism—the idea that all the physicalist answers will one day be found for all mental phenomena. The greatest problem with this form of scientism is that its conclusions about an objective world presuppose a presence—an experiencing thing—that it cannot bring itself to acknowledge. At best, the dominant form of neuroscience can try to persuade us that this subjective realm of experience is only another kind of object, a chemical machine called the brain whose secrets and tricks we are slowly uncovering. All we lack is more powerful technologies to make the discovery complete. Some of the best thinkers have concluded that consciousness is only an illusion constructed by the brain in order to assist the propagation of genetic material.

This conflict between the non-objectivity of behavioral observations and the inability of science to bridge the mind-brain gap seems bereft of a solution. Neuroscientists can propose yet further physiological investigations. Philosophers can offer up an endless stream of thought experiments, but there is no final resolution to the problem of subjectivity trying to objectify itself. This notion of neural correlates of conscious mental states is at the heart of a number of neuroscientific misconceptions ranging from assessments of consciousness, to the claims that morality can be ascertained scientifically. The feeling of security given by the reductionist approach is in fact illusory—a feeling of security analogous to the fundamentalist religionist’s.

Two: Even if the mind/brain system were completely explained, a scientific model for anomalies would still be problematic under our epistemic autocracy because such phenomena are, by definition (mostly) single witness-dependent, subjective, and often singularly-occurring phenomena. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, these reports are incommensurable with our scientific method of hard data, replicable experimentation, and peer-reviewed study, so they would still be eliminated from consideration.

From the point of view of the religious fundamentalist, the anomalies’ ambiguous nature contradicts the idea that God has a specific order to existence. People today still claim to encounter angels and demons, for instance, and while these episodes may pose problems for the ecclesiastical authorities, they do not for the common believer. The belief is solid because it has historical provenance thousands of years old. Still, most mainstream Christian and Muslim sects chose to minimize people’s accounts of encountering them.

Anomalous experiences cannot be transmitted to others—except by a sympathetic recognition by persons to whom a similar event has occurred, or the faith and belief-induction of those close to them.[16] As a culture we in the “West” have tended to throw Charles Fort’s “damned” experiences all together in an inchoate mass. Fringe incidents begets fringe community: a near-death experiencer gravitates into a support group with other survivors, learns of the afterlife’s “ascended masters,” then the UAP-entity connection to these ascended masters, then crystal power, and is embraced by the New Age set and may end up converted to belief in a nefarious, Reptilian-led New World Order—all because their original NDE experience has found no home in our materialist-dominant culture.

Inevitably an experiencer is compelled to retreat from defending the pragmatic value of their anomalous experience—the positive changes that occurred to them as a result—to arguing whether it even happened in objective reality. The positive changes in the experiencer’s personality are irrelevant to the debunker, as we noted; they fall back on the “God-sensing center” of the brain’s neurological edifices, or the “spiritual-neuron bundles” responsible for conversion experiences (usually a temporal lobe malfunction) and consequent beliefs that arise from the malfunction.

The tenuous research on the brain’s “God center” point to merely correlative relations between neural stimulation and a reported experience; there cannot be a causative God-sensing center in the human brain in the way that, say, the pituitary gland causes the secretion of hormones.

This use of language is known as a category error and is, ironically, often deployed by the debunkers against religious believers. How can God be sensed by a part of the brain, when God/a larger spiritual world does not exist for the scientist? To be clearer: the debunker looks upon the anomaly percipient’s experience as an avowal of belief, not a statement of fact. “The pituitary gland secretes hormones” can be empirically demonstrated through measuring instruments, but that proposition depends upon the consensus meaning of “pituitary,” “gland,” “secretes,” and “hormones.”

There are observable referents to each of the words. The statement “I sense the presence of a loving God” also depends upon the meaning/reference of each part of the proposition—but that which is signified by the object “God” has sense, but no referent that can be measured. Most people experience the “oceanic feeling” of Oneness or interconnectedness at least once, and in innumerable ways. It is often used as a substitute for God. That it should have a neural correlate does not negate the meaning of the experience to the subject, to say nothing of the time factor: that the subjective experience may be the cause of the neural change. We will explore the arrow of causation in this essay.

The crux of the matter is this: what happens when percipients are compelled to use the epistemological methods used by the dominant scientistic regime to explain their unique experiences? They must turn to physical evidence, of course, to sate the physicalist demands.

Perhaps 5-10% of the time the UAP (and even fairy, djinn, or cryptid animal encounters) produce inexplicable physical traces such as landing marks, burns, sickness in the percipient, stigmata, scars, spontaneous healings, etc. From the most generous frame of reference, these traces are exactly the result of what is described—physical evidence that some kind of high-intensity energy interacted with the percipient. But they always turn out ambiguous from a scientific analysis.[17]

Just as the effects of quantifiable objects (such as electromagnetic fields in a coil) may produce theories as to how they work, we can trace the effects of paranormal events back to their probable causes. This is what I intend to do in this essay.

We will eventually see that the suspension of a single explanatory reference frames regarding “Otherly” beings lets us entertain the idea that there is a family resemblance between what experiencers of UAP entities, fairies, djinn, and Other beings claim, and take all such accounts on multiple levels. This is a fruitful approach used by journalist John Keel and ufologist Dr. Jacques Vallee—in particular, Vallee’s idea that, regardless of their physically real/unreal status, these Others’s methods and effects mirror that of spy operations (psy-ops). Working from psychologically observable effects to possible causes seems both the most conservative and the richest stance to pursue.

Although varied in form, the spectrum of entities embody similar content/meaning/ends in their human interactions. No amount of conditioning will produce such phantasmal spectacles with predictable success. UAP and related phenomena appear to appear randomly (which, as I said, is what makes them impossible to study), and as long as most scientific organizations refuse to admit their existence there will be a poverty of potentially relevant information surrounding any unusual experience: an analysis of local geomagnetic disturbances, a change in the percipient’s brain chemistry, and, perhaps most implausibly, persons elsewhere in the world who are undergoing another kind of anomalous manifestation at the same time, or even groups of people actively trying to access another realm through occult ritual or meditation.

Such correlations are impossible to achieve; if we could somehow cross-section the world or take a snapshot of everything occurring everywhere in the globe, would we find some correlative supernatural events are transpiring elsewhere during a UAP or apparitional entity encounter?[18] And can we find functional relations between them?

The question is this: Statistically, on any given day or hour, how often do high strange anomalous events occur? And how are we to classify them?

These are impossible statistics to accumulate, but they would seem to be imperative to an understanding of UAPs and their attendant phenomena. Should such a database be established, it could find correlations that yield analyzable material. If scientists don’t even try to establish regularity to the phenomena, we can never get anywhere. Regularity establishes the basis of classification and testing. Researchers like Aime Michel, Vallee, and Keel have attempted analysis of UAP sightings by frequency and location, yielding at least some patterns related to electromagnetic earth disturbances; Keel and Vallee both strongly suggest a relationship between the percipients’ life history, psychological state, and the conditions under which the sightings occurred are the most important aspect of the phenomena. Albert Budden has further discovered deep parallels between electro-hypersensitive persons and UAP activity and personalities prone to “abductions.” I agree with this psychological/health angle, and will follow this lead as basic.

 

A CONCESSION TO THE EPISTEMIC AUTOCRACY: ANECDOTES, DAMNED ANECDOTES!

Cognitive scientists and psychologists claim to have rid themselves from Cartesian dualism and Skinnerian behaviorism, but these ideas have lived a skulking shadow-life in the psychology lab regardless. The structure of neuroscientific practice involves the experimenter’s believing the verbal accounts of a test subject’s experiences that the experimenter correlates with their objective/physical measuring devices. This yields publicly available data for inspection by expert and amateur alike.

What is needed is the third way, the mediation.

To be clear: To prove anomalous beings and phenomena don’t exist is impossible. To prove an anomalous experience changed a person’s outlook on life—including their habits, diet, and even their lifelong maladies, etc.—is proven beyond doubt, in hundreds of cases going back centuries.

Many people take this statement to mean some kind of positive assertion that “ETs” therefore must exist, but we shouldn’t assert this; we should deal with the facts, the possible, and the probable. We first need to bracket the experiences phenomenologically without regard to their physical cause, accept them in the form they are presented, and work backwards.

So all we have left is anecdotes. And from anecdotes we shall have to proceed, using logic and categorization to make sense of them. Anecdotes constituted the greater portion of human knowledge for the past 10,000 years—stories of battles, peoples’ folkways, spirit encounters, fairytales, and gossip. It was only by means of the data-organization techniques generated over the past 5 centuries that patterns could be gleaned from the raw data these stories presented. In our age of corporatized, physicalist science, these folktales of encounters are considered curiosities at best, an irritating form of non-scientific knowledge at worst. Almost always the word “anecdotal” is derogatorily cast upon UAP, NDE and psi studies. They are viewed as collections of mistaken impressions loosely gathered together. Mostly this criticism comes from our popular science boosters and professional debunkers, and not necessarily credentialed scientists themselves. Many of the actual scientists know better; they know that anecdotes are where science can begin, for all collections of anomalies that end in paradigm shifts start off as anecdotes encountered during experimentation or observation. Moreover, radical critics of scientific methodologies hold that the line between experimental conditions and anecdote is artificial; all the preparation (choosing the experiment’s participants, designing the experiment’s conditions, weeding out confounding factors) are just made in order to produce a series of anecdotes (the experimental runs) arranged and stereotyped in a strict way to reveal a certain result. The only difference between a collection of anecdotes and a scientific experiment is that a hypothesis motivates the experiment, a guess at the empirical effects of the hypothesis is made ahead of time, and a result is obtained. Studies function as little more than anecdotes that are used to back the claims of newer studies. The special status of these anecdotes—and why we are prohibited from calling them such—is that their transparency of methods and design supposedly render them replicable by other scientists.

So ahead we’ll go. In Part Two we will examine the rise of the “grey alien” and its “purpose” through witnesses’ experiences and the popular culture. Part Three will approach current theories of neuroscience with regard to quantum phenomena and especially their non-local aspects, leading to the conjectured existence of a field I call the metachoria, in which humanity has co-created from an “imaginal realm” very real experiences and energies that we are just on the edge of understanding. It’s necessary for to delve a bit deeply into some interpretations of quantum experiments and theory and their relation to the brain’s structure in producing—or rather filtering—conscious experience. After that, we will examine the many phenomena associated with dissociative identity disorder, hypnotism, seemingly impossible feats of psychophysical magic, and the holographic universe/implicate order hypotheses. The four of these combined will provide a foundation for the examination of Albert Budden’s theory of electro-hypersensitivity in certain individuals, and the anomalous experiences that can result.

 


[1] Possible exceptions are stringent evaluation of the models used in the cognitive sciences, neurology, and psychology by thinkers such as John Searle, Thomas Nagel, Hubert Dreyfus, David Chalmers, Colin McGinn, Roger Penrose, and Emily and Edward Kelly. On the more radical side, we have the philosophers of science Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn—which still are institutional critiques.

[2] Evidenced by such thinkers as G.E. Moore, Karl Popper, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Martha Nussbaum, and Alasdair MacIntyre.

[3] This study will dispense with the terms UFO, flying saucer, and extraterrestrials. In their place I will substitute the “Others” because I don’t think it is useful to draw a hard distinction between the “craft,” the “entities,” their “origin realms,” “technology,” and their effects on percipients. The aberrant experiences should be considered as wholes, both on individual and collective bases. The supposition that these anomalous “presentations” may likely involve a form of “holography” or especially altered states of consciousness in the observer, noted by many investigators, has led me from this group of terms in favor of a singular one. The Others is a term meant to encompass the fact that something unknown and intelligent is interacting with human (and animal) minds. The specific form taken by the “entities” or their “craft” is less important than the fact that an interaction is taking place. As many researchers have noted, a study of folklore and history shows that the Others seem to alter their appearance based upon cultural constraints. This would mean they have an intimate knowledge of our minds, either by “study” or a form of “mind-hacking”—or that they are generated in part by us. But they have interacted with purpose nonetheless. I believe the previous generations of terms used to describe them are something we must condition ourselves to go beyond if any further progress is to be made. One may think this is an even worse nomenclature to use, but it elides the bewildering varieties of beings in favor of, hopefully, a philosophical engagement with something that could turn out to be the most significant in human history.

[4] One variation of this confluence began with Dr. Meade Layne’s “Etherian” hypothesis that was developed through trance medium Mark Probert’s communications with “space intelligences” between 1946-53. See The Coming of the Guardians: An Interpretation of the Flying Saucers as Given from the Other Side of Life, Inner Circle Press, 2009 (originally published 1958). In 1904 & 1918, poet and occultist Aleister Crowley supposedly accomplished “interdimensional” communications and evocations of extraterrestrial beings, one which became his “Holy Guardian Angel.” Crowley’s devotees John W. Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard performed Crowley’s “Babalon Working” ritual in 1946 to “rend the veil” between our realm of Malkuth (in Kabbalistic terms) and that of the Abyss, or Qlippoth (the shattered remains of material unused in Yahweh’s creation); some claim that, through their incompetency, the duo was unable to close this portal, resulting in the entire UAP “demonic invasion.” If nothing else, the coincidence of the dates 1946-1947, when UAP first appeared in vast numbers, and Crowley’s visual descriptions of the beings he contacted are interesting anecdotes.

[5] I am thinking here of the work of Aime Michel, who in the mid-1950s first (and unsuccessfully) submitted UAP sightings in France to statistical and “orthotenic” analysis; of Dr. Jacques Vallee, who did the same but came to embrace past folklore as continuous with UAP mythology and involved psychic factors; Trevor James’s and Brinsley le Poer Trench’s biological “sky people” hypothesis; John Keel, who introduced the world of occult manifestations into the mix by 1970; Dr. Michael Persinger, who attempted to explain experiences by means of electromagnetic interference with the brain’s temporal lobes; and, closer to today, the thorough work of Albert Budden in the 1990s, whose hypothesis we will explore in depth. Apart from Vallee, Keel, Persinger, and Budden there have been no theoreticians of UAP activity whose musings have come close to answering the full spectrum of the mystery.

[6] Many overly-curious investigators have tried to short-cut this problem by utilizing psychic mediums to contact the entities behind the UAP, as we shall see.

[7] In connection with UAP and “cryptids,” no physical evidence, such as an artificially created artifact, has ever passed analytical muster as something possibly from “elsewhere.” We are told about landing marks, drained car batteries, car paint damage, electrical surges that overload a grid, etc. Witnesses suffer burns, nausea, and even death from their encounters. These are obviously signs that something occurred. But no physical object has ever survived scrutiny as proof of an exotic “craft”. Further, I will purposely ignore the claims of dozens of witnesses to “crashed saucers” seen on-site or in secret government hangars, because these claims always lead into the wilderness of mirrors; they are always suspect to hoaxing, a witness’ misidentification of advanced black-budget military tech, or disinformation, simply because the government may want to project a certain narrative. Thus I am foregoing the use of any confirming/disconfirming statements by any government officials, studies, “inside sources,” etc., for the existence of UAP phenomena. These twisted tales have been covered ad nauseam elsewhere. The methods of science are all that is needed to make progress in understanding it. It’s unfortunate but the dis/misinformation techniques used by the government intelligence agencies have so thoroughly muddied the evidence trail regarding the existence of these things as to merit a complete disregard for a serious researcher. Studying the phenomenon and drawing conclusions from available public evidence is not only possible but can yield scientific breakthroughs, though warned against by certain experts.

[8] The latest coming-to-a-debunkers’-message-forum-near-you tool is to classify anomaly-experiencing person as a “schizotypal personality,” which holds, according to the JAMA Psychiatry July 2015 issue, that 1 in 20 people experience random veridical hallucinations at least once in their life; veridical in that they are not recognized as hallucinations as such. The APA has now devised this new classification as a spectrum disorder—a resting-state for humanity, in other words, with each individual falling somewhere within the spectrum. Some persons can even have many hallucinatory experiences while otherwise being completely sane and importantly, productive citizens. And thus, the pathologizing of everyday life, context-free of the hallucinations’ content and precipitating conditions, and in manageable quantificational form, marches on. On the other hand, their tired fallback reasoning for the impossibility of ETs and transdimensionals is deteriorating in the light of contemporary discoveries in quantum physics, nanotechnology, and “reservoir computing.” Recent findings such as the capacity to slow down photons’ velocity in superfrozen mediums, the ongoing research into space-warp or electromagnetic/radiation pulse drives, and the behavior of particles in zero-point energy conditions (absolute zero temperatures, 0 Kelvin, which obtain in open interstellar space) are challenging basic assumptions about the nature of matter and light.

[9] Scientific American article entitled, “Is It Possible to Measure Supernatural or Paranormal Phenomena?”

[10] Computer scientist and ufologist Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck have compiled a historical catalog of aerial anomalies, Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times. The criteria in the ancient world was quite strict to officially record a “prodigy” or “portent” in the sky; most times they were related to earthly events such as the outcome of battles, plagues, coups, etc. before being written down. This criterion held from Rome to China, and was used all the way up to the late Renaissance, but their many reports come from monasteries and lone chroniclers of towns. Vallee and Aubeck were equally strict in their choices; the recorded event had to have properties that defy descriptions of meteorological or astronomical phenomena such as meteors, bolides, temperature inversions, fata morgana, etc.

[11] Reported sightings increase and decrease in number from year to year. There is always a resting state of stigma attached to “close encounters.” In all probability this is a disconnect from what is actually going on; the sightings and close encounters may still be occurring between waves, but the stigma for the witness over going public remains, threatening one’s standing in the community. That reports suddenly begin to appear in great numbers may be a function of social snowball effects: when waves occur, they become undeniable events, whatever their real cause. And many times witnesses come forward during waves with reports of events that happened several years to even decades earlier because a modicum of “social safety” has been established by the welter of percipients revealing their experiences. The stigma is (if only temporarily) loosened.

[12] Like the children’s game “telephone,” noise can overtake and distort an informational signal (the percipient’s tale) when passed through a network, but noise has been found to be quantifiable by the number of participating nodes involved in the signal’s transference. A story told through two degrees’ separation from an eyewitness would not distort the data to a limit that would render useless its information. It depends on the veracity of the nodes. Those who are biologically-related or close friends are within the scope of the first node, with less well-known acquaintances or friends of the close friends in the second, and people within the second degree friends’ connected social groups in the third node. Beyond that, the quality of the signal—the story’s strict adherence to facts—breaks down. As per Claude Shannon’s investigations into what constitutes a signal versus a non-signal (or noise), it was found that a signal degrades into noise over time due to the second law of thermodynamics; entropy can increase over time or over distance (as measured by the number of connection points through which it travels). There is a parallel to this in neuroscience: Valid psychological studies have shown how memory slightly overwrites a recalled experience almost each time it is called up. The anomalous events with which this essay is concerned would obviously have a special place in the memories of the percipients; although they are many times in some kind of altered state of consciousness, their core recollections have been found by investigators to remain stable—which either makes them suspect as real experiences (for how can a real experience not be altered in the repeated recollection) or demonstrates that they actually occurred, having been burned into the person’s mind in a special way.

[13] This is known as the Basic Limiting Principle, as outlined by philosopher C.D. Broad.

[14] Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 3rd Edition, 1996.

 

[15] Many scientists perceive that if there were something to it, teams of experts would already be on the case. They then cite Project Blue Book and the Air Force/CIA investigations as reasons to dismiss the phenomena as solved. But these projects have amply been shown to be whitewashes. An average of 20% of the thousands of sightings were still classified as unexplained in the final reports. Furthermore, the original Air Force investigation, Project Sign (1948) supposedly concluded extraterrestrial craft were the most likely explanation. This “estimate of the situation” was deep-sixed by Air Force General Hoyt Vandenburg and the report destroyed. It is facts like these that scientists need to become aware of. There are literally hundreds of examples like this—a history of prevarication and disinformation in the scientific examination of the UAP phenomenon (which is why I’ve tried to avoid mention of the government in this essay). The reasons why would fill a book. See Richard Dolan’s UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Coverup, 1941-1973, Hampton Roads Publishers, 2002.

[16] The mass media cannot encompass the subtleties of experiencers’ tales either, being fueled on immediate spectacle and the utilitarian, extraverted mindset of our society. In short, anomalous experiences (and especially their aftermath) do not fit the compressive laws of mass media representation. For instance, America heard about the Heaven’s Gate tragedy in 1997 but had no inkling of the cult’s existence or beliefs. One cannot make money off anomaly witness experiences, unless you’re talking about the train of quickly-cancelled Bigfoot/UAP-chasing reality shows featuring “crack” researchers on the trail of physical evidence that never shows up—or fictions such as Twin Peaks or The X-Files, crafted from them because they always already touch a deep mythic impulse.

[17] See the works of Jacques Vallee, J. Allen Hynek, and John Keel. Perhaps in the most famous UAP evidence case, farmer Joe Simonton witnessed a silver disc landing on his property in 1961. The three black-garbed men inside the “craft”, one of them holding a bucket, gestured to him to get some water. Simonton did so and was given three wafers the men were cooking on what appeared to be a grill! They proved to be made of ordinary terrestrial grains. Simonton said they tasted of cardboard. Such a strange story would no doubt garner dismissal from 99% of the population. Yet the sight of a silver disc a few miles away by an independent witness at the same time, and Simonton’s prior and post-experience standing in the local community (“He’d never make up a tall tale, let alone a story like that”) has to this day kept the story in the realm of a “real” UAP entity encounter.

[18] If you perhaps consider conservatively that one in ten experiences makes it to an investigator and one in ten of those reaches print, the Others must be encountered at least once every day somewhere on the planet. And from reading the lot of the collected stories it would seem one might as well watch your own backyard closely instead of the skies, for many of the accounts occur on the ground close to one’s house, while camping, or on a walk and involve “vehicles” tangentially or not at all.

…in which physicalists’ protests against accepting the reality of anomalous experiences demonstrates not a world succumbing to anti-science (as they’d have you believe), but rather their own desperation at the Newtonian worldview’s obsolescence–which is steadily proceeding from within physics itself. In other words, the grounds for explaining people’s anomalous experiences expands by the day, contains elements that are “magical” yet scientifically tractable–and the arch-skeptics don’t like it. Perhaps the most common example of this reality-rupture is the UFO, which we’ll examine in depth.

The Metachorea, Part 2: Why the Greys?

EVOLVING UAP “OTHERS” AND EIGHT TEMPLATE ABDUCTION CASES

We’re familiar with the stereotypical grey alien. Thousands of people have reported encounters with them, in many different situations. These imps ostensibly figure in the world’s folklore as well, from the mantindane in Southern Africa, the ikuyas of Brazil, the specific Hopi Kachinas to the Wandjina of the indigenous Australians.[1] There are dozens of “experiencer memoirs” on the book market that seem to describe interactions with more or less the same creature.[2]

Beings of the grey type appeared only very sporadically in UAP landing reports (usually in spacesuits complete with helmets) from the 1950s until the early 1980s. They then became a standard element in abduction scenarios to the present day. The only types of “alien” that have held steady throughout the modern 70-year phenomena are the long blond-haired, blue-eyed “Nordic” and the “hairy dwarf.” Nordics ostensibly got their start with George Adamski (contacts between 1951-59), who claimed they were from Venus.[3]

Nordics have been reported hundreds of times, both in conjunction with UAP and without them (in “bedroom visitations,” usually preceded by a glowing haze or ball of light). You could plausibly say the Nordics resemble angels or spirit guides, and thus initially appeared to humanity as far back as the ancient Roman world. The hairy dwarf likewise figures in folklore the world over, from some types of the ancient Greek Pygmies and kobaloi/kobolds through Scandinavian trolls and huldravolk (hidden people) and medieval goblins to the Ebu Gogo of Indonesia, the Shoshone Nimerigar, and the Ojibwe’s memegwaan.

 

—————-

With the appearance of the greys came the accompanying reports of a heralding “blue-white light in the bedroom,” levitation of the physical body or astral body, travel thru walls/windows to a round room, sexual examinations, rape,[4] induced pregnancies, “false pregnancies,” fetal extraction, “hybrid baby presentations,”[5] and the uncovering of a lifetime of abduction experiences going back in some cases to age two. Through my research I’ve discovered that only eight cases out of hundreds (1890-1980) introduced all or most these elements before their profusion from the late 1980s to the present: the Sara Shaw case (1953), the Betty Andreasson case (1967), the Shane Kurz case (1968), the Buff Ledge case (1968), the Pat Roach case (1973), the Sandra Larson case (1976), the Stanford, Kentucky case (1976), and the Allagash Four case, (1976).

I’m intentionally omitting grey abduction reports that were made under hypnotic regression or conscious recall post-1987, when Whitley Strieber’s Communion and Budd Hopkins’s Intruders were published and became bestsellers (Communion reached #1 and remained there for months). It was through these books that alien abductions by greys entered popular consciousness in an unprecedented way. It was only after 1987 that reports of “lifelong” repeating abductions in experiencers’ lives inundated the field, going as far back as the 1950s, reported mostly under hypnosis and still featuring the greys during the time 1947-1980 when they were not reported in thousands of consciously-recalled UAP accounts that featured visible entities.

Exposure to popular culture becomes a confounding factor in evaluating the recalled elements here, so I’m trying to concentrate on early reports that contain the many standard elements of the repeating “show” before there was any mass knowledge of the beings’ appearance and behavior and environment.[6] Many books of experiences that were partially or fully recalled prior to 1987, such as the Allagash event or the Buff Ledge event, were investigated earlier but written up and accepted for publication after 1987 simply because of the intense interest and momentum Communion and Intruders created in the publishing industry. Alien abduction narratives became hot property between 1988-1993, perhaps peaking with the publication of C.D.B. Bryan’s book on the MIT-sponsored abduction conference (1994) and Harvard psychiatry professor John Mack’s professional interest in the subject (1993).

Many “nuts and bolts” (NaBs) advocates of UAP phenomena (those who believe biological extraterrestrials from another planet are here in physical ships) have for the most part settled upon a specific story, while seeming to ignore the fact that “UFOnaut”-human interactions have radically evolved in appearance and function over the past seven decades, if not centuries. As we’ve seen in the first chapter, the NaBs exponents explain this by saying that perhaps many ET races are here, or only a few that, like we’ve said, can project their appearance in whatever manner they want.

For the NaBs proponents, when these “experiencers” give their accounts and an expert-hypnotist fine-tunes and collates the reports they seem to arrive at a simple narrative conclusion: a dying, cloned extraterrestrial race has come here across space to replenish itself by creating a hybrid race between themselves and humanity. In other words, ET advocates make sense of the experiencers’ reports through the hyper-technological lens of our society. Our own fears of ecological destruction and hubristic science are reflected back to us through the cataclysmic visions that the greys often induce in experiencers during abductions,[7]along with the dissonant comfort that this same higher race may have answers for us…to immortality, to interdimensional travel, time travel, to paradise.

The story has become a repeating show, a rerun from experiencer to experiencer. Folklorist Thomas Bullard breaks down the abduction experience into 7 parts: Capture, Examination, Conference, Tour of the “ship” (rare but sporadically reported; it was first described in the Hills’s 1961 case), “Otherworldly journey” (possible but not uncommon; we will see it in the Betty Andreasson case), Return, and Aftermath. After we examine the eight cases I will offer a list of recurring elements enumerating the details of Bullard’s sequence.

And the material revealed by experiencers and trance-mediums alike, who claim contact with “extraterrestrials” and reveal their motives, is startlingly similar in content: 1) “our vibratory rate is about to heighten in an ascension of some kind from the third density to the fourth density;” or 2) our planet will become uninhabitable, and those chosen will transcend this third density planet in some kind of ET Rapture; or 3) these alien beings are omnipresent and only need but choose to materialize anywhere, anytime; or 4) there is no good or evil, only “service to self” or “service to others”; or 5) there is a gradually-focusing spiritual orientation for human life through many incarnations on many worlds…etc.[8]

Why this particular narrative? Can’t we consider the possibility that a form of telepathy has taken place between the veteran abductee hypnotist and the experiencer/medium? Or that the dying-alien narrative has gained memetic traction in our culture, like a literal “mind virus” propagating in the dreaming night-brew of neurochemicals? That is to say, the experiencers are having night terror paralysis/visions/dreams that have been unconsciously shaped by the cultural proliferation of the grey, that are later recalled as real events?

These two popular skeptical explanations are perhaps only slightly less outlandish as that of a dying race of embryo-looking cyborgs popping into our reality to borrow our astral bodies and extract DNA from semen and ova to serve their ends…The problem is the small details these experiencers have reported, both from conscious recollection and under hypnosis. In many cases, there is a poverty of cultural contamination: too little to no prior knowledge of small details in the hundreds of abduction narratives that nevertheless appear in fresh narratives in new case after case.[9] These can include the particular shape of a scalpel-like instrument; the coldness of the ovoid rooms; the lack of obvious light source in those uniformly-lit rooms; the passing of the “doctor”-being’s hand over the forehead or eyes of the experiencer to stop the pain of a medical procedure; being unable to recall the transition into these rooms (“doorway amnesia”); etc.[10]

Betty and Barney Hills’s 1961 New Hampshire nighttime highway abduction is considered the first “missing time” UAP abduction but it did not contain many of the elements that would two decades later become standard—the details previously mentioned: floating into a beam of light, Out of Body Experience (OBE)-like intervals, doorway amnesia, the uniformly glowing round rooms, a “black box” wielded by the entities, a variety of beings seen together (mantis, Nordic, grey), an enhanced “psychic abilities” aftermath,[11] induced visions of apocalypse and paradise, etc.

 

          The identical elements between the Hills’s account and contemporary experiences number only eight: 1) prior to hypnosis by Dr. Benjamin Simon, Barney Hill consciously recalled feeling psychically controlled by the “leader” being’s eyes from the road as he watched the craft with binoculars; 2) the medical examination, reported by both; 3) the use of a letter-opener-type scalpel instrument to “rake hair samples” from the arm; 4) the removal of sperm from Barney by a suction-type device; 5) the insertion of a long needle into Betty’s uterus through her belly button as a “pregnancy test”; 6) the passing of the leader’s hand over her eyes/forehead to relieve the pain of the test; 7) her “conference” or tour of the vessel with the leader after the examination; 8) the general description of short beings with large, slanted eyes.[12]

The famous Pascagoula, Mississippi abduction case of October 1973 featured floating beings that carried two fishermen through the air into a landed craft.[13] Four months later in 1974 in Warneton, Belgium, a motorist whose car stopped dead in the night was confronted by two short “twin-faced” beings with inverted pear-shaped heads, large black eyes, no noses, and slits for mouths—what we now describe as greys. However, they were wearing space/pressure suits with helmets.[14]

“Spacesuits” like this are very rarely reported anymore; they seem to be a relic of the 1950s-60s Space Age, when they were ubiquitous in encounters.

One could trawl through the old reports and pick out each contemporary element’s appearance—elements that now all come together regularly like a theater performance that has been perfected after many rehearsals.

————–

Here are the first eight cases that involve this entire abduction spectacle, listed in order of their public unveiling, that I’ve found. The elements of the abductions which have become commonly reported are italicized and bolded:

1. 1976: In 1975, Sandy Larson was driving with her daughter and daughter’s boyfriend near Fargo, South Dakota at about 3am when they saw an array of intense lights descend from the sky, growing closer. They stopped in mid-air less than fifty feet away from the car. A portion of the lights changed direction and disappeared off towards the horizon. At that moment the three passengers felt that time slowed down somehow as the remaining lights stopped. They abruptly found that an hour had passed. Sandy’s daughter Jackie found herself in the back seat when she’d been sitting up front with her boyfriend Terry.

Veteran ufologist Dr. Leo Sprinkle hypnotized Larson. She recounted that a craft had landed and told of being floated into the UAP with Terry. A bizarre robot-like being with glaring black eyes and jointed arms put her on a table, rubbed a clear, cold liquid over her skin, and inserted an instrument up her nose, then performed other medical procedures. Curiously enough, a long-existing sinus problem was cured after the experience. The face of the being’s “mummy-like” swathings could be interpreted as heavily wrinkled and folded skin. In the drawings made from her description, the being in fact facially resembles a grey, but inside a mechanical body. At one point she said the being cut open her head and removed her brain (this is a common procedure in shamanic initiations by Otherworldly spirits).[15] After a period of time she and Terry, whom she did not recall seeing inside the room, were returned to their car, and all conscious memory of the incident vanished immediately. Daughter Jackie was also hypnotized by Sprinkle and recalled only standing motionless in a field. Terry refused to be regressed.

Four months later, Sandy Larson had a night-time “bedroom visitation” of two beings. They floated her through the wall to a glowing orange craft, then transported inside a transparent cube to a building in a desert-like place. She claimed she tried to get them to understand that human minds are each different from one another, a concept they apparently couldn’t understand. The beings wanted her to “give them a report on everyone she meets” when they returned for her some day.

After this interrogation they returned her via the orange object and she recalled feeling that she needed a bath to remove the “alien germs,” which intrigued the beings. They had no understanding of soap. Having arrived at her home, Sandy then took them into the basement and showed them laundry detergent and even gave them a cup of it. At that point her memories of the night of December 4, 1975 cease.[16]

2. 1975, Utah: Mother of three Pat Roach was awakened at midnight in October 1973 by the sounds of her children screaming and the cat howling; dogs across the street were also barking. Her six year-old Debbie said a skeleton had been in the corner of their room, and that she had just visited a spaceship. Since there had been reports of a prowler in the neighborhood recently, Pat called the police, who found no sign of forced entry. After the police left, Pat’s oldest daughter Bonnie said that a “spaceman” had indeed been in the house but couldn’t recall anything further. They all had vague recollections of bright light filling the house.

When put under hypnosis in 1975, Pat recalled awakening in the bright light that night to see two small beings beside her couch. She and her children tried to fight off the creatures, who tranquillized and floated them to a craft in a nearby field. Pat was given a gynecological examination in which needles were inserted in her side. A needle was also inserted into her head, and the beings “took her thoughts.” She characterized them as clinical, unfeeling entities—which would become a standard description of the greys’ robotic, military-like demeanor. She also reported a middle-aged, apparently human male with glasses who was working alongside the creatures as if monitoring their work. This accompanying human appears in many subsequent reports (Travis Walton’s being the most famous) but most of the time a taller grey of definite gender dressed in a smock, robe, or doctor’s coat of some kind is reputed to be in charge. These taller beings additionally are reported to have a direct relationship with the experiencer over a long period of repeated encounters, as if they were a “handler” or “soul mate.”[17]

The six year-old Debbie was told she would forget the experience but replied to the creatures that she wouldn’t; she was the first to react when brought from the spell, claiming to have seen a skeleton. She also said she had seen a line of people—neighbors, some of whom she recognized—waiting to get on the “ship.”[18]

Pat Roach’s friends and family both noticed a triangular set of red marks on her arm after the incident.[19] The child Debbie Roach, whose conscious recall was the greatest, remembered a box-like suitcase had been brought into the house by the beings then removed when they returned. This “black box” figures in dozens of cases from the 1950s to the present, in many different contexts—it is used as a hypnotic device in one case, a healing device in another, a blood-sample taking device in a third, etc.

But most telling is Pat Roach’s general impression of the beings that abducted them: she claimed, “They need us.” Out of her hypnosis, she clarified that she was given knowledge that they were genetically extracting material from humans to clone them. This is clearly in line with fairy lore, as will be explored Book Two.[20]

3. 1976: On January 6, 1976, three women left a restaurant in Lancaster, Kentucky at 11:15pm for their 45-minute drive back to Liberty, Kentucky. At about 11:30, a red glowing orb soared downward from the skies ahead and materialized above the highway into a silver saucer lined with yellow lights and a brilliant dome. It swept to the left side of Route 78 and pivoted until its bottom faced them. The driver Louise Smith pulled over and tried to step out. The other two terrified women managed to stop her and continue driving (Smith never recalled this occurring). The UAP then sprayed the road with three brilliant blue-white lights and followed the car. One of the beams struck the vehicle. The backs of the women’s necks and heads terribly burned at this light. The car appeared to accelerate to 85 mph despite Smith taking her foot off the pedal; it also listed left and they had the sensation of turbulence as the car shuddered continuously. The road before them became perfectly straight, completely unlike the winding pavements of Route 78. There was a vague memory by all three women of a stone wall.[21]

Then abruptly, their surroundings returned to normal—but for the fact that the trio had headaches, irritated skin, nausea, and torpor. They made it back to Louise Smith’s trailer and were extremely thirsty. Mona Stafford’s eyelids were swollen and all their eyes were tearing continuously. They were astonished to find it was 1:25am. Smith woke her neighbors to check if the time was correct. It was. They told them their story. The husband asked them separately to draw the object. The depictions were identical.

Several days after the incident Smith found her taillights and turn signals were burned out, and her battery nearly drained; her pet parakeet was now scared of her (it died within a few months). Over the next weeks, the trio lost much weight and suffered symptoms like radiation sickness and actinic burns to their eyes. Their story made its way to investigators. All three passed polygraph examinations. When placed separately under hypnosis, the women told the same account, up to the hallucinatory straight road and wall—then they were suddenly elsewhere, and their stories diverged in the details. Mona Stafford’s first conscious memory of the missing time period was examination by a large eye; whether it was biological, as in an “alien’s” eye seen very close, or a “scanning machine” was unclear to her. Under hypnosis she recalled being in a stifling atmosphere whose ceiling reminded her of the inside of a volcano, although with further hypnotic clarity she found herself in what appeared to be a white operating room. Short beings in “surgical garb” moved beside the table on which she lay. Painful “bending” procedures were done to her legs. She felt a “wettish”, spider web-like substance coating her body and burning it.

In her hypnosis session, Louise Smith recalled her car being pulled backward and stopping at a stone wall that joined a driveway, then, apparently without transition, a pressure being exerted upon her chest as she lay upon a table. Her “examiners” telepathically exhorted her to forget their presence.

The third woman, Elaine Thomas, recalled also being within a “netted, cocoon-like device,” but this one constricted her throat when she tried to speak or emotionally protested. A bullet-like object poked her chest. She described the beings as about four feet tall, with outsized heads and dark, “turtle” eyes.

On January 6, 1976, at about 11pm, a married couple, the “T.s,” saw a light-bulb shaped, neon-like object pass south in the night sky. A Randall Floyd and his wife—and, he claimed, the “whole neighborhood”—watched a large, soundless, oval-shaped light maneuver through the skies earlier, at 8pm. Also at this time, Mike Fitzpatrick, David Irvin and Irvin’s family claimed to see a saucer with a row of orange lights.

These sightings occurred near Stanford, Kentucky, the night of the women’s experience. Investigators discovered that Fitzpatrick’s sighting was on record with the Stanford police. He had made it before the women’s story had been public.

There were “high-strange” sequels to this triple abduction: principal NICAP investigator Leonard Stringfield was concerned for the three women’s mental and physical health, and regularly checked up on them. On July 29th he called Elaine Smith, who frantically told him that she had been bidden the previous night by a voice to travel back to the stone wall, which she and Stringfield had together earlier located while retracing their path along Route 78 (at that earlier time, Smith, terrified, could not get out of the car to stand near the wall). Entranced by the voice, she dressed and did so, staring at the wall in the darkness. After an indeterminate amount of time she finally pulled herself away and drove back home and discovered that three rings on her hands were missing.

Later, Mona Stafford was visited in her house by a “biblical-looking” being with a beard and robe that simply appeared in a golden glow. Entranced like Smith, she could not pick up the telephone to call her friends or Stringfield while the event occurred.[22]

4. 1977: Betty Andreasson’s experiences are the most fantastical in the history of ufology. Five books have been written about her continuing involvement with “greys” and Nordics and other kinds of beings. Possessing an eidetic memory and being an artist, she was able to draw detailed pictures of what she re-experienced under hypnosis.

It began one foggy night in late February 1967, when the lights flickered and failed in her Massachusetts house. She, her parents, and three children saw a pink-orange glow outside the back of their home. The lights came back on. Her father went to the rear kitchen window and saw what he described in a legal affidavit as “a bunch of Halloween freaks” bouncing towards the house like grasshoppers. He retreated fearfully to the family room with the others. It was his last memory before waking up the next morning. The family consciously remembered the pulsing light, then feeling exhausted and all going to bed (or finding themselves in bed). Betty recalled that after her father went to the window she saw four greys in uniforms materialize through the back door. At this point her conscious memories ceased. While hypnotically regressed in 1976, she saw that her family seemed frozen in time from this point forward, except when her 9-year old daughter Becky (when hypnotized separately) turned her head and saw Betty and “Quazgaa” (the taller “leader” grey) holding a Bible together, and Quazgaa passing a blue book to her mother. Betty herself vaguely remembered this prior to her hypnosis. Betty was taken from the house and floated into a ship in the back yard, transported to a cavernous place, shown a unearthly garden/city, given a vision involving the classic phoenix/fire/worm-rebirth transformation, and had an encounter with the “One” which she believed was the Godhead. She could never speak of the content of this last experience and hasn’t to this day; being a fundamentalist Christian, she interpreted the entire episode in terms of angels and the fallen “Watchers” (grigori/Elohim) from Genesis who long ago bred with humans. One of the beings used a hand-held globe of light to keep her family tranquillized in the house while she was gone.[23]

5. 1979: Hans Holzer’s book “The Ufonauts” contains the second variation of the accounts of the typical UAP abduction account. In 1975, a young woman named Shane Kurz was hypnotically regressed to a 1968 missing-time episode that contained the full measure: the light filling her bedroom (which her mother and neighbors too had witnessed); walking trance-like into the night (an effect of the light) to meet with a saucer hovering over a nearby field; extraction into the saucer by a beam of light; no recall of how she immediately appeared in a round room; telepathic communication with the beings; impregnation; a later fetal extraction. She was “branded” with a triangular mark (like Pat Roach and Dr. X [see footnote], and many abductees) extending from her belly button across her lower abdomen that would spontaneously recur over the years. In its immediate aftermath she suffered deep lethargy, eye soreness, skin problems, and headaches, and her menstrual period ceased for 18 months. The details of Kurz’s experience, even more unbelievable than others in that hers involved “occult” or supernatural elements, in 20 years would come to be entirely routine “high strange” events in experiencers’ lives.

If Kurz fabricated this narrative, or her mind confabulated it while under hypnosis—and there is room for doubt here, because she had previously sighted UAPs twice with her mother and was interested in the subject, as well as being familiar with the Hill abduction case which had become public two years earlier in 1966—it does not explain why thousands of people worldwide would come to tell minor variations of her story a decade later. Advocates of the “psychosocial” explanation for abductions and debunkers both like to give “mass hysteria” as the answer—but that nebulous concept is itself scientifically unproven and has no known physical/psychological basis.[24]

6. 1980: In 1975, Sara Shaw asked investigator Ann Druffel to explore a  “missing time” event that involved a bright light and disorientation 22 years earlier, in 1953, in Los Angeles’s Tujunga Canyon. It happened to Shaw and her girlfriend Jan Whitley. Both women had no interest at all in UFOs and did not connect the experience with them, until Sara heard of the missing time phenomenon. The two women told the same story under hypnosis of a bright blue-white light waking them at 2am on March 22, 1953, the entry of short, black-clad beings into the house, being floated into a hovering, Saturn-shaped craft, and a medical examination. Jan (who Druffel believed was the focus of the abduction) fought the beings, while Sara was tranquillized and even mirthful during the episode.

Another event occurred three years later, in 1956: Jan and friend Emily Cronin pulled over at a rest stop to sleep late at night on a coastal highway. This involved memories of a bright light and men surrounding their car. When they later searched for this rest stop on the same stretch of California coastal highway, they found nothing.[25]

In 1959, Sara Shaw abruptly switched careers and eventually claimed a sort of psychic communication involving a cure for cancer and that she had a special purpose in the world. This “mission” message happens to many “silent” abductees, that is, individuals who have strange experiences but don’t connect them to abductions. Her ex-girlfriend Jan would develop cancer and pass on in 1979.

If their recollections are actual events, this would be the earliest case (1953) involving greys and a stereotypical abduction.[26]

7. 1993: Walter Webb’s exhaustive investigation in the “Encounter at Buff Ledge” is the fifth part of the template, for its story includes the (future-typical) travel to a cylindrical mothership high in space, a round room with a high, railed walkwayaround it full of glowing screens and lights, and being shown visions on a screen. This event occurred in 1968 to a pair of male and female teenagers who never again spoke to one another after it occurred, as if they were compelled not to (another common reaction by multiple abductees, whether close friends or just acquaintances)—a separation that went on for ten years after the incident.

The Buff Ledge summer camp on Lake Champlain was mostly deserted on August 7, 1968; staff and children were away on a swim meet. Lifeguard “Michael Lapp” (16) and “Janet Cornell” (19) went onto the dock and talked as the dusk set in. They had never before conversed. At one point they saw what appeared to be Venus—but then it dropped closer to the earth, elongated into a shining cylinder, and began disgorging lights. The cylinder moved up into the sky and disappeared. The three lights formed a triangle and moved closer; two of the lights raced off into the distance.

The remaining light drew closer until they could see that it was a disc-shaped object with a flattened cupola. It dove into Lake Champlain, emerged, and began to draw near. The object mesmerized the two. It came within a few dozen yards of the dock. Two entities were clearly visible in the dome staring at them. They had oversized hairless heads, large, oval black eyes, and appeared to be wearing skin-tight grey uniforms. Michael tried to ask Janet if she was seeing this but she was in an immobile trance, staring out over the lake.

Michael then initiated a telepathic conversation with one of the beings. He was so amazed and delighted that he laughed and slapped his knee—and one of the beings did the same! The other seemed to be in a trance, like Janet—or concentrating its attention upon her. Michael waved and shouted at them to come closer. The beings disappeared as the craft came slowly closer, then they reappeared.

Be careful what you wish for…

Within seconds the craft hovered over them. Michael leapt up to touch it and a very bright light engulfed them. He draped himself over Janet as the light seemed to enter his mind.

Suddenly it was nighttime, and the girls’ team was returning from their swim meet. Michael and Janet lay groggy on the dock. They wandered back to camp on the shore. Someone asked them what those bright lights were on the lake(!) but they did not answer, drifting to their respective cabins to go to sleep. They would not talk again for ten years.

After this experience, Michael would re-evaluate his life and become a religion major. Janet eventually moved to Atlanta. In 1978, Michael wrote to astronomer and UAP investigator Walter Webb of the Hayden Planetarium asking for help. Webb tracked down Janet and wrote to her, inviting her to reunite with Michael and undergo hypnotic separate regression to recall the event. He spent the next five years on the case.

The duo consciously remembered the object hovering above them then awaking to darkness. Janet’s recollection was that the object was very close over the dock and they crouched or lay down and then passed out in a bright light.

Under hypnosis, Michael found himself inside the ship with a “leader” being. They stood upon a walkway above a round room. It was impossibly larger than the saucer they had seen. The “vehicle” was in space, approaching the cylindrical “mothership.” He could see Janet upon a table, naked, being examined by the “creatures.” Samples were taken from her body. He reported computer-like lights on the wall near her. He was led down to a table next to Janet’s, laid down and passed out. When he awoke it appeared that the saucer was inside a huge space, presumably the cylinder. A light beam teleported he and the leader through the wall and into a large space full of the same “alien beings.” The leader brought him into a room, where a “helmet” was placed over his head. A group of beings were watching a film of some sort in his peripheral vision on a bubble screen and reacting to the images. 

Then the leader took him to another room, touching his hand, and Michael saw visions of a landscape with a purple sky. Many other humans surrounded him, all distraught. Janet was next to him crying. He passed out again and seemed to be falling towards an infinite number of “screens” each showing him and Janet on the dock. He entered one of them and the leader’s voice said goodbye to him.

Here it must be emphasized again that they hadn’t spoken since that night, nor had Webb revealed any of Michael’s details to Janet:

Janet, under hypnotic trance, recalled the saucer above them on the dock then immediately found herself upon a table surrounded by beings that were touching her. There were lights upon a wall. She saw Michael and the other being in the distance. She lapsed in and out of awareness. Her memories had significant gaps but she recalled being with Michael twice in rooms. She too reported that the small saucer had entered a larger one in which it sat. A mothership.

It must be stressed that Webb chose a hypnotist who had a total lack of knowledge of UAPs to boot, unlike many investigators.[27]The two told stories he determined were 70% congruent. This is an amazing case because Webb’s fieldwork showed exemplary precaution and skepticism. It contains some of the best evidence that something far from ordinary psychological states occurred to the two teenagers.[28]

8. 1993: Four art college friends went on a fishing trip deep into the remote northern Maine wilderness on August 20, 1976. On their fourth day traveling north they, along with several other witnesses, saw a glowing orange orb appear erratically over the distant woods around Chamberlain Lake. Two days later, they reached the northernmost point they could and made camp on the Allagash waterway. Late that night (under a clear and moonless sky) they built a huge bonfire onshore to orient themselves while doing some night fishing. Suddenly the same fiery object appeared, moving slowly over the trees across the lake, swirling with many colors. Chuck Rak was first to notice it, and became immobile in fascination. One of the men, Charlie Foltz, flashed a light at the silent orb, which immediately began floating towards them. It sent a bright blue light beam onto the lake surface. Terrified, they began to paddle back towards camp. The light struck their canoe and the next thing they recalled was being on shore, staring at the object in the sky as it bounced upward stepwise and shot off like a meteor. They discovered their fire, set to burn for two to three hours, was embers. It seemed 20 minutes at most had passed. Exhausted, they immediately fell asleep.

Jim and Jack Weiner, identical twins, were the first to begin having nightmares about the “missing time” between the light striking the canoe and their coming ashore. Their dreams involved non-human creatures. After hearing about the missing time-UAP phenomenon, and Jim’s reading Strieber’s Communion, they approached ufologist Raymond Fowler (chief investigator the Betty Andreasson case) in 1988. It must be stressed here that their nightmares unequivocally preceded the publication of Communion by years, and Jim Weiner was terrified by the coincidences he read therein with his own dreams—hence his contacting the famed researcher. Fowler set up hypnosis sessions for all four men. They were told individually not to divulge to the other three what they revealed during the trances. They each recalled the same basic story of being levitated by the “tunnel-like” blue light, entering a room where they were tranquillized by (insect-like) greys and each placed one by one on an examination table in which sperm samples were taken. Afterward they were floated and guided in the “tunnel-beam” by the beings, who physically helped them back into the canoe. Since they were trained artists, each drew virtually identical beings without knowledge of the others’ pictures—most incredibly, that the beings’ hands had only four digits in two pincer-like groups of two.[29]

THE EYES HAVE IT

So we have a fact, whether its content is “real” or psychosocial in nature: the encounters reported in media have changed over the decades 1950-1990 from being an outside/observer to an inside/participant.

I realize that this is a small dataset. This conjecture is culled from the dozens of books I have read over a period of years as I searched for the first unambiguous (as possible!) historical descriptions of the template abduction scenario. I claim eight cases, but of course there may be reports I’ve missed, and there may be experiences like these that simply have not been reported. For instance, a small being tried to capture a man during the 1897 American wave of “phantom airship” sightings—and claimed he experienced several hours of missing time during the chase. He was not, needless to say, hypnotically regressed to explore what befell him during his amnesiac period.[30]

I can only make these assertions based on the veracity of the experiencers’ recollections and the diligence of the original and subsequent investigators, who ruled out many mundane explanatory factors. Nor have these eight reports been proven fraudulent or decisively debunked over the intervening decades; they are in a sense canonical. A few more equally unexplained cases from the 1960s, 70s, early 1980s are available but the eight above cover the specific details that proliferated through the early 1990s experiences to the present.[31] Revisionist ufologists who have revisited these canonical cases have tried to explain them in psychosocial or psychological terms, some even invoking the involvement of intelligence agencies, but all of their interpretations have fallen short in my opinion.[32]

The point is that holistic change occurred over time—a change in the relation-triad witness/phenomena/after-effects.

By the time the alien abduction conference was held at MIT in 1993 the community had come to focus on at least two strong narratives, both based on the same material but with divergent interpretations. As arch-debunker Philip Klass once (paraphrasing) said, “given a choice between being hypnotically regressed by Leo Sprinkle or Budd Hopkins, I’d choose Sprinkle. At least then I’d have happy recovered memories.” Klass’s statement is a pithy summation of the problem that had emerged: One set of abductees, those laboring under the least ambiguous explanatory narrative for the phenomenon (Hopkins’s and historian/abduction researcher David Jacobs’s) mostly underwent the recovery of horrific experiences/memories with serious physical and psychological side effects. In total, Jacobs and Hopkins regressed perhaps over a thousand individuals. These victims had PTSD, anxiety disorders, paranoia, hypochondria, etc. Conversely, the abductees regressed by Dr. Leo Sprinkle, Dr. Richard Boylan, hypnotherapists Dolores Cannon, Barbara Lamb, John Carpenter, and Harvard psychiatry professor Dr. John Mack had minimally or manageably disturbing experiences to which they eventually learned to psychologically adjust and even incorporate into new lives that often involved healing professions, shamanistic type practices, or jobs that concerned activism against the earth’s deteriorating environmental balance. In other words they “accepted their role in the Others’s plans,” however mysterious those plans may be.

Those with professional credentials—Mack, Sprinkle, Boylan, Lamb, Cannon—tended to produce greater numbers of people finding acceptance of these experiences. Perhaps this is due to the social expectations of a clinical, therapeutic setting. Hopkins and Jacobs had neither licenses nor professional guidelines.[33]

——————-

To recap: reports of UAP entities in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s changed from “swarthy” and “Asian-looking” human beings to a wide variety of beings (hairy dwarves, small bald spacemen in pressure suits, the Nordics, elf-like creatures, etc.) to the standard “greys” which began to the best of my knowledge with the Hill, Tujunga Canyon, Kurz, Roach, Kentucky, Allagash, Larson, Buff Ledge, and Andreasson abductions in the 1960-70s. I think it’s no coincidence that mass consciousness of UAPs and their “alien pilots” exploded during the mid-to-late 1960s due to television’s domination of mass media. Science fiction UAP shows such as “The Invaders” (1967) became popular. The grey beings came to dominate the scene in the 1980s, as did what turned out to be tales of genetic extractions, impregnation, training exercises, “sick hybrid baby” nursings, and exposure to apocalyptic visions for whose aftermath the abductees were “chosen” to assist.

Here’s a list of recurring elements in these eight cases:

-Heralding very bright light

-Appearance of “greys”

-Telepathic communication (orders, mentally calming platitudes, ambiguous answers to questions)

-Floating into air with “doorway amnesia” (no recollection of entering “ship”; all cases except Andreasson’s)

-Becoming naked (or having one’s clothes removed) and being upon a table in glowing circular room with no visible light source.

-Being coated with a (usually) cold substance (Larson, Andreasson, Kentucky, Vilas-Boas [1957])

-The use of a “wand”/needle with a glowing tip (all cases but Kentucky)

-Insertion of needle in head, side, navel, neck, nostril.

-Instant tranquillization by the beings when pain occurs, usually by the passing of the “leader’s” hand over the eyes or forehead.

-Use of a black box device for tranquillization (Roach case)

-Robotic demeanor by greys.

-A taller, leader being (Hill, Buff Ledge, Larson, Allagash, Shaw, a human in the Roach case)

-Beings show the percipient a vision of a “heavenly” place on a screen (Buff Ledge, Andreasson cases; Betty Hill was shown a star map [1961]).

-Interest in the human reproductive system (extraction of eggs/sperm; all but the Kentucky case).

-Sudden return to car/house/campsite with vague or no recollection of events.

-Physical sequel—“branding” such as scars, triangular burns/rashes, nausea, headache, blurred vision, conjunctivitis, swollen eyelids, excessive sleeping or insomnia, nightmares.

Historical Phases:

ENTITIES:
Small beings and humanoids in silver suits/“diving suits”/flight suits: 1947-present

Giants, up to 11 feet tall, in silver suits/flight suits: 1952-present.

“Dark-complected” or “Mediterranean-looking” humans: 1947-1985

“Asians”: 1947-1970 (1896-1970 if the airship landings of 1896 are included)

“Nordics”: 1947-present (or antiquity to present, on a cultural assessment)

Imps or dwarves: 1950-present (or antiquity to present)

Reptilian creatures: 1950-present (or antiquity to present)

Presence of hairy bodies, including face: antiquity-present

Greys (in order of their media reporting): 1967-present (Or 1961-present including the Hill case, or 1953-present in Shaw case [1990])

Mantises/mantids: 1990-present

OBSERVED BEHAVIOR:

1951-present: Hybrid human/almost indistinguishable from human being, bearing “message for all humankind”, with or without presence of object.

1952-1985: Instruments used by entities seen at a distance such as “metal detectors” being waved across ground; silver wands (1954-present); a box on chest or belt that when touched induces paralysis in observer (1953-present).

1950-1985: Observation of surveying/collecting of flora/mineral samples.

1967-present: entities holding a small globe of light which effects paralysis (Andreasson); in her later recollections of earlier abductions, she witnessed a tiny marble of light from the entities that flew and attached itself between the eyes on the forehead.

WAVES OF ACTIVITY:
–The first wave was simply the “object” seen in flight (antiquity-present)

–The second wave was the “object” seen in flight or hovering, with a subsequent ray of light that paralyzes the observer

–The third wave was of landed “objects” with the entity either “surprised” by witness and followed by a quick takeoff; sometimes the startled “pilots” paralyzed the percipient (1947-present, possibly far earlier—this is consistent with the “fairy-stroke”/“elf-shot” of fairies) then entered the UAP and took off, or they intentionally approached the witness (with or without paralysis), then takeoff. Many times it appeared as if the beings were either collecting flora or repairing their “craft.” (1949-1981).

–Fourth and overlapping with 3 is automobile disturbance either before or during sighting of “craft” (1950-present; many Otherworldly encounters during the pre-automobile era reported disturbed horses that often would stop and go no further in the presence of beings/lights).

–Fifth is observed landing or already landed craft seen, paralysis, and abduction (Vilas-Boas and Hill, 1957-present, reported 1957 & 1961, mass media presentation for both encounters in 1966). Albert Rosales’s humanoid encounter catalog contains scattered reports in the early 1950s in — of consciously-recalled abductions without greys that also had reproductive operations.

–Sixth is the appearance of a strong light in the house, paralysis, and abduction to a circular room involving the standard elements (Shaw, 1953, Andreasson, 1968-present).

—————

Adherents to the nuts-and-bolts UAP conjecture would explain the large variety of entities reported prior to the greys’ prevalence by saying that many alien races are here, or perhaps the aliens’ appearances have been deceptive in the past but they are now finally showing us their true form and purpose through the Nordics’ and greys’ seeming ubiquity in these encounters.

Indulging this for a moment: if they deceived percipients before, for whatever reason, then why should we believe this is their true form?

It is more likely the greys and the Nordics are the “model” millions of people have (un)consciously chosen to accept. For several reasons:

They are basically human looking. Collectively, abduction experiencers certainly haven’t settled upon hairy, grunting ugly dwarves as their primary antagonists (these figure in early 1950s-1990s, especially South American, UAP reports—although many experiencers, including Whitley Strieber, have encounter cloaked, dark blue-skinned “dwarves” during their episodes).

This “choice” of the greys’ physical appearance and purposes is in line with ingrained cultural expectations. Consider the Talosians from the original 1964 Star Trek pilot, “The Cage”: they were short, skinny, pale, huge-headed, bald, tiny nosed, with hardly a mouth. If we gave them large slanted ebony eyes, they would look almost exactly like greys. The Talosians possessed stupendous powers for casting holographic illusions on humans, and are involved in a desperate search for genetic “stock” to rebuild their civilization, which their ancestors destroyed. Sound familiar?

Here is H.G. Wells’s extrapolation of what humans would look like given a million years’ evolution:

 

Here are huge heads, large eyes, skeletal bodies. Thanks to Wells, dozens of visual depictions in syfy art, from the 1890s onward depicted skinny, simioid beings with large craniums and large eyes. Folklorist Thomas Bullard, Martin Kottmeyer, and Robert Sheaffer have each undertaken an extensive cataloging of ostensible “contamination” of UAP entity descriptions by science fiction monsters and motifs, particularly the spate of 1950s alien invasion films and 1960s-70s TV shows and films. Their work showed only ambiguous (statistically insignificant) correlations between extraterrestrial depictions, in everything from pulp magazines to TV shows and the subsequently reported “real aliens.” But correlation is not causation, of course, and the attempt to explain a mechanism of action for how people would experience these Others via entertainment sources goes, for the debunkers, no further than “cryptomnesia of the media source combined with hallucination brought on by unconscious stress hysteria, or dream/self-hypnosis mis-experienced or misremembered as reality.” Whoof! It is a game try, and may explain a portion of cases, but ultimately untenable explanation for the experiences in which multiple witnesses and physical evidence is present. And it does not explain the prevalence of the greys in reports.

Experiencers report beings that resemble human fetuses—basically large heads with vestigial bodies. Consider the image metaphorically: The head dominates: the intellect dominates. The body is negligible. And what results from a race in which the head outweighs the heart? Unfeeling, cold beings who treat humans like lab rats.

 

As noted above, the grey has precedent in UAP reports but at one time they had visible irises and pupils, and not the black, shiny eyes. The Hills and Betty Andreasson reported large, visible black irises on the entities they met. This to me signifies another subconscious projective clue: the eyes being the “window to the soul,” and such emotionally expressive organs, the greys now have no eyes, thus have no souls. These organs that communicate so much between humans is a void. With researchers Budd Hopkins, Whitley Strieber, David Jacobs, Raymond Fowler, Edith Fiore, John Carpenter, Yvonne Smith, and John Mack came mass experiencer reports of these black eyes.[34]

Many other types of “high strange” beings have in fact been encountered since 1980, but the reports seem to have been swept under the rug over the past 30 years, ever since the greys appeared in the popular literature. They are outliers and not taken seriously, thus no longer widely reported. That is to say, a consensus set in on the aliens’ appearance, and many ufologists became just as narrow-minded as the debunkers (as noted already, one great exception to this is researcher Albert S. Rosales, who has published fourteen books on these outlier creatures that appear in conjunction with UAP sightings).[35]

When one examines the most elaborate ongoing abduction cases—Betty Andreasson Luca’s (1967-95) and Whitley Strieber’s (1985-97) for instance—you find the themes that hundreds of other experiencers echo: messages of ecological destruction, impending human sterility, the spiritual poverty of Western worldview, the need for redemption, a “purification” of the planet, the beings as evolutionary principles connected with the dead, as guides and “Watchers,” as guardian angels. These match with religious visionaries’ experiences throughout history. Sneaking beneath this current discourse is undoubtedly the deep-time symbolisms that world mythology presents. Transitional periods of great societal upheaval and psychological transformation should produce, by Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, a certain stereotyped response by the mind—and this seems to be the case here. The greys may be symbols of our future, creatures embodying a liminal state between the atavistic and the high-technological.

Abductees are kept in constant state of confusion and disorientation during their experiences. Nothing is clearly or directly perceived. As we can see, stereotyped imagery is prevalent: the round dimly lit room, the operating table, a wall of lights/computers, scanners, etc. Rote orders, exhortations to relax, and cosmic platitudes are offered by the Others during the terrifying encounters. The aliens speak of disaster and rebirth of their race and the creation of a human-hybrid one on a world that may or may not be the earth. They claim that the human race is repeating their past mistakes, and they show experiencers images of what is taken to be their now-barren world.[36] Very often their ships contain plant nurseries. For instance, after passing through a verdant, hothouse-type landscape, Betty Andreasson was shown an unaltered, straightforward Phoenix rebirth “performance” that deeply affected her. This amounts to psychodrama. The Others act as doctors, performing check-ups and operations on humans, thus are acting like our “keepers”—and contactees/experiencers claim they’re our siblings or even parents. As noted above, experiencers are often “washed” or cleaned with cold gels and liquids, like a baptism, before medical procedures or “transportation” scenarios where they visit the aliens’ home world. They are also at times immersed in pools of vibratory liquids under which they find they can breathe.[37]

The alien fetuses removed (by light or “physically”) from female experiencers’ wombs are usually immediately transferred into a liquid-filled container.[38] Experiencers male and female almost very often report seeing nurseries with walls filled with these tanks.[39]

I’m not saying something very strange is not happening, or that some intelligence is not interacting with us. I’m saying they take the form we partially project onto them. We are co-creating their form through some presently unknown psychophysical means, which we shall explore. Another way to say this is that there is a third element between the tired mind/body duality. This third is an interface with “outer” reality, and is the primary means of perception—not the sensory apparatus of a physical body or brain. What I call the metachoria is the field in which all unwilled mental phenomena occur, but metachores (unconscious/subliminal templates or images) per se have the character or aspect of “transmissions” from elsewhere or elsewhen for those who experience them. These may come unbidden from things such as a sudden image for a painting in an artist all the way to a full-blown abduction experience. It is a matter of degree of the state of attunement to the metachoria. This is my nexus between a certain kindof mind of the UAP/paranormal experiencer, which I will later discuss more clearly in parts four and five of this essay. The rest of this work will address physical (re)actions by which these phenomena manifest in “our” world. The particular psychophysical histories of the experiencers, while in many cases showing similarities such as psychic abilities or “fantasy proneness” or dissociative tendencies,[40] will play a large part in my description but is not determinative. That there is something on the “other side” of perceptible reality that is utilizing electromagnetic phenomena and persons highly sensitive to electromagnetic fields is implied but I submit we can know only a small set of axioms regarding these forms’ motives or true nature. It is only by their statistical rarity and the effects they sometimes catalyze in witnesses that they are called “supernatural.” I believe they are of natural origin—albeit “agents” of a biological superorganism of which our consciousness observes only a narrow phenomenological range of activity.[41]

The next part will outline an interpretation of the physics of consciousness with regard to willed vs. unwilled thoughts and actions and the place the quantum Zeno effect (QZE) within the brain’s neurons has in this apparent dichotomy; we will discover that there is something missing in this formulation that only conjecturing a third field would accommodate. The chapter will also address the concept of quantum entanglement, feedback loops between “mind” and “matter,” the Fourier transform/frequency domain model of the bodily senses, and the holographic universe conjecture.


[1] The indigenous Australians of the Arnem Land have the Mimi, who are the forefathers who taught many skills to the Yolngu and Bininj clans in antiquity. They are described as extremely frail and thin, and could be contacted by approaching sacred stones or mountains in ritual manner. These places were doorways to an immaterial dimension that, like the fairy and djinn planes, existed outside of the human world. Mimi play tricks on humans if they or their magic places are not respected. Shamans could fully interact with the beings. Their offices derive from the cult-heroes of the totemic heroes, spirits and ghosts and second the long line and hierarchy or order of medicine men, which leads back to the same heroes of the Dreamtime. They were thought to steal food, fool unsuspecting travellers, and even shoot magic darts—which is a connection to many shamanistic practices and the “fairy elf-shot.” The magical arrow is also associated with Abaris the Hyperborean, a figure said to have emerged from a mythical land “beyond the north wind”. Abaris was said to be able to commune with spirits, heal the sick and travel through the air on a magic arrow. Additional connections to Apollo and Pythagoras hint at the shamanistic journeying technique of “incubation” practiced by the healer Asclepius in his temple.

[2] And then there is the existence of ancient cave paintings in Australia, India, the American Southwest which depict beings very similar to the descriptions of the greys: large, bald, pale heads and staring ovoid black eyes with stick-like or vestigial bodies. Anthropologist Michael Narby in his book The Cosmic Serpent and Graham Hancock in Supernatural speculate that these strange beings were encountered during shamanistic trances so regularly that they merited artistic representation on cave and rock paintings. This conjecture will play a crucial part of my thesis as to UAP “creatures’” genesis and purpose.

[3] Clark, Jerome. The UFO Encyclopedia: The Phenomenon from the Beginning, 2 Vols., Omnigraphics Inc., 1998, pgs. 26-37. Adamski is widely regarded as a charlatan (at worst) or someone who confabulated and capitalized on a real experience with UAP (at best). We would consider ludicrous his claims about the Venusians’s civilization—from a literal point of view. But do the Nordics’ independent longevity in UAP reports 1) grant some kind of credence to Adamski’s outlandish stories, or 2) bump down the believability factor of Other experiencers’ tales or 3), suggest some sort of psychological “screen” is being induced on all the witnesses’ minds, and the actual energies/intelligence behind the images are beyond our comprehension, as one of our ET hypothesis conjectures in the preface allowed for? And if the third option is so, why do these hidden intelligences choose robed/jumpsuited, blue-eyed, blond seven-foot “Aryans” and not a beautiful Ethiopian princess, even occasionally? Perhaps the hidden intelligences don’t do the choosing. Perhaps we do, because the “Nordic” and dwarf images are very ancient and have always signified the Otherworld (of which more later).

[4] Jacobs, David M., The Threat: Revealing the Secret Alien Agenda, Simon and Schuster, 1999, pgs. 76-88; Clark, The UFO Encyclopedia: The Phenomenon from the Beginning, pgs. 4-15;

[5] Pritchard, Andrea; Pritchard, David E.; Mack, John E.; Kasey, Pam; Yapp, Claudia, eds. Alien Discussions: Proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference held at MIT, Cambridge, MA.,1995, pgs. 45-81; Jacobs, David M. Secret Life: Firsthand, Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions, Touchstone, 1993, pgs. 49-60, 91-93, 107-131, 153-186, 209-219; Jacobs, David M., The Threat, pgs. 116-118, 128-160; Clark, The UFO Encyclopedia: The Phenomenon from the Beginning, pgs. 7-9, 15-17;

[6] There have long been battles over the veracity of memories recovered under hypnosis. Rarely are they accepted in court, especially after many of the allegations during the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s-early 90s were proven to be hoaxes or confabulations. Studies have shown that in general, emotionally disturbed individuals and their health practitioners both are primed to play out a specific dynamic during a clinical setting. The patient is primed to provide material acceptable or amenable to the therapist’s skills. The same dynamic holds between an abductee and a qualified hypnotherapist or an “abduction expert” who practices hypnosis without a license. The theory goes that the abductee unconsciously (or consciously) wants to please the researcher with an account that conforms to the template; in this way, both participants are recognized as valid and “special.” When an abductee deals with someone of David Jacobs’s or Budd Hopkins’s stature, who are known world-wide as “abduction experts,” the unconscious is even more emotionally engaged and the imagination active. Thus we can say, with a high degree of probability, that there will be a level of confabulation present in abduction narratives made while under hypnosis by an abduction expert, whether licensed or not. To what level that confabulation rises has supposedly been neutralized by researchers withholding outlying, unusual details over time in their published works, to see if these “odder-than-normal” details turn up in further cases. Although this is meant to be a scientific method to determine the veracity of a case as a “control,” the approach is flawed; it is the abductee’s prior knowledge of any narrative structure or sensory details to these experiences that should always be the issue. To put it another way, if a family of homesteaders living off the grid for several generations were to suddenly show up terrified at the local police station with conscious, template-level tales of abduction, their lifestyle would count in favor of the truthfulness of their claims. If Amish families, say, with none to minimal familiarity with aliens or abductions were to claim the full-spectrum conscious experiences we are detailing, what could we say about it? The Amish would probably claim they encountered demonic forces. But if they reported classic grey beings, we would have to concede that, at least, the image of the grey has risen above the level of a “cultural contaminant” and gained some sort of independent psychological existence.

[7] See Strieber, Whitley. Communion: A True Story, Avon Books, 1987, pgs. 52-64; Jacobs, David M., The Threat: Revealing the Secret Alien Agenda, Simon and Schuster, 1999, pgs. 227-234; Bullard, Thomas E., The Myth and Mystery of UFOs, The University Press of Kansas, 2010, pgs. 89, 140, 179, 218, 230; Clark (1998), pgs. 7, 8, 17; Randles, Jenny. Abduction, pg. 136; .

[8] See Rueckert, Carla and Elkins, Don. The Law of One: Ra Material, L/L Research, 1982; Anka, Darryl, Bashar: Blueprint for Change: A Message from our Future, New Solutions Publishing, 1990; Cannon, Dolores, The Convoluted Universe Series 1-5, Ozark Mountain Publishing, 2001-2015; Marciniak, Barbara, The Bringers of the Dawn: Teachings from the Pleiadians, Bear & Company 1992. The list could encompass dozens, perhaps over a hundred, books.

[9] Bullard (2010), pg. 299; Clark (1998), pgs. 13, 21, 23;

[10] Bullard (2010), pgs. 71, 138-39, 142; Bryan, C.D.B. Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: A Reporter’s Notebook on Alien Abduction, UFOs, and the Conference at MIT, Penguin Books, 1996, pgs. 27, 261, 418; Clark (1998), pgs. 6-14.

[11] See Randles, Jenny. Abduction, Guild Books, 1988, pgs. 67, 69, 91; Clark (1998), pgs. 9, 10, 16, 705-07; Bullard (2010) pgs. 143-44.

[12] Full account: Fuller, John G. The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours “Aboard a Flying Saucer,” New York Press, 1966. Four years prior to the Hills’s missing time experience, in 1957, Brazilian farmer Antonio Vilas Boas was plowing his field in the middle of the night (due to the daytime heat) when he was dragged aboard a teardrop-shaped craft by four beings in spacesuits. He was stripped naked and examined. He was then led into a room where he had intense sex with a pale, tiny, growling woman with blue, slanted, cat-like eyes. Just before the woman’s appearance, the “astronauts” had applied a gel to his skin with sponges and a type of smoke had been ejected into the room that made him nauseous; he claimed uncontrollable passion towards the woman and later speculated that either the smoke or the gel was a powerful aphrodisiac. He remembered the entire experience without hypnosis. Boas’s description of the woman’s face and her platinum-blond hair are very similar to both the female Nordics (although she wasn’t seven feet tall) and “hybrid human” greys. This case was investigated in Brazil within four months of its occurrence, but unknown to investigators in the USA until 1966, after the Hills’s case had its spectacular unveiling via the Saturday Evening Post. So the theme of reproduction-intervention was present in these two earliest reports. See Coral and Jim Lorenzen, Encounters with UFO Occupants, Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1976, pgs. 61-87, for the full account.

[13] Ibid, pg. 215; Blum, Ralph and Blum, Judy. Beyond Earth: Man’s Contact with UFOs, Bantam Book,s 1974, pgs. 12-36.

[14] Lorenzen, pgs. 342-346.

[15] A similar “physical” procedure of “cranial brain removal” has occurred in other UAP abductions. See Fiore, Edith. Encounters: A Psychologist Reveals Case Studies of Abductions by Extraterrestrials, Doubleday, 1989, pg. 139; Rosales, Albert S. Humanoid Encounters: 1985-1989, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015, pg. 289.

[16] Full account: Lorenzen, Coral and Jim, Abducted! Confrontations with Beings from Outer Space, Berkley Publishing, 1977, pgs. 52-69; Clark (1998) pgs. 573-76.

[17] Often their heads are described as resembling a praying mantis, and the experiencer often senses that this being is possibly millions of years old and infinitely wise.

[18] This detail would also come to be repeated many times throughout the 1980s and 90s: rooms full of people known and unknown are seen by the abductee aboard the craft or a cavern of some sort by the experiencers. Many times these hordes are sedated upon tables, or seen naked in groups in a groggy state. In a few instances, two repeat experiencers had abductions in which they remembered seeing each other during encounters that were later discovered to have occurred on the same night. See

[19] While this may or may not be related to her experience that night, this detail nevertheless recalls the 1968 case of “Dr. X” in France. Preeminent UFO expert Aime Michel interviewed Dr. X several days after his experience occurred. (“X” was pseudonymously used because he was a well-known town physician at the time, and all the examiners vouched for the man’s sincerity in the face of his incredible tale). A few days before the incident, X had injured his foot with an axe. He additionally suffered from a permanent limp due to a wound inflicted while serving in the Algerian war. He was awoken by his infant son’s cries late that night. Entering the room, his son was gesturing at the window, where a light pulsed. Several hundred yards away, two massive lights were strobing above the woods. They joined then “exploded” in a lightning-like flash. Both his war wound and the ax wound were instantly healed. Even stranger, a triangular red rash appeared around his navel—and one appeared around his infant son’s navel as well. They faded over several weeks but would periodically return on both of father and son (once, purportedly, they broke out simultaneously when the two were far apart from each other). See Clark, Jerome. The UFO Encyclopedia: The Phenomenon from the Beginning, 2 Vols., Omnigraphics Inc., 1998, Vol. 1, pgs. 335-337; Vallee, Jacques, Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact, Anomalist Books, 2008, pgs. 173-176.

[20] Full account: Lorenzen, Coral and Jim, Abducted! Confrontations with Beings from Outer Space, Berkley Publishing, 1977, pgs. 9-24; Clark (1998) pgs. 800-802.

[21] These effects on the car and the perception of a “changed road” have occurred in a few abduction cases. See the Australian case of Maureen Puddy, which occurred between July 1972 and February 1973, cited in Bryan, C.D.B., Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: A Reporter’s Notebook on Alien Abduction, UFOs, and the Conference at MIT, Penguin Books, 1996, pgs. 70-74.

[22] Full account: Stringfield, Leonard. Situation Red: The UFO Siege, Fawcett, 1978; Clark (1998), pgs. 554-58; Lorenzen, Coral and Jim, Abducted! Confrontations with Beings from Outer Space, pgs. 114-131.

[23] Full account: The Andreasson Affair: The Documented Investigation into a Woman’s Abduction aboard a UFO, Prentice Hall, 1980; Clark (1998), pgs. 86-95.

[24] Full account: Holzer, Hans. The UFOnauts: New Facts on Extraterrestrial Landings, Fawcett Gold Medal Books, 1976.

[25] This is quite a common phenomena as well in the minutes leading up to encounters: brilliantly lit rest stops, houses, diners, gas/convenience stores, or construction sites are observed that, when later searched for along the same route, are found not to have existed.

[26] Full account: Druffel, Ann and Rogo, D. Scott, The Tujunga Canyon Contacts, Anomalist Books, 2008. However, more cases have come to light involving greys that occurred in the 1950s, culled from regressive hypnosis sessions in the late 1980s-present. See Yvonne Smith’s Chosen: Recollections of UFO Abductions through Hypnotherapy; Dr. John Mack’s Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens and Passport to the Cosmos, and Intrusion by Bob Mitchell.

[27] If this were done as a rule by investigators with those claiming abduction, perhaps the “psi-contamination” explanation for the startling uniformity of details could be ruled out.

[28] Full account: Webb, Walter N. Encounter at Buff Ledge: A UFO Case History, J. Allen Hynek Center, 1993; Clark (1998), pgs. 169-172.

[29] Fowler, Raymond, The Allagash Abductions, Granite Publishing, 1993.

[30] See The Great Airship Mystery: A UFO of the 1890s by Daniel Cohen, pgs.

[31] For instance, in 1975, Air Force Sgt. Charles Moody went out to watch a meteor display at 1AM and saw a UAP drop from the sky and hover very close to his car. Returning home after a period of confusion, he found several hours of missing time had passed when he was sure his trip should have taken no more than forty minutes. He experienced intense pain in his lower back the next day, and developed a “heat rash” on his lower body. These physical reactions might indicate an allergic reaction to enormous EM exposure. He had no memory of abduction until spontaneously recalling it weeks later. He consciously recalled the UAP landing, and later fully recalled the abduction involving greys in which he injured two of the beings before being taken into the “ship.” Their leader showed him the propulsion mechanism during a tour of the vehicle before releasing him. It must be stressed that there were no images or descriptions of “grey” beings, the “tour,” the rooms’ uniform lighting without a source, the missing time phenomenon, crystalline “engine” parts, etc., that Moody described that were known to the public at the time except for the 1961 Hill case (see Lorenzen, Coral and Jim, Abducted! (1977) pgs. 38-52 for the full account). The elements listed above would all become parts of the standard narrative in the 1980s and 1990s. According to Albert Rosales’s humanoid encounters catalogue, creatures similar or identical to greys in conjunction with UAP were reported in Bethel, North Carolina, 1920; Port Burwell, Canada, 1925; Poitiers, France, 1928 a man saw a light land and was taken into a strange area with grey-like creatures and covered in a cold gel that evaporated, and he was able to pass through the space’s walls (we will see that these are two fairly consistent details in today’s abductions); Floridablanca, Colombia in 1950; Safonova, USSR in 1951; West Surrey, England, in 1956; La Napoule, Alpes Maritimes, France in 1956; and Novato, California in 1958; Sedalia, Missouri, in August 1965; Island Lake, Manitoba, fall 1966; Mendoza, Argentina in September, 1968. UAP-associated “reptilian” beings were reported in Nuevalos, Spain in 1954; Riverside, California in November 1958; Vienna, North Carolina in June 1963. “Doorway amnesia” was reported in an abduction encounter involving non-grey creatures at St. Francis River, Arkansas in 1954 when a 7-year old boy was allegedly hit with an intense light and found himself upon a table surrounded by beings; in March 1959 a Japanese businessman allegedly saw a spherical UAP approaching and suddenly found himself aboard the “craft.”  A case involving an entity touching a percipient’s forehead to induce tranquilization is reported to have occurred in Cordoba, Argentina in 1957. I must stress that these were all consciously recalled encounters in which hypnotic regression was not used. I have deliberately avoided the 1975 Travis Waltoncase for reasons of continuing controversy over his polygraph tests and the tangle of claims and counterclaims involving character that noised his story from the beginning—although the debunkers have never convincingly discredited his and his six co-workers’ tale of the UAP and Walton’s being struck by a beam from it.

[32] In the book The Abduction Enigma for instance, author Kevin Randle, the primary APRO investigator of the Pat Roach case, eventually dismissed it as the product of confabulation, contamination and “leading questions” by hypnotist Dr. James Harder. The regression transcript evidence Randle produces in the book is weak: just a few questions Harder asked that Roach answered in the affirmative and proceeded to elaborate on. In hypnosis, there are literally thousands of questions a hypnotist could ask that are knowingly meant to lead the experiencer during sessions that are just as often answered “no” and corrected by the hypnotic subject. Randle simply puts down Roach and her children’s experience to the fact that there were rumors of a prowler at the time in her neighborhood. Apparently he means they had a hysterically-shared fantasy. No scientific explanation is offered how such a thing could occur; it fails to explain both children’s conscious recollections of a “skeleton spaceman” in the house, Roach’s disorientation and unexplained terror that night, her memory of a bright light, and the marks on her body…On the Allagash case, he dismisses Jim Weiner’s first hypnotic accounts as contaminated simply because he read Strieber’s book Communion, which contained many parallels to nightmares he had already been having for years and is in fact what caused him to seek investigator Raymond Fowler’s help in the first place (and Randle doesn’t begin to explain how such an odd coincidence such as this would be possible). He ignores the other three Allagash men’s hypnotic accounts of their missing time, which are very similar to identical to Jim’s. Randle claims that their speaking together about the strange incident in the 12-year interim caused “contamination”—which says nothing as to how they could come up with similar to identical accounts of the “repressed” experience, unless one allows for telepathy. Investigator Fowler made certain after Jim Weiner’s first sessions that Jim reveal nothing of what they had uncovered to the other three, who had not read Communion. Additionally, Randle sloppily summarizes the events leading up to the four men’s return to their camp after the conscious UAP encounter, when they found their huge bonfire reduced to embers. Obviously a period of hours had elapsed between their leaving and returning, when they were certain the whole episode had taken 30 minutes at most. He fails to mention the classic interplay between a UAP and a human light source, in this case Charlie Foltz turning the flashlight at the thing and “signaling” at it, which caused to object to send a beam down and approach them. Again, these events were all conscious recollections of the four men prior to their hypnosis…Randle also summarily dismisses the Shane Kurz abduction as unreal simply because paranormal researcher Hans Holzer did the hypnotic regression on her…The Abduction Enigma does not touch upon our other five template cases. Randle and his co-authors selectively choose cases where contamination by accounts of the Hills’s, Vilas-Boas’s, and Strieber’s encounters is in fact possible. This is a valid qualification, but again, it does not explain the core uniformly, consciously recalled experiences. These Randle explains away in the Roach case as fantasy generated unconsciously by the media-ubiquitous UFO reports of late 1973. The book also conveniently mentions only in passing the thoroughly researched multiple-witness accounts we have been looking at, such as the Andreasson case, the Buff Ledge case, and the Stanford, Kentucky case.

[33] Go into BUFORA, ethics.

[34] Which according to Betty Andreasson Luca are conjectured to be contact lenses with holographic projective/memory and neurologically extractive properties.

[35] While the greys’ physical appearance got made into Halloween costumes and bumper stickers and appeared in Hollywood movies, the damned within the damned march on. Rosales has spent over 40 years collecting humanoid reports that in most ways do not conform to this “mainstream” midnight theater show that keeps both MUFON and Pleiadian cults going. His (currently) 14 volumes of worldwide humanoid reports 1AD-2015 show that the parade of high-strange beings has never ended. Hypnotic recall of the encounters is rare in the reports he has documented; the percipients were either fully conscious or under the Oz Factor while experiencing the Others but required no therapist to elicit their memories. This alone makes them (ironically perhaps) less suspect than the ongoing parade of “grey manipulations.” Rosales’s reports are the raw accounts from field ufologists and cryptozoologists across the world and show that hairy dwarves, little green bearded men, Sasquatches, reed-thin “elves,” uniformed giants, living stick figures, smoky apparitions, sentient, human-shaped fogs, white “Michelin tire men,” winged furry “demons,” space-suited elves, fairies, and indescribable Bosch-like beings have not disappeared from human experience.

[36] Clark (1998), pgs. 7, 9, 15; Randles, (1988), pgs. 175-76. The list of these attributes from Hopkins’s and Jacobs’s books would be very long. They figure in most of their cases.

[37] Fowler, Raymond, The Andreasson Affair, pgs. 59-65, 101-103; Bryan, pg. 21, 414; Turner, Karla, Taken, pg. 73, 107, 139; Smith, Yvonne, Chosen, Backstage Entertainment, 2008, pgs. 54-64, 79-81; Clear, Constance, Reaching for Reality, Consciousness Now Inc., 1998, pgs. 142-144; Fiore, Edith, Encounters, Doubleday, 1989, pg. 19; Mack, Abduction, pg. 34-35, 125; Rosales, Albert S., Humanoid Encounters: 1900-1929, pg. 129; Jacobs, David M., The Threat, pgs. 100-101; Randles, Jenny, Abduction, pg. 91;

Hopkins,

[38] Fowler, Raymond, The Watchers, Bantam Books, 1990, pgs. 19-34; Clear, pg. 144; Smith, pgs. 80-81; Mack, John, Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters, Three Rivers Press, 2000, pgs. 121-127.

[39] Mack, Abduction, pg. 155; Turner, pg. 154; Clark, Jerome, ed. The UFO Encyclopedia: The Phenomenon from the Beginning, 2 Vols., Omnigraphics Inc., 1998, Vol. 1, pg. 7; Jacobs, The Threat, pgs. 62-69, 100-101.

[40] Bryan, pgs. 126-127; Kelly, Edward, and Kelly, Emily Williams. Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2009, pgs. 337-340, 345-348.

[41] This may sound like pantheism or panpsychism, because it is.

“UFOnauts” used to come in all flavors: space-suited dwarves, hairy gremlins, robed monks, silvery giants, glowing balls and humanoids, tall blond “Nordics,” “Asians,” “Mediterraneans”–then suddenly in the mid-1980s witnesses started mostly reporting the skinny lightbulb-headed cyborgs called the greys. What the hell happened? Here I look into the history of the alien abduction, examine the history of its elements, and possibly why the grey bastards monopolized a perfectly entertaining form of theater with their supposed genetic machinations.