I don't believe that ETs are behind the UFO phenomenon. That is not to say that it isn't a legitimate phenomenon.
The Enduring Enigma of the UFO
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"Such experiences are reported not as fantasy but as realityoften more intensely real than everyday life. Observers interpret them according to their expectations and culture. Religious pilgrims at Fatima saw a disk in the sky as a religious miracle; pilot Kenneth Arnold saw flying craft. Others may perceive ghosts of the dead, apparitions of the living, techno-elves, blobs of light, or extraterrestrials. Westerners tend to see technologically sophisticated spacecraft piloted by humanoids, straight out of the special effects and cast of a Star Wars movie. We expect to get radar hits on apparently solid flying machines, and sometimes we do.
One of the first to explore the notion of mythology manifesting as physical reality was psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who in 1957 published the book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. More recently, authors Jacques Vallee (Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact) and Keith Thompson (Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination) and folklorists Peter Rojcewicz and Thomas Bullard have written about the parallels among UFOs, folklore, and mythology. Space-Age myth does not imply that UFO sightings or encounters with angels, aliens, fairies, sprites, elves, or demons are fantasies. Rather, it suggests that some of these experiences may literally be psychophysical, blurring conventional boundaries between objective and subjective realities. Some may object that this proposal doesnt account for the physical traces associated with some UFO reports, but this misinterprets what Jung and others have proposed. They suggest that the manifest world emerges from mind, that is, that mind shapes matter. Where have we heard this before?
In his book Global Mind Change, former IONS President Willis Harman discussed three basic ways of looking at the world. He called the current Western scientific worldview materialistic monism, or M1. Within M1, everythingboth matter and energy is made of a single substance. From matter emerges everything, including the brain-generated illusion called mind. In M1, angels and aliens walking through walls are fine plot points for an episode of The Twilight Zone, but they are impossible in the real world. In M1, UFOs are conceivable, but only in terms of hard, physical spacecraft with humanoid pilots. Most of the modern technological world was created based on M1 assumptions, so it carries enormous persuasive power. But the whole panoply of noetic experiences defy materialistic explanations, suggesting that M1 is an incomplete worldview. Detailed taxonomies of these anomalies are described by all cultures; they include, among others, the Hindu siddhis, the Catholic charisms, Sufi attainments, and, in indigenous societies, shamanic magic.
Harmans second worldview, M2, represents dualism, which assumes two fundamentally different kinds of substances in the universe, matter and mind. Many scientists today reject dualism because it begs the problem of how two deeply different substances could interact at all. In addition, it seems lavish to require the universe to maintain (at least) two distinct essences, when it would be far simpler to have only one.
The third worldview, M3, is transcendental or mental monism, which Harman argued is the source of both the perennial wisdom and the emerging worldview of the twenty-first century. In M3, consciousness is primary, and matter and energy are emergent properties of consciousness. M3 accommodates everything that M1 and M2 allow for, as well as rogue phenomena like telepathic ETs, observation-shy UFOs, and collective mindmanifested UFOs. Evidence in favor of M3 has been slowly amassing for over a century. Such recent books as Irreducible Mind, Entangled Minds, and Measuring the Immeasurable (see review 0n page 41) discuss the empirical evidence in detail, ranging from psychic phenomena to creative genius to mind-body interactions to evidence suggestive of reincarnation.
A Persistent Taboo
If Willis Harman was right and as a species we are evolving toward an M3 worldview, then our future understanding of the UFO enigma will probably be a radical departure from anything we are able to imagine today. But short of a viable explanation, one thing is already clear: It is a phenomenon worthy of serious study. One hopes our leaders will have the courage to break the UFO taboo that has intimidated mainstream scientific interest in these and related phenomena. With sufficient long-term funding and access to the immensely powerful (and mostly military) technologies, already in place for detecting flying objects that are virtually anywhere in the world, we would gain a much better chance to more fully understand these potentially paradigm-shattering phenomena. But as long as the UFO remains an outcast from the halls of science and scholarship, the taboo will persist. Of course, some may prefer it that way.
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Chapter 9 Excerpt
"In 1972, Dr. Carl Sagan and Thornton Page collaborated on an article entitled "UFO's: The Extraterrestrial and Other Hypotheses." In it, Sagan posed the pertinent question: why are people so attached to the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs? Why not, he suggested, propose that UFOs are projections from the collective consciousness, time travelers, visitors from another dimension, or the halos of angels?(1)
The reason, of course, is that human beings are confined to the three-dimensional world in which time travel and angels are not known to exist. The things we are familiar with-metallic spaceships and material bodies-must in our world operate within the context of a specific atmosphere subject to a strict set of physical rules. Our view of what is possible in the world is thereby severely limited by our own experience. But is it reasonable to rely solely on our experience to tell us what is and is not possible?
In fact, though Sagan himself implied 25 years ago that it may be illogical to insist upon an extraterrestrial explanation for UFOs, he and others in the scientific community have repeatedly denied the existence of UFOs and alien abduction based on the inability of observable facts to confirm the very same extraterrestrial hypothesis. In other words, the extraterrestrial hypothesis has long been a "straw man" for mainstream science.
Jacques Vallee believes that, indeed, the wealth of UFO data accumulated over 50 years suggests that UFOs (and their occupants) cannot be satisfactorily explained by the extraterrestrial hypothesis. But to reject the reality of UFOs on this basis alone is wrong. In his important work "Five Arguments Against the Extraterrestrial Origin of Unidentified Flying Objects," Vallee discussed the paradox inherent in mainstream science's view of the UFO phenomenon:
Scientific opinion has generally followed public opinion in the belief that unidentified flying objects either do not exist (the "natural phenomena hypothesis") or, if they do, must represent evidence of a visitation by some advanced race of space travelers (the extraterrestrial hypothesis or "ETH"). It is the view of the author that research on UFOs need not be restricted to these two alternatives. On the contrary, the accumulated data base exhibits several patterns tending to indicate that UFOs are real, represent a previously unrecognized phenomenon, and that the facts do not support the common concept of "space visitors."
Five specific arguments articulated here contradict the ETH: [1] unexplained close encounters are far more numerous than required for any physical survey of the Earth; [2] the humanoid body structure of the alleged "aliens" is not likely to have originated on another planet and is not biologically adapted to space travel; [3] the reported behavior in thousands of abduction reports contradicts the hypothesis of genetic or scientific experimentation on humans by an advanced race; [4] the extension of the phenomenon throughout recorded human history demonstrates that UFOs are not a contemporary phenomenon; and [5] the apparent ability of UFOs to manipulate space and time suggests radically different and richer alternatives.(2)
Physical considerations: UFOs
As the empirical data mounts, the E.T. hypothesis becomes increasingly inadequate as an explanation for observations made by UFO witnesses and abductees. Indeed, the evidence practically begs for "radically different and richer alternatives." The UFO literature gathered by private researchers (as well as government sources, and specifically Project Blue Book) is full of references to craft that execute "impossible" maneuvers: they make right-angle turns at incredible, gravity-defying speeds; instantly change size and color; vanish and reappear "out of nowhere"; jump about, shape-shift, partially dematerialize, stretch, contract, and accelerate at speeds of tens of thousands of miles per hour and faster.
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Even more mysteriously, abductees report, the experience of being inside a UFO reveals a world where our physical laws frequently fail. Time becomes distorted and seconds inside a ship become minutes or hours outside the craft. Spatial anomalies are reported: UFOs often seem far larger on the inside than their outward appearance dictates. Invisibility and materialization and de-materialization of doors and other seemingly solid structures within the craft are commonly reported.
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