UFOs : Why they are not important, unless you give a shit

I used to be ‘in to’ UFOs a long time ago.  Back in the early 1990’s when I would frequent the Encounters forum on Compuserve.  I even managed to become involved in a little bit of UFO lore when Ray Santilli faxed alleged film segments from his infamous Alien Autopsy film to me.  This particular bit of UFO mythology today has become a well documented hoax, in large part due to the excellent research by Phillip Mantle.

 

Like most in the field I lost interest in UFOs because it seemed that nothing new was going on.  What point is there to read yet another UFO book or follow yet another sighting report?  And, the reports of alien abductees became like trying to glean meaning out of somebody else telling you about their dream or LSD drug trip.

My attitude on the topic was that I was interested, but only up to a point.  Something ‘new’ would have to happen to get me interested in the topic again.  This evening I find myself newly interested in the topic but, surprisingly, it has nothing to do with anything ‘new’ happening in the field; UFOs remain, as always, elusive.

What with my father recently passing away, and my daughter going to school in Chicago, over the past few months I have spent nearly every weekend with hours and hours driving on the road.  The radio in my car doesn’t work and, since I drive a convertible, it’s not like I can really hear it anyway.  When I got my Iphone I looked for some compelling content to put on it and one of the things I tried out was a whole bunch of podcasts.  Since I used to be interested in UFOs a long time ago, I went ahead and subscribed to several podcasts related to the topic.

Most of them sucked and couldn’t hold my interest, but two of them turned out to be really entertaining.  The first is ‘The Paracast’ by Gene Steinberg and David Biedny.  It’s a pretty entertaining show and they bring a generally skeptical tone to the proceedings which I felt made it interesting.  The second, and by far my favorite, is ‘The Culture of Contact’ by Jeremy Vaeni.  Jeremy is a real shit disturber who wallows in sarcasm, self deprecation, and high farce to bring a fresh face of hilarity to what is a fairly absurd topic. 

The first episode of Jeremy’s podcast I ever listened to was his most recent 50^th episode special.  In this episode he spent the entire podcast ridiculing and satirizing some the lunatics and colorful characters that infest the UFO field.  I don’t think anyone who wasn’t already familiar with these personalities (Dr. Steven Greer and Zacharia Sitchin) would really appreciate the humor but if you, like me, had been subjected to the ravings of these lunatic charlatans it was high camp.

Since then I have listened to every single one of Jeremy’s podcasts and have been wildly entertained.

While little seems to have changed with the UFO phenomenon itself, nevertheless how this phenomenon is perceived in our culture has changed dramatically.  The History Channel is broadcasting high quality programs on the topic and the subject seems to have lost nearly all of the societal taboos previously associated with it.

I decided I would take some time this evening to ponder some of my thoughts on the topic of UFOs.  I warn you that this will enter into some fairly speculative territory but, let us be frank, it is a speculative topic.

I would like to begin by stating that UFOs are the least important thing in the world and, at the same time, the most important.  What do I mean by that?  Well, UFOs just really don’t affect our daily life or existence at all.  From a percentage standpoint relatively few people have ever seen one.  I have not and any ‘belief’ I have on the topic rests solely on the testimony of others.  For even those who have witnessed a UFO, still, it tends to be a singular event in their life and, while odd, does not affect them in any deeper way.

Even those who claim to have interacted with UFO occupants, perhaps experiencing missing time and a possible abduction episode, are still relatively unaffected.  Take for instance the case of Travis Walton.  Clearly this was a big event in his life but, nevertheless, he had no conscious memory of the actual experience and it appears to have been a one time occurrence.  Even those who claim to have directly interacted with this phenomenon report it as happening only at fairly distinct intervals in their life and, often times, retain little conscious memory of the supposed events.

So, if we range from those who have never witnessed a UFO (the vast majority) all of the way to the person who feels they have been abducted by aliens, still there is little concrete impact on their day to day lives.

Any interaction between the phenomenon and humanity has boiled down to little more than ‘signs’ and ‘mysteries’ in the sky amounting to nothing (unless you count religions and cults, which I will get to later.)

So, from the perspective of how do UFOs affect your daily life, how do they affect your job, your life, you kids, your family, the answer is not at all.  The phenomenon is truly insignificant to the vast majority of the population of this planet.

On the other hand, UFOs are the most important thing in the world because, if real, they imply things about the nature of reality which are deep and profound.  Now, the last I checked your average person out there cares more about their sports team than they do about ‘the meaning of life, the Universe, and everything’.  It’s a simple fact.  Those of us who toil away studying religion, philosophy, and physics are in the minority.  Today we live in a world where a single scientist might devote their entire life trying to understand intimate details about a particular species of spider.  We have archeologists who devote all of their time and energy unearthing a single site.  And, we have physicists who will spend billions of dollars smashing sub-atomic particles together in an effort to better understand the nature of reality.

When you put it into that perspective, then UFOs are the most important thing ever because, ‘if real’, they are a game changer.  They completely rewrite the entire playbook and change the playing field.  UFOs challenge our conception, perception, and definition of what ‘reality’ really is.

There is one form of study of UFOs which does bear real fruit and that is when we look at its impact on our society.  We don’t have to contemplate the ‘reality’ of UFOs to study how the belief in them affects our culture.  Jacques Vallee did great work in his seminal piece ‘Passport to Magonia’.

For those reading this who don’t know much about UFOs you might think they represent a belief in extraterrestrial spacecraft visiting earth.  And, it might be reasonable to think that if you hadn’t looked at all of the evidence.  

The problem is that UFOs are a whole lot more than just flying saucers (i.e. seemingly structured mechanical flying vehicles based on some form of material technology).  Unfortunately, UFOs encompass a wide range of phenomenon that includes balls of light, and shape-shifting devices that might split into two, or three, or four, or dissolve into nothingness.

In short, UFOs are really f**king strange.  What you might not know, if you haven’t read all of the literature, is that UFO reports far predate 1947, or even the attack in Los Angeles in 1942, but go back to waves in the late 1800’s and even earlier in the folklore of almost all human cultures.  Another interesting element is that the ‘technology’ behind the UFOs (as structured craft) appears to have changed over this period of time in relation to *our own* culture!  These devices were at one time much cruder and have grown more sophisticated over the decades, seemingly always just a bit in advance or our own human technology.

The occupants, while often typically small little dudes in appearance, have transformed from elvish characters, to small children, to the ‘grays’ we hear so much about today.  Now we may think we have a pattern of behavior in alien abductions but, still, we have encounters in this past century where the occupants acted completely differently.  For example, they might ask for information about the local weather, farming, or share a buckwheat pancake with a bemused farmer.

So what does it all mean?

Well, of course, I don’t know.  In fact, no one knows.  And, anyone who says they do is probably full of shit. 

There is a lot of talk about the US Government running a ‘cover-up’ of the UFO phenomenon.  And, to be honest, they are.  That’s ok, it’s their job.  When our airspace is being invaded by this phenomenon it is their job to defend it.  If a flying saucer crashes and there might be technology to glean from it, it is the government’s standard operating procedure to both hoard and protect that technology from our enemies.

And, while the US government may have some crash debris and some better documentary evidence in the form of films and photographs and, who knows, maybe an actual ‘alien’ body on ice, I doubt quite seriously that they know, or understand, what the hell is going on better than anyone else out there.

There is a seductive temptation to latch onto such physical manifestations as crash debris and bodies and then eliminate or reject ever single other aspect of high strangeness surrounding this phenomenon.  But, the fact is, that in all fairness you just can’t do that.

One thing we must always remind ourselves of is that the ‘cover-up’ surrounding UFOs and their occupants is being conducted by the entities who are flying the UFOs.  Remember that, and remember that well.  These entities, which intrude into our reality and do create a serious impact on our culture, hold all of the cards.  They buzz our military installations with impunity.  They have disabled our nuclear weapons, presumably just to show that they can.  Every single time we have ever scrambled jets to chase them, they either wink out of existence or have disabled the weapons systems on board our aircraft.

After all of this time it doesn’t appear that they necessarily mean us any great harm but, then again, there is zero evidence that they have our best interests at heart either. 

For as long as people have been interested in the UFO phenomenon there has been one single and driving force; a deep seated desire for ‘proof’.  A desire to be vindicated and make the skeptics of the world eat crow.  This group of people generally rails against the US government (i.e. intelligence agencies) but, surprisingly to me, never seems to blame the jackasses flying the UFOs.  Just what species do you think you belong to anyway?

Over the years, no one has ever been vindicated.  Many have died without any satisfactory answer to these questions and, I strongly suspect, many more will.  The phenomenon lurks in the shadows and there is absolutely no indication that it will ever change.  All contact between us and ‘them’ has been on an unfair playing field.  ‘They’ operate by means of deception and have, actually, destroyed the lives of some people who have been duped by their alleged communications.

If you measure only the ‘effect’ these encounters have had on our culture it is quite disturbing.  UFO encounters have launched major religious events (Fatima), cults, and New Age thought.  People who find themselves sucked into these encounters generally appear to lose all capacity for rational thought.  People from the far religious right often describe UFOs as a ‘demonic’ presence.  While this is a description which simply caches the phenomenon into their own irrational framework it does point out that our interaction is completely unfair, unbalanced, and 'their' behavior is fundamentally devious in its nature.

If the US government admitted tomorrow that UFOs are ‘real’, bringing out say some compelling archival film footage, photographs, maybe even debris or, the ultimate piece of evidence, a body, what chaos would that create?  Honestly I don’t think that people would be shocked or surprised by it.  Our society has been so inundated with UFO lore that, I honestly believe, it would be accepted fairly readily with the 50% plus of society enjoying a few days of ‘I told you so”; and then what?

Then, little would be learned, because these items of ‘proof’ would provide almost nothing of an explanatory nature about the root source of this bizarre phenomenon.

People in the UFO field will often filter out the data that is ‘too strange’ or ‘too bizarre’ so that all that is left is what is tangibly physical and tidy to digest.  This leads to conclusions, or hypotheses, which don’t even begin to touch about the real nature of what we are dealing with.

This does raise some interesting questions in my mind.

Are flying saucers, structured mechanical craft, the product of a technological society somewhere in time and space?  The flying saucer we see in the sky, was it built in a factory?  Where is the assembly line?

Why is the seemingly technological nature of flying craft just a bit in advance of our own society?  Why were there airships in the 1800’s and in the early 1900’s UFOs would spit fire and flames out like our rockets that were soon to be?  After the flying eggs, and flying saucers, of the 50’s and 60’s today we have massive triangles that blot out the night sky they are so huge.

Why would a civilization, presumably far in advance of our own, undergo an equivalent advance in technology in concert with us?

Where do UFOs exist when they are not ‘here’?

Of course I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but I have some interesting ideas.

What if the most advanced technology in the Universe is not material but, rather, consciousness itself?

Why not consider the fact that there is no such thing as a thing.  I recommend to you an excellent book by Paul Davies called ‘The Matter Myth’ which reminds us that, when you get right down to it, there really isn’t any such thing as solid matter.  As we know by now our bodies are comprised of cells and these cells are comprised of molecules and these molecules are comprised of atoms, and these atoms are comprised of electrons, protons, and neutrons, and these particles are comprised of yet more subatomic particles known as quarks, and muons, and gluons, and the like.  And, when you get down to the subatomic level you find out that everything we perceive as ‘solid’ is actually virtually 100% entirely empty space and even the things we think of as ‘things’ are themselves indeterminate waves of probability in hyperspace; subject to the quantum uncertainty principle this ‘stuff’ doesn’t actually exist until we bother to perceive it and, prior to that, it exists within the implicate order of the Universe as an infinite set of probabilities.  (For God so loved the world he created the quantum uncertainty principle)

The implicate order of the Universe exists, outside of time, and represents the eternal ‘now’ of all that ever is, ever was, or ever will be.  It represents the infinite probabilities of an infinite number of simultaneous Universes describing the range of all expression that could ever be.   Our conscious experience of the Universe is it’s unfolding into the explicate order.  Here we create the illusion of time, and space, and experience.  While all of this is incredibly real to us, and even though a solid brick wall is, in fact, comprised almost entirely of empty space, I would still recommend you not try to walk through it even if the fact of the matter is that matter is ephemeral.  Matter is vibrational energy in hyperspace and, no, I didn’t make this shit up or read it in a New Age magazine. 

However….what if…the most advanced technology in the Universe is not of material technology but, rather of consciousness?  What if there is an advanced consciousness which can manifest itself as technology?  This consciousness manifests itself for a brief period of time, exists while we experience it, and then disappears with nary a trace.  There are no factories which build the UFOs, as they are created, at will, like the tulpas of the Buddhist monks.  These UFOs reflect the technology of the time it manifests within and in conformance with the will of the consciousness driving it.

Like Charles Fort I have come to the conclusion that we are owned.  This planet earth, and its incredible diversity, is a giant science experiment for some advanced consciousness which we cannot even begin to comprehend.  If you try to imagine your relationship to a dog or a cat, or let’s say maybe to an ant, or perhaps lets get realistic and say our relationship to a microbe, then you might begin to understand the relationship between us and the consciousness behind the UFO enigma.  This consciousness would no more think of talking to us as an equal as we would do the same to an ant in our ant farm.

This, my friends, is why no amount of crash debris or ‘alien’ bodies is ever going to help reveal the true mystery behind this problem.

Nevertheless, remember as I said before, UFOs are absolutely *not* important to any of us as we tramp our way through our material existence in this culture and in time and space.  These UFOs are only of interest to whacked out philosophers who have too much free time on their hands and access to the Internet.