UFOs: an inconvenient truth

I have come to a slightly uncomfortable conclusion regarding UFO phenomena.

No, I don't believe it's all a hoax.  Not entirely.  However, I do not believe that there are aliens while at the same time I do strongly suspect the presence of UFOs.  Confused?  Good.  Hang on.

A while back, I posted a pic on the Facebook page for ESE.  This pic had a collage of the various types of UFO craft that have been allegedly spotted.  My pal David commented that he believed this wide variation to be indicative of UFOs being a falsehood (paraphrase).  In a way, he's correct. 

Consider the wide variety of reports, the ones that extend far beyond the stereotypical "flying saucer" or triangle reports.  For example, at the dawn of the 20th Century, there were numerous sightings of "mysterious airships" many of these accounts closely resembling the cigar-shaped balloons and dirigibles of the time yet with flight characteristics just a step beyond.

This is to say nothing of the wide disparity in the descriptions of UFO occupants.  The brilliant and thorough Jacques Vallee has done numerous studies on the subject.  This is not a recent phenomenon, rather it was one that reaches back to prehistory.  The first records indicate encounters with "half human, half animal" beings.  By the establishment of Christianity as a world force, we see these encountered beings resembling "angels." Around the same time, there are reports of "gnomes" and "hairy giants." Modern "alien" experiences began with contact people and our "space brothers" or supposed extraterrestrials that are very humanlike in appearance and were here to help us.  They also have scientific interests with a few reports stating that the aliens were observed taking soil samples (not unlike the Apollo astronauts of the same era).

Then there are wilder encounters, such as the "Hopkinsville goblins," beings such as Mothman as written about by John Keel, and others with visages not unlike the kind depicted above.

Unfortunately, all of that was but zakuska for the terrors that followed.

By now, reports of UFOs and their occupants have once again become largely homogenized and conform to a broader template.  In plainer language: The Greys.  The bug-eyed, diminutive, rather sinister beings described in books such as Whitley Streiber's Communion and Budd Hopkins' Intruders, each of them depicting frightful and rather cookie-cutter accounts of people ripped from their beds at night by Greys and then subjected to painful and traumatizing medical exams.  Yes, one need only look at pop culture to see that the majority of people think "Grey" when they hear the word "alien."  Although I will admit that David Icke and his "reptoids" are beginning to give the Greys a run for their money.

How can all of this be?  Is it all psychological, meaning people influenced to mass hallucination by popular culture and media?  The physical evidence suggests against that.  However, the reports are far too all over the map to be alien in nature either.  And here's where Vallee and John Keel begin to get it right, in my opinion.

There is a psychosocial aspect to the entire phenomenon.  This is something that adapts to what we want and what we expect to see.  Or perhaps what we fear to see.  We may be encountering a higher intelligence, lifeforms that exist on another level of consciousness that morph their visage to meet our expectations.  This dovetails with John Keel's notion of the "superspectrum" from The Mothman Prophecies.  If so, then what do these beings want?  What is their nature?  What is their endgame?  What do they hope to accomplish through abduction and experimentation?

Then again, human consciousness and the power of the human mind may be collaboratively constructing these beings and experiences.  This opens the floodgates on a whole number of other issues, such as tulpas, the incubus and succubus, and larger questions about human nature, such as but not limited to what we as a species want and what we are capable of doing.

Sigh.  I really miss the simplicity of spacecraft and visitors from other planets.


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