Inner Space Travel
Are UFOs the Fourth Shock to our Human System?
The mounting interest about UFO whistleblower David Grusch’s claim that the U.S. is in possession of “retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin” has finally reached the slow-moving U.S. Congress. The public hearings scheduled to begin this week have excited much of the UFO community, but they may be filling some with dread, or at least concern. A few voices in the community have taken to saying that this potential revelation could prove an “ontological shock.” What does that even mean?
David Grusch in uniform
I admit that, unlike a lot of the people who have been writing and podcasting about the UFO phenomenon in recent years, I have never had an experience of contact—not even during a number of past life regressions with skilled hypnotherapists. I have not so much as seen a likely UFO hovering in the skies—an increasingly common occurrence these days. As a child, however, I did devour copious amounts of science fiction, and not just the high-end Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein and Frank Herbert variety. Long before Star Trek and The X-Files, I immersed myself, along with my best friend, Billy Gray, in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars books, which I found much more fascinating—and credible—than the Tarzan comics based on his most popular series of books. The story of a former Civil War soldier who appears to die but then is transported by a kind of astral projection to the planet Mars appealed to my Aries nature—along with titles like The Gods of Mars, The Warlord of Mars, and Thuvia, Maid of Mars.
The hero, John Carter, has to battle fifteen-foot-tall, four-armed warriors with glossy green hides, “gleaming white tusks protruding from massive lower jaws to a point near the center of their foreheads, the laterally placed, protruding eyes with which they could look forward or backward, or to either side without turning their heads, the strange antennae-like ears rising from the tops of their foreheads, and the additional pair of arms extending from midway between the shoulders and the hips.” The Martians’ leader, Tars Tarkas (pictured here) brings to mind descriptions of insectoid and reptilian aliens of certain recent accounts of contact with ETs.
I may have known those books were just fiction, but they prepared the way for the more factual volumes of Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision and Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? when I came across them a few years later. Although both of those authors were roundly debunked at the time, I found their theories at least as credible as the Big Bang. (And both have come in for more favorable reevaluations in recent years.)
The idea that UFOs have visited Earth, either from distant stars or other dimensions that exist alongside ours, never seemed unbelievable, and I won’t be surprised to learn that we have had them in our possession for at least the past 75 years. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel some trepidation at finding out just what kinds of deals our government (and Russia’s and China’s) have cut with the visitors. I don’t think we have any idea how benevolent or maleficent the owners of those recovered craft may be, but I do think we need to know more about who they are.
And so, I look forward to sharing the details of where my research has taken me the past few years, and how it can help us be prepared for what we will inevitably learn in the weeks and months to come. Do we need to be gripped by ontological shock, though? Maybe not. But first, a bit of context.
Nicolaus Copernicus's heliocentric solar system
“Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love.” So said Sigmund Freud over a century ago in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (translated into English in 1920). The first outrage was that “our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable.” Freud attributed that shock to Copernicus, but was circumspect enough to add that it could be traced to “Alexandrian doctrines” from the fourth century BC. (Knowledge of the heliocentric solar system actually appeared thousands of years earlier, as we’ll be discussing in future blogs.)
Darwin's outdated evolutionary theory
“The second,” Freud went on, “was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him: this transvaluation has been accomplished in our own time upon the instigation of Charles Darwin, [Alfred Russell] Wallace, and their predecessors.” We now know that Freud got the idea for those outrages from the 19th-century German physiologist and polymath Emil du Bois-Reymond. (See Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany, by Gabriel Finkelstein, MIT Press). But let’s give the guy, who my first therapist liked to call “Uncle Freud,” credit for popularizing Emil’s insight. We’ll also see that Darwin’s theory of evolution was far inferior to that of his collaborator Alfred Russell Wallace, who believed that Darwin’s “gradualism” theory couldn’t adequately explain the great leap forward to Homo sapiens. (Wallace also wrote a 1907 book seriously examining the possibility of life existing on Mars.)
Finally, Freud credited himself and his colleagues, somewhat egotistically, with “the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavoring to prove to the ‘ego’ of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind.”
That brings us to what some may consider the most recent blow to our anthropocentric egoism, in the form of revelations about UFOs or UAP by former intelligence officer Grusch that began more than a month ago. I’ve been posting links on my Facebook page (starting June 15) to the groundbreaking article about Grusch’s revelations in The Debrief by two of the most credible investigative journalists in the field of ufology (Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal), and a lengthy interview with him by a third journalist (the Australian Ross Coulthart).
As you likely already know, Grusch maintains that he has become aware, through a network of colleagues in the intelligence world, that the government has more than a dozen of those “craft of non-human origin.” He claims further that the information has been illegally withheld from Congress. Because it is classified, he can’t reveal it to the public, but has insisted that Congress demand to be briefed by the Dept. of Defense. After prompting from a small handful of Congressmen (including Chuck Schumer of New York, and Marco Rubio, vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence), that has come to be, and a Congressional hearing scheduled for July 26 promises to get some answers—maybe.
But what does this all mean to us on a personal, existential level? In the world of ufology, these stories about governments and corporations attempting to reverse engineer non-human craft have been rumored and discussed among insiders for decades. Some even more garish rumors were themselves rumored to be inside disinformation gambits intended to make the whole UFO phenomenon seem like nonsense. For instance, one astounding story that lit up the ufology world for a time back around 2005, involved something known as “Project Serpo.”
This story claimed, in great detail, that an ET—then called an EBE for “Extraterrestrial Biological Entity”—who had survived the 1947 crash landing of a UFO, had been able to communicate with its alleged “home” planet, called Serpo, in the binary star system Zeta Reticuli, some 39 light years away. With the military’s help, this story went, the EBE arranged to be rescued by a spacecraft from Serpo and, in exchange, to allow a group of 12 members of the American military to travel to Serpo with him on the rescue craft and live on Serpo for 13 years. This scenario was eventually debunked as having been created with the help of a retired Special Agent for the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigation to make other UFO “revelations” appear farcical. That story was part of the Dept. of Defense’s long-term strategy of humiliating anyone who reported UFO sightings.
But now, when Dave Grusch, who has all the right bona fides, has come out to three highly credible journalists, these rumors are becoming common knowledge. The question remains whether what he and other members of the intelligence community have to say will cause panic on Earth, result in the spread of a rapidly growing religion based around UFOs, or, more optimistically, lead humanity to raise its consciousness. As some ufologists believe that the aliens—whether they are visitors from distant star systems or interdimensional beings who live among us—are out to raise the level of our spiritual awareness, I wouldn’t write off that possibility.
Although thinking about how the general public will react to these revelations does give me a sense of foreboding, it also excites feelings of hope. It’s not that I haven’t speculated on the possibility that more technologically advanced beings have been living among us for decades and, more likely, millennia. I have. But if it became clear that these beings, or some previous iteration of them, were responsible for seeding human life on Earth, it begs the question of whether that would change how we look at the concept of a divine Creator. And by extension, would it also challenge our beliefs about what happens to our consciousness in our journey to and through the afterlife?
A clear revelation of physical evidence of non-human presence on Earth likely wouldn’t cause the materialistic-scientific-minded to change their agnostic or atheist belief patterns. Still, the discovery of quantum physics more than a century ago may gradually be changing that as its concepts of nonlocal reality and quantum entanglement filter down to mainstream culture. But would it cause dismay among religious believers of various earthly faith traditions?
The relationship of extraterrestrial consciousness to the spiritual principles taught by the world’s religions varies, and established faiths have not all taken a stand on the possibility of ETs fitting within their conception of God as creator of the entire universe. Some Islamic scholars have interpreted the Quran to be open to the possibility that Allah created a wide variety of beings on and beyond the Earth, based on verses like this one: “And among His Signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and of whatever living creatures He has spread forth in both. And He has the power to gather them together whenever he pleases.” (Quran, 42:30) Agha Mahdi Puya, the Ayatollah and Islamic scholar most notable for his famous 20th-century exegesis (tafsir) of the Quran, was specific about the existence of alien life in his commentary on the above ayah, or verse: “Life is not confined to the earth. It is indicated in this verse that life in some form or other is existing in the millions of heavenly bodies scattered through space. The Almighty who created such countless beings has surely the power to bring them together when the trumpet is blown.”
In 2008, the Director of the Vatican's Observatory, Fr. José Gabriel Funes, said in an interview with the Vatican daily, L'Osservatore Romano, that believing in the possible existence of extraterrestrial life is not opposed to Catholic doctrine. Armin Kreiner, a professor of theology at the University of Munich and author of Jesus, UFOs, Aliens: Extraterrestrial Intelligence as a Challenge to Christian Beliefs (currently available only in German) dismantles the “ideological negationism” of UFOs, rejecting it as completely inconsistent. Reverend Barry Downing, an American presbyter with a degree in physics and author of essays such as “The Bible and Flying Saucers,” goes even further. He states that not only do aliens exist, but they have always been here on Earth, and they still are.
Carla Rueckert channeling Ra
The existence of extraterrestrial consciousness has also made itself known through channeled sources. One of the most credible and astute series of books to emerge in the past century, The Ra Contact, or the Ra Material, appeared in the early 1980s. Following on the heels of the Seth Books of Jane Roberts, which began in the 1970s, the Ra Material was channeled by a trio including the experienced channel Carla Rueckert, who was referred to by Ra as the “instrument.” Ra described itself as composed of an entire civilization of 6.5 million extraterrestrial beings fused into one unified consciousness and speaking with one voice. Ra claimed to have originally lived on Venus and to have visited Earth and interacted with the Egyptians before and during the time of Akhenaten, and claimed to have built the Great Pyramid at Giza using thought-power. Ra said that its primary purpose in visiting Earth was to promote the Law of One, a basic principle that all is One and that all things that exist are ultimately the same essence within many forms and configurations.
The information contained in the five books of the Ra Material is complex, and I’ll go into it in more detail in a later blog. (Ra also claimed to have developed the Tarot as a way of teaching certain spiritual principles to the Egyptians, and offers fascinating explanations of the chakra system.) I bring it into this conversation because Ra self-identified as an extraterrestrial being, and also said that it is “in service to the One Infinite Creator,” which it does not describe as an external entity, but as an all-pervasive intelligent energy that lives within everything that exists. According to Ra, our perception of separation can be utilized for learning, and underlying it is an indivisible oneness; the Creator, as described by Ra, could be perceived as a Supreme Being or Godhead, the One who became the Many from a desire to share itself with, not unlike the Vedantic principles of Indian spirituality.
Ra hasn’t been heard from in many years, but other channeled entities are now communicating regularly, such as Bashar, channeled by Darryl Anka; and the Allies of Humanity, who have transmitted several books via Marshall Vian Summers; both are available online and I’ll be discussing them in the future.
I don’t feel any particular existential fear that non-human beings, either in the universe at large, on our own planet, or in another dimension, possess more advanced technology and intelligence than we do; anything less would be vastly dispiriting. Whether they would have our own best interests at heart, however, is another question entirely. The consensus of ufologists is mixed on the subject of whether “visitors” are out to help us or merely to make use of our resources. David Grusch claims to have heard reports that aliens may have killed the occasional human. Some researchers have speculated that an interdimensional race of reptilian beings, sometimes called the Archons (a Gnostic term), or the Anunnaki (“gods” who founded Sumerian civilization), have hijacked the Earth and are still in control on a secret level. The British author David Icke (pronounced “Ike”) proposes an elite called the Illuminati, a genetically modified human–Archon hybrid race of blood-drinking, reptilian shape-shifters, who are capable of assuming any human form, including, he believes, members of the British Royal Family. Writers such as Icke, whose ideas of a reptilian conspiracy can be traced back to the pulp fiction of Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard, make it easy for skeptics of the UFO phenomenon to write it all off as third-rate science fiction. But that would be a mistake.
First of all, the UFO phenomenon is multidimensional—literally. Alongside the extraterrestrial hypothesis, which claims that UFOs are physical craft from other planets or star systems, and the psychosocial hypothesis, which says that UFO sightings are best explained as psychological or social phenomena, is the “interdimensional hypothesis.” This view proposes that UFOs are a modern manifestation of a phenomenon that has occurred throughout recorded human history, but which was previously attributed to mythology or folklore. One of the most compelling advocates of the interdimensional hypothesis is the brilliant French astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallee, who has conducted perhaps the most extensive and credible in-person research on the subject of ufology across many decades.
Vallee presented his theories in Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, first published in 1969, and still a classic in the field. After carrying out extensive historical research, Vallee came to an astonishing conclusion, one that seems to be leagues apart from today’s reports of technologically sophisticated interstellar craft:
"If we take a wide sample of this historical material, we find that it is organized around one central theme: visitation by an aerial people from one or more remote, legendary countries. The names and attributes vary, but the main idea clearly does not. Magonia, heaven, hell, Elfland—all such places have in common one characteristic: we are unable to reach them alive, except—as we shall see—on very special occasions. Emissaries from these supernatural abodes come to earth, sometimes under human form and sometimes as monsters. They perform wonders. They serve man or fight him. They influence civilizations through mystical revelation. They seduce earth women, and the few heroes who dare seek their friendship find the girls from Elfland endowed with desires that betray a carnal, rather than purely aerial, nature."
Before becoming known as a reliable authority in the ufology field, Vallee (b. 1939) began his scientific career as a professional astronomer at the Paris Observatory. He co-developed the first computerized map of Mars for NASA in 1963, and later worked on the network information center for the ARPANET, a precursor to the Internet. He sums up his take on the UFO phenomenon this way:
"We have come to realize that we are dealing with a genuine new phenomenon of immense scope. The UFOs are real physical objects. Yet they are not necessarily extraterrestrial spacecraft. To put it bluntly, the extraterrestrial theory is not strange enough to explain the facts. And I will be disappointed if UFOs turn out to be nothing more than visitors from another planet. . . . The theory that suggests itself, as we analyze and reanalyze the forces at play, goes beyond the notion that these are simply technological vehicles produced by advanced races on another planet. Instead I believe that the UFO phenomenon represents evidence for other dimensions beyond spacetime; the UFOs may not come from ordinary space, but from a multiverse which is all around us, and of which we have stubbornly refused to consider the disturbing reality in spite of the evidence available to us for centuries."
—Jacques Vallee, Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact (Alien Contact Trilogy 1), p. 325-326. Anomalist Books. Kindle Edition, 1988, 2008. Italics mine.
Panspermia
Even the term “UFO phenomenon” itself can be somewhat misleading. For one thing, it’s entirely possible that life on Earth, including human life, was seeded not by visiting “aliens” from Orion or Aldebaran, but by passing asteroids carrying the building blocks of life, i.e., the elements of which DNA is constructed. As far back as the 5th century BC, the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras believed that the seeds of life are present throughout the universe. He coined the term panspermia—from Greek roots meaning “seeds everywhere”—to describe his theory that life traveled between planets as bio-organisms. To support this theory, however, we don’t need to rely on sources such as the pulp fiction of Robert E. Howard (who, incidentally, committed suicide at the age of 30) or Edgar Rice Burroughs. The basic premise of panspermia has been advanced by the likes of Carl Sagan; Francis Crick (who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology for co-discovering the double-helix structure of DNA); and British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), who invented the term “Big Bang.”
Sir Fred Hoyle in his lab at the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy in 1967.
The NASA website Astrobiology Roadmap has this to say about panspermia:
Current models indicate that there are natural means to propel organisms into interplanetary space. For example, meteorites that originated on Mars have been found on Earth; these samples verify that such an exchange of planetary material has occurred. In addition, experimental evidence from the orbiting Long Duration Exposure Facility and from at least one Surveyor lunar lander indicates that some common terrestrial microorganisms can survive in excess of five years.
A variation of this theory, known as “directed panspermia,” holds that beings from different star systems have purposefully seeded planets with their own DNA to preserve their lineage. [Crick, F. H.; Orgel, L. E. (1973). "Directed panspermia" Icarus.19(3): 341–346.]
Much as I admire the writings of Carl Sagan and Fred Hoyle, the most concise explanation of directed panspermia that I’ve found appears in a 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, entitled “The Chase” (Season 6, Episode 20). In this brief segment, inspired by Carl Sagan’s book Contact, an Ancient Humanoid describes why and how her race used directed panspermia to seed the universe.
Was Yahweh an Alien?
Terms like multidimensional and interdimensional can also be applied to the study of UFO phenomena that go back in history—at least as far back as the Hebrew Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament. One of the most original and significant sources in this regard is the eminent Italian translator Mauro Biglino, who is so highly regarded that for many years he has translated ancient Biblical Hebrew for Edizioni San Paolo, one of the leading publishing houses for religious subjects in Italy and Europe. Although his books, with titles such as The Naked Bible and The Gods of the Bible, are considered controversial, his knowledge of ancient languages, including Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, is unimpeachable. As we will see, he has made the remarkable assertion that, based on literal meaning, the Hebrew plural noun Elohim, which appears often in Genesis and has been conventionally translated as “God” or “LORD,” actually refers to a number of physical beings who ruled various tribes in the biblical land of Canaan.
Mauro Biligno
The most frequently mentioned of these Elohim is “Yahweh,” which Biligno says has been grossly misrepresented by theologians, both Jewish and Christian, as the name of the almighty spiritual entity whom most believers identify as the Supreme Being who created the universe. For reasons that will become evident as we examine his work in future, Biglino does not translate Elohim and Yahweh, but leaves them, and a number of other crucial Hebrew words, as they originally appear in the ancient texts (transliterated into English).
Why should that matter so much, especially to people who don’t follow either Judaism or Christianity? For one thing, as Biligno reasons, the only credible explanation is that the original authors of the Bible never intended to present Yahweh and the Elohim as a transcendent spiritual entity ruling the entire universe, but as a physical being who ruled a small tribe of Israelites. Yahweh may have been physically larger and far more technologically powerful than humans, and he apparently traveled around in various flying machines, reminiscent of the vimanas of the Indus Valley that appear in the Indian Ramayana and Mahabharata. That would go a long way toward explaining how an omniscient, all-loving Creator could have demanded that his followers do brutally violent things to the tribes that they encountered, as reported in the Bible. Not to mention Yahweh’s apparently bottomless appetite for burnt sacrifices of infants and animals. Over time, and with the help of theologians, Biligno argues, the factual descriptions of Yahweh and the Elohim were changed to monotheistic beliefs that don’t match the literal facts being described.
But that raises yet another imponderable question: Who were the actual physical beings that the authors and editors of the Hebrew Bible called “Yahweh” and “the Elohim,” and where did they come from?
I certainly don’t expect a Congressional hearing to begin to answer such questions. Indeed, given that, at this stage, only three men, including David Grusch, who have previously testified will appear, I doubt that many questions will be answered this week. Still, in order to watch David Grusch disclose what he knew about a secret program a month and a half ago, I had to track down a digital news channel that I wasn’t previously aware even existed, NewsNation.com. I’d wager that most people in the general population aren’t yet aware of him or what he said. But now that his testimony and that of other reputable witnesses with Armed Services experience will be readily available on the House Oversight committee’s streaming site, I’m willing to believe that will change. And when Congress reconvenes in September after their summer recess, a lot more things may have changed.
In any event, I look forward to discussing with you in the weeks to come the questions underlying the links between the UFO phenomenon and our understanding of the spiritual.
The Congressional Hearing will be held on Wednesday July 26 at 10 AM ET. Here’s the link to the livestream when it’s ready to go.
