Aliens

In this post we're going to talk about aliens. "Extra-terrestrials," "non-human intelligence," UFO's, UAPs. This is one of the most bizarre (in the truest sense of the word) and disconcerting topics I have ever really looked into, and for every answer found, you get two questions. It's hard to know really where or how to dig into the topic since there are so many different threads and avenues to go down that lead to more threads and avenues. I'm going to assume that you know next to nothing on the subject at the start and then get deeper into it, like an onion. I'll touch on the the 7 or so books I've read on the phenomenon as well. Most of it has to do with abductions but there are plenty of other things at play here. Prepare yourself, things are going to get strange.

So first off, I have gleaned over the years, that before you start talking about aliens or UFO's or alien-hybrid-reptilian-humanoid breeding programs in any sort of serious way, you first have to talk about talking about it. More than politics, even more than religion, this topic makes people very strange when you bring it up. Try it out if you don't believe me. Most people hear the word 'alien' and just tune out or laugh. Actually when you think about it, it's a little weird that the topic of aliens almost immediately elicits a chuckle or outright laughter in our culture (and it mostly is just Western culture that treats aliens and 'other worldly beings' as jokes. Every other culture that I've read about fear and revere them, which is probably the natural reaction minus an ongoing 100 year CIA psy-op. ) 

'Little green men.' It's so ridiculous, they say, it's obviously a joke. It has to be, right? If you bring up the topic in any sort of serious way, you will be met with derision almost always. People say that there isn't any evidence of alien life, but I actually think the opposite is true. There's too much evidence. So many unexplainable pictures and videos, some 100% verified from military sources with the pilots and radarmen testifying to them under oath. Never mind the fact that the US government has confirmed the existence of crafts that fuck with our planes and ships that we cannot even remotely explain. Never mind the hundreds of thousands of personal accounts and missing time episodes, plus the crop circles. (By the way, I could make an entire post on crop circles alone. One group of guys who were casually linked to the US military one time 'admitted' to making one as a hoax and that largely made the story disappear from the mainstream, but if you look into it at all you'll see that the hoaxers claims are impossible. To explain how they got to the middle of the crop circle they claimed to have made without making any footprints, they said they pole vaulted into the middle of it and then back out. With all kinds of boards and equipment to make them. The Why Files did a great episode breaking all this down which I highly recommend checking out. Honestly, crop circles alone nearly prove the existence of aliens. Check it out sometime, I promise it's worth it. That youtube video has almost 7 million views). You throw a couple hoaxers (intentional and not), loons and drones into the mix and it all just feels like a blurry, messy morass that people don't want to deal with. Similar to religion, the phenomonom also attracts more than its fair share of whacko's, grifters and hustlers who either see confirmation of their pyschosis or, at the other end of the spectrum, dollar signs. The topic also challenges just about everything we think we know about life and reality itself. Time travel, different dimensions, consciousness without physical bodies, 'portals', abductions, alien-human-hybrid breeding programs. It is a lot easier and probably more comfortable to chalk it all up to nonsense and hoaxes. But once you turn over this rock and see all the little squiglly movement, you really can't put it back again.

The first little seedling of an idea for me that really got me thinking about aliens and the possibility of life elsewhere out in space is the Fermi Paradox. Named after Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, it basically posits that knowing what we do about space so far, it doesn't make sense that we haven't seen evidence of aliens yet. We can observe something like 100 billion stars, just in our own galaxy. A lot of them, like tens of billions, are similar to our sun and have planets orbiting them. That means that there should be something like a couple billion planets orbiting some kind of sun, just in The Milky Way. Then consider the fact that Earth is a relatively young planet, somewhere around 4.5 billion years old. The Milky Way Galaxy is around 13 billion years old, and the universe itself is somewhere around 14 billion years old. So that means that the universe existed for roughly 10 billion years before the earth was even formed. Then add on another 4 billion-ish years until humans came online. In other words, there are tens or even hundreds of billions of planets relatively close to us and orbiting a sun that have been out there in space for billions of years, all before a human being ever took a step on Earth. Humans have existed for something like half a million years, give or take a couple thousand years, and we're already in space. We have put men on the moon, we have rovers on Mars, Venus and various asteroids and we've sent mini, unmanned ships deep into space. The area above Earth is nearly covered in satellites and we emit all kinds of evidence of ourselves into space. If someone from a different planet was looking, they could pretty easily see us. Imagine 50 or even 100 years from now. Assuming we're still here, we'll have way more ships and satellites and other things in space. Colonization of Mars will probably happen in the next couple hundred years. If you assume our trajectory for space travel remains at least consistent, (which is a gross under-assumption. Generally, as things progress, they progress faster and faster. Think of the hockey stick curve. For instance, it took us something like 200,000 years to get a plane in the air, but then less than a hundred years after that to put a man on the moon) in something like 500 years we'll probably have colonies on Mars and will be using it as a launch pad to get to other planets. We could conceivably colonize our galaxy in 1,000 years - a blip in time on the cosmic scale. Assuming our current trajectory at least holds, we should be a multi-planet, space traveling species in about half a million years, total. Again, very roughly. Give or take a few hundred thousand years. So it begs an obvious question. With their massive multi billion year head start, why haven't we seen anyone yet? Where is everyone?

This question alone got me going down this rabbit hole a good decade or so ago. When you think of the sheer vastness of space, the amount of suns and planets that are out there, it is hard to imagine that it's just all for us. But then when you add the fact that Earth is a young planet, it really does make you wonder, how have we not made contact with anyone else yet?

There are a few possible answers to the Fermi Paradox which I find less interesting than the question itself, but I'll run through them real quick:

-We are alone. We haven't found anyone yet because there is nothing and no one to find. I find this to not only be the least likely option, but also the (second) most terrifying. To be truly all alone on this tiny little spinning rock in an infinite, ever expanding void. A completely barren universe, save for us, to me anyway, really is unnerving. All this infinite space, just for us? So if we went extinct, that would be it for life in the entire Universe? Also, the fact that we exist almost completely rules this possibility out, in my view anyway. I could wrap my head around a completely barren, lifeless Universe, or one which supports life and has many instances of it in its literal infinite space. But for there to be exactly one life form? Just logically it makes the least sense to me out of all the possibilities. 

-Life is extremely rare/spread out. Perhaps there is other life in the universe, only it is extremely rare. Or spread out over time. Perhaps civilizations spring up and die, separated by millions or billions of years. Even this seems unlikely to me though. Because even if there is something like a one in a billion chance of a planet orbiting a sun to have life, we should have seen at least evidence of at least a few by now. However, when you consider how vast everything is and how limited our vision of it is, perhaps what we've done so far is like sticking a cup into the ocean and concluding that there isn't any life in it because the cup didn't have a fish in it.

-They're there, we just can't see them. An interesting possible answer. What we can see with our naked eye and even on radar is pretty limited. It's possible that whatever life is out there is so advanced that they've transcended the need for physical bodies and maybe even physical reality itself. This is roughly what I believe and if you read the literature about abductions and alien encounters, it makes the most sense. Imagine a person from the year 1600 waking up in a busy city in today's world. Think of how different things would be to him. It would be close to being on a different planet. That's just a 400 year difference and staying on the same planet. Imagine a four thousand or four million year difference, AND being on a different planet, maybe even a different solar system. The differences would be incomprehensible. The people or beings would be so different and have such different needs and wants and motivations. They might not even have any needs or wants! So the fact that we have yet to make contact with anyone or anything doesn't mean a whole lot to me.

-Predator universe. This is probably the most unnerving and terrifying one to think about. It could be that the Universe is teeming with life, but one alien species is the dominant one and eliminates any and all competition they find. So anyone who finds that out hides from being able to be seen from space. This isn't as far fetched as it sounds at first, and many serious people have brought it up, especially in regards to the way we have broadcasted various messages like 'Hello!' into space for the past 50 years. "Physicist Stephen Hawking, in his book A Brief History of Time, suggests that "alerting" extraterrestrial intelligences to our existence is foolhardy, citing humankind's history of treating its own kind harshly in meetings of civilizations with a significant technology gap, e.g., the extermination of Tasmanian aborigines. He suggests, in view of this history, that we "lay low"."

-The Great Filter. This one is pretty scary too. It could be that basic life itself is fairly common throughout the Universe, but intelligent, organized, planet colonizing life is so rare that it barely exists at all. This could be due to something called The Great Filter, or some kind of major resistance/filter that hits life before it can become the kind of civilization that we're talking about. Now the question becomes, if there is a Great Filter, is it behind us? Or in front of us? Maybe the jump from single cell, algae type of life to anything more than that is the Great Filter. Or the jump from the water to the land, or the jump from monkey/primate to human. There are probably thousands of possible jumps in our evolutionary history that could have been the Filter. But what if it's in front of us? What if the technology that makes space travel possible is just too much for most civilizations to handle? What if once atomic energy becomes possible, it's just a matter of time before we blow ourselves up or set ourselves back to the Stone Age, over and over? See, isn't this a fun topic to think about?

What we now think of aliens and then later the alien abduction phenomenon really began shortly after World War II. There was the famous Roswell New Mexico 'crash' at Area 51 in 1947. Then in 1961, there was the Betty and Barney Hill famous abduction case, which was the first real nationally known 'alien abduction' case. (An interesting somewhat lesser known fact about the Betty and Barney Hill case; they were an older interracial couple in New Hampshire in 1961. Why on Earth would an interracial couple from 1961 make up such a story? Why would they involve the police and invite all that attention onto themselves? Neither profited from it and Barney's life took a turn for the worse after it happened. The idea of them making this story up and sticking with it their whole lives, to no benefit to themselves, is almost harder to believe than the idea that they were abducted). 

Then you had the Travis Walton case, where a logger got abducted by a UFO in front of a crew of men and then reappeared five days later. These are two of the most famous abduction cases as both have had multiple movies/shows made about them, but there are literally countless stories and accounts of people being abducted by aliens. (If you don't know about either of those cases, just read their wiki pages. They're insane. And the documentary about Travis Walton is called 'Catching Fire' and is definitely worth a watch).

When you first hear about someone claiming to have been abducted by aliens, floated through a wall and into a space ship, you probably immediately think that they're lying. But when you actually dig into it and think about it, the idea that they're making it up quickly loses steam. For one, why would they? You might say for fame or some sort of notoriety, but in the vast majority of the cases I've read about in various books, the abductees wish to remain anonymous. They aren't writing a book or selling anything or gaining anything through their stories, so that puts that possibility out to pasture right there. The second thing you might think is that they're disturbed people. But this again fails under scrutiny. Most of these people are completely normal, high functioning adults. People with families and careers. The researchers carefully screen anyone they talk to, and the vast majority of them are living in constant fear and have had their lives upended over it. They're desperate for it to stop (most of them, anyway. After a certain point, some of them understand it more and come to accept it.) Lawyers, doctors, farmers, policemen, teachers...anything you can think of. Living perfectly normal lives aside from getting visits from alien beings. Not only that, but almost all of them report very similar scenarios. People who have no possible way of communicating with each other, some from different countries, reporting very similar things happening to them on these ships, some of it downright degrading, gaining absolutely nothing from their stories. At some point, you have to turn that 'debunking' ray on the debunking itself.

It all sounds so crazy and far-fetched at first, but when you really think about it, is it really that outlandish? That reality is different than what we think it is? We haven't even fully explored our own planet. Most of the ocean has never been seen before. Is it that out of the realm of possibility that intelligent life exists somewhere else in space and has interacted with us in a way that we find bizarre? 

There are a few different components to the whole thing. Number one, you have abductions. That's the part I am most into and probably know the most about. Most of the abduction stories involve breeding and/or some sort of sexual encounter. Males report having their sperm taken and having sex with aliens, alien-human hybrid beings, and even other humans while on a ship. Females report all kinds of weird sex stuff. Lots of unexplained scars and even missing pregnancies. Ovaries and eggs being harvested. One fact that always stuck with me was that multiple women reported to John Mack that during an abduction, something was put up inside their vagina, like way way up. And then they felt like they were inflated from within somehow. John Mack asked an ob/gyn friend about this, and the doctor said it sounded exactly like how they harvest a womans eggs. They inflate the inside of a womans uterus to make more room in there and to get her organs out of the way. They'd be put under anethestsa normally, of course, so they would have no memory of it. It seems like the aliens are doing this procedure while the women are awake, but they aren't being hurt by it. 

Another component of the alien phenomenon is the UFO's. Ships, orbs, rays of light, UAP's. Probably the most visible part of it all. And this isn't even controversial anymore. The USAF has admitted that their pilots routinely come across things in the sky and on their radar that they cannot explain, moving at speeds that would easily kill any human on board. All with no heat signature or obvious means of propulsion. There's real, unclassified video of tic-tac like crafts flying in and out of the water without making a wake or slowing down at all. There exists a pretty famous 4chan post from a guy who says he's in the military and has terminal cancer and was spilling the beans. His claim was that UFO's actually originate here on Earth and are all made from spec, one offs built for a purpose. That's why they always seem to look slightly different. He says there's a mothercraft somewhere in the Ocean that pumps them out. And obviously a random 4chan user doesn't mean much by itself, but it was definitely an interesting read. I can't find the post now but it was all over Reddit for a while. I have screenshots of it if anyone is interested. 

Another component to the phenomenon are the little mummies of alien bodies that were found in Peru. This was big news when it happened but staying with a constant theme in all of this, once they were found there was a lot of back and forth between scientists arguing over who got to see it and do work on them. Some people claimed they were fake, it all got messy and weird and it kind of disappeared from the mainstream. Very similar to crop circles. Almost the same exact thing happened with the metallic orbs that were found, also in Latin America. And then of course we had that whole New Jersey 'drone' thing here a few months ago. Remember that? A strange thing I remember reading about that story is that the crafts (they weren't drones, at least not at the start) were showing up at the houses of the FBI agents investigating it! I think what happened there is that there definitely were unidentified crafts flying around, and then the FBI sent their own drones up to investigate it. Eventually the story just became 'drones', but I was following that whole thing from the start and they were absolutely not just drones. I saw a few pictures of the crafts and a few of them looked kind of like airplanes but not really. Like an AI rendering of a plane from far away. One had the wings upside down. I live in the Northeast and I saw a few odd looking crafts around that time as well. As usual, it's just weird enough to be something, but not 100% conclusive of anything.

Another part of this whole thing is the cattle mutilations. There have been dozens if not hundreds of reports of cattle and other animals being found dead with vital organs (usually sexual organs but not always) completely missing, no blood anywhere, and, astonishingly, the carcasses will be left untouched for months. No predators, no birds, not even maggots end up eating it. One report was of mutilated cow corpses being found on a farmers roof! Like crop circles, I could probably write a whole blog just on cattle mutilations but that's beyond the scope of this post.

The abductions are the most fascinating part though, to me at least. If you accept that these people are telling the truth, the implications are reality shattering. The 'how' and even more-so, the 'why' of it all is what always gets me thinking. So I'm going to roughly go through the books I've read so far and what I've taken from each one and what I think it all means, all put together.

The first book I would recommend to someone coming at this with little knowledge of the subject would be 'Abduction' by John Mack. John Mack was a professor of psychiatry and the founder of the Dept of Psychiatry at the Cambridge Hospital in Harvard Medical School, a real, respected psychiatrist and professor from Harvard. He got hooked up with Budd Hopkins (who we'll read about soon) and started having sessions with people who claimed they were abducted or visited by aliens. He was totally convinced that these people were the telling the truth, and he ended up becoming a super prominent voice and author in the UFO world. Harvard actually suspended him for a year once he started getting into it, but was brought back in on good terms after an 'investigation' and an outcry from his peers. And I say 'John Mack was' because he is dead. He was hit by a car while out for a walk and died, which is exactly the kind of weird thing/death you see in this space. Again, something odd but nowhere near conclusive of anything. Anyway, Abduction is the accounts of 13 people that Mack had sessions with. It's written very clean and clearly and while the accounts are utterly insane, it isn't overwhelming to read. This is a good book to start with.

The next I would say, in order, would be 'Communion' by Whitley Striebler. Whitley has been on Joe Rogan and other podcasts. 'Communion' is one of the biggest, 'most OG' abduction books ever. Its cover is fairly famous in this bizarre corner of the world:

 

This book is basically about the authors history of being visited and abducted by alien beings for his entire life - his family and even friends and neighbors too. He said something was implanted in his ear that he can still feel. He actually went to the doctor to have it removed but as they were trying to remove it, they said it moved. Like it was alive and trying to evade capture. There's actually video of it, believe it or not. Here you go.  As usual, it isn't slam dunk evidence of anything, but it's just another thing to add to the list. This book is OUT THERE and I absolutely couldn't put it down. Hard to even really describe. Throughout Whitleys visits and abductions, he noticed that there was always the same alien present, a sort of bigger, female, leader among worker bees (the one on the cover). He ends up forming a sort of relationship with her and says he can see and talk to her in his mind. One passage I always remember is that he said at one point, he got a strikingly clear view of this alien in his mind. Like he was actually looking at her. He said he thought to himself 'I wonder what the bottoms of her feet look like' and the being actually picked up her feet and showed him. In the image in his mind. In a lot of abduction cases, people report that the aliens not only speak to them telepathically, but that the people could talk back. Again, the implications of all this are staggering. We might be talking about interfacing with beings that are perhaps millions of years ahead of us. I would say this book is an absolute must read if you're interested at in all of this stuff.

Up next I would say 'Missing Time' by Budd Hopkins. I would say these three books round out the Big Three of must read alien/abduction books. I've written about Hopkins before so I won't go too into it again. This books is similar to Abduction where you have people recounting their abductions or 'missing time episodes', usually under hypnosis. This book has a more eerie and ominous feel to it for some reason. John Macks books are a bit more clinical, probably because he was an actual doctor and professor. 

Going in order, I would next recommend 'Intruders: The Incredible Visitations At Copley Woods', also by Budd Hopkins. This books is about one woman/family/house and the unreal sightings, visits, missing time episodes and abductions that have been happening to her and her family for as long as she can remember. Similar to Communion but written by an outside observer. 

After that, I would recommend Karla Turners three books: "Into The Fringe; A True Story of Alien Abduction", 'Taken: The Alien-Human Abduction Agenda" and finally 'Masquerade of Angels'. She's another one of these authors who died relatively young. She fought a long battle with cancer so it isn't really suspicious, (until you really, really get into it all.) All three books are fantastic and worth reading, but Masquerade of Angels is probably the most interesting/unique. 

You see, a common theme in most abductions is the aliens imparting a certain message to the abductee's. The main one is almost always that we're harming the planet, we've gone astray from our purpose or God or nature or 'The Source' as it is sometimes called and we're hurting our planet almost to the point of no return. Many abductees have been shown images of apocolytopical events, seeing the Earth from space consumed by fire or literally breaking apart. They said they were made to believe that they were seeing the actual future. During the famous Zimbabwe School UFO sighting, where an entire class of school children reported they saw a UFO land and little beings get out, they all also reported getting spoken to 'in their minds' (telepathically) that we were hurting the Earth and needed to take better care of it. (By the way, this was really made famous by John Mack. He traveled to Zimbabwe and investigated the whole thing and came away saying the children were 100% telling the truth. In all the years that have followed, none of them have changed their story.) A very common theme in a good chunk of abductions is the aliens telling us humans that we're not taking good enough care of the Earth. They also sometimes say that their planet died out and they're cross breeding with us to save their race but also save us. However, in Masquerade of Angels, Turner has a different hypothesis. She thinks that the aliens are lying and are a lot more evil and selfish than most think. She thinks they need us for breeding and are just doing whatever they can to make it easier or to make our planet last as long as possible. There's all kinds of evidence and stories in the book about them being possibly deceitful. A weird running theme in a lot of the abduction stories is that besides the worker bee grey aliens, most of these beings are sort of playful and trickster-ish. Like they have a mischevious sense of humor.

Lastly, the book I'm currently reading is "Passport To The Cosmos", John Macks follow up to 'Abduction'. I would only read this once you're fully into the subject as it deals with the more esoteric themes like spirituality and shared consciousness. Probably the weakest of the bunch but still worth reading. Up next I have 'Passport to Magonia' by Jacques Valle which I have heard was great so I will update once I read it.

This is getting long and meandering so I will wrap it up soon. Putting it all together, from what I've read and seen in dozens of books and many hours researching and reading, is this: it all seems roughly similar to what a lab monkey might say about us if it could talk. Most abductees report that the aliens handle them with something between cold indifference and almost a fear or respect. Whitley Streibler always said he got the feeling that the worker bee aliens who handled him and got him in and off of tables and things seems to fear and almost be 'in awe' of him. He and others have reported that the commonly seem little "greys" seem to almost be controlled by someone else. They stumble around, fall, and seem uncomfortable in their bodies. A couple people have reported seeing groups of them walk in perfect lock step with each other. Most abductions feature these greys as the worker bees and one or two bigger, different looking alien or aliens that seems to be in charge. Others have reported regular human beings as part of the abduction teams and sometimes as the ones in charge! 

Rarely are people actually hurt in any of these abductions. Most of them are terrified, of course, but there seems to be little to no reports of anything resembling violence or anything really sadistic (though that may depend on your definition of sadistic). The aliens actually seem to go out of their way to make whatever they're doing as painless as possible, and even seem to be able to block it from our memory (though not completely and it seems that hypnosis largely can overcome it). Nearly all abductees have scars which they or no one in their family can explain (which, as Hopkins points out, is more odd than you might think at first. Think of any real scars you or the people you know may have. I would bet you know the story behind each and every one. For all these people to have real, serious scars and none of them able to remember how they got them is again one of those bizarre, unexplainable things but not 100% conclusive of anything.)

Lab animals, animals in the wild, animals in zoos, domesticated animals; they would all have a very different perspective of humans. Some humans they see are sadistic and want nothing more than to hurt them. Some are so empathetic to them that they may lay down their lives to protect them. And then you have everything in between. And we're all the same: human. The way we might knock out a wild Rhino, perform some surgery on it that it can't possibly comprehend, could be the way these aliens interact with us. And we could watch a Rhino with something as simple as a trail camera and it would never know. I think the alien phenomenon is similar. It's easy to look down the food chain, but to look up? It's counter intuitive to a human. 

Anyway, I'm going to wrap it up here. I could go on and on but I'm rambling a bit. If anyone wants a Part 2 to this let me know. It truly is a fascinating and life changing subject to really look into. It isn't what you think. There is a spiritual connection to it all, especially the deeper you go, which was very surprising to me. When you think of aliens you probably think of advanced technology and futuristic sci fi stuff. And sure, that's all there. But there's a deep spiritual side to it all that I can't really explain in a blog post. Reading all this stuff has been one of the main reasons I don't consider myself an atheist anymore, either. Not the whole reason but a big part. I'm telling you, it's worth reading one or two of these books and see if it grabs you. The whole thing is much different than you might think. It has implications for you too, whether you believe in this stuff or not.

As always, you never know what you're gonna get around here. Thanks for reading, bye for now!