Throughout my time researching the history of humanity and it’s relationship with the UFO phenomenon, I keep coming back to the same question I’m not so sure there’s an answer to.
Where does mythology end and history begin?
I was an unabashed atheist up until a couple years ago. This shift in thinking seems to be a common theme among those who dive deep down the rabbit hole of the connection between UFOs and human cognition, which I consider one of the most fascinating aspects of this mystery. I’ve actually had several run-ins with this intelligence myself as I’ve detailed in a previous piece.
I am not saying I now believe in God. Rather, I believe the concept of God is simply an anthropomorphization of the universe. I think belief in God is an honest attempt to make sense of something unfathomably enormous and mysterious.
Humans do not like the unknown — or more specifically, the feeling of uncertainty. Our dependence on tools like calendars, clocks, and maps show just how important it is to understand where we are in spacetime and in relation to other things. One might argue that if we didn’t have these human constructs to rely on, we might never get anything done.
Perhaps the idea of God was just another invention by humanity to keep us from worrying about what is out there, beyond our comprehension. The responsibility for all things outside of our control can be placed in the hands of a higher power. Knowing God is always watching can be very comforting, and comfort is a feeling most humans strive for in their day to day lives.
So if God is a human construct, where did the idea originate?
That brings us to gods, with a little “g.” Ancient myths around the world are replete with examples of individual gods too numerous to name here. These gods were fallible, unlike the singular almighty God spoken of in monotheistic religions.
Many of these gods did horrible things. Many of them performed miracles. Taking all of these stories together, to me it seems these gods were very similar to mankind itself when considering the diversity of their actions and intentions.
What’s strange in my view is the historical consensus that these stories were only made up to teach lessons, and offer some sort of esoteric wisdom that was never meant to be taken literally. It actually seems dismissive to assume this, especially considering that spoken word was the only way history was passed down for millennia.
Why would anyone base their own history off of riddles and thought experiments describing events that never happened? Was reality just a metaphor to the ancients? Or were they actually describing real events that only seem absurd from our narrow slice of science developed only over the past hundred years?
In his recent Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse, Graham Hancock floated a very interesting idea. He posited the possibility of an ancient advanced civilization living alongside another primitive one. He explains how there’s already evidence of this in today’s world, with current day hunter-gatherers living in the same era as the B-2 Bomber. I personally don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest the same thing may have been possible thousands of years ago.
Expanding upon his hypothesis, Hancock theorizes that this advanced civilization may have sent emissaries all over the world to spread knowledge of complex concepts like architecture, agriculture, and astronomy before a major cataclysm wiped out many of the organisms living on the planet at the time.
That got me thinking. Perhaps the reason for this worldwide transfer of technological understanding was a way to ensure this was carried on in case the more advanced civilization did not survive.
But I realized the more likely reason, in my opinion, is that members of this advanced society had the technological means to flee the planet. They wanted to leave behind something the survivors could remember them by, and give them a fighting chance to evolve as a species after a catastrophic event.
They escaped and wanted those left on earth to take the baton.
This brings up an interesting connection to the UFO phenomenon when we consider certain observations people on the “inside” of the current disclosure process have shared in the past few years.
In 2017, Tom DeLonge did an interview with Joe Rogan which was widely seen as a disaster. He spoke about the Greek gods, Atlantis, and many other ideas that seemed way too “out there” for anyone not steeped in the deepest of UFO lore. He repeatedly referred to his advisors, who were eventually proven to be some pretty heavy-hitters in the military and intelligence community. Many in the public sphere took his words to be the ravings of a lunatic.
As if the blowback DeLonge received from the public weren’t enough, he has subsequently revealed that he angered his advisors in the military and intelligence communities as well — but not because of his seemingly outlandish claims.
The reason?
Apparently he said too much.
Four years later, in a 2020 interview with The Plug, DeLonge told the story of the interview from his perspective and encouraged people to listen to his words again.
Now keep in mind, my guys were being followed. Some of my guys were wearing bulletproof vests. We had crazy national security investigations going that I can’t get into on some of the things that were happening with my company, because it looked like we were about to begin spilling the biggest secrets ever, which wasn’t the case.
So I got caught in a situation I was kind of unprepared for so I kind of riffed as best I could. But I tell people, take a listen to the shit that I said because I got in a lot of trouble after that fucking interview. And if you’ve noticed, I’ve never done anything like that ever again.
Assuming that the fallout DeLonge describes with his advisors is accurate, it is worth revisiting what was said in that “dumpster fire” of an interview. What intrigues me most, and is relevant to the discussion here, are his comments about the Greek gods.
First off, he tells Rogan that there were Greek letters inscribed on the exterior of the craft that infamously crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.
There’s a very advanced group that left after a catastrophe and hung around in a small outpost here, and throughout time would push civilization forward and that’s who the Greek gods were. That’s why it’s very interesting, on the Roswell wreckage there’s Greek writing.
The way DeLonge sort of blurts this out tells me that this may be one of the pieces of information that his advisors weren’t too happy about him sharing.
Recalling Graham Hancock’s hypothesis that an ancient advanced civilization existed alongside a more primitive one, this is suggestive of a scenario where this craft was somehow created or inspired by a technology that could be considered supernatural or magical. One might say this technology was created by the “gods.”
Furthermore, the fact that a former CIA director personally urged DeLonge and his co-authors to research the ancient Greek connection to UFOs leads me to believe that there is definitely something to this hypothesis.
DeLonge spoke about a conversation they had before he published the first book in his series Sekret Machines.
Not that long ago, he was director of CIA and he went on to be director of NSA. Right when I sat down and told him about the book, you know what he says to me?
He goes, “I didn’t read much science fiction as a kid but I read a lot about Greek mythology,” and looked me in the eye. Then I said, “Well you’re going to love the last page of my book then,” and he’s all, “Am I?”
Then when my book was about to go to pressing, I had a very important person call me up and he said, “Can you stop that pressing and maybe insert something about Greek mythology?”
I said, “I sure can.”
Based on the criteria DeLonge gave when describing his meeting with this top intelligence official, it is pretty obvious that he is referencing former CIA director Michael Hayden. In the second Sekret Machines book, the plot line does in fact include an archaeological excavation on the Greek island of Crete.
The final notable comment from DeLonge in the interview is the relation of ancient Greece, and specifically Atlantis, to the buildings of a military contractor rumored to be involved with UFO reverse engineering programs called Science Applications International Corporation.
Something you got to realize is, for example, the sixth biggest defense contractor in the world — at least they used to be sixth — is a company called Science Applications International Corporation. SAIC. Their headquarters are actually in San Diego. In the front of the building you have an obelisk coming out of a fake lake, and two Atlanteans on thrones and they’re both holding pyramids. One says the past and one says the future. They’re eight foot tall statues, and they’re fucking nuts by the way. SAIC, they went over to Leidos…
SAIC’s involvement with UFOs, and other related phenomena like remote viewing, goes back decades. Bobby Ray Inman, another former CIA director, was on the board for years. Inman is somewhat infamous in the UFO community due to his deep involvement in black projects and a conversation he had with prominent ufologist Bob Oechsler, in which he suggested he was aware of UFO programs. He is a major player in the recently released research document “Loose Threads” that details many connections between military figures and the phenomenon.
Taken together, it is clear there is some overlap in DeLonge’s comments about UFOs during his Joe Rogan interview and the narrative presented in Graham Hancock’s show Ancient Apocalypse. An ancient civilization lived alongside a more primitive one before a cataclysm occurred. DeLonge describes the people of Atlantis, thought to be such a civilization, as leaving earth and establishing outposts in our solar system.
The idea of these two civilizations living side by side brings us to another intriguing notion suggested by the former director of the Pentagon’s UFO program, Luis Elizondo.
Elizondo suggests we should be open to the idea of not one, but multiple “mankinds.”
What if, for a moment, “mankind” wasn’t singular? Maybe, just for a moment, it’s “mankinds,” plural. Are we as a society even prepared to have that conversation?
What if the things that make us human most, like emotions, love, empathy, are not necessarily unique traits to humans within the universe?
Maybe other things can experience that too and maybe the definition of being human isn’t have two arms, two legs and look like this. Or having a body or having hair or no hair.
Maybe being human is far more profound than that and maybe those traits aren’t unique to us.
This dovetails again with Hancock’s theory of multiple civilizations at varying levels of sophistication and DeLonge’s statements about Greek gods having outposts in the solar system after escaping a cataclysm.
The questions that now arise extend beyond the cataclysmic event itself and into the consideration, to quote Elizondo, of “what it means to be human.”
An interesting theory addressing how the human race became the apex predator on earth describes a process of self-domestication. This led to us being less prone to reactive aggression and allowed social groups to form due to altruistic reasons — meaning we sacrifice progress of individual human organisms for the sake of the evolutionary advancement our species as a whole.
But what if humanity wasn’t self-domesticated?
What if we were domesticated by a higher, more advanced lifeform?
And if so, how would they go about it?
One theory that comes to mind is gene-culture coevolution. If a superior culture can affect our own through creating social structures like religion that shape human behavior, they can affect our genes without having to intervene directly.
Theoretical gene–culture models consistently find that the gene–culture dynamics are typically faster, stronger, operate over a broader range of conditions and are more potent than conventional evolutionary dynamics. Gene–culture coevolution is likely to be the dominant form of evolutionary adaptation for our species.
By modifying selection pressures and increasing the intensity of selection, cultural processes can speed up evolution; by providing an alternative means of responding to ecological and social challenges, cultural processes can damp out selection and slow down the evolutionary response. Extensive evolutionary responses to cultural niche construction in our species are likely to mean that human minds are specifically adapted for culture.
The idea of the intelligence behind the UFO phenomenon guiding humanity through indirect means has been speculated about by prominent academics like Stanford microbiologist professor Dr. Garry Nolan.
“You don’t have to do much to influence a civilization’s direction. All you have to do is let yourself be seen. You don’t need to genetically intervene to steer the course of history. An idle push here, given insight into a plant’s utility there (through shamans), and voila…
“Helping one group versus another is selection and breeding. It can be as simple as that. Humans have practiced husbandry for centuries. Witness cows, dogs, horses, etc.”
Dr. Nolan has also spoken at length about how the environment of an organism can affect its evolution through a process called epigenetics.
I’ve said this before, I think we’re just a bunch of angry apes. I don’t think we’re ready for some of the answers yet. It’s like you don’t tell your children certain things until they’re mature enough, and we’ve pretty much proven that we’re still not mature enough yet.
You know, it’s interesting that evolution as I said before doesn’t care about time. DNA doesn’t care about time. We’re sort of the first level of civilization that was achieved out of competition.
The tribe that was more competitive than the other, and frankly more aggressive — and that frankly had narcissistic, psychopathic leaders that were willing to unite a continent at the expense of blood — were the ones that succeeded. But as we’re seeing played out in today’s politics — without getting political— that’s not necessarily a survival trait for a species, right?
So is the long-term play for evolution, the creation of a certain level of complexity that either realizes it needs to get rid of that aggression or there will be a collapse. A rise, collapse, rise until the genetics is selected for that.
There is an interesting study that was done, and I don’t remember who did it and whether it was validated or not, but it was shown that in women, after wars, that there were — it was more likely for the women’s boy children to be homosexual. The end of postulate was that they would be less aggressive. So there’s kind of an encoding in the woman to fear of a problem in terms of stress, that we need to lower the aggression in the males because they’re getting out of control.
There are certainly other cases showing that the grandmother who is starved has a baby, and if it’s a woman, is epigenetically programmed to have a child who is more likely to gain weight. So it’s an epigenetic programming event.
The concept of the rise and fall of civilizations until a certain type of genetics is reached seems to fit well with the narrative developing using the statements previously presented in this article. Providing a more primitive species with advanced concepts such as agriculture and astronomy would certainly have a major effect on culture, and therefore the genetics of its participants.
However, there is one thing that still sticks out to me in Elizondo’s quote. Although he refers to “mandkinds” in the plural, he also suggests these other species wouldn’t necessarily resemble Homo sapiens. Specifically, the quote I’m concerned with is, “maybe the definition of being human isn’t…having a body or having hair or no hair.”
If another mankind does not have a body, what does that mean for our interactions with this hypothetical advanced civilization in ancient times?
Surely we must have been able to perceive whatever form these beings had taken if we were to learn such advanced processes from them that completely turned our hunter-gatherer society on its head. These “gods” were described as being part of physical reality in the ancient texts, although they did have powers regular humans did not.
There happens to be one speculative explanation for the discrepancy that fits within this current narrative that’s been building — they were part of our physical reality and they no longer are.
It could be that after escaping the cataclysm, this advanced civilization’s evolutionary path no longer dictated the need for a physical body outside of Earth and its gravitational field.
Or perhaps after they left Earth before the cataclysm, and in the time since, we evolved to filter out whatever perceptions we used to detect these entities that no longer affected our culture, and therefore no longer essential for us to “tune into.”
Perhaps we increasingly started having to depend on each other and our cognition developed to support that transition.
The default mode network (DMN) is a connected system of different regions in the brain that is responsible for our sense of self in relation to others, day dreaming, and consideration of past and future events. This network lights up when we are not performing a task and are left alone with our thoughts. These are the most basic foundational thoughts we have when not engaged in an activity outside of ourselves or acting on primal instincts.
Dr. Garry Nolan had some interesting thoughts on the DMN. I tweeted a speculative thought experiment about our species potentially losing our ability to perceive certain things that we may have been able to in the past.
Dr. Nolan replied with an interesting theory of his own, which was the first time I had ever heard about this network in the brain.
Maybe we evolved a more advanced default mode network (DMN) which is shut off w/ psychedelics, & is an essential part of who we consciously are, when awake, from moment to moment.
One network to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.
Dr. Nolan’s idea essentially posits that we may have a more evolved DMN because it promoted social integration and benefitted our evolution, similarly to the theory of self-domestication.
In another tweet in the same conversation, Dr. Nolan also brings up the idea of “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”
Interesting that the default mode network really only activates/stabilizes after age 6-9. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny wherein our development as organisms mirrors our evolutionary past, per discussion that young children or animals seem more aware?
Dr. Nolan provides a link to an article that expands on this concept.
More than just a catchy phrase, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” is the foundation of recapitulation theory. Recapitulation theory posits that the development of individual organisms (ontogeny) follows (recapitulates) the same phases of the evolution of larger ancestral groups of related organisms (phylogeny). Applying this theory loosely, a seedling of a recently speciated flowering plant (something that recently evolved to be a species) would, throughout its embryological development, mimic the morphology of more ancestral plants—or plants that evolved in earlier times.”
He sums it up pretty well in a final tweet.
The idea is that the awareness dims as the adult DMN locks down & rigidifies brain operational networks. The hypothesis is that animals and young children have yet to develop an adult DMN & use different perception filters.
This essentially states that our biological state in early development reflect our previous state of evolution, i.e. our behavior as a species that would be exhibited in ancient times. He theorizes that since the DMN isn’t fully formed until 6-9 years of age, perhaps we still perceive things during our younger development that we did in our ancient past.
It may also require us to dig deeper into the “imaginary friends” countless young children claim to interact with.
Connecting these dots leaves me with some intriguing if unanswerable questions.
- Is it possible that humanity shared a common ancestor with a species that evolved to form an advanced civilization that lived alongside us in ancient times?
- Could they have evolved or created technology that allowed them to no longer be trapped as physical being, but still be able to manifest as one?
- Could that species, aware of an impending cataclysm, have sent emissaries across the world to teach us agriculture, astronomy, and architecture in the hopes that this more primitive species would carry on their legacy after they were gone?
- Could our own senses have evolved to no longer perceive these life forms as their absence to longer necessitated us to?
To be clear, these are wildly speculative questions based on hearsay and should not be construed as a scientific theory, or really anything more than a thought experiment.
But I truly believe it is this kind of thinking that needs to be encouraged if we are ever going to figure out the history of our species, and more specifically its relationship with the origin of the UFO phenomenon.
