Throughout the decades, ufologists have generally been portrayed as naïve pseudoscientists who attribute anything in the sky considered unidentified to an extraterrestrial civilization visiting our planet from another.
Despite the numerous assumptions and outright disingenuousness required to paint genuinely curious researchers with such a broad, cynical brush, this stereotype has nonetheless been perpetuated by Hollywood and a mainstream media that insists on introducing any news segment concerning unidentified aerial phenomena with the X-Files theme song and at least one snarky, overplayed dad joke.
Even up to this day, in the “UAP” era following the December 2017 New York Times report, the stigma seems to be alive and well in newsrooms at the editorial level.
Perhaps the groundbreaking article on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), the Pentagon’s now-defunct UFO program led by former US intelligence official Luis Elizondo, has been retrospectively viewed as an aberration by those at the top of the decision-making ladder, leading the Times to run blatantly biased and dismissive headlines more recently.
The most obvious examples of this curious about-face can be attributed to NYT national security reporter Julian Barnes, who penned an October 2022 article misleadingly titled Many Military U.F.O. Reports Are Just Foreign Spying or Airborne Trash.
This unnecessary and derisive use of the word “trash” in the headline clearly served no functional purpose other than to grant the reader permission to write off the then-upcoming government UFO report, the details of which turned out to be anything but insignificant.
Many prominent “skeptics” applaud this arrogant flavor of cynicism and view the disparagement of the UFO subject by our institutions as justified due to the lack of data in the public sphere, often ignoring the fact that said data actually does exist and is being gate-kept by benefactors of the information vacuum enabled by over-classification.
Most believers rightly cry foul, but for many, this is a knee-jerk emotional reaction to the invalidation of something they want to be true.
Any headline that does not confirm proof of aliens visiting our planet — which would be literally every credible headline ever written about the subject up to this point — triggers outrage. Nuance is considered a nuisance to many in this crowd, as any encouragement of rational thinking raises suspicions of complicity in the ongoing “psyop.”
But there is a subset of individuals within the “believer” camp who have an actual reason to be irritated on a personal level by headlines such as these. This group may even be more skeptical about the origin of these craft and their potential occupants than the debunkers blinded by their tunnel vision regarding the extraterrestrial hypothesis, as counterintuitive as that might be.
The people I’m referring to here are experiencers of the phenomenon, citizens of the world who have interacted with the craft and beings reported over millennia by countless individuals, cultures, and religions. Most experiencers I’ve met personally do not claim to know at all the origin of this phenomenon or its intentions, and are only certain of the fact that a phenomenon does exist.
These are the people I believe want and deserve answers the most.
But the notion of experiencers — and the phenomenon interacting with them — is not just some contemporary enigma that started cropping up out of the blue after the infamous Roswell crash of 1947.
There is a long historical record of these contacts throughout humanity’s time on this planet, and the innumerable run-ins with these seemingly otherworldly entities take on as many different forms as one can imagine.
Poking and Prodding
There has always been an underlying theory in ufology that the intelligence behind these craft have the intention of influencing humanity’s evolution in some self-serving way. Many in the field believe the biological testing reportedly performed during abduction events is proof of an interest in our genetics and demonstrates monitoring of our DNA.
I have argued previously that if implementing desirable alterations in our genetic makeup is indeed a priority for “the Others,” this is most likely achieved much more subtly to disguise their intervention and give the appearance of uninterrupted natural selection.
The prospect of a more advanced species harnessing gene-culture co-evolution to guide mankind in a certain direction would make more sense, as any intervening hand would go unnoticed and slight adjustments could be made on the fly just by showing themselves to specific individuals at the appropriate times.
But if that more advanced species were to adopt this approach, the strategy and execution of these interactions would have to evolve alongside humanity in a fluent manner as well.
Stanford geneticist Dr. Garry Nolan, who has consulted for the US government in his work researching the brains of UFO experiencers, explored this progression of contact modalities recently in an interview on the Lex Fridman Podcast.
How would you, as a higher intelligence, represent yourself to a lesser intelligence?
Well, let’s go back to pre-civilization. Maybe you show yourself as the spirits in the forest. You give messages through that. Once you get a little more civilized, then you show yourself as the gods. Then you’re God.
Well, we don’t believe in God anymore necessarily, not everybody does. So what do we believe in? We believe in technology, so you show yourself as a form of technology, right? But the common thread is you are not alone and there’s something else here with you, and there’s something, as you said, watching you. At least watching over your shoulder.
But I think, like any good parent, you don’t tell your student everything. You make them learn, and learning requires mistakes. Because if you tell them everything, then they get lazy.
What Dr. Nolan describes here is an adaptation of influence based on the complexity of the current society.
If you were interfacing with a less advanced species, like hunter-gatherers, then it would make sense “meet them where they were” if you were trying to effectively communicate information intended to trigger a desired change in behavior. You might want to keep it simple by restricting communication to visual cues so as to not overwhelm them in relation to their more limited subjective experience.
Members of a more advanced agricultural society, however, may benefit from a more complex interaction as they may have more capacity to incorporate it into their worldview. You might incorporate language or music, things that a hunter-gatherer would likely have no context for, rendering them useless as a communication tool.
Regardless, individual experiencers appear to inhabit the nexus where these contact events occur. Whether a specific person is chosen for this interaction based on their ability to influence others, genetics, or location is up for debate.
What is quite clear, however, is that the temporal era in which the experiencer resides seems to be a major factor when it comes to the contextual manifestation of this phenomenon.
It tends to reflect the observer’s cultural and individual beliefs right back at them and often does so in a profoundly personal way.
Welcome to Fairyland
What I found to be one of the oddest connections between mythology and the UFO phenomenon was the similarities with fairy folklore as outlined by Jacques Vallee in his classic ufological work Passport to Magonia.
In all honesty, I avoided the book for much longer than I should have because of how absurd it sounded.
But once I realized that absurdity was a major part of both the phenomenon and Vallee’s analysis, it became clear that I may have been missing some essential correlations in my own research that only he was capable of making.
As I combed through wild stories of such archetypes as steampunk airships and “space pancakes,” a clear pattern began to emerge.
The absurdity of these tales was deeply reflective of the culture at the times they originated, and the interactions described seemed designed to fundamentally influence those involved in them at the deepest, primal level.
This absurdity also felt reminiscent of the logic — or lack thereof — experienced during sleeping dream states, at least in my own experience.
Vallee summarized what he was attempting to do with the book towards the end of the second chapter, and it echoes what Nolan stated in the previously quoted interview.
Perhaps I have now succeeded in evoking in the reader’s mind a new awareness: the suggestion of a possible parallel between the rumors of today and the beliefs that were held by our ancestors, beliefs of stupendous fights with mysterious supermen, of rings where magic lingered, of dwarfish races haunting the land.
Purposely, in this second chapter, I have limited the argument to the mere juxtaposition of modern and older beliefs. The faint suspicion of a giant mystery, much larger than our current preoccupation with life on other planets, much deeper than housewives’ reports of zigzagging lights: Perhaps we can resolve the point by trying to understand what these tales, these myths, these legends arc doing to us.
What images are they designed to convey? What hidden needs are they fulfilling? If this is a fabrication, why should it be so absurd? Are there precedents in history? Could imagination be a stronger force, to shape the actions of men, than its expression in dogmas, in political structures, in established churches, in armies?
If so, could this force be used? Is it being used? Is there a science of deception at work here on a grand scale, or could the human mind generate its own phantoms, in a formidable, collective edification of worldwide mythologies? Is a natural force at work here?
These questions posited by Vallee are fascinating and have some rather profound implications, but please allow me to ask a few of my own in the context of the discussion we’re currently having in this article.
- Is this phenomenon trying to expand our imagination by broadening our view of what we think is possible through some kind of mythological reinforcement?
- Since we now “believe in” technology, as Nolan says, are the reported crashed UFOs just an attempt by this phenomenon attempting to integrate itself into a modern-day version of folklore?
- If our current technology has indeed been helped along by exploiting aspects of crashed UFOs, is our technological trajectory truly a natural progression, or are we on a deliberately predetermined developmental track based on these physical materials the phenomenon has provided us?
- What if the result at the end of that track were much more beneficial to the intelligence behind the phenomenon, and perhaps detrimental to our own species?
Perhaps by exploring a more current take on fairy folklore, we can pinpoint narratives that might help us understand what to expect.
One Mind To Rule Them All
In the second fictional Sekret Machines book, A Fire Within, Tom DeLonge and AJ Hartley explore aspects of fairy folklore in a way that digs a little deeper into the actual mechanisms behind how the phenomenon presents itself.
Throughout the book, there is the notion that a consciousness exists on our planet that is very different from our own. It is a solitary consciousness made up of many individuals, most commonly referred to as a “hive mind” in the science fiction literature.
This hive-mind consciousness can take many forms, including orbs, childhood book characters, and — you guessed it — fairies.
This insect-like consciousness is described as amoral and indifferent to human suffering. It can enter and alter people’s dreams and memories, as well as connect us to other humans telepathically without our consent.
These “bugs” disguise themselves as more “glamorous” creatures like elves and fairies, demonstrating the “trickster” element of the phenomenon that Vallee himself frequently references in his case studies.
Jennifer stumbled through the hallway of the empty little house, unsure what to think, her mind full of strange images, the old woman watching her from the chair through compound eyes, the impossible light that had filled the cottage before her disappearance, the framed pictures of elves and fairies with their butterfly and beetle companions.
Except that the elves and their bugs weren’t separate at all, were they? They were one. They had been painted separately because that’s how people made sense of them, but the shining ones had always been somehow insects for all their magical glamor.
She didn’t know where the idea came from or why it had struck her now and with such strange certainty. The word glamor seemed particularly right. In ordinary talk it meant merely allure, the sophisticated appeal that some people radiated when they were suitably dressed. But the word went deeper. In the fairy stories of her childhood it meant something like a spell, a magical veil that disguised the elves and goblins so that their true hardness and cruelty were lost in ethereal beauty.
Fairies, or the Fey as they were sometimes called, were cruel and selfish creatures, and it was only their glamor that stopped people from recognizing them for what they were. They were prone to random malice, delighted in spreading chaos and disorder amongst humans, and their acts caused pain, suffering, even death.
Acts such as abducting children…
The abduction aspect of the phenomenon is an unmistakable parallel between fairy and UFO lore, as is the similarity between fairy rings and crop circles.
But this trickster element of hive-minded insects masquerading as glamorous fairies — and its proneness to “random malice” — should be quite concerning if this is truly the type of intelligence responsible for guiding our civilization.
If our own technology is currently the basis of what will become our latest mythology, and looking at the current state of social media, one might not be surprised to discover our current paradigm was put into motion by such a hive-mind intelligence.
Tom DeLonge stated as much himself in an interview with Jimmy Church in 2016.
The UFO phenomenon has a hive mind. These creatures, they potentially don’t have souls. They are like clones, and they worship their own technology to some degree. They feed off fear and negativity.
The one thing that they cannot stand…[is] the frequency of elevated human consciousness. So what’s the best way to keep us from elevating our consciousness? You crash a craft and the transistor pops up, then you get video games and iPhones and all these things. You walk around like…a cyborg, a soulless little hive mind, all getting direction from devices.
So are our iPhones just the “fairies” of the 21st century?
These devices seemed so magical at first, but with the current state of the world, the glamor seems to have faded.
Is the full realization of UFO technology the subsequent mythology in line for us to worship?
Or will it be something else — or someone else — entirely?
