That the UFOs fail to make open contact indicates an equally stubborn need to remain hidden. Indeed, their home turf appears to be the periphery of human consciousness. All of this suggests an agenda. I don't think "they" are patiently waiting for us to make some gesture of ultimate recognition; rather, I propose that the UFO/contact experience -- whatever its goal -- is well underway.
In addition, both Keel and Vallee share a pronounced distaste for tales of crashed alien hardware a la Roswell; according to Keel's take, a physical event as pronounced as a crippled UFO is effectively impossible, as his "aliens" are largely immune to dangers posed by the world of gross matter.
Some speculators make the mistake of thinking that the revisionist, postmodern cosmology advanced by Vallee and Keel is incompatible with the hallowed ETH. But in truth both models are anything but mutually exclusive. It's even possible to imagine technological aliens from some distant star developing the ability to access Keel's "superspectrum" for reasons we can only guess.
Maybe the reason we don't hear the incessant chatter of extraterrestrial radio transmissions or see megascale engineering works etched onto the dome of the night sky isn't because alien intelligences have uploaded themselves into addictive virtual environments; perhaps they've shed their physical forms, but in an altogether different fashion. They might inhabit a previously undetected cosmological substrate, enmeshed in the universe's deep structure as we twitch feebly on the surface, so many bacteria in an intergalactic Petri dish.
Many ufologists committed to the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) exclude the Hopkinsville incident from their files because, at least in retrospect, it seems so implausible; attacking an isolated farmhouse hardly seems like the behavior expected of "real" extraterrestrials. Interestingly, journalists noted that purported psychic Edgar Cayce had grown up just south of Hopkinsville. Some Forteans wondered, not completely without justification, if there might be some sort of connection.
Unlike many would-be debunkers, Matheson's book reveals an astute familiarity with the principal texts (John Fuller's "The Interrupted Journey," Raymond Fowler's books on Betty Andreasson, etc.) Matheson raises valid points about the way popular authors present strange memes to an astonished (if often credulous) readership. In so doing, he sounds a scholarly alarm that writers of the paranormal ignore at their peril.
Because of its alarming (and peripherally erotic) overtones, the "hybridization program" has become a staple ingredient in many books purporting to explain alien abductions, such as "The Threat" by David Jacobs and Budd Hopkins' "Sight Unseen." Jacobs, Hopkins and their peers believe that the UFO and abduction phenomena are necessarily interlinked: UFOs are exotic vehicles used by the abductors to further their agenda. (In what I've termed the "Silent Invasion Scenario," the ubiquitous Grays are suffering from some sort of genetic malady and must rely on infusions of human DNA to survive -- sometimes with governmental complicity.)
It was supposed to work like this: the aliens would furnish the government with a list of their human abductees, never going over quota. But soon the horrible truth became apparent: the aliens were abducting more than their legal share of unwitting humans. And to top it off, they were performing grotesque biological experiments with cattle and leaving their handiwork in plain view. Moreover, some of the abductees weren't coming back . . .
While I predict we'll find extant life on Mars sooner or later, I'm not as certain if that life will be truly Martian. It's just as likely to have come from Earth in the remote past, only to adapt to Mars' harsh, arid climate. A cause for celebration, to be sure--but not quite the triumph of discovering a legitimately alien form of life.
If and when we do stumble across alien organisms in our own celestial backyard, we might hope to learn that they evolved independently of Earth's own biosphere. Such a discovery would add evidential force to the argument that the galaxy is bound to harbor at least a handful of technological civilizations.
The "Kardashev Scale" has become a mainstay among futurists seeking to plot humanity's own future. But while not without its usefulness, Kardashev's model remains speculative. There's no guarantee that a high-technology ET civilization will abide by his template, however sensible it might seem. The Kardashev Scale assumes, for instance, that aliens will share our own imperialistic sensibility. In truth, they might be far less aggressive, requiring less energy than we might expect; there's no readily apparent reason why even the most resplendent of civilizations would require the resources of an entire galaxy.
One can think of any number of activities that might engage ET societies; our evident failure to observe Type III civilizations is hardly proof that ETs don't exist.
If popular wisdom is to be trusted, the Roswell case incorporates everything an investigator might need to conclusively establish an extraterrestrial origin for UFOs: exotic hardware and alien bodies--hardly the sort of evidence one might expect from even the most ambitious of hoaxes. And the government's schizophrenic stance on the reality of the event positively begs speculation about some form of high-level cover-up--what nuclear physicist turned UFO researcher Stanton Friedman has repeatedly described as a "Cosmic Watergate."
The events at Roswell in the summer of 1947--dawn of the modern era of UFO sightings--constitute a daunting mystery that has come to adopt the trappings of myth.
Some will doubtlessly argue that I'm over-thinking the controversy. Maybe the ETH will triumph by virtue of its simplicity; after all, aliens from space--strange as they might be--are consistent with known physics. Speculating about the role of consciousness and the very nature of "real," on the other hand, might seem abstruse or even like an effort to apologize on behalf of the phenomenon itself.
Boldly venturing away from conventional evolutionary narratives, McKenna speculated that homo sapiens might owe its unique cognitive abilities to exposure to psilocybin, a mushroom-derived substance with pronounced neurochemical effects. In McKenna's scenario, the medium is the message: the bizarre worlds encountered by people under the influence of psilocybin are components of an "invisible landscape" with which we share a profound and unacknowledged symbiosis. (McKenna credited the advent of language, among other phenomena, to chemically altered states.)
Today, Fermi's query has attained the status of a cosmic statute, especially among theorists convinced that intelligent life is witheringly rare. Proponents of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, for instance, believe the universe shows unmistakable evidence of existential "fine tuning," presumably to allow the existence of human life. (An engaging alternative is that the universe is as we perceive it because, if it were otherwise, its history would have precluded our evolution and we simply wouldn't be here. More recently, cosmologists have speculated that we might inhabit a "multiverse" comprised of an infinite number of universes, all governed by variations of the laws of physics as we know them. If such is the case, we shouldn't be especially surprised to find that physical laws seem "fine-tuned" for our existence, as our universe would be one of many: a cosmic jackpot well within the realm of probability.)
I chastise the so-called UFO "community."
