On How UFO Disclosure Could Save Us All.

“From space, you realize how small and interconnected we all are. It’s a perspective that can inspire us to be better stewards of our planet and work towards a brighter future.”
— Scott Kelly.

“From space, you see the fragility of our planet and the urgent need to protect it. We are all astronauts on this spaceship Earth.”
— Jean-Francois Clervoy.

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”
— Edgar Mitchell.

After I had delved head first into the subject matter back in high school, a friend of mine heard me criticizing the government cover-up and asked me why I thought it was so important that they disclose what they knew about the subject, particularly since to his eyes, I bought into it all anyway. While I don’t recall how I answered back then, I’m more than prepared to answer why, at this point in my life, I think official UFO disclosure is so important.

One reason, I confess, is rather selfish: I am chronically filled with doubt. There is little if anything in my life that I invest one hundred percent certainty in, and with respect to the weird shit in my life, there have been periods of intense, soul-crushing doubt of varying degrees. If the truth were to be disclosed, I’d finally know with something more approximating certainty that I’m not simply bat-shit insane – and I could feel more comfortable talking with others about it, as my fears of them labeling me bat-shit insane would also, as a result, be significantly reduced.

In essence, I wouldn’t feel so alone in this.

Not only that but deeper questions may be answered as well. If disclosure were to happen the way so many have imagined it officially, it would likely stretch beyond the mere official confirmation that these craft exist and are operated by advanced, non-human intelligence (NHIs) – things that at this point are pretty damn obvious anyway. There would be details. If what David Grusch says is true, for instance – and I am reasonably confident at this point that it is – then there is an expansive Program involving elements of the US intelligence agency, defense contractors, and the Five Eyes alliance that has been involved in retrieving NHI “biologics” and technology and has made efforts to reserve-engineer and replicate that technology for the last eight or nine decades in an effort to win a secret, multi-decade cold war they’ve had with similar programs developed by our geopolitical adversaries.

If so, they must, at the very least, have developed educated hypotheses regarding the origins, nature, purpose, and capabilities of the NHI, all of which I am far more interested in than the mere confirmation of their existence. And while I’m not at all convinced they’ve successfully reverse-engineered and replicated the craft, I also think it’s impossible that they could have been studying such things, particularly for this length of time, without developing both scientific understanding and technological breakthroughs that, if accessible to the public, could transform society for the better in ways we couldn’t even currently comprehend,

There’s a bigger, far grander reason why I think disclosure is so vitally important, however, and it has to do with the psychological effect this might have on the human species.

During periods in which I either know or suspect I’ve been in contact or have had a resurgence of my recurring dreams regarding UFOs, I’m typically left in the wake of it with this peculiar, dark, expansive mood or state of consciousness that forces me into something akin to a third person perspective. It temporarily makes all my personal, worldly concerns and even many of the collective things we tend to value seem petty, ridiculous, trivial, childlike, immature, and ultimately irrelevant in comparison to what’s “out there.” For years I’ve struggled to articulate it, though I think I’ve gotten a better grasp on it now: it leaves me with the unshakable feeling that our island earth and the global human civilization is essentially the cosmic equivalent to North Sentinel Island.

Let me explain.

The residents of North Sentinel Island, the Sentinelese, have occupied that island for roughly 60 thousand years with only minimal contact with the outside world, and over that period of time, their knowledge and way of life have apparently changed very little. It’s thought that they have yet to learn how to even generate fire on their own. They live in huts, fashion spears and make canoes to fish in the waters around their island. It’s easy to imagine that they have their social squabbles and consider it to have all the importance in the world, all the while utterly blind to the greater global and historical context in which they’re inescapably embedded.

After all, they have had no knowledge of the agricultural or industrial revolution, the theory of evolution, the existence of DNA, or the science of genetic engineering. To see a locomotive would blow their mind, let alone a Tesla or the rockets we launch into space. An iPhone would be a flat, smooth, shiny, magical rock to them – a miniature version of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey – and they probably couldn’t wrap their mind around the internet. Just think for a moment how they’d react to robots, commercial drones, virtual reality, and our awesome medical technology. Consider how they know nothing of the satellites orbiting around the earth, of the probes and rovers we’ve created that explore the moon, Mars, and asteroids, or the five probes of ours that are on their way out of the solar system as we speak.

Hell, they’re entirely ignorant of the fact that we long ago discovered the earth is but one of many planets revolving around our star, the sun, and that our solar system is but one of countless other star systems in our galaxy, which is but one of many galaxies in the known universe, and that cosmology and quantum physics is seriously considering that our universe may be but one of multiple, perhaps infinite universes. They may not even know that there are other islands, and other continents, and almost certainly know nothing of countries, alliances between such countries, global trade, or that they have lived through two world wars. They know nothing of the threat of climate change or nuclear war, both threats generated by the global society they know nothing of and play no role in, but which threaten their very existence just the same.

In essence, they know nothing of the global, political, economic, and cosmic context they are embedded within. They don’t even know that their island is “owned” by India and that India has effectively quarantined the island, having set up patrols in the surrounding waters to ensure that everyone just leaves them the fuck alone. Now, we have checked up on them from time to time, some bold people have slipped through the cracks and encountered groups of islanders, but how would the greater populace take to their stories? Maybe they’d be called crazy, maybe they’d be believed, and yet, over the generations, those tales would likely evolve into myth and religion. One only has to take a good, hard look at cargo cults to see what could happen.

Now consider that there may very well be a cosmic community of extraterrestrial intelligence that treats the earth and its inhabitants much in the same way we treat North Sentinel Island and the Sentinelese. Compared to them, we may be just as primitive if not more so, and their knowledge is likely as ineffable to us as ours would be to the Sentinelese, and their technological capabilities just as equivalent to magic to our eyes. They may patrol the interstellar space around our star system in an attempt to quarantine us from other forces, and while their motives and methods might be vastly different, and they might be more involved with us in some important ways, the analogy is still incredibly useful in my eyes.

While I had been aware of the island for some time and had vague notions as to how it might be used as an analogy for our cosmic circumstance, it was Eric Weinstein who fleshed out the general idea in a relatively recent appearance he made on The Joe Rogan Experience. He only used this analogy as a launch pad, however, and went on to ask important questions that extended the analogy. We quarantined North Sentinel Island not just because they had no immunity to the diseases that we carry and to which they had no immunity and which we would likely transmit to them upon contact, but because our minimal contact with them over history – perhaps inspired in part by how we may have spread disease among them in the aftermath – has made it clear that they don’t want to be bothered. While he failed to mention it, I also think that we might have the natural impulse to protect them from the circumstances of the modern world in the same way we wish to protect young children, endangered species, or natural habitats.

In essence, in our global case, some rendition of what is known as the Zoo Hypothesis.

He asked us to imagine how our attitude towards the Sentinelese might change, however, if they suddenly started advancing as the global community did – and while it constitutes a leap in the analogy, it remains an important question to contemplate. How would we react, for instance, if we suddenly became aware that the Sentinelese had set off an atomic bomb?

The children are growing up, and in so doing, we’d conclude, they’re well on their way to becoming a threat to not only themselves but to us all.

As a consequence, perhaps we would increase our surveillance of them, and perhaps their technological evolution would have made our former, more limited presence more detectable anyway. In any case, given their growing understanding of the world around them and how they applied it in their technology, their perspective on us would stray from the former myths and be closer to an actual understanding, though they may not connect their former myths to what they were now seeing. Even with respect to what they were now seeing, many of them might deny that we constitute the solution to their equivalent to the Fermi Paradox.

Maybe we would begin to make contact with them in slow, cautious, measured steps, always assessing their reactions so as to not push them too far too fast. And perhaps that may be akin to what our global circumstance has been since we began denoting nuclear weapons in the 1940s. Perhaps a community of NHI began an enduring process – forged, for all we know, from former experiences with countless other North Sentinel Island Earths – of acclimating us to their presence in preparation for the inevitable revelation of the greater cosmic context to which we are in some senses unfortunately, in some senses fortunately, but in any case, irrevocably embedded. So the UFO phenomenon blasted into collective consciousness during the First World War, though reached its crest during the summer of 1947, with “occupant cases” or Close Encounters of the Third Kind breaking through into collective awareness within the following decade, and alleged meetings between these NHI and our so-called leaders to follow.

Regardless of the truth of the matter, the essence of the North Sentinel Island analogy certainly describes how I feel in the wake of my recurring UFO dreams, UFO encounters, and alien encounters and abductions, and research has revealed to me that I am by no means alone by any measure: others, in all three categories, feel remarkably similar to the way that I feel. We are part of something bigger, some greater context to which we are utterly unaware, and before which we stand in an eerie mix of terror and awe, the signs of which make us feel small in surface comparison but somehow grand through our deep sense of connection.

This shift in mood, cognition, and perspective we feel in the wake of these encounters, as well as the general trigger, has been explored in at least a general sense elsewhere, though never directly associated with alien encounters or the UFO phenomenon. In short, the experience seems strangely related to what has been called the Numinous experience and the Overview Effect.

The earliest source was theologian Rudolf Otto, who wrote the book The Idea of the Holy, which was originally published in German in 1917 and later translated into English in 1923. According to Otto, “the holy” could be described as containing two distinct elements, one being moral perfection, which I feel to be irrelevant here, and the other which he referred to as the numinous, which he claimed could only be understood through experience, yet which I described the best I could in a former blog post nonetheless:

“The numinous experience was itself composed of three parts, all articulated in the Latin phrase “mysterium tremendum et fascinans.” In short, this roughly translates to English as “a fearful and fascinating mystery,” though in efforts to further to flesh out the concept, it seems best to break it down in more detail, namely word by word.

By “mysterium,” he means to convey the notion of what he refers to as “the wholly other.” This is something so utterly alien to our ordinary experience that it generates a state of astonishment or wonder in us — one that is so absolute it leaves us in a state of silence and stupor. Then there is the element of “tremendum” or “mysterium tremendum,” which leaves us feeling small, utterly insignificant, frustratingly inadequate and ultimately terrified before its awesome and overwhelming power. Last yet equally significant is the vital ingredient of “fascinans” or “mysterium fascinans,” which is to say a charm or attractive quality which inspires in us an allure or fascination despite the simultaneous, aforementioned terror.

And in the midst of these echoing dream themes or an actual sighting or encounter, being before these UFOs does indeed elicit the sense of being in the presence of something terrifyingly and fascinatingly alien …”

With this notion of the numinous held firmly in mind, I’d like to now turn attention toward what has come to be known as the Overview Effect, which was first predicted, albeit in a vague sense, in 1948 by astronomer Fred Hoyle, though the term itself was first coined in the 1980s by philosopher and author Frank White, who fleshed it out as he later went on to interview astronauts about their actual experiences when viewing the earth from space. Elsewhere, this experience has been referred to as the Orbital Perspective, the Astronaut’s Secret, and astronaut Edgar Mitchell called it the Big Picture Effect – and in the case of Mitchell’s experience, which took place on the moon rather than the more typically experienced view from low earth orbit, even Frank White elected to distinguished it from the typical Overview Effect, christening it instead as the Universal Perspective.

When many astronauts come to view the planet Earth from space, they have a profound and overwhelming perceptual, emotional, cognitive, and even spiritual shift in consciousness that leads them to an elevated sense of connection to the earth and its inhabitants as a whole, often resulting in a transformation in their self-concept and value system that tends to grow over time. In attempts to summarize it, terms such as “self-transcendence” and “awe” are often employed. Much as in the case of Otto’s numinous experience, it is said that experience is required to truly understand it.

Both the numinous experience and the Overview Effect involve an alteration in consciousness and associated shift in overall perspective triggered by personal experience – though there is evidence that conceptual, intellectual understanding spawned by indirect stimuli may trigger the general effects as well. Frank white, who coined the term Overview Effect, described having had a brief taste of the experience while looking out an aircraft window as he flew across the country, after all, and some attribute the 1968 “Earthrise” photo, taken from the moon by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders, as inspiring the first Earth Day in April of 1970, and the environmental movement that surrounded it. Some have seemed to touch upon the surface of this experience, at the very least, through a photo taken, largely due to Carl Sagan’s suggestion, by NASA’s Voyager 1 space probe from a distance of 3.7 billion miles from Earth on February 14, 1990. It certainly seems that Sagan encountered something akin to this experience, given what he conveyed about the image in his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot:

“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

I can’t help but hypothesize that revelations that the human species is not only not the lone intelligence in the cosmos but that a community of ETI not only exists and is aware of us but has been consistently interacting with us would if officially disclosed and publicly accepted, result in a collective shift in consciousness that would serve to change humanity for the better. Now it could be that these ETI don’t exactly have our best interests in mind, that they consider us the way we consider other lifeforms on our planet, all of whom we generally perceive as being lower on the food chain than ourselves – that they might see us not as primitives, as we see the Sentinelese, but as animals to be studied, used in experiments, adopted as pets, trained to serve as slaves, or even used as sources of nourishment. Even so, such knowledge is our right. It would at least give us the ability to make more educated decisions and provide us with a context in which to make such decisions, and consequently elevate our species and potentially place us on a more productive, compassionate, and sustainable path.

In the absence of official disclosure, however, I fear that this potential path is unnecessarily constipated – and I might add, unethically so. Given the knowledge the alleged Gatekeepers of truth must have amassed since the birth of the Program, a good sense of whatever grander cosmic context we’re embedded in must be well within their line of sight, and to deny it to the public is blatantly unethical. That knowledge should be a human right. The conspiracy of silence they’ve sustained, the program of disinformation and ridicule they’ve continued to engage in – it all constitutes a crime of the highest order.

Such a disclosure, such a revelation, could utterly transform the collective human perspective, and at a time where I personally feel – and I sense I’m not alone in this assessment – we could use it most. It might inspire us to overcome our petty divisions, to stop seeing ourselves as a member of a tribe or a state or country but rather as part of a global community with grander ties to an interstellar one.

We deserve to know. We have a need to know.

Our very survival might depend on it.

Of Sentinel Island Earth and Cosmic India.

In a clip from a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Rogan was talking with Eric Weinstein, who has a Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Harvard. They were speaking on the subject of UFOs, which always grabs my interest, when Weinstein suddenly brings up North Sentinel Island. Immediately, I got excited, as I’ve often thought of this island in the context of the UFO phenomenon, as I think it may serve as a good metaphor for what our stance might be in the greater cosmic community of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). He took that metaphor far further than I ever had, however, and I found myself increasingly fascinated with what he had to say, though it did take repeated listens and a bit of decoding to achieve what I was satisfied constituted a satisfactory understanding.

To understand the metaphor, of course, one has to first understand the history of the island itself, which I find fascinating. North Sentinel Island is a heavily-forested, 23-square-mile island that is part of the Northern Andaman Islands of India. Little is known for certain regarding its inhabitants, the Sentinelese, who have lived in relative isolation from the rest of the planet for the last 60 thousand years, and who have apparently developed very little during that time.

They are described as muscular, dark-skinned people with an average height of five-and-a-half feet, thought to be due to island dwarfism, with an estimated population currently ranging anywhere from between 15 to 400 people. So in short, we haven’t the fucking foggiest clue. They are hunter-gatherers, using spears, bows and arrows to hunt native animals, and also know how to make canoes, which help them to collect seafood such as mud crabs and mollusks, all of which they eat raw. Though they use fire when it occurs naturally, as in the wake of lightning strikes, after which they strive to keep the flames alive for as long as possible, they are not thought to know how to generate fire on their own. They live both in beach huts that house a single family and in larger huts that contain several. It is claimed that they can count only to two, with anything more considered only as our equivalent to “many,” and that though they speak an unknown language, they have no written equivalent.

What few advancements they’ve made over their 60k years of near-solitude have all apparently come as a consequence of the minimal cross-contamination between their relatively static, compartmentalized culture and our ever-developing, interconnected, globalized society, and there are but two general examples, so far as I can tell.

One would be in their tool-making, with upgrades evidently inspired by the metals that have washed up on their shore, which they subsequently used either as weapons in and of themselves or to sharpen their already-present ones. A much more prominent influence, it appears, would fall into the realm of the cultural, inspired by their brief contacts with members of our global culture over the last three centuries, which has seemingly and understandably led to their distaste for all foreigners. Though so far as the historical record reveals this may have initially been but a prejudiced, xenophobic reaction to the unknown, subsequent contacts with us clearly gave them sufficient justification for this attitude.

The earliest recorded contact took place in 1867, when an Indian merchant ship known as the Nineveh crashed on the shores of the island, with the survivors subsequently attacked by bows and arrows. If this was truly their first encounter with the outside world and the tale was conveyed accurately, without censorship or heavy spin, it would indeed amount to reactionary xenophobia on the part of the Sentinelese. If so, however, reinforcement was surely delivered within a little over a decade. According to his book, A History of Our Relations with the Andamanese, British officer Maurice Vidal Portman took a trip to the island in 1888, where, after some days of searching, he came upon and subsequently abducted an elderly woman and man as well as four children, who he then took with him and his team to Port Blair, the capital of South Andaman Island. All six abductees soon fell ill and the elderly two died, prompting him to return the four, sick children to the shores of the island along with gifts.

Although one might credit Portman with his acknowledgment that he had fucked up and for his attempt to atone for his fuck-up by returning the sick children to the island, and one might even excuse his understandable ignorance of the nature of disease given the period he lived in, his act of returning those four, sick children to the island from which they came likely made his actions more devastating to the inhabitants than would have been the case had he merely kept the four children – even if, in the end, they died due to their illness. After all, as we can now with science and reason conclude, the six abductees became ill because they had been isolated from the greater context of the human populace for so long, and as a consequence had been isolated from the diseases that had developed and evolved in that greater, evolutionary context beyond their remote island, and as a consequence they had not developed an immunity towards them. By dropping those sick children back off on that island, assuming those children made their way back to the Sentinelese populace, it’s likely that he introduced diseases to those inhabitants that spread like wildfire, killing them off in great numbers.

Given the tales that those four must have told of their experience, in the eyes of the survivors of what must have undoubtedly constituted a plague among them, their xenophobic reactions towards the survivors of the Nineveh only two decades before would not only have been reinforced, but elevated. I don’t think it a leap to assume that this likely circumstance explains their hostile reactions to subsequent visitors in decades to come – and how even the peaceful reactions with outsiders that have been documented since, which may have led to similar exposure to diseases to which they had no immunity, may have abolished all skepticism among them, and may have solidified such xenophobic reactions among even the most skeptical amidst their populace. This would easily explain the reactions they’ve subsequently had towards the approach of any outsiders, even if not overtly threatened.

In 1956, their susceptibility to diseases towards which they have not been naturally immunized ultimately led to the island being quarantined, as this was when the Indian government issued the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (Protection of Aboriginal Tribes) Regulation. The area around the island was subsequently patrolled by the Indian Navy. While it was now established law that all other peoples of the earth should leave them the fuck alone, I somehow feel certain that all who read this are aware that no aspect of government is capable of perfectly executing their duties. I feel equally certain that you are painfully aware of those who constitute what, under the ever-widening umbrella of legal no-nos, are known as criminals.

At least one legal and understandable exception has been made in recent history, however. In 2004, after an earthquake in the Indian Ocean that claimed the lives of 200 thousand people, the Indian government sent a helicopter to the island to check up on them. Amazingly, the natives appeared fine and dandy and didn’t appreciate their presence in the least. On the absolute contrary, they threw stones, spears, and shot arrows at the helicopters, and the photos taken are pretty wild.

Much as was the case with the crash of the Niveh, there was also an accident that brought outsiders to the island, On January 27, 2006, two Indian fishermen, Sunder Raj and Pandit Tiwari, got drunk while illegally fishing for crabs nearby the island. They failed to respond to warnings from other vessels and their anchor failed during the night, allowing their ship to drift to the shore, where the natives wasted no time attacking them with axes. Their bodies were first put up on bamboo like scarecrows facing the sea and were later buried in shallow graves. Three days later, an Indian coast guard helicopter flew to the island to collect the bodies, but they were greeted with a rain of spears and arrows. Ultimately, the bodies were abandoned.

Despite the sheer weight of history that suggests with considerable strength that the island should be avoided like the plague we constitute to its inhabitants, there was a lone idiot that was nonetheless determined to visit it in November of 2018. This idiot was John Allen Chao, a Christian missionary who paid two fishermen roughly 30 thousand dollars to take him there, where he tried to make contact with the natives several times in order to convert them to his bloody religion. Evidently, his god had taken the day off, for as a result of his religiously-fueled determination he became a human pin cushion, with his body, porcupined with arrows, left there on the shore. The fishermen were later arrested.

At this point, some may be asking: what the bloody hell does this have to do with UFOs and aliens? As it turns out, at least potentially, quite a fucking bit.

When Weinstein brought up the island, he emphasized that while it is presently owned by the Indian government, the Sentinelese haven’t the foggiest clue that India even exists, let alone that they and their island are claimed by it. Nor are they aware that the Indian government has declared their island off-limits to any outsiders, with the Indian border patrol enforcing a 5-mile no-trespassing zone around it. What he was suggesting, of course, is that some galactic equivalent of India may similarly claim ownership over “our” island Earth, unbeknownst to us, and may also be enforcing such a quarantine, patrolling the area around our planet or even our star system in an effort to keep outsiders away.

He isn’t alone in proposing this hypothesis, either. As a matter of fact, what he’s implying is a well-known proposed solution to what is popularly referred to as the Fermi Paradox – the apparent contradiction that arises out of the fact that assuming ETI exists, we should have had direct, overt, public, and incontrovertible evidence for their existence by now. We should have been visited by them or detected radio signals from them, and yet there is allegedly no evidence that we have. While there have been countless proposed solutions to the Fermi Paradox, a popular solution is what is commonly known as the Zoo Hypothesis. Here it is posited that a group of ETI has claimed ownership of the earth, maybe even our entire star system, and quarantined the area so as to allow for an uncontaminated, natural evolution and development of life on our planet – yet they have kept close tabs on us, observing us through covert surveillance, rendering our planet a more high-tech, superintelligent version of a zoo or nature reserve. In other words, the ETI is serving as the galactic equivalent to India with Earth constituting the cosmic analogue to Sentinel Island, as Weinstein suggested.

So within the context of this hypothesis, how does one explain UFO sightings, let alone encounters – particularly alien abductions? To my pleasant surprise, Weinstein continues with the analogy to address this very fact, pointing out that much as in the case of Sentinel Island, not everyone is apt to abide by this interstellar law. Another possibility is the Leaky Embargo Hypothesis put forth by Dr. Hal Puthoff, where multiple ETI may have agreed to keep us quarantined, but that this embargo has “leaks” in it where they and their craft are occasionally seen and, despite the induced amnesia, abductions are occasionally recalled.

Assuming such a quarantine was established, however, why would such galactic India do so? There are many potential reasons, as it turns out, and one has already been covered: vulnerability to disease.

While Weinstein didn’t go so deep into the comparison, at least during the referenced podcast, it’s possible that bacteria and viruses from an ETI could indeed affect the human species if contact was made, and for the same reason that Portman’s Sentenaleze abductees fell ill: we have been largely isolated from the greater cosmic community and so have not built up any immunity to these diseases among them that they have. There are even suggestions this has actually occurred in two cases of UFO crashes, specifically the Roswell crash of 1947 and the 1996 crash in Varginha, Brazil. In an anecdote provided by the late Glen Dennis, he had visited a nurse at the hospital in Roswell shortly after the discovery of the crash, where she and the others in the room grew violently ill from exposure to the dead alien bodies and their horrific odor. Similarly, many became ill and even died after exposure to living alien beings encountered in the wake of the Varginha, Brazil crash, which was also associated with a horrific odor.

While it is possible that the spread of disease is one reason Earth may be quarantined from the galactic community, if so, it is unlikely to be the only reason, in my opinion. After all, no such ill effects have been reported in UFO cases known as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which include but are not limited to what is popularly known as alien abductions. Given such encounters are clearly intentional, and that crashes of their craft and exposure to their occupants, living or dead, at least appear on the surface to have been unintentional, the suggestion would be that they have means of interacting with us that do not expose us to such alien viruses and bacteria – and perhaps simultaneously do not expose them to earthly ones.

Aside from disease, however, there are other potential reasons for such a quarantine. As often cited in UFO circles, there is a small section in the 1960 NASA-commissioned report formally entitled Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs, though typically referred to as simply The Brooking Report, which suggested that, much like historical encounters between more-advanced and lesser-advanced societies on our own planet, overt, officially-confirmed, public knowledge of ETI may destabilize or even obliterate our society. Assuming the ETI give a shit about such matters, this could be another reason they may have put us under planetary quarantine.

They may even have a historical precedent here with respect to our island earth and our species specifically.

Given we don’t know when this quarantine was established, this doesn’t discount the possibility that, throughout human history, some ETI may have established brief or even long-term colonies here on our precious, cosmic island. It is possible, even likely, that many such encounters, if they happened, met with violence from humans, which would make the effects of contact resonate perfectly with the Sentenaleze comparison. However, it is equally possible that those historically distant encounters resulted in the equivalent of what we now call Cargo Cults. This is to say that maybe over time, after the planetary quarantine was established, these contacts evolved into tall tales and inspired ritualistic behavior, thereby explaining our current conceptions of angels, demons, gods, and devils. Maybe, “as ancient astronaut theorists suggest,” this even explains some of the mind-boggling stone structures that still stand today, however, degraded they might be in some cases by the relentless sands of time. Maybe it explains the more shoddy attempts at mimicry of those stone structures that followed.

If this was indeed the case, once the cosmic community – the alien equivalent of India – came to possess the earth, they realized the damage these historical contacts had done to our species or the unwanted influence the “cargo cult” mythologizing had had on our culture, and so they enforced the quarantine and began the covert surveillance. And so over time our civilization arose, grew, and developed – mostly in isolation, though not without the influence of our history with the alien others, however mythologized those relationships might be by the sands of time, as well as the effects of those criminals that still managed to slip through the cracks in their security and interact with the often barbarous inhabitants of this wonderful space-rock.

It is equally or additionally possible that they desire to quarantine us so as to study and even experiment on humans and other earthen animals genetically, psychologically, and sociologically, taking advantage of our state of isolation, which would, as the zoo hypothesis blatantly suggests, make the earth the equivalent to a planetary-wide zoo and perhaps even a laboratory for ETI. John Allen Ball, a former MIT Haystack Observatory scientist, proposed what is considered a variant or extension of the Zoo Hypothesis, where the earth is used by the aforementioned galactic community as a laboratory, subjecting the planetary species in question to various experiments, both individually, in groups, and as a planetary community.

While he never stated it explicitly, in his conversation with Rogan, Weinstein revealed that, at the very least, he has invested quite a deal of thought into this possibility. What would this be like from the perspective of the human species? This is where Weinstein dives in head-first, exploring the hypothesis with passion, however vague he is in how he expresses it. Here, he says, the human species would come face to face with what he calls the Doubly Scientific Method, to which we — even our greatest, most intelligent, most educated scientists – are utterly unfamiliar.

When it comes to the conventional scientific method, Weinstein explains, there is always the hidden, unspoken assumption that, whether the target of our study is rocks or an octopus, we’re more intelligent than that which we’re studying, and all else is down the intelligence scale.

“And what do we do? We disguise ourselves, we create artificial environments. We do all sorts of crazy things based on the fact that we’re smarter than what we study, from everything from rocks to orcas. The Doubly Scientific Method says, okay, assume you’re studying a rat in a maze – but you, yourself, are the rat in somebody else’s maze. … you have to assume that whatever is studying you is hiding from you the way you are hiding from your subjects. So if you see somebody in a Duck Blind, for example, and he’s studying ducks, you understand that somebody may be hiding from [him in the same way].”

In other words, Weinstein’s Doubly Scientific Experiment suggests that alien scientists of a higher order may be studying human beings, even human scientists. What Weinstein didn’t care to explore, at least as evidenced in the clips I’ve watched, is how human scientists might manage to successfully study the alien scientists that are presumably studying them. He may have avoided this question, deliberately or unconsciously, because effectively studying them may be impossible – through science, anyway. Our only hopes in gaining a true understanding as to their nature and objectives may come through another field, and this suggestion came to be when what he had to say brought me back to the written words of another scientist – the astronomer, computer scientist, and ufologist Jacques Vallée.

In his 1979 book, Messengers of Deception, Vallée details a discussion he had with a retired US Intelligence officer he calls “Major Murphy” (though he is quick to point out that Murphey is of a higher rank than implied by his pseudonym), who argued that UFOs were not a “scientific” problem. Rather than science, he insisted, the study of the UFO phenomenon belonged in Intelligence, which is to say counterespionage – his own field of expertise. To further articulate what he meant, Murphy explained to Vallee how “science had certain rules. For example, it has to assume that the phenomenon it is observing is natural in origin rather than artificial and possibly biased,” which is precisely what Weinstein pointed out. Murphy then went on to explain the distinction in this approach to Vallée:

“You are a scientist. In science there is no concept of the ‘price’ of information. Suppose I gave you 95 percent of the data concerning a phenomenon. You’re happy because you know 95 per cent of the phenomenon. Not so in Intelligence. If I get 95 percent of the data, I know this is the ‘cheap’ part of the information. I still need the other 5 percent, but I will have to pay a much higher price to get it. You see, Hitler had 95 per cent of the information about the landing in Normandy. But he had the wrong 95 per cent! … If [the forces behind the UFO phenomenon] know what they’re doing, there will be so many cutouts between you and them that you won’t have the slightest chance of tracing your way to the truth. Not by following up sightings and throwing them into a computer. They will keep feeding you the information they want you to process. What is the only source of data about the UFO phenomenon? It is the UFOs themselves!”

Murphy then recommended that Vallee “look for the irrational, the bizarre, the elements that do not fit” if he truly desired to ascertain the truth. Vallee took his advice and ultimately began to wonder if it was ETI we were dealing with after all. While he has never outright dismissed the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) to my knowledge, he did invest a great deal of time exploring what we might call the extradimensional or Interdimensional Hypothesis (IDH). In other words, he considered that these creatures may not be entirely physical in nature but rather be native to higher spatial dimensions of our own universe or native to a parallel universe altogether. Weinstein also speculates on this possibility. While I find both their speculations intriguing, creative, and well-worth consideration, at present I simply don’t buy into them – at least to the exclusion of the ETH.

My perspective is that while, from an angle, they could be considered an Interdimensional Intelligence (IDI), so could human beings. All throughout our history we have had experiences – out-of-body experiences, astral projections, clairvoyance, telepathy, psychokinesis, contacts with the dead, reincarnation, etc – which are typically experienced spontaneously, even if consistently throughout the life of a particular individual. To me, this implies that humans would also constitute IDI, though we are clearly less adept at exploiting that aspect of ourselves, and so it strikes me as obvious that a more-advanced ETI (who, like us, would also constitute an IDI) would have incorporated this into their knowledge, integrated this into their scientific understanding, and come to exploit this in their technology. Even so, they are physical beings just as we are, and so derive from a physical planet – in both cases, just as is the case with us, and so ETI seems the most logical designation for them.

Extending the Sentinel Island analogy even further, however, Weinstein then asks, in the aforementioned Rogan podcast, what would happen if India were to suddenly notice peculiar and alarming phenomena on or emanating from Sentinel Island. Stretching your imagination now to the extremes: What if India suddenly began detecting radio signals coming from the area? A mushroom cloud? What if rather than mere canoes, they began building much larger boats that began exploring the greater territory around the island?

In other words, what if, in what we call our 20th century, the galactic community noticed that we had developed radar, V-2 rockets, and atomic weapons?

In such a case, Weinstein suggests, Cosmic India would conclude that their approach to Sentinel Island Earth would have to change in accordance with the disturbing feedback they were receiving. If nothing else, the suggestions that Sentinel Island Earthlings had detonated a nuclear bomb would probably inspire Cosmic India to pay stop perceiving us as a primitive society and pay closer attention, as countless ufologists (who so far as I can tell have been inspired by the thoughts of nuclear physicist and ufologist Stanton Friedman) have pointed out. In their eyes, it is at this point that we would have crossed a crucial threshold in the development of technologically-capable intelligent life and entered some liminal zone betwixt planet-bound infants and truly spacefaring adults. We would be cosmic adolescents to them, naive yet powerful teenagers bursting with potential that could ultimately manifest as either dangerous pests to them (if we did not manage to annihilate ourselves and most of the life on our home planet first) or, perhaps with the right guidance, prove to be a worthy addition to the greater cosmic community.

In either case, it is at this point Cosmic India would begin the process of making contact with the residents of Sentinel Island Earth. Though he does not detail the means by which they would make overt contact, I think it’s a safe bet they would do so through a process of incremental acclimation to their presence, and I think the modern history of the UFO phenomenon strongly suggests that this is exactly what has been happening.

In Bad Company.

As stupid as we all too often seem to be as a civilization — particularly when you try and take the wide-angle lens, third person perspective — perhaps our path of self-destruction is not an uncommon one.

I remember hearing once that “intelligence is a failed mutation,” but I’ve come to disagree. There may be species infinitely far more intelligent than ourselves who aren’t in the appropriate environment and/or have failed to evolve the bodies necessary to manipulate their environment so as to develop a high-tech civilization. Dolphins or octopuses that developed on an ocean planet would have neither the right bodies or the right environment, for instance.

Perhaps when an intelligent species is in the appropriate environment and has evolved the biological technology necessary to manipulate the environment and build artificial high technology, however, they have a damned good chance of engaging in species suicide and potentially bringing most life on their home planet down with them. So perhaps one of the reasons for the Great Silence in the cosmos is that the Great Filter is ahead of us — that advanced, technological civilizations may be relatively common but have the tendency to kill their planet and therefore their high civilization before they migrate to space.

This might be inevitable, for instance, if such a civilization needs fossil fuels to achieve our heights of civilization and beyond. If so, perhaps all such civilizations also need to change course before the damage is irreversible and civilization collapses — and maybe intelligent species just aren’t that likely to change course. If they can migrate to space and become an interplanetary civilization, perhaps that helps to some degree, but unless those factions of the species are self-sufficient and need not rely on the home planet to sustain their existence, it wouldn’t help much at all.

And maybe climate change and ecological destruction isn’t the only element we share with fallen global civilizations across the universe. Maybe the kind of political divide we’re presently experiencing in the US and the general disagreement on what constitutes truth is not unique to this time, place and species but is instead a recurring theme across life-bearing worlds that have developed intelligent and capable creatures.

It’s a thought that’s been plaguing me lately, and it certainly doesn’t make me feel any better about our curcumstances.

In more ways that one, we may not be alone.

Aliens and Insects I: Evolution, Humanoids and Cosmic Convergence.

So far as we know, all life that has ever lived on earth can be traced back to a common ancestor that emerged on the scene shortly after our island earth came into existence some 4.54 billion years ago. Estimates of when “genesis” began currently come as early as 4.41 billion years ago, a mere blink of the Gaian eye, let alone the cosmic one. From that seed sprung a sapling that grew into the tree of life we’ve struggled to chart, our evolutionary history, binding all the diverse species on the planet, through evolution by means of natural selection — or more specifically, what is known as divergent evolution. This occurs first at the scale of microevolution, which creates diversity within a species — which is to say the differences between those members give them a degree of uniqueness, but they can still reproduce with other members of the species.

These differences pile up when populations of a species become geographically isolated, however, and their uniqueness consequently grows, as in the case of the finches studied by Darwin on the Galapagos islands. He found that the finches on this chain of islands were similar to one another as well as to the finches found in America, though all the populations differed slightly from one another. His hypothesis was that the finches on each of the islands all had a common ancestor that migrated from the mainland, hence their similarities; their differences were associated with the distinct adaptations that were developed in response to their new environments on their respective islands, particularly in order to exploit the different food sources provided.

Ultimately, over the course of many generations, such populations diverge to such an extreme degree that the macroevolution milestone is achieved and speciation occurs — which is to say they become not merely a unique population within the species, but a separate species altogether. Though Tab A might still fit into Slot B for some time, it will become increasingly difficult for the two species to produce healthy offspring that are capable of reproducing themselves. It is through this process, where small modifications in response to different or changing environments add up over inconceivably long periods of time, that the first form of life on the planet led to the diverse species that have come to inhabit the globe ever since.

Divergent evolution therefore explains the differences between closely-related species — as well as the similarities, of course, given the shared history. Such similarities are known as homologous similarities, as they were inherited through a common ancestor. This explains, for instance, the similarity in skeletal structures among mammals, even whales, who bear the skeletal structures of fingers in their flippers and two nostrils in their blowholes. It explains the coccyx, or remnants of a tail, among humans. As the tree of life diverges into different species, natural selection is rather economical in that it works off of its former successes with further adaptations rather than shaking the Etch-a-Sketch and starting over, tabula rasa style. So the process of divergent evolution is rather intuitive in that way.

The same is not at all true when it comes to convergent evolution, which is a bit more counterintuitive, even mysterious, at least on the surface. This occurs when the differences between two species make perfect sense given the degree of divergence from their last common ancestor, but their remarkable similarities in traits are astounding for the very same reason. In this case, such traits are said to have an analogous similarity, as they were developed independently. This of course makes one wonder how this could happen, and the answer seems to be that natural selection favors similar solutions to the same problems.

Species that live in similar environments will develop astoundingly similar body plans, for instance, particularly if they fulfill the same role in the same niche. Dolphins, sharks and ichthyosaurs all share the same, basic body plan characterized by a streamlined body, dorsal fins, flippers and a tail fluke despite the fact that they share no common ancestor from which they could have inherited such traits from. They developed them naturally and independently because they are all marine predators and these traits are perfect for maneuvering in a fluid environment. It is for this same reason that birds, bats and butterflies all independently evolved the similar trait of wings, which are clearly successful adaptations for maneuvering in the air, and why the legless, ground-welling and subterranean creatures known as worms and snakes themselves look so similar to one another. This also occurs at the level of body organs, such as the eye, which has developed several times independently. Ears and sonar have also independently evolved more than once. So though evolution by means of natural selection is by no means teleological, which is to say it does not deliberately aim towards a single, ideal form, even specific to environments, patterns do indeed emerge — common traits do develop between organisms separated by genetics, time and space.

In light of this fact, regardless as to whether panspermia is the process that spreads life out across the universe from a single genesis or life on earth and countless exoplanets had an independent genesises, we should expect there to be commonalities between life on earth and life out there. Or, at the very least, that makes sense to some of us. Others seem to find this notion distasteful, among them astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and Dr. Jonathan Losos, a Harvard biologist. In a discussion between Tyson and and Richard Dawkins, Tyson brings up his disappointment with the humanoid body-plan of Hollywood aliens, calling it unimaginative and improbable — the same argument all too often used by those debunking the alien abduction phenomenon. Rather than agreeing with him, however, Dawkins kindly raises objections:

“Other worlds are going to be very different, but we perhaps shouldn’t write off the possibility that the Hollywood aliens… they might not be that unimaginative. I mean, my colleague Simon Conway Morris has even suggested that it’s very likely that there will be, if not humans, at least bipedal, big-brained, language-toting, hand-toting, forward-looking eyes for stereoscopy, pretty much humans. He thinks it’s highly likely. He’s got a religious agenda, I’m sorry to say, for that, but like him, I appreciate the power of natural selection.”

For anyone that became acquainted with the work of Dawkins through his outspoken atheism, it should be clear that his value in the perspective of Cambridge University paleontologist Simon Conway Morris in this particular matter had to be well-earned one. Even so, Dawkins never properly articulated the reasons behind the perspective of Morris or why, for that matter, he agreed with him, though Losos was a bit more clear in his reasoning against the general idea.

Alien life, argues Losos, may take many turns, and to support his argument he highlights what he called evolutionary singletons, which are species with what appear to be unique adaptations found nowhere else on earth. He fails to consider the possibility that his sample population is only planetary and may simply not be large enough to see how even the traits of these apparent singletons might be echoed throughout the cosmic community of life. So certainly they, like every other form of adaptation we find throughout the history of the earthen animal kingdom, exist, but so do those of the intelligent, humanoid, opposable-thumb variety. And while we seem to have the potential to eventually directly observe and interact with the variety of extrasolar life that surely exists out there is the vastness, we have yet to venture very far in our spacefaring journey, which leaves us with the question: what kind of extraterrestrial life may venture so far as to directly observe or interact with us?

There is good reason to suspect that in order for an advanced, extraterrestrial species to create a technology with which it might communicate with us or visit us it may require a humanoid body plan — or at least that it may be one of a limited number of body plans necessary to properly exploit intelligence.

Consider, for instance, the existence of an extraterrestrial species that is far older and more intelligent than the smartest human being that has ever lived, but that this intelligent mind evolved in a body akin to an octopus that is itself trapped in the depths of an ocean encapsulated by the surface ice of Europa. Despite its vast intelligence such a creature would have never seen what dry land is like, let alone the sky, and would be unable to so much as start a fire. Or consider that a creature such as a crow or an elephant that possessed such intelligence. Our earthly octopuses, crows and elephants are certainly intelligent creatures and they — and creatures of far lesser intelligence — have been seen to utilize sticks and other such things as simple tools, but how would they be capable, regardless of their intelligence, of developing high technology? Human beings were able to develop such technology due to the convergence of several necessary factors, with our intelligence being only one of them. In addition, we evolved in a manner that led to us to being bipedal, which freed up our “front legs” so that they could be used as arms, thereby enabling us to use our intelligence, via our opposable thumbs, to manipulate our environment in accordance with its desires, fashioning spears, steam engines, hydrogen bombs and spacecraft.

And what other variables might have had to have come into play, perhaps out of sheer chance, so as to enable us to develop technology sophisticated enough that we could potentially communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) and ultimately evolve from our status as a planetary species to become a stellar, and eventually interstellar, civilization? Fermi’s Paradox may be explained by an unimaginably thick buffer betwixt the emergence of simple, planetary life and a spacefaring civilization — a buffer composed of more layers of “filters” between than we could ever hope to imagine.

Clearly, we can’t be sure. But that a species would need sufficient intelligence that naturally evolved in a humanoid body would certainly seem to be a reasonable starting point. If such a humanoid ETI became interstellar, they would surely explore various planets and study all available forms of life, though their interest would become most acutely focused on those extraterrestrial species that shared important traits with them: sisters and brothers in cosmic, convergent evolution, as it were.

If we dare to adopt as a working hypothesis that the mass of reported alien encounters and alien abduction reflect happenings in objective actuality, subjecting the appearance and behavior of the most commonly-reported aliens, known as the Grays, to analysis with convergent evolution in mind might provide us some insights. We might be able to mentally reverse-engineer the environment in which they developed and even determine what kind of species they are — or are at least akin to from the vantage point of the earthbound life with which we are familiar.

Despite sharing the humanoid body plan with human beings, after all, the Gray aliens show no signs of being mammalian. They have no nipples or breasts, nor lips for suckling. They express no emotion on their faces. They have never been seen to sweat. They have no hair. If we scrutinize them closely enough and run through the natural “escalation of hypotheses” regarding their biological nature, we may arrive at the same suspicion that many abductees tend to share — namely, that these entities are insects, or at the very least insect-like.

Insects arrived on the Gaian scene far earlier than man, his simian ancestors, or even mammals. They first appeared some 500 million years ago, having evolved from crustaceans into one of the very first land-dwelling animals. As a whole, insects tend to mature and reproduce rather rapidly, and within a single insect’s lifetime it can often produce hundreds of offspring, and though many if not most of them die before reproducing, those that do survive and reproduce carry on their successful mutations. This increased genetic diversity means a greater likelihood of favorable mutations developing — genetic “errors” that enable them to adapt to and exploit a wide range of environments. As a consequence, they have spread out across the earth, rooting themselves in nearly every conceivable terrestrial habitat, some considerably extreme from the human perspective. They also have an increased probability of successfully adapting to changing conditions within their given environments, which would not only explain how they have managed to so swiftly evolve resistances to the insecticides we develop but how they managed to survive many of the extinction events that have plagued the earth since her birth. It should therefore not be surprising at all that they presently make up three quarters of all animals on earth: there are a million known species collectively composed of some 10 quintillion individuals.

Given a different planetary and historical context and sufficient time, it is not at all that difficult to see how a species of insect might have developed the intelligence, body-plan and will necessary to emerge as the dominant species, to take the global throne.

It can’t be ignored, of course, that there are also clear differences between the Grays and what little we know regarding our own, earthbound insects — but assuming they are indeed insects, should this be all that surprising? We evolved from apes, after all, and this does not suggest that an extraterrestrial exobiologist could come to a wholesome understanding of us by means of studying the apes or apelike parallels on their own planet. We became human when we evolved the newest part of our brains and began walking upright, and this made us quite distinct from other apes. Given different conditions on a different planet in another star system and enough time, it is not at all that great a leap to assume that at least one insect species might have developed the morphology, intelligence, technology and motive necessary to bring them to our pale, blue dot, where they could interact with members of our own species.

Unlike our earthen insect species, they are not characterized by six legs and antennae, they have no body hair, and their mouth doesn’t seem to operate for the purposes of either consumption or breathing — but there may be good reasons for this. They may not have evolved the capacity to taste or smell given the nature of their particular ecosystem, or perhaps different organs developed to serve those purposes — nostril holes may have developed for olfactory purposes instead of antennae, for instance. Some have hypothesized that the insects with which we are familiar have six legs because they are so small and move so quickly, whereas larger animals move more slowly and their nervous systems are more adept at maintaining balance with four legs or less. In that light, perhaps the Grays have two legs rather than six simply because they are larger. Alternatively, or perhaps additionally, it may be due to the fact that they evolved on a planet with less gravity than the earth, which would reduce the balance issue regardless of size. Though not all earthbound insects have wings, most do, though such a low-gravity planet may have also reduced their necessity.

That they have binocular vision, which is to say that their eyes are positioned in front of their head rather than to either side, would seem to suggest they evolved from a predatory insect species. That their eyes are large and black may indicate that they need to pick up more light than we do, so they may live in an environment much darker than our own — a planet with thick cloud-cover, shorter daytime hours, that their planet resides farther from their star(s) or that their home star(s) are of a different type, that they are subterranean creatures, or perhaps only that they are a nocturnal. Alternatively, or perhaps additionally, their eyes may be so large simply because they are insects, which is to say because those eyes are compound eyes, enabling them to see a wider range of the light spectrum than we can.

These are so far only small matters in my mind, however. More broadly, my reasons for suspecting they are insects are threefold: first, they appear bear the three qualities of eusociality; second, it explains their physical form; third, it helps explain their psychology.

A.I.pocalypse, Neuralink and the Superbrain.

After I got home that evening and hopped on YouTube, I quickly discovered that The Joe Rogan Experience podcast was streaming live — with Elon Musk as the guest. I think I cheered aloud. I then sat my happy ass down for two and a half hours, watching it from start to finish. However brief the moment was, I should mention, I knew from the moment he took that single, solitary puff of Mary Jane that this was what the media would jump on. Never mind the substance that could be procured from their conversation, never mind even the whiskey they were drinking, it was all about the stuttering genius partaking in a tiny hit of the Devil’s Lettuce.

Akin to Eckhart Tolle, he exhibits a characteristic behavioral trait when asked a question. He looks down, eyes flickering back and forth as he processes the question and awaits the response offered by the depths of his relentless, explosively hyperactive mind. Sometimes, like Jordan Peterson, his eyes dart to the sky, but I think the same subjective activity is at work. In the process, he seems to naturally experience the sharp distinction between inner and outer reality in much the same way that I do when I’ve smoked a sufficient amount of marijuana. Put simply, he becomes so absorbed in his internal focus, drawn into his mind to such an extreme and intense degree that all external sensory signals are drowned out, utterly lost to him. A moment of loaded silence passes. Then he changes channels, placing his focus, his target of psychological absorption, yet again on the external world, and offers his response.

It’s an abrupt switch. There is no middle ground. From the depths of the Mariana trench to the highest point of Olympus Mons, no segue necessary. It is no wonder that, though he has experimented with meditation via mantra, he feels anxiety towards Rogan’s suggestion that he try out a sensory deprivation floatation tank. The guy’s mind is a ceaseless swarm of ideas.

When AI is brought up, which was nearly inevitable, he confesses that he has become less worried about it. Not because circumstances has become less dire in his eyes, either, but because he’s come to adopt a more fatalistic attitude.

His calls for prospective regulation have fallen on deaf ears, and while disappointment, frustration and depression doesn’t seem to graze the surface of how it makes him feel, he doesn’t seem surprised, and he explains why. This is simply not the way the process of regulation tends to come about. Shit first hits the fan and then, over a period of struggle that could take up to a decade, regulations are finally put in place. Like seat-belts in cars. But if that pattern were to play out with respect to regulating AI, he says, it would be far too late.

Given what he considers to be a failure on his part to convince The Powers That Be, he has other safety measures in mind. First, though, it might be best to illustrate precisely what he thinks the danger is.

As he sees it, the danger of AI is likely to manifest, first and foremost, in one of two fashions. It will either be controlled and weaponized by a small group of people — a government faction, a terrorist organization — or it will develop a will of its own, and in either case there is potentially grave danger. If AI develops into a superintelligence, it will quickly become capable of improving upon itself, with the consequence of those improvements leading to still greater and swifter improvements. It essentially achieves a singularity, Musk says, in that the ultimate result is impossible to predict. Circumstances may not lead to our extinction, but it would certainly be well outside human control. AI would be so intelligent that even if it were benign, we’d be like pets to them. And they would be gods to us. This, Musk argues, wouldn’t exactly be the Panglossian “best of all possible worlds,” however, and I couldn’t agree more.

His solution, unfortunately, scares the shit out of me even more than the alleged dangers inherent in the rise of AI itself. Given the inevitable rise of superintelligent AI, he says, the best-case scenario for human beings would be to merge with it.

“If you can’t beat it, join it,” he offers.

It would be the only way to defend ourselves from AI, to arm ourselves against it, and to prevent us from becoming their house pets. This isn’t as drastic and divorced from our current circumstances as we may think, either, he stresses. In essence, we are already cyborgs. We have digital versions of ourselves online through email and social media. We can answer questions on Google, hold video conferences with people across the world. Our phones and laptops are extensions of us.

There is certainly, clearly a difference between this, our current relationship with technology, and what we typically think of when we imagine a cybernetic organism, of course. He describes this distinction as being our current “bandwidth problem”: our rate of input/output is far too snail-pace, particularly the output. Our vision can take in a lot of data through all the text and imagery on our screens, but we have to deliver our input through hunt-and-pecking fingers or, in the case of our phones, merely our dumb, clumsy thumbs. He suggests that what we need ASAP is a high-bandwidth interface with the cortex. Just as the cortex works symbiotically with the limbic system, the AI could work symbiotically with the cortex, making us more or less what we typically imagine as cyborgs. The rate of data exchange would be so fast that experientially, we would be one with the AI extension. We would have enhanced cognitive ability. We would interact with one another in simulated worlds, download limitless data, even backup our identities and achieve technologically-mediated immortality.

This is the aim of one of his companies, Neuralink: to blend man and machine so that we ride the AI wave rather than be submerged by it. And it fucking terrifies me.

In the midst of hearing him talk about this, I was reminded of both Delgado and Bearden, who helped me fashion nightmarish scenarios for the human future back in high school.

Ah, the good ol’ days.

I first heard of Dr. José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado back in my Sophomore year, I believe. Rather than the popular notion that physical abnormalities were the cause of mental disorders such as schizophrenia and epilepsy, he hypothesized that the underlying issue may be erratic electrical activity in the brain. After he learned of research that seemed to show that the movements of animals could be controlled by stimulating their brains with electrodes, he focused his own research there. Rather than lobotomizing people, he thought he might be able to jolt their brains into the normal manner of functioning, and to meet this end he invented the stimoceiver. It was essentially a radio receiver attached to electrodes, and he went on to implant them in the noggins of various animals including cats, dogs, monkeys, chimps and eventually human beings.

Through use of an implanted stimoceiver he could remotely control various parts of the limbic system. In the experiments he began carrying out in the 60s, he found that he could produce a wide spectrum of emotions and behavior in his subjects from the simple to the curiously complex — and all at the mere press of a button, the crank of a dial. The way we passively change channels on the television, adjust the temperature in our house or turn the dial on the radio, with just as much ease he could produce euphoria or terror in another, he could summon up a fit of rage, conjure sexual desire, or produce passivity. Armed with nothing but a remote control, he once stepped into the ring with a bull implanted with one of his stimoceivers and was able to stop the aggressive beast dead in his tracks every time it charged at him.

When his experiments moved to human beings, he found that he could induce emotional and behavioral responses they were unable to overcome by will. Even more disturbingly, in some cases the subjects mistook their remote-controlled behaviors and emotions as natural responses — as products of their own, free will.

Allegedly, such behavior can also be produced through posthypnotic commands, but that’s another long, ranting article.

Aside from remote control, he also discovered he had the ability to reprogram or condition the brain. There was a chimp named Paddy, and after she was implanted he monitored her brain waves and induced a painful sensation every time her brain produced certain spindles, ultimately training her brain to stop producing them altogether in just shy of a week. Admittedly, the potential this has for preventing seizures is amazing. It could also “train the brain” against depression and countless other mental disorders. Psychiatrist offices are full of patients who take drugs to overcome these very things every day; drugs that often have horrible side effects, at times much worse than the symptoms they’re administered to treat. Here, a person’s neurological habits could be subject to a limited period of conditioning. No lifelong routine of popping pills necessary.

Still, its more than a bit horrid.

So while there are certainly beneficial aspects to this technology, it is outweighed in my mind by the potential horror that could result from its use — particularly today, where upgraded versions of his stimoceiver would be much smaller and inserted far more easily. And technologies such as Neuralink could provide an avenue for such control as well, either by terrorists, hackers, or power-hungry factions of the intelligence community.

In addition, Neuralink may potentially pave the road to something even more terrifying, and this is where we come to Thomas E. Bearden. I first heard of him in the book Silent Invasion by Ellen Crystall, which led me to his own book, The Excalibur Briefing, which I found interesting insofar as I could comprehend it at the time. Eventually I came across him again, without seeking, in the mentally nauseating New Age book Gods of Aquarius by Brad Steiger, where he was given the last word. I photocopied that part of the chapter during high school and, looking into my files two days after watching the Rogan podcast with Musk, I found I still had it.

Reading this back then constituted a turning point in my thinking, where my growing paranoia regarding the experiments of Delgado reached a peak and solidified.

In Gods of Aquarius, Bearden speculated that:

“The evolution of a life-bearing planet may be divided into stages, the first five of which are: (1) The formation of the planet itself and some billions of years of cooling, so that a primordial atmosphere and ocean are gradually evolved; (2) The fomenting of amino acid structures in the violent convulsions of the primeval sea and planet; (3) The formation of the self-replicating supermolecules, DNA and RNA; (4) The formation of one-celled organisms; (5) The formation of multicellular organisms. At the upper end of the fifth stage of evolution, the intelligent mobiles emerge, as do eventually tool-using intelligent mobiles. This is the level on which man finds himself on the planet Earth.”

It is interesting to find that much of what he said, particularly beyond the quoted portion above, falls in line with my current thinking. He states that in life, in organisms, there are two competing control systems. The first he describes as “genetically programmed,” and this refers to the instinctive or genetically-hardwired and are inherited by virtue of being a member of the species; the second deals with the “genetically unprogrammed,” which is to say the patterns learned or conditioned through individual experience and cultural influence. Organisms must have some degree of both in order to survive, though a more “intelligent” species has more of the second.

In order for an intelligent organism to utilize it’s intelligence to its fullest potential, however, it must bear a body that provides the naturally-evolved tools or technology that makes the utilization of that potential possible, which is something I’ve contemplated in depth. As I’ve written of before, it may very well be that a species of octopus exists in the deep oceans under the thick surface ice of the moon Europa that bears an intelligence far greater than our own. Despite its relative superintelligence, however, it would be unable to develop spears, let alone the advanced technology our comparatively stupid selves have managed to develop — and simply due to the fact that it does not bear opposable thumbs or exist within an environment that would enable it to create fire.

Human beings are a tool-creating, tool-using species, however, and over the course of evolution we have developed greater and greater technology, or systems of tools. Our technology, serving as extensions of our bodies, which themselves constitute an extension of our minds, brought us to dominate all other species on earth and increase our population. It will also likely pave the way to our self-destruction, however, because our species in-fighting is not only no longer limited to our genetically-evolved technology (our bodies) but also no longer regulated by our genetically-hardwired instincts.

We need not strange someone, or even shoot them personally. We can bomb them remotely. This distance, available through our technology, gets around that limiting, hardwired sense of empathy.

Our technology is also advancing at an exponential rate. Bigger, better, faster, stronger. More destructive, at least potentially. We are on a positive feedback loop of conflict heading towards destruction. This was as central to Bearden’s concern as it was, or so it seems, to Delgado’s.

Despite the dangers inherent in going forward, we cannot go backward in evolution, Bearden concludes. Becoming a technological species was a one-way threshold. In terms of “natural” evolution, the human species has achieved its final stage, and the next step, the sixth stage of evolution, must be a conscious one — and, in Bearden’s estimation, a technological step, if we survive ourselves and are therefore capable of taking that next step at all.

(It also strikes me that this could be the filter that explains the “cosmic silence” so often spoken about when discussing the so-called Fermi Paradox.)

What would this sixth stage constitute? In the eyes of Bearden, by necessity it must be characterized by the reintroduction of internal control, preventing the kind of “destructive competition” that accelerates us towards species suicide, without relinquishing our intelligence, which is to say our “genetically unprogrammed” nature.

Over the course of recorded human history, we have struggled to achieve this.

“Law, logic, philosophy, creed, religion, practice, love, sacrifice, money, the ballot, and the bullet — all of these have empirically proven that they cannot solve the human problem for all humanity. Since none of the solutions advanced to date can solve the problem, we must discard them all and search for a new approach.”

How? What on earth could solve the problem? The solution he proposes could be seen as the inevitable trajectory of our technology, the endpoint of it’s ever-advancing and allegedly exponential rate of advancement, barring self-termination. He contends that the only available solution is to unify all human brains “into one giant superbrain” adding that “one would also hope for the ‘maximum individual freedom within the constraints of minimum essential inter-individual control.’”

“One would hope”? Seems frighteningly low on his hierarchy of values, from the smell of it.

This could be accomplished through, and would in all likelihood (at least in my own, paranoid mind) be the end result of, the kind of technology Delgado was developing and, more to the point, the kind of mind-machine interface technology that Musk was proposing as the most beneficial avenue given the inevitable rise of superintelligent AI.

Bearden envisions this as each individual or “mancell” functioning within its own personal sphere but interactions between such mancells being governed by the technologically-induced harmony of what would constitute a technologically-mediated superorganism or massmind.

Bearden hypothesizes that when, to start simply, two minds are technologically linked — at least in the kind of high-bandwidth, time-delay-free union Musk aims for in his Neuralink effort — a phenomenon occurs that is not unlike what happens naturally within the complex mesh of matter packed into the typical human skull. The cortex and the amygdala, or limbic system, are in symbiosis, causing them to identify not as individual parts, but as a whole, just as Musk explained.

The two sides of the cerebrum or cerebral cortex, the left and right hemispheres of the brain, have a similar relationship, perceiving themselves not as the dualistic aspects that they are physically, but as the singular entity they are experientially and enact behaviorally.

As Bearden explains, the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body and the left hemisphere controls the right, and one hemisphere, typically the left, tends to dominate. Despite this, we do not typically consciously experience any separation between the left and right side of our body. Both hemispheres are connected by the corpus callosum, a thick mesh of nerve fibers that transmits the messages between them at such a high rate of speed that it produces a convincing illusion of immediacy from the standpoint of conscious awareness.

“If one holds up both hands and observes them, one is perfectly aware that here are two separate hands, but is only aware of one being to whom the hands belong, even though each hand is being controlled by a different cerebral hemisphere.”

In other words, in those with functional, cerebral hemispheres, the inter-cerebral bandwidth is heightened to the point where our consciousness cannot detect any time-delay between one hemisphere and the other. Whatever one hemisphere generates the other hemisphere experiences as having generated itself. Put in another way, Bearden explains:

“… when consciousness can perceive no difference, identity results, just as separate movie frames appear continuous (each two appear one) when flashed at 22 frames per second. Thus in one’s own body, two brains are integrated into one functional brain and one perceptual personality. There is no conscious separation of the two brain hemispherical perceptions, and one consciously is aware of only one being or continuity, himself.”

This is precisely what Musk appeared to be trying to convey when he spoke about the AI extension. The AI extension he appears to be aiming at through Neuralink would constitute a artificial, technological layer of the brain that would, given sufficient bandwidth, perceive itself as being as synonymous with the AI extension as one hemisphere of the cerebrum considers itself synonymous with the other. If such a super-brain were to be accomplished, the brain itself would look upon the singular human organism in much the same way as the singular human organism — you, I — currently look upon one of our hands.

On a positive note, this linkage, according to Bearden, would naturally eliminate competition between individuals within the network, at the very least what he describes as “destructive competition,” as such behavior would be as self-defeating as you using one of your hands to stab the other. We would be one super-brain with access to countless bodies.

Where would there be room for an individual? For privacy? For personal freedom?

While this superbrain is not necessarily what Musk proposes, it certainly seems like a step in that direction and may even be an unintended consequence of the aims of Neuralink. As with Delgado and Bearden, Musk has good intentions, but be it intentional or not, this may ultimately destroy the individuality we presently enjoy, obliterate any vague semblance of privacy and personal freedom. Liberty of the soul could meet its dead fucking end here.

And that saying, the one about what the road to hell is paved with? Call me paranoid, and I hope I am, but it still might be a good one to keep in mind.

The Moth.

Nietzsche seemed to view sympathy or pity as an insult — it implied you thought you were higher than another, more capable, and they would be unable to accomplish something without your charity. It would appear to be just as insulting — blatantly cold and sadistic, actually — to just sit by and watch another struggle in my eyes, however.

It could be that I’m looking at this the wrong way, though. It could be that observing while adhering to a strict code of noninterference has a great deal of logic behind it and it just appears so cold due to the way I’m framing it. Relevant here, perhaps, is a scene from the first season and second episode of the television series LOST, where Locke has a conversation with Charlie in the forest:

“That’s a moth cocoon. It’s ironic — butterflies get all the attention, but moths, they spin silk. They’re stronger. They’re faster. You see this little hole? This moth’s just about to emerge. It’s in there right now, struggling. It’s digging it’s way through the thick hide of the cocoon. Now, I could help it — take my knife, gently widen the opening, and the moth would be free — but it would be too weak to survive. Struggle is nature’s way of strengthening it.”

There may be multiple reasons for not interfering with another’s life, or with a culture or even a planetary species, but this is the most ethical reason I can come up with.