UFOs, the Office of Global Access, and the Spirit of the 4602nd AISS.

On November 28th, 2023, Josh Boswell, Chris Sharp, and Matt Ford published “CIA’s secret office has conducted UFO retrieval missions on at least NINE crash sites around the world, whistle-blowers reveal,” an article for The Daily Mail that reported on the role that the CIA’s Office of Global Access (OGA) allegedly played in UFO recoveries.

According to the article, among the 56 offices in the CIA, and the nine offices in its Science and Technology wing specifically, the OGA was established in 2003 to “integrate analysis, technology, and tradecraft to attack the most difficult targets, and to provide worldwide collection capability.” The OGA specializes in facilitating covert entry into and exit from anywhere globally where individuals would ordinarily be denied access, such as behind enemy lines. According to multiple sources, the article says, while the majority of missions conducted by the OGA deal with mundane and conventional retrieval operations – snatching up the downed tech of our earthly adversaries; that sort of thing – three sources to The Daily Mail, all of whom feared reprisals and so wished to remain anonymous, informed them that since it’s inception the OGA has also been coordinating UFO retrievals for the US from around the world. The office works in concert with Special Forces Operations – Delta Force, SEAL teams – to retrieve craft, be they landed or crashed. After the OGA acquires these UFOs or associated materials, they pass them to private aerospace government contractors. Here, the collected material can be subject to analysis while simultaneously being shielded from audits and oversights, and given the strict compartmentalization, many if not most involved in the analysis may not even realize the nature of what they are studying.

Reading the article, I was suddenly struck by the similarity between the activities of the OGA and the activities initially ascribed to the US Air Force’s 4602nd Air Intelligence Service Squadron (AISS). Created in 1952, the 4602nd was tasked with collecting downed foreign documents, crews, and hardware, and had over a dozen field units spread out all across the US. By the end of 1953 – and perhaps not coincidentally, just after the January 1953 Robertson Panel – the 4602nd was also assigned to investigate UFOs. As far as the public knew at the time, this was Blue Book’s job, but the 4602nd would now be the first to receive UFO reports, deal with those reports that concerned national security issues, and hand down the rest to Blue Book. In July of 1957, the unit changed names. No longer the 4602nd, it was reborn as the 1006th. It again died in April of 1960, now reincarnated as the 1127th USAF Activities Group. And as journalist Ross Coulthart wrote in his 2021 book, In Plain Sight, the efforts went on over time, under different titles:

“In 1961, an AISS operation named Project Moon Dust was tasked in a letter known as the ‘Betz Memo’ to ‘locate, recover and deliver descended foreign space vehicles.’ Another project, Operation Blue Fly, was proposed to deliver the recovered objects to the Foreign Technology Division at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. In his 1990 book, Out There, the New York Times journalist Howard Blum asserted that the ‘foreign space vehicles’ the US Air Force sought included craft of extra-terrestrial origin and that Moon Dust was a kind of ‘UFO SWAT team’. The book described the secret team’s role as ‘field exploitation of unidentified flying objects, or known Soviet/Bloc aerospace vehicles, weapons systems, and/or residual components of such equipment.’ Surprisingly, declassified Project Blue Book and US Defense Intelligence Agency files do show the US was involved in a covert worldwide ‘UFO’ investigation and recovery program. Operation Moon Dust definitely involved retrieval of ‘foreign technology’ from other countries, but it also specifically sought ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’ and ‘flying saucers’.”

At the request of the Air Force, a committee was established in 1966 to review the best of Blue Book. Based out of the University of Colorado, it comprised four psychologists, one astrogeologist, one assistant dean of a graduate school, and one physicist – the chairman, Edward Condon, which is why it is often referred to in UFO circles as The Condon Committee. Two years later, in 1968, after studying 59 UFO reports, the Condon Committee released their results, officially entitled, “Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects,” though it has since been far more popularly referred to as the Condon Report. In it’s summary, it states that “[n]o UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security”, though given that since 1953 UFO reports that were judged by the 4602nd and its reincarnations to be matters of national security never even fell into the hands of Blue Book, this conclusion is clearly bullshit. And if one needs further evidence that this is the case, there is the “Trick Memo” found by staff member Ray Craig, handed down to research associate Norman Levine, who in turn provided it to David Sanders, the principal investigator. This memo makes it clear that the whole thing was a ruse from the start.

Nonetheless, based on the recommendations of the Condon Report, Blue Book was terminated in 1969, which for years the US Government as a whole insisted was the end of its interest in the UFO topic. Despite this allegation, we have what is popularly known in UFO circles as “The Bolander Memo,” received through FOIA. Dated October 20, 1969 and signed by Brigadier General C.H. Bolander, it makes clear that, regardless of Blue Book’s closure, UFO reports would “continue to be handled through the standard Air Force procedure designed for this purpose” and “reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security […] are not part of the Blue Book system.”

In other words, despite the fact that the Air Force’s public relations front was gone, behind the scenes the spirit of the 4602nd remained as embodied and active as ever – at least at that point. While this is the extent of my limited knowledge regarding the incarnations of these efforts, there are strong suggestions of its survival, if only in spirit, beyond 1969. And if there is any reason to think that spirit continued its clear tendency to reincarnate, there are these recent allegations regarding the CIA’s OGA, which seems to be tasked with executing the same damned activities, though they’ve evidently gotten better at it over the decades. According to The Daily Mail article, after all, one source claimed that the CIA has some sort of “system in place” that can detect cloaked UFOs, and regardless as to whether the “’non-human’ craft land, crash or are brought down to earth, special military units are sent to try to salvage the wreckage” and that at least nine such craft have been recovered, two of them entirely intact, the rest damaged.

There has been a little pushback here, however, and from one I’ve come to consider in-the-know. In a clip from Cuomo’s show on NewsNation on November 29th, in an interview he had with Representative Tim Burchett and Coulthart, Coulthart said:

“What I can tell you is the Office of Global Access is the office in the CIA that has been coordinating this. They have been doing crash-retrievals for many years. One of the things I do take issue with in The Daily Mail’s story today is that they say there’s just nine craft that have been recovered. My understanding is that there are considerably more. And as the article accurately reports, this is done in collaboration with JSOC, the Joint Operations Special Command, notably with special forces drawn primarily from the US Air Force. So yes, the article is accurate, and I’ve got it also confirmed independently by multiple senior intelligence sources.”

Concerning the number of UFO retrievals, he’s not alone in pointing out this discrepancy. In his recent Joe Rogan interview, David Grusch has stated the number of UFO retrievals are in the double-digits, and in his June 7th Substack article, “US Has 12 or More Alien Spacecraft, Say Military And Intelligence Contractors,” a title that I feel speaks for itself, journalist Micheal Shellenberger made the same claim.

This article in The Daily Mail curiously emerges just as the Schumer Amendment (officially known as The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023) to the Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (FY24 NDAA) has passed in the Senate, but is currently receiving pushback in the House of Representatives. If passed, it will set up a means by which the US Government could, at the presidential level, collect, evaluate, and systematically disseminate over time a disclosure of what the government knows regarding NHIs and their technology to the American people. If the amendment does not pass, many attest, the government will be unable to control the narrative and disclosures through the media, private efforts, and potentially through global adversaries will be the means by which the truth will be delivered to the public.

If the amendment fails to pass, in other words, those in the know who have already spoken to the likes of David Grusch, Ross Coulthart, Micheal Shellenberger, and Congress will have no choice but to enlighten the public through other means, which means that regardless as to whether it’s a global adversary or efforts within the US that spill the beans, such an uncontrolled disclosure may be catastrophic – if not to the populace, at the very least to those Gatekeepers of the Big Secret that sit atop the compartmentalized silos, given safety only by the shadows they have thus far been capable of hiding in.

Schumer’s Amendment, Three Mikes, and a Mitch (Constipations in UFO Disclosure).

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is an annual act that specifies the annual budget of the US Department of Defense – in short, it funds the military. As a consequence, as I’m sure you can imagine, it’s an act that inevitably passes in some form or another every fucking year. Well, this upcoming year’s version – known as the Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (FY24 NDAA) – has an amendment officially known as The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023. However, it’s been frequently referred to as The Schumer Amendment. As with the recent, historical UFO hearing, the act is bipartisan, sponsored by Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Mike Rounds (R-SD), as well as Rubio, Gillibran, Young, and Heinrich.

At roughly forty-six minutes into a recent The Joe Rogan Experience podcast (#2065), whistleblower David Grusch revealed that a few months before he went public he learned about The Schumer Amendment, and this served as just another reason he blew the whistle. Given the data he’d gathered from his duties, he felt he was the only one who had the opportunity to do so, and he also felt those behind the amendment would be hesitant to go forward with it all unless they had something to point to publically.

The meat of the act, according to Grusch, deals with where it demands that the president establish a 9-person Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Review Board within 90 days of FY24 NDAA’s enactment. It states that it must include at least one of each of the following: a current or former national security official, a current or former foreign service official, a scientist or engineer, an economist, a professional historian, and a sociologist and that all members must be granted necessary clearances and accesses. Government agencies and contractors would have 300 days to turn over any NHI data or recovered samples and technology to the board, which would be subject to the power of eminent domain – though, as NewsNation noted, it’s unclear how the legislation would compel them to do so if they showed reluctance. In my eye, it would be similar to how the Pentagon has recently failed its sixth audit in a row without penalty.

At any rate, once the board has received the data, samples, and tech, it would then have 180 days to investigate and then 14 days to publish its findings. The president would have the power to delay the disclosure of certain data if he judged that it posed a risk to national security, but any such postponement would require an unclassified, publicly available reason, and the delayed data would have to be periodically reviewed to assess whether or not conditions had changed and they could now be declassified and released.

Though I have thus far been unable to find it in the act myself, according to Grusch, it also outlines a controlled UAP disclosure plan that is six years in length, conceivably from 2024 to 2030.

During his Rogan interview, or conversation, or whatever, he mentioned how it passed the Senate with flying colors, but – as he was told by his connections on The Hill – it was receiving pushback in the House. He mentioned only two individuals during the podcast: Mike Turner and Mike Rodgers.

Representative Mike Turner (R-OH) is the Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Grusch went to Turner’s committee in December of 2022 to give them a classified briefing, and while Turner himself wasn’t there, his staff and lawyers were. Despite providing all the data he could in the time he was given, after the UFO hearing in late July, Turner went on Fox Business and, though only calling him a “whistleblower” and not calling him out by name, essentially claimed Grusch didn’t know what he was talking about.

Not coincidentally, I strongly suspect, he’s from Dayton, Ohio, where he once served as mayor. Dayton, of course, is the home of Wright Patterson Air Force Base, the former location of Projects Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book, which collectively studied UFO sightings from 1948 to 1969, and is also where Roswell wreckage is allegedly stored, home of the mythical Blue Room – and so on, and so on. As Grusch himself stated, that’s, well, more than slightly suspicious. It also doesn’t help that – as Grusch made mention of and I subsequently confirmed for myself – Turner was listed in 2010 by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington as one of the 26 most corrupt members of Congress. Among his top donors are Lockheed and Boeing.

Aside from blocking the bill, according to staffers Grusch says he’s talked to in the past two weeks Turner is also looking to fund an opposition candidate for Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN 2nd District) in 2024. I immediately saw the relevance here. While I no longer pledge allegiance to either of the political parties, by nature I lean to the left, and though I know nothing of Burchett’s values and ideals beyond his determination to overcome the political polarization in this country and his outspoken stance on the UFO issue, I’ve come to deeply respect the guy since Grusch came on the scene – and yes, despite the fact that he’s a Republican. He comes across as a nice guy, constantly calling his interviewers “brother” and frequently spouting the phrase “dadgummit,” much to my amusement. He has spoken on numerous news programs and podcasts in support of UFO disclosure, and it doesn’t surprise me in the least that those like Turner who clearly desire to sustain the government secrecy and cultural stigma surrounding the UFO subject would want to kick Burchett off the Congressional podium and slap the megaphone from his hands.

So, yeah: fuck Turner.

Mike Rogers (R-AL, 3rd District), is the Chair for the House Committee on Armed Services, and Grusch seemed confused by his participation in this, though he didn’t go into any detail as to why.

According to Grusch, the alleged reason for the pushback was essentially that the proposed UAP Review Board demanded by the Schumer Amendment allegedly echoed the duties already ascribed to the DOD’s ARRO office which, as Grusch described it, is a load of horse shit. ARRO is within the DOD and the Intelligence Community (IC), he explained, not above it, at the presidential level, where the board would be – where it would have presidential authority over all other agencies, capable of extracting the aforementioned data, samples, and technology and having the authority to declassify them and provide them to the public.

The efforts of the two Mikes were bothersome enough, but more dire bullshit was to follow.

Subsequently, via Reddit, I came upon more fuel for my pessimism. This is where I learned of an article published in the Liberation Times, written by one Christopher Sharp on November 24th entitled, “Black Friday: Republican Leadership Takes Axe To UFO Transparency Legislation,” and, given my clearly masochistic bent, I proceeded to read it. To no surprise, this article confirmed what Grusch had already announced three days earlier, namely that Rogers and Turner have sought to squash the Schumer Amendment. They added, however, that the disclosure-phobic Mikes had also recruited to their cause the new Speaker of the House, Representative Mike Johnson, thereby completing a trinity of Mikes that I passionately want to slap the everliving shit out of. In addition, they recruited the chinless, perpetually buffering, turtle-devoid-of-a-shell, and presumably sociopathic Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnel.

I should add that I wasn’t exactly a fan of McConnel before all of this, but now, now that he’s joined the Disclosure Resistance Campaign? Now? Now the only two things preventing me from supporting his lynching by a mob are my fundamental ethics (rooted in my empathy, reason, and respect for due process) and the fact that it would be far, far too difficult to ascertain where his face ends and his neck begins.

And yes, this is a joke, not an authentic death threat. I’m not serious. It’s a dark joke, but a joke nonetheless. Don’t, like, cancel me and shit.

To go on, however, on the same day the article was published, Ross Coulthart tweeted on X, or whatever it is you now call posting something on what was formerly known as Twitter, regarding the Liberation Times article:

“This story is 100% accurate. An extremely powerful Defense Aerospace lobby is pushing key politicians in Congress to block the Schumer Amendment to the NDAA.”

Count me among the utterly unsurprised.

And wait, dear readers: there is even more disturbing news.

“It is understood that the four powerful Republicans are prepared to ‘compromise’ by amending language contained in the Act,” so The Liberation Times article went on to say, “although that would involve stripping it of its key provisions and crippling the Act of any meaningful power.”

Of course, I couldn’t help to think to myself. Of course, that’s the case. Why would I expect any different? Please, please tell me there’s still hope…

“One source familiar with the current NDAA conference process, which reconciles differences between House and Senate versions through negotiation,” the article went on, “told Liberation Times,” and I quote:

“It’s a shame that such monumental legislation is the victim of political brinkmanship. Neither of the detractors gives a hoot about serving the public interest and instead wants to use this amendment as leverage to get their own political interests codified.

When supposed “leaders” like this use the American people’s interests as their fodder, we should be reminded of what sparked the American Revolution in the first place. These individuals would be wise to remember that.”

The article goes on to emphasize, however, that bipartisan members within the Senate, House, and White House are determined to resist any attempts to soften or terminate the language of the act – and specifically mention, among this joint effort, Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, as well as long-standing disclosure proponent John Podesta, as well as members of Congress that include Rubio, Luna, Gallagher, and – of course, dadgummit – that outspoken motherfucker Burchett as well.

Here’s the thing: if the true motivation behind the effort to maintain the secrecy and prevent disclosure isn’t just for a minority to sustain power over the majority (as knowledge is power, after all), then it has to be the fear of how the populace will react or respond to these revelations or how the NHI will respond to the disclosure to the populace. And if that’s the case, the true, underlying motivation is to kick the can down the road, to pass the buck, to postpone the inevitable.

The inevitable, however, is the inevitable, and the act – or rather, inaction – inherent in not disclosing it yourself does not prevent its disclosure, it merely prevents you from disclosing it, and if someone else discloses it before you, they have the power, they have the greatest conceivable amount of control over the narrative, and in the aftermath you’re left in the dark, dethroned. Silence and lies: they can serve you for a time, but never forever. Best to get ahead of it. Best to do so before someone else steals your thunder.

Do you feel it? Do you sense the penetrating silence? That’s the experience one has before a storm. And make no mistake, that thunderous monster is rolling in.

The three Mikes and a Mitch? They signify nothing less, nothing more than the death rattle of the biggest secret.

In the article mentioned above, The Liberation Times provided a quote from an unnamed source who they claimed had “knowledge of the current situation regarding the NDAA negotiations,” and this source had a damned good point:

“We’ve got a problem. Russia or China may beat the United States to disclosing the facts around a non-human intelligence if we don’t get our act together fast. This should be motivation enough for Republican leadership to fight for the UAP Disclosure Act.

They should be doing everything in their power to get it passed expeditiously. I’m baffled.”

As am I, anonymous source to Liberation Times. As am I.

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.