Notes on UFO/ET Phenomena

Jim Fournier
January 5, 1998

Popular understanding of the UFO/ET phenomenon is often framed in terms of the dichotomy:
"I believe" or "I don't believe." In my opinion this simplistic formulation of the question does not adequately frame the possibilities with respect to the UFO/ET phenomenon. There are too many categories and contradictions for such labels to be meaningful, though these two positions might be seen as opposite poles in the most prominent of several possible polarities which
may be identified with respect to attitudes towards the overall meaning of a multitude of
unexplained phenomenon.

"I know that I don't know"

My own position, after having spent a fair amount of time looking into the situation, is firmly that "I know that I don't know." I do have suspicions, and deep intuitions, but these should be distinguished from belief or knowledge. Like John Mack, I do believe that people are having "real" experiences, but this raises the question, can someone have an experience which is "real" without it necessarily being an experience of objective "reality", as we currently understand it. My own suspicion is that it is our categories of mind and matter which are wrong. Once we assume that mind and matter are separate and immiscible, then any experience which does not fit neatly into one or the other category will be deeply problematic. Our implicit cultural assumption is that only experiences rooted in matter have any "objective" truth. Such experiences exist "out there" and may thus be simultaneously observed by many individuals. By contrast, it is assumed that all experiences of mind do not involve matter, aside from our own brains, and are thus necessarily interior and subjective. It is therefore assumed, a priori, that only experiences which involve matter have any objective reality which may be simultaneously perceived by a number of independent observers. It is further assumed, by induction, that any experience common to a number of observers must involve an exterior event in matter, or conversely, that any interior event must be entirely subjective and not part of exterior consensus reality. If these interrelated ontological assumptions are to some degree incorrect, as has been implied by modern consciousness research, as well as virtually every other culture's understandings of reality, then we might be able to formulate a variety of explanations for the UFO/ET phenomenon which transcend the apparent paradox they pose to our ontological model.

However successful we may be in showing that the observed phenomenon do fit what we might expect to see from the collective subconscious of our species dispensating our collective hopes and fears, to that extent these phenomena might be seen as a question of objective collective consensual visions which would thus have a measure of ontological, but not necessarily physical, reality.

But, this possibility could in no way prove the absence of a potential synchronicity, first pointed out by Jung, that the actual arrival of interplanetary technological beings, in matter, could be synchronistic with their independent expression in the collective human subconscious. In other words, even if we can demonstrate that the whole phenomenon is entirely consistent with what we might expect to emerge from the collective subconscious of humanity at the cusp of the millennium, this could not be distinguished from the impact of the actual arrival of beings from elsewhere in space (or time, or dimensionality), purely by coincidence.

Indeed, it occurs to me now that, unless this is either a case of synchronicity or projected quasi-collective vision, it is virtually impossible to explain the virtual zoo of different entities and alien visitors sighted over the last century. For if one wanted to claim that only one distinct type and species, or congregation of confederated species, have any objective (physical) reality, then the only way to explain all the different types of alien reports is to assume that the variation between them is due to them being individualized expressions of an archetypal theme -- or else there is one hell of a crowd of different aliens represented on and around earth right now.

I do not regard this as an impossible eventuality, or one which it is possible for us to definitively prove one way or the other right now. I say this not because it is impossible for us to have collective experiences, but rather because it is impossible for us to accurately interpret what they mean with certainty. If there were only one type of experience which stood out as most plausibly "real", against the background of other inter-psychic and intra-psychic experiences, then we might be able to focus on these as distinct from the great morass of tales, many told by people, many with impeccable credentials, who have experienced a high degree of veridical certainty,
at least with respect to UFO sightings.

With abduction accounts there is no question of a strong psycho-physical affect among those who remember them, often touching the core of their life and death fears. It is particularly with respect to the abduction phenomenon that it seems to be appropriate to ask whether this might be an inter-dimensional rather than inter-spatial phenomenon.

This question can also be appealing with respect to UFO sightings as well. Again, it is difficult to devise a thought experiment which would be able to determine which explanation is more correct. From our perspective, inter-dimensional enfoldment might mask what looked to us like virtually instantaneous changes in the position of UFO's with respect to time. A manifold composed of space, time and dimensional symmetry might also suggest that some sort of time travel could account for the presence of the aliens.

There are, of course, urban myths for each sci-fi variation. In one, the little gray's are our technologized selves from some dark future come back to warn us of our current mistakes. In another, the little grays are here from elsewhere in space to warn us of our current crisis, and scare us into action. In other scenarios, its the Pleadeans who are the good guys (angels) and the little grays are actually up to no good (devils). This verges well toward the mythic/archetypal interpretation, pointed to by Vallee, which would appear to favor the collective psychic projection. But this interpretation may also imply that one would be forced to accept the UFO phenomenon as evidence of a collective psychic projection creating the appearance of material reality, even on radar, and sometimes even on film, as well as evidenced in burnt patches and possibly even some of the crop circles.

Crop circles, or at least many crop circles, are one of the best articulated example of another very real phenomenon accounting for some percentage of all UFO/ET reports -- Hoaxing. Yet it is difficult to discern for certain whether all of even those people most demonstrably capable of perpetrating a hoax in this case agree that all of the existing circles were, or could be, faked.

One interesting quasi-reductionist answer might be to posit that all unexplainable UFO sighting phenomena are in fact actually alien craft here for the millennial show, who's cloaking devices malfunctioned temporarily, while all abductions, channelings and other psycho-spiritual phenomena are our collective psychic response to both our own terrestrial fears for the fate of the Earth in our own times, as well as our psychic reaction to the dissonant experience of sighting actual alien craft. This might be described as a "humanity in the millennial terrarium" hypothesis wherein the aliens are seen as god scientists studying us as we attempt to evolve through the neck of the techno-spiritual hourglass. Obviously, one needn't confine this type of explanation to UFO sightings alone, but it can also easily be expanded to form the basis of a view of all alien contact.

One of my favorite thought experiments is to take as the model for the little gray's behavior, an experience I had as a child one summer with my father who was studying hot springs in Yellowstone. Our cabin in the rangers compound was referred to as "the bear boys shack" because the year before some brothers named the Craigheads lived there while they were doing experiments on bears. In the end they were not well liked by the rangers. It seems that the Craigheads had used a tranquilizer which didn't render the bear fully unconscious when they were tagging them and taking whatever biological samples they needed. The bears came out of the experience feeling hostile toward humans in general. It is amazing how much the Craighead's attitude toward the bears mirrors the gray's attitude toward humans as reported by abductees. One could use this metaphor as evidence for at least two diametrically opposed explanations. Either the aliens are acing just like a scientistically advanced technological species would be expected to act toward us, or the grays represent the perfect projected fantasies of our collective archetypal hopes and fears.

Again, I in no way want to disparage the latter explanation as any less "real" than the former. Especially if one does not want to explain the UFO side of these phenomena through recourse to fully material ships from elsewhere in space, then paradoxically, for the materialist reductionist, the alternative is to postulate a reverse causality loop wherein collective consciousness essentially acts on the average outcome of events in matter. This is to say that we must postulate that collective thought imagines at least a quasi-material reality into being i.e. sightings are shared between two or more credible witnesses, some incidents leave radar traces, and a very few are even photographed or leave burn marks. All of this suggests a phenomena capable of perturbing energy fields within material reality i.e. coherently arranging photons of a variety of frequencies and energies, and causing these disturbances to shift from place to place very rapidly. I suppose it is possible that a true reductionist might argue that even this could have been faked, but I would answer only by the chief spook agency's in the US government. Even then it seems doubtful that the vast variety of phenomena seen as early as the 1940's, 50's, and 60's could have been achieved by any imaginable human technology of those times.

This leads to the question of...