Promise and Peril of ETI-TI-IDI Contact

Article by John Hart published in EdgeScience Issue 52

Credible news reports describing sightings of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) have increased around the world in recent decades. Complementarily, the Hubble, Kepler, and James Webb (NASA), and Gaia (European Space Agency) telescopes have peered deep into space and far back in time and found previously unknown galaxies, stars, and planets, some of which are amenable to biota, possibly even intelligent biota. Consequently, distinguished scientists are changing their speculation about other intelligent lives existing in the universe. There is scientific evidence that establishes, and credible anecdotal narratives that assert, that this life does exist: ETI (Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and IDI (Inter-Dimensional Intelligence) have occasionally visited Earth and its environs and been observed by TI (Terrestrial Intelligence). Astronomer J. Allen Hynek developed three “Close Encounters” (CE) categories to describe the proximity of what today are called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). All of this provides “food for thought” for readers who know little about or are skeptical regarding the existence of UAP controlled by ETI and IDI.

News stories of flyby visits around Earth by craft controlled by other-than-human intelligent beings, and even of direct Contact with them, have catalyzed ever-increasing speculation about who is visiting Earth and humankind, and what might be their intent. In the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, several distinguished scientists—including National Medal of Science recipients Harvard University biologist E.O. Wilson and astrophysicist Avi Loeb—as well as geologist-paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, University of Cambridge mathematical cosmologist Stephen Hawking, and astrophysicist and computer scientist Jacques Vallee—have considered seriously the existence of ETI and IDI. “We are not alone” is being gradually rephrased to “We were never alone.”

Close Encounter of the First Kind

A brilliant light streaked across the star-studded sky above the Hudson River near Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1963. Startled, I watched it from the riverbank with two friends. It was the brightest, fastest, largest, and lowest meteor I had ever seen. Suddenly, without slowing or banking, it shot upward, perpendicular to its original trajectory. Amazed, I told myself that this was impossible: I had learned in college physics that, according to the laws of physics (as understood by Earth scientists at the time), the sudden drastic change in direction should have caused the object to shatter. I blinked my eyes to do away with the illusion and said nothing to my companions. Then, one of my friends said that he had seen an object suddenly change direction, shoot upward at a right angle, and quickly disappear into the darkness. “I guess we saw a UFO,” he said, and we laughed. When I reflected on my reaction to the UAP on this occasion years later, I realized that it should be clarified to note that humans’ scientific knowledge is likely far inferior, currently, to that of other-than-human intelligent beings exploring the cosmos.

Humankind has begun to explore in earnest “space, the final frontier” as dramatized in “Star Trek” on television and in movies. In the process, speculation about human Contact with other-than-human intelligent life has become better known in European and Euromerican cultures. Over millennia, meanwhile, Indian (the preferred self-designation of most [American] Indians; see Native Sun News, 2015) peoples in North America, and indias/os in Latin America, have had such Contact. Their interactions are documented and described in centuries-old oral tradition narratives and twenty-first-century books and articles by Indian scholars such as Montana’s Ardy Sixkiller Clarke.

Anyone who has seen an intelligently controlled UAP cannot forget their experience.

Anyone who has seen an intelligently controlled UAP cannot forget their experience. In the years that followed my sighting, I thought periodically about the event. At the beginning of the 21^st century, when I read that Stephen Hawking had disparaged the possibility of other-than-human intelligent beings coursing the cosmos, I knew that he was wrong. I began to write and publish on the topic. I wanted people to consider a possibility counter to what Hawking asserted unequivocally: that humankind is being and has been visited by other intelligent species for millennia, on some occasions having direct Contact.

Cosmos Contact: Close Encounters of the Otherkind

The product of my ever-developing thinking was the trilogy “Cosmos Contact: Close Encounters of the Otherkind.” In its final volume, Third Displacement (Hart, 2020), I have a special focus on astrophysicist Jacques Vallee, whose writings I had come upon while researching for and writing the second volume, Encountering ETI (Hart, 2014). His theory of interdimensional travel intrigued me: it made sense to me when I recalled my Hudson River Valley college experience. In that event, the UAP disappeared almost immediately once its horizontal trajectory was altered to a vertical ascent. I emailed Vallee, noting my agreement with him, at least partially. And so began a postal mail and email conversation that has continued to this day.

I am fully cognizant that academic scientists often raise their eyebrows or roll their eyes when the subject of Otherkind Contact comes up. On one occasion, when presenting my research to university faculty, I observed this directly. After my lecture, a conservative colleague approached me to tell me that his father had seen the UAP over the Hudson River Valley. On another occasion, while lunching with three colleagues, a historian and two distinguished senior scientists, I mentioned that I intended to teach a summer course on the possible existence of other-than-human intelligent life. The scientists poked fun at such an absurd idea. Then, I related to them the event described earlier in this essay. After that, the historian spoke about her aunt, a conservative, Republican Kansas farmer who looked out her kitchen window one day while washing dishes and saw a very large, circular object land in her field.

After a pause, one of the scientists described a time when he was in the US Air Force during the Cold War and patrolled a Maine beach. His assignment was to look over the Atlantic to detect an imminent attack by Soviet airplanes. He saw four exceedingly fast objects approaching in formation in the sky, scanned them with his binoculars, and determined that they were not “ours” or “theirs.” He called his base and was told that nothing was on the radar. He watched them streaking closer, saw them without his binoculars, and called his commanding officer, who told him he must be mistaken. He replied that he had been assigned to see and report approaching aircraft, which he had just done. He was told to await further orders. In a few minutes, his commander called him back and said, “You do not see anything. Repeat: you do not see anything.” He followed orders and never spoke about the incident. His faculty colleague of almost fifty years, seated beside him, was astounded: “you never told me about this before.” He replied that he had always been fearful about possible negative impacts on his scientific reputation and career if he disclosed the event to anyone.

Indian Peoples’ Narratives

In some events recounted by Indians in the Americas, the Visitors drop by for a while, then depart; sometimes they are amiable, sometimes hostile. In some native peoples’ cultures, they are described as ancestors whose intercourse with native populations produced descendants who have survived intergenerationally—including among the Lakota in the Midwestern US and the Uru-ê Wau Wau, the “people from the stars,” in Brazil. Among the latter, Bernardo Peixoto was an Uru-ê Wau Wau spiritual leader and healer who earned his Ph.D. in anthropology, left Brazil, and taught indigenous languages and cultures at the Smithsonian. He was subsequently interviewed in Boston by Harvard psychiatrist John Mack (Mack, 1999, pp. 158-9). According to Peixoto, these Visitors are called atojars, “entities from the stars” or “people with so much knowledge that they cannot be from Earth” (Mack, 1999, p. 158).

In Indian peoples’ cultures, occasional Contact with Visitors had been accepted routinely over the centuries. However, today Indian elders (spiritual leaders, often traditional healers, and on occasion human rights activists) state that a different type of Visitor has been coming to Earth in recent decades. Stories about abductions by the latter are new to Indian cultures. They are described in contemporary narratives, such as in stories by Ardy Sixkiller Clarke, Ph.D., a Cherokee/Choctaw Indian and Emeritus Professor, Montana State University.

In Indian peoples’ cultures, occasional Contact with Visitors had been accepted routinely over the centuries. However, today Indian elders state that a different type of Visitor has been coming to Earth…

In More Encounters with Star People, Clarke interviews urban Indians. Jimmy, a seventy-three-year-old traditional elder, healer, military veteran, and college graduate who had described past Star People appreciatively, states that today many species are visiting Earth. Some “have no regard for us as a species. They consider us no better than someone might regard a bug” and have abducted humans—sometimes, without returning them. When Clarke asked Jimmy if “Star People are devious and dishonest,” he answered, “No, not the Star People. The Star People are those who came before us. They are the ancestors. I am talking about some of the other species that inhabit this great universe. They make their victims believe they are special or chosen…humans accept their lies and say they are peaceful and loving. There is nothing loving about them” (Clarke, 2016, pp. 179-85).

At the beginning of Space Age Indians, Clarke states that “I discovered that there were several races of space visitors, some of whom were benevolent while others were malevolent” (Clarke, 2019, x). Clarke’s warnings are complemented by those of psychiatrist John E. Mack in Abduction, and astrophysicist Jacques Vallee in Confrontations. Their realistic and comprehensive assessments of Visitors’ practices and procedures revise and supplement the partial and much more idealistic narratives that usually describe them and their Contact with humankind.

Teilhard de Chardin: Intelligent Species in Space

A few years ago, I made a startling discovery as I searched for scientists who have stated that intelligent, other-than-human species are present in the cosmos. Renowned Jesuit geologist, paleontologist, and mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) pondered that possibility in 1920 and later in 1953, shortly before his death. Earlier in his life, because he had stated that Christianity and evolution were compatible, Teilhard had been exiled by the Vatican from his native France to China. Ironically, while there, he was invited to be the geologist for the expedition that in 1928 discovered Sinanthropis pekinensis (Peking Man), the then-oldest human remains ever found.

A collection of Teilhard’s essays was published as Christianity and Evolution (Teilhard, 1971). In the book, in an unpublished 1920 essay, “Fall, Redemption, and Geocentrism,” he wrote: “[I]t is almost impossible to conceive that, among the millions of Milky Ways which whirl in space, there is not one which has known, or is going to know, conscious life” (p. 38). In an unpublished 1953 essay, “A Sequel to the Problem of Human Origins: The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds,” he stated that since there are “millions of galaxies in the universe” (p. 230), if technology were available to detect the “specific radiation of the ‘noospheres’” [intelligent beings’ locales, as indicated by energy emanating from their thinking] scattered throughout space,  it would be practically certain that what we saw registered…would be a cloud of thinking stars” (p.231). He went on to say, integrating his understanding of evolution on Earth with his theory about a similar evolution among other species on other worlds, that “considering what we now know about the number of ‘worlds’ and their internal evolution, the idea of a single hominized planet in the universe has already become in fact (without our generally realizing it) almost as inconceivable as that of a man who appeared with no genetic relationship to the rest of the earth’s animal population” (p. 231).

Teilhard’s latter elaboration is a good counterbalance to the more well-known but less accurate 1961 proposal of radio astronomer Frank Drake. The Drake Equation questioned mathematically whether there could be intelligent life in the cosmos. Drake’s calculations are under scrutiny today by scientists who consider the cosmic implications of the number of planets discovered to date.

J. Allen Hynek (1910-86)

Astronomer Allen Hynek, Head of the Astronomy Department, Northwestern University, was the first official US Air Force/US Government scientific investigator of the UFO phenomenon. He held this position for twenty-two years. Initially, he called himself the “official debunker” of UFOs and the existence of other-than-human intelligent species. However, in the course of his work, he gradually realized that he could not scientifically debunk every narrative among the thousands he investigated. He proposed that an independent scientific inquiry be established, one not subservient to the US government. This was not done, and eventually, he resigned his position but continued his work.

While still engaged in his official government capacity, Hynek developed the “Close Encounters” categories that intrigued Steven Spielberg. This inspired Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” The film is based on stories of people who had had some Contact with other intelligent beings. A CE-I was an object within five hundred feet of the observer; a CE-II was an object that left physical evidence that it had come; a CE-III was an event where direct Contact had occurred (Hynek, 1997, pp. 135-219). Hynek elaborates on these categories in Chapter 7: “UFOs Close Up: Close Encounters of the First Kind”; Chapter 8: “The UFO Leaves Its Mark: Close Encounters of the Second Kind”; and Chapter 9: “Approaching the Edge of Reality: Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

John Mack (1929-2004)

In his writing on Contact, John Mack reluctantly became a controversial figure within the scientific community before his untimely death in 2004. Pulitzer Prize recipient Mack headed the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. When engaged in research on ETI abductees (whom he called Experiencers), in hopes of finding a new type of delusion, several of his colleagues complained that his scientific credentials were being diminished thereby and unsuccessfully sought to have him fired.

In Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (Mack, 1994 p. 13), Mack states that “some encounters are more sinister, traumatizing, and mysterious. Others seem to bear a healing and educational intent.…Even less well-documented than the actual abductions are the consequences of the experience…. Many Brazilian abductees experience [afterward] increased telepathic abilities, clairvoyance, visions, and the receiving of spiritual messages which are often concerned with world ecology, the future of humankind, and social justice.”

A scientific assessment complementary to the stories narrated by Mack and Clarke is presented by Reinerio Hernandez et al. (2018) in the Journal of Scientific Exploration : “A Study on Reported Contact with Non-Human Intelligence Associated with Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.” The study was under the auspices of the Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences (FREE). It investigates the stories of more than three thousand people who “reported various forms of contact experience (CE) with a non-human intelligent being (NHI) associated with or without an unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP).”

Edward O. Wilson (1929-2021)

Harvard Emeritus Evolutionary Biologist, National Medal of Science and Pulitzer Prize recipient, and prolific author E.O. Wilson at first questioned the possibility that there was other-than-human intelligent life in space. After the Hubble and Kepler (NASA), and Gaia (European Space Agency) telescopes discovered thousands of planets, Wilson changed his mind and wrote chapter 10, “A Portrait of E.T.” in The Meaning of Human Existence (Wilson, 2014, pp. 110-22). In it, he speculated about what that other intelligent life might be like, basing his projections on his vast knowledge of Earth species. He reinforced his statements in a “Big Think” television program, which he opens with “E.T. is out there” (https://youtu.be/eS875xBs1T4). More recently, Wilson remarks in Tales from the Ant World (2020, Introduction, “Ants Rule,” 1) that “…visitors from other star systems, when they come (and mark my word, they will eventually come)….” Indeed, “E.T. is out there.”

Disclosure: Wilson and I wrote complimentary blurbs for each other’s 2006 book: he for Sacramental Commons and I for The Creation.

Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)

The late Cambridge University mathematical cosmologist Stephen Hawking served as my intellectual foil in the first two books of the Cosmos Contact trilogy. Initially, he had denied that other-than-human intelligent life exists. He declared that humans should abandon Earth (since humanity is destroying its home planet) and establish a base on the moon and a colony on Mars to survive as a species. Then, he acknowledged that intelligent life might exist elsewhere in the cosmos but was dangerous to human existence: humanity should hide from it and not try to communicate with it. Eventually, he allowed for cautious Contact. Finally, he reversed his earlier positions entirely, stating that to his “mathematical mind” it was “perfectly rational” to assert that other intelligent beings exist, given the discovery of vast numbers of planets. Not only was ETI/IDI “out there,” but humankind for its part, should strive to protect and not abandon Earth: it is humans’ home, and the only planet humans know. He declared in a front-page essay in the December 1, 2016 edition of The Guardian that humans should be concerned about their home planet and seek to conserve it: Earth is the only planet on which humans can live now and into the foreseeable future:

We face awesome environmental challenges: climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans. Together, they are a reminder that we are at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity. We now have the technology to destroy the planet on which we live, but have not yet developed the ability to escape it. Perhaps in a few hundred years, we will have established human colonies amid the stars, but right now we only have one planet, and we need to work together to protect it. (p.1)

Finally, [Stephen Hawking]  reversed his earlier positions entirely, stating that to his “mathematical mind” it was “perfectly rational” to assert that other intelligent beings exist, given the discovery of vast numbers of planets.

Jacques F. Vallee

Astrophysicist Jacques Vallee is a mathematician (B.Sc., Sorbonne), astrophysicist (M.Sc., Lille University), and computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence (Ph.D., Northwestern University). His first position after he received his astrophysics degree was at the prestigious Paris Observatory. There he saw, along with other astrophysicists and astronomers, footage of anomalous objects cruising the cosmos, going at speeds and making maneuvers impossible for human aerial craft. The Director of the Observatory seized and destroyed the films. The incident stimulated further Vallee’s longtime interest in the presence of Visitors in Earth’s solar system.

In 1980, Vallee climbed with his wife, Janine, and Brazilian homicide detectives, up Morro do Vintem, a hill across the bay from Rio de Janeiro. In 1966, on its top, the bodies of two young men had been found. Locals said the men were expecting to meet Visitors, and that a saucer-like object emitting blue rays hovered above the hill while they were on it. Next to their bodies, which were lying on the ground with peaceful looks on their faces, were homemade lead masks. The cause of their death was not determined, even by 1980. Vallee wondered as he went up the hill:

If such an event could be validated, we might get closer to a proof of the reality of UFOs. At the same time, however, many of our ideas about the phenomenon would have to be drastically revised. Gone would be the gentle visitors, the scientific explorers, the mischievous aliens that fill the pages of UFO books…A more complex and dangerous picture would emerge. (Vallee, 2008, 3)

Although exposed to the open air, the bodies did not decompose. Vultures or other predators or scavengers did not attack them. At and around the site where they were found, no vegetation grows.

Vallee and Chris Aubeck collaborated on a more than two thousand-year summary history of unusual events and human encounters with strange intelligent beings in Wonders In The Sky (Vallee & Aubeck, 2010). In it, the historical stories from biblical lands date back to 1460 BCE in Lebanon (p. 29) and, among biblical narratives, to 850 BCE, the story of the prophet Elias/Elijah (I Kings 16-2 Kings 2) in which the prophet and his successor prophet, Elisha, with whom he is walking and conversing, are separated by a fiery chariot pulled by fiery horses, and Elias (who does not die in Bible narratives) is taken up to heaven by a whirlwind (pp. 30-32); and to 593 BCE, the story of the prophet Ezekiel (Ez 1-3), who is taken to a mountain top and sees “a whirlwind…a great cloud with raging fire engulfing itself…brightness all around it and radiating out of its midst the colour of amber,” and extraordinary “living creatures” emerged from it, each of whom has four faces and four wings, and “wheels within wheels” at their side, on the ground (32-5).

Avi Loeb

Harvard Astrophysicist Avi Loeb, National Medal of Science recipient, has written numerous technical articles for scientific journals. In 2021, he authored Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, a national bestseller, even before it was published. The book focuses on the global news media-reported 2017 exceedingly rapid approach of UAP ’Oumuamua to and into Earth’s solar system, partial orbit around the sun, and departure from the solar system. Loeb proposes that this object is a lightsail from an exo-solar system intelligent species. Using a lightsail, a spacecraft can rapidly traverse the cosmos, drawing renewed energy from stars around which it briefly and partially orbits…at 196,000 miles per hour. It functions similarly to how winds propel a sailing ship.

Puncture Wounds Some Abductees Received from Visitors

Vallee in Confrontations, and Mack in Abduction, similarly describe wounds received by abductees. According to Mack (1994), the abductees “frequently bear physical and psychological scars of their experience. These range from nightmares and anxiety to chronic nervous agitation, depression, and even psychosis, to actual physical scars—puncture and incision marks, scrapes, burns, and sores” (p. 13); bleeding from the nose, ear, and rectum (p. 30); and persistent gastrointestinal symptoms (p. 31). Vallee (2008) states that Dr. Carvalho in Brazil told him that patients who had been struck by beams of light streaming toward them (from UAP) had “Two puncture marks inside the red circles resembling mosquito bites, hard to the touch” (p. 222). Mack (1994) again, in Abduction, contactee Peter described very bright “laser beams” projected into the center of his forehead, and afterward found “two small, red lesions like healing pimples behind his ear that were distinct from insect bites in the rapidity with which they healed and the symmetry of their arrangement” (p. 296).

These narratives balance the positive experiences described by Clarke, Mack, and Vallee. The latter are more numerous and well-known; the former are elaborated infrequently because they contradict the dominant, optimistic beliefs expressed by most ufologists.

U.S. Government Deception and Misdirection

The US government has denied for almost eighty years (since Roswell, 1947) that UFOs, UAP, and ExoEarth intelligent beings exist. Recently, it briefly seemed that a breakthrough was in the offing. According to an article by Reis Theibault, “Thanks to Trump-era covid relief bill, a UFO report may soon be public—and it’ll be big, ex-official says” in the March 23, 2021 Washington Post, Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) inserted a UAP-related requirement in the $2.3billion appropriations bill, which included the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021. The “committee comment” part of the Act contained the section “Advanced Aerial Threats.” The latter required a report that, according to the Washington Post, stipulated “that the director of national intelligence work with the secretary of defense on a report detailing everything the government knows about unidentified flying objects, “ including a ‘detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence’ gathered by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Taskforce, the FBI.” (Thebault, 2021). The promised honest assessment either did not occur or was not released to the public.

In response, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, on June 25, 2021, issued an “UNCLASSIFIED” Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. In its first paragraph, in the section Scope and Assumptions, the document states that “This preliminary report is provided by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in response to the provision in Senate Report 116-233, accompanying the Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA) for Fiscal Year 2021, that the DNI, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense (SECDEF) is to submit an intelligence assessment of the threat posed by unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and the progress the Department of Defense Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) has made in understanding this threat.”  As has been customary in government reports and statements about UAP, misleading information is included, and serious questions are deflected in this review of a mere 144 cases of UAP. Other, more provocative, challenging, and evidence-laden cases are omitted. The number of cases cited is a minuscule, selective release of incomplete data from among the thousands that the USAF is known to have received. Also, the report is confined to incidents reported solely in 2004-2021, thereby omitting thousands of in-depth, scientifically analyzed events.

The Executive Summary of the supposed “assessment” states inaccurately and dogmatically in its first sentence: “The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP” This is stated in the Preliminary Assessment (PA, item 3, p. 2. Unfortunately, the PA does not define what it means by ‘limited amount’ or ‘high-quality reporting,’ given that thousands of cases have been reported and scientifically analyzed in past years by Allen Hynek [see above] and Edward J. Ruppelt [see below].

The PA acknowledges that “Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation,” and in a few cases, “UAP appeared to exhibit unusual flight characteristics.” However, the PA immediately offsets that observation by asserting that various types of errors might have occurred: “sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception” and that the events described need further “rigorous” analysis (PA, p. 3).

U.S. Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt

The government statement is inaccurate, untruthful, and misleading. “High-quality reporting” and “rigorous analysis” were utilized more than fifty years previously in a systematic scientific process devised by US Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, the first chief of Project Blue Book (which was established to study UFO stories), and Director of the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. He describes his UAP investigative work in his 1956 book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (Ruppelt, 1956). Ruppelt is one of the most important and exceptional participant witnesses to initial government research about and deliberations on UAP.

 Ruppelt’s college degree was in aeronautical engineering. He states that by early 1948, when “the Soviets [were] practically eliminated as a UFO source,” military speculation about “the idea of interplanetary spaceships was becoming more popular. During 1948, the people in ATIC were openly discussing the possibility of interplanetary visitors….” (p. 30) Ruppelt originated the term ‘UFO’ to replace “flying saucers.”

On the issue of US government secrecy and withholding UAP reports, Ruppelt states that “Some good reports have come in and the Air Force is sitting on them.” (p. 240)

At the conclusion of his book, after having done a more thorough analysis of UAP than had been done before (or since), Captain Ruppelt declares:

…every time I begin to get skeptical, I think of the other reports, the many reports made by experienced pilots and radar operators, scientists, and other people who know what they’re looking at. These reports were thoroughly investigated, and they are still unknowns. Of these reports, the radar-visual sightings are the most convincing. When a ground radar picks up a UFO target and a ground observer sees a light where the radar target is located, then a jet interceptor is scrambled to intercept the UFO and the pilot also sees the light and gets a radar lock-on only to have the UFO almost impudently outdistance him, there is no simple answer. We have no aircraft on this earth that can at will so handily outdistance our latest jets. (p. 242)

Ruppelt notes that when scientific information is on the “edge” and unaccepted originally, it becomes scientifically mainstream in time. He notes that in France in the nineteenth century, when two scientists in the Academy of Sciences reported that “stones fell from the sky,” they were expelled from the Academy. However, although the ‘stones’ stories were initially derided, the “stones” were eventually classified as “meteorites.” (p. 242) Ruppelt implies that this will be the case, too, regarding UFOs and their occupants. He concludes his book with the statement, “Maybe the earth is being visited by interplanetary spaceships. Only time will tell.” (p. 243)

Ruppelt died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack shortly after his book was published. His expertise, and potential future insights and writing, were preemptively and unfortunately eliminated. No equivalent serious investigation of UAP has been undertaken.

The question, “Are there any UAP that are controlled or piloted by other-than-human intelligent beings?” is readily answered: “Yes.” The question people should ask is “Why are the intelligently controlled UAP and their occupants here, and how should we engage them directly?” This begins to touch on the important issues of intention—to help us or to harm us, or solely to observe us? —and of the way the controllers of UAP might do any of these. Their actions will flow from whether they are benevolent or malevolent or, perhaps, indifferent observers of our self-destruction via our home planet Earth’s destruction.

Affirming Human Intelligence

The number of serious stories about UAP, elaborated by distinguished scientists, should prompt people in the twenty-first century to converse in a language that reflects humanity’s current context and considers our potential future place(s) in the cosmos.

In the first paragraph of this essay, I suggested that people who have been unaware of reported Contact events and their potential impacts, or who have been skeptical overall about Contact with other intelligent species, think about how they describe their intellectual position and suggest clarifying questions about Contact issues. A good start would be eliminating the invalid, off-topic question, “Do you believe in UAP or that other-than-human intelligent beings exist?” “Belief” usually has to do with metaphysical or metamaterial intellectual speculation, not consideration of physical or material being. The question just asked would be like, “Do you believe that humankind constructed an International Space Station?” Rather, “thought” and “knowledge” are appropriate and relevant exercises of minds reflecting on UAP and other-than-human intelligent species. The questions to be asked then would be: “Do you think that UAP or exoEarth intelligent beings exist?” to which a person might reply, “Yes, I do,” and provide the reasons why they think this, or “No, I do not” and provide their rationale for this position. If someone has seen a UAP, as I have, another appropriate question would be: “Do you know that UAP exist?” to which I would reply, “Yes, I do,” and explain how I have such knowledge. The latter two queries would generate at least a pause for thought as the questioner and questioned remain engaged intellectually in a material mode.

After undeniable Contact, overall positive outcomes might result from the different ideas and actions—conflictual or compatible—that originate on Earth and in distinct and distant cosmos places and in the space between them. Humankind should hope and interact in a way that, after Contact, they might coexist congenially with other intelligent species in a relational community of intelligent beings.

About The Author

John Hart, Ph.D.,  Emeritus Professor of Christian Ethics, Boston University, is the editor of The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Ecology, Foreword by Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I and Afterword by Claremont University Emeritus Professor John Cobb. He is the author of seven books, including the “Cosmos Contact” trilogy, whose final volume is Third Displacement: Cosmobiology, Cosmolocality, Cosmosocioecology, Foreword by Jacques Vallee, Afterword by John Haught. He was selected for the “Oxford Seminars in Science and Christianity” (University of Oxford, England), and the International Indian Treaty Council Delegation to the UN International Human Rights Commission. 

References

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