Whitley Strieber
 

I spent yesterday afternoon and evening at the home of author Peter Diamandis at a meeting to discuss a new X-Prize. Avi Loeb, Ryan Graves spoke, as did Peter Skafish and Garry Nolan of the Sol Foundation. I was given a few moments to introduce myself from the audience and say a bit about the close encounter experience.

The speakers were all brilliant, and I was powerfully struck by how convincing it was to hear this incredibly accomplished and articulate group of individuals, one after the other, discuss their work and the reasons that it is so important.

When I got my few moments, Avi immediately began to react in a way that suggested to me that he believed that such accounts could not be factually supported—actually, he reacted to me in much the same way that many of his colleagues in his own field have reacted to him. And he did it for the same reason—the claims are an extreme challenge to norms, and there is no hard, straightforward evidence. He cannot produce materials that prove objects like 3-I Atlas and Omuamua are intelligently designed, and I cannot prove that the close encounter phenomenon involves contact with nonhuman beings.

I was expecting this response from somebody, and was able to react to it, I trust, in a non-confrontational manner. Until there are facts to consider, no debate is really possible anyway.

What he did is called defensive derogation: a claim or assertion is protected by devaluing another. It is an effort to defend the authenticity of one’s own claim by revealing that another is even more fragile. It’s not an intellectual choice, but rather something we do instinctively. 

Let’s explore why this happened, why he was not wrong to challenge me just as, as I am sure he would agree, his colleagues are not wrong to challenge him.

The issue is evidence. While Avi can argue, and brilliantly, that the evidence that he has provided that the interstellar objects he has studied is sufficient to justify further study, he cannot satisfy his peers that they were, indeed, intelligently designed on other worlds. Nor is is he advocating that, no more than I am advocating alien contact. 

Actually, we share the same quandary. I can make an unimpeachable case that many thousands of people are reporting that they have been approached, and in some cases experienced physical intrusions that left evidence. But just as Avi cannot claim that the objects he is interested in are definitely the product of intelligent engineering, I cannot claim that the observations that I and others have made during close encounters reflect what actually happened. And neither of us has any intention of engaging in such advocacy. 

But that doesn’t mean that the answers to the questions posed by the information we have, in our separate areas, both gathered, is not important. These are the most important questions ever formed, for the answers have the potential to completely change our core experience of what it means to be alive in the world.

This gets me to the X-Prize, and I have a proposal that I hope will lead to a fundamentally new understanding of the mystery which confronts us, by which I mean both the UAP phenomenon and the reports of what may be direct contacts with entities associated with it.

If we get this right, then we will enter a new phase of human experience.

One part involves taking an in-depth look at the UAP and related phenomena and addressing the fact that the functionality that we can see in objects ranging from the interstellar voyagers to UAP, to the orbs called up by experimenters such as the Skywatch group, suggests that there is an entire level of physics which is, at present, unknown to us. This goes beyond what has been attempted behind closed doors for years, which is to understand how UAP can defy gravity and move at such high speeds. That study has been confined to explaining these functionalities in the context of the laws of physics that we already know. There is a much bigger fish in this sea, in fact, an entire unknown physics that probably involves such basic things as new definitions of motion, distance and time, and along with them a different and more comprehensive approach to what constitutes reality. 

I have a proposal that I hope will lead to a fundamentally new understanding of the mystery which confronts us.

Basic to properly addressing these mysteries is the comprehensive expansion of data collection, which is where someone like Avi Loeb comes in.  The second is looking at this data in the most basic way and defining the functionalities we observe very precisely, so that we can begin the process of describing the laws of of the unknown physics that must govern them. This should include not just the movements of UAP, but also why and how related phenomena, such as the ability to appear and disappear, are involved and how they actually work.

In addition, some of the whistleblower testimony and observations at places like the Skinwalker Ranch, suggest that things we would classify as supernatural or paranormal are involved, and, as these phenomena must also be governed by a physics, they must not be separated from the study simply because there is no way to fit them into current physics. 

There can’t be anything that we can see that is outside of reality, so these things that we have been ignoring or identifying as deities, ghosts or whatever, are subject to  laws of some kind. In other words, their functionality has rules, and those rules are a physics.

Thus the first part of this X-Prize is about redefining physics in such a way that it includes laws that govern observable phenomena that we do not presently understand. To determine what should be included is straightforward enough: this might as well be called the Physics of the Impossible.

But how does this physics actually affect us?

Whenever you see a ghost, experience telepathy, are visited by an angel or a demon or an alien, or lose time that you cannot explain, or find yourself levitated into some sort of impossible place, or moved through time, you are experiencing the physics of the impossible at work.

So the second part involves obtaining viable evidence that can put a baseline under not only the close encounter stories, but our entire relationship with impossible experiences.

If we do this successfully,we will learn how the now-hidden laws of the physics of the impossible affect our lives. We will move everything from gods and ghosts to aliens and angels into the realm of the understood. 

I do not see the close encounter experience as necessarily reflecting contact with aliens, but obviously I won’t dismiss that or any theory about what it is. One thing about it that is certain is that it has always been misunderstood or denied. We have never had a clear understanding of why  ghosts, demons, angels, gods, aliens  or any of it, even exists. My sense is that these manifestations are part of the living world, and therefore that they are admissible to understanding.

So this part of the project would be approached from a number of different directions. First, the baseline in factual experience must be established. What parts of witness memories of their encounters are entering through the senses, and what parts is the brain constructing from imagination and expectation in order to build an internal picture that makes sense to the witness? Because the brain manages information received from the senses differently from what it constructs internally in order to organize input for which it has no precedent, there is something here that can be measured and interpreted.

The methods of doing this are still being explored, and the way the brain handles input is quite complex, but given the work that has already been done by research neurologists, additional study is almost certainly going to produce useful results. Once a protocol is established, a cohort of close encounter witnesses and other paranormal experiencers can be designed that will enable the identification of which parts of the experiences that the brain received from the senses and which parts it confabulated in order to form a coherent picture of what was being observed.

The objective is not to prove that, if the reported experiences do have a physical baseline, then claims of alien contact are true. Far from it. The objective is to show that there either is or is not a physical component to such experiences.

If such a component proves to be present, then a new analysis of the experiencer testimony should be undertaken, which is where disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychology and the study of myth should be engaged.

It’s a huge project. But we do have the tools to address it. There is not one discipline I have mentioned that does not already possess the needed tools. All we need is a clear definition of objectives and cultural permission to pursue them.

If we engage in this project, we will make a giant leap toward the goal that I suggested during my brief statement at the Disclosure Foundation conference in Washington last June, which is that I want us to become a cosmic species. I define that as gaining the same or greater understanding of reality that whomever manifests UAP, orbs and close encounters, and has controlled us in the past through the means of what we thought were supernatural beings, possesses. Ideally, understanding will bring with it the ability to use the new knowledge to enrich humanity at every level.

One must ask, since these two lines of inquiry are obviously so essential to our future, why hasn’t this already been done? The reason is that the broad scientific and academic communities do not have the kind of acceptance within their cultures that would allow such studies to be undertaken. Communities cannot function without standards, and such studies are not acceptable under present standards.

But that’s why it’s called the “X-Prize.” It is there to challenge old standards by providing new ones that work better. This prize can be and should be, the ultimate disruptor, the one that frees us truly and finally into the greater and more empowering clarity that has eluded us for so long.

The reason that our intellectuals have not already embraced this quest is official secrecy. It prevents these communities from revising their standards to accommodate these mysteries. But that can change, and now is the time.

Over the past few years, I have watched the congressional hearings, listened to the whistleblower testimony, met and gotten to know many of the whistleblowers, and satisfied myself that they are offering useful testimony of historic importance. I have also observed just how hard hidden elements within the government are trying to prevent the exposure of physical materials from other realities, intact craft of unknown origin, and any cadavers, to open scrutiny. When it comes to anything physical, or anything like clear videos or sharp photos, they draw the line, at least, so far they do.

And this doesn’t matter anymore.

No further release of data is needed to empower our intellectual establishment to open the door to these subject areas The whistleblowers with their revelations and the experiencers with their stories, have laid the groundwork. All that is now needed is for someone of great authority, probably the U.S. president, to call a press conference and say that non-human intelligence is real and they are here and we don’t yet know what that means, but let’s open the door to our scientists and academics so that they can find out.

If that is done, then the vast human intellectual resource around the world that has been forced to remain neutral for all these years will spring into action. I assume that it will leap past what the secret keepers have discovered in a very short time, and we will, at last, be on our way to fulfilling the dream of occupying a place of mastery in our mysterious universe, and will finally understand our own mind and the glories hidden within.

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