The Danger of Disclosure

Every few weeks, it seems, another announcement appears claiming that some authoritative group, usually involving the pope, the president, Edgar Mitchell and whomever, is about to announce that UFOs are no longer unknown, but are alien craft. I’ve been hearing about pending announcements like this for as long as I’ve had an interest in the subject, and they have always worried me. They worry me more than ever now.

We are not in any way prepared for such an announcement, but the reason is not as straightforward as it may seem. There isn’t likely to be any panic, at least not initially, but later there is apt to be. This isn’t for the reason that Stephen Hawking recently suggested, that aliens might prove to be hostile, but because our visitors, if they are aliens in the conventional meaning of that word, are very, very different from us.

One person who is never mentioned among those who might be involved in the disclosure process is me. Instead of allowing one of the very few people on earth, or indeed in its history, to have had much open contact to participate in the process in any way, I’m not simply marginalized, but carefully ignored on the theory that what I have to say would be too bizarre for people to accept.

Personally, I don’t much care, but I do know that without even the virginal understanding I possess to add perspective, contact, should it follow disclosure, is apt to be a disaster for the human race.

So, it’s fair to ask, what’s wrong? Why can’t they just land, come out of their spaceships, and have a nice discussion with us, perhaps about how to build a starship, or engage in what some disclosure advocates call “exopolitics?”

I can only speak from my own observations, but I do think that there is a very specific difference between us that is going to make communication, to say the least, both challenging and dangerous. Understand, I am not saying that our visitors are necessarily hostile. In fact, my own thought is that Stephen Hawking’s speculation that aliens might be dangerous reflects the tragic lack of sophistication with which even our best scientists are addressing the matter.

Recently, for example, in Melbourne, the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, got a good laugh from his audience by dismissing the whole UFO and abduction phenomenon, and crop circles, for that matter, as ridiculous and calling people like me “cranks.” When I interviewed him for Dreamland some years ago, he was quite polite to me, but at that time, of course, he was selling a book.

In any case, let’s put aside childish things for the time being, and address the real issue. When I was in direct contact with the visitors, it was clear that they were real, but not in the same way that we are real. They were not ghosts, spirits, or some sort of arcane aspect of the mind, but actual, physical beings who were, it soon became clear to me, far more elaborately embedded in reality than we are.

But what was the difference? It amounts to this: reality is composed of information. What we see all around us is basically the same thing that exists in a computer: bits that are either information or not information. We know that, on the level of the very small, the world unfolds in a different way from what we see on the larger, or classical level that we can observe directly.

In our reality, if you flip a coin, you get either heads or tails. You never get both and you cannot get both. However, on the scale of the very small, that’s not how things work, and not only that, recent experiments have shown that, even at a classical scale, matter can be induced to be both a particle and a wave at the same time.

Normally, however, there is a strong interaction that prevents atoms from going into superposition and becoming indeterminate?essentially everywhere at the same time. They remain in the classical state because they are always in contact with other atoms.

Experimentally, we can so isolate them from their surroundings that they do go into superposition, but we can only do this for a few seconds, just long enough to take advantage of their indeterminate state to, say, do hyper-fast quantum computing.

But what if we could control the degree to which we were, as bodies, in superposition or in a classical, determined state? And what if we could also control how information unfolds at the very smallest level? And if we did not only possess quantum entangled neurons within our own brains, which we do, but were quantum entangled with all other human brains, and therefore could each access the knowledge and intellectual power not just of one brain, but of billions?

We would be radically, fantastically different from what we are. We would have the ability to spontaneously change our appearance, or even become invisible. We would be able to not only extend our awareness across the whole of reality, but also to draw on our collective understanding to interpret what we see.

We would, in short, be like our visitors. But we are not like this. Because of the nature of our bodies and the structure of our brains, we are welded to classical reality. Only by the greatest effort, using advanced techniques of meditation, can we even glimpse what our visitors always see.

Not only that, we are entirely natural bodies. We’re not enhanced with any sort of designed biology, but from my own observations, I can make a strong case that our visitors may be a mixture of natural and artificial components that will eventually compel us to stretch our definition of consciousness to include what is, in effect, a machine intelligence living in a biological foundation.

I have spent time with the visitors, not a lot of time, but enough to say with confidence that they apparently have another level of consciousness and probably additional brain matter to accommodate it. This would account for their larger heads, one might suppose. It would also account for our profound emotional response to them. They see more of reality, and we sense that, and it is viscerally frightening. To experience this yourself, force a dog to look into your eyes. Smarter dogs will become quite uncomfortable, because they will see the chasm of the unknown there: your vastly greater contact with reality.

Roughly speaking the human brain contains three levels: a hindbrain that governs instinct and autonomic behaviors, a midbrain where our emotions reside, and the neocortex, which in human beings is grossly enlarged compared to other animals. It is the neocortex, with its ability to reason, that makes us human and gives us our vastly enhanced understanding of the world around us.

I believe that our visitors have a fourth level, a hypercortex, that mediates their relationship to the world around them in the ways I am describing above. It gives them vastly more access to reality than we have. It provides them with the power to alter reality on the informational level, meaning that, for them, physics is not a set of laws that cannot be changed, but a tool that is easily amenable to manipulation.

We see the world in a linear format that is imposed on us by the structure of the human brain. They see it on the vastly larger scale that a hypercortex with all of its additional properties provides them.

I doubt that this hypercortex evolved naturally. I suspect that it was designed, that it is, essentially, artificial, which accounts for the surprising way that they function with such shocking precision, but also with such a complex and rich emotional content.

So, why would disclosure be dangerous? If it somehow leads to immediate and direct contact, it is going to devastate the human mind. Your dog will need to look away from your eyes after a few seconds. But it is the nature of the visitors to be essentially everywhere that their consciousness is engaged. Thus, if they appear here in numbers, they will not only enter our physical world, they will enter our minds. And, I can assure, you, that kind of contact is as hard a thing as a human being can experience. It is an agony beyond terror. I know. I have been there.

It is also true, though, that it can be understood and accepted. I never lost my visceral fear of the visitors. But, as I came to understand its origin, I was able to live with it quite comfortably. So we CAN achieve contact, but if there was to be an attempt at mass interaction now, it would certainly cause the collapse of the human mind. Just a very tiny number of people would survive with their sanity intact. The surprise and the intimacy of the apparent threat would be too much to bear.

As I have said in these pages before, and as, in fact, I have written John Podesta and others, there is a route to contact that will work well for us.

This is the process that we need to undertake: first, there should be a disclosure at the NASA level that there are apparently unknown objects in our skies; second, the National Academy of Sciences should encourage granting so that research can be done into this area. In this way, we will begin at the beginning to build a real foundation of understanding on our own terms. If science shifts away from the weakness that it now displaces and begins to address the issue with the appropriate tools, we will soon form enough of an image of our visitors and their capabilities to go to the next step, which is to study, in a considered and scientifically valid manner, the bodies and minds of people who claim contact.

Initially, this part of the study should be confined to people who have identifiable implants, or have had them removed. Later, when we understand more clearly how the mind deals with the contact experience, we can extend the study to include people whose experiences are not grounded in physical evidence.

Right now, there are 12 people from whom identical implants have been removed. That’s correct, identical in physical appearance. And all of these objects are available for study, but not just now. At present, we have a government frantically trying to hide the reality that it started a shooting war with the visitors, which caused them to relegate us to the level of animals and not to deal with us on anything approaching an equal level. We have a scientific community that is profoundly afraid of seeing more than it can bear, which is, incidentally, the origin of Dr. Hawking’s concern. On a deep level he fears coming into contact with somebody who knows essentially everything. And he’s right to fear that.

DBH Kuiper and Michael Morris offered the thought in the April, 1977 issue of Science that anybody who could reach earth from another star would probably keep themselves well hidden, because they would be here in search of innovation (something new) and would know that, if they revealed themselves, our entire culture would be redirected toward them, with the result that we would cease to innovate.

It may be possible to gain all knowledge. Perhaps this is why one of the visitors, when I asked how he understood the universe, replied with a vivid image of a coffin. To come to the end of innovation would be the most profound catastrophe that could befall an intelligent species, and the quest for the new would take on an almost mythic urgency.

So, disclosure is a lot more complicated than the chaps who expect it to lead to a nice sitdown with the aliens might expect. To understand why the visitors are probably here, and why they might resist an open meeting with us unless we are absolutely about to go extinct, it’s necessary to recall the words of Samuel Johnson: “Such is the state of life that none are happy except by the anticipation of change.”

I think that the visitors have lost this, and so have ended up at the end of meaning but not at the end of being. They are, in this sense, both alive and dead at the same time. But they have a chance to regain the taste of life, at least vicariously, by living again through the medium of being fellow-travelers on the human journey.

It is this overwhelming need that will always prevent them from revealing too much of themselves to us, and that will stand as a profound and permanent obstacle to us meeting them on terms that we might find congenial. Should we end up subsumed into their much more powerful reality, we will suffer the wrenching agony of having been hurled to the end of the path before we have even begun to take baby steps, which is a fate, quite literally, worse than death.

It would be nice if the disclosure community had the ability to address some of these issues usefully, but without including articulate close encounter witnesses, they can only fumble along as they are doing now, a bare step ahead of the scientists, who have not yet begun to crawl, let alone walk.

But we could fly, if we do this intelligently. We could make contact work, and take a huge leap forward as a species, rather than remaining as we are now in the nursery, or throwing ourselves off the cliff of premature contact.

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