By Alan Steinfeld – Author and Editor of Making Contact: Preparing for the New Realities of Extraterrestrial Existence
The Lies and the Truth
In Chinese medicine there is a saying: “The bigger the front, the bigger the back.” This means that the more someone boasts, the more they are hiding. In other words, the bigger the lie, the more transformative the truth. In the case of Making Contact, nearly 75 years of denials and cover-ups have kept us from the obvious and simple truth that “we are not alone.” Nick Pope, a former investigator for the Ministry of Defense in the United Kingdom on UFOs, implies in the opening essay to Making Contact is the need for the coverup is to hide the potential threat to the population. Ironically, he quotes a 1997 Ministry of Defense report: “They have never shown any hostile intent and therefore cannot represent a threat.”Still, Pope goes on to say this: “Not only can we not assess the extent of any threat, we cannot even say if one exists at all. The military perspective …in relation to UFOs, the issue of threat is always going to be front and center.” Nevertheless, it seems that no harm – except shock, surprise, and wonder – has ever been recorded when craft have been reported flying over our civilian or military airspace.
What has been the threat from a military point of view has been the visitors’ preoccupation with our nuclear weapons. UFO researcher Robert Hastings of New Mexico interviewed more than 120 former service members about unidentified flying objects over nuclear weapon storage and testing grounds. For instance, one testimony from retired Air Force Captain Robert Salas was about the Malmstrom Air in 1967 when 10 intercontinental ballistic missiles suddenly became inoperative after a mysterious red glowing object was seen over the base. If the armed services consider interference with our most treasured articles of war a threat, then perhaps what they are telling us is that we are really a threat to ourselves.
In addition, UFOs represent a potential threat to oil and gas companies that rule the world. It is clear that whatever is behind the maneuvering of these craft is not using fossil fuels to fill up their gas tank to get here. Rather what has been observed is the applications of quantum mechanic principles such as super position, entanglement, and the use of wave/particle duality.
The Truth Hurts
Taking such noticeable observations into account was Luis Elizondo, former head of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). After studying hours of classified government films, these objects were not from any country we know; indirectly invoking the idea of an extraterrestrial intelligence. But why should that foster three quarters of a century of fabricated denials by those at the deepest levels of government? The answer is the deepest threat of all: the assault on humans as the masters of creation.
In the last few hundred years our race has suffered from three insults to our proclaimed superiority. The first was cosmological, when Copernicus proclaimed the Earth (and therefore man) was not the center of the universe. The next insult was biological, as Darwin proved humans were not made in the image of God – but evolved from lower forms of animals. Freud and the psychological revolution of the twentieth century brought us the third insult, by discovering the unconscious ruled our behavior, stating that our lives were controlled by an inaccessible force. Even if Nicolaus, Charles and Sigmund were right, the assumption that humans are the smartest guys in creation still prevail. However, when looking at the bewildering movements of UAP, with no visible sign of propulsion our current science must, if they can face it, claim ignorance.
This is a major threat to the all knowing scientific hierarchy, and such people as the chief American astronomer Neil Degrasse Tyson, who refuses to acknowledge the insult. He demonstrated this when he was asked to comment on the Navy pilots’, from the USS Nimitz, image of the now famous “tic tac” video. He concluded they were seeing malfunctioning artifacts on their equipment’s screen.
Obviously, he was in total ignorance of the fact that four pilots in two surveillance jets also saw the curious object with their own eyes.
The tragedy of such a dismissive response is the missed opportunity of growth in scientific understanding. Not only does he dismiss the lived experience of so many, but he also leverages his reputation, and his prestige by joking instead of serious consideration. Such arrogance might take a lesson from one of America’s most honored men of letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1844, Emerson expressed the evolution of a mind confounded by mystery:
“The state of science is an index of our self-knowledge. Since everything in nature answers to a power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is because the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.”[1]
Scientific pride is what Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was based on. He wrote: “In many ways, the established paradigm is the enemy of discovery. An anomaly may not be perceived for what it is, precisely because it is not expected”[2] But a man who was truly willing to embrace the unknown, even if it meant changing the face of physics forever said this: “Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance.” Albert Einstein.
Two principles are key to making contact with a greater intelligence.
One is that anomalous phenomena are not something to deny or to believe, but a possibility to be explored.
Two, life is most likely not a freak occurrence, but an emergent property of creation.
However, faced with the ideas of threats to the witless obsession of military domination, and the dim-witted greed of corporate influence supported by the half-witted arrogance of scientific assumptions, making contact with the phenomena will remain ‘brute and undetectable.’ The hope is to let the shadow pass from threat to curiosity so that one day soon we will know what Eden Phillpotts realized in his 1918 observation of nature from, A Shadow Passes:
“The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”
References
[1] Ralph Waldo Emerson The Poet, Essays: Second Series [1844],
https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/poettext.html
[2] D. N. Perkins, The Mind’s Best Work (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1981), 178.