UAPs and Non-Human Intelligence: What is the most reasonable scenario? ~ Bernardo Kastrup, PhD, PhDhttps://www.bernardokastrup.com/2024/01/uaps-and-non-human-intelligence-what-is.html?m=1I submit to you that the following tentative premises are justifiable: firstly, there is an engineered technology in our skies and oceans that is not human. The counterargument to this is, of course, that UAPs may be top-secret but very human military devices, often called ‘black technology.’ Yet, this seems to contradict much of what has been disclosed since 2017. The following passage from the testimony of CDR Fravor to Congress illustrates the point: representative Ms. Nancy Mace asked, “Many dismiss UAP reports as classified weapons testing by our own government. But in your experience as a pilot does our government typically test advanced weapons systems right next to multimillion-dollar jets without informing our pilots?” To which CDR Fravor responded: “No. We have test ranges for that.”
Moreover, if UAPs such as the metallic spheres were black technology the US Department of Defence were trying to keep secret, it is hard to imagine why Dr. Kirkpatrick—an official of that very department—would publicize their existence and even declassify a video showcasing their size, form, flight capabilities, etc. Also, the fact that UAPs often seem to defy our understanding of physics doesn’t line up with the black-technologies hypothesis, as it would require not only the engineering to be secret, but also the very advancement of the human understanding of physics. This isn’t impossible, but isn’t very plausible either. Finally, it is difficult to imagine why such game-changing black technologies—which would have to have been around for at least as long as the UAP phenomenon itself—were never used in large and conspicuous scales to advance the geopolitical interests of any nation.
Secondly, if there is non-human technology in our skies and oceans, then there must be Non-Human Intelligences (NHIs) active on our planet, engineering and controlling the UAPs. This does not imply that the NHIs are extra-terrestrial; it means simply that they aren’t human.
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Two key conclusions from Dr. Vallée’s work are particularly pertinent to our challenge here. The first is that, based on countless witness reports, the phenomenon does not seem to make any distinction between physical and psychological effects; it produces both, as if they were mere facets of one and the same causative mechanisms. The boundaries we draw between the mental and the physical don’t seem to be observed by the phenomenon, which transits casually back and forth across the dividing line. Dr. Vallée acknowledges the undeniable physical aspect of the phenomenon—it can be filmed, tracked by radar and other sensors, emits measurable energy, often leaves physical footprints and vestiges behind, etc.—but adds that at least part of what the witnesses experience is “staged”: the UAP sometimes evokes archetypal, symbolic imagery directly in the witness’ mind to convey a feeling-laden metaphorical message, which transcends the objectively measurable characteristics of the phenomenon.
Though Dr. Vallée had already come to this conclusion decades ago, recent investigations into secret US Department of Defence programmes on UAPs, by journalist Ross Coulthart, seem to confirm it (see pages 265-267 of Mr. Coulthart’s 2021 book, In Plain Sight). Stanford Professor Dr. Garry Nolan, perhaps the most respectable scientist to actively research the phenomenon, acknowledged Mr. Coulthart’s reporting on the matter. He went on to recount a specific UAP case that illustrates, perhaps better than any other, the UAPs’ ability to directly manipulate human perception: “[this is a] story that Jacques Vallée brought to me, of a family in France, driving down the highway. This was like in the last five or ten years [from June of 2022]. And they had a glass-topped car. They look up and they see a UFO, you know, basically paralleling them down the highway. The mother looks around and sees that no other individuals nearby are freaking out about this thing above them. The children in the back take out their cell phones, take a picture of it. They get home and they look at the pictures on their camera, and they don’t see an object [of the kind they thought they had witnessed]; they see a little star-shaped thing about thirty or so feet above, and I have the picture. That doesn’t look anything like a drone. … I think it has like seven spokes and a central hole of some sort. So, you’re left with this: they saw a giant craft, but the picture shows that it was nothing [like it] there. Nobody else could see it. So, even if it was an object that was there, others weren’t capable of seeing it, so it was manipulating vision” (my emphasis).
The second pertinent conclusion from Dr. Vallée’s work is that the pattern of behaviour of UAPs is not consistent with the extra-terrestrial hypothesis (see chapter 9 of his book, Dimensions). Dr. Vallée estimated that, in a period of just twenty years, there have been about three million UAP landings. This is not consistent with visitations by beings from another planet for the purposes of surveying the Earth or researching its inhabitants (orders of magnitude less visits would have sufficed for these purposes); instead, the UAPs’ behaviour is precisely what one would expect if they were from here—and were simply going about their business. After all, there are many rare—and some not so rare—animal and plant species that human beings encounter a lot less frequently than 150.000 times per year, and they are undeniably terrestrial. In his interview with Mr. Coulthart, also Dr. Nolan expressed the view that UAPs are not extra-terrestrial.
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The question now is, when were fossil hydrocarbons first available in large-enough quantities to fuel the initial growth of an ancient industrial civilisation? Dr. Schmidt and Dr. Frank estimate that this was already the case in the Carboniferous period, about 350 million years ago, which leaves us with a window of hundreds of millions of years for industrial NHIs—multiple different ones—to have developed on Earth.
Notice that my claim here is not that it is likely that high-tech nonhuman civilisations have emerged on Earth before us; I cannot evaluate the probabilities involved. My claim is that, based on what we know, such civilisations are not impossible or inconsistent with the geological record. On the contrary: as Dr. Schmidt and Dr. Frank point out, the record shows several periods of global warming consistent with large-scale industrialization.
Now, since we cannot visit an NHI city today, it is necessarily the case that, if such ancient terrestrial civilisations ever existed, they have largely died out—at least as far as the surface of the planet is concerned. This, however, is not implausible: as we know from our own case, civilisations can start, reach high-tech levels, and then be annihilated in a mere few thousand years. Indeed, although our civilisation is still going, we are painfully aware of how easily and quickly it can be brought to a swift end tomorrow, in a thermonuclear war, asteroid impact, climate collapse, a more deadly pandemic than the one we have just survived, etc.
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Any culture once exposed to the magnitude of a planetary catastrophe will have a historical trauma transmitted down the generations through myth and storytelling, similarly to—but much more acutely than—how flood stories have survived since the end of the last ice age. Such a culture will be wary of the planet’s surface, for the latter is a notoriously exposed and volatile region: it undergoes far more extreme temperature swings then, say, the deep oceans and underground caves; it is prone to severe weather that can ruin crops and flood entire cities; it is exposed to irradiation from solar storms and other cosmic events, which can ruin technology and life; it is extremely vulnerable to comet and asteroid impact, as the dinosaurs found out; etc. And since such a post-apocalyptic culture would have been reduced to relatively few members, their requirements for living space would also be relatively modest. Depending on the surviving level of their technology, they could have made a home for themselves underwater or underground.
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NHIs, by definition, don’t share such commonality with us. After all, they belong to a different species. Their cognition will almost certainly unfold with vastly different patterns and modalities. Even their logic may bear little resemblance to our own Aristotelian axioms. Moreover, their cultural context is bound to be entirely different from ours, leading to different empirical references: originally, they may not have had a cognitive category for, say, ‘car’ or understand the concept of a wheeled vehicle (for instance, if they are an aquatic species). It is naïve to expect that NHIs could learn our language as easily as a Chinese person can learn English. The underlying cognitive structures and references won’t line up; why should they?
Nonetheless, this doesn’t mean that we and NHIs can never communicate. What it does mean is that achieving this feat will require an effort to enter each other’s cognitive inner space—literally. In other words, before they could communicate with us, they would have to gain direct access to, and manipulate, our abstract mental processes. This is not something that can be casually achieved in the way I can pick up Italian during a holiday.
You will be closer to appreciating the difficulties if you think of whales: we know they have a language that scores higher in some relevant measures of complexity than our own. Yet, we can’t translate ‘Whalish’ into any human language, even though whales, just like us, are air-breathing, breast-feeding mammals.
To really appreciate the difficulties we have to go beyond whales—close relatives of ours—and imagine that, say, praying mantises—ancient insects much less related to us than whales—would have some form of language, and that we would try to communicate with them. Now we’re getting closer to the mark, for the cognitive templates and inner logic of insectoids are bound to be very largely incommensurable with ours. The challenge here is not mere translation; to speak ‘Insectoidish’ one would have to enter the cognitive space of insectoids—i.e., enter their mind.
Intellectual-level communication between more advanced terrestrial NHIs and us will require direct access to our cognitive processes. They will have to directly modulate our own abstract references and modes. In other words, they will have to convey their ideas to us by prompting our own mind to articulate those ideas to itself, using its own conceptual dictionary and grammatical structures. And because their message—a product of their own cognition, incommensurable with ours—is bound to not adequately line up with our grammar and conceptual menu, this articulation will per force have to be symbolic, metaphorical; it will have to point to the intended meaning, as opposed to embodying the intended meaning directly, or literally.
There is plenty of clinical precedence for this in the literature of depth psychology. Analytical Psychology, for instance, maintains that the deeper, evolutionarily ancient, instinctive layer of our mind, for not having the language capabilities of the executive ego, speaks to us in dreams and visions through symbols, metaphors. It can’t tell us in English, for instance, that time is flowing while we procrastinate, so to prompt us to act. So it may, instead, trigger and modulate a dream in which we, say, accidentally drop our backpack in a fast-flowing river and watch helplessly as it floats away. If the deeper layer of our mind, for being phylogenetically primitive, is incapable of articulating the conceptual abstractions ‘time,’ ‘flow,’ and ‘procrastination,’ it can still point symbolically to its intended meaning; it can still confront us with imagery that evokes the same underlying feeling—a sense of urgency—that would have been evoked by the statement, “time is flowing while you procrastinate.” This is what intellectual-level communication looks like when the interlocutors do not have commensurable cognitive structures. And this is how we may expect NHIs to communicate with us, if they have the technology required to reach directly into our minds and manipulate our cognitive inner space.
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Indeed, a different event of abiogenesis—there is no a priori reason why life must have arisen from non-life only once on Earth either—could have set a different biochemistry; one still capable of storing the organism’s body-plan, of constructing the organism’s building blocks (proteins, in our case), of metabolizing, and of passing the organism’s body-plan to the next generation via reproduction; yet one different from ours. This is acknowledged in biology in the hypothesis of a “shadow biosphere”: there may, in fact, be organisms on Earth with biochemistry different from ours, because they may be descendants from a different abiogenesis event; we haven’t detected them yet because we haven’t done a detailed biochemical analysis of most organisms on the planet.
If even terrestrial organisms, which arose and evolved on this very planet, could have biochemistry distinct from ours, it stands to reason that organisms evolved in another planet, with different environmental conditions and chemical composition, are very unlikely to have the exact same biochemistry we do. That would require an implausible coincidence of literally cosmic proportions, even under the assumption of convergent evolution at the level of the phenotype (i.e., body form).
Therefore,
if the biologics in the freezers of the powers-that-be have the same biochemistry we do, I believe it is safe to assume that they are terrestrial; they are our older cousins—likely forever traumatised by earlier planetary cataclysms—and certainly not aliens.
Another prediction of the ‘ultra-terrestrial’ hypothesis is this: the materials—say, the metals—used in the UAP craft should have isotope ratios compatible with an earthly origin, as opposed to one outside the solar system. If the powers-that-be are in possession of such craft, this shouldn’t be a difficult test to perform.Together, the two test results suggested above, if mutually consistent, should be conclusive.