My favorite movie of all time is “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. On the surface, you might claim that that makes me an UFOlogist or heavily into alien visitations. Well, my eleven-year old self was, but then I grew up. “Close Encounters” is really a film about facing the scary unknowns and finding out that they are pretty amazing and magical when you find the courage and tenacity to explore them further. As an eleven-year old growing up in Kansas, I had no idea about alien visitation or what the three levels of alien encounters were. With no internet at the time and well before Mulder and Scully were on the search for the truth, I had to find books on the subject…in the library. The Roswell crash, of course, piqued the interest of those who believed that our federal government had been keeping alien encounters under wraps, but this was the cold war and they could have been keeping a Soviet plane crash quiet.
I was also alive during the first moon walk, the first space shuttle launch (and crash) and the Voyager missions. My generation got to watch astronauts and probes expand us beyond our little rock three spaces from the sun. We learned the extreme difficulties of launching people into the treacherous depths of our solar system to the point that we still haven’t sent humanned missions to Mars, Ganymede or any other suitable location forty years later. Our best and brightest, who lived for space travel, questioned whether aliens would be able, much less willing, to travel to our planet and why. They would have to be so far beyond our meager skills just to leave their own solar system and then travel for decades or centuries just to make it to our neck of the Milky Way (see Kardashev scale). Their reasons to travel here would have to be compelling and a few, just plain scary. To travel this far and not make official contact, not use our planetary resources, not try to supplant the dominant species on the Earth makes no sense. If you research further, you will find there is a progenitor claiming physical evidence of alien abductions, encounters and alien ships, the other UFOlogists are parroting his claims. The physical evidence simply isn’t there.
For a lark, I watched an episode of “New Thinking Allowed” with Joseph Burkes, an Emergency medicine physician who spent his youth as an activist and then later as a close encounter seeker. I was listening half-heartedly hearing much of what I’d heard for decades until the last ten minutes of the show when he made a claim that I hadn’t heard from xenophiles before: we aren’t being visited physically, we are being visited holographically. Dr. Burkes who had written a chapter in the book “Paths to Contact”, is now more of a proponent of psychic rather than physical alien visitation. Here are Dr. Burkes’ comments:
“…Experiencers describe over fifty different phenotypes of so-called ETs. (The term “phenotype” refers to category by appearance.) How is this possible? Where do they all come from?
Is the entire galaxy sending representative to visit us, mostly at night, in our dreams, and in our fantasies? Are there dimensional portals allowing such beings to enter into our reality from other planes of existence? Why is there such a terrible paucity of physical evidence?
We are left with narratives and the rather simple-minded formula that for many goes. “If you remember it then it physically occurred.” Back in 1990 during a series of contact experiences I believe that I was actually shown by an intelligence associated with flying saucers how they create illusion. It was a kind of “show and tell” lesson that one might use to instruct children. Thus, I came up with the Virtual Experience Model. According to this schema the “ETs” can create hologram like displays that we interpret as “craft,” a Virtual Experience of the First Kind (VE-1)
2. According to an account in Dr Karla Turner’s “Masquerade of Angels”, they can create a virtual reality experience that is technologically mediated, a VE-2.
3. And according to Dr. Andrija Pucharich’s experience with Uri Geller in the 1970s the alleged aliens can create in us virtual memories, i.e. impregnated ones that don’t correspond to any physical event, a Virtual Experience of the Third Kind, VE-3.
One might ask, “So what if some of these different types of so-called aliens are just illusions? For all we know the assortment of phenotypes are created by some form of intelligent energy. They might be confounding us by produces visual displays that we interpret as physical beings, but in reality, are a kind of “masquerade of aliens.” If this is true then a radical reassessment of the entire field of UFO studies is in order. I imagine the resistance to this iconoclastic model is quite high. With not much success I have been promoting the Virtual Experience Model for nearly 20 years against what passes as “conventional wisdom in the UFO field. Despite my having to go against the current, it is my hope that understanding the mechanisms of contact will allow us to strengthen our investigations into “This Otherness That Experiencers Now Call ET.” This is one of my alternate designation for UFO intelligences.
The use of technologically mediated illusion can explain the confusing picture of close encounters with strikingly different phenotypes. Dozens of beings with radically different appearances might not exist at all, but rather we encounter them in a series of theater of the mind productions. With an ability to create virtual reality, or the technology to implant false memories that many recall as “abductions,” UFO intelligences could make it appear as if the whole galaxy is visiting Earth.”
Since I have been spending much of my free time researching psychic ability in its many and varied forms, this became a light switch moment for me. Apparitions, aliens, discarnates, animal spirits and other forms of communication coming at us when we’re not quite awake or alert may just be from a single universal consciousness. We may be generating a comfortable or desirable visage for the entity most of us long to communicate with. I brought this up at the Rhine’s weekly meeting and there were many nodding heads save one. We have a residential Carl Jung fan who sees these sorts of visions as originating within our own psyches. We can generate a self-inflicted hallucination if we want it badly enough just like the Lost Boys could bring Tinkerbell back by clapping. There are two places where this argument falls apart. First, there are people who have made claims of alien contact who were not actively seeking it, nor were they fans of aliens. Second, shared visions or mass hallucinations if you will, have occurred during Dr. Burke’s alien encounter sessions many, many times. Airplane pilots will agree about a UFO encounter and RADAR will pick up the rapidly moving blips. Sailors on ships will describe an event with incredible agreement, yet no physical proof exists. These people do not want to see anomalous events because their careers might be at risk for making a report to that effect. I doubt that their psyches were primed to see aliens. Mass psychic telepathy seems unrealistic as well. My hypothesis is like Dr. Burkes’ holographic projection that mimics a physical object somewhat like the projections on the holodeck in “Star Trek: Next Generation”. The other encounters during meditation, hypnogogic (just before sleep) or hypnopompic (waking) states, however, may be telepathic communication. Either way, to me this seems to be the most logical hypothesis for alleged alien contact.
