The consciousness aspect of the UFO phenomenon. I.

 

Background

Beginning with this blog post, I will focus more on the consciousness aspect of the UFO phenomenon. Why? There are several important reasons, but I think to suffice to mention in this initial post are these two reasons:

1. Many people who report contact with UFOs say it has significantly altered their perspective on life.
2.  Individuals, or experiencers, also talk about telepathic communication and manipulation of the experiencers´ perception of space and time during an encounter with the UFO phenomenon.

So the first (1.) point should indicate that these experiencers genuinely believe that something extraordinary happened to them. Something that had a profound and lifelong effect on them as human beings. It would be dishonest of me to claim that I know for a fact what happened to these experiencers or who or what caused the profound changes. I do not know that. 

But I know that profound changes in one's worldview and values, as seen and documented in some experiencers, are not typical and rarely occur quickly. These kinds of profound changes are generally related to traumatic events (war, violence, physical, sexual, and emotional abuse), or some sort of sudden insight, or expanded awareness, often in connection to mystical and spiritual experiences, meditation, euphoric states, etc. 

Therefore, I believe contact cases exist between humans and the unknown, defying conventional explanation (e.g., profound psychological and emotional changes). More importantly, I think there are some cases of contact where the human genuinely believes his or her experience and candidly tells his or her story. For me, that is reason enough to take their stories seriously and respect the people telling them. 

How will official transparency progress?

 

Introduction

What are the plausible developments of what seems to be a genuine openness about UFOs/UAP from, particularly, the U.S. Government (USG)?

In the following, I am going to give some plausible answers to that question. Or speculate on the question, if you will, because I do not have any facts to argue with certainty for any of the scenarios presented below.

The reader should note that my presupposition is that a disclosure process, or greater official transparency, about the physical and technological aspect of UFOs/UAP, is ongoing since late 2017. I also think the disclosure, or whatever the right term, is benign at this point in time. Not everyone in the UFO community agrees with my assessment. But I have chosen not to go into the different views and arguments on the question "disclosure or not?" or "disclosure or Psyop?" in this text. 

Public transparency doesn't guarantee unrestricted information flow from officials. That is neither surprising nor necessarily suspicious. There are, however, legal limits to the extent of control that government officials can exert. 

I started to write this text before UFO historian and author Mr Richard Dolan made his show "The End of UFO Disclosure?" on his YouTube channel (live-streamed on August 19, 2020). Even though I disagree with Mr Dolan's pessimistic (or realistic) outlook on the future of disclosure, I think he raises some relevant points in his analysis from August 19, 2020. 

I will come back to Mr Dolan's video further down, but now to my thoughts on plausible scenarios to the question mentioned at the beginning of this text. 

Political scientist Alexander Wendt on UFOs

 The link at the end of this text takes you to an interview with a professor of international relations, Alexander Wendt, done by Sean Illing for Vox. The article was updated on July 24, 2020, because of the New York Times (NYT) article about the Pentagon's Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force (there is a link to the NYT-article in Illing's article). 

My main point with this text is to highlight the fact that most people who study credible data on the UFO phenomenon will end up with the conclusion that there is a real phenomenon worthy of a scientific investigation. Most people reaching that conclusion can separate the issue of UFOs being real from what they are. Sadly, unsound sceptics like Seth Shostak and Neil deGrasse Tyson try to make it the case that everyone interested in the UFO phenomenon cannot differentiate between those two issues. 

For sure, some UFO believers have a hard time understanding the difference between saying that UFOs are real and what/who is behind UFOs. But Sean Illing and Alexander Wendt do not fit into that category. I think both Illing and Wendt's approach to the UFO phenomenon, and their conversation in the interview, can serve as a model of how to be and stay, both open-minded and sceptical. 

Scientists think UFOs deserve scientific investigation

In an opinion piece in Scientific American, two scientists write UFOs are a scientifically interesting problem and deserve objective scientific analysis.

The two scientists and authors of the article in Scientific American, Ravi Kopparapu, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and Jacob Haqq-Misra, an astrobiologist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, suggest that interdisciplinary teams of scientists should study UFOs, or UAP (UAP, referring to “Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon”, is the preferred term by the U.S. Department of Defence).

Why should scientists spend their time and energy, and risk their reputations, on studying UFOs, according to the authors? Their answer in the article published on July 27, 2020, is partly based on the released videos by the Department of Defense (DoD) showing UFOs/UAP, the recent confirmation by the DoD that the videos are in fact genuine, and that the flying objects are still classified as “unidentified”, or “unexplained.”

But the authors' main answer to the question of why study the UFO phenomenon is also the most pertinent one:

US Senator Marco Rubio Speaks Out About UFOs

"NEW INTERVIEW: US Senator Marco Rubio Speaks Out About UFOs." Posted on brian hanley's YouTube channel on July 17, 2020. Duration: 2:12 minutes.

"This interview was conducted by investigative reporter Jim DeFede".

A short, but what may very well turn out to be a historical, interview with Senator Marco Rubio for CBS Miami. Even though the interview is short, and Rubio repeats his main premise ("national security") as to why the US government needs to study UFOs, he also says some interesting things.

These are the most important things Rubio said, in my opinion, and how I understand them within the larger context of the current governmental transparency on the UFO issue.