A.D. After Disclosure: When the Government Finally Reveals the Truth About Alien Contact (20 page)

Understanding that, from this point, we are estimating using logical guesses more than hard data, let us press on a little. If we consider that only one-third of sun-like stars have rocky planets orbiting them, and that only one-third of those have a planet that is roughly the size of Earth, and that one-tenth of those developed life of some sort, and that
one-hundredth of those were home to a species that attained intelligent life akin to birds, reptiles, and mammals, and one-hundredth of those gave rise to a species that mastered science and technology, we would be left with more than 16,000 technologically proficient civilizations that have existed in the Milky Way alone.

Some exobiologists might think these estimates are very high; others might consider them conservative. But let us stay with the estimate of 16,000 technologically proficient civilizations. What might be the odds that some of them currently exist? Here, too, we can do little more than guess, but surely it seems reasonable to suppose that there may be quite a few. Have many of these mastered the art of space travel, as humanity is only now just beginning to do from its home on Earth? Even if some of them rejected the idea of reaching out to other life forms, perhaps for philosophical reasons, there may be others who have embraced it.

Clearly, there are hindrances to them contacting us. There is the problem of distance. We are constantly reminded by astronomers of the “astronomical” distances separating the stars. These are far beyond what human beings can travel. There is also the question of how long technologically advanced civilizations can last. Considering how quickly we have brought ourselves to the brink of global disaster by means of nuclear weapons, natural resource depletion, and environmental pollution, we wonder if other technologically advanced societies last very long before collapsing. Yet, as we will discuss shortly, there may be a good reason to suppose that advanced civilizations can be durable. They may even be more durable than their planets. It is possible that at least some of the UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors who no longer have a home world, or have exhausted its resources, and are travelers in space, stopping to re-source their ships for the rest of their journey.

It is certainly possible that
all
of the diverse beings associated with UFOs have extraterrestrial origins. This scenario is still the odds-on favorite as an explanation for UFOs. A Las Vegas oddsmaker would have to make this likelihood the one to beat.

Still, other long-odds answers do exist.

Intelligent Machines

It may be possible that the Others are not alive in the sense that we are. Given our rapidly approaching abilities in machines and artificial intelligence, and the fact that other civilizations could be hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years more advanced than us, it is possible that we are encountering contact with the products of advanced machine intelligence.

Most scientists involved in artificial intelligence research are convinced that we are on the verge of a new era in civilization: the age of intelligent machines. Many of them also believe in the inevitability of an event they call the Singularity.
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This is believed to happen when computer intelligence becomes able to upgrade itself, to reprogram itself continuously, and become self-aware.

Such a process could involve a rapid, exponential increase in computer intelligence, far surpassing human intelligence. Consider Moore’s Law. In 1965, Gordon E. Moore predicted that the number of transistors per integrated circuit would double every 18 months. Incredibly, this has held true. In 1971, the leading integrated circuit had more than 2,000 transistors; by the year 2000 that number was 42 million. In 2010, Intel unveiled the world’s first 2-billion transistor microprocessor.

Is there a critical mass in terms of hardware, software, connectivity, and storage that will enable machines to foresee their own technological needs and redesign their software? Instead of requiring 18 months to double their power, what would be needed when artificially intelligent computers are assisting with the research? Could the time be cut to 12 months? And when it becomes more powerful still, to six months? Then three months, then one month—then what? At that point, as one AI writer put it, “our crystal ball explodes” and everything we know goes out the window.

When will this happen? Many AI experts believe it could be anywhere from 2020 to 2080. Some prognostications are unsettling. More than one scientist has predicted, for all intents and purposes, a god-like level of intelligence residing within machines. Some, like Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, have issued warnings. Others believe that Singularity may be the only way our species can be saved from itself.

Human beings are not suited to live in space, nor anywhere other than Earth. We evolved here, with Earth’s unique gravity, magnetic fields, temperature, microbes, atmosphere, and food. To live elsewhere, we would need to be modified, perhaps so much that the result would be something entirely different than what we are now. A new species, created with some of our DNA, would probably be the most logical means of sending biological organisms to distant worlds. Unless, of course, it is a better choice to let the machines go it alone.

Was such a scenario played out somewhere else in our galaxy? Perhaps the answer is yes. If so, it could explain many elements of the UFO phenomenon. Why, for instance, has no one announced themselves formally to us? Perhaps because establishing relations with human beings on any level of parity makes no sense to a machine or artificial organism.

On the other hand, an advanced machine intelligence might be interested in our biological resources. In order to interface with natural worlds, a machine intelligence might create biological entities for expressly that purpose. Presumably, the best way to do this would be by custom-creating entities from the DNA native to that particular planet. Our scientists are only beginning to unravel the secrets of DNA. But to an intelligent machine wanting a supply of biological organisms, such raw material could be very important.

This brings us to the Grays. These creatures seem to be perfect candidates for artificially created beings. They appear to be gender-neutral, and many witnesses claim they lack sex organs. This makes sense. Why would you want a drone-worker to have the ultimate distraction of sex organs, when you can make such creatures yourself? Author and abductee Whitley Strieber has described his impressions of the Grays as mechanical, working in a tight unison that would be unusual for biological creatures, but reasonable for mechanical ones.

Abductees often describe a single Gray taller than the rest, who is “in charge.” They often report a procedure, sometimes called Mindscan, when the entity probes the person’s mind telepathically and “sees” their innermost thoughts. This might be interpreted as tremendous psychic power possessed by the entity, but perhaps such a thing could be done by
implants within the brains of the alien being and abductee. For instance, it is now possible for chimpanzees to move a computer cursor across a screen, solely by the power of thought—and a conveniently placed chip in the brain.

Such news gives one pause when considering claims of alien implants within human abductees. Could implants be more than mere tracking and storage devices? Could they also function as conduits to an advanced machine intelligence?

Consideration of this theory weakens one of the main skeptical arguments against UFOs: that advanced technological civilizations may not last very long. Skeptics see our own civilization spinning rapidly out of control and extrapolate this feature to intelligent life elsewhere. Now, advanced technology wielded by biological entities may indeed be inherently unstable, but it is not so clear that such a condition applies equally to advanced machine intelligence. If not, the extraterrestrial hypothesis—combined with advanced AI—becomes more tenable as a way to explain UFOs.

As for understanding the motives of any artificial intelligences that are here, this might be as difficult to fathom as life beyond the Singularity. After all, if UFOs are the product of advanced machine intelligence, they passed that point long ago.

Earth-Based Entities

Maybe we know less about the Earth than we think we do. Under this theory, we are not the only intelligent life-form living on this planet. It might seem counter-intuitive that another intelligent species could have evolved here on Earth without our knowledge. But one interesting possibility would be a branch of humanity itself. Is there enough time in the prehistory of humans on Earth for a technologically capable civilization to have evolved and then, somehow, gone into hiding from the remainder of the human race?

We might call this “the Atlantis theory.” Among scholars of alternative ancient history, there is a major school of thought contending that there was in fact such a civilization, and that it suffered a cataclysm around 12,000 years ago. This cataclysm left its mark on later human groups in the form of myths about the Great Flood.

Perhaps an early civilization, one which attained great heights of science and learning, did exist during such an antediluvian period. Could it be that representatives of that civilization continued on, but kept their knowledge to themselves? Would they have interacted with the rest of humanity—mere savages by comparison—and passed themselves off as gods? Could they then, over the following thousands of years, have continued to develop as a quasi-secret society, partly interacting with the masses of humanity, but also continuing their own esoteric tradition, one in which they eventually developed flying saucers?

As difficult as it might be to accept for many people, there is an undeniable neatness to the idea. It would explain the human-looking “extraterrestrials,” which would now not be extraterrestrial at all. Perhaps, too, these highly advanced humans conducted genetic manipulation to create the other types of “alien” entities.

Again, we are left with the question of why we fail to see evidence of such a human civilization. But perhaps that is because they have merged themselves with us, effectively living among us. Another possibility is that the human-looking entities that people encounter are indeed human, but were taken millennia ago by extraterrestrials. After thousands of years, they have been enhanced and made to seem like gods to the rest of us.

Whatever the answer, we might wonder if they control human civilization while still maintaining themselves as a separate society. It also seems possible some of them have established permanent residence here. After all, we do have a beautiful planet.

Extra- or Ultra-Dimensional

The people who lead the way in “out-of-the-box” thinking are the physicists. They openly discuss reality, perception, and nearly every other once-crazy idea in ways that demonstrate how the universe is much stranger than we ever considered.

It should not surprise us, then, to learn that some of them do not confine their cosmology to just one universe. Increasingly, they theorize about a “multiverse,” which includes other universes existing beyond the
boundaries of our own reality. There are several variants of this idea. The idea of “bubble universes” is that some regions of space do not continue to expand or stretch along with the rest of the universe. They form bubbles, which may contain different properties and physical constants, effectively resulting in multiple universes. Physicist Michio Kaku has skillfully argued that our universe may be just one in an endless multiverse, a single bubble floating in a sea of infinite bubble universes. Another version of this idea is through an interpretation of quantum mechanics by which something that is possible, but not realized in our universe, may exist in another universe. A common analogy is that reality is a many-branched tree in which every possible quantum outcome is realized.
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Common sense would have us believe that the Others have been separated from us by space; that they have traveled long distances to reach us. But could it be that they coexist with us in the same space, only in a parallel reality? If so, traveling from “there” to “here” may not be about long journeys. Perhaps it involves some other form of transportation that simply crosses over the barrier in one way or another.

It is conceivable, based on statements made by sober physicists, that there may be multiple Earths in existence, perhaps an infinite number. Is it possible that one of them has achieved the capability to travel from their version of our planet to ours? The mind reels, but scientists increasingly allow themselves to muse about such matters and are (usually) not laughed at by their colleagues.

This is hardly to say that the idea of multiple universes is established science. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to test the theory. This means it is possibly “unfalsifiable,” and therefore outside proper scientific methodology. Some critics also argue that it seems contrary to Occam’s Razor as an explanatory principle of our reality. More to the point, it is not clear which of the several concepts of a “multiverse” would explain how beings could travel from one reality to another.

There are many cases in the UFO literature describing objects that appear to “wink in” and “wink out” of our reality. Perhaps this means that they have mastered some sort of cloaking technology, or perhaps it means that they truly enter and exit our reality.

If an interdimensional explanation is true to some extent, it could explain certain phenomena ranging from UFOs to ghosts and other paranormal activity. It may turn out they are “bleed-throughs” from other legitimate realities.

Angels and Devils

The written evidence from the earliest human societies suggests that people believed they had interactions with highly intelligent and powerful beings. We have described them by many names, including gods, fairies, angels, and devils. One possibility is that these are names we gave to arriving extraterrestrials, or perhaps to members of a lost, Atlantean civilization.