Richard Dolan, one of the world's leading thinkers of the UFO subject, has again offered an original analysis, one that is sorely needed in our time. Despite a new partial openness to public discussions of UFOs since 2017, the most important question continues to be left unasked: who are these beings and what do they want?

This is perhaps the most vexing problem within an already difficult subject. Dolan has gathered together a mass of UFO contact and abduction cases and has tried to make sense of them.

Dolan argues that:

• The "true" UFOs are not ours.
• Aliens are here mainly because of our own development as a society and as a species.
• There is more than one group here, some arriving earlier than others.
• At least one of these groups operates on an entirely different level than we do, making it difficult to deal with them.
• At least one of these groups may be a genuine threat to us.

This is because it is humanity's particular development that has drawn in the galactic neighborhood to see what is going on, and perhaps to influence it.

To my wife Tracey.

My partner in everything.

This book would not have happened without the generous help and support from many people.

I am grateful to those individuals who have helped not only in the operation of our active website, but whose insights into the UFO subject and alien encounters has been very helpful to me. They are Kirsten Blackburn, Dr. Bob McGwier, Mark H., Jay King, and Sherri Miller. I also want to thank our good friends at PursuingX who have worked so hard for us. I hope all these people realize just how much Tracey and I have appreciated them.

I want to thank Sherri Miller a second time for the excellent artistic contributions she generously provided for this book. In addition, Thanks also to “Danny” (pseudonym) not only for discussing his experiences, but for his own arresting images of one of the entities he encountered. Dr. Sean Esbjörn-Hargens graciously allowed for the use of his collection of alien images. Researcher Michael Schratt and artist Tom Bogan also contributed striking illustrations for several cases described in these pages. While we are on the matter of artistic contributions, I must thank my wife, Tracey Garbutt Dolan, for contributing two outstanding sketches of her own encounters.

There are too many people who’s ideas have reached me directly to make an imprint in one way or another into this book. I can’t mention them all but want to acknowledge Drew Streitberg, David Wenbert, “Active Guardian,” and Scott Santa. I apologize to the many people I have overlooked.

Finally, and most importantly, I thank my wife, Tracey. We have been partners in everything great and small, rain or shine. She has helped me in more ways than I can describe, and pulled me through more hard times than I have a right to expect. And she has always been there for me, just as I am for her. For all that and more, thank you my love.

Compared to everything else I’ve ever written, this book goes into some wild directions. For more than twenty years I have written about UFOs, a subject that has been on the fringes, often subject to ridicule. But I have always tried to do so with care to the facts and to restrain my speculative impulses.

This book, however, is an unapologetic speculative analysis on the most challenging question in the UFO subject: who are the aliens and what do they want?

I didn’t consider writing this book until early 2020, when I began to prepare two new lectures for an online conference. One was titled, Humanity’s Fourth Stage. It was a way to formulate the long history of our species into three stages, and an argument that we are now entering the fourth grand stage. Essentially, the path from hunting and gathering, to sedentary agriculture and the birth of cities, to science and industrialization, to where we now stand in the early 21st century: an age of artificial intelligence and transhumanism. In other words, I argue that we are embarking on a deep and irreversible transformation of the foundations not only of human civilization, but of the human being.

The other lecture I prepared that spring was titled Alien Agendas: An Executive Briefing. That lecture is the germ of this book. There I tried to gather what I considered to be the best evidence from the many stories of alien encounters and make sense out of them. I am well aware of how treacherous such a project can be. UFO sightings are hard enough to write about, but at least there are good cases attested to by multiple witnesses, electronic and physical evidence, and even declassified government records. You’ve got something tangible to work with. Yes, there are many gaps in that story, but at least there is a core of solid evidence that a researcher can work with.

It’s much harder with claims of alien contact. It’s not so much that the claims are not credible. In my own opinion, many of them are. But very few of them consist of multiple witnesses. Many of them occur under traumatic circumstances. Nearly all of them take place under circumstances in which the witness is wholly overmatched by the alien intellect, technology, and cognitive management capabilities. They can control our emotions to a large extent, and they have the ability to impair or even bury our memories of them. They work exceptionally well by stealth, much to the detriment of our ability to deal with them. Not least of which is our own psychological resistance to the entire idea of alien encounters, which in the context of our official narratives of what constitutes reality, often seems preposterous even to the person who experienced the event. All of which makes our information and judgements about them imperfect, to say the least.

Despite those and other obstacles to our understanding, researchers have access to a great amount of information about alien encounters. To a lesser but still significant extent, also about the aliens themselves. The information is not entirely uniform; there are inevitable discrepancies in how people describe the beings they encountered. But the broad consistency of many accounts, including many arcane details, is undeniable.

There are conventional ways of explaining those consistencies. Most common are psychological and social causes. For more than fifty years our culture has been very familiar with the idea of alien abduction. Like it or not, the stereotypical notion of small gray aliens with large wraparound eyes taking people in the dead of night for medical examinations has made its way into our collective psyche. It’s a truly rare person who has never encountered the idea. Therefore it’s all contamination, argue quite a few skeptics.

We can’t ignore the possibility that any single account might be the result of social influences. But when we get into the details, many of these stories don’t easily allow for a psycho-social explanation. Aside from the fact that many recollections of an abduction or encounter are vivid and highly specific, they are bewildering to the people having them. It’s fair to say that many, maybe most, would prefer to believe their experience was imaginary.

Then there is the sheer quantity. Whereas we can measure at least a small portion of UFO sightings, since there are a few databases that house such reports, we don’t have anything comparable that records alleged alien encounters. But there is no question that a massive data trove has developed over the years, contained in countless books, articles, interviews, and collected studies. The number of reported cases runs into the thousands; how many thousands I have no idea, but the number is high enough.

One of the biggest hurdles to accepting the idea of alien encounters is basic skepticism about UFOs themselves. But a detailed review of proven UFO reports, especially military reports in which it’s clear that authorities were utterly mystified by an extraordinary object, certainly hints strongly that someone else is here. Someone our society has not acknowledged. Explaining all such cases as exotic black budget technology, or as Russian or Chinese technology, fails miserably. The door is open to other probabilities, other intelligences.

I long ago concluded that the most reasonable explanation for the best UFO reports is that “others” are here, somehow, from somewhere. Once we make that single admission, it becomes easier and frankly logical to recognize that the recollections of so many people actually do have a reason to be accurate. We acknowledge that aliens are probably here. People are remembering specific details about apparent aliens often, though not always, in connection with UFO sightings. There actually is a solid foundation for us to believe that some of these people did in fact encounter aliens.

I decided to work with these accounts on the basis that they are fundamentally true and try my best to make sense of them. Making the call on which cases are more noteworthy than others will always be filled with some subjectivity. It’s probably impossible for anyone to know the full history of all such encounters, or to understand them all at the deepest levels. It’s easy to make a mistake in judgement and I am sure several have crept into my own study. But I also believe that it is possible to review cases that appear to be strong and information-rich, and to develop a reasonable picture of what we are dealing with. This is what I have tried to do here.

That is why I think of this study as a speculative analysis. By speculative, I don’t mean imaginative. I mean an attempt to fill in a picture based on the available information, a picture that can offer a scenario that makes sense based upon what we (think we) know. That makes analysis important. We take what we have and try our best to puzzle out what makes the most sense. It’s an imperfect method for knowledge, and perhaps knowledge isn’t the best word to use here. “Developing a hypothesis” would be more accurate. But few people would deny the value of developing hypotheses for what is surely one of the most vexing and potentially important phenomena of our time.

Some things only become obvious in retrospect. After I completed my research into what I have called the fourth stage of humanity, it became clear to me that we can’t understand the presence of other beings here on planet Earth without understanding the long trajectory of humanity. This is especially so regarding the current place we have found ourselves along that long path. Where we are right now matters very much in connection to an alien presence. Before we understand what these other beings are doing here, we need to understand where we have come from and where we are going. For that reason, the basic concept of that research has made its way into this study.

I have been in the UFO field for more than a quarter of a century. My initial position during the 1990s was quite conservative compared with where it is now. In those early years, I told myself that I only had one simple question in relation to UFOs. I didn’t even care to know, so I claimed, whether or not aliens were real. Nor did I concern myself with abductions, or crop circles, or anything else that I considered “weird.” My question was: Do UFOs constitute a genuine, legitimate part of our history?

That was a long time ago. It’s been a long journey to reach my current perspective on UFOs. I learned that the subject served as a gateway into countless other fascinating questions. It turned out to be one of the biggest surprises of my life. Finally, after all these years, I want to go deeper into the weeds. It’s time not simply to acknowledge that, yes, aliens are probably here, but to ask who are they and what do they want?

So, imperfect as I am sure it is, I am offering a scenario of the alien presence and goals. While I am basing everything that follows on evidence that I believe to be valid and true, there remains much that I don’t know and can’t pretend to know. I have no doubt that this is an incomplete picture. In all likelihood, none of us will ever know the full scope of the reality of the UFO/ET phenomenon. But I hope that, as an exploration, you the reader find this to be engaging enough to go the distance with me. There are many fascinating questions in here and important directions for future research.

Since 2017, our public conversation about UFOs has changed dramatically. Many are still unaware of this change, because after all they have their own lives and concerns. Not everyone cares. But anyone with a passing interest in the subject has witnessed a sea change in attitude.

The New York Times, CNN, Fox, Washington Post, Scientific American, Popular Mechanics, and many other fully mainstream organizations have been taking the matter seriously. To those of us that have followed UFOs for so many years, the change has been astonishing and refreshing.

None of this has happened before, and it can only be good for us as a society to be able to have a conversation on UFOs. This was impossible even a few years ago. We are now at a point in which voices from the mainstream media are asking, are these UFOs real? Some of them even openly suggest that the answer is yes. At the least, they recognize that there is something out there that seems real enough, and for which we don’t have a conventional explanation.

So far, that’s the limit. Beyond this limit is a wasteland, a place that the establishment media continues rigorously to avoid. It is the no-mans land in which we might openly entertain the notion that someone else, someone beyond our civilization, is behind the UFO phenomenon. It’s the question that everyone sees but no one asks, the omnipresent shoe waiting to drop.

News media coverage of UFOs has suddenly become serious.

There are other no-go zones since the door opened a crack. For example, beyond the question of aliens, there is the question of political and military coverup of UFOs. That is another shoe waiting to drop. Or the question of UFO crash retrievals. This is something that is tantalizingly close to being discussed. It has been raised ever so tentatively, and then it goes away with no attempt to go further. One of the most astonishing moments regarding UFO crash retrievals occurred on May 31, 2019, on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Carlson’s guest was Luis Elizondo, formerly of the Pentagon’s AATIP program connected to UFOs, now a member of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences (TTSA). The interview ended with this exchange:

Carlson: Do you believe, based on your decade of serving in the U.S. government on this question, that the U.S. government has in its possession any material from one of these aircrafts?

Elizondo: I do, yes.

Carlson: You think the U.S. government has debris from a UFO in its possession right now?

Elizondo: Unfortunately, Tucker, I really have to be careful of my NDA. I really can’t go into a lot more detail than that, but simply put, yes.

Now, you would think that exchange might have been enough to stir up a larger public conversation, but other than within the UFO research community itself, very little changed. Yes, it’s remarkable to hear even a small admission like that coming from establishment media, but we are still taking baby steps.

Not only that, but it’s entirely possible that further progress on the road to Disclosure slows to a grinding halt. There is no inherent reason why the ball will move any farther down the field. The reason, in my own view, is that the revelations have essentially “maxed out.” We are at the point in which there is a semi-official disclosure that something is out there and we don’t know what that something is. That position remains a place of safety from the establishment point of view. It’s a place that continues to allow for the coverup to continue, slightly refreshed and updated for our era.

Who knows how long it will take our society to arrive at a more advanced place in all this. It could take many years. Meanwhile, we can address the deeper questions ourselves.

Based on everything I have researched in relation to UFOs, I long ago concluded that there are aliens, that some of them are here on Planet Earth. From the evidence I will present, there appear to be multiple groups and, most likely, multiple agendas.

There are obviously people who think such a line of inquiry is premature. They might not question my assumption that there are aliens “out there,” but they would definitely push back on the suggestion that any such aliens are here. But I think we can make that assumption. Not with the same level of certainty that a FOIA document can demonstrate that the CIA was having high-level conversations about UFOs, or that the U.S. military has had numerous encounters with inexplicable aerial and oceanic objects. But we can, with reasonable application of intelligence and logic, infer a few important things.

One is that the UFO phenomenon continues to be anomalous and definitely unexplained. Whether it’s the Tic-Tac UFO of 2004 or any other UFO case that you can think of going back through the 1940s and even before that, there is more than enough evidence showing that too many of these objects have been carefully observed doing things that we have believed to be impossible. Our best evidence indicates that at least part of the phenomenon, the core part of the UFO phenomenon, very likely includes what we would call aliens.

We could say they are extraterrestrial, or we might ponder if they are interdimensional in some way, or even whether they might be time travelers of some sort. Or perhaps there are other explanations and scenarios. I am not inclined to believe in most of them, but we can make a reasonable case that at the very least they are not us. They derive from a civilization that is not our own, and is not from here.

That constitutes our starting point.

Dolan at the International UFO Congress in March 2017

Richard Dolan has been researching and writing about UFOs and related matters since the 1990s. He earned degrees in History at Alfred University and the University of Rochester, as well as a Certificate in Political Theory at Exeter College, Oxford University. He was also a finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship.

Richard’s background in Cold War history, international diplomacy, and world history enables him to bring a unique perspective to his research into UFOs. He has appeared on many television and radio programs and has lectured around the world.

Richard lives in Rochester, New York with his wife, Tracey Garbutt Dolan.

Find him at richarddolanmembers.com, richarddolanpress.com, and his Youtube Channel to find out about his current projects.

The Alien Agendas: A Speculative Analysis of Those Visiting Earth

Richard Dolan
Richard Dolan Press
Rochester, New York 14619 USA

Copyright © 2020 by Richard M. Dolan
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Richard Dolan Press and logo are registered trademarks of Richard Dolan Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dolan, Richard Michael
     Alien Agendas: A Speculative Analysis of Those Visiting Earth / by Richard M. Dolan
     245 p. cm.
     Includes bibliography and index.
     ISBN 9798557741590
     1. Unidentified Flying Objects
     2. History.
     I. Dolan, Richard M. II. Title

First published in the United States by Richard Dolan Press
First Printing: December 2020
Cover Design by Enrico C. Gabuyog, Jr.

All photographs and illustrations in this book were reproduced with the kind permission of their owners, or else are in the public domain.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Also by Richard Dolan:
UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-Up
UFOs and the National Security State: The Cover-Up Exposed
A.D. After Disclosure: When the Government Finally Reveals the Truth About Alien Contact
UFOs for the 21 Century Mind: A Fresh Guide to an Ancient Mystery
The Secret Space Program and Breakaway Civilization
UFOs and Disclosure in the Trump Era

When inquiring about an alien presence here on Earth, let’s start at the beginning. That is, how long have they been here? Can we even know? Do we have any reason to believe in some sort of Ancient Aliens hypothesis? Any answer to this would potentially have great bearing on the question of their agenda.

There has been much work on this question, but I would like to reference someone who remains completely unknown to the field of ufology, yet whose work may be relevant to the question at hand. This is a deceased friend of mine, Dr. Colleen Clements. Colleen lived in Rochester, and we were friends for ten years until she died in 2011. She was a professor at both the University of Rochester and the Rochester Institute of Technology. She wrote two interesting books on the theme of potential ancient visitation by extraterrestrials, something unusual for an academician—and something which distinctly harmed her career. Although her books are not widely read and the writing can at times be challenging, her work contains valuable information.^[1]

Colleen Clements argued that humans are a hybrid race. Our species, she suggested, was probably genetically enhanced by extraterrestrials sometime around 40,000 years ago. She based her case on several factors, the two most prominent being genetic and mythological.

The genetic argument comes down to something known as the D allele of our microcephalin gene. The microcephalin gene turns out to be crucial for the development and size of our brain. Genes have parts of them known as alleles, and the particular allele known as the D allele of that gene is very important to our story.

Geneticists are able to determine how long we have had this particular allele, and even what part of the world it originated from. It turns out that the answer is something like 40,000 years ago and somewhere in central Eurasia. There’s a date range involved, actually, which could be as little as around 14,000 years and as much as 60,000 years. Because of this range, geneticists have tended to split the difference and arrive at the compromise number of 37,500 years ago, which is midway between the extremes. For my own purposes, which I will explain below, I have rounded the number to a bit more than 40,000 years, and currently see 45,000 years ago as a strong likelihood. Sometime around then, the human race acquired this particular allele. Hopefully the day will come when we have a closer estimate of when this occurred.

But why is this important?

It matters because all geneticists agree that this allele came to us through interbreeding. That is, from an outside source. That makes this very interesting. The governing assumption among geneticists and pre-historians is that it had to be the Neanderthals, since they (probably) existed at the time this allele was introduced. The Neanderthals went extinct sometime around 30,000 years ago, or perhaps somewhat more recently.

In addition to the Neanderthals, there was another human group at the time, known as the Denisovans. We don’t know as much about them as they left behind a very scant fossil record. Although they were distinct from the Neanderthals, they were closely related to them and shared a great amount of DNA. Moreover, they lived in central Asia, which is where our D allele first appeared. Furthermore, there is proof of Denisovan interbreeding with modern humans, primarily within the Polynesian and Melanesian populations, as well as among Australian aboriginal people. That’s because the Denosivans migrated from East Asia down to those regions.

However, while the Denisovans are known to have interbred with those human populations, there is much less Denisovan DNA in Eurasian populations. According to genetic analysis, there was apparently some interbreeding, but not very much.

Artist reconstructions of Denisovan (l) and Neanderthal (r) humans.

Even so, we might ask what’s the big concern about this D allele? Clearly homo sapiens sapiens interbred sufficiently with both of these groups, so can’t we assume we got it from one of them?

When Colleen published her final book in 2008, the Denisovans were unknown to her; they had just been identified that very year. But the human genome was fully mapped and known by then, and we had good information (if incomplete) regarding the Neanderthal genetic structure. Therefore, she asked the logical question: if geneticists know that the D allele came from outside homo sapiens sapiens, did we get it from the Neanderthals. Were they “the daddy”?

She was skeptical that they were, since the D allele had not yet been found in Neanderthals. She conceded, however, that if we discover it within the Neanderthal genetic structure, we could accept the implications of Occam’s razor and conclude that they provided this crucial allele to us. At the time of her writing, the case was still open.

Fast forward twelve years to 2020, long after Colleen’s passing and while I was researching this question. Naturally, I wanted to know what we had learned since 2008, and was fully expecting the D allele to have been located in Neanderthal DNA.

To my surprise, it wasn’t. And not for a lack of trying. Geneticists have looked for it but simply haven’t found it. To put it more clearly: they have found no evidence for the D allele among Neanderthals. One can always fall back on the possibility that it’s there and we just haven’t found it yet. But in fact scientists have been looking hard and it doesn’t seem to be there.

A detailed study was undertaken to determine this very issue. A well preserved Neanderthal fossil from 50,000 years ago was studied specifically to find this particular allele. The report from 2010 stated definitively that there was no evidence of it.^[2]

Back in 2008, Colleen argued that if it turns out that the Neanderthals did not have the D allele, then we must rule them out as the source of it in ourselves. How could we acquire the allele from them if they never had it themselves?

Therefore: who’s the daddy?

Could it be the Denisovans, whom Colleen didn’t know about? It turns out there have also been attempts to find the D allele in the Denisovans. One researcher admitted that they “seem an unlikely source,” as “their genetic contribution to most living Eurasians was at most slight.” To date, all attempts to find this allele in the Denisovans have failed. From a perusal of the available literature, it’s clear that the scientists involved would very much like to find it. They seem to understand the implications well. Considering the very close genetic relationship between the Denisovans and Neanderthals, we should assume that the odds of finding the D allele in Denisovan DNA is at best a longshot.^[3]

Geneticists recognize the importance of finding this allele because of its role in the development and growth of our brain, and the fact that its appearance may well have triggered an explosion of human creativity and invention. If we did not get this allele from the Neanderthals or Denisovans (neither of which showed signs of the creativity and genius of our ancestors starting around 40,000 years ago), then we might consider some serious rethinking of our early history.

It may seem as though I am giving an excessive amount of space on this question in a study of alien agendas. Chalk it up to going down a very interesting rabbit hole. But now we arrive at the key question. If, after repeated attempts to find it, scientists still cannot locate this critically important D allele in our microcephalin gene, we must ask ourselves, where did we get it from?

The creative explosion of humanity starting from around 40,000 years ago is nothing short of astonishing. It marks the earliest forms of truly sophisticated, beautiful artwork. What’s interesting is that you can compare it to even earlier forms of artwork created by our ancestors, not Neanderthals or Denisovans, but homo sapiens sapiens, and the contrast is plain to see.

sub-sahara 70K years ago (l) South Africa 60K years ago (r)

The first two pieces of artwork depicted here are by our direct ancestors from 70,000 years ago and 60,000 years ago. Both show a capability for abstraction and have aesthetic value. But without any disparagement, they are not in the same class as what people started creating, very suddenly, a little more than 40,000 years ago.

The astonishing cave painting from Indonesia has only recently been discovered and is believed to be as old as 44,000 years. It is currently the oldest sophisticated cave artwork we know of. The bottom two images include artwork from 39,000 years ago and 38,000 years ago. These creations clearly exhibit a high level of technical expertise that is nothing short of extraordinary by comparison with earlier eras of human art.

Indonesia 44K years ago Spain 39K years ago (l) Germany 38K years ago (r)

The Indonesian find is interesting because it is not in upper central Asia, where we believe the D allele first appeared. The artwork is in a region known as Sulawesi, which is east of Borneo and south of the Philippines. It is rather far away from central Asia. However, this is not necessarily a problem in terms of our theory. In the first place, we don’t know the exact year that we obtained our D allele. Experts can only estimate. Therefore, migrations from that region, which did occur, could easily have happened in less than a thousand years, or even over a span of a few centuries. And there may be more amazing artistic creations and inventions to find along the way. Moreover, the dating of this particular piece may well undergo refinement in the future. It’s a new discovery.

But what is perfectly clear, simply by looking at the artwork, is that there was a sudden rise in the artistic ability of human beings that began shortly more than 40,000 years ago. Our brains clearly had changed, and the D allele of the microcephalin gene might be the key.

An interesting thing about the D allele is that it is not in 100% of the human population. Instead, it exists in roughly 70% of people worldwide. A genetic analysis of the ethnic groups around the world indicates that it originated in north central Asia. Within the Mongolian population, for example, there is a 100% incidence of the D allele. Second to the Mongolians are the Yakut people in Siberia, with a 99% incidence of the allele. As you move away from north central Asia, the percentages become lower.

My old friend Colleen was also a dedicated student of ancient beliefs and mythologies from around the world, and believed that a comparative study of ancient myths supported her thesis. In particular, she cited the earliest sky god myths, sometimes known as the sky diver myths.

These may well be the oldest human stories, far older than the epic of Gilgamesh. The earliest sky diver story, as far as scholars can tell, originated somewhere in—you guessed it—north central Asia. This concerned a sky god named Erlik Khan, who is the key ancient god of the Mongolian people.

In the myths, Erlik Khan was not the creator of mankind. He was the second most powerful god, and directly served the Creator God who had created the universe. In the Mongol belief system, there was no solid Earth in the beginning, only endless deep ocean. Erlik Khan was tasked by the Creator God to descend (dive) to the ocean and “pull up” Earth. Now, this is an ancient story, eons before human beings even invented writing, so we don’t know what the earliest forms of the story were. In the version that has come down to us, human beings did exist, but were not animate or intelligent. According to their ancient belief, it was only through Erlik Khan that humans became intelligent. In the wake of what we have learned about the D allele, that’s quite interesting—human beings existed before Erlik Khan descended, but were not intelligent. Only after his appearance did we become intelligent!

Again, we really have no way of knowing when to date the beginning of this myth. It is extremely ancient, we know that. And of course these types of myths exist in various forms throughout all of the early human cultures.

What we really want to know is, where did this story come from? If we hypothesize that humanity was visited by an extraterrestrial race 45,000 to 50,000 years ago, we might ask, how would that event have been transmitted through the ages? We didn’t have writing. We communicated stories orally, most likely in poetic form. Poetry after all is how you can remember a very long story. To me, it seems entirely possible, just as Colleen suggested, that early human beings encountered these “sky gods” who manipulated our genetics. It seems entirely possible to me that from this encounter, our ancestors developed the story of the Sky Diver God Erlik Khan.

There are a number of arguments in support of ancient aliens, but to my mind this is the most intriguing. It’s not difficult for us to envision a group of extraterrestrials visiting at that time, encountering our ancestors, and thinking, close but not quite there; let’s tweak them and see what happens.

Proposed spread of “sky diver” myths.

When you look at all the varieties of the sky god myth, it seems plausible that they originated in north central Asia and spread south to places like India, east over the Bering land mass into North and South America, and west into Europe and even further south into Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Near East. Colleen traced variations of what appear fundamentally to be the same myth. One interesting element from these myths is how the “gods” interbred with humans.

Before discussing the implications of this and getting into probable alien types, I will leave the last word to Colleen.

Scientists may currently prefer Homo Neanderthalensis and its presumed ancestor Homo Erectus as candidates for the other species who interbred with us, but the old texts identify that species as an extraplanetary species. That species is called variously a sky being, a Bene Ha-Elohim, a Watcher, an Anunnaki, an Asura a member of the Annead, a fallen seriph, or other names lost to time.

Ultimately, if we did receive that D allele from extraterrestrials, then we ought to assume one of two things. Either that these extraterrestrials were fully, or nearly fully, compatible with us biologically, which means they would have looked essentially human, or they did not look human but were skilled at manipulating our genes. In either case, it would be the case that humanity is be the project of someone else.

In this context, the famous remark of Charles Fort comes to mind. Fort, who lived a century ago, can justly be called the first genuine UFO researcher. In his writings he once simply wrote, “I think we’re property.” The scenario outlined above brings that statement home.

1. Clements, Colleen D. The Order of the Dragon: The Battle Between the "Other History" and the Accepted History (BookSurge Publishing, 2006) and The White Island and the Black Book: The Scientific and Philosophic Re-Creation of the Suppressed Eurasian Culture (BookSurge Publishing, 2008).

2. See “The Microcephalin Ancestral Allele in a Neanderthal Individual”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871044/

3. See John Hawks, “Denisova microcephalin status,”
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/denisova/denisova-mcph1-2011.html

A speculation. If extraterrestrials manipulated our genetics some 40,000-plus years ago, what is the likelihood that some of the humans at the time were taken? Not merely temporary, as we understand modern day abductions, but permanently? What if some of our ancestors were adopted, possibly enhanced even further, and made to live within an extraterrestrial society, beyond our civilization, ever since?

Clearly, we cannot know the answer to that. But it doesn’t seem outrageous to me that if we were modified as a species back then, that some of those humans were taken permanently. Despite how primitive our society was at the time, it would not be hard for others to see that human beings could be useful in many ways.

A question. If we were modified and enhanced, how likely is it that we have been monitored ever since? It would seem likely, at least to some degree. The great unknown question is, to what degree? Have we have been completely controlled all this time, in some covert manner? You can make an argument that the answer is yes, but it seems to me more likely that the answer is no, at least if we are talking about overt control. It strikes me as unlikely and implausible that this would be so.

Several reasons come to mind. One would be the lack of clearcut UFO sightings in ancient times. We know that, yes, there were UFO sightings and a variety of interesting and intriguing stories that occurred in prior centuries and millennia. But when you look deeply into those stories, you notice several things are lacking. One is anything more than a handful of accounts of clear and obvious technology in the skies. The large number of what we tend to call early UFO accounts are hardly ever described in that manner. We read accounts of unusual fireballs or flaming objects. Sometimes these objects seemed to maneuver in ways that don’t seem natural. But descriptions of metallic-looking disc shaped craft are almost nonexistent. Some ancient accounts might be interpreted that way but they just aren’t that clear.

However, we must still acknowledge that there were some ancient sightings of “UFOs” that are perplexing and can’t be explained away. So we do have reason to think that someone has been here all along, although not exactly in our faces.

A better reason to doubt that there has been active control over us by aliens is the lack of reliable accounts of genuine alien-looking beings. No grays, unless we allow for the potential exception of the Wandjina, the ancient sky gods depicted in a cave in Kimberly, Australia. In the aboriginal tradition, these are sky gods who helped to create the world. They have chalky white skin and huge black eyes. Some analysts argue that it’s a mistake to interpret these images as aliens, although some of the depictions seem straightforward, especially in cases when they are wearing robes—something the aborginal population of Australia is not known to have worn.

One of many cave paintings of the Wandjina, all of which are thousands of years old.

Outside of Australia, however, we simply don’t have images from our ancient past of beings that look like gray aliens. There are some that we could interpret that way if we wanted to, but it doesn’t make them a sure thing.

Added to this is the fact that there simply wasn’t any discussion about this matter much before the 20th century. Yes, there were stories in folklore about the gods covertly visiting the mortals down on the surface, whether in the Bible or Greek mythology or many other sources. These, however, may very well have derived from the ancient sky diver myth discussed above. There is nothing in the historical record showing that alien visitation was part of any genuine discussion.

This is not to say that we should rule out all interaction with them over the many years. But it is to say that such interactions might have existed at a low level. At the very least, aliens were not announcing themselves to us, and human societies were not talking about them. If they were “walking among us” in medieval society, for instance, no one seems to have suspected it or discussed it. People did believe in spirits, and some believed they had received visitations from angelic or demonic beings. Perhaps one could make a case for those visitations being the result of aliens.

But to my mind, the idea of a low-key alien presence for most of our history makes perfect sense. The plain fact is that for most of our history, we were not that interesting. However, we might well have been monitored for our future potential.

Consider human society back then. A society utilizing primitive muscle-power technology, one that only invented writing and the wheel a mere six thousand years ago, and which only developed science a couple of centuries ago. Anywhere on the planet, human society was one in which people did the muscle work themselves or at most had animals pulling wooden carts and plows.

Why would aliens announce themselves to our ancestors?

What would be gained for an extraterrestrial race to announce themselves to such a human society? And what would they gain by controlling or managing it? Would it be in order for some of them to be kings, living in unheated castles and getting killed off in their thirties or forties? After all, this was a common fate for kings and rulers. One supposes that anything is possible, but when you get into the details of our ancient past, the evidence doesn’t support the idea that they tightly controlled us.

One obvious problem of open contact is that ancient people would have had no ability to comprehend the reality of something as exotic as alien visitation. The idea of other planets and worlds was foreign to them. It’s true that some “stars” were called “planets,” (from the Greek planete) which simply meant “wanderer.” That is because some of those points of light clearly moved across the sky. It was only much later in time that we realized those wanderers—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—were actually other worlds. It’s hard enough nowadays for most people to consider that there are extraterrestrials interacting with Earth’s population. People of earlier eras would have been at an even greater disadvantage.

I’ve sometimes wondered about what it would be like to travel back in time one thousand years to any human society on Earth, carrying the knowledge that we currently have. Imagine that you have been thrown back into medieval Europe or ancient China, or sub-Saharan Africa, or India—literally anywhere a thousand years ago. What could you tell those people about the nature of our world today?

The answer is, very little, if anything. Find the most brilliant or educated thinker of the age, perhaps some monkish scholar who could read and write and had studied all the ancient manuscripts that were available to him. Then tell him that the Earth is a sphere roughly 8,000 miles in diameter and circles around the Sun at a distance of 93 million miles. He would likely tell you to stop right there, that’s quite enough! Don’t bother trying to explain that the Earth is billions of years old, or that there are tiny particles called microbes, or that we have smart phones, or anything else about our world today. Essentially, anything we told such a person would be too much, whether that person was the greatest genius of their time, or an ordinary farmer working the fields. It would make no difference.

These insurmountable difficulties would arise even though we would be among fellow human beings who are separated from us by a mere thousand years—not very long in the grand scheme of things.

But now consider what an alien group would be able to communicate to our ancestors. It’s obvious that there would have been no point for them to tell the locals anything at all. There would be nothing in it for them, nothing to gain. It helps us to appreciate the logic of Star Trek’s Prime Directive.

As I have tried to show, there is a case to be made for some outside group to have genetically enhanced our species a little more than 40,000 years ago, and that we have been subject to an ongoing, low-level monitoring effort for a long time. But things changed as we approached the 20th century.

Our species, taxonomically classified as homo sapiens sapiens, is now believed to be more than 300,000 years old.^[4] For nearly all of that time, our ancestors lived in one way, and one way only, and that was as hunters and gatherers. This was Stage One of human existence. While there were always obvious variations in that mode of living due to geography and a range of environmental factors, it was remarkably stable. Actually, as scholars are now pointing out, it was often a much better mode of living than had previously been believed.^[5]

Then, a little more than ten thousand years ago, our ancestors began to domesticate animals and farm the land. That’s the agricultural revolution, transforming human society into human civilization. So began Stage Two of Humanity.

That process didn’t happen overnight, but over the course of a few thousand years it constituted a deep revolution in the very nature of our existence. It led to a dramatic growth in population, to the development of towns and cities, to the invention of countless new tools and methods of organization, including the wheel, irrigation, metallurgy, writing, and everything else we associate with civilization.

Most of us know this story, at least in basic outline. What many people do not appreciate, however, was just how stable this form of society was. Compared with hunting and gathering, it certainly was incredibly dynamic. But in many ways it was stable and predictable. A peasant working the fields in ancient Egypt five thousand years ago could be dropped into a French village of the Renaissance five hundred years ago and still have a basic understanding of how to live in that society without too much transition. Yes, there were obvious changes that took place, and a number of important technological advances. But the basic continuity cannot be denied. Most people still lived off the land and still worked with the same types of animals and implements. A difference of thousands of years separated the two societies, but the lifestyle actually changed very little.

Then came the next great revolution, one of industrialization and science—Stage Three. This happened by degrees, beginning with the scientific revolution of the 17th century with thinkers like Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz who helped to establish an intellectual foundation for a new way to think about the world, one that had never existed before. By the 18th century, practical strides were made toward industrialization, which was simply a way to apply mechanization as a way to replace muscle power in the creation of the goods and services. That hypothetical Egyptian farmer who was dropped into the French Renaissance of the 16th century would have been utterly lost had his time machine dropped him off just a couple of centuries later.

This third stage of humanity is when we truly obtained the fire of Prometheus—science. As the 19th and 20th centuries progressed, this powerful knowledge transformed the world at an incomprehensible speed.

Scientific knowledge and application transformed our civilization. It allowed human beings to create something completely new, from nuclear explosions that mimic the power of the Sun, to space satellites, to computers, to wireless internet, to everything else that makes up our world today. It took a few centuries to lay down the foundation, and then a mere century to transform our world, from that rickety little airplane built by the Wright Brothers in 1903, to where we are now. It’s an unbelievable transformation. Seen in that context, there can be no question that anyone who had been monitoring us would realize that a much more intensive observation would now be warranted. Suddenly, the locals had become very interesting.

The sightings data supports this conclusion. UFO sightings began to increase even from the very beginning of the industrial revolution in the 1750s or so, and steadily increased throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. UFO sightings skyrocketed during the 20th century, even well before the famous sighting of flying saucers by Kenneth Arnold in 1947. Very likely, some of the increase in sightings was a reflection of our improved ability to detect them. We developed electronic means of detection like radar, and we got ourselves up in the air, above the clouds and able to see things we never could see before.

But the sheer number of UFO reports suggests that the bulk of these increased sightings most likely happened for a different reason: there simply were more of these visitors around. The upsurge in sightings is so vast, so profound, that we really need to recognize that it has been our own development that is the main reason we are seeing so many UFOs today. They came in larger numbers once we gave them a reason to. Undoubtedly, Earth’s natural resources and genetic diversity would be of interest to an extraterrestrial species. But the reality is that we are about to leap into their world. That more than anything else explains why they are here in significant numbers.

And now we are just beginning to transition to the Fourth Stage of Humanity, which might best be called the Transhumanist Stage. I will have more to say about this later, as it has powerful implications for any alien agenda.

4. This is a number that has continually been pushed back during the course of the last several decades. See “Homo sapiens” in Encyclopedia Brittanica,
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Homo-sapiens.

5. Scott, James C. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2017).

I would like to bring up one puzzling result of this theory of potential alien tampering with our DNA. When we consider it, we can quickly recognize that it’s a difficult concept to accept, even though the idea of ancient aliens is accepted by many people.

The problem is the sheer span of time involved. Whether ancient aliens proponents argue that ETs have been among us for two thousand years (Jesus was an alien theory), or five thousand years (ancient Sumer/Annunaki theory), or forty thousand years, we are talking about a span of time that, for human society at least, seems incomprehensibly long.

In the entire history of our civilization, we don’t have any examples of long-term planning that even exceeds a century or so. Indeed, most of the elite groups of human civilization have not planned anything beyond a few years, or at most a few decades. Despots throughout history may have thought they were part of a much longer continuity. The ancient Egyptian pharoahs thought they were part of an immortal line of divinities, and even Hitler talked about his “thousand year Reich.” But things never work out that way. Governments get switched out, policies change, and continuity is broken with regularity. How then could it be possible for another group to have maintained a consistent presence here, observing us or monitoring us, in roughly the same way for many thousands of years? Five thousand years is difficult enough, but here I am suggesting something as outrageous as forty thousand years.

I have to concede that this is a very tough nut to crack. But rather than try to explain it, I will speculate about what kind of society or organization could conceivably undertake such a long range plan with such consistency.

The first thing that comes to my mind is that the controlling structure of such a society would have to be stable enough to enforce total and uniform control over its members. It would imply a structure that is incredibly static. Such an immobility of change would imply, to me at least, a command structure that is non-biological. Biological organisms are born and die. They have an imperative to reproduce, which itself implies a degree of emotion, passion, and unpredictability. In any biologically-driven hierarchy, this would in turn imply at least some degree of ego-driven ambition, which would be a catalyst for change.

Now, it’s possible that the hierarchy of such a society could be biological if certain conditions apply. One might be a very long lifespan. Let’s assume this is the case. How long an alien lifespan could be is an open question. If they have mastered their genetics, they conceivably learned how to switch off their aging mechanisms—something our scientists are working on today. So let’s say that they have done this and achieved, if not genuine immortality, then perhaps an extremely long lifespan.

How long could that be? Could it be five hundred years? A thousand? Longer? Of course we can only guess. We can imagine that any extremely long lifespan like that would bring a psychological state that is very, very different from our own. We humans often wonder what it would be like to live for such a long period of time, but we don’t think as often about how such a long lifetime would affect us psychologically. Presumably reproduction rates would decline dramatically. That would give rise to a society that almost certainly would become intellectually ossified.

But even if an alien lifespan is as long as a thousand years, there would have to be other factors to ensure such astonishing stability in their long-term operations. The best candidate I can think of would be if long-term planning and operation were under the control of an advanced artificially intelligent algorithm, or series of algorithms. Essentially, a living machine of some sort. And again, this is something we currently see developing in our own civilization.

If anything like what I am suggesting is true, we might also assume that an observing alien presence would be interested in ensuring that any changes that take place in human society would be (a) not a threat to them and (b) taken completely under their control if any threats were to arise. If I am right in thinking that stability is their overriding goal, then we have to think very carefully about how they might perceive humanity’s rapid transformation of the last century or two.

There is at least one other important scenario we ought to consider in terms of this massive thousands year-long timeline. Can these beings operate outside of our spacetime? Do they interact with time differently than we do? I ask this question without being able to answer it, but as we will see in the pages that follow, there are instances in some intelligence appears to be able to do just that. Can other beings “time jump” throughout our reality, something depicted in the fictional television series Fringe? Is this mere science fantasy, or is it actually possible in some manner?

Or is it something even beyond this? Do these beings inhabit another dimension of our reality that we have not yet truly understood, except through the explorations of a small number of spiritual adepts over the centuries? I don’t know if this would make such entities “spiritual” beings, or simply physical beings that “live” in some other reality we know next-to-nothing about. People talk about these concepts often enough, but that doesn’t mean we really understand them.

As you can see, we are talking about some wild possibilities here which are difficult if not impossible to prove or disprove one way or the other. That makes them unattractive to scientists, who like to be able to test a hypothesis. In the world of science, such ideas are unfalsifiable, meaning that they can’t be proven true or false. In the scientific mindset, that makes them invalid. But something might be unfalsifiable and still be true.

If one of these wilder possibilities is true—if these beings are somehow spiritual and (normally) live as non-physical beings—we are going into some other directions, and terms like angels and demons will enter into the discussion for some people. What that actually would make these beings could be something else entirely, which I can’t even begin to untangle.

Before discussing any agendas, we need to determine who they are. And in order to do that, we need to decide what information we should use.

One source is something I have always referred to, which are declassified documents from the U.S. government and other governments. These documents tell us important things about the nature of the UFOs, although very little about the beings themselves. At the very least, they prove conclusively that someone has technology and science that has not been supposed to exist. And since there remains no evidence that any Earthly power has been responsible for inventing astonishing flying saucer craft that can instantly accelerate, stop, hover, zigzag, and outperform the best aircraft in the world with ease, it’s a reasonable conclusion that we are talking about aliens of some sort. Whatever that means and wherever they might come from.

In addition, there is a substantial body of witness testimony concerning UFO crash retrievals. Even though we still don’t have a formal official acknowledgment about them, the volume and quality of the testimony is more than enough to accept the reality of UFO crash retrievals. Many of these crash retrieval stories include descriptions of alien beings and bodies. Besides, as of this writing, we have moved very close toward a quasi-official acknowledgment of UFO crash retrievals, judging from some of the articles coming out of the New York Times.^[6]

In addition to the above forms of evidence, there are many statements from people claiming to have had encounters with various types of alien beings. Conceding that this category is a mixed bag in terms of quality and reliability, we still want to sift through accounts that seem credible. Some of these come down to a judgment call, but that is no reason to avoid trying our best.

Beyond these, there are still other kinds of information to consider, what we might simply consider to be interesting testimony and leaks that don’t fit into the other categories.

Essentially, from a range of sources, we will try to formulate our best assessment of (a) what kinds of beings are operating these UFOs and (b) what they are up to.

6. Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, “No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public”, New York Times, July 23, 2020.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/pentagon-ufo-harry-reid-navy.html

Let’s now move into a discussion of who these beings appear to be. Perhaps a good place to start is by looking at a recent and large study about people who have had UFO experiences. This is known as the FREE Study (The Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences). In 2018, this organization published the results of a large survey that included thousands of experiencers of UFO and extraterrestrial or alien encounters. There are fair concerns about how this study was done, primarily from the fact that all the data came from an online questionnaire without clear indications of filtering for non-authentic experiences. Having acknowledged this limitation, it’s still clear that this study includes a great amount of valuable data and deserves to be examined.^[7]

Data in the FREE study

Five commonly reported alien types.

The study has a number of components. One of them concerns people who claimed to have been onboard a UFO and seen occupants of the craft. Again, you never know whether each specific respondent is being completely truthful or accurate, but definite patterns do emerge. One interesting fact jumps out. Of all these respondents, 45% of them claimed to have seen human-looking beings. Roughly the same percentage also reported having seen short gray aliens. Many of the respondents saw both of these types at the same time.

Not surprisingly, other types of beings were also reported. Roughly a third of all respondents claimed to have seen tall gray aliens that were five feet tall or even taller. About 20% reported seeing hybrids, presumably alien-human hybrids of some sort. A smaller but still significant amount of respondents, about 13%, saw mantid or insect-type beings, and about the same percentage also reported seeing reptilian-type beings. In addition, about a third of respondents reported “other types,” which is a bit like throwing in the kitchen sink, but it seems important that we recognize the great variety of alien types that people report.

Therefore, from this survey, the fundamental alien types are, in order of appearance: human, short gray, tall gray, hybrid, insectoid, reptilian, and a variety of other types.

There are other collections that support the data in the FREE study. A compendium of a dozen research sources gives results that are fairly consistent: human-looking beings, short grays, tall grays, reptilians, insectoids, and so forth, right on down to the smaller but significant percentage of beings whose appearances vary greatly. Among these various studies, human-looking beings are once again in a tie for first place, although here it is with reptilian beings, followed closely by grays and insect-like beings.^[8]

The variety of entities reported is interesting. Of course, we need to account for the likelihood that a certain percentage of these descriptions are faulty. Some may be absolutely false, some may be screen memory, and some may also come down simply to the interpretation of the original artist or interviewer doing his or her best to follow a witness description. Even so, having accounted for such inevitable inaccuracies, it’s the consistency that continues to prompt us to consider that the witness descriptions are accurate, and that there genuinely is a variety of alien beings.

This might strike some people as all-too-obvious. However, it’s worth pointing out that for many years there has been resistence by many UFO researchers toward accepting all this variety. I suspect that most of us want to believe in simple, clean solutions. One alien group—okay, that seems believable. Two types? Perhaps there are competing groups. But three or more—to say nothing of claims of fifty or more different types—somehow feels like too many, at least to most of us. So, for years, researchers would often ignore the variety, or more often just shrug their shoulders and assume there could be faulty memory at work, or screen memories, to explain some of the crazier descriptions of aliens.

There could be good reasons for the variety that we haven’t yet explored. The main thing, however, is that we are wisest when we adhere to what the data seems to be telling us. In this instance it points to the likelihood that a variety of beings are here.

7. Hernandez, Rey, Beyond UFOs: the Science of Consciousness and Contact with non Human Intelligence (Volume One), 2018.

8. See 33 Types of Non-Human Intelligences (NHIs)
https://www.exostudies.org/updates/33-types-of-non-human-intelligences-nhis/

Types of Aliens Reported (Right Click and "open image in a new tab" to view full-size)   Humanoid Looking Hybrid Types Gray Alien Miscellaneous alien Humanoid Looking Aliens, sketch by Sherri Miller. Hybrid Alien Types, sketch by Sherri Miller. Gray Alien Types, sketch by Sherri Miller. Miscellaneous alien descriptions. Images adapted by Sherri Miller.

Here is a series of drawings of alien beings that have been described and collected over the years by generations of UFO researchers, from the 1940s through the early 1990s. This was gathered together and the original images sketched by Sean Esbjorn-Hargens.^[9]

Many of these illustrations derive from well known cases over the past several decades. I took the liberty of separating them out into morphological types so that we could get a sense of how they group together.

Once again, quite a large number of them look human—more or less. Some have unusual features, such as the eyes, but they generally look human.

There are a certain number of other types as well, including a large collection of obvious hybrid-type beings, with definite variations in how human or how alien they appear. Also included, of course, are a variety of grays, quite a large group of them. Despite some definite variety, they share much in common.

And then there is a category we might call The Kitchen Sink. It includes the strange creatures described in the Hopkinsville, Kentucky case from 1955. It includes the short, hairy type of creature described from South America in 1954. One creature looks like it belongs in the classic children’s book Where The Wild Things Are. There is a reptilian in the mix, some frog-like and amphibian-like beings, and the bizarre carrot-eared creature described from the 1973 encounter from Pascagoula, Mississippi.

Not every case from which these depictions come is a sure thing, but a number of them come with detailed witness testimony that has always struck me as legitimate. So there we are, and the variety is undeniable.

Can all of this variety be genuine? Maybe it’s a sign that I’ve been in the field for too long, but I believe the answer is yes, they can be genuine.

9. See “Types of Aliens Reported,” by Sean Esbjorn-Hargens
https://www.earthlymission.com/types-of-aliens-reported/.
Hargens is author of Integral Life,
https://integrallife.com/author/sean-esbjorn-hargens/.

Despite the great variety of beings that have been reported, we see they run from the gamut of those beings that look completely human, to those that look human-like, to those that look much less human but still have what we can call a humanoid appearance, including the ability to walk upright on two legs, and possessing the basic features we have such as two arms, grasping hands, two eyes, a nose, a mouth and so on. Moreover, beings that are roughly our size. Even those beings that are three feet tall are at least close enough to us. After all, they aren’t reported as ultra-tiny or gigantic in size.

Is it realistic to expect all alien species to be like that? Shouldn’t there be examples of truly wild-looking aliens that might be visiting here, perhaps with octopus-like tentacles, or two heads, or multiple legs like a giant centipede? Where’s the real variety, like the famous bar scene in the first Star Wars movie?

For many years, I tended to brush aside or politely ignore the mass of reports that included sightings of perfectly human, or nearly human, occupants of UFOs. It’s not exactly the case that I tried to debunk them, but generally I was mistrustful of them. My assumption was that there are no nearby Earth-like planets and that therefore it would be unlikely that there are other worlds that could be home to human-looking beings. What are the odds, I used to think, that some distant planet many light-years away would also have beings that evolved so similarly to us? It seemed unlikely to me.

I look at the situation differently today. One reason is simply that the overwhelming amount of testimony is too much to ignore. Another reason is that I have come to ask a different question, namely, how could it be true? Or, to clarify that a bit: What conditions would need to exist for humanoid or human-like beings to come here, seemingly from elsewhere?

That turns out to be a very interesting question. We understand that our part of the universe is not unique. All of the elements and chemical compounds that are in our part of the galaxy (from hydrogen to the full range of heavier elements in differing amounts) exist pretty much everywhere else. All of which means there undoubtedly are a certain number of planets that are similar to Earth. And indeed, we now estimate that there are possibly six billion Earth-like planets in our own galaxy alone. To qualify as Earth-like, incidentally, a planet must be rocky, roughly the same size as Earth and be orbiting in the habitable zone of a sun-like (G-type) star.^[10]

If the planet is like our own, at least in basic generalities, it would stand a good chance to have its own carbon-based life-forms, including plant and animal, with some that live in oceans, and very likely others that would eventually find their way to land. If they have plants living on land, they might well evolve a form of photosynthesis that produces oxygen, in which case you could see oxygen breathing creatures on land.

In other words, it could be that Earth-like planets develop life in a consistent manner. But do they create humans as well? Doesn’t that still seem improbable?

Perhaps not so much, at least in the basics. We have two eyes, two ears, a nose and a mouth. We have opposable thumbs on our hands, two legs that allow us to be bipedal and make use of our arms and hands. Our eyes are positioned five to six feet above the ground, which is a very useful evolutionary strategy. And we’ve got good brains, which is an expensive organ in terms of the amount of energy it requires, but so far has been worth the cost.

When thinking about evolution, it’s important to remember that every feature that a species develops may offer something valuable, but it also comes at a cost. Which is why having two arms and four legs wouldn’t make sense for us, as the extra two legs would require more energy (food) input than would be worth the gain that is obtained. The same can be said for all other features of our body. The most successful creatures are perfectly adapted to their environment with bodies that utilize the resources efficiently, without excess energy waste.

Although scientists have often speculated that life elsewhere is probably bizarre and foreign, it is possible that successful life forms—especially those that develop technology, science, and space travel—might function within more closely defined parameters. Successful carbon-based life forms elsewhere may very well have evolved in ways that are similar to how we evolved. Parallel lines of evolution, and not the Star Wars bar scene, may be the order o the day.

It almost seems surreal to consider this, but perhaps the idea of human-like creatures evolving elsewhere might not be so crazy. What would be very interesting to ponder is the possibility that our ancient visitors may themselves have looked somewhat like us, or at least enough like us that our ancestors would recognize them as advanced beings, and maybe even as gods.

With the estimate now at six billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, we clearly have lots of company, and there have probably been many opportunities for beings to evolve who may look at least a little bit like us. It’s probable that what happened to us has happened elsewhere. They could look like humans, or perhaps like short bald-headed beings, or even seven foot tall insects, for all we know, but the basic body plan for technologically successful species might be consistent.

10. “New Estimates Say 6 Billion Earth-Like Planets Exist in Our Milky Way Galaxy,”
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/new-estimates-say-6-billion-earth-planets-exist-our-milky-way-galaxy-162978

Even though we can see how or why aliens might look somewhat human, it probably still comes as a surprise to many people that nearly half of all reported aliens look very human. That’s quite a lot. It’s one thing to look humanoid or human-like. But to look perfectly human? How could that be?

My best answer at this time is what I have already suggested: that our species was monitored and enhanced in our distant past, and the reasonable possibility that some of our ancestors were taken and adopted by whomever was visiting. If those two scenarios are true, they would explain why so many human-looking beings are reported in connection with UFOs.

I should add a proviso here. It is not necessary that visiting aliens would have taken humans to adopt, adapt, and breed beginning 40,000 years ago. It’s possible that such a process started at some later point. Perhaps the same group that originally enhanced us came back several thousands of years later and took a certain number of humans for their purposes. Or perhaps it was a different group of aliens altogether that came at a later time. But it seems to me that if someone knew about us 40,000 years ago, then we became a known and tempting subject to them and potentially other groups in our stellar neighborhood.

Whether our ancestors were taken 40,000 or 5,000 years ago, we would have to assume that, given enough time, those humans would have developed into something very different from us. They might still look like us, but they would have cultural differences nearly as vast as we have with genuine aliens. They would also probably have key genetic enhancements, including better health and longevity, and most likely critical mental capabilities, including a greater mastery over their own consciousness and some form of telepathy.

It’s a fascinating scenario to think about: what would their society look like? Where did they live for presumably so many centuries? This most likely would be a span of time longer than our oldest societies: longer than the duration of ancient Egyptian culture, longer than Chinese civilization. Did they live solely aboard massive spaceships that somehow were able to provide for their biological, emotional, and intellectual needs, from growing healthy food and nutrition to fresh air, an engaging social infrastructure, and even the right level of artificial gravity for their bodies? For thousands of years? When I think about it that way, it seems rather implausible.

Were they brought to another planet that turned out to be appropriate and hospitable for them? Given the vast number of Earth-like planets that we now are confident do exist, and given the assumption that someone had access to science and technology that could get them to one of these worlds, we could at least speculate that this scenario might work. Presumably they would be able to travel from their world to ours as needed with relative ease.

Another possibility is that such humans remained here on Earth all along. In this scenario there are several possibilities. One is that there would be a group of them that lived together, perhaps alongside or in communication with their alien superiors. Where this society would be is anyone’s guess. Could this be the explanation for some of the astonishing and, to many, inexplicable ruins in various parts of the world, including the Great Pyramid in Egypt or the structures at Machu Picchu? We are treading on some unsteady and speculative ground to be sure, but could it be possible?

If that were the case, where did those ancient advanced groups go off to in later years? Did they melt into the rest of human society at some point? Did they leave Earth and go somewhere else? Questions upon questions.

Maybe some were enhanced to some degree and inserted back into human society, either with or without the knowledge of who they actually were. Again, I have to emphasize that none of us has any genuine idea what is true here, but it’s the nature of the massive holes in our ancient history that we can even ask these types of questions, like it or not.

If we go through the long history of written records, we find countless stories of encounters that ordinary people have claimed to have with entirely human-looking beings that didn’t appear to come from ordinary human society. Judging these ancient accounts leaves us in great uncertainty. Although our ancestors from thousands of years ago had the same intelligence and perceptive abilities we have today, they also were under the influence of ideas and ideologies that we cannot help but describe as pre-scientific, certainly not the perspective that we take for granted today. Yes, they were able to witness and describe things they saw, but when we review many of the encounters that were recorded, it’s hard to accept many of them as literally true.

But just as with modern UFO reports, the sheer quantity of these ancient stories is impressive. I think we have to assume that ancient people were encountering something. And there is enough consistency in the stories that we can draw some tentative conclusions.^[11]

Fazio Cardano

Here is one that I consider intriguing. It dates from the year 1491 and concerns a distinguished Italian jurist and mathematician named Fazio Cardano. Cardano was a professor at the University of Pavia and a friend of Leonardo da Vinci. He was also said to be the most esteemed physician in Milan with a reputation throughout Europe.

According to an account written by his son, the brilliant polymath Gerolamo Cardano, the senior Cardano received a visit on August 13, 1491 at around 8 p.m. in the city of Milan from “seven men” who appeared to him “clothed in silken garments resembling Greek togas and wearing shiny shoes. The undergarments beneath their glistening and ruddy breastplates seemed to be wrought of crimson and were of extraordinary glory and beauty.” They told Fazio that “they were men composed of air and subject to birth and death. It was true that their lives were much longer than ours, and might even reach to three hundred years duration.”

They engaged with Cardano in interesting philosophical and spiritual matters. According to this passage written by the younger Cardano:

Questioned on the immortality of the soul, they affirmed that nothing survives which is peculiar to the individual. When my father asked them why they did not reveal treasures to men if they knew where they were, they answered that it was forbidden by a peculiar law under the heaviest penalties for anyone to communicate this knowledge to men. But when he questioned them as to the cause of the universe they were not agreed. The tallest of them denied that God had made the world from eternity. On the contrary, the other added that God created it from moment to moment, so that should He desist for an instant the world would perish. Be this fact or fable, so it stands.^[12]

Judging from the sources—two brilliant, well-known, and leading thinkers of the day—I think we can accept that this event happened. Cardano’s visitors certainly made a strong impression on him. Were they playing a practical joke? Or were they really from somewhere else? The elder Cardano’s Wikipedia page is short but states that he “was devoted to hermetical science and the world of the occult,” and furthermore “was always in the company of a familiar spirit who talked to him.” But would this discount his claim? I shouldn’t think so. To look at it another way, his studies in those areas might have prompted the visit in the first place. It’s certainly interesting that Cardano’s visitors did not hold theological ideas in keeping with the current norms of the day, not by a long shot.

One thing that we see throughout our recorded history is that there have been many claims by people to have been taken aboard flying vehicles by beings, or to have seen people being taken aboard such vehicles. One example is from the North American Chippewa Indians from around the year 1700. According to the lore of that nation, some Indians encountered a man sitting the grass. When they approached him, he raised his hand and said, “I don’t belong here. I dropped from the above.” He told them that he had been “running in the sky,” and that there was an open place and he fell through. They wanted to take him back to their village with them but he insisted they first clean the place where he was to stay. They did so and he went with them. He was said to be good-looking, “clean and shining bright.” Everyday at sundown he watched the sky. He told them, “something will come down, I will go up.” One day he told them, “now it’s coming,” although no one else could see anything in the sky. One person in the village saw a brilliant star shining high above. According to the legend, when the object got low enough it was very beautiful, and two of the men pulled it down. The stranger then entered the object, rose into the sky, and was gone.^[13]

Another fascinating story, this one from Norway, dates to June 1720, in the Asdalen Valley. This is a substantial distance to the north in that country and to this day remains sparsely populated. We have a detailed account describing the abduction of a 15 year old girl named Astri Olsdatter who had worked at a farm. She claimed to hear music from the nearby mountain. As she listened to it, a man who appeared in the likeness of her employer was able to get her to follow him. Along the way they met with four other men, dressed nicely in red shirts, black trousers, blue stockings, black buckled shoes, and black round caps. They all had blond hair. At that moment the man who looked like her employer instantly changed his appearance. Suddenly they were inside the mountain without her knowing how they had gotten there.

Inside the mountain was a large and beautifully finished space which contained quite a few men and women. The girl immediately became upset and refused to cooperate with this group, even refusing to speak to them or eat any of the tasty food they were continually offering her. The furnishings were elaborate, with lots of descriptions of silver and gold, silken pillows, and other luxuries. One woman really tried to soften Astri’s attitude, but to no avail. They wanted her to stay with them and offered her the choice of marrying any one of the handsome young men that were there. Nothing worked. They then presented realistic apparitions of her aunt and her mother, who tried to talk her into staying. She later noted that the group ate and drank without saying any prayer first, something unthinkable in her culture. She described incredible beautiful music coming from all kinds of instruments. She was eventually allowed to run away from this place and return home. Before she left, the woman who had been kind to her grabbed her sternly and “crushed her hard on her chest.” Another person said to the woman, “Do not hurt her. We will always get her again.”

Astri believed she was gone for only half a day and was shocked to learn that she had been gone for five days. This caused quite a stir in her village. She was confined to her home for two weeks and not allowed to return to church until after that. It appears that the leading citizens of the area interrogated her about the event, and by all accounts she seemed honest.^[14]

These stories merely scratch the surface of a deep and rich history. Ask different scholars on what they mean and you will get different answers. Are these and all the other similar stories from those early years simply fanciful tales that people made up to pass the time? Or was there something unknown to us that triggered the stories, which the people telling them didn’t understand? Or were they essentially true, albeit accounting for some of the oddities of the beings that were described? For instance in the Chippewa tale, the strange man claimed had had been a “runner” in the sky and fell through an opening. It’s easy to see why a highly advanced group of people would choose not to tell ordinary people about many of the realities of their world and society.

These three cases each show a slightly different attitude among the mysterious people. In the case of Fazio Cardano, he appears to have generated genuine interest from these beings who felt a desire or need to introduce themselves to him. Why this would be we cannot say. Cardano was an exceptional man of his time, but there were others who might have merited a visit, such as his friend the great genius Leonardo da Vinci. Even so, Cardano studied widely and deeply, and was surely a very interesting person.

The Chippewa legend, if we take it at face value, seems to have described an accident by the “other” humans who somehow lost one of their own before they were able to retrieve him. This is a trickier story to interpret because it had gone through a long oral tradition before it could be written down, hence all manner of corruption probably crept in, such as the part in which two men of the tribe helped to pull down the descending craft that ultimately retrieved the stranded visitor.

The story of the young lady from Norway strikes one as a failed attempt at an abduction of the permanent kind. Again, if we take the story at face value, then this group had access to outstanding technological capabilities and, despite living in the interior of a mountain, had no problem in providing very well for themselves. They also maintained an ethical code, since they did not forcibly keep Astri. They did however indicate that they would take her again, something very reminiscent of contemporary stories of abduction. One thing we might wonder about this Norwegian group is whether or not they actually human. After all, they had the ability to create illusions and to recreate the images of people the girl knew, including her own mother. If this is a true story, then this group had been watching the locals in this remote area very closely. We might ask, why? What was the point? Of course, this might have been done with minimal effort on their part. Presumably the young girl was interesting to this group for some reason we don’t know.

11. See Aubeck, Chris and Vallee, Jacques, Wonders in the Sky. Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times, Penguin, 2009.

12. Rosales, Albert, Humanoid Encounters, 1 AD-1899: The Others Amongst Us. Also Vallee, Jacques, Passport to Magonia.

13. Rosales, Albert, Humanoid Encounters: 1 AD-1899: The Others Amongst Us, citing Brown, Charles, Historical Society of Wisconsin.

14. Rosales, Albert, Humanoid Encounters: 1 AD-1899: The Others Amongst Us. Citing Ole Jonny Braene in Magonia List, quoting “Illustrerer Nyhedsblad,” Christiana Norway, October 3, 1858.

Let’s move into the 20th century, in which witnesses saw human-looking occupants of UFO craft. I am fascinated by collections of early 20th century stories of encounters with flying saucer occupants, since they are poorly known but on occasion very intriguing. Some of them involve the infamous airship sightings that took place in the western part of the United States during 1896 and 1897, although so many of those accounts seem fanciful and spurious. What is less well known are the many inexplicable airship sightings that followed through the first decade of the 20th century. These sightings were widespread, with New Zealand being a particular hotspot in the year 1909. The United States was also scene to many of these encounters and sightings at this time. Many of those cases involved human looking occupants and are difficult to explain away.

The cover of Leo Dworshak’s book, and Dworshak in later years.

Moving forward into the century we come across a case from 1932. This concerned twelve-year-old Leo Dworshak, who was playing with this brother near the town of Killdeer, North Dakota. The boys saw a strange craft land nearby. They tried to approach but were prevented by some sort of force field. They watched the machine rotate “in a complicated way.” It was silent and produced no visible exhaust.

The ship left but returned the next evening. This time the brothers saw two men who were in perfect physical shape and looked nearly identical to one another. The men invited the boys to come onboard and spoke to them in perfect German (the boys came from a German family). According to Leo, however, most of the information conveyed was via telepathy. The boys learned about the future, including the rise of Nazi Germany and even about such things as environmental dangers and the existence of home computers. The men said they came from “the twelfth galaxy” and kept twelve of their kind on Earth at all times. Their ship could become invisible when needed. The men told the boys that people were not going to believe their story about meeting them.

Dworshak had a few later encounters with these men as the years went on. He died in 2007 at the age of 87, having discussed his experiences in a book titled UFOs Are with Us—Take My Word. People who met Leo described him as intelligent, honest, straightforward, and sincere.^[15]

After flying saucers became a household word in 1947, the U.S. Air Force took on public responsibility for investigating these sightings. This resulted in Project Blue Book. One of Blue Book’s more interesting cases took place on September 21, 1954, in Santa Maria in the Azores Islands. At 9:45 p.m an airport guard observed a small saucer with a clear nose land about 50 feet away from him. It was about ten feet in diameter and five feet high; roughly the size of a car. It had poles or appendages attached to the nose. It made a humming or whining sound as it came down and landed vertically. A blond man of normal height appeared, spoke in a strange language, patted the guard on the shoulder, got back into the craft, hooked up his harness, pushed a button, took off with the craft’s nose pointed up, then leveled off and climbed vertically. The entire encounter lasted two or three minutes. What is interesting is that Blue Book did not list this case as a hoax or misidentification. Instead it was listed as unknown.

Papua, New Guinea, 1959. Thanks to Michael Schratt and artist Tom Bogan.

A better known case of apparent humans aboard a flying saucer occurred in Papua, New Guinea in 1959, and is known as the Reverend Gill or Father Gill case. This is an interesting and well-substantiated encounter. Reverend William Booth Gill was a missionary in New Guinea, and was close to many local inhabitants of that region. For two days in a row, Gill and about two dozen or more witnesses had a clear view of a craft above them. These sightings were late in the day, toward dusk, with more than enough light to see well.

Standing on the top of the craft were several human-looking beings, seemingly engaged in some kind of work. On both occasions that the craft was in view, there was a kind of communication that went on between the people on the ground and these beings, including waving back and forth, flashlights (by both sides), and other signs of goodwill. After the second evening, the craft did not return. Gill wrote an extended description of this to his supervisor, along with a signed statement from several dozen witnesses.

Illustration of New Zealand encounter in 1959.

I have sometimes discussed some of these interesting encounters with my friend and fellow researcher Michael Schratt. One case that Michael brought to my attention happened in New Zealand, also in 1959. This involved a woman who was out in her yard doing laundry in the early evening. She saw a UFO very distinctly. Not all of the details of the case are clear to me, but at some point a human-looking being exited the craft and stood in front of her. He had an odd appendage on one arm. He wore a spacesuit similar in appearance to those worn by the early Mercury astronauts, such as Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, or Alan Shepard, as well as the early Soviet cosmonauts. He apparently spoke, but his language was unknown to the witness.

Now, the images that were created for this may not be exactly right. When I asked Michael about the details of what this witness saw, she had apparently said that the man in the spacesuit looked “more human than alien,” but what exactly that meant is not clear to me.

When I discussed this and a few similar cases with Michael, we had a difference of perspective. I’m always interested in his opinions. He’s an expert in military history and aviation history, and the two of us often discuss the likelihood of a secret, and very human, breakaway civilization. He and I both believe in the likelihood of some type of highly advanced black budget operation, although I tend to be more hesitant to ascribe UFO sightings of the 1950s or even the 1960s to such a program. Today, yes, especially during the last four decades or perhaps a bit more. However, I have not crossed the line into accepting that we had built fully functional flying saucers in the 1950s, and which were operational worldwide. Perhaps one day I will, but right now, no. While I have little reason to doubt that some UFO sightings are the result of our own classified technology, I have a difficult time with such an explanation for the full and rich history of these encounters and sightings.

In the examples we have seen so far, I think it is unlikely that these were classified projects. More than sixty years later, we still have no idea where such a classified programs would have been based, or what infrastructure at the time could have been responsible for manufacturing these flying saucers. To say nothing of what technology and science would have been utilized for them. No researcher has been able to answer these questions. The other problem with the theory of a classified society, at least in many of these UFO cases, is that there are several instances, such as in the New Zealand case, in which the very-human-looking occupants of these craft spoke a language that witnesses said was incomprehensible. Think of a language that may be wholly unknown to you, perhaps Mandarin, or Russian, or German, or Spanish, or Swahili. Most likely, even most people who don’t know a word of Russian might well have heard bits of the language here and there at least to say that something “sounded” Russian. Even in 1959, I think it would be odd if someone were to hear something so radically different that it would be completely unrecognizable. It strikes me as very unlikely.

This is especially true when we consider that any secret flying saucer program in the 1950s and 1960s would have come from a very small number of candidates, essentially the United States and Russia. We can rule out Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan, at least during the first few decades after the Second World War. Ditto China, which was technologically far behind at the time.

So as far as incomprehensible languages is concerned, the only genuine candidate would be Russian. Let’s give the Russians credit—they were out in front of the space race during the late 1950s and certainly had an advanced scientific infrastructure. It’s also understood that the Russians had their own UFO encounters and possibly crash retrievals by this time. Perhaps they were working on their own secret flying saucer program. But if they were, we know nothing about it to this day. It seems unlikely, from my perspective, that the Russians were behind these sightings. It is more likely in my view that these human-looking beings did not belong to our civilization. And that includes the following cases that occurred in the 1960s and afterward.

Rendition of Simonton’s encounter. Sketch of the craft based on Simonton’s description, and Simonton himself with one of the “cookies.”

One such UFO occupant case occurred on April 18, 1961. It was one of the few that received much publicity at the time, and as result became controversial. At 11 a.m., Joe Simonton, a sixty-year-old chicken farmer of Eagle River, Wisconsin, was startled by a strange loud noise above his farmhouse. He stepped to the window and saw a silvery object coming down vertically in his yard. He immediately went outside and walked toward the object. A hatch in the upper portion opened and he saw three dark-skinned, dark-haired men inside. They were about five feet tall, short but still within a normal range. They wore dark blue knit outfits with turtleneck tops, and knit helmets similar to those worn under headpieces. They were clean-shaven. The inside of the craft was dull black and Simonton noticed what looked like instrument panels.

The men did not speak to him, but one of them handed Simonton a silvery jug with two handles and made a drinking-like motion, apparently indicating that he wanted water. Simonton took the jug, filled it, and handed it back. Looking into the craft, he saw a man cooking on some kind of flameless cooking appliance. There were several small, perforated, cookie-like objects beside the griddle. Simonton motioned that he would like one, whereupon one of the men handed four of them to him. They then closed the hatch and the object departed at a 45° angle and was gone in seconds. The encounter lasted for about five minutes.

Simonton tasted a cookie and said it was like eating cardboard. The case was investigated by the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) and received media attention. The other “cookies” were eventually analyzed and found to consist of corn, wheat flour, and other familiar ingredients. Simonton was not happy with the attention he received and said that if it happened again he would probably not tell anyone about it.

It’s a strange case because it’s so prosaic. Perhaps that’s why I like it. The U.S. Air Force, which officially looked into it, speculated that Simonton might have had a mental illness that caused him to hallucinate the encounter, but no one who actually met with Simonton ever seemed to believe that. Rather, people seemed to think of him as perfectly sane and honest.

Drawing from the 1967 encounter by police officer Herb Schirmer.

Another intriguing and once-better-known encounter with human-like UFO occupants took place in the town of Ashland, Nebraska at 2 a.m. on December 3, 1967. Police officer Herbert Schirmer was doing a normal patrol along Highway 6, having just passed the intersection with Highway 63, when he noticed what looked like red lights on top of a large truck. He stopped with his headlights shining on the object. He quickly concluded the object was not a truck. The blinking red lights came through oval portholes of a flying saucer that was hovering about eight feet above the road. He watched the object rise into the air with flames coming from underneath. It passed almost directly over Schirmer’s patrol car, then quickly shot out of sight.

The encounter seemed as though it lasted about ten minutes, but when Schirmer returned immediately to the police station, it was 3 a.m. He had definitely lost some time. At the station he made the following entry into his logbook: “Saw a flying saucer at the junction of highways 6 and 63. Believe it or not!”

Afterward, Schirmer developed a red welt on his neck, a headache, and he began to feel ill. This was when the University of Colorado’s Condon Committee was investigating UFOs, and Schirmer soon had their attention. Two months after his encounter, he was hypnotically regressed by psychologist Dr. Leo Sprinkle of the University of Wyoming. This unlocked vivid memories.

Schirmer recalled that after he stopped his car near the object, the engine died and his radio went silent. A white object emerged from the craft and seemed to communicate mentally with him, preventing him from drawing his gun. Human-like beings, five feet tall or a bit shorter, escorted him from his car and into the ship. One of the beings gave Schirmer a tour of the upper half of the craft. Communication apparently was both spoken and telepathic. The beings had slightly slanted eyes that didn’t blink. Their skin was light gray in color, their heads were long and thin, their noses were flat, and their mouths were slit-like. They wore silver-gray uniforms and gloves. An emblem of a winged serpent appeared at the left breast of each suit. The beings wore helmets which had a small antenna on the left side around the ear. Schirmer believed these antennas facilitated communication with him.

The main being showed Schirmer a TV-like screen that displayed a star system. “This is where we are from: a galaxy next to yours,” he said. Schirmer saw writing that he could not understand. He learned that the beings drew energy from electrical power lines, and also had a base on Venus. They told him that they would visit him twice more and that some day he would “see the universe.”

In Schirmer estimation, these beings were friendly. His life and career suffered as a result of the encounter, and there was never any indication that he was anything other than honest and sincere about what he claimed happened. At this point it might be a good idea to pause and assess a few things. We notice already from these few twentieth century cases that there are two basic types of human-looking occupant of the UFOs. First, those who looked like perfect human specimens, who could live and walk among the rest of human society without being noticed, except perhaps for their good looks. A second type of human-like entity was a bit shorter but could still conceivably fit in, perhaps as long as people weren’t observing them too carefully. The beings in Herb Schirmer’s encounter certainly had some unique features that would make them stand out in a human crowd, but overall they seemed human enough.

How to make sense of these encounters? We are left with some choices. First, we can gloss over some of the differences by assuming faulty memory, especially in Schirmer’s case because of the hypnosis. Or we can assume all memories and accounts are accurate. In that case, we would have “perfect” human beings of different sizes. After all, the people that Joe Simonton encountered were merely short. Otherwise they seemed absolutely normal. So we can lump them in with the other humans. The beings that Schirmer encountered, however, seem different enough that we are inclined to categorize them as another group.

Of course, if we take all the messages that people received as accurate, things become more splintered, but is that really warranted? How accurate or truthful would all of these messages be? The beings that Leo Dworshak spoke with said they came from the “twelfth galaxy,” a nonsensical statement. Schirmer’s contact said they had a base on Venus, also seemingly implausible (unless they were, say, in orbit around Venus for some reason). Who knows, maybe all the messages were true, but this seems hard to believe. In general, among these human-like beings, there seems to be at least two specific types or maybe more.

Alabama 1983. Rendition based on witness accounts. Artist: Tom Bogan. Alabama 1983 (close up). Artist: Tom Bogan.

Another case I learned about from Michael Schratt took place in Mobile, Alabama in 1983. It contains multiple-witnesses and appears to be solid.

Michael is one of the very few people who has gone through the complete sightings database of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies in Evanston, Illinois (CUFOS). This is one of the cases he uncovered. Clearly, the craft that was seen was extraordinary and nothing like what any nation is known to have been building at any time, certainly not in the 1980s.

But it was the sighting of the beings inside that piques our interest here. According to the primary witness, “the beings were pale-skinned dressed in white one-piece suits.” She judged them to be “about our height, 5 feet 10 inches, quite slender but with chests larger than ours. The top of the head more prominent, no hair … and having the lower half only of ears similar to our own.”^[16]

It’s remarkable that she was close enough to see such detail, but her account appears to be quite specific, so evidently she could. Her remark about the ears was interesting. “The lower half only” were similar to our own. Does that mean the upper half were different, perhaps pointed like Spock? We don’t know. The witness did not note anything unusual about the eyes. One might assume she couldn’t see them closely, but we might also think that if they were big black wraparound eyes, she might have noticed. What did draw her attention, she told investigators, was the grace of their movements, and the fact that the atmosphere inside the craft seemed “sterile.”

15. Rosales, Albert, Humanoid Encounters, 1930-1949: The Others Amongst Us.
Korczak, Ken, “Plain-Talking, Plains-Dwelling Leo Dworshak Tells His True Story of 1932 Alien Contact in Rural North Dakota.”
https://toptenbookreview.com/?p=2519

16. Note: the artist in this rendition gave these beings hair.

Not all of the interesting encounters with strange humans involve sightings of UFOs. There are quite a few stories that describe bizarre encounters with perfectly human-looking beings, but who for one reason or another seemed like they “didn’t come from here.”

One such story dates from September 1932 and took place in France, near the city of Amiens. This was later reported by French ufologist Jean Sider and was investigated twice by French police, the second time many years later. A young woman suffered head injuries when her car hit a tree. Two passing motorists took her, still unconscious, to a private hospital. The director, a Dr. Victor Pauchet, attempted to treat her but discovered that her blood was bluish in color and did not match any human blood type. Her name was registered as “Smith” of English nationality. She was given a saline transfusion and placed in a room with barred windows and guarded by a nurse. Somehow the nurse fell asleep and the patient vanished. She had left the bed neatly made and all doors were still locked from the inside. The crashed car also vanished. Not surprisingly, everyone was greatly shaken by this. A second investigation of this incident was made in 1977, probably on behalf of the French UFO agency GEPAN.^[17]

During the 1950s, stories of contact with human looking extraterrestrials became widespread due to popular accounts of “contactees” such as George Adamski, Daniel Fry, George Hunt Williamson, Elizabeth Klarer, Howard Menger and many others. It is safe to say that most people consider these claims to be fraudulent and hoaxes. However, even today, a certain percentage of UFO researchers take at least some of these claims seriously. Famed astronaut Gordon Cooper for instance knew Daniel Fry professionally when Fry worked at White Sands Proving Ground and stated that he believed Fry to be totally credible.^[18]

I have never gone all-in on contactee stories, but could any of the claims be true, or have a kernel of genuine legitimacy? I have a hard time envisioning virtually identical human beings evolving elsewhere. But could humans from here have been responsible for some of these encounters?

Some of these stories do strike me as worthy of consideration, although generally not the cases in which someone promoted themselves as a contactee. One encounter that I find noteworthy is that of the mysterious Mr. Janus. This story connects to Prince Philip, husband and consort of Queen Elizabeth of the United Kingdom. As of this writing, Prince Philip is still alive and well into his 90s. He also has had a lifelong interest in UFOs. During the 1950s and for many years after that, the Prince was a close friend to a gentleman named Sir Peter Horsley. Horsley himself was a capable and accomplished man, a former RAF fighter pilot and highly skilled in many areas. It is easy to see why he would have the confidence of someone like the Prince.^[19]

During the 1950s, Prince Philip asked Horsley to do some research for him on the subject of flying saucers and everything connected to them. On one occasion in 1954, Horsley had an encounter in a London apartment with a gentleman identified only as Mr. Janus.

Stock image that is a reasonable representation of the enigmatic Mr. Janus, except that the actual Mr. Janus looked closer to forty years of age.

Horsley had a long conversation with this man, who sat in a chair during their entire time together. Janus immediately asked to have a meeting with Prince Phillip, which was highly unusual and very forward. Horsley asked why, and Janus replied that the Prince was an especially advanced thinker for someone in his position and their meeting could do much good if it were to happen. They then had a long conversation, during which Horsley became convinced that this man was an extraterrestrial. He remained convinced of that for the rest of his life, into the early 21st century. Janus also seemed to be telepathic. Horsley wrote that he was struck by “the man’s extraordinary ability to read my thoughts.”

Janus talked to Horsley about the low level of consciousness exhibited by most of the human race and how the extraterrestrials were looking at humanity—exactly as if Mr. Janus were an extraterrestrial himself.

Provided Man overcomes his self-destructive excesses, he could have the means of traveling throughout the universe during the next few hundred years, at first in robot and computer-controlled spaceships …

His message was largely spiritual and anti-materialistic. Janus emphasized that the occupants of UFOs were not readily inclined to make open contact. Most of the vehicles are controlled by computers and “robots.” But mainly, Earth’s population and society simply were not ready for contact. The knowledge of these beings “must come slowly to those most able to assimilate it in the fullness of time.”

Janus also mentioned a group of people he called the Observers. It wasn’t clear if these were the same beings as were operating the UFOs. They have studied Earth for a long time, he said, and continue selectively to interact with a small number of people. These observers “have highly developed mental powers, including the extra-sensory, thought reading, hypnosis and the ability to use different dimensions.”

Janus did not explicitly tell Horsley that he was an observer, but that was Horsley’s conclusion. Toward the very end of the conversation, Horsley thought to himself that Janus’s “personality was so powerful and hypnotic that already I was wondering what to do about him.” At that moment, Janus seemed to read his thoughts and said, “Because of what you have been told you are sensing danger. You are wondering who or what I am?” The conversation ended at that point and they said goodbye.

Horsley was a worldly, astute, and sophisticated man, not someone who would be easy to fool. Yet he came away from that meeting convinced that Janus was some sort of “other.”

Then there is the remarkable story of remote viewer Ingo Swann. During the mid 1970s, Ingo had an encounter with a man known only as Axelrod, a man every bit as mysterious as Mr. Janus. I had the good fortune to visit Ingo Swann at his home in 2003 and talk about this encounter, and I later wrote about it at length in Volume 2 of UFOs and the National Security State. Essentially, this is another case of what I think was an instance of human-looking non-humans operating here quietly on Earth.

The story, very briefly, is as follows. In 1975, Ingo Swann was already known to people in the intelligence community for his outstanding record of “psychic spying,” known as remote viewing. He eventually was asked by an intermediary to meet with a man who turned out to be “Axelrod” inside a secure underground facility where Ingo was tasked to perform various remote viewing exercises, including remote viewing the Moon. Axelrod had two assistants working for him, who appeared to be virtually identical (Ingo nicknamed them “the twins”).

Over the next few years, Axelrod contacted Ingo on and off. On one occasion while in Los Angeles, Ingo was shopping for groceries and encountered a strikingly beautiful woman. As he got closer to her, he became terrified and was convinced she was an alien. He looked over and saw “the twins” in the store, motioning for him to get away from her. In the aftermath, Axelrod phoned Ingo and told him it would have been very dangerous if he had approached her. During their final get-together, Axelrod and the twins took Ingo by plane and helicopter to a forest in what appears to have been Alaska, where they witnessed a triangular UFO appear out of thin air above a pond, whereupon it began sucking up the water like a reverse waterfall. Axelrod asked Ingo if he was able to sense anything about the craft and whatever might have been inside it.^[20]

I have spoken to people close to Ingo who absolutely believed that Axelrod was not a normal human, but from somewhere else. His job, it was speculated, was to conduct counterintelligence on the new remote viewing program, presumably in an effort to determine vulnerabilities to his own group or society. I don’t know if Ingo personally believed that, but at least some people close to him in the intelligence community did seem to believe it.

Over the years, I have collected a number of stories of eerily telepathic humans. So have other researchers, of course. These are stories of people who look like us but don’t seem like us. There are too many of these stories to ignore.

Many times I have told two particular stories of this kind, often back to back, as they seem to me like bookends that belong together. One was told to me by a retired Air Force Colonel with a Ph.D., and his wife. They were having some fun downtime at a Las Vegas casino with a friend of theirs, whom the Colonel described as “psychic.” While on the second floor of a posh Las Vegas hotel, the friend stopped them both and said, “that woman over there is not human.” She motioned to a beautiful blonde woman in blue clothing. The friend and the Colonel’s wife quickly went down a nearby escalator, but the Colonel stayed behind and observed.

Suddenly, he “heard her” in his mind, telling him in essence that there was nothing for him to see here and to go about his business. This startled him, as the woman was at least twenty feet away from him and didn’t say a word. Soon after, she was joined by an extremely handsome blond man, also wearing blue. They conferred briefly and then began walking toward the escalator. The Colonel was determined to say something to them, but they simply walked past him and began to descend. He followed them. Again, he heard them in his mind, and the conversation was along the lines of “he isn’t part of the program, he knows nothing, just ignore him.”

At this point in the telling of the story, the Colonel’s wife interjected and told me, almost humorously, of how she and her friend were hiding behind a slot machine, watching the three of them come down the escalator. I asked the Colonel if he was certain he heard these two in his mind, rather than an actual conversation, and he replied that he was quite sure.

As they arrived at the floor below, the couple simply walked away and that was the end of them. However, the story does not end here. The psychic friend was also a hypnotherapist, and the three agreed that she should regress the Colonel in case he might remember additional details of what the two enigmatic blond individuals had communicated. Within a day or two, he was at her home in a quiet cul-de-sac neighborhood, getting into a hypnotic state. But every time he was ready to begin, loud construction noises outside interrupted them. Each time they went out to look, they saw nothing. Eventually they gave up but agreed to meet in a month when the Colonel would be back in the area.

A month went by, and the Colonel phoned the friend in order to set up their next appointment. “What appointment?” was her reply. “The hypnotic regression!” he responded. “Remember?”

In fact, not only did the friend not remember any of this, she had no memory of the original encounter in the casino. She had no memory of the two mysterious blond individuals. As if someone or some group had wiped her memory of the event altogether.

Two years after I interviewed the Colonel and his wife, I met another married couple at an event on the other side of the country, in western Pennsylvania. The woman approached my table and told me her story. In 1965, she said, she was a 15 year old young woman who was in church with her mother. In her town, she said, everyone knew everyone, especially in church. And yet, two strange people sat down in the row ahead of her. They were a blond-haired supermodel couple, both with stunningly beautiful blue clothing. She was mesmerized by them and wondered why no one else in the church seemed to notice them, since they truly stuck out visually.

She noticed that they were unfamiliar with the routines of a normal Catholic mass, and found herself watching them both very carefully. Then, as she said to me, “I heard them in my mind.”

What she heard was something like a conversation between them, although she never made it clear to me if she could distinguish who was speaking to whom. But the conversation went something like:

“We seem to be fitting in pretty well here.”

“Yes, except for the girl behind us, who can hear us.”

That got her attention, for sure. After that exchange, she heard no more from the couple. At the end of Mass, the couple got up and out immediately, and exited the church ahead of the crowd. At this point, the intrepid teen decided to chase after tham. “Where do you think you’re going, young lady?” said her mother, who had no idea of what was going on.

The young woman pressed on through the crowd, trying to catch up to the mystery couple. As she exited the church, she saw them moving fast across a parking lot and toward the crest of a hill. They went over the hill and she continued to follow them. As she reached the top of the hill, she saw them walking quickly across a field toward a wooded area. Certainly this is very odd behavior on their part. She began down the hill to continue her chase when she saw something that stopped her, literally, in her tracks. This was another individual, standing at the edge of the woods waiting for the couple.

“Did you ever see Lurch, from the TV show The Addams Family?” she asked me. “He looked exactly like him.” The strange man was very tall, thin, wearing black or dark clothing, and a black brimmed hat. Standing on the side of the hill, she watched as the blond couple approached “Lurch,” whereupon the three entered the woods, never to be seen again.

In both of these cases of blond “supermodel” aliens with telepathic ability, there were no sightings of UFOs, and ultimately we don’t really know if there can be conventional explanations for these stories. I can only say that I have absolutely ruled out hoax in either case. These people were truthful, and I would wager that anyone else who spoke to them would believe them every bit as much as I did. As it stands, I take these accounts as true, and as accurate representations of what happened. And I believe there was telepathy involved in both instances.

Illustrations of the two female beings in Khoury’s room.

In that context, let’s discuss another case of human-looking aliens. This involved a man named Peter Khoury in 1992, also known as the Hair of the Alien case. Khoury lived near Melbourne, Australia, and woke up one morning to find two nude women at the foot of his bed. Odd as this seems, there are a few scattered reports of similar sexual-type encounters with human-looking-but-somehow-alien beings. It’s significant to note that Khoury stated that several abduction encounters had occurred earlier in his life since childhood, including in 1971 when he still lived in Lebanon.

The two women did not look completely human to Khoury, and their appearance frightened him. It has to be emphasized that Peter Khoury at no time ever wavered in what he said about this encounter, and never seemed to feel comfortable telling the story. There was a blonde-haired woman who was directly in front of him, and next to her was a dark-haired woman who looked Chinese.

The blonde woman, who seemed to be over six feet tall, had unusually large eyes, much larger than normal. She apparently was also very strong, because she reached forward and pulled Khoury’s head to her breast. Out of fear, he pulled away, but she persisted. This happened three times. Finally, he instinctively bit down on her nipple and actually took off a piece. He saw no blood and she gave no sign of being in pain. Rather than making any noise, she simply let him go and looked at the other woman, as if via telepathy and to say “he’s not supposed to do it that way.” Khoury began coughing uncontrollably at this point, as whatever he had bitten off was lodged in his throat. When he looked up, the two women were gone.

If that were all there were to the story, we would have forgotten it long ago. But there was something left behind from that encounter, something which could be studied. That was a single strand of blonde hair. This hair, it turned out, was wrapped rather tightly somehow around Khoury’s penis, which he removed and placed into a ziplock bag. The hair was eventually subjected to a genetic analysis, something written about by Australian researcher Bill Chalker in his book, The Hair of the Alien.

The analysis determined that the hair in question was very unusual. As Chalker put it, “the analysis confirmed the hair came from someone who was biologically close to normal human genetics, but of an unusual racial type—a rare Chinese Mongoloid type—one of the rarest human lineages known, that lies further from the human mainstream than any other except for African pygmies and aboriginals.”

Another oddity was the hair color. Considering the ethnic group from which it seemed to come, it should have been black, not blonde. Moreover, it was determined that the hair was not bleached or colored in any way. Chalker later had additional tests done on this strand of hair. Not only did it have the unusual DNA profiles of a rare Chinese DNA in the hair shaft and the rare Basque/Gaelic type DNA in the hair root, but it also had “indications” of the CCR5 gene deletion factor. This last feature, wrote Chalker, is quite rare in the human species, being confined to a small percentage of people of northeastern European descent. However, its presence “would allow such beings to carry out intrusive activities amongst humans without concern for diseases such as HIV & smallpox.” None of these factors are easy to explain, but would seem to be the product of sophisticated genetic engineering.^[21]

So what kind of encounter was this? Such a bizarre event, but worth thinking about. For instance, the manner of the departure of the two women. The fact that the genetics of at least one of the women was human, but very rare and seemingly some sort of hybrid. We might easily surmise that there is a hybrid human group that has access to very advanced technology. We might also infer that some of these beings live here on Earth. If so, it means that there are other societies that share our Earth with us, covertly.

Incidentally, I recently came across another account of a story very similar to the Khoury incident, reported by researcher Preston Dennett in a collection of encounter cases that he personally had researched. This incident occurred in 1993, just a year after Khoury’s encounter. It involved a man named Gary, who had experienced a long history of sightings and abductions. On one evening while his wife slept on the other side of the bed, Gary was wide awake trying to sleep with the cover over his face, as he apparently often did. Eventually he looked out from his blanket and saw, to his horror, another face staring back at him, six or eight inches away. It was a blonde-haired woman dressed in gray, on her hands and knees. She was very beautiful, and described later as looking like the actress Pamela Anderson.

Gary’s reaction was that this was an intruder who was going to try to rob them. He shot straight up, shouting. To his surprise, the woman also jumped up. In her case, however, she quickly floated up through the roof. Naturally this awakened his wife Grace. He pointed at the ceiling, which he said had a strange swirling effect as a result of the woman going through it. But Grace didn’t notice it. He told her he saw a ghost and left it at that.

Two weeks later, he and his wife were in bed again. She was asleep, facing away from him. He woke up and opened his eyes, seeing the strange woman down on her hands and knees again, but this time staring at Grace. Apparently she didn’t notice that Gary was awake. Trying to stay calm, he reached across to put his hand on the woman’s shoulder, probably to see if she was an actual, physical being. He then said, “Hello, what’s your name?”

Once again, the strange woman reacted violently and shoved him backwards with both hands. He screamed, Grace woke up, but the woman was gone. Once again, Gary did not know how to tell his wife of what had happened.

This is a very involved story and the reader is invited to read it all in Dennett’s book. Gary had many abduction experiences, both with and without his wife. On one occasion he had a sexual encounter from another abduction, finding himself in a large warehouse size room having sex with a woman—not the strange blonde woman but someone else. This encounter took place many years after the one from 1993. He essentially woke up having sex with her there. He looked around to see an enormous number of other people also having sex, although many were writhing alone in some sort of orgiastic state. The woman he was with kept trying to bring his attention back to her, but he continually looked around, even noticing two short grays walking through the room. “Don’t worry,” she said to him, “they won’t bother you.”

He tried asking her questions, such as what was this all about, but she kept saying that she wasn’t allowed to tell him, and evaded all of his inquiries. He had the impression that she lived and worked with the Grays and did not live on Earth.^[22]

Here is one final story for this section. This is one that came directly to me while I was giving a lecture in Iowa in the year 2011. It came from a woman who, in my strong opinion, is honest and truthful.

In the spring of 1998, Lorraine (pseudonym) was a young American college student in her early twenties, studying for a semester in the U.K. toward a degree in English Literature. She was an intelligent, articulate, and level-headed person who had several occasions to take the train system in the U.K., shuttling between London, Birmingham, and Swansea. Then, toward the end of February or the beginning of March, she had an extraordinary experience.

Boarding the train at Stratford Upon Avon, she was bound for Swansea, Wales. The time was around 5 p.m. or 6 p.m., in the midst of commuter rush hour, so it was not surprising to see a full car. In fact, the car was packed, and many were standing in the aisle. She entered the car and to her surprise noticed one empty seat.

She sat down. The compartments were designed for four people each, with seats side by side and facing each other. To her left was a woman holding a newspaper, wearing a headscarf and gloves. She seemed as though she might have been 50 years old, and looked as though she was ending a long day at the office. Ethnically, the woman looked northern European.

Lorraine greeted her politely, “Hello, how are you?” The woman faced her with eyes that were unusually large, unusually round, and with colors that were “brilliant”—not hazel, but some combination of brown and blue. Although the woman wore eyeglasses, this did not account for the appearance of her eyes, in Lorraine’s opinion.

The woman’s first response was a long, drawn-out “Ooohhh,” and then a polite reply. Her accent was odd. Despite being in western England not far from Wales, the strange woman spoke in a perfect mid-western American dialect. In fact, she sounded like someone from central Iowa, where Lorraine had grown up.

Image: Shutterstock

There was only one other unoccupied seat in the entire car, and it was directly across from Lorraine. Bags and items covered it, however, and these belonged to a woman directly opposite her unusual companion. This person had dark, curly hair and brown eyes, and generally seemed more normal-looking. Yet, here, too, the eyes were unusual, protruding out more than normal and looking very intense. During the brief, polite exchange between Lorraine and the scarfed woman next to her, this other woman leaned forward, obviously listening, attentive, and curious. The way in which she did this struck Lorraine as somehow not normal. Although she never spoke, she moved her head and mouth in ways that were strange in some elusive way. When she looked at Lorraine, it was in a strangely unsettling manner.

Lorraine looked around the car. A young man, perhaps thirty years old, was standing and reading a magazine. He smiled at her and went back to his magazine. Another man, not more than eight feet away, sat one or two rows away in an aisle seat, looking directly at her. He seemed ordinary enough, probably in his mid-40s, bald on top, with a noticeable paunch in his belly, almost to the point of bloating. He wore a white tee shirt, jeans, a black leather jacket, and no glasses. And here is where matters became truly strange.

Lorraine noticed this man’s left index finger. She was astonished to see that it was unraveling.

The finger had a seam, just as cloth would have. She looked carefully. What she saw unraveling was not medical sutures, but thread. Nor was this an ultra-tight-fitting glove. Her eyesight was excellent, and she knew what she was seeing. The “skin” of this man’s hand appeared to be very silky and definitely synthetic. He seemed to be wearing a human suit.

The two looked at each other. Like the two women in her booth, this man had an unusual look in his eyes. Then he turned away to look out the window.

Now Lorraine felt light-headed, “almost as if my brain were paralyzed,” she later said. She began to feel physically ill. What was going on, she wondered? “Did I just have a stroke?”

A realization hit her. This man was not human, nor the people around her in the train car. Panic briefly overcame her, and she resolved to leave the train at the next stop, no matter how far she was from Swansea. The strange man with the unraveling finger began to fidget and look uncomfortable. As the train came to a stop, Lorraine rose to her feet, but the man beat her to it. In a flash, he rose and exited the train at the opposite end of the car. She decided to stay on the train and sat down again.

But her encounter with this man was not quite over. Now off the train and on the platform, he walked among the crowd. He found Lorraine through the window and stared at her, holding his gaze as he walked by. She now noticed that his clothes did not fit; somehow they were out of proportion to his body. Somehow, too, his eyes ‘changed,’ yet another of the odd, slippery qualities of her experience.

Before the strange man was gone from view, the scarfed woman also looked at him. As she did so, she lifted her newspaper, which directly blocked the side of her face from Lorraine’s view. Perhaps she was communicating in some way with this man. Across from her, the woman with the dark, curly hair also watched the man as he walked by.

As the train began moving again, the scarfed woman turned to Lorraine. “We’ve been here for many, many years,” she said. Recalling the moment years later, Lorraine realized how naive and confused she was at the time, for she interpreted this to mean, “we, the British, have been here for a long time.” Yet this woman sounded as though she had been raised in the cornfields of Iowa. The incongruity was lost to her at the moment. So, too, was a follow-up statement (unfortunately recalled only sketchily), that referred to Lorraine as a “star being” or “star child.”

The next stop was approaching. Lorraine had lost her early fear and was feeling relatively safe, even despite her conviction that she was among aliens on this train. Yet what followed was perhaps the most amazing event of all.

As the train came to the next stop, every single person on the car, roughly thirty to forty people in all, stood up in unison. Within seconds they were out of the car. No jostling, no sounds, just an exceptionally rapid and orderly exit from the train car. So fast was it that Lorraine could not recall the departure of the two strange women sharing her booth. “It was the most organized, efficient departure from a train I have ever seen. Unbelievable and completely organized.”

During this rapid exit, she noticed that the man who had been reading a magazine and who had smiled at her was acting as a chaperone to the group. He was human, Lorraine was sure of that. The same was evident of a young woman whom she now saw accompanying him. While the group filed past Lorraine, a few looked at her and smiled. One, with “a goofy smile and unusual eyes,” said hello.

The next thing she knew, she was sitting in a completely empty train car.

Unfortunately, the group’s manner of departure prevented her from seeing what direction they went, whether they stayed together or went their separate ways. Unfortunate, too, were the various memory lapses Lorraine had of the incident many years later, including such basic facts as which train station the event occurred at. “Perhaps my brain was shut off,” she later wondered.

Strangely, she put the event out of her mind for the remainder of her journey. Arriving back at her college dorm room, she changed her clothes and went to the recreation area where a television was on. “That’s when it hit me,” she said.

Another student, a friend of hers, entered the room. She told him what had just happened. To her surprise, he took the story in stride. In fact, he said, he had heard rumors of a community in the U.K. that had “sprung up from nowhere.” Perhaps there was a prosaic reason for it, he wondered. Perhaps this was simply a new real estate development and nothing more. However, according to the friend, the people who lived there never opened their doors and were never seen anywhere. Not surprisingly, the name, location, and very existence of the town has never been confirmed.

Of the encounter itself, perhaps some may dismiss it as a paranoid delusion of a young student living in a foreign country. But I met with Lorraine while lecturing in Iowa, and spoke with her multiple times in detail about this event. At all times she was rational, precise, and sober in her manner and description. The story stands as an inexplicable encounter from a credible witness, one of many that litter our world and challenge our perceptions.

17.  Rosales, Albert, Humanoid Encounters 1930-1949, The Others Amongst Us. Asten, Warren, MUFON International Journal, Oct. 2008.

18. Fry’s Wikipedia page lists his job at the time as “Aerojet designing, building and installing transducers fo control, feedback and measurement of rockets during flight and static tests.”

19. Horsley, Peter, Sounds from Another Room, (Leo Cooper, 1997).

20. Swann, Ingo, Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy, (Ingo Swann Books, 1998)

21. See Chalker, Bill, Hair of the Alien: DNA and Other Forensic Evidence of Alien Abductions (Pocket Books, 2005).
Also see Chalker, Bill, “Peter Khoury and the ‘Hair of the Alien’ – 20 years on”
http://theozfiles.blogspot.com/2012/07/peter-khoury-and-hair-of-alien-20-years.html and
“HAIR of the ALIEN – the CCR5 deletion factor,”
http://theozfiles.blogspot.com/2005/07/hair-of-alien-ccr5-deletion-factor.html

22. Dennett, Preston, Onboard UFO Encounters: True Accounts of Contact with Extraterrestrials, 2020.

This is such a strange subject, and knowing just how to evaluate every witness claim is difficult. In the case of Gary, Dennett stated that he knew Gary well and placed high credibility in him. That is certainly good, but unless each of us has experienced something like what these witnesses claim, moving into something like a confident belief will often be a hard sell. For myself, I included that story because of the confidence that the Dennett himself placed in it, and because of its similarity to the Khoury case, which can make it very important.

We have reviewed a smattering of cases dealing with human-looking beings who do not appear to come from our society. They seem to come from elsewhere. But if that is so, where do they live? Do they have a permanent presence here on Earth? If so, their infrastructure would have to be located somewhere and frankly we have no clue.

Is it true, as Daniel Fry’s contact “Alan” told him, that at least some of these beings have the ability to provide permanent or long-term living arrangements for people? We should consider this as likely, if for no other reason than to find some way to account for the occasional report of absolutely gigantic UFOs. Such reports have occurred, and a number of them have been from reliable military pilots. What else could be the purpose of an aerial craft that is larger than an aircraft carrier (which some of them have reputedly been). Indeed, some have been described as significantly larger even than that. They seem like small cities, probably large enough to house at least several thousand people fairly comfortably. Just how the technology would enable people to live in comfort in that kind of environment is another question altogether, and seems beyond our capabilities at the present. But perhaps not for them.

It seems possible that they could live underground, at least to some extent. Our own civilization has been able to go deep underground and under the ocean floors for some time now, so one would think this could be within the capabilities of another group that comes here. There can certainly be factors that mitigate against this. Presumably, building a large underground base could be a challenge for a visiting group, especially if they are not bringing their whole society with them. In any case, I have a hard time imagining that any visiting group would want to remain underground permanently. It doesn’t seem like an attractive long-term option. Particularly if one were “human” in any significant way, since we would assume they would be well-designed to live above the ground. Even so, we can at least admit that living underground would be conceivable and even desirable, assuming concealment is important. And also, it’s possible that enough technology can solve any problem, including long-term living underground.

There are other possibilities. One is that they live off world. Another is that they have lived among us without our knowledge. I think yes applies to each of these two scenarios, although to what extent I am not sure. Possibly both of these scenarios, off-world and living among us, are significant. In other words, there is reason to consider a substantial presence of them, integrated somehow, into our society. Additionally, I would say it’s likely that at least some of these human-looking beings live or work with alien-looking aliens.

Image: Shutterstock

When considering some of the extraordinary people in the previous accounts—the women from the Peter Khoury incident for instance—we might wonder if they had been genetically enhanced descendants of humans who were taken much earlier in our history. Such human-looking entities as we see in the Khoury incident and many others is an indicator to me that these beings are essentially us. I think the likelihood is strong that they originated from Earth, just like us, but they are by now in a very different place from us culturally and even biologically. Yes, they look like us and there is very likely an affinity that still exists between us, but there are very likely many important things about them that are different.

The most probable scenario is that there is an active presence of human-looking beings who are not like us. They live a life of which we have no idea, and a culture about which we can only guess. But part of their role has been to monitor our world, and humanity in particular. They are a part of us, but have moved on considerably, to say the least.

Let’s explore the idea of alien infiltration. At one point during the early years of the U.S. remote viewing program in the 1970s, star remote viewer Pat Price walked into the office of Dr. Hal Puthoff. Price was such an amazing remote viewer that he had already been investigated by the FBI—they wanted to know how he gained knowledge of actual code-word programs within a major NSA underground facility in West Virginia. The answer is that he had done so from the other side of the country during one of his remote-viewing sessions.

Locations of alien bases, according to Pat Price.

Now Price walks into Puthoff’s office. He tells Puthoff that he had been doing some remote viewing on his own time and decided to find out if there were any extraterrestrial bases on Earth and, if so, where they were. Price said he was able to identify four bases: in the Pyrenees, inside Mount Hayes, Alaska, in a mountain within Zimbabwe, and Mount Zeil in central Australia. As Price saw it, this last one seemed somewhat similar to the alien base in the movie Men in Black, in which there were a variety of extraterrestrials as well as humans from our own black budget world, only without the comedic value of the movie. Price said this group in Australia noticed him viewing them and he immediately broke off his session.

Normally, I would not be inclined to include a psychic account of extraterrestrials in a study like this one, but Price was just too good and too accurate to be ignored here. His statement should be taken seriously. Personally, I tend to think what he saw was probably true.

There are also a number of other claims about infiltration from other UFO researchers over time. I recall getting one from the late Elaine Douglas, a very fine researcher who told me years ago about her research in which she had learned of human-looking non-humans within the United States intelligence community, including as I recall the CIA. She didn’t tell me if she knew how prominent they were, but I know she was impressed by the likelihood that this was true. Elaine was one of the most intelligent and analytical people in the UFO field, and I would love for a researcher to have access to her file on this matter.

I think infiltration by human-looking non-humans must be considered as a genuine possibility. If so, it surely would help if we knew how to detect such infiltration. It would have to be done without them knowing, which (if they have actually infiltrated our society already) is probably impossible.

Before moving any further ahead, there remain other possibilities to explain human-looking “aliens.” We might call one of them the avatar hypothesis. Is it possible that extraterrestrials, who look nothing like us, nevertheless have an ability to “insert” their consciousness into a human body? Is it possible to grow a human body into which another consciousness can be inserted? In the movie Avatar, humans who traveled to another world inserted their minds into synthesized bodies of the local population. Obviously, we have no science that can explain how one might do this, and especially to go undetected as a member of a digitally micromanaged population. Unless, of course, such avatars have permeated key elements of our human infrastructure and can manage the situation. Yes, it sounds like it belongs in a movie script, but such possibilities should be considered.

Every so often, mainly in abduction research, we come across accounts of human souls being temporarily “extracted” and placed into “containers” while an ET procedure is occurring. It has been suggested that this is to prevent the soul from “recording” the event. Yes, this sounds rather out there, to be sure. But for those who believe in nonlocality, and in the possibility that one’s consciousness or soul can be detached from the physical body, and if one concedes the possibility that a science and technology might potentially exist to do so, well … could it happen?

How can any of us know for sure if these beings have such a capability? But if they do, if such technology and capability exists, then there could easily be a capability for them to move their own soul or consciousness into a human container. A true Invasion of the Body Snatchers scenario. As a method of monitoring and even influencing human society, this would be a much safer option than openly invading our world or making an announcement of their presence. No one can say with certainty if this is actually happening, and the idea currently offers no way to be proven or disproven. Even so, I would simply restate that we are trying to find hypotheses that can explain the presence of these human-looking non-humans among us. This is one.

There is another theory that must be considered and acknowledged, which is the hybrid-hubrid theory offered by abduction researcher David Jacobs. Dr. Jacobs, who is now essentially retired, has conducted an extensive amount of hypnotic regressions of apparent alien abductees. Having known him and spoken with him for many years, I can attest to his integrity and acumen. Alone among abduction researchers, he has actively tried to ascertain a genuine alien agenda, much as a counter-intelligence officer might try to gather evidence and make a determination adversarial power.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Jacobs was the first researcher to piece together a reasonable full portrait of a “typical” abduction experience, based on the pieces he obtained from many abductees. In other words, he sorted through the fragments, determined the proper order of the procedures, and laid out a plausible scenario in his book Secret Life. That was in 1993. In later years, books like The Threat (1997) and Walking Among Us (2015) went further. In these later works, especially Walking Among Us, he presents the idea that the hybridization program conducted by gray aliens, under the direction of insectalin (mantid) aliens, have by now created an alien-human hybrid that looks nearly perfectly human, but which still retains the core quality of the extraterrestrial telepathic ability. Indeed, this capability is beyond telepathy and goes to active mind control, providing that the hybrid-hubrid is close enough to the target and that there aren’t too many humans around—which would make control difficult or impossible. Jacobs’ assessment is that these hubrids have recently been successful at integrating themselves into human society.

His case studies are worth reading and his implication is clear: the hybridization program is not ancient, but recent. Perhaps a century old, but not much older. This infiltration, in his view, is an integral element of a straightforward planetary takeover. These beings have done it before and they have a system. Many of the abductees Jacobs has regressed tell him that the hubrids are anticipating something they call the Great Change. None of them have clear details on what the specifics of the Change are, except that it seems to involve an open and powerful presence of the aliens here on Earth. In Jacobs’ view, this equates to some form of takeover.

This hypothesis probably seems as fringe as the notion of avatars and soul containers. But for those who think of the hubrid theory as nonsense, I would recommend reading Walking Among Us as a start. To those with little background in his work, the book may well come as an unpleasant shock, mainly because of how well Jacobs makes his case.

For all the power of Jacobs’ research and thesis, my own conclusion is that he may well be correct, but incomplete in describing the bigger picture. By Jacobs’ own research, true hubrids are a very recent development, definitely not earlier than toward the close of the 20th century, maybe the 1980s at the earliest. But there are many cases of perfectly human-looking beings engaged in these flying saucers long before. What accounts for them? I don’t think this was something Jacobs really ever asked. No matter how great a researcher may be, it is so easy to overlook inconvenient evidence.

These beings look like us, and they almost certainly have our basic genetics. But there are surely some key differences. We can assume they have enhancements in critical areas such as intellectual capability (including telepathy and mind control), and probably physical abilities as well. Recall the sighting from Mobile, Alabama in which the beings on the craft were very slender but with large chests. Or the “perfect” specimens in 1932 who spoke to twelve-year-old Leo Dworshak, and who never seemed to age as years went by. Or indeed the beings who told Fazio Cardano in the 15th century that they could live for three hundred years. Perhaps these people were designer babies, much as we foresee the coming generations of humans.

Their science is different from ours, their culture is different from ours. I consider it entirely possible, even likely, that they live in a kind of society that we humans are now moving swiftly to achieve, which I have discussed in my theory of the Fourth Stage of Humanity and will cover later in this book.

At the very least, we can assume that their culture is very different from ours, but also that some or (perhaps) many of them have learned our game well enough that they can integrate and play along. Not unlike deep undercover enemy spies. Whether or not they are friends or enemies is something we cannot truly know without detailed inside information.

One final and important point.

We must assume that they find our infrastructure and current society to be very interesting. They must also find it important enough to justify their engagement in our world. This would not have been the case 500 years ago, or 1,000 years ago, or at any other time in our past. But it is the case now.

Five hundred years ago, we could not have been interesting to them, and certainly could not have been the cause of concern or worry. But that has all changed during the last century. Without a doubt, we have become very interesting and probably worrisome. Not simply regarding nuclear technology and weapons, although this would be an obvious concern to any observing species. However, it’s really our entire trajectory, including everything to do with our computing technology, our advances in AI, in genetic manipulation, in nanotech, in new forms of computing, in the whole array of advanced weaponry, and in the civilizational reorganization that is currently and rapidly underway.

Some people can see this, while others remain blind: our species is in the midst of a 21st century Gleichschaltung. A full reorganization of human society, one that will undoubtedly prune unwanted elements of humanity (by those able to do the pruning) while harnessing what remains into a tightly controlled collective that will probably become a powerful presence once we get ourselves fully and finally beyond this planet. The newly created human ant colony will then move into space, undoubtedly like other species have already done.

All of this transformation has happened within the space of less than two centuries. We’ve existed as a species for several hundred thousand years, but in a mere cosmic blink of an eye, we have vaulted ourselves to a new position of great power and danger. So yes, of course any observing group will become interested in us at this point. Finally, it’s worth noting that none of these human-looking beings have ever seemed hostile. Sometimes they were described as friendly, often as standoffish, but never as aggressive. This has been consistent over many years and many cases.

However, there is one important distinction that must be made. It does appear there are at least two specific type of human-looking beings who are not from our civilization. Those humans who have been seen and commented upon since ancient times through the early 20th century, and the hubrids as described by Dr. Jacobs. So far, we have only touched upon the latter group but will return to them in the next part of this book.

Sketch of a typical tall gray alien by Sherri Miller.

Now we turn our attention to the aliens many readers have been waiting for: the grays. Despite the preceding discussion of human-looking aliens, whenever people think about aliens, most of us imagine a gray alien with large black wraparound eyes. It’s understandable, since many people have claimed to have had such encounters, and authors such as Whitley Strieber and Budd Hopkins helped to make this type of alien extremely well-known.

Earlier in this book, I cited the various studies that indicated that humans, not gray aliens, are the most commonly reported “alien” on a UFO craft. That’s true in a sense, but also deceptive. Humans are reported more than short grays or tall grays, which are categorized separately. When you combine categories of short gray and tall gray, at least in the FREE Study mentioned earlier, then gray aliens overall are reported more frequently than humans by people who have been aboard a UFO craft.

Even though there are two basic types of gray alien, there are variations within each type. This includes skin color, which has been described as anywhere from pasty white to every shade of gray, to pinkish beige and brown. And while their heads are consistently described as larger proportionately than human heads, even here there is some variation in shape and size. It’s hard to know what to make of these variations. Are these the result of genuine differences, like the range of racial and biological differences among humans from around the world? Or are all those variations really an illusion, and are only the result of the mental control that they can exert over us?

Other variations among grays include such matters as basic as the number of fingers that have been reported, sometimes as three and sometimes as four. Perhaps it’s difficult for witnesses to notice the exact amount amid the confusion of something as bizarre as an alien abduction or encounter.

Even the quality of their most dominant feature—those massive black eyes—has not always been reported with perfect consistency. In general, the eyes are reported as extremely prominent, and are usually as enormous and pure black, frequently with a subtle fluid or liquid quality. In addition, they are usually described as almond-shaped and almost wraparound. But some witnesses have described the eyes of grays, both tall and short, as smaller, sometimes as more roundish, and sometimes even as a different color. Again, it’s hard to know what to make of these variations. Human beings have differing qualities of skin color, hair, and even general shape and size for many of our features, noses being one of many examples. Still, all of these variations seem quite minor compared with something as basic as the size of one’s eyes. Maybe the variations come down to artificial genetic modification, or maybe it’s an illusion or trick they play on abductees. Or it can be something else altogether. Right now, we just don’t know.

The variations are interesting, but ultimately we are struck by the overall consistency in descriptions of these two types. Among the taller grays especially, the eyes are arresting and even hypnotic. They seem to be the gateway to powerful telepathic connections, often delivered with great emotional power. Moreover, all grays are described as thin, often exceptionally so. The arms are always described as long and thin. It’s remarkable when you think about it; none of them are overweight. When you think about the human population, we have always had thin and fat people, but the grays seem to have one body type only. Not surprisingly, there are no witness accounts of grays ingesting food through their mouth, but there are reports that they take it through their skin while they are in their own distinct isolated compartment aboard their craft.

Another interesting feature about all grays, but which is hardly ever discussed, is one interesting physical capability: they can move very, very fast. This is mostly observed when witnesses see a gray, tall or short, in an outdoor setting, and when the encounter appears to be unexpected by the gray. Witnesses have reported that grays can move extremely fast when they need to. However, they don’t use muscle power in their legs or body. Instead, they glide much faster than a professional athlete can run. They have also been seen leaping and scaling barriers such as fences with ease. It would seem that they use some sort of science and technology that enables them to do this.

Another point of virtual uniformity is in the matter of mind control. This is particularly related to their skill of telepathy, which appears to be universal among them, perhaps enhanced via technology. All grays, especially tall grays, have a powerful ability to control the thoughts and behaviors of most people they encounter, including control over our emotions. This includes the critical skill of keeping people calm and obedient during an abduction process, to say nothing of their typical success in causing people to forget their experiences with them. This mind control exists even when no abduction appears to have occurred, for instance in the aftermath of a multiple witnesses UFO sighting. Frequently many or all such witnesses will never discuss their sighting in the aftermath, even with each other. Sometimes they can’t even seem to remember it. These beings are obviously exerting significant mind-control over us. This ability has its limits and doesn’t always work, but it very often does. The mind control is not only due to their telepathy, however. When reviewing the many cases of abduction and encounter, it seems clear that grays use technology effectively to affect the parts of our brain that they need to affect.

There are definite differences between the tall and short grays and they clearly play different roles in their society. One interesting and very important difference between them is in the area of gender. Short grays appear to come in one neutral gender. This clearly speaks to them as purely artificial biological creations. Tall grays by contrast seem to have specific male and female genders. It’s not that the female tall grays look different to us than the males, but abductees often comment that they somehow “know” a certain tall gray is female or male. I don’t know if we have anything like a statistical analysis of this, but it might well be a 50-50 split. Female tall grays are always described as being tender and even emotionally empathetic. It’s not that they are especially demonstrative, but they are able to convey a sense of emotion and caring at times. Judging from the tone of numerous abduction claims, female tall grays play an important role in facilitating the abduction experience and in keeping abductees calm. Of course, male tall grays don’t have any problems in controlling abductees either.

The existence of male and female genders hints that the tall grays may not be purely artificial. Do they reproduce by copulation? We don’t have any evidence from witness testimony that indicates this, but perhaps it’s possible. Nothing in any of our interactions with them indicates that tall grays are particularly sexual, if only because they don’t display anything that we would describe as passion. Emotion sometimes, but no passion. Moreover, they appear to be highly controlled in their emotions and behavior. Perhaps they engage in sexual reproduction via in vitro or some other artificial means, or maybe they actually have a controlled or disciplined form of sexual intercourse.

It’s clear that tall grays are the ones in control, at least in relation to the short grays. Short grays are excellent for doing their tasks, which include carrying out the mechanics of an abduction, of operating the craft, and generally of managing most people throughout the process of abduction. But they are subordinate to the tall grays, who are better able at communicating with human beings at deeper levels when necessary, and also of performing most of the complex procedures of an abduction, such as extracting sperm or ova, or inserting implants into abductees. It must be mentioned, however, that short grays have been observed to perform these procedures also.

Clothing, incidentally, also seems standard among all grays, tall and short. They are seen to be either nude or wearing a skin tight uniform. At times the uniform is obvious, often blue in color but sometimes other colors also. Every now and then a witness will recall seeing a tall hooded being, often described as anywhere from six to eight feet tall. Oddly, they are often unable to describe a face inside the hood, but a few witnesses have stated they saw the face of a tall gray inside the hood. There is a detailed hooded being story later in this section involving my wife Tracey.

One of many sketches of the landed UFO and alien beings from the children of the Ariel School in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, 1994.

There are even times when grays, tall and short, seem to engage in friendly or even playful activity. It’s rare but not unheard of. In the Fall of 2020, I interviewed filmmaker James Fox and we briefly discussed the famous Ruwa, Zimbabwe Ariel School encounter of 1994. He told me that some of the children, now adults in their thirties, described how at least one short gray was seen being almost playful while perched on top of the landed craft. It seemed to be trying to engage the children and put them at ease.

Of course, these moments of apparent empathy are greatly tempered by the fact that grays can manipulate us so easily. Partly this has to do with when they come to take people, often in the middle of the night and interrupting our sleep at 3 a.m. But while this is logistically useful for them, their timing is only one element in their ability to control us. Ultimately, they simply possess a near-total ability to control our emotions and induce obedience. One obvious piece of evidence supporting this is how they are so often able to cause people not to fear them. When you consider the dramatic nature of being taken and brought to a strange place in which you are surrounded by alien beings with big black eyes, that’s quite remarkable.

The sense of kind and caring grays is also tempered by the fact that abductees are clearly disoriented by these beings, and that their memories of an abduction process is usually, though not always, sporadic and incomplete. You could be in the midst of an involved abduction procedure and the next thing you remember, you are back in your car or home. That is usually when a feeling of dread or upset can overcome the abductee. They know something wrong just happened but their memory is being blocked. So we don’t really know everything that these beings are doing to us.

Descriptions aboard the craft of grays have been strikingly consistent. The interior of these craft are nearly always described as having smooth and rounded edges and walls, diffused lighting with no source of light visible, an area described as a sort of control room which contains control panels, viewing screens, and low, shallow benches that are molded to the walls. Also typical are claims that walls can instantly become transparent, along with the ever-present operating tables, dentist-like chairs, and medical equipment—usually that are able to come right out of a wall or ceiling. In addition, it’s often said that the interior of these craft inexplicably look much more spacious than the exterior size of the craft should allow. How that is possible is anybody’s guess, but it’s not an unusual claim.

There are a few other interesting observations by abductees about the grays. One abductee reported that the way the grays move their craft is not by means of advanced propulsion, whether this be by motors powered by nuclear fusion, or electrogravitics, or any other method we know of. Rather, they do it by expanding and contracting space around them. The craft doesn’t move. Instead, the space around the craft moves. It’s an interesting possibility, but how exactly they can do this is surely not clear to us, other than by a very advanced application perhaps of the mathematics developed in the 1990s by Miguel Alcubierre of the University of Wales. It was Alcubierre who developed a mathematics of something like warp drive in which spacetime around a craft can shrink or expand. We understand the general idea of this but, as far any anyone knows, don’t understand how to manage such a feat operationally.

Furthermore, some abductees have stated the grays control their craft by some combination of advanced technology and their own telepathy, which somehow enables them to bond with the ship itself to transport it through space—or rather, as I just stated above, to have the space around it to warp and move. In fact, quite a few abductees have reported being taught by the grays in the operation of these craft. In other words, they claimed to have been taught how to fly a flying saucer.

Another interesting possibility, at least judging from the statements of some abductees, is that not all of the alien craft do their work in space. Yes, there are certainly many recollections by abductees of noticing the stars through the transparent walls of the craft and of being taken somewhere off of the Earth. However, there are also claims of being taken to large caverns under the Earth. These are usually described as looking sophisticated and well-finished. In addition, at least some abductees have stated the alien craft can go through solid ground or rock to arrive at these underground bases. Certainly, such an ability would make having secret underground chambers very useful.

But we must never forget that the grays possess an astonishing ability to create all kinds of illusions. They are masters of this. Sometimes grays will appear to people wearing bizarre human clothing. The belief among witnesses is that this is some kind of an attempt to put them at ease. It’s not clear that the grays were actually wearing those clothes. They seem to have mastered the art of illusion, the science of invisibility, and the ability to control time, space, matter, energy, and gravity.

The grays, tall and short, abduct people. A huge difference between gray aliens and human-looking aliens is that human-looking aliens don’t take people without their consent. Grays do. In fact, nearly all abduction accounts are dominated by descriptions of gray aliens.

It’s not that all grays are perceived as mean and nasty. Many abductees don’t have negative feelings about their gray abductors. Some have claimed that their physical illnesses were healed by grays. Some abductees may have a distant memory of a tall gray holding their hand during the abduction process. Grays regularly provide messages of reassurance, such as “Don’t be afraid,” “No harm will come to you,” “We are here to help,” “It’s just a check up, it’s okay,” and so on. Short grays can convey these messages, but it seem that tall grays are more likely to do so.

Even so, abductions by grays occur for one dominant purpose: to utilize human genetics for the creation of human-alien hybrids. Therefore, they have a powerful interest in human reproduction, which requires an intrusive presence into one of the most intimate aspects of people’s lives. This in turn demands psychological handling of the most sophisticated and powerful type. Researchers have come to this conclusion after years of talking to abductees. This includes extensive amounts of regressive hypnosis to enable them to get behind the blocked memories of these confusing and disorienting experiences.

Some have criticized the use of regressive hypnosis for creating confabulated and false memories. While no method of memory enhancement or extraction is foolproof, I have to disagree with the overall assessment. The transcripts of many regression sessions reveal too much consistency, including countless arcane details. Besides, it is well recognized that hypnosis can uncover genuine memories—and yes, sometimes result in an inaccurate and false recollection. The process is not fool-proof. Even so, the individuals who are known to have performed extensive hypnosis have been careful not to lead witnesses into particular areas, and even sometimes to try to “trick” abductees into a false answer on various mundane aspects of the experience in order to test the strength and conviction of their memory. The consistency is strong. It is worth mentioning also that not all accounts of the abduction experience are pulled out via hypnosis. A certain number of these encounters are recalled without them. They generally fit the pattern.

What we can say with confidence is that grays take people and bring them to their craft, usually to perform procedures on them. All grays, tall and short, are skilled at this, but normally the short grays are responsible for performing the routine tasks of an actual abduction. They maintain secrecy by controlling the environment in which the abduction will take place. Thus, having the event take place at night, either at home or in an automobile, is the most common environment for this to happen. People who are nearby are “switched off,” that is, rendered unconscious or immobile while the abduction takes place. There are no known instances of someone being abducted from a public event, or a busy workplace, or other crowded places. Over the years, abduction researchers have found consistent patterns, down to minute details, among individuals who had no opportunity to communicate their experiences to one another, including specific elements that were not available in the mass media.

The procedures during an abduction are not always described as painful, but they certainly can be and often are. Anesthesia seems to be optional with these beings, mainly because they (usually) can wipe a person’s memory after the fact. The procedures usually include physical examinations by aliens that focus on the reproductive system and usually result in the extraction of sperm and ova.

One of many potential alien implants removed by the late Dr. Roger Leir. From https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/2014/05/we-are-not-alone-alien-implants.html

Grays also make extensive use of tiny implants which they insert into abductees. These implants don’t seem to have anything to do with the hybridization program per se. Abductees often report that they were subjected to such unpleasant procedures as needles or other long implements inserted directly into one of their eyes, their sinus cavity, their temple, or others part of their body such as arms and legs. These procedures appear to be how the implants are inserted. Although sometimes the procedures are helped along by the presence of a compassionate tall gray providing reassurance, often this is not the case, and abductees often have reported extreme pain and no compassion from the grays during the procedure.

The various body locations of these implants makes it clear that they are irrelevant to reproduction and can only be for other purposes. The late Dr. Roger Leir, who studied this matter extensively, described the sophistication of these implants, both biologically and technologically, and noted that they emitted a particular radio frequency. The simplest conclusion is that the implants are tracking devices, but they also may be more than that. Many abductees believe the implants can record everything they see and hear, and even their thoughts and emotions. Some also have expressed the belief that the information from these implants allows grays to “duplicate” their own brain, perhaps allowing them to create a backup copy of themselves. Of course we don’t know how true these suspicions are, but they are not uncommon.

At some point during the abduction experience, it is likely that a tall gray will engage in a deep mental or psychic penetration of the abductee. This always involves a type of hypnotic control exerted over the abductee in a way that seems connected with their powerful eyes. The point of this seems to be to enable the aliens to manipulate human emotion and memory. Sometimes this mind control procedure is not done by a tall gray, but by an even more powerful being, the mantid or insectalin type. We will return to those beings shortly.

Many abductees have also stated that somewhere in the craft they saw a wall lined with large aquarium-like tanks. In these tanks were fetuses or babies suspended in a greenish-blue bubbling liquid. Presumably these were taken from abductees, since they have often been described as hybrids. On occasion, abductees have reported seeing unconscious human adults in these tanks.

Other elements of an abduction include forced mother/child interaction between abductees and hybrid babies and toddlers. The purpose seems to be to help with the development of the baby, which after all requires human touch and some semblance of love in order to thrive. How they thrive during the periods when the biological mother isn’t available, which is most of the time, isn’t clear. However, as we shall see, there are humans (or human hybrids) that are also aboard the craft that might fulfill a nurturing role.

Alien abductions are disorienting and often terrifying. Here is one, coming from someone I know named Danny (pseudonym), who is highly respected in his community and is known for being intelligent, level-headed, and honest. He also has many years of abduction experiences, often traumatic. One of these occurred in August 2013.

During the week before the abduction, Danny and his fiancee experienced a variety of minor electrical disturbances and malfunctions in their house. On the night before the abduction, while they were sleeping, the door to their ensuite bedroom opened. This was a springloaded door that made a distinctive noise and then automatically shut. Danny woke up to hear that door open and shut. Getting up to check the house, he found nothing. Although the sound was too distinct for it to have been a dream, he went back to sleep.

Minor electrical disturbances continued the next day, such as toys activating on their own or lights inexplicably going out. That night while they slept, both of them suddenly woke to the sound of music in their bedroom. It turned out to be a musical birthday card Danny’s fiancee had purchased for a friend. It was in a sealed envelope with a push button that was very difficult to push and activate. Exhausted and full of adrenaline, they went back to sleep.

Then something entered their bedroom. To this day, Danny has “flash memories of something walking in the room with lights around it.” He still remembers the light from the window shining into the room and illuminating the doorway where something walked in. His only word for the being is “humanoid.” He can’t recall any more detail.

The next thing he remembers is lying on a a medical gurney of some sort and being transported down a corridor. His arms and legs were paralyzed, and only by sheer force of will could he move his head slightly. As he was pushed down the corridor, he saw other people or “beings” walking in the opposite direction to him but he was moving too fast to get a proper look and they paid him no attention. The walls were extremely dark in color and jagged like a cave. He didn’t sense wheels on the gurney, only the feeling of being transported. Periodic lights from the ceiling illuminated the passageway.

It was then that he noticed “strange little beings” around him. These were short, gray creatures with wraparound eyes on an “upside down fat tear-drop shaped head.” Their height seemed to be just under five feet tall. Their skin was smooth, blemish free, and felt like that of a dolphin with an oily sheen to it.

Danny arrived at his destination. A bright light shone over him and he perceived that someone was talking to him. He thinks it was a voice in his head that “felt” female. He can’t remember specific features of this being, who essentially was the doctor during this abduction. Interestingly, the being referred to him by his formal name from birth, which no one had used since Danny’s teen years. In other words, these beings knew his legal name, but did not use the one he had been using every day for years.

The doctor’s voice was pleasant. “She” explained the procedure and pulled out a white cylindrical object about 15 centimeters (six inches) long and just over a centimeter (half an inch) wide. She told him that this object needed to be inserted into his nose. When Danny looked at it, he told her it would never fit. Don’t worry about that, she replied.

The device had a single button on it. The doctor pressed it, and out came a very thin, silver, metallic shaft. It had a bright light at the tip. The doctor showed Danny that this extension could be controlled directionally and that it worked something like a plumber’s drain snake.

She warned him that the procedure would be a bit uncomfortable but that he would be okay. She actually asked him if he was alright with her going ahead with the procedure. Later marveling at how compliant he was throughout all of this, he said yes. The probe then entered his right nasal passage. It turns out this was good, because his left passage had a deviated septum and a bone spur, and going through there would probably have caused unbearable pain. Even so, the procedure was uncomfortable, and Danny felt at the time that the device was going behind or around his eye. He later learned this probably wasn’t the case, as nerves in the nasal cavity can trigger such sensations.

But the probe was going very deep into Danny’s nasal cavity. He was desperately hoping it would be over soon. The doctor asked him how he was feeling. Uncomfortable, he said, but still okay. She then told him the next part might be more uncomfortable for him but then the whole procedure would be over. Danny braced himself.

He now felt the instrument go far deeper. This was becoming genuinely painful, he told the doctor in a panicked voice. She remained calm and told him, “just a little bit more and a little bit longer.” The probe went much deeper still. Danny said the probe had now gone “significantly” deeper. He felt it break something and reach into his brain. Then he screamed. “I can honestly say I have never screamed like that before in my life,” he said. “It was a pure, primal scream full of fear and pain and all I could think, beside the white-hot pain, was they lied to me, it hurts, they lied, they’re liars! I’m going to die!”

Meanwhile, his alien doctor and the short grays around him were completely calm. The doctor motioned to the grays, and one of them walked behind Danny and placed a hand on either side of his head. The pain instantly vanished. Following that, he appears to have passed out.

He felt hazy when he woke up, very much like a post-operative patient. He looked over to one side and saw a small gray next to him performing some task. Then he faded out again. When he regained consciousness a second time, there was a man—a normal looking human being—in a “full-dress, olive-green military uniform.” The man had light gray hair cut short in a military style, and a bushy light gray moustache. He was probably in his 50s or 60s, and had a colorful array of medals on his chest in addition to more military ribbons then he had every seen on a military person, covering almost his entire pocket.

This man was staring at Danny. He might well have been speaking to him, but all Danny can remember him saying was that he would have no memory of this event. Danny replied, “I will remember you.”

Danny’s next memory is of waking up in his bed and experiencing the worst headache of his life, as well as a major sinus infection. For the next two weeks, something in his nasal cavity, possibly a nerve, triggered and pulsed up to twenty times before stopping, only to fire off again randomly. One strange thing about this is how the pulsing migrated over the two weeks. At first it was centered half way up his nose, but it moved higher and higher over the next two weeks until it was over his right eyebrow. Eventually it stopped. Another odd symptom was a constant watering of Danny’s right eye. The simple act of pressing his right cheek would cause tears to spill out.

By a stroke of luck, Danny was able to see a doctor within days of his abduction. The doctor confirmed that he had severe sinusitis, something Danny had never gotten before but which he now suffers from regularly. A CT scan was taken in order to help determine any cause of the problem, but nothing unusual was noticed.

Unfortunately for Danny and many others like him, this is simply one of countless ordeals he has gone through. He never asked for this, but the beings responsible have made their own decisions. Those who are skeptical of Danny’s story, or think it the result of fantasy or confabulation, should know that it has been repeated in one form or another by many other people. It is just one drop in a large bucket filled with similar stories.

There are a number of noteworthy elements about this encounter. First, while Danny was able to identify short grays during the abduction process, he wasn’t able to get a clear identification of the alien doctor. If we were to guess, we would say it was a tall gray, simply because they are often seen doing involved medical procedures during abductions. But it’s interesting that he was unable to identify the “doctor” clearly. It’s also not unusual. In my view, this speaks to the aliens’ ability to disrupt our cognitive functioning and memory. They clearly understand how to inhibit the formation of new memories while they have someone in their custody. But while their “memory management” is usually effective, it isn’t perfect. As we have seen here, Danny was able to remember many key details of his encounter.

Second, what did this doctor put in Danny’s brain? What kind of implant needs to be embedded into the brain? Because that is where it seemed to go. Presumably it is designed to interact with the brain, potentially to record activity and create a record of his consciousness. Even more disturbing, hard though this is to suggest, is its potential to influence brain activity as well. These are only hypotheses, of course, but it’s difficult to imagine other purposes for such a procedure.

Third, this abduction didn’t seem to have anything directly related to reproduction or hybridization, although we can assume that not every abduction occurs for that purpose. This abduction was so important to the aliens that they damaged Danny’s health as a result of it. Undoubtedly they believed that whatever they were inserting into his brain was more important than his health.

Fourth, a human military officer was present at the abduction. Not only that, but he seemed to have some authority there, or at the very least an important reason to be there. Danny is not American, but he lives in an English-speaking western-based society whose military is closely integrated with that of the U.S. The presence of a decorated and experienced military officer there, who seemed to be very familiar with the abduction process, is every bit as disturbing as being taken by the aliens themselves. After all, we expect our government and military to look out for us, to protect us. We don’t expect them to be complicit in removing people from their homes and performing unknown forms of surgery on people without their consent. But more than this, we can assume that this military man’s knowledge of the event went up the chain of command—not the official chain of command but one that follows classified protocols inherent to what is undoubtedly an ultra-secret and ultra-protected Special Access Program (SAP), buried under layers and layers of legal illegality.

There are many other implications to this fascinating and disturbing abduction story. But one thing that comes through loud and clear is that these beings have astonishing capabilities and no problem doing whatever they please. There appears to be no push-back from the U.S. or any military that we can imagine, no brakes on their forward motion.

Sketch of the hooded being, by Tracey Garbutt Dolan.

Another bizarre, fascinating, and viscerally real encounter with a tall hooded being was experienced by my wife Tracey sometime around 2007, possibly a year earlier or later. At the time of her encounter, she was with a friend of hers, a woman named Janine (pseudonym), who lived in the Seattle area.

The two were at Janine’s home watching television in the late afternoon. It must be stressed, therefore, that not only was this a situation in which there were no drugs or alcohol or any other substance that would have impaired their faculties, but it was in the late afternoon when both were wide awake. In that sense, one could not ask for more ideal circumstances to witness something out-of-the-ordinary.

The television was ten to fifteen feet away from them. While the two of them were watching the program, something appeared between them and the T.V. The vision lasted for about one second and then was gone. It was a very tall hooded being, roughly seven feet tall. Tracey couldn’t clearly perceive the center portion of the being, including its face. And then, as soon as it appeared, it was gone.

While the moment was happening, Tracey’s strong sense was that she was seeing the “conclusion” of some sort of process. At the same time she was hearing something in her mind, something like an imperative telling her, “That’s just a projection of the T.V. It’s just a projection of the T.V.”

She looked at Janine next to her, who appeared to be dazed. Tracey called her name. Suddenly, Janine became alert and immediately said, “I thought that was a projection of the T.V.!”

The two of them discussed what they had seen, a being standing between them and the television. And then it was gone. They wondered what had just happened, and didn’t have any good answers. If just one of them had seen it, it would have been easier to dismiss. But how to account for both of them seeing it? And what about the idea of it being a projection of the T.V.? How did both of them arrive at the same thought using the exact same wording?

After talking about it for a short while, both of them promptly forgot about it. Just how and why this happens to UFO witnesses and people who experience close encounters is of great importance because it happens so often. It seems counterintuitive. How could someone so easily forget one of the most extraordinary experiences of their life? And yet in the UFO field, it happens all the time.

Years later, Tracey remembered the event and eventually met with respected hypnotherapist Barbara Lamb, who regressed her for several hours. During this session, Tracey recalled additional details about the encounter. One memory was that the being performed some sort of non-invasive examination of something that was in her brain, possibly an implant. According to Tracey’s memory obtained via this regression, one purpose of the implant was to keep tabs on the other non-human beings who were interacting with her.

Tracey perceived another potential use of whatever this technology happened to be. During the hypnotic regression, she discerned that it also served as a kind of valve that could “open” or “close” a person’s ability to perceive other dimensions of reality, and could do so to varying degrees. She perceived that it was used as part of a widespread testing of the human population. Her guess is that this is a way for these beings to learn under what conditions they themselves might be visible to us balanced against how much “interdimensionality” we can handle.

The entire “check-up” occurred right in the livingroom. She had no memory of being taken anywhere. She did not get a malevolent sense of the encounter but acknowledged that her emotions might easily have been managed by the being.

One interesting element of the regression was how Tracey perceived the being “moved” her consciousness to the side, as it were, allowing her to watch it work on her head and the tiny device within it. She felt paralyzed but aware as though it knew a part of her would be watching. She tried to see inside the hood, and although she could see everything else, this was like a solid wall she could not penetrate.

During the hypnotic regression, Tracey also remembered specific and unusual details about the fabric and pattern of the couch from all those years ago. She later called Janine to ask about the couch, and it turned out that her memory under hypnosis had been correct. Although the specifics of the couch might seem like an unimportant detail, Tracey’s accuracy in remembering them under hypnosis gives us confidence that other memories she recovered from her session were also accurate.

For my part, the truthfulness of Tracey’s account is beyond dispute. But we both acknowledge that even a clear memory recalled under hypnosis may be inaccurate. How can we know with certainty that this event happened? She thinks her memory is reliable, but it’s hard to know for sure.

If her memory is solid, however, then this is more evidence that their interest in us is not entirely about creating a hybrid species. They are also interested in our minds, or at least our brains.

A final question arises. What was this being? Instances of hooded beings are somewhat rare among experiencers, but not unheard of. There are several accounts linking them to tall grays, some to reptilian beings, and even to other types of entities. Indeed, beyond the realm of UFOs and aliens, hooded beings have been reported for centuries in terms of ghostly or spiritual apparitions. My initial thought was that this might be a tall gray or possibly a reptilian entity. Tracey, however, is not sure that is correct and takes no position on its identity.

She did, however, offer an interesting perspective as a result of thinking about her hypnotic regression, including the feeling that “we are a mass experiment.” She received “the distinct impression that this type of being I saw is one of many interacting with us, one of many experimenting on us.” The entity’s adjustment of whatever was inside her brain was done somehow to “control the variables of their experiment,” to determine how humans react to greater openness to other-worldly realities. But she also perceived a second motivation: to monitor the actions of any other alien or ET species on her that might “taint” the experiment. She believes the implant probably has the ability to record any such interaction by other alien groups.

Her final feeling is that the hooded being’s own agenda was its primary concern, but it was also accounting for her well-being, at least to some extent.

Let’s stay a little longer on the interest these beings have in our brains. Many, if not all, of the aliens that people have encountered seemed to have telepathic capabilities. Some skeptics doubt that telepathy is possible, but there do appear to be some ways to achieve it. An obvious way is via technological strategies such as futuristic neuralink-style implants. Another way might be through extra low-frequency (ELF) brain waves.

It’s interesting that we even have “brain waves.” We hear the phrase but seldom stop to ponder what brain waves actually are. In fact, all of our brain activity, not only our higher thought, but our memory, emotions, and motor control is marked by “synaptic transmission,” or how one neuron in our brain communicates with another. But our thinking obviously doesn’t occur one neuron at a time. It happens within a vast network of neurons, and the activity of this network actually produces a synchronized pulse of electrical activity. That’s your brain wave, and it is measurable.

The brain wave of a human being normally varies from 5 hertz to 30 hertz, in which higher waking consciousness is associated with higher hertz. The lower frequencies between 5 and 11 hertz are associated with resting and meditative states. It appears that telepathy is more likely when the brain is operating at these extra low-frequency waves. The idea is that the longer distance between the crests of the wave helps in the process, although I confess I need a major science lesson here to understand all this better.

Anecdotally, one commonly hears statements like, “I began meditating and after a few months, I had an experience.” It’s so common, in fact, that we should almost expect it. Could it be that when one goes into an extra-low-frequency meditative state, it sparks the interest of other beings who utilize that state and know how to identify it? Very likely, they see the mass of humanity going about their lives without much understanding into their state of their mind, but those relative few who do might get the attention of some of these beings.

As we discussed earlier, visitations by these beings may not always result in classical abductions for the purpose of creating hybrids. My wife Tracey’s encounter with the tall hooded being, or “Danny’s” harrowing abduction and implant story, may be examples of an ET species demonstrating an interest in technology that allows for monitoring of our brain activity and perhaps even our very consciousness. While that isn’t telepathy per se, it could be a way to “read” the mind of someone from a distance via advanced technology. It could easily be a very advanced version of neuralink.

Some prior research and claims support the notion that these beings, or some of them at least, have very advanced psychotronic technology. One such interesting remark was made by Colonel Philip J. Corso in his book The Day after Roswell.

The medical examiner wrote that measurements of brain activity taken from the EBE (extraterrestrial biological entity) who was still barely alive at Roswell showed that its electronic signature, at least what they were able to measure with equipment back in 1947, displayed a signal similar to what we would call long, low-frequency waves. And the examiner referred to a description by one of the Roswell Army Air Field doctors that the creature’s brain lobes seem to have been not just physiologically and neurologically integrated but integrated by an electromagnetic current as well.^[23]

Corso added that from what analysts had learned from retrieval of alien crashed discs, the aliens:

… used some form of brain-wave control for navigation. How they directed their thoughts or translated them into an electronic circuit, we didn’t know. But we knew that there were no steering wheels or conventional methods of control on the spacecraft, and the headbands we found with the electronic sensors on them were designed to pick up some form of signal from the brain. The analysts at Wright Field believed the headbands formed an integral part of the circuit.^[24]

Of course, there are researchers who toss out everything Corso said because his book, which claimed that ET technology was segued into the American military industrial complex, was also littered with factual errors and other elements they deemed to be implausible. I personally think this is a short-sighted approach to Corso, and have never agreed with it. Corso was in his eighties when he wrote his book, which was significantly edited for readability by William Birnes. To expect him to make up these stories whole cloth is truly ridiculous, and yet skeptics seem to think Corso (or Birnes) engaged in such creative shenanigans. For the record, Corso had many believers, including a large number of military-intelligence-scientific people who personally interviewed and investigated his background and claims.

Corso wasn’t the only person to talk about sophisticated alien headbands. One of Leonard Stringfield’s sources also discussed this back in the 1970s. Stringfield wrote:

… originally, I heard of it from a former NASA source as a ‘translator,’ used to communicate in all languages with people on Earth Barry’s source referred to it as a ‘transceiver,’ adding cryptically that it was used in the ‘projection of brain waves.’ One sample of the band, he said, was procured from the 1962 crash, and has since been analyzed and developed by the Air Force in an attempt to ‘talk them down (UFOs) into landing.’ Finally, on this perplexing issue, I asked my medical source if such a gadget existed. In time, I learned that he was aware of it, but had not seen it. He offered no details. Of course, in research it is known that a head band, or similar unit, worn on the chest or waist, is described during encounters with live entities.

These statements don’t prove that such an alien headband exists, but they give us reason to think they do. If a kind of psychotronic alien headband does exist, it would mean that they understand the science of consciousness well enough to have useful technology that enhances telepathic capabilities. It would mean that they understand the physics of consciousness in a way that still eludes us.

Yes, our own science is making some progress in understanding and (especially) manipulating consciousness. But it’s a fair guess that we aren’t at their level, and that therefore they have definite advantages in their interactions with us. That advantage allows them to control us neurologically when we are abducted, so if they don’t want someone to move a muscle, that person won’t. These advantages may also allow them to influence our modes of thought.

The low frequency connection implies not only that we would be more receptive to them in the meditative state, but also deeper states, such as sleep and dream states. What might it mean when people recall unusually vivid dreams—alien abduction and encounter dreams—that don’t feel like ordinary dreams? For many years, researchers have wondered about this, going at least back to Dr. Karla Turner during the late 1980s. Is it possible that some types of abduction states take place only in the dream state? If that is so, what purpose would such encounters serve?

Another interesting question. Is it possible that the only way they can actually communicate with us is when we are at those very low brain frequencies? If that is so, then we might be automatically hampered in our ability to communicate with them via logic and reason, since as we all know, our dream states usually involve a repression of our higher frequency brain functioning, which includes all of our higher reasoning skills. That is why dreams always seem so surreal and illogical to us when we remember them in the morning. But what if, for some of these beings at least, their primary mode of communication happens to be in those lower frequencies? If they seek to communicate with us, we might have to meet them on their turf, so to speak, and our interactions might well seem dreamlike.

23. Corso, Col. Philip J. with Birnes, William J. The Day After Roswell, Pocket Books, 1997, p. 192.

24. ibid. p. 196.

At this point I am going to include another encounter described to me by my wife Tracey. I am grateful for her permission because it was never her intention to publicize her many odd experiences, even though they are noteworthy.

At some point in either April or May of 2016, while living in an apartment in St. Petersburg, Florida, she had a strange experience. The day had gone by and it was nearly midnight when Tracey realized that she had not meditated all day. This was something very important to her so she decided to do that before bed.

Immediately upon beginning, she felt the presence of something significant or powerful to her left. The sense was so prominent that it frightened her and made her meditation session impossible. She continually opened eyes, looked to her left, but saw nothing. Yet she felt an overwhelming, and to her unmistakable, sense of a presence, as though someone was standing beside her.

Her behavior at this point perplexed her in retrospect. Despite her intense feeling of fear, she didn’t do the things she would normally do, such as examine the apartment or at least watch the front door. Instead she went to bed. Then, oddly, she decided to lie down with her back to the bedroom door, something she also would never do when afraid. Facing the outdoor window, she noticed an intensely bright flashing white light above the distant treeline. She knew the buildings and structures in that area, and wondered what the light could be.

That was her last waking memory. She then woke up inside a dream. In this dream she was herself as a little girl in her “house.” But this was not any childhood home. Instead, it felt like her St. Petersburg apartment, except that she was one floor above—a floor that didn’t exist in reality. In the dream, she was running around the house feeling very excited and happy. “Oh my gosh, they’re coming! I’m so excited,” she kept saying. The feeling was like being a child on Christmas Eve waiting for Santa Claus. In this dream, however, she was expecting someone else. “All I need to do,” she said to herself, “is do what they told me. They told me to get into my bed, close my eyes, and then they will be here.” Somehow, she knew that she had to pretend to be asleep. She ran to her dream bed, which in fact was her actual bed. Waiting for the visitors in her dream, she gripped herself in excitement while lying in bed, keeping her eyes tightly closed. She knew that “they” were going to come to take her.

Sketch of the female tall gray being, by Tracey Garbutt Dolan.

Two beings then entered her room. She could not see them but felt them as “large, wide energies.” They lifted her under each arm and pulled her out of her body. She knew this was how it was supposed to happen, how in fact the whole process was supposed to go, and that she was not meant to look at them.

Now she was directed to look forward. Before her was a tall gray being, seemingly fifteen feet away. This being was very tall, thin, and lanky. Its head was elongated and became wider at the top. Tracey immediately knew this being was an extremely wise and loving female. There was a profound elegance to her physically as well as in the core of her being. She was “the wise one,” “the highest,” and the one “in charge.” There was a sense of exceptional intelligence about her. Behind this exceptional being was a bar or railing that went across, as if she were on a cruise ship, except that behind her was a starry background.

The “little girl Tracey” in the dream was incredibly excited to see this entity and approached her with a feeling of indescribable joy, love, and anticipation.

The next thing she knew, however, she was hovering above her adult body, which was lying in her actual bed. Immediately came a sense of panic that the experience was ending. Not only that, but she couldn’t remember what they had talked about. As she entered her adult sleeping body, she repeated the phrase, “Remember gray wrinkley skin.” She said this multiple times and then woke up.

She knew there had been a conversation and felt devastated that she couldn’t remember it. Now wide awake in bed, she discovered several oddities. Always a side sleeper, she was surprised to find herself flat on her back in the gingerbread position. Then there was her phone. Every night before sleeping, she would place her phone on the floor, far away from her bed on the floor in order to keep the cell phone radiation away from her. Not this time, however. Upon waking up, she immediately reached for her phone in order to record this ultra-vivid dream. Instead, she found it resting on her stomach, a place she would never put it. Especially odd was how she woke up in a different position than how she had laid down, which had been on her side. One interesting question might be: if she fell asleep on her side, how could her phone be on her stomach when she woke up?

The time was 2 a.m. To her best recollection, she had gone to bed sometime between 12:30 a.m. and 1:00 a.m. She was actually surprised it wasn’t later since it felt as though she had gone through a very involved experience. She dictated everything she could remember into her phone with the overwhelming feeling that she must never forget it.

She noticed another oddity. This was an object of some sort that she discovered under her skin, above her collarbone. It was small, possibly the size of a grain of rice, and moved beneath her skin whenever she touched it. From time to time to this day she still notices this strange object.

Tracey regards this as one of the most intense dreams she ever had, and believes strongly that it was much more than a simple dream. She has considered undergoing regression in the hopes that she might remember more of what may have happened, but admits there is something inside her that resists. I asked her if perhaps part of that resistance is an inner fear of discovering that she was emotionally manipulated during her experience, which she thought was possible. Her main thought, however, was to wonder if her resistance was simply “programming” by them. Are they so terrifying that this is their way of protecting us? Whatever the reason, she is frustrated by the fact that her visual memory, usually so exceptional, can only give her a hazy recollection of the extraordinary being. She could never achieve a perfect focus of her.

As a rational, thoughtful person with a strong interest in human psychology, Tracey has wondered if there is some way that this was “just” a dream. Her dominant thought, especially as someone who has studied her dreams, however, is a certainty that this dream was no dream. Instead, it was very real and physical. She believes it really happened.

Abduction researchers still don’t have a solid consensus regarding the purpose of the abduction and hybridization program. This is not surprising given the sophistication of alien methods to implement their program. Probably the most common belief among serious researchers is that the hybridization program is done in order to create human-looking hybrids that can infiltrate our society.

We discussed this a bit earlier in this book. The best known exponent of the alien hybrid idea is Dr. David Jacobs. He boils down their program to two words: planetary takeover. Jacobs came to this conclusion, he wrote, due to the consistency of the many abductees he worked with, many of whom described ongoing relationships with the human-looking hybrids (whom he termed hubrids) over the last few decades. As he has seen it, the point is to create ever-more human-looking hybrids through an ongoing process of refinement, getting the end result to look almost perfectly human while enabling the hybrid to retain the core mental features of the alien race. The main feature seems to be telepathy and the ability to exert mind control over ordinary humans. His conclusion is that the abduction process is common and worldwide. Moreover, it is being undertaken with the greatest level of stealth possible. Abductees report that their hybrid-hubrid controllers have sometimes hinted to them of an impending Great Change, although the specifics of this change are never provided. Jacobs has interpreted it as a takeover of our world by stealth. That is, until it’s too late and the process is brought fully into the open.

While most abduction researchers agree that the creation of human-looking hybrids is happening, they do not all agree with how Jacobs interprets this. One reason is that the messages coming from the gray aliens themselves speaks to different concerns. These include: impending environmental destruction, lack of spiritual advancement by humans, and in general the likelihood that human civilization is going to experience a catastrophe, and that they, the grays, are trying to help avert the worst of it. Therefore, some of these researchers interpret the presence of hybrids within our society as something positive, not negative. In general, they believe that the grays are trying to help in one way or another, but that they maintain secrecy because they know that human society would not respond positively to their presence. I think we can all agree on the likely truth of this last statement.

Therefore, despite the differing opinions on the ultimate motivation of the grays, the reality of the abduction and hybridization program is not much disputed among researchers. Furthermore, there is broad agreement that at least some of those hybrids have slipped into the general human population, many of them for years. At the same time, an unknown but probably sizable amount of other hybrids remain with the grays in their society. Exactly what they do isn’t clear, but it would make sense if they were engaged in various helper roles to facilitate what may well be a massive and worldwide abduction program.

In the previous section of this book, we covered the phenomenon of human-looking beings that did not appear to come from our civilization. This phenomenon has gone back for many ages and could well have derived from interactions with an alien race thousands of years ago. There have also been interactions by people with human-looking (but decidedly odd) occupants of UFO craft throughout the 20th century. It must be emphasized that these beings are entirely distinct from the hybrid-hubrids we are discussing here. In other words, there are at least two kinds of fully human-looking “alien” (if we can use that word) that have been observed.

Whereas the human occupants of UFOs have generally been noted to be psychologically healthy and to display a normal range of positive emotions, the hybrids described in abduction research are usually not described that way. Abductees who deal with these hybrids often comment on their lack of genuine emotion, their cold manipulation, and behaviors that we would normally consider to be psychopathic or sociopathic. Not necessarily violent, but certainly manipulative and uncaring, and also able to emulate human emotions like any good psychopath. Jacobs is best known for delving into this area, but it’s worth mentioning that the late Budd Hopkins wrote about several such encounters in his final UFO-related book, Sight Unseen.^[25]

This is yet another area in which the UFO subject takes the brave reader into an area that seems utterly outlandish to someone who is unfamiliar with previous research. We could conceivably be in a situation in which multiple human-looking beings coming from different civilizations and operating with different agendas are here, right now, living and working within human society.

25. Hopkins, Budd and Rainey, Carol, Sight Unseen: Science, UFO Invisibility, and Transgenic Beings (Atria Books, 2003)

Other than short and tall grays, abductees have recalled other types of creatures. These have been noted less frequently but are still reported often enough that they seem important. Of the types, the most significant in my view are described as looking like large insects, often resembling a gigantic praying mantis. They have been given a number of names, most notably mantids, insectoids, or insectalins.

Although the FREE Study indicated that mantid beings are reported as frequently as reptilian beings, other studies have indicated they are more rare than accounts of reptilians. However, mantids may very well be the most dominant species of alien that we humans are currently encountering.

However, many mantid encounters are hard to decipher. Witnesses often claim to experience them during out of body moments or after periods of extended meditation. Not always, of course, but it’s not unusual. In other words, there is a strong mental and spiritual element to these encounters. This doesn’t negate the experiences, but it does cause one to wonder about the objectivity of the encounter itself, and whether or not it took place within a dream-like state. If that is so, those of us who have not had such an experience may understandably have difficulty knowing what to make of them.

Yet, the stories are largely consistent. As stated, their physical appearance resembles that of a large praying mantis, anywhere from six feet tall to as much as eight feet or possibly even taller. Their heads are triangular, with large, slanted, and extremely dark or black eyes. Their torsos are long and thin, and their necks, arms and hands have more joints than humans have. Their color is usually dark brown, but they have sometimes been described as green or black. Some mantids don’t seem to wear clothing, but it’s not unusual to read accounts of them wearing long robes, sometimes with collars or hoods.

Mantids are often, although not always, encountered in connection with grays. When we hear of these two types together, the mantids are always in charge. The fact that they are more rare than grays supports this conclusion; after all, why would the boss be performing the menial work?

There are obvious commonalities between the mantids and the tall grays, enough that it has made me sometimes wonder if we are talking about the same creature. There are general similarities in body style, size, and physical appearance, as well as in their intensely telepathic manner of communication. Also, like the tall grays, experiencers claim that mantids come in both male and female genders.

Despite the overlap between mantids and tall grays, I continue to think that the two types are most likely separate. While there are physiological similarities, there are also distinctions between them that it seems we can probably consider the mantids to be a separate and more powerful species than the tall grays.

Like both tall and short grays, mantids are described as communicating with human abductees via telepathy. Similar to the tall grays, they are typically described as being able to calm abductees with ease, erasing their fear and providing emotional comfort during the encounter. This capability in mantids appears to be extremely powerful and includes the ability to generate vivid imagery within the mind of the abductee. These projections usually emphasize the negative consequences of humanity’s actions on the planet and involve scenes of horrific destruction to Earth or ourselves. Basically, these are the same messages abductees get from the grays, although it seems more vividly projected from the mantids. I think this is telling. The fact that mantids and grays give the same messages to abductees, and do it in the same manner, tells us quite clearly that they belong to the same society and infrastructure. They work together. Finally, it’s interesting that although all communication from mantid to human appears to be telepathic, mantids themselves have been observed communicating with each other via clicking sounds.

Another feature of mantids is their ability to change their appearance and make themselves appear human. This might be due to their mental capabilities, or perhaps their technology, but abductees have noted this more than once. Again, this has been known to be the case with grays (both short and tall) but once again the mantid capability seems to be the strongest.

It must be emphasized that although mantids might have status over grays within their society—and we don’t know this for certain—they definitely make many solo appearances without any other beings. Surprisingly, a number of these have been reported from outdoor settings, in which the witness was completely wide awake and engaged in some activity. But others are middle-of-the-night bedroom visitations. Many of these are from people who state that they were wide awake; even so, many encounters are only incompletely recalled or described. Here is one that was sent to me directly by a man I know personally. The encounter was kindly rendered into what the witness says is a completely accurate sketch.

One evening in early 2017 I was in bed unable to fall asleep, with a feeling of being watched or monitored. My partner remained very asleep, despite me tossing and turning. After some time, a bizarre and large rectangular ‘doorway’ developed on a wall in our bedroom, next to the closet. I couldn't see through the portal —it almost looked like a flat screen composed of amber and grey pixels projected onto the wall. Oddly, the light was somehow localized and didn't illuminate the room as one might expect. Initially, the very large mantid being only stepped halfway through, very much hunched over at about 6 feet tall.

The top two-thirds of its torso and its long arms protruding through the portal, I felt a line of communication being established. I spoke in my mind, Why tonight? Are you physically here? It stepped further through, stood straighter, and raised a long, thin arm. As it cocked its head slightly while looking at me, it slowly reached delicate fingers over the top of the adjacent open door in our bedroom and opened it further. That was the answer.

Sketch by Sherri Miller of mantid visitation.

Like many other witnesses, this man has had multiple mantid encounters, some of which were attended by short grays. The mantid in the bedroom encounter described above wore a white robe, but they have worn different items. In the opinion of this witness, the white robes are a specific garment, which he likened to surgical scrubs.

He states that in another encounter which involved short grays, he had an eyeball temporarily removed in a surgery. He isn’t certain but believes a mantid was present at this encounter. According to him, a snake-like tool was used that seemed to have “its own consciousness.” He emphasized that the actual procedure was performed by the surgical tool itself. Once placed in front of his eye, it came “alive.” Three or four pincers popped out, and the device seemed independently to slide under his eyelid and pop his eye out of the socket. With his other eye, he could see the one eye and a bit of optic nerve. His sense is that they either put in or took out some kind of implant behind the eye area, and placed it back in.

An interesting sidelight to that encounter is that although he had previously worn eyeglasses for years, he no longer needed them after that night. He speculates they accidentally “fixed” his eyesight somehow during or after the procedure, although he acknowledges the possibility that they intended to do so.

What is fascinating is how, when this man described his encounter with another person known to me, that individual broke into tears—the same tool had been used on him. Both acknowledged the procedure was painful and terrifying. Incidentally, the witness suggested that the reason a gray may have performed the eye surgery rather than a mantid is because the mantids “don’t touch people often.”

As with the grays, people are divided in assessing the motivations of the mantids. Indeed, it’s not unfair to characterize this as a political divide. Not necessarily the same as Liberal vs. Conservative, but there is an undeniable ideological element to it. In other words, there is a contingent of researchers and experiencers who interpret the mantids and grays in a positive light, as beings of emotional and spiritual depth. They are seen as intelligent and gentle. Such interpretations have gone so far as to attribute the goal of aiding human spiritual evolution or even “ascension” to these beings, to say nothing of a desire (or mission) to protect humanity from itself and save the Earth.

At the opposite end of this interpretive spectrum are the mantids as adversary or enemy. In particular, to the extent that they are seen in connection with the grays and the hybridization program—which is often—mantids are perceived as directing the entire operation of infiltration and worse. Jacobs theorized that the mantids (or insectalins, as he calls them) are the most powerful alien species interacting with Earth and humanity. They have an extremely high intellect and created the grays as a helper species; while the grays have strong telepathy, mantid telepathy is the strongest.

Following their creation of the grays, according to this scenario, the mantids then oversaw the creation of the full range of hybrids, while attempting to create a hybrid species that looked enough like us that they could fit into our society, but while also retaining the core element of the mantid-insectalin telepathic ability. Their plan for infiltration, according to this interpretation, is not being done altruistically for humanity’s benefit.

How long have grays and mantids been interacting with humanity? If we are looking for written or visual representations of them throughout history, then we have to conclude that they did not arrive until sometime around the middle of the 20th century, maybe slightly earlier. They surely seem to be very recent visitors to our world.

There are a few potential outliers in terms of evidence. The five-thousand-year-old cave paintings of the Wandjina in Australia stand out as one possibility. Undeniably, they look like gray (or chalk white) aliens. But are they? Sure, it is possible that the aborigine peoples of the area directly encountered gray aliens and then depicted them in their cave art, but we would need to account for the fact that there are no such depictions in all the rest of the archeological and historical record. There is nothing else like these images or descriptions until well into the 20th century. So before we directly connect the Wandjina to grays, it would be nice to see at least a few examples in between.

It’s not for a lack of trying. There are quite a few collections of early stories of encounters with “beings” throughout our history. Jacques Vallée and Chris Aubeck prepared the excellent Wonders in the Sky, and there is also the extensive collection of Albert Rosales in his Humanoid Encounters series. In all of the accounts of the strange encounters of ancient people, there simply are no descriptions of gray aliens, or of any other alien type that people talk about today—other than beings who looked entirely human.

Therefore, it seems most appropriate to conclude that these beings are new to us. If they did visit the people of Australia thousands of years ago, they don’t seem to have loitered around during the interim.

It’s true that ancient folklore is replete with descriptions of short beings who interfered with humanity in one manner or another, whether these were gnomes, leprechauns, fairies, and so on. But none of them were ever described like gray aliens. Now, I should state right here that there are enough strange aerial sightings that have taken place over the past few thousand years that we really do have to take seriously the likelihood that UFO activity has continued all the way through our history. Many of those encounters were written in such a way that figuring out exactly what people were looking at is impossible. But enough remain extremely interesting and difficult to explain away, that in order to be honest, we need to consider the possibility that a highly advanced intelligence has been operating here for eons. One example from Vallée and Aubeck’s excellent Wonders in the Sky will give a sense of what I mean.

On July 15th 1385 “at London and likewise at Dover, there appeared after sunset a kind of fire in the shape of a head in the south part of the heavens, stretching out to the northern quarter, which flew away, dividing itself into three parts, and travelled in the air like a bird of the woods in flight. At length they joined as one and suddenly disappeared.”^[26]

There are so many of these types of statements during that era, not just from England and the rest of Europe, but also from China and Japan—two literate societies on the other side of the world. Keep in mind that not many societies at that time had much literacy to speak of, but where it existed, we often find reports like the one above. It’s true that in that statement there are no explicit descriptions of a flying mechanical vehicle. But it’s also true that the lights described moved intelligently and did things that we can’t explain. How can we know who was responsible for those “wonders in the sky?” Perhaps we might speculate that it was the mantids or grays or reptilians after all. But it remains the case that people were not reporting such creatures until well into the 20th century.

The recent arrival of grays, mantids, and reptilians coincides with humanity’s scientific and technological explosion, which includes of course our detonation of nuclear weapons. By any logic—assuming of course that one believes in these beings—they arrived here because they were interested in what we are doing now. Either that, or their arrival was simply a matter of chance.

26. Vallee, Jacques & Aubeck, Chris, Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times (Penguin, 2009),
citing C.E. Britton, A Meteorological Chronology to A.D. 1450 (London: H.M.S.O., 1937,) p. 149.

It’s a good idea to make a distinction here between short grays on the one hand, and another short, sometimes large-headed, alien species that people have also described. This was especially so during the 1950s, during various waves of sightings of such beings in places like France, Italy, and indeed much of Europe. Also in the United States, there were quite a few descriptions of short beings, roughly four feet tall, engaged in what looked like collection of biological specimens.

What is missing, however, is as important as what is there. The main missing element in these descriptions are the black eyes. By any way we look at it, that seems very important. It’s hard to group these other beings in with grays if they lack their single most defining visual feature.

Who might these beings be? The controversial Majestic Documents uses the term Ebens (short for Extraterrestrial Biological Entity) for these entities.

Depictions of short humanoid beings: the DeWilde encounter, Valensole, and Socorro.

Even so, it could be rash to jump to conclusions about them. Most of the sightings of them from the 1950s and 1960s took place in some sort of confusion by the witness. In the well-known case of Marius DeWilde, who in 1954 saw two short “humanoid” beings at night on the railroad tracks just outside his house, we have the situation in which it was very dark and his only decent source of light was a flashlight. The short creatures he described seemed somewhat mechanical, although the depiction of them by the artist shown in this book makes them out to be more mechanical than the description warranted. The situation was startling to him, and while he confidently told police that he saw two small creatures and their flying saucer (which appears to have made an indentation on the railroad track), is it possible that he missed important features of the grays due to the circumstances?

There is an equally intriguing encounter from a decade later in France, in the village of Valensole in 1965. Here, a lavender farmer named Maurice Masse, a respected French Resistance fighter from the Second World War, saw a landed flying saucer on his property and two short humanoid beings nearby. These creatures had large heads, proportionately similar to short grays. There was certainly a strong resemblance to them. Even so, they were not described as having huge black eyes, although a number of recent artistic depictions of the event include the black eyes.

In the U.S., the famous landing of an egg-shaped craft in Socorro, New Mexico witnessed by police officer Lonnie Zamora had beings that seemed similar in size as to the French cases just mentioned. It’s harder to know because Zamora did not get as close as DeWilde or Masse had, but he was close enough to see that they were the size of children, not adults. However, they were wearing suits with a helmet or head covering and he could not see their faces.

The pioneering researcher, Leonard Stringfield, lecturing on UFO crash retrievals and alien bodies during the late 1970s.

In addition to witness sightings like these and many others, we find potentially similar descriptions in some of the UFO crash retrieval stories that have come down to us. In general terms, there is a consistent line of description of short alien beings from these sources, too. Of particular importance is the work of the pioneering Leonard Stringfield, who collected many accounts of UFO crash retrievals and alien bodies from the late 1970s until his death in 1994. His results are worth exploring.

Stringfield collected scores of such stories, usually from retired military men and women, sometimes from their spouses or other family members. He was known as a sober, serious researcher of UFOs and had himself served in the Second World War, which probably helped him earn at least some trust from his mostly military witnesses. Here are some of the more noteworthy descriptions of the aliens from his informants. Note the overall consistency that emerges from them.^[27]

One witness claimed to have seen alien bodies from a crash retrieval in 1953. He described them as roughly four feet tall, lying uncovered on a fabric which was on top of a block of dry ice. His glimpse of the dead creatures was brief but clear, and he recalled that their heads were disproportionately large by human standards, bald, and narrow. The skin looked brown under the hangar lights. The eyes seemed to be open, the mouth small, and the nose was “indistinct” and hardly visible. The aliens were wearing tight-fitting dark suits and one of them appeared to be female.

Another witness, who was a U.S.A.F. sergeant and Air Policeman, saw three small alien bodies in 1973. Stringfield originally learned about this not from the direct witness but the man’s wife. Her husband had told her the story once before they were married. The aliens were dead, he told her, and stretched out on a table. Their bodies were about three feet tall, their heads “abnormally” large, and they may have had some kind of “short fuzz” on the top of their heads. She did not recall any other details about the head or face. Their skin was off-white or cream colored. Stringfield eventually reached the husband who confirmed the story. He also added that their skin color was like a “drowned cadaver just brought out of the water.”

One witness told Stringfield about having seen nine dead alien bodies preserved in deep freeze conditions. They were about four feet tall and grayish in skin color. The man offered no other information.

Another witness claimed to have seen a dead alien body in deep freeze preservation in 1952. Speaking to Stringfield many years later, he said the alien was about four feet tall. Its head was hairless and large by human standards, the skin was smooth and gray, its eyes were open (but not otherwise described), it had long arms, and (in an interesting visual) its feet were like those of an orangutan. That last description would seem to indicate that the alien had prehensile—that is, grasping—toes. It should be noted that this was a unique, one-time, description of the aliens’ feet that no other witnesses have corroborated.

Another witness was a general who had seen aliens from a crash in 1957 in the American southwest. Stringfield obtained this source via a go-between but was confident in the information. The general (who was a colonel at the time of his experience) had seen four bodies, each roughly five feet in height. Their heads were large by human standards. No other details were available.

Another witness saw dead aliens from a UFO crash in New Mexico in 1962. Two beings were discovered inside the craft, each about three and a half feet in height. Their skin color was grayish-pink. Their heads were slightly larger proportionately than human heads would have been. Their eyes were also somewhat larger than what a human would have, the nose much smaller, the mouth tiny, lips extremely thin, and the ears not visible at all with only a hole at each side of the head which led to the inner ear. They wore a one piece suit that contained no buttons or zippers.

One of Stringfield’s most important contacts was a prestigious surgeon who had performed an autopsy on an alien being in the early 1950s. Stringfield got to know this doctor fairly well, who in addition to doing one autopsy of an alien, knew of several other alien bodies via professional channels.

The specimen examined specifically by the doctor was four feet and three inches long. The head was pear-shaped and oversized by human standards. The eyes were “mongoloid” in appearance, and the ends of the eyes farthest from the nasal cavity slanted upward at a ten degree angle. The eyes were recessed into the head. There was no visible eyelid, only what seemed like a fold. The nose consisted of a small fold-like protrusion above the nasal orifices. The mouth seemed to be a wrinkle-like fold. There were no lips as such, merely a slit that opened into an oral cavity about two inches deep. A membrane along the rear of the cavity separated it from what would be the digestive tract. The tongue seemed to have been atrophied into almost a membrane. The being had no teeth and no outer ear lobes. Its skin was hairless and grayish in color. It did not seem to have distinct toes, instead it possessed a “fusion of small bones that indicated evolutionary degeneration.”

From these and other sources, Stringfield put together his best summary of the alien beings.

Drawing by Leonard Stringfield and submitted to a doctor who had performed an alien autopsy in the 1950s. The proportions were accurate, according to the doctor.

The height variation of these beings was generally between three and a half to five feet. They were extremely light weight, approximately 40 pounds. They had large heads by human standards, and no hair. The skull had a heavy brow ridge, and large, almond-shaped and elongated eyes that were sunken or deep set into the skull. They gave the superficial appearance of being Chinese (“oriental” or “mongoloid” to use the terms used at the time). Ears were not visible, while the nose and mouth were very slight. It did not appear that the mouth functioned for communication or for eating. These beings had no teeth, no digestive system, no reproductive organs, no genitalia. His doctor informant had speculated they had atrophied. At least some of the beings shared identical facial characteristics and appeared to be “formed out of a mold.”

Other consistencies included arms that were long and thin and the legs that were short and thin. The number of fingers on the hand might be varied: four was the most common number, but sometimes witnesses reported fewer fingers, and sometimes more. At least some of the aliens had a slight webbing between their fingers. Their skin was usually described as beige, tan, or pinkish gray in color.

When assessing the descriptions that came to Stringfield, mostly during the 1970s and 1980s, a few things stand out. First, these beings seem very, very similar to descriptions of short grays. The general body type, height, and most of the facial features seem to be a match. But of course one overriding feature is missing: those overwhelming black eyes. And not simply the color but the size. The eyes that were described to Stringfield were usually somewhat larger than human eyes but not massive or dominant.

What do we make of such a glaring discrepancy? A few options present themselves. First, that these beings were genuine short grays, but that their eyes looked different in death. Could the massive black eyes be something artificial or technological, something added to the grays to enhance their capabilities? With that single discrepancy accounted for, we suddenly find tremendous consistency between many of Stringfield’s accounts and contemporary accounts of short grays from abductees.

Another possibility is that there are important missing elements to the witness descriptions, considering that most were made many years after the fact and often occurred under less-than-ideal conditions. Still, it’s hard to imagine how even a cursory glance at a gray alien would not result in seeing those eyes.

Yet another possibility is that descriptions of gray aliens evolved over time due to cultural and subconscious baggage. Qualities like being short, having large heads, tiny noses and mouths, gray skin, each separately entered the picture over time until they solidified into the grays that now dominate the popular idea of an alien. Of course, to hold this position would require a significant dismissal of witness testimony—and there is a lot of it, to be sure. This is the position of the “psychosocial” school of ufology, which sees the phenomenon primarily in terms of our psychological response to unusual stimuli. Just what the stimuli could be that could provoke such specific descriptions, however, is left unanswered.

There is of course a fourth explanation, which is that we are talking about an alien species that is distinct from the grays.

I believe each of these explanations might play a role here in some way to explain such a discrepancy, but ultimately there is no way to know for sure.

Another interesting question that arises from these accounts is to what extent are these beings the product of a natural biological evolutionary process and to what extent they are artificial? There seems to be room for both possibilities. The fact that they lack genitalia and other reproductive organs points to something artificial—except for the statement by Stringfield’s doctor informant that they seemed atrophied.^[28] Similarly regarding the statement about the particular fusing of the bones within the alien foot. Other features, such as mouths that don’t take in food, or the apparent absence of a digestive system, really emphasize the artificial nature of these beings. In general, these entities surely seem like the biological products of specific genetic modification, having a fascinating combination of natural and artificial qualities.

After all this time, we are still not fully confident in describing what these beings are and their connection to the grays. Even calling them ebens, as I have opted to do here, is tricky and could be a mistake. It’s possible that a number of the entities described to Stringfield were actually gray aliens. It’s also entirely possible that at least some of those aliens were not short grays but belonged to a separate group. So for now at least, we can cautiously call them ebens.

However, whether the grays and ebens are one and the same or totally separate, we can say the same thing in terms of when they arrived. There is no reason to think they were here in any significant numbers until the 20th century.

27. All of these incidents are listed in Stringfield, Leonard, UFO Crash Retrievals: The Complete Investigation – Status Reports I-VII (1978-1994) (Lulu, 2019).

28. Although even if they are atrophied, could they still be functional? After all, a biological organism needs to reproduce in one way or another.

There are some encounter cases that defy easy categorization, and whether or not the beings were grays or some other species is probably impossible to know at this point. Several of them are famous cases in UFO abduction history, and a quick review of them is in order here.

Antonio Villas Boas.

One is the encounter by a 23 year old Brazilian farmer named Antonia Villas Boas, which occurred on October 15, 1957.^[29] The previous night, Boas and his brother witnessed a bright light above their heads while they worked in the fields. It was only three hundred feet above them and maneuvering around. Boas left his brother to get a closer look, but the light zoomed back and forth whenever he got close. According to him, this happened more than twenty times. He gave up and the light disappeared.

On the following night, Boas was working alone in the fields. A reddish light came right on top of him. It happened so quickly, he said, “that it was on top of me before I could make up my mind what to do about it.” An egg-shaped craft with three extended legs landed. Before he could run, a small figure in strange clothes tried to grab him, but Boas struggled so much that three more quickly surrounded him and lifted him off the ground by his arms. Were these gray aliens? Some have interpreted it this way but it’s hard to know. They were around five feet high, and possibly even a bit taller. They had gray suits and large round eyeglasses or coverings. Boas said there were three silvery tubes that protruded out of their heads or headgear. They also made strange animal-like grunting sounds.

They brought him into the craft, stripped him naked, and coated his body with a clear, odorless liquid. One speculation is that was a germicide. Another is that it was a sexual stimulant. Blood was taken from his chin with a device of some sort. They brought him to a room to a empty room with a foam-like bed. Boas had a hard time breathing and actually vomited.

At some point after this, a beautiful nude woman entered the room. As Boas described her, she seemed to have much in common with the hybrid-looking blonde woman encountered by Peter Khoury in 1992. She had bleach-blonde hair, large slanted blue eyes, a narrow face, and very thin lips that were almost invisible. Boas described her as extremely seductive. An interesting physical attribute noted by Boas with some embarrassment, was her pubic hair, which was an unusual bright red color. Boas said that a gas was released, which he believed was a kind of aphrodisiac.

The woman silently approached him and pressed herself against him. He became aroused, responded to her advances, and had two sexual encounters with her within the space of about an hour. It was an odd experience. The woman never spoke but only made strange animal grunting sounds. She wouldn’t kiss but instead preferred to bite his chin. He was repulsed and attracted to her at the same time.

After the encounter, one of the beings came to retrieve her. She smiled as much as she could, pointed to her belly, then pointed to the sky. It’s interesting that Boas interpreted this to mean that she intended to come back and take him with her. This frightened him because he was attached to his family and current life. As far as his sexual encounter, he concluded that “all they wanted was a good stallion to improve their stock.”

One of the aliens returned Boas’ clothes and led him back to a room where the crew communicated with each other with their unusual sounds. They ignored Boas. Realizing he was not in danger, he observed that the walls were smooth, metallic, and windowless. He saw a box with a glass top, looking something like an alarm clock. He described it as having one hand and several marks that corresponded to the clock positions of 3, 6, 9, and 12. But the hand never moved, and Boas concluded that it wasn’t a clock. He apparently either tried to steal this object or made his intention clear to do so, because one of the aliens shoved Boas back and took it. Jacques Vallee later interpreted this object in terms of the symbolism one gets from fairy tales in which time does not pass.

Collected images related to the Boas abduction account.

Boas was released and watched the craft quickly depart. It was around 5:30 a.m., meaning he was gone for just over four hours. A fascinating sidenote is that the battery wires of his tractor had been detached, presumably during his capture. His abductors knew he might try to escape and knew how a tractor worked.

For three months after his encounter, Boas experienced excessive sleepiness and symptoms related to radiation poisoning. These included body pain, nausea, headache, loss of appetite, burning sensations in the eyes, and skin lesions at the slightest bruising. These lesions would appear as small red bumps with a yellow discharge. Boas was examined by Dr. Olavo T. Fontes, a professor of Medicine at the National School of Medicine in Brazil. Fontes became a leading international member of the Anomalous Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), headed by Coral and James Lorenzen, who were the first to give this story serious attention and publicity. Boas himself went on to earn a law degree and became a practicing attorney. He died in 1992, maintaining the authenticity of his story to the end. One would have to wonder how a Brazilian farmer could possibly suffer from radiation poisoning.

To this day, no one really knows what to do with this case. A number of commentators consider it to be a hoax. How could Boas realistically mate with a woman who seemed to be some sort of hybrid from a different species?^[30] But even skeptics recognized that he was level-headed and rational. Regarding the question of hybridization, a few issues arise. Why didn’t they simply extract his sperm through a medical procedure, as many later male abductees reported? If the purpose was to create offspring, one would think an in vitro procedure would be more reliable. However, it must be said that “forced” sexual encounters have been reported quite a few times by male and female abductees, including with beings suspected of being hybrids.

In trying to assess the nature of Boas’ abductors, we don’t really have enough information to know who they were. Their faces were concealed from him. They were somewhat shorter than most adult men, but not significantly so. Despite the assumption of some contemporary commentators that these were gray aliens, there isn’t any reason to infer this from Boas’ descriptions. But it was an abduction, and at least some qualities of the encounter were reminiscent of later accounts with grays.

Betty and Barney Hill.

Then there is the famous abduction of Betty and Barney Hill. This has been a well-told story for more than half a century. The couple was driving home to Portsmouth, New Hampshire after a vacation. At around 10:30 p.m. they noticed a strange light in the sky. Eventually the light became odd enough that they stopped the vehicle. Barney took the dog our for a quick walk while Betty looked at the light through binoculars. She wondered if it was a flying saucer and he thought it was a commercial aircraft. Then it seemed to move rapidly toward them, and even Barney was becoming concerned. He later describing the object as “a plane that wasn’t a plane.”

Back inside the car, they drove along a lonely stretch of road, still being “followed” by the unusual object which seemed to be getting closer. At some point, the craft descended close to the Hill’s car. Barney stopped the vehicle and got out for a closer look. By now, the object, which was definitely a craft, was possibly as low as 100 feet above the ground and seemed quite large. It was “pancake-shaped” and silent. Carrying the binoculars, Barney approached it. He saw a row of windows along the front of it and was shocked to see between eight and eleven figures standing behind the windows.

Barney sensed that these were not human beings and ran back to the car screaming “they’re going to capture us!” He started the car and drove as fast as he could. The object moved directly toward the car. The two began to hear beeping and buzzing sounds and they both felt dulled and sedated. Eventually, they returned to full alertness, discovering that they were 35 miles further along the road than where they had just been. They had no idea how they got there. Just as odd, they arrived home two hours later than they should have.

There is much more to this story. One thing worth mentioning here is that shortly after they returned home, Betty experienced incredibly vivid dreams about their experience as being an alien abduction. This happened for five consecutive nights. Eventually, the two went through regressive hypnosis with a highly established psychiatrist, Dr. Benjamin Simon. These began in early 1964 and lasted for several months. The sessions with Betty and Barney were done separately and Simon gave them post-hypnotic suggestions to prevent them from remembering their details (thereby preventing them from sharing their memories with each other). Their recollections were strikingly similar and compatible.

A clear and consistent story emerged. While driving fast to escape from the craft, Barney suddenly had an urge to take the car off the road into the woods, and onto a dirt road. Eventually “six men” appeared in the middle of the road. Then the car stalled. Three of the beings approached and in his mind Barney heard a voice telling him not to be afraid and to close his eyes. When he did so, he felt as though their eyes were somehow pushing into his own. It was unnerving.

Top: Barney’s sketch of the being he encountered. Bottom, Two sketches by artist David Baker, based on his interviews with Barney. (credit: NICAP 1972).

The two were led out of the car up a large walkway coming from the craft. Once onboard, they were separated. Each was examined medically. Barney laid on an examination table with his eyes shut tightly. A “cup-like device” was placed over his genitals which took a sperm sample. Skin was scraped from his arms, and his ears and mouth were examined. He felt someone feeling his spine, possibly counting the vertebrae. Their language was not anything he had heard, only strange mumbles, except when they addressed him, which he understood in English. Their mouths did not appear to move.

Betty’s regression memories closely matched Barney’s, but from her own perspective, and corresponded well to her previous ultra-vivid dreams. She was left with the apparent leader of the group. He examined under her arm and took skin samples from there as well as from her ear, nails, and hair. He inserted a long needle into her navel, which he told her was a pregnancy test. This caused her pain which stopped when he placed his hand over her eyes. She asked him where they came from, and he produced a three-dimensional star map. He said the twelve glowing dots were stars, and the lines were connecting paths.

After coming out of hypnosis, she drew the star map at Dr. Simon’s suggestion. This map has its own history due to the extraordinary efforts of amateur astronomer Marjorie Fish, who created a three dimensional model of star systems within 65 light years of Earth. This was all pre-internet, of course. She was expecting to find several potential matches to Betty’s drawing but found only one: the Zeta Reticuli star system.

One thing we have to say about Betty and Barney Hill is that at no time did anyone seriously suggest they were hoaxing or seeking attention. They were decent and honorable citizens who had earned the respect of everyone who knew them. If we consider that their shared “interrupted journey” really happened as it appears, then who abducted them?

Overall, the description of these beings comes closer to our understanding of gray aliens. It’s possible that this is the answer. Descriptions and depictions of the beings encountered by the Hills essentially show everything except the ultra-black eyes. But we must recall these memories were extracted via hypnosis (from a psychiatrist who was a UFO skeptic, by the way). We can consider that it’s entirely possible that their memories under hypnosis, while good, may not have been crystal clear in every respect. We can leave enough wiggle-room in this instance to allow for the possibility of gray aliens being responsible. But then again, we can’t be certain.

Depiction of the aliens seen by Travis Walton.

Finally we have the Travis Walton “Fire in the Sky” case from November 5, 1975. At this point, the Walton abduction might be more famous than the Hill case, although both are iconic in ufology. Travis was hit and nearly killed by a bright blue beam of light from a flying saucer, witnessed by his six co-workers from their truck. Watching it happen, they panicked and drove off for a few minutes. After all, they assumed that the beam had killed Travis and they might be next. They returned quickly, but not until after Travis had disappeared. For five days, the crew members lived under suspicion of murder. Upon his return, Travis had specific memories of what had happened. Subsequent attempts at hypnosis had to be ended when it was evident that the stress was too great for him.

Travis only remembered about 90 minutes worth of his five day experience. Most likely this is because he was unconscious for nearly the whole time, and possibly near death. He woke up on an examination table of some sort, seeing three alien beings staring down at him. These could be gray aliens but then again, it’s not clear-cut. The general descriptions he has offered seem at least to be compatible with gray aliens.

First of all, he said, they were definitely not human. These beings were “shorter than five feet, and they had bald heads, no hair. Their heads were domed, very large. They looked like fetuses … They had large eyes—enormous eyes—almost all brown, without much white in them. The creepiest thing about them were those eyes … they just stared through me.” He added that their ears, noses, and mouths seemed very small.

He instantly became terrified. He grabbed a glasslike cylinder from nearby. First he tried to break it to use it as a weapon, but it wouldn’t break, so he waved it around menacingly at the creatures. They responded by silently walking out of the room, leaving him alone.

After getting up and searching the room, he found a corridor that led to another room, much larger and spherical. In the center was a high-backed chair. He thought someone might be seated in it but approached it anyway. As he did, lights began to appear in the room. The chair was empty, so Travis sat in it. When he did, many more lights appeared, like stars projected on a planetarium ceiling. On the right arm of the chair was a green screen about five inches square with intersecting black lines. On the left arm was a short lever with a molded handle on top. Travis pushed the lever and saw the stars around him began to rotate slowly. When he let go, the stars remained at their new position. He decided to leave well enough alone and stopped.

When he left the chair, the stars disappeared. He then heard a sound behind him and saw a human figure wearing blue coveralls with a glassy helmet. The man’s eyes were larger than normal, and bright gold. Travis asked the man a number of questions, but only received a smile. The man motioned for Travis to follow him. They went down a hallway which led to a door and a steep ramp down to a large room similar to an aircraft hangar.

There he saw several disc-shaped craft. They walked into another room where there was a woman and two other men, all similar to the first man. They were not wearing helmets and Travis tried asking them questions also. They gave the same grin as the first man, and led Travis to a small table. He sat there and the woman placed what looked like an oxygen mask over his face, and he passed out.

The next thing he knew, he was lying on the ground and saw a large flying saucer above him take off, leaving him alone. He walked to a phone booth, called his brother, and his case soon made the news worldwide. This is another fascinating encounter. Travis Walton not only has passed multiple polygraph examinations, but so did his co-workers, who all stand by the story. It has stood the test of time.

The outstanding feature of this case is the collaboration between obvious non-humans and perfectly human-looking beings aboard a UFO. The alien creatures could possibly have been gray aliens, but the eyes, while close, don’t seem to be a match. However, they do match a number of descriptions of other landed occupants of UFOs that have been gathered over the years. Either the grays have an ability to change the appearance of their eyes somehow, or there is another alien species that works aboard UFO craft. One that otherwise looks very similar to grays.

The human component is also fascinating. We don’t know how or why such a collaboration exists, although I offered a suggestion earlier in this book. Perhaps it is a case of humans that were taken from Earth long ago and acculturated to an alien civilization, where they have long since made their home?

A final point about this incident. Travis always believed that getting hit by the beam of light was an accident. He thinks he might have made a movement that triggered an automatic response, or else something just went wrong. He further believes that the aliens saved his life.

29. For a good summary of the case, see Long, Nick. “Alien Abduction: The Antonio Boas Story,” Feb. 22, 2018.
https://anomalien.com/alien-abduction-the-antonio-boas-story/

30. See Swancer, Brett, “The Completely Bonkers Alien Abduction of Antônio Villas Boas,” Mysterious Universe June 12, 2020.
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2020/06/the-completely-bonkers-alien-abduction-of-antonio-villas-boas/

Sketch of a Reptilian alien, by Sherri Miller.

We arrive at another of the iconic alien types. There is a lot written about Reptilian aliens on the web, although many of the sites copy and paste the same information, so it’s not clear who really knows what. We are told they are from the star system Alpha Draconis, and that they are known as Draconians or Dracos. Exactly how this information came to be described so confidently is another question entirely.

But it is true that reptilian beings are described often enough by abductees. Descriptions are fairly consistent: they are said to be about the height of an adult man, physically muscular and strong, to have scaly, reptile-like skin, and even to look like lizards or like snub-nosed crocodiles. Some witnesses have even reported a tail. Most witnesses state that these beings are frightening to behold.

In his book Walking Among Us, David Jacobs conceded he didn’t really know where to place the reptilian aliens within the overall scheme of things. His grand scenario included mantids at the top, followed by their creations the tall grays, then the short grays, and then the various levels of hybrid down to human beings. But the reptilians don’t easily fit into that scenario, even though some abductees have placed them in conjunction with grays or even mantids. Therefore, the question arises as to what they actually are. Perhaps they are simply an allied species, working with the grays and mantids for some reason, or maybe they were conquered or somehow enticed to collaborate with them. Or maybe they are fully independent and have their own agenda. We are simply guessing here.

One thing that has come up more than once are claims by witnesses to have seen reptilian aliens alongside U.S. military personnel, sometimes on their craft and sometimes at a secret underground facility. The stories are not unusual among abductees, though often they are fragmented. Frankly, it can be a challenge to find some of them believable but again, there are quite a few of them.

In Preston Dennett’s recent book, Onboard UFO Encounters: True Accounts of Contact with Extraterrestrials, he tells the stories of fifteen individuals who encountered aliens aboard a UFO. Like so many others, many of the people in this study had a lifetime of contact. One of them, a Marine named Ramon, described ongoing involvement by the U.S. military with UFOs and aliens.^[31]

Stationed at Camp Pendleton in San Diego in 1964, Ramon was essentially “volunteered” into an assignment with eleven other marines to take a blacked-out bus trip to a secret facility. The soldiers were drugged and in a stupor. They passed through many checkpoints, with each new checkpoint becoming more difficult to pass through, eventually causing the Navy driver to argue with the guards. Finally, they arrived at their destination, an isolated hangar in a desert location.

The marines, all privates, were marched into an open room inside the hangar. They were accompanied by two doctors and a sergeant. They were brought one by one to a chair where their blood was drawn and they were apparently hypnotized. They were then injected with something to sedate them. One of the doctors tried to reassure Ramon that he wouldn’t be alone.

A pair of large hangar doors was opened, and the men saw a flying saucer sitting on the floor of the hangar. Ramon had been a witness to a similar looking craft as a child. A mobile staircase sat next to the saucer, leading to an opening. The sergeant reminded the men about the importance of their mission.

This was when “they marched out several reptilian-looking humanoids” who were brought to the men. “They walked right alongside the sergeant,” said Ramon. “They weren’t being held; they were co-existing, shoulder-to-shoulder.” The account continued:

One of the reptilian-looking figures approached Ramon and the other men. “He walks up to us, and I just look at him. This being was seven feet tall, muscular, not skinny, wearing a blackish-green uniform. I remember the face looking almost scaly, like a reptile, like a snake has scales. It was frightening.”

The reptilian uniform had a large badge depicting a dragon-like creature. The appearance of these reptilians caused the soldiers to break rank. Ramon’s next memory was of standing in front of his barracks at Camp Pendleton at 3 a.m. He had the sense that one or two days had passed. He was so traumatized by the experience that he was immobile in front of his barracks. He couldn’t take a step. Another marine eventually approached him and helped him to his bunk where he fell asleep.

Once again we have a story of human-alien collaboration, and once again it involves doctors and drugs. Ramon wasn’t able to provide any further details about this mission, nor why they were brought to meet these beings.

The answer might be in Ramon’s future assignments in Vietnam, many of which he stated were UFO related. His first assignment took him into the Vietnamese wilderness with eight other men. They came to a huge cave with a “carved-out, round, circular opening right in the middle of the jungle.” Ramon immediately thought this would be a good size for a UFO to enter. The next day, they were near the cave when they heard a loud noise that sounded like an electrical discharge. Coming from the sky were bolts of energy which effectively surrounded the men. The beams were as high as a three story building, so the scene had to look astonishing. It wasn’t clear where the beams were coming from. Ramon did not know if the officers were expecting this. No one said anything either way. The beams eventually stopped.

He soon had another assignment, which was to document anything in the air. Not surprisingly, he began to record UFOs within the overall scheme of airborne objects.

Before Ramon left the Marines a few years later, he went in for a physical examination at a veteran’s hospital. The doctor asked him when he had surgery. Ramon said he had never had surgery. The doctor told him that there were at least three surgical scars on his body.

Considering these features of Ramon’s story, it’s a reasonable guess that the visit to the reptilian aliens included covert surgery. Perhaps it involved an implant, although we might assume that it would be the reptilians doing the implanting in 1964. U.S. and Earth-based technology had not gotten to a sufficient level of miniaturization to have tiny implants that could do much of anything.

These stories drop fascinating hints. But we still lack important information, including so much about the reptilians themselves. They appear to be part of the alien presence here. Most significantly, they seem to have a strong tie-in with the U.S. government, along with other alien groups.

No wonder the UFO coverup has continued all this time. The secret is too deep, too involved, and has resulted in the creation of a secret world that is so divorced from the rest of us that bridging the gap is a serious problem. Over a decade ago I coined the term breakaway civilization to help us envision such a dramatically split-off society. Studying the tales of extraterrestrial or alien contact give further depth and meaning to that idea.

31. Dennett, Preston, Onboard UFO Encounters: True Accounts of Contact with Extraterrestrials (Blue Giant Books, 2020).

Two of Danny’s illustrations of the entity in his bedroom in 2020.

Earlier I discussed the case of “Danny” (pseudonym), who had an excruciating experience involving a possible implant in 2013 by what appears to have been a female tall gray entity. Like many abductees and experiencers, Danny has had multiple contacts that are vividly real and yet remain elusive. An experience he had on May 21, 2020 is one of these.

On several occasions since his initial abduction of 2013 he clearly perceived “shadow beings” in his bedroom. In his words, somehow they “partially phased into our reality, or for whatever reason I could perceive them.” He emphasizes that it’s more than simply perceiving them; normally he can see them as dark black entities without other specific features. Not long before the evening in question, he saw three of them in the room, going through what looked to him like an instructional or practice scenario, as if they were planning out positions and movements before the main event. When he lunged at them, they phased out of his view.

Then for the first time, not long after this experience, he saw one of them clearly while in bed. He recoiled back slightly and propped himself up. He estimated its height at six feet and of a slender athletic build. “It had extremely furrowed brows and appeared angry or hostile on a first glance,” he said. “It took one step towards me and reached down towards my face.”

He thought it was going to touch him. Instead, its hand actually went through him, into his head. The entity then withdrew its hand and simply observed for a moment, “the way a painter observes brush strokes just made from a distance before painting again.” Then it leaned in again and did the same thing. This felt odd but not painful. Danny was surprised that he wasn’t afraid. He simply observed it and wondered what it was doing.

While watching this creature, Danny noticed that although he could see it clearly, it was partially transparent. It seemed to him that the light from the window was what allowed him to see this entity. After the third or fourth time it reached toward him, Danny gathered up the courage to reach out for it. His hand went through it. The being stopped and recoiled. It noticed that not only was Danny fully awake but that he could see it.

For a few moments, it simply watched Danny. What followed was a strange sort of dance in which Danny reached out repeatedly for it while it would move its hands back each time he tried. Realizing he couldn’t grab it, Danny stopped. The entity also paused. It stared at him intently before it simply reached out again and placed its hand back within his head. It seemed to assess that he was no threat and went back to doing whatever it was doing.

This exchange lasted for several minutes. In that time, Danny could see the shape of its head and body structure. He realized that the eyes which had seemed hostile were more accurately just conveying intense concentration. The being was somewhat “snakelike” in some respects. Its eyes were jet black but human sized, and they reflected the light coming in from the window. He could also see from the entity’s movements that its hand was twisting back and forth while in his head.

During this encounter, Danny tried communicating with it by asking questions in his mind such as “what are you doing? What do you want?” He received no answers. Several times he asked it to leave but with no acknowledgment. Then he reached for his phone to take a photograph, and it was gone.

When he conveyed this story to me, he recognized that it sounded odd. And yet, he said, “I absolutely swear on my life it occurred.” I know him and believe him.

He wonders that, considering something physical occurred to him in 2013 and a procedure was forced upon him that seems to have resulted in something being placed in his brain or otherwise affecting it, he wonders why this entity was also reaching into his head. Was it adjusting something, trying to remove it, or perhaps trying switch it off?

He has encountered several different types of beings over the years, and this one seemed different from the others. He wondered if this being was part of the group that performed the procedure on him in 2013, but somehow doubts it. This one simply appeared in his room without a need to abduct him.

Encounters like this open up more questions. Do alien groups compete with each other? Does one species know when another species is abducting someone? Do they spy on each other in the same way that intelligence agencies spy on other nations? Or do they compete with each other despite working for the same authority in the same manner that the FBI, NSA, CIA monitor each other while formally working for the same government?

After years of experiencing intrusive events, Danny has tentatively concluded:

… the entire thing is multi-faceted. It’s ET, it’s other sentient beings on our planet, it’s Military/Black ops, it’s interdimensional (ultra-terrestrial), it’s many things, but it’s not one race. It’s many.

Like many others, he is frustrated to be in the dark as to what they are they doing.

Charles Hickson (l) & Calvin Parker (r) and the type of being they described.

Beyond reports of human-looking beings, short and tall grays, mantids, and reptilians, people have reported a range of other types of alien beings and phenomena. Some types have been described a single time only, and we are left with bizarre descriptions that don’t make sense and seem wrong in some way. One such example was the entity described by two fishermen in Pascagoula, Mississippi, in October 1973. Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker witnessed a flying saucer at the bank of the river where they were fishing and said they were subsequently abducted.

They gave a recollection of three beings that floated out of the craft. They were about five feet tall with heads shaped like bullets with no necks, a tiny slit for a mouth, no apparent eyes, and carrot-like projections where the ears and nose would be. The two men were terrified, and Parker appears to have fainted. Hickson stated that he was immobilized, floated into the craft, and held for twenty minutes while he was scanned by an eye-like object that floated over him. He was eventually floated back out to be rejoined with Parker, who by now had regained consciousness and was extremely upset.

The two immediately reported this to local law enforcement. Initially suspecting them of being delusional or of lying, the sheriff became convinced that they were truthful.

The alien that the men described is surely strange looking, and we don’t know how to make sese of it as a natural creature. One speculation is that it was a robot of some sort, but even as a robot it seems like a poor design. The men never altered their story.

In the history of alleged alien encounters, there are other equally strange looking creatures. In November and December 1954, South America was scene to a number of reports of short and very hairy, or even furry, alien creatures who attempted to abduct people. Some of the encounters involved physical altercations and fighting.

The Hopkinsville creatures as described by the Sutton family.

In 1955 in the town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, a family by the name of Sutton claimed to have been under siege all night and into the next day by a group of aliens that were short, with long arms, huge eyes, and enormous ears. The creatures were able to float toward the house at times, peer into the windows, and jump onto the roof. Shotgun blasts did not injure them.

Not surprisingly, the case received a great deal of humorous publicity since these were simple folks from the country, and it was assumed that this was some alcohol-fueled hallucination. But there was an entire extended family in that house, men, women, and children. Local and state police investigated and although they did not see evidence of aliens having been on the property, everyone could see the family was sincere and frightened.

As far as I have been able to see, the aliens in the Hopkinsville case were not described anywhere else. The witnesses claim to have seen the creatures clearly, but who knows? Perhaps in their panic and terror they made mistakes in their observations—although it must be said that when going through the specifics of the family’s account, two of the men in the house got very close to some of these creatures.

There are countless other one-off or near one-off types of descriptions: the red-eyed creature from Varghinia, Brazil in 1996, or different types of red-eyed creatures seen by Australian witness Kelly Cahill in 1993, or the gigantic and tiny human-like creatures described in the Italian “Friendship case” that extended over a period of decades.

Is it possible that so many different types of beings are coming here? We’ve already discussed the logic of bipedal humanoid-types of beings evolving elsewhere with similar body plans to our own— two arms, two legs, two front-facing eyes, and so on. Even so, the amount of variety probably strikes most people as unrealistic.

There is at least one other type of unusual encounter that we should not ignore, which are quite a few claims regarding intelligent light phenomena. That is, balls of light or glowing orbs that seem to act intelligently. There are so many cases of this that I don’t think it’s necessary even to argue for them; they are reported everywhere, including in classic cases from Project Blue Book from decades ago, to collections in all the major civilian UFO organizations, from NICAP, APRO, and MUFON to the National UFO Reporting Center.

These orbs have been frequently been described as yellowish-orange in color and basketball-sized, although other colors and sizes have also been reported. I have come across many such accounts from all of the above-mentioned sources, but the one that stands in my memory the most is one that I was told personally by a close friend. He told me about an event in 1978 when his teenage stepdaughter woke up in her bed in the middle of the night with an urge to look out her bedroom window. She saw a glowing orange orb hovering in their backyard. The next thing she knew, she was standing alone in her nightgown at night in the yard. Fortunately it was summer, so the weather was tolerable. She had no memory of how she got outside, but only remembered seeing the orb from her window. My friend said the entire family was perplexed and disturbed by the event.

We don’t know what that orb was, or countless others like it that witnesses have seen. Was it a kind of sentient being? Can light phenomena be sentient? Or was it someone’s very advanced technology? My own inclination would be to guess the latter. Still, this is yet another of those strange things about UFOs that don’t allow for an easy conclusion. In the case of an apparently intelligent ball of light, we might remind ourselves that even now neuroscientists don’t know how consciousness is created or works. Moreover, there is a sizable minority within neuroscience who argue that consciousness somehow incorporates the notion of nonlocality. In other words, that the critical element of consciousness may be something beyond chemical and electrical connections in our brains. Anyone who has had a convincing out of body experience can attest to this, but we still don’t have the science to explain it.

At the very least, however, we humans still have a long way to go if we want to resolve some of the great mysteries of our existence. There is so much we just don’t know.

So far, we have discussed some interesting elements of our potential ancient history, the likelihood of human-looking “aliens” in our world, and of the dominant alien-looking beings that people seem to encounter. We have explored some scenarios in which these encounters might make sense. I realize as much as anyone that even considering this subject will seem bonkers to some readers. But I would remind them that our contemporary establishment has now reached a point in which it is slowly but surely acknowledging a genuine UFO reality. Granted, not everyone agrees, but I would counter that there is enough evidence to make the case definitively.

The crux of the matter, however, is that if one acknowledges the reality of genuine, inexplicable UFOs, then there is an inevitable followup insight, which is that there is a society and infrastructure behind those objects. Someone made them, someone operates them. Rather than politely and vaguely dance around who those someones happen to be, what we are doing here is a speculative analysis that tries to envision probable scenarios.

These scenarios are very far afield from our officially sanctioned reality. It is a reality that is strenuously imposed by an established group of “authoritative” sources. So, when we study the mass of data regarding human contact with these other beings, we ultimately have to choose between what we think that data is telling us, and the “authoritative” establishment position. I think that many students of this subject are likely to conclude that the problem lies with those so-called authoritative sources, especially regarding the reality of alien interaction.

Before delving into the potential agendas of aliens groups that appear to be here, we need to address a critical feature of their presence.

Essentially, at least some of these beings operate “at another level.” In other words, well beyond what we are capable of. There are phenomena in this world that appear to be so strange that they are beyond our explanation. Even interplanetary aliens doesn’t seem to cover some of these. Whether they represent the same phenomenon as UFOs and aliens, or something else entirely, is something we don’t always know.

One obvious UFO example is the now-famous case of the Tic Tac UFO involving the USS Nimitz and USS Princeton off the coast of southern California and Mexico on November 14, 2004. This was more than simply an encounter with a craft of astonishing capability. According to the testimony of all the major witnesses, the object they encountered that day showed an ability to arrive at a rendezvous point that was given to Navy personnel through a highly encrypted channel, the codes of which are said to change every 15 minutes. These are complex encrypted codes, and yet the intelligence controlling the object apparently had the ability to decrypt and understand the message in real time, and then reach the point before the Navy jets arrived. All this, aside from the fact that the object demonstrated aerial capabilities incredibly beyond our top fighter aircraft. Not even close.

Over the years, other research in ufology has pointed to a high level of intelligence going well beyond what our common sense tells us should be possible. Dr. Harley Rutledge conducted fascinating work during the 1970s and 1980s which he called Project Identification. Rutledge led a team of researchers in a scientific attempt to study UFOs. In his region of Southern Missouri, he traveled to UFO hotspots to record data and conduct measurements. Rutledge was no wide-eyed believer, but during the course of his research became convinced that there is a precognitive (and genius) level of intelligence to these beings.

There is the example of the well-known Skinwalker Ranch in Utah. Quite a lot of research has gone into this place, and researchers such as Dr. Eric Davis, Dr. Colm Kelleher, and others have described the intelligence there as having an extraordinarily high precognitive sentience. That is, it’s like a chess player that is twenty moves ahead of his opponent. It’s a fair argument to state that the Skinwalker Ranch is not a definite UFO-related phenomenon. There have been events there that arguably are, and others that seem more closely related to poltergeist activity. We don’t know what is going on there.

Beyond that, we might consider including the inexplicable “Missing 411” cases as part of this phenomenon. Such cases have been documented by researcher David Paulides. Whether or not they are the work of an ET group or something even beyond is impossible to know at this time. Paulides’ work is very important, in my view, aside from providing the ultimate experience in creepy late-night reading. Some of the disappearances he reports are truly strange, with people sometimes disappearing in a near-instant, often in the depths of the U.S. national park system, but also in cities and towns across North America. They too are suggestive of a much higher and potentially malicious intelligence that is operating far above our level. They remind one of some of the equally odd animal mutilation cases, which are also difficult to explain.

Some might suspect that some of these cases are from a black budget clandestine group. Regarding the 411 cases, this conclusion seems untenable when we consider that many of them are a century old or even more. This problem has been with us for quite some time. Whether or not they represent the same intelligence as what is behind the UFO phenomenon is another matter, but we should not rule out such a connection.

There might be potential theories that have some explanatory power for at least some of these true oddities. They involve interdimensionality and parallel universes. These have been described as young and very theoretical sciences. Much disagreement exists. Even so, they are interesting from our vantage point here.

The concept of a parallel universe was first proposed in 1954 by a Princeton University doctoral student named Hugh Everett III. There are parallel universes, he argued, almost exactly like ours. All of the universes are related by having branched off from each other. Once they have branched off, differences emerge, essentially giving an infinity of possibilities and outcomes. In one (or many) universes, someone really did kill baby Hitler. In others, the dinosaurs never became extinct but evolved into—wait for it—super intelligent bipedal reptilian geniuses. And so on and on. In this theory, travel between these universes seems to be impossible.

String theory, developed by physicists such as Michio Kaku and Brian Greene, similarly allows for parallel universes. According to the theory, our own universe is like a bubble that exists alongside similar parallel universes. Moreover, this theory goes beyond Everett’s theory by supposing that they can come into contact with one another and in a sense penetrate the membranes (branes) of other universes. According to this theory, gravity actually does this. Also, according to string theory, rules apply differently in the universes. Time exists in ours but may not exist in other universes. Here’s a fun thought, coming from a completely unqualified observer: in other universes, the laws of physics over there can enable other beings to visit our own universe.

Of course, we have no idea if parallel universes really exist. Or if so, where they exist. Some notions suggest that each brane is exceedingly close to the ones it branched off from, something which apparently is happening all the time. Maybe the next universe is right in front of your nose. This might all prove to be wrong. Still, there are glimmers of possibility entertained by some of our best theoretical physicists that some version of other universes and realities does exist, and an acknowledgment that a certain level of interaction among them may be possible.

I don’t know exactly how alternate universes or dimensions can explain a sentience that can run circles around us in our own world, unless of course other beings operate within a dimension of time that somehow functions well beyond our own.

Be that as it may, the UFO phenomenon seems to involve an intelligence that (a) doesn’t appear to come from our own society and (b) appears to operate at orders of magnitude beyond our own abilities. Perhaps there is some trickster intelligence beyond ET. I do not believe there has been any tangible observation that has strongly linked the events at the Skinwalker Ranch with any of the alien types that people have noted over the years. The same goes for the Missing 411 cases. We simply don’t know what is going on here. Some of these cases might have nothing to do with UFOs, per se. Whoever is behind these truly bizarre occurrences, they don’t appear to be our friends. If they turn out to be an extraterrestrial group, this could signify a problem.

There is at least one additional way that some group or entities, be they aliens or something else, are “operating on another level.” This relates to claims by people to have had telepathic communication with extraterrestrial or otherworldly beings. Not while aboard a craft, but in the course of their daily life. Often this can come about via meditation, but sometimes it just happens.

Of course, there is a long tradition of mystical encounters, from ancient shamanic rituals through modern times, including things like automatic writing, channeling, telepathic “downloads” and, in ufology, CE-5 (close encounter) protocols.

Needless to say, these are controversial and many observers dispute their legitimacy. I mention it here for a few reasons. In the first place, there is an abundance of testimony regarding telepathic communication between ET/alien beings and abductees and experiencers. It’s so widespread that it’s actually common. Second, as was mentioned in a prior segment on low-frequency brainwaves and telepathy, there are at least hypothetical reasons as to why some form of telepathic communication could be possible. Third, it seems at least plausible that human beings have a natural psi-sense which has diminished to some degree from its original strength in paleolithic times. Thousands of years of urban civilization probably blunted this ability of ours, but has not destroyed it.

Mainly, however, I discuss this matter here because so many people have claimed to have received communications from extraterrestrial or interdimensional beings. Nearly all of these claims have included positive messaging, usually with a spiritual focus. This is enough of a phenomenon that a substantial school of thought exists within ufology that interprets the extraterrestrial presence as mostly very positive.

This phenomenon was quite visible during the build-up to the much-anticipated (by some) winter solstice date of December 21, 2012. For that event, which was mostly determined astrologically, many people nevertheless claimed to receive channeled or downloaded messages emphasizing this as a date of “ascension.” A major spiritual transformation that would spread across the globe.

Obviously, that did not happen. But many people continue to receive information from alleged extraterrestrials who are here to help humanity on its spiritual path. Assessing the merits of these many claims is next to impossible. For sure, the UFO field is littered with wrong predictions and “prophecies” which seem to be offered on a near-constant basis. Very few of these statements are even testable (such as claims that the channeling beings are from a lost civilization like Atlantis or Lemuria, or from the future, and so on). Moreover, most channeled information doesn’t even try to make predictions or provide tangible information. Instead it usually comes in the form of spiritual or personal advice. It’s not evident how such information is helpful to our work.

Having said that, I believe it would be rash to throw out all such claims of telepathically-derived information. Our society is still in the early stages of understanding much about consciousness; there remains so much ahead for us to learn. Personally, I do believe such unusual forms of communication to be possible, even if we haven’t figured out the details of how it works. But we are obligated to be careful regarding claims of such contact. They are inherently subjective for starters. Plus, too many times we see claims given by obvious hoaxers or people who suffer from delusions. It’s a reality and that means we must be extremely cautious about accepting claims from people who are looking for attention.

Still, we should consider it possible that some of the claims may have merit, and that there is one or more extraterrestrial or otherworldly group of helpful beings out there,. Perhaps they are able to communicate with those of us who tune in at the right frequency, so to speak. If I can believe in remote viewing, and if I can believe that some abductees receive telepathic messages while aboard a UFO, then I should be able to accept this possibility as well. As long as we remember that caution is the word.

We now need to continue exploring what it appears these alien beings and groups are up to. We have already had some of that discussion in the preceding pages. Now let’s go further.

No matter how many or varied our visitors (or intruders) happen to be, there appears to be a sizable number of them that have arrived from elsewhere in the galactic neighborhood. Why do they operate in secret? Why don’t they announce themselves openly?

We can’t know this answer without living with them, communicating with them, and having the opportunity to study them every bit as carefully as we study international relations among the nations on Earth. Failing that, we can at best make a few rough guesses.

When people ask why the aliens don’t openly announce themselves, it is usually asked without a review of UFO history, and without much appreciation of how difficult, impractical, and even dangerous an open announcement could be.

First of all, the answer to the question, why don’t they announce themselves would be different depending upon how long they have been here. So let’s start with the assumption that they are relative newcomers, arriving in major numbers during the 20th century. We don’t know this for sure, of course, but UFO sightings statistics show much greater numbers of genuinely perplexing sightings (by far) than in prior centuries.

Setting aside for the moment questions about specific aliens such as the mantids, grays, reptilians, or any others, let’s explore the scenario of any newly arriving alien group establishing diplomatic relations with the governments on Planet Earth. After all, if they were to make a public announcement that they are here, we would expect that there would be immediate action by many governments to establish a relationship with them, if only for the purposes of communication.

There are nearly two hundred officially sovereign nations in the world. Only a few, however, have genuine power. We might assume aliens would be in contact with the United States government. Would they also talk with the Russians and Chinese? Or any other national government? With all of them? Would they work exclusively through the United Nations? Would they go through the informal channels of the global elite who work behind the scenes and attend the annual Bilderberg meetings?

An open announcement by recently arrived aliens presupposes that they (a) quickly recognized the intrinsic value of nation states, (b) were able to identify and distinguish among those states and determine their relative strengths among each other, and (c) figured out a way to communicate with us. Is it likely or unlikely that a new arrival would gain a sophisticated knowledge of the Earth’s geopolitical relationships? Enough to enable them to navigate their way through it without problems?

Of course, if (as it appears) many of them arrived sometime during the 20th century, and they quickly realized that our civilization had some level of sophistication and weaponry, then it would surely be rash simply to appear anywhere and make open contact. If the point were open contact, they would need to research, to learn the ways of the planet, to make sure that they were not making an awful mistake. They would need time to develop their plan.

In the case of our world, it’s entirely possible that any newcomer would be taken back by the nature of the global power structure, which they might think to be shockingly fragmented, and to be in a state of constant global warfare and civil unrest. This would be especially so if they arrived during the 20th century, a time of incredible technological and military progress, and terrifying advances in our ability to kill and destroy. It might be prudent for them to hold off on any open contact, at least until they could gain a basic understanding of the global situation on Earth.

Now consider the actual history of UFO interactions. It looks as though someone did make their presence known around the time of the Second World War. A bad time to make any open announcement. Even after that war, the remainder of the 20th century was a cesspool of global violence, strife, and weapons escalation. Not exactly a secure environment in which to say hello.

Then there is the matter of human nature and human aggression. Medieval philosophers spoke about humanity as perched between the angels and the animals. It’s a perspective that recognized the extremes in our nature, but angels and demons would have worked better. Animals don’t engage in sick atrocities; that’s a human distinction.

We are capable of great thoughts, deeds, and achievements. We have produced countless artists, mathematicians, and thinkers of all kinds of genius. A species that produced Pythagoras, Leonardo, and Beethoven has something going for it.

We are also the only species on Planet Earth that regularly kills its own for personal gain and profit. Chimpanzees kill each other sometimes, but humans have made that pastime their own. We do it individually and in organized groups, against other individuals and organized groups. We’ve become creative about it. We have invented endless varieties of torture. Not simply via murder and warfare, but also via genocide, and we have done this throughout our history. We are the only species that kills other animals for sport.

Aside from such sadism, humans have exploited each other since our first permanent settled communities more than 10,000 years ago. We have enslaved, mutilated, beaten, broken, and imprisoned countless fellow humans so that the most powerful can discipline, control, and extract labor from everyone else. In nearly all past and present human societies, a tiny group of people have owned and controlled most of the wealth, owned the best land, eaten the best food, and lived the best lives. They created and disseminated religions and ideologies designed for mental confinement. The typical formula for creating this control was through the alliance of religious indoctrination and state violence. Today digital media has replaced religion for many people but the fundamentals are the same.

To some, this may seem like an unfair characterization of human history. It’s true that history is complex and there is more to us than oppression and violence. Even so, it is an important part of our history and who we are. We take our violence for granted because it’s all around us.

Any visiting species would notice that this troubled and violent species has developed a complex civilization with ever more sophisticated and deadly weapons. Even if they had our best interests in mind, they might well decide that they should delay establishing relationships with sovereign nations for a while, but rather to deal with the locals without bringing governments into the equation. This would be something that governments would probably consider subversive. It would be a situation in which a foreign power would be quietly infiltrating human society to some extent, and interacting with its citizens.^[32]

Beyond political and power considerations, there are other obstacles that would confront any new arrival here. Something as simple as how to communicate. They may have two arms and two legs like us, but clearly their psychology, capabilities, temperament, and many other qualities are different from ours. What if they can’t communicate with us the way that we communicate? What if they don’t have a spoken or even written language? Or, if they do, what if their structure of thought and “psychological grammar” are difficult for us to comprehend? How easy or difficult might it be for us to understand each other well enough that we could get along? People often assume that we could find a way, and maybe that is so, but it could also be a problem.

Also, what’s in it for them? Is open contact beneficial to them? We have already gleaned some reasons why they would avoid open relations. But are there reasons why it would be a good idea for them?

Maybe, like us, they have national or global political communities. Maybe, also like us, they eventually tried to knit those various communities into a planetary or galactic federation. It would imply that there is a regional or even cosmic level of legal organization, something people like to speculate about but of course this is something of which we have not the slightest knowledge. But if this were the case, it could eventually be in their interest to bring Earth into their community. Or at least into some informal sphere of influence. On that basis, they might eventually make themselves openly known to all of the world. They might be waiting for some form of global political and military order to assert itself. This probably means authoritarian centralization, since it’s easier to deal with one authority than many. Or they might be waiting for our civilization to achieve a sufficient technological capability (practical space travel, better computing technology, genetic modifications, etc.)

I have often thought of this line of speculation as pure fantasy, and it easily falls into a trap of assuming these other beings have benign motives for reaching out to us. But from time to time I have gotten information (to be fair, all second-hand) that speaks to at least some of this scenario.

For example, a good friend of mine who has had a track record of quietly cultivating relationships with some well-placed government and military insiders, told me of a high-level NASA contact who befriended him. This contact had no interest in discussing UFOs, aliens, or conspiracies with my friend. However, being very smart and persistent, my friend was able to get this NASA person to talk (briefly) about the UFO-alien reality on two occasions. In anger, the NASA official finally said that “they” would never do anything openly here until we are able to engage in serious space travel. Then, he implied, and only then, will we be able to communicate more openly with them.

Could that be true? Perhaps it’s simply the opinion of someone in NASA who knows that UFOs and aliens are real and was offering his best opinion. All that can be said was that the official’s statement was taken as honest, thoughtful, and backed by genuine knowledge, and with a genuinely high rank within NASA.

Even if we consider that the motives of some of our visitors might be benign, it’s easy to see that they would have more than enough reason to keep their presence here quiet for the foreseeable future.

But what if at least one group has motives we would consider malevolent? Can we expect all of our galactic neighbors to be friendly or helpful? We know that if the shoe were on the other foot, and space-faring humanity encountered a less advanced society on another world, those folks might want to run for cover, or fight. Human beings would quickly try to dominate and exploit such a world at their earliest opportunity.

But what if the human arrivals were too small in number to conquer such a world? What if a human military unit or swashbuckling exploration party found a beautiful world of immense resources that could be adapted easily enough for their purposes, but which was blemished by the presence of an already existing and dominant population? Furthermore, a population that they saw as selfish, immature, violent, and not to be trusted? One that engaged in constant warfare and other activities that damaged the long-term chances of that world’s ability to thrive? Moreover, a society that caused the arriving humans personal safety concerns. The new arrivals might have better technology, but they would be greatly outnumbered and would be dealing with a world in the midst of a technological and scientific transformation which was about to make them potentially much more difficult to manage.

Some of the arriving aliens here on Earth may see the matter this way. Whether they are peaceful and loving or more aggressive, they probably perceive a long-term threat posed by humanity.

And what if they are interested in establishing themselves here in a position of power or wealth? If they wanted to live here in some capacity? If they wanted something from Earth itself? Secrecy would be essential to their goal. So would infiltration, to whatever degree possible.

When we look over the history of leaks and alleged insider claims, we see that much of the above logic could easily apply to the mantids, grays, ebens, and reptilians. It could help to explain their own history of secrecy with us.

Actually, it looks like some of these groups are not entirely secretive with humanity. Just very quiet. Over the years, there have been claims that aliens are communicating on a limited basis with some of the power players on Planet Earth. Realistically, this makes sense. It’s easy to envision an alien group deciding to work quietly with the dominant powers on the planet, if for no other reason than to avoid hassles, or worse.

One such account includes Eisenhower’s alleged 1954 meeting with aliens at Edwards Air Force Base. There are also claims by such individuals as Bill Uhouse, Dan Sherman, and Charles Hall—all people who worked either directly for the U.S. military or a major defense contractor. These people have all claimed that there is a limited level of collaboration between the U.S. military and a visiting extraterrestrial group. There have been other claims and sources which state or imply that there is a tightly controlled channel of communication between the U.S. government and a group of extraterrestrials who quietly live here on Earth under the protection of the U.S. government.

It’s true that each of these stories differ from each other in certain ways. We can assume they can’t all equally be true. But we might also plausibly conclude that each has a sliver of the bigger picture, the full version of which we have not yet gotten.

The same can be said about claims of human-looking infiltrators into our society. As we have seen, enough of these stories have circulated for a long time. Moreover, it’s a scenario that has logic to it. It is not hard to understand reasons why a visiting or intrusive species would try to infiltrate our own society—if they had a plan for using their influence to move that society in directions they wanted it to go. We will return to this thought shortly.

What seems most likely is that, among the groups that may be here, a combination of cooperation and divergence exists among them. This probably includes the all-important matter of what the agenda should be for humans and life on Earth. This may even include conflict among them, although I am not aware of any information that explicitly points to this.

In this context, I am reminded of a conversation I had with researcher Linda Moulton Howe. Many years ago, she told me about a conversation she had with a military source in whom she had high trust. This is a story she has since repeated a number of times. In short, her informant was a retired defense official who told her there was a kind of competition between three basic extraterrestrial groups: human-looking “Nordic” types, gray-type “ebens,” and reptilians. I don’t know if the terminology was his or Linda’s. Each group had a primary sphere of influence, as it were, although I was not clear how that worked out. The human-type beings, she was told, were essentially in rivalry with the ebens, until the reptilians came along as the “police,” apparently to impose some sense of order. Supposedly, that failed and they too became involved in the behind-the-scenes struggle for power on Earth. Exactly what would constitute power isn’t clear, but the impression he gave her is that humans themselves were the prize, or at least a significant prize. All three alien groups, she was told, have the ability to look human, or somehow to take on human form. According to her informant, he belonged to a secret department that monitored these extraterrestrial rivalries.

Is this true? I have no idea, except that I do think those three ET types are among those here on Earth. The notion that any of them can infiltrate human society is interesting. Again, this is a scenario with at least some potential logic to it.

While we are on the subject of infiltration, we can ask another question. If humanity is in such a dire situation with all of these alien groups arriving here, why wouldn’t any government or respected major institution try to expose the truth and awaken us to such a potentially grave threat?

Perhaps it’s more logical to ask, why would they? After all, are there any examples of governments exposing uncomfortable or dangerous truths on behalf of the world’s people? Exposing truth is not something that makes the to-do list of governments, especially powerful ones.

Moreover, the reality is that most governments don’t have the power to engage in any such expose. Nor do most of them have access to enough information on the subject of UFOs and aliens. For most of the world’s national governments, “disclosure” is a fantasy. There are only three genuine candidates that could do it: the United States, Russia, and China. You can rule out all of the second-tier power players such as the United Kingdom, France, Israel, or Japan. They are all deeply integrated into the U.S.-dominated global system. They will not and cannot act on UFO disclosure without the United States allowing it. We live in a mostly post-sovereign world. Nations today have limited sovereignty, and those limits vary from nation to nation. None but the aforementioned three have enough sovereignty to alert the world to something as profound as an alien presence or, worse, infiltration.

Even so, there might be a handful of nations that could consider an end-run around American, Russian, or Chinese domination and “disclose” the truth. One might be India, which has a formidable military, intelligence community, and space program. Moreover, while India is geopolitically aligned with the United States overall, it may yet have enough independence of latitude that at least in theory it has freedom of action. It’s also on fairly good terms with Russia. Of course, current border strife with China in the Himalayas—an issue that is unlikely to go away any time soon—will increasingly force the Indians to become more dependent on U.S. power and Russian weapons. The Indians probably won’t want to rock the boat.

Other nations that could conceivably alert the world to the threat of an alien infiltration might be Brazil or Iran. Brazil is a regional power with a long history of UFO encounters. Its relationship to the U.S. has had its ups and downs, to say the least. Overall, despite being a key member of the BRICS economic alliance, Brazil is well-integrated into the U.S. military-intelligence system and therefore not likely to bolt loose.

Iran is another story. That nation has a capable military and intelligence community and also a long history of UFO encounters. Moreover, Iran is most certainly not under the influence of the U.S. national security state. But Iran also has essentially no influence over global media. The Iranian government might make a major global announcement but would get nowhere with it. We have by now reached a point in the world today where major news can be completely throttled by the western media complex and its partners in Silicon Valley: mainly the unholy trio of Facebook, Twitter, and Google (which includes YouTube). Literally any story today can now be either buried or smeared with so much disinformation that it’s becoming almost impossible to loosen their stranglehold over “authoritative” information.

This leaves the United States, Russia, and China as the main disclosure players. Aside from the longstanding geopolitical, financial, and societal reasons for not revealing the UFO reality to the world, there may be another reason that disclosure won’t come from them.

That would be that one or more alien players have inserted themselves, somehow, into a position of influence among one or all of these three nations. We must quickly add that we don’t know this is the case. It may not be. But the motivation for an alien group to want to do this is undeniable. If they are smart enough to traverse impassible distances to reach us, they have probably learned a few things about interpersonal and power relationships. Such influence over the world’s most powerful governments and institutions might come through secret agreements, they might come through covert infiltration, or both.

I say this not because I know this is the case. But it might be so. To deny such a possibility outright, without investigation of the full history of the UFO/alien phenomenon, strikes me as arrogant and blind.

32. To which a certain number of humans would probably exclaim, “Great! Let’s have more of that!”

The foregoing speculation addressed the reasons for secrecy for a newly arrived alien group. But what about aliens who have been here for a long time?

First, let’s ask if they ever had a reason in the distant past to openly announce themselves to us. Since no alien species ever did so, a person might conclude that no aliens were ever here to begin with. On the face of it, that would seem to be the logical assumption, and of course that is our society’s official truth. Even though students of ancient UFO encounters and other suggestive evidence might think otherwise, we will acknowledge that it’s still a possibility. After all, suggestive evidence is not the same as proof.

But just as there is overwhelming logic to support the idea of alien secrecy today, the logic of secrecy has also existed throughout our history. The reasons were different, however. Let’s assume, as evidence suggests, that someone has watched us and interacted with us for a long time. If so, then why would they have operated behind the scenes for so long? It would be a coverup that has lasted for thousands of years.

An obvious question: couldn’t they simply have ravaged defenseless humanity back then like interstellar Conquistadors? What could possibly have stopped them?

Actually, several things. For starters, there are potential problems presented by biology, logistics, relations with other alien groups, and the intrinsic value of human beings themselves.

Biology. First things first. Any species from another planet would encounter serious biological obstacles to a planetary takeover. We can reasonably assume that gray aliens or any other extraterrestrial species evolved on a world with important differences from what we have on Earth. Any alien species would have to make significant adaptations to their own biology before being safe here.

We have to remember that human beings are perfectly designed to live on Earth. That’s why we are happy when we have good weather, blue skies, and fresh water. Those things are good for us because our species evolved with them. The same thing applies for more subtle but no less important factors such as Earth’s gravitational strength, the levels of solar radiation, and the entire ecosystem of microorganisms that live around us and inside us every day. A species from another planet would find the features we take for granted as deadly to them.

Any form of extended planetary interaction, much less takeover, would require that they change themselves sufficiently so that they can live here pleasantly. Otherwise there would be no point.

There is the distinct possibility that at least some of them are only interested in extracting resources from Earth, be they mineral or biological. In which case they wouldn’t need to interact too much with the local human population.

But with that said, what would stop them from creating a hybrid species much earlier in our history, infiltrating hubrids into our population thousands of years ago, and then introducing radically advanced technology? After all, it would seem silly if all they were to do was to infiltrate our earliest societies so that they too could take down an elk with a spear or spend hours over an open fire cooking it. Or engage in the undoubtedly scintillating campfire banter under the stars.

Presumably if they were to infiltrate us back then, they would have wanted to do it with a view toward transforming that society into something more technologically advanced, something comparable to the level that got them to Earth in the first place. Would there be any reason why they couldn’t simply have humanity leap from hunting and gathering to achieving high technology within a few generations?

Western colonial powers did exactly that to much of the world during the 19th and 20th centuries. A transformation that took Europe several centuries to undergo happened in a matter of a few generations across much of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The change was disruptive, resulted in massive displacement, suffering, and death, but it happened. So why didn’t ancient aliens do the same thing?

One possibility is that they weren’t here. But since I have been suggesting that they were here, let’s look at some other reasons. In the first place, the problem aliens would have faced would be more than simply replacing the indigenous people with their own avators or hubrids. There’s the entire structure of humanity’s hunting and gathering society. In the case of modern European colonialism, there was already a powerful infrastructure in place to effect massive change. Europe and America had created a large, industrial, and well-organized society that had the means to enter other regions of the world and extract what they needed for their continued economic growth and wealth. Even though 19th century Africa and Asia were less developed than the industrial powerhouses of the world, they were much more advanced than the ancient hunting and gathering societies that existed more than 10,000 years ago.

To create a viable new society, you need a population to build it. The people would have required massive indoctrination into the new ways. The mental changeover required would have been far greater than anything even Africans, Asians, or Native Americans had to contend with when the colonialists came for them. There would have to be a complete reorganization of their society (e.g. cities and all the infrastructure that goes into supporting them). There would have to be a substantial increase in population, when you consider just how few people existed back then and how scattered they were.

In short, a tremendous amount of groundwork would have been necessary for aliens to build their brave new industrial and post-industrial world. This would be harder still if there were only a few of them. Perhaps if there were some ideological fanatics among the aliens who believed in their equivalent of missionary work, they might have been willing to gut it out and convert the natives by the sword, so to speak. Since that didn’t happen, we can at least thank heaven for small mercies.

The point here is that conquest by hubrid infiltration would not necessarily be a viable option for an alien species, even in our ancient past. Or, it might be more accurate to say that it wouldn’t give them a quick solution. We can always wonder if they have been working on an infiltration plan behind the scenes for a long time. This means they would have inserted themselves into human society long ago. Perhaps they did this, but then we can ask: what good did it do for them? The only result would be to have merged with the humans already here and seemingly become indistinguishable from them. It would mean that all of us have alien DNA. If that is the case, it’s probably a bit late in the game to complain about it. Or maybe they inserted a few genius avators throughout our history. Perhaps Socrates, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed were aliens and didn’t know it. Or perhaps instead the list is more like Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, John D. Rockefeller, and the current batch of speakers at the Aspen Institute. After all, there are a number of ways to move human society along a certain path.

The point is that the only viable way of managing the future of Earth would require them to either become like us biologically, or to control us as puppet masters of some sort. We can guess that their goal might be to create some sort of society such as what they have, which would mean overseeing a social and intellectual transformation of Earth’s humans in order for us to build a global infrastructure that aliens would find useful. A plan of thousands of years might seem outrageously long to us, but taken in the long view of things, our transformation has been incredibly rapid. Maybe they are overseeing and monitoring that transformation, and maybe this has been their strategy.

I am not saying this is the answer. I am saying this could be part of the answer. It’s a scenario that fits with what we know of our history.

Logistics. As we can see, biology presents a serious obstacle for any alien plan to develop Earth’s real estate. But there are logistical problems to any plan that would involve conquest of Earth. Very likely any alien group arriving here would have been too few in number. Yes, we know the Conquistadors were also a tiny number that succeeded against a much larger Aztec population. But the Conquistadors were also motivated by gold and slaves. They were all about getting rich. Who knows, maybe some alien groups are little more than interstellar economic hit men. However, even if they were, human populations in our distant past lived in very small groups scattered around the globe. The Conquistadors succeeded because they toppled the central government of the Aztecs, after which the population passed directly into their control. No such structures existed for hundreds of thousands of years in our earliest history.

Things changed once we started to build cities and civilizations, and one supposes it would at least be conceivable that ancient aliens might have thought that a takeover of, say, the Roman Empire, could have been worth their while. They could have inserted their hubrids and avatars into the structure of power, including the Emperor, the Praetorian Guard, and the wealthiest landowners, and forced them to allow for the development of a viable commercial class. This in turn could have fostered a greater spirit of entrepreneurship and exploration, leading to something like free enterprise capitalism and new inventions and the scientific method and … okay it might be fairly clear that this would not necessarily be an easy thing to do after all, even for a highly advanced alien species.

Maybe there would have been another way of using a structure as powerful as the Roman Empire for an earlier form of planetary takeover. Maybe all they needed to do was to seed the population with new ideas that could have led to an understanding of science, which didn’t begin to happen until the 1600s and 1700s in Europe. If the hybridization program were aggressive enough, maybe aliens could have remade human society a thousand years earlier.

But of course none of that happened. Most likely because there were no grays intervening, and because whoever was monitoring us didn’t have that as their goal.

Interstellar relations. Another obstacle to an early alien takeover of Earth and humanity could easily have been relations with other alien groups. We know nothing about interstellar relations. We don’t know if there are any interplanetary legal or bureaucratic institutions at all. We don’t know if there is even diplomacy among different worlds.

On the one hand, it’s not difficult to imagine something like that. However, we would have to wonder how stable any such interstellar or interplanetary arrangements would be. How dynamic are the various societies that interact with each other? Here on Earth, everything is in constant flux. One day Rome rules the world, then it’s the Arabs. Then the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch, the English, or the Germans. Then the Americans, or maybe the Russians or Chinese. The point is that nothing in our world has been stable in terms of power politics, and that is merely over a scant period of a few centuries.

There is a scenario in which a long-term stability is conceivable, even among societies scattered across the universe. That would be some sort of interstellar artificial intelligence that rules over everything.

Actually, that is a scenario that solves a few otherwise mysterious problems. It would explain the seemingly incredible level of patience exhibited by a such a long-term plan that we apparently are seeing. It wouldn’t mean that all the aliens people have encountered over time are artificially intelligent machines or avatars. But it could mean that their society is managed by such an intelligence. Such a society could also end up becoming extremely stable— if a bit stagnant.

Humanity’s intrinsic value. Finally, an overt alien presence in our ancient past, whether in the form of conquest or salvation, might not have happened because they recognize something intrinsically important about us. We are violent and sadistic, we are elevated and spiritual, passionate and logical, and have proven ourselves to be endlessly creative. We are a bundle of contradictions and potentially very dangerous. But only the greatest cosmic dullard can deny that we are exciting.

One interesting possibility concerns our consciousness. Just what our true capabilities are is unknown because we have barely begun to test them. We may discover that we too have the ability to psychically interact with a craft, or to manage space and time in the same way that these other beings seem to be able to do.

Visiting aliens thousands of years ago or today might recognize that they need humans in one way or another. Maybe as little more than valuable slaves, or maybe as trainable workers, or maybe as middle management, with or without a glass ceiling. Whatever their assessment of us, it’s not difficult to see why they would opt for a general hands-off policy in order simply to watch what is probably the Greatest Show in the Quadrant.

Earlier, I wrote about the idea of four stages of humanity. Three hundred thousands years as hunters and gatherers. Ten thousand years of agriculture and settled communities, cities, nations, and civilization in general. Three to four hundred years since we developed science and industry. Now we are moving into something new again. This has powerful implications for the presence of “others” here and their potential agendas.

The human race is currently developing an array of new technologies that are resulting in a new social order, a new form of civilization, and a new type of human being. All of this is so radical and new that we can’t accurately describe it as a mere continuation of what we have been doing all along.

By itself, 5-G technology will be enough to transform our world into something unrecognizable to prior generations. Because of it, smart devices will be able to peek into every aspect of a person’s life. Of course, our smart phones and social media have already taken us a long way down that road. Add to this a host of increasingly sophisticated algorithms that can identify, analyze, and predict behavior, and you end up with a society that has eliminated all privacy. Again, we have already gone very far down this path, but there is a difference between having small pockets of privacy, which is our current situation, and having none at all, which is where we are headed. Such an unprecedented situation, on an increasingly global scale, will result in a deep cultural and psychological transformation of people everywhere.

Earlier, I described this as our movement toward becoming one big ant colony, but other technologies are coming on line that will reinforce this notion. Some of what’s happening is not all that exotic, such as the overt and global-wide censorship, propaganda, and mind control exerted by tech giants Google/Youtube, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter. They justify these policies in the name of protecting people against alleged hate speech, fake news, and misinformation. As recently as a decade prior to this writing, such intrusive micromanagement of information would have seemed inconceivable. One can already see how it is shaping public opinion, particularly for young people still in their formative years. After all, they are being trained from early childhood to receive dopamine hits through the vacuity of meaningless virtual experiences and “likes” from anonymous sources in the digital landscape. They are entrained into social media addiction, which then seamlessly manages all the information that reaches them.

These corporations are explicitly doing the mind control work that would still be illegal if it were enacted by most western governments. We can envision a time in the near future when overt government censorship is widespread and accepted by the rest of the world’s population, not merely in places like China and conservative Muslim nations. For now, however, the private tech companies have proven their value in the quest to achieve totalitarian population control. They have gone far toward the goal managing the thoughts and psychology of every person on the planet in a way that the medieval church succeeded in doing for a much smaller population for hundreds of years.

Except that this method works better. It’s more sophisticated, more immediate, and will prove to be more powerful. The algorithms of Facebook, for instance, have become so complex that their programmers don’t understand how it all works, but the entire structure is designed to keep everyone staring at their phones, nonstop throughout the day, every day, for the remainder of their lives.

Even more exotic technologies are taking us to the next stage. Elon Musk’s much-touted Neuralink, a two-way human-web interface said to improve the bandwidth of human communication, is currently in its early stages, but is expected to be much more powerful soon. In theory, this will allow people direct access to the web in some way that is difficult currently to imagine, but we are told it is happening. Of course it allows web access to people’s minds. What could go wrong with that?

Behind all of this is the coming AI revolution. In fact, it’s here already but just beginning. We will soon be faced with algorithms that can pass the Turing Test, and which will surpass human cognition in countless ways. It doesn’t mean that computers will become conscious in the same way that we are, or even that computer consciousness will be superior to human consciousness, if such a thing can be measured. Many skeptics of the coming AI singularity get hung up on this notion. Computers don’t have to be fully conscious or “alive” in the way that we are, in order for them to dominate the world. They simply need to be inserted into the critical components of our economy, bureaucracy, and governing structures.

Then it will be impossible to extricate them. It will also be impossible to understand their decision-making processes. The process is happening now, and becomes more entrenched as each new year passes. This super-AI intelligence will be what is plugged into our brains via Neuralink or its successors. It can allow us to hitchhike our way aboard a genius intelligence that can either be godlike or demonic. There is no guarantee against the latter outcome.

Factor in such obvious physiological changes that are occurring throughout all of the western societies and now much of the world. One example is the measurable and dramatic drop of testosterone among men, something that has been studied for several generations but which seems to be accelerating. Sperm counts are also dropping precipitously. For thousands of years, human males had a certain physiology and hormonal makeup that was consistent, but which in the space of a few generations has dramatically changed, taking with it what was long considered to be basic masculine traits. Not surprisingly, cultural patterns are emerging to encourage us to abandon traditional forms of “toxic masculinity.” It would be interesting to see current data on recent changes in female physiology, but there seems to be less research into this matter.

What we are seeing is a cultural transformation that is congruent with the technological changes taking place, all of which are driving greater centralized planning and control over the global population. In other words, a dramatic loss of freedom.

One seemingly small but in fact distressing aspect of this has been the the destruction of something as simple as free, unstructured, unsupervised play among children. The damage this has done to the last few generations of kids is incalculable. Play has been understood by psychologists to be extremely important developmentally, and by this they mean unstructured, unsupervised play. This is how young people learn how to resolve conflicts, to communicate effectively, to develop confidence, to become strong, to learn both cooperation and independence. One might argue that the helicopter “safety first” style of parenting is a purely cultural phenomenon, unrelated to the great changes taking place elsewhere in our world. But this is wrong. The dramatic loss of free play is just one of many examples of how culture responds to deeper structural changes that are occurring all around us.

Combine the loss of free play with a growing addiction to cloud-based corporate entities such as Alexa and Google Echo (which are designed to answer complex questions in simple, “authoritative” answers), and we now see the latest generation of children being raised in ever greater isolation and dependence, lacking the ability to study, research, and think independently.

This is only the beginning. We stand at the gateway to the era of designer babies—genetically modified humans. Proponents of this brave new world tell us that our descendants will be smarter, healthier, and longer-lived than we are. The intelligence claim is debatable. While genetics is important in our intelligence, so too are the life experiences that result in lives that are challenging, interesting, and meaningful. But we may concede that genetic enhancements may result in those changes for the humans who can afford them. A biologically-based caste system of sorts may well be what awaits us within a century or so.

This is our current trajectory. We are creating a society and personal qualities that the aliens likely have. We are currently going through a process that is bringing us closer in line with any and all visiting extraterrestrials.

Although this is truthfully a proper subject for a separate book, it must be said at least in passing that the global response to the Covid-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated our movement toward this type of future. Consider this short list of effects, which could easily be longer if we tried to be comprehensive. But even this will give a fairly clear idea of how the pandemic response has moved us rapidly toward humanity’s fourth stage of existence:

• Movement of the global economy and society more fully to virtual mode: everything from education, shopping, healthcare, recreation, even sex. Conveniently making it easy for digital tracking of all of one’s activities.
• The push toward new digital currencies, on its way toward rapid implementation in China but soon to be followed everywhere. A perfect way comprehensively to track the economic activities of all people.
• The massive push, despite economic shutdowns, toward a pervasive 5-G infrastructure to enable the rapid deployment of invasive smart devices and technologies. Again, for the purpose of better tracking people’s movements and ensuring “safety” and “eco-friendly” energy usage and such.
• Implementation of draconian laws to restrict people’s ability to live, work, and move freely in order to ensure “safety.”
• Overt censorship by the major digital media (Google/Youtube, Facebook, Twitter) on a breathtaking scale, such as was unimaginable a mere five years earlier. All in the name of protecting people from misinformation.
• The destruction of the livelihoods of a huge portion of the former entrepreneurial middle class and independent farmers, most of whom had been in direct competition with centralized Big Retail and Big Food. These individuals were far too independent to be assimilated into the new system.
• Destruction of the old-fashioned face-to-face businesses that allowed people to have human-styled interactions and conversations with each other. We can also include the end of live music and entertainment and hope that one day that will make a half-hearted return.
• Acceleration in the development of artificial intelligence in such areas as policing. This makes the call for defunding the police actually feasible, since AI algorithms will soon be making immediate decisions in conjunction with society-wide surveillance of every imaginable human activity.
• Destruction of medical privacy in order to ensure their healthcare data is accessible, again for reasons of safety.
• Implementation of Digital health IDs as a requirement for international travel.
• Creation of political chaos on a global scale as a way to undermine the vestigial belief in the old systems of governance. This makes it easier for people to acquiesce to bold new ways of “reimagining” how to run our world.
• Preparing people for a rollout of smart wearables. Presumably a smart mask will be an early example.
• Widespread discussion and implementation of variations of Universal Basic Income (UBI) due to the economic shutdown and need to keep people solvent to a minimal degree. When increasing numbers of jobs disappear, greater numbers of people will have no economic options at whatsoever, hence UBI. The lockdowns greatly accelerated this development by a number of years.

Again, there is much more than even what is included in this short but frightening tally. What we can say with confidence is that the Covid response didn’t create these outcomes. It did, however, radically speed them up by several years sooner than would otherwise have happened.

In the context of any potential “alien infiltration,” it’s at least worth an idle query as to whether or not any elite powerful group may have had an interest in using the pandemic as an excuse or even as a Trojan Horse to implement the rollout of the above-mentioned outcomes. Who is running our world, anyway?

The thing is, whoever is most instrumental in guiding this hellish process, it has implications for the alien presence. Probably the most significant one is that for the first time, any “visitors” will be confronted not by a disjointed and technologically primitive species, but by one that has become unified, rationalized, bureaucratized, technologically sophisticated, and totalitarian. Possibly just like them.

Before returning to the specific alien groups that seem to be here, it’s helpful once again to emphasize the speculative nature of this discussion. I realize that some of the following statements are truly out on a limb. Trying to create a full picture of something based on highly contested evidence may well produce some mistakes and even gaffes. Therefore, I suggest we take these statements not as definitive but as tentative. Even so, they will hopefully provide some useful potential insights. Better still, they might provoke us into unique insights.

There are a few groups that we might now roughly identify. First, there is the group that has been here for a long duration starting in our antiquity. If they enhanced our genetics in the distant past, they don’t seem to have done much else during the many thousands of years that led to the formation of our first organized towns and cities. Whatever policy that may have existed seemed to be primarily hands-off, letting our ancestors slowly build their population, culture, and technology. As far as we can tell, whenever these beings have interacted with us, it has been in a limited form and confined to completely human-looking beings. There are no indications that there has been a hostile relationship.

Either this group or some other group was responsible for the few really interesting UFO reports that have come down to us over the centuries. Compared to the density of reports we have today, there are very few from our distant past. But those accounts do exist, and enough of them are strong enough to persuade us that someone was operating advanced technology available to no one else on the planet.

These beings may be every bit as human as we are, but very likely advanced in their genetics. Some of the 20th century encounters that people reported from human operators of landed craft show them to be psychologically normal and healthy. Many of them were friendly and engaged in normal human interactions.

Just where and how they live their own lives remains murky and baffling. Do they live somewhere here on Earth permanently? It’s entirely conceivable that these people have one or more secluded bases of operation here on Earth. If we take the information from star remote viewer Pat Price, then they or other groups have at least four permanent secret bases here. Still, if they ever lived here as a coherent and distinct group, we haven’t yet found any confirmed evidence of it.

Or, instead of living here permanently, do they simply “visit” from time to time? It’s also a reasonable guess that they, like other aliens, long ago learned how to traverse the immense distances in space. Could it be that they have their own home world, perhaps a planet like Earth? Maybe they aren’t actually human but can mask their appearance.

Ultimately, they appear to have been monitoring our development for a long time and probably continue to do so.

Before moving on to the next group of aliens, we will mention one more time the possibility that human-looking aliens might come from different sources. They might be an ancient but biologically enhanced relation of ourselves, and I do think this is a genuine candidate to explain at least some of our ancient UFO history. But another possibility is that they are a human-like species that evolved elsewhere in the universe, arising from similar conditions as we have had on our own Earth. This is essentially the story told by Charles Hall and of his encounters with the so-called Tall Whites in the 1960s.

There are at least two additional potential versions of human-looking beings who are not exactly as they appear. However, these belong in the categories below and so we shall encounter them there.

Once we achieved a full immersion into the stage of science and industry (stage three of humanity), we began to encounter other visitors. Some of this was due to our ever-greater ability to detect them. Telescopes, cameras, aviation, the electronics revolution, and simply a much greater world population all gave us an ability to detect anomalies in the sky that our ancestors lacked.

The sheer volume of detailed UFO and alien encounter claims, however, is so great that it appears that many of them decided to arrive here in the 20th century. Of these, there are at least two types of short, bald aliens that have interacted with our world. One of these are the infamous grays. More on them in a moment. The other type was noticed quite a bit during the 1950s and 1960s during a variety of landing cases and possibly in some of the crash retrievals. Even now, it’s not clear that they are truly a separate group from the grays, but it seems probable. One thing about that, however. If they are a completely separate type from the grays, it’s not clear what they are doing now. They don’t seem to be abducting people or otherwise infiltrating our society. If they were here, or are here, their agenda is an enigma and might be relatively inconsequential. That may sound like a strange way to refer to any visiting alien species, and it’s probably wrong. But relative to the group we are now about to discuss, it is probably true.

When we talk about the grays, we are talking about a complex organization. We can say more about them because they have been engaging with human beings directly for several generations, and we have gotten many more opportunities to learn about them. The interactions are one-sided, which makes it very difficult for us. Yet it hasn’t been impossible to learn a few things.

Grays come in two basic types: short and tall. Within those two types appear to be some variations, but overall it’s fair to keep it to two. If we see them as a military organization, the tall grays are the officers while the short grays are the infantry. They serve different roles, although each type can generally perform the functions of the other and sometimes does.

Gray appear to work under the direction of a higher group of alien still: the mantids. Although there have been many descriptions of specifically mantid-like beings, I confess to a continuing nagging doubt that makes me wonder if tall grays and mantids are one and the same. During abduction accounts, their behaviors are similar and often indistinguishable from each other. Their appearance is close enough that we might account for the discrepancies to some form of mind manipulation. A number of abductees have told me personally that they aren’t sure if they were in the presence of a tall gray or a mantid being.

Whatever the enigmas of their internal social organization, the grays and mantids have a clear agenda. Starting sometime around the mid-20th century, they have undertaken a systematic process of abduction, medical examination, implantation of covert devices into humans (including into our brains), and the extraction of our genetic material. This last part has everything to do with the creation of a hybrid alien-human species that can pass for human and be immersed into our society. As we noted earlier, not everyone has the same interpretation over what this means. Some see this development as dire and malevolent, others as a way to raise human consciousness.

However one interprets it, there are reasons to conclude that the hybridization program is widespread, continuous, and operating on a virtually industrial scale. That’s David Jacobs’ conclusion, based on the amount of activity he detected simply from the Philadelphia area, where he conducted most of his regressions. Descriptions of activity aboard a UFO craft has sometimes included testimony of numerous tube-like structures designed to incubate or store hybrid fetuses or even sometimes grown adults. Certainly, one of the key points of the abduction process seems to be to extract sperm and eggs from people. Enough abductees, especially females, have described how they were asked to hold hybrid babies while aboard a craft.

Most hybrids could not pass for human and could not be inserted into human society. Their role in the grand scheme of things isn’t clear. Probably they help in whatever roles are suitable for them and presumably they live with the rest of the alien crew.

This shows that there are may be two goals to the hybridization program. There are hybrids that live with the aliens and hybrids designed to live here on Earth. It is interesting to think about how the grays do this. We can guess that they have identified a critical component of their own DNA that they insert into human embryos. Something like a radical version of in vivo gene therapy.

Of course, if this is true and there is a growing influx of hybrid-hubrids into our population, we could expect geneticists eventually to detect the various changes that this would entail. Maybe one day they will indeed notice such changes. But how long might that take? Conceivably genetic changes might be made in a subtle manner that wouldn’t easily be noticed and which might allow the program to go for quite some time before then.

People who think hybridization programs are nonsense should remember how far we have come with CRISPR gene engineering technology. It is now possible to “edit” genes with a precision never dreamed of in prior decades, and that precision is increasing every year. Once the grays have learned everything they need to know about human DNA, and which elements of their own DNA could be merged with human DNA to get their desired result, the rest is a matter of mass production.

But if that aspect of the alien abduction program is true—that is, if hybrids are being created by aliens and simply being born to human mothers—one wonders what if any their role in a changing world would be. Are they sleeper agents waiting for the Great Transformation? Some of them appear to think so, but then again we have no idea about the truth of their hybrid claims to begin with.

The kind of hubrid that Jacobs has written about is a different thing altogether. Those are said to have been raised with the aliens themselves and indoctrinated into their culture and values. They are then supposedly brought to human society where there are covert teams that integrate them—usually with the help of abductees, sometimes willingly, sometimes not.

As if these scenarios weren’t strange enough there is one other, wholly hypothetical, possibility that should at least be considered. without any research corroborating it but which remains an interesting possibility, are what we might call avatars. That is, organically grown or co-opted human bodies, but inhabited by alien souls, something which assumes the capability to move a soul into different “containers.” If it sound “out there,” that’s because it is. But this is actually something that has been claimed from time to time. If it is true, there would be virtually no way to defend against it.

Whatever is the answer (or answers), or even if there is another option not indicated here, they appear quietly to be operating in our world. Given enough time, one imagines it would be entirely feasible for them to insert their people into our power structure, if they haven’t already done so.

When we present all of these scenarios like this, as simple words on paper or a screen, we can either conclude that we sound utterly insane, or conversely that we understand why the secrecy lid on UFOs has been so very tight for so long.

Keep in mind one thing: that behind this UFO phenomenon is a massive reality of some kind. The secrecy and opacity of this subject for so long has blocked us from filling in all the blanks. But whatever those blanks actually are, they are undoubtedly something quite radical in relationship to what we think we know about our world.

There have been sporadic claims—can they be called leaks?—for years as well of at least some degree of either (a) communication, (b) collaboration, or (c) infiltration going on between alien groups and the U.S. government. Usually the claims fall into the category of (a) or (b).

For instance the story cited earlier of Ramon, who was initially discussed in a book by Preston Dennett. Ramon claimed that as a U.S. Marine in the mid-1960s he witnessed active collaboration between the U.S. military and large reptilian aliens. Other stories over the years have had grays as “guests” of the U.S. government, the most famous account probably being that of Bill Uhouse regarding the alleged J-Rod, who was said to work on technology projects with government scientists. Or Charles Hall’s claims regarding Tall Whites in the Nevada desert, similarly having a quiet understanding with the U.S. government. There is also the statement of Dan Sherman, who described his job of engaging in very strict and limited communications with aliens while working in the U.S. military.

I doubt that anyone truly knows with confidence how many of those stories are true. What strikes me about all of them, however, is they seem to be sincere and are certainly detailed. We don’t know that they are true, but they could be true, and there is a logic as to why they would be true.

Ultimately, the behaviors we see among all the alien groups share certain commonalities. The main one being covert activity. Every one of them operates below our radar. That activity is one in which they are engaged, in one form or another, in ways that directly affect our society. They are acting upon us. It seems evident that they have decided that we are important enough for them to intervene in our world and that they must do this in secret. That is why it would be helpful to have human-looking players working for them, which is what we can assume the hubrid program is designed for.

There is a good reason to think that all of these alien groups, whether they be peaceful or aggressive, are unhappy at the prospect of our species entering into whatever greater galactic community that exists.

We (usually) take our intrinsic value for granted. But even under the best and most peaceful conditions, our appearance as an advanced technological species is probably disruptive to them. These are societies probably based on the profound stability and stasis imposed by a hyper-intelligent artificial intelligence. By implication, the constant volatility of the human race would be a concern to them. Then factor in our violent and warlike nature. We no longer bother with shields, javelins, and swords. Now we have weapons that are immensely destructive and intelligent, which we have created in the snap of a cosmic finger. Yes, they are concerned, no doubt.

Any of the messages that people have received from these beings, whether they are human in appearance, or gray aliens, or any other type, confirm this attitude. The messages have all been the same: humanity is warlike, dangerous, and not ready for open contact. There is the possibility of course that these are self-serving and manipulative statements. After all, if you are planning to infiltrate and take over a society by stealth, it helps to demoralize as many people as possible. If they are guilted into believing in the worthlessness of their own society, they won’t be fighting you when you assume power. So goes the theory, and it could be true.

But the claim could be both self-serving and true at the same time. They might well fear us to some extent. It would therefore be in their interest to manipulate and control us as much as they can. And since they may not be in a position to initiate some Independence Day styled destruction of human society, then the best strategy for them would be to work by stealth with human operatives. Especially if there is any level of competition among alien groups who may have competing goals.

It seems evident that the beings who are here have a strong interest in us, our capabilities, and our future. Of course, it would be easy to imagine they have an interest in this world as well, but if so, their first priority would still have to be to find a way to deal with us.

There are undoubtedly many other life-supporting planets in the universe, but it doesn’t mean that Earth isn’t an extraordinary find. By any galactic standard Earth must be worth a close look. It is a perfect petri dish for creating and hosting an abundance of life. We even have a Moon that may well be unique in its ability to stabilize and protect the development of life. Even amid the many planets that contain intelligent life, how very lucky and unique our world undoubtedly is.

Given all that, other beings might want to find a way to live here. If they have a sophisticated ability to manipulate genetic material, which they presumably have at a very high level, then why not find a way to inhabit a human body and live here? We humans are perfectly suited for living right here on this planet. Everything is right for us: planetary gravity, the amount of sunlight, the temperature, the sources of food, our compatibility with the planet’s microorganisms, the appreciation we derive from our senses of the natural beauty of this world, and anything else you can think of. We are perfect here because we evolved here. A visiting—or invading—species would logically want to modify themselves to the extent possible so that they can live here as pleasantly as we do. For that, they might want human bodies.

Enter the immanent global implementation of 5G technology, artificial intelligence, and numerous other revolutions in our technology, and our global infrastructure might be extremely attractive to them. How nice it would be to inhabit a human body, live on Earth with access to technology that could allow one to live in luxury forever. No matter how advanced, no matter how spiritual they might be, it is not hard to see the allure of that. For that reason, we ought to consider the creation of this new 5G infrastructure to be an attraction. It could even be that a visiting species would want us out of the way altogether.

Judging from the types of evidence and claims that exist among people with alleged alien contact, it seems possible that there are aliens who want to help us. Of course, we could ask, how could they really help us? That is very likely easier said than done. Given the fact that we have a large number of UFO sighting reports, declassified military documents, and private accounts of UFO events near nuclear locations, it surely seems that someone is concerned about our nuclear technology. Moreover, if you care to believe the many messages that abductees and contactees tell us, these beings believe that humans are making a wreck of the world via nuclear dangers, warfare, environmental degradation, low levels of consciousness, and that we are about to experience a “great change.” This message comes through repeatedly, not only from the human-looking beings, also from the grays and other types.

Recall the Mr. Janus story from Sir Peter Horsley from the 1950s. At one point, Janus said to Horsley:

“Man and his journeys through the universe may find immeasurable centers of culture far more ancient than his own. He’ll discover a wealth of experiences infinitely more startling and beautiful than can be imagined, even other universes with different space and time formula. Man invading space for material gain or personal glorification alone will gain nothing.”

Maybe this is just a form of guilt-tripping the natives in order to break down their resistance to the infiltration plan. Or maybe it’s legitimate moralizing. But beyond providing mostly random people with such moral exhortations, what really are their options? To appear openly and take control of our world so that we don’t screw it up? One supposes it could come to that, but it hasn’t so far. Such a step could have drastic and probably deeply negative consequences for human civilization.

I think that one of the biggest mistakes we could make in relation to these beings is to conclude that they are somehow omnipotent. They seem to have limitations, at least when it comes to operating within the vastness of human civilization.

One thing we can state with confidence: they are very active in our world. It is important to them that they are here at this time. There are simply far too many sightings to claim otherwise. There isn’t definitive evidence available to the public researcher that they are overtly hostile, although there have been a number of confrontational and provocative encounters between military forces and UFOs. The real concern is whether or not any of these groups have a secret or covert hostile agenda.

Every now and then, a statement or story comes to us from “up high.” We have a global political and power establishment that is so opaque that most people are simply used to the fact that we will never be able to penetrate the darkness of secrecy and obtain truth on much of anything worth knowing. Even so, over time there have been several indications that the top of the human hierarchy is aware of something dark and problematic in relation to an alien presence.

I have told the Jimmy Carter story many times over the years. I received this story from someone whom I consider to be a rock-solid source. Carter was briefed on the UFO/ET situation on June 14, 1977, just five months after he was inaugurated as President. My source could not tell me of the specifics of what the briefing entailed, but said that at the end of it, President Carter was in tears, with his head in his hands.

Another such story was included in A.D. After Disclosure, which I coauthored with Bryce Zabel in 2010. In that book, we included an account that Bryce had obtained concerning a senior cabinet member of Ronald Reagan’s first presidential administration. At the time, we were vague enough in the telling of this story that no names were revealed, but in a more recent interview I did with Bryce in September 2020, he decided to reveal the key details that we had left out of the book.

The source of the story turned out to be Brent Friedman. Brent and Bryce were co-creators and co-producers of the TV show, Dark Skies, and so they worked extremely closely together. Brent had been a childhood friend of the family of John Herrington, whose name was also left out of our book. Herrington was selected to be President Reagan’s Under Secretary of the Navy. While the Friedman family was visiting the Herringtons in 1981, young Brent, at the age of 18, stayed up late into the night talking with Herrington. At one point, after a few drinks, Herrington told him that he had spent eight weeks at an underground facility outside of Washington, D.C. He told Brent “there is other life in the universe and I’ve seen it.” As Bryce related the story, Brent asked Herrington, “why are you telling me this? I’m 18 years old!” Herrington’s answer was “who’s going to believe you?” During the conversation, Herrington added that the scenario was deeply upsetting to him because he had children to raise. Friedman didn’t appear to have gotten any other specifics beyond this. Incidentally, Herrington became Secretary of Energy during Reagan’s second administration. This would seem to be significant in relation to the UFO coverup, considering that the DOE has some of the deepest levels of secrecy in all the U.S. government.^[33]

We have a number of suggestive statements from high level people from around the world. For years, Dmitry Medvedev was the second most powerful politician in Russia next to Vladimir Putin. In December 2012 while in Davos, Switzerland, Medvedev told an interviewer of how, when one becomes President of Russia, he is given two briefcases; one with information on all nuclear weapons and codes, and the other detailing the alien presence in Russia. The interviewer laughed while he said this, and establishment news sources uniformly assumed he was joking. However, Medvedev himself appeared very serious. There has never been any followup to this statement, and we can probably assume there won’t be any.

We have a statement from 1976 by a Spanish General named Carlos Castro Cavero in which he openly stated that information on UFOs is shared at the highest levels internationally.

Everything is in a process of investigation, both in the United States and in Spain, as well as the rest of the world. … The nations of the world are currently working together in the investigation of the UFO phenomenon. There is an international exchange of data.

There is a statement by my friend, the late Robert Dean, a U.S. Army Command Sergeant Major. From 1963 to 1967, Bob served at NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) as an intelligence analyst with a Cosmic Top Secret clearance. While there, he read a file from SHAPE’s security vault called “The Assessment: An Evaluation of Possible Military Threat to Allied Forces in Europe.” This file gave detailed information about ongoing UFO encounters by NATO forces.

In 2014, I sat down with the former Chief of Staff of the Portuguese Air Force, General Tomas de Silva, which was arranged by the Portuguese UFO researcher Francisco Maureo Correa. General Silva told me explicitly about how NATO leadership was well acquainted with UFO/ET phenomenon, but that there was essentially nothing that he could do about it. He relayed several dramatic and inexplicable UFO encounters of the Portugese military with UFOs of which he had direct knowledge.

In a more recent conversation, I was told by a source in whom I have confidence that, while he did not know whether or not there has been open contact, “a handshake has been made.” We can interpret that how we wish, although I think it is possible that more than a handshake has been made, and moreover that it has occurred beyond our formally recognized legal system and structures.

I have spoken publicly about the notes written by Dr. Eric Davis on his 2002 meeting with retired Admiral Thomas R. Wilson. This was an extensive description of a private conversation that two had, which was finally leaked to the public in June 2019. I was shown these notes in 2006 from an unimpeachable source, someone very close to the scene.

The notes describe Wilson’s telling of his failed attempt in 1997 to gain access to a deeply classified special access program concerned with reverse-engineering alien technology, specifically an intact flying saucer. At that time, Wilson was Deputy Head of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After he was threatened with his career if he continued to probe into this, he relented and was soon rewarded with a promotion to Head of Intelligence (a position known as J-2), and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), before finally retiring from the U.S. Navy in 2002, shortly before his meeting with Davis.

There are many important data points in these notes, but one for our purposes is that Wilson was able to get a face to face meeting with the three “gatekeepers” of the program, as he called them. These were not U.S. government personnel, but employees for the defense contractor charged with the program. The best guesses at this time are that the company is Lockheed Martin. The notes make it reasonably clear that Wilson was able to meet with them only because he was becoming a nuisance and they could no longer ignore him. It became evident that nearly the entire program was being managed by this private contractor, with seemingly little to no input from the actual U.S. government. This at least was the distinct impression Wilson came away with, which he conveyed to Davis.

To this day Wilson denies that any such meeting with Davis ever occurred, and Davis offers nothing beyond a “no comment.” Of course, no one has offered even a remotely plausible explanation of how such detailed notes were hoaxed, especially considering that they leaked from the estate of the late astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, a friend and colleague of Davis, and had been quietly circulating for many years.

The corporations that work within the UFO/ET programs sponsored by the U.S. government have total legal protection. The mode of secrecy is something I call legal illegality. We will have an extremely difficult time trying to get genuine information out of such a system.

33.  AD After Disclosure: 10 Years Later | Richard Dolan Show w/Bryce Zabel at 55:00.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhrVgptTaK8

We need to remind ourselves of the great limitations of our knowledge. This applies not just to UFO researchers. I would say that UFO researchers overall are well aware of the limitations they face in obtaining rock-solid, verifiable information. But it applies just as much to supporters of the conventional wisdom that remain skeptical of the UFO and (especially) alien reality.

For nearly all of our history, our knowledge of this world has been woefully limited and often wrong. Travel back 5,000 years and have a conversation with a farmer in the Nile delta, and you would learn that every time the sun sets, that is the God Ra descending to the underworld to fight the demons of chaos and keep the universe in existence for one more day. If Ra were ever to lose that battle, the world would end. We modern time travelers would hear such a story and smile because we know better.

Similarly, if we were to travel anywhere else in our past, to any region of the world, we would encounter similarly “wrong” ideas about how the world works. And not just in the distant past. Two centuries ago it was widely accepted that a human being could not withstand traveling at speeds faster than 50 miles per hour. A century and a half ago it was an axiom that heavier than air mechanically-powered flight was an impossibility. Less than a century ago we were told by experts that the idea of space flight was “bilge.”

Our conventional wisdom was marred by wrong ideas because ignorance was so widespread. There was just so much that people did not know. It’s only been roughly 150 years that we have begun to piece together any real knowledge of our ancient past, thanks to the discipline of archeology. Prior to that, nearly all that was known by western civilization about the ancient world came through the Bible. Entire cultures and civilizations were completely unknown to us, the Hittites being one of many examples.

Fifty years ago ideas like genetic hybridization of species was considered fanciful. Yes, we had a long history of selectively breeding certain traits in animal and plant species, and even creating different types of hybrids. But these were processes that took many generations. The idea of scientifically manipulating genetics by way of gene editing was off the table and hence, ideas of human-alien hybrids were widely considered ridiculous.

Or the idea of advanced artificial intelligence. Les than fifty years ago this was mostly discussed in the realm of science fiction. Some forward thinkers considered it to be possible at some future point. Largely, however, conventional wisdom discounted such a possibility.

Or even the idea of extraterrestrial life. We forget how recent it was that astronomers and other experts widely argued that life on Earth was the great fluke of the universe and that we are entirely alone. By that logic, UFOs were impossible.

And yet, each generation looks back upon the mistakes and ignorance of the past and makes the same mistake: “they were ignorant, but we have it figured out.” Only to be corrected in turn by subsequent generations.

Conventional wisdom can be a bitch.

Whoever and whatever these aliens are, wherever they have ultimately come from, it is evident that they are both human and non-human in appearance. They don’t necessarily share the same agenda.

Judging by the number of sightings worldwide, even after accounting for cases of mistaken identity, they are here in large numbers. This means they have some sort of active infrastructure which in turn probably has the protection of the various governments of the world.

Consider why this has to be true. At this point, there can be no way that even advanced aliens can fully hide their presence from the technologies now available to detect them. If they have bases inside mountains or under the ground, or even under the ocean floor, they are going to be found. Maybe not all of them, but probably quite a few. This would not have been the case one hundred years ago, nor even fifty years ago. But by now, the places where an alien base can remain fully hidden from our satellites and listening stations must be getting close to zero.

If that is so, it’s equally clear that no one has declared war on them. This, after all, would be difficult to hide from the rest of the world. And if the governments of the world refuse to engage in hostilities with these beings, they surely do not want the general public to know about them. Therefore, at the very least there is a tacit understanding among Earth’s leadership that any and all alien bases must be protected from prying eyes. This must be true whether the human political leadership wants these beings here or not. It’s a situation in which they really have no choice.

There may be different groups and agendas, but I think that there is also some amount of collusion going on among these various alien groups. They’re here because of us, and especially because of humanity’s current state of development. They may well be concerned about us and whatever dangerous capabilities we may develop, but there’s also an enticement for them—the world we are building. I think it’s foolish to assume that all levels of advanced AI are inherently better than the version of AI that we’re about to unleash, or that all versions of extraterrestrial intelligence are better than ours. That may not be true. There may be very specific things about us that are unique and special, quite possibly to be feared, or possibly to be desired.

If I were to go out on a limb and identify the various groups and their agendas, here is how I see it at the present time.

1. An ancient and advanced human group.
2. A mantid/gray group.
3. A reptilian group.
4. A separate short humanoid group (ebens).
5. One or more additional groups.
6. A potential trickster intelligence.

Now to summarize each one.

Over many centuries, witnesses have claimed to have encountered advanced beings that appeared to them in fully human form. We understand that many of these stories are colored by the entrenched beliefs of their time and culture. But not all of them appear to be fanciful, and quite a few of them have come down to us in a clear and factual manner.

It seems plausible to me that our species was genetically enhanced more than 40,000 years ago by the addition of a critical allele in our microcephalin gene. This controls critical features of human brain development. The addition of this allele seems to coincide with the creative explosion of human beings, a transformation that in retrospect is more profound than our agricultural or industrial revolutions. It transformed the very nature of our species.

If we accept this idea, it means that an advanced species from elsewhere was interacting with us. At any point afterward it would be entirely possible for them to take some humans and keep them in their own society. Creating genetic enhancements seems easy enough, especially given time.

As time passed, this advanced human group might have achieved some level of independence, or at least some rank and authority in their society. Highly intelligent and genetically advanced humans are probably a genuine force and at the least would be useful if controlled.

We can’t know who the ancient human figures were that ancient peoples encountered, but it seems to be a reasonable bet that this is the answer, at least to some degree. It’s also entirely possible that some of this group integrated itself within human civilization. Just how much is an open question.

In terms of attitude and actions, there doesn’t appear to be any hostility coming from this group. The approach seems to have be standoffish monitoring of human activity. That begs the question of where these advanced humans have operated during all this time. It’s conceivable that they live on an adopted world somewhere else but have the capability of visiting Earth. If so, it would imply a remarkably stable society of their own to engage in the same type of low-level observation for so long. I have speculated earlier that this might mean their own hierarchy is highly rationalized, bureaucratized, and controlled. It especially implies a non-biological leadership, essentially some form of highly advanced algorithms that manage things. This could be true even if some of them have been placed here for a long time, living in their own version of a secret society.

This group seems interplanetary and to have arrived recently in our history. Their appearance is too different, as are their behaviors and psychology. Also, their technology and science seems to be orders of magnitude beyond what we have been able to contemplate in our own society, and there are indications it might be beyond the advanced human group that is here, although that’s not a sure thing. By their actions, especially the secret operation of abduction and hybridization, this group has to be considered dangerous. Some researchers don’t see this group as malevolent, but any group that engages in a massive program with such a degree of deep secrecy should cause rational people to be suspicious at the very least.

By these actions, the mantid/gray group appears to be opportunistically trying to influence a world that is developing scientifically at an exponential rate, at least currently. That’s an easy motivation to understand, whether it be for profit in some way or simply as a perceived measure of self-defense from a volatile and potentially dangerous species.

This group has been able to act with complete security. World governments, most critically the United States, have knowledge of them and even probably know the location of at least some of their bases of operation. Yet as far as anyone can tell, they do nothing about this.

Several reasons for this come to mind. One is that the various governments of the world have no ability to deal with them, at least without giving away the secrecy game to everyone else. Even if governments did openly declare the presence of these aliens, it’s possible they have no ability to oppose them at this time. The response could well be paralysis brought about by a lack of good options.

Another reason could be infiltration. This does not have to be on the order of fictional movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or They Live! It could be a case of a few discretely well-placed individuals at the right levers of power who can influence the financial, social, technological, scientific, and geopolitical currents necessary to move humanity in the directions they want it to go.

These individuals don’t have to be the famed hubrid-hybrids that the grays and mantids are believed to be creating. Rather, there are other possibilities for high-level infiltration. Some of these would require the extremely advanced technology that we know they have in areas like mental manipulation. Or they might be engaged in even more sophisticated plans without all those hubrids or avatars. We live, after all, under a global system dominated by bribery, something almost entirely undiscussed in our world. Anyone can be bought, influenced, or controlled. It would be foolish to discount such a capability from this group. Many keys exist to gain entry to a person’s will.

This is a hard group to figure out. Like the gray/mantid group, they seem to be recent arrivals. Also like them, they have access to exceptional technology. The experience of Danny’s bedroom encounter with one of these beings shows they can somehow phase into and out of our reality. By everything that we can determine, the grays and mantids share this capability. One conclusion is that they may be interdimensional in some way, but the reality is that we don’t really understand how that actually works. Yet, it could be that they exist at another place. As some scientists put it, a theoretical “brane” world slightly removed from our own, which somehow they have learned how to navigate. We don’t have the science that fully explains how this could be, but it would help to explain many of the events that otherwise seem inexplicable.

The story of Ramon, the U.S. Marine who saw intimidating reptilians working with the U.S. military back in the 1960s, is one of many that indicate communication and collaboration between reptilians and elements of the U.S. government. The reason why any government would want to maintain tight secrecy over this is easy to understand.

Stories of abduction by reptilians do exist but are not as common as those that include grays. And there don’t seem to be indications pointing to a hybridization program such as we see in relation to the grays/mantids. That leaves us with more uncertainty regarding reptilian beings. They can be frightening, and it’s not clear that they are friendly. They may or may not be hostile. But they are presumably looking out for their own interests as all species can be expected to do.

Regarding their relationship with humanity, many of the interactions we know about show they are interested in our brains, or our minds. Whether this means they are monitoring us, conducting tests on us, or trying somehow to influence us, they consider us important enough to be interacting with us in such a manner.

To start with, there may not be a single type of these beings. The physical varieties reported seem to preclude that. A number of these entities were reported as looking very similar to grays, with large bald heads and generally short of stature. Only the lack of large black eyes prevents us from lumping them into the category of short grays. Yet they seem to be a distinct group from the grays.

Other variations have been reported, including some that seem dubious. One example is the very hairy short humanoids reported during the wave of sightings in South America in 1954. These creatures appear to have been a one-off and we have to wonder about how truthful those reports are. Perhaps they came and left, or perhaps they were temporary and discontinued creations of another species (after all, many of their reported abductions ended in failure). Or perhaps they were never here to begin with and those reports were fantasy.

That aside, there have been enough reports of gray-like entities that are different enough from the grays that we need to consider that their presence here is real. Exactly what they are doing is hard to say, since they remain elusive. Like the grays, they have taken humans aboard their craft—that is, unless all of them were grays who modified their appearance and identity. But if they are distinct from the grays, then there are at least two groups of aliens here that are engaged in actually taking people to bring aboard their craft.

Also, if they really are separate from the grays, it’s difficult to ascertain their agenda or motives. Stories of “ebens” living as guests of the U.S. government exist, going right back to crash retrieval stories of the 1940s and 1950s. These may or may not be gray aliens. There is a lot of smoke here, but that smoke makes it very difficult to see clearly.

Aside from the main types of alien that people report, there is a certain percentage of encounters with beings that don’t fit in the categories already discussed. Whether it’s the large-eared short creatures seen in Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1955, or the carrot-eared beings in Pascagoula, Mississippi in 1973, or the red-eyed creature of Varginha, Brazil in 1996, there are creatures whose appearance is unique. Or in some cases certain types have been seen more than once but rarely, such as robotic creatures.

Some of these types have allegedly abducted people, sometimes they were involved in crash retrievals, and sometimes they engaged in what seemed to be confrontational behavior. All we can say right now is that we don’t really know much about any of them or their motivations. We can only assume that they, like the others, are here now because of the current state of development of human civilization.

We have only had a limited discussion of this possibility. Another way I sometimes characterize this is as a “meta-intelligence.” By this, I mean there appears at times to be an intelligence operating in our world that is of such a high order that it seems to be prescient. It can not only enter our consciousness in ways that are inexplicable, but it operates in ways that seem uncanny and many moves ahead of us at every step.

The phenomena recorded at the Skinwalker Ranch, some of the most baffling 411 (missing persons) cases investigated by David Paulides, or the synchronicities reported by Mike Clelland in his Messengers books speak to this. Many of these cases make it appear that there is a crossover between some of the UFO phenomenon with other parts of our reality, including the mysteries of consciousness, dimensions, time, death, and the afterlife.

I suspect we will not solve the mystery of this trickster intelligence any time soon, if ever. There are limits to our own ability to understand reality. Our brains organize our world in efficient and effective ways, but they are still only methods of creating order in an otherwise chaotic existence. It’s not that there is no objective reality to that order, but our ability to perceive it has definite limits. Our dogs understand many things about the world we live in, but they will never know how their dog food ever got into the can that contains it. They are beautiful creatures but their minds don’t work that way. Our minds operate at a different level and we can understand an incredible world of concepts entirely unknown to our dogs. But we too have our limits.

We perceive reality through our five senses and most likely an atrophied sixth sense that (I have long believed) our ancestors had in greater strength. Our minds organize reality spatially and temporally, a great tool for us but still they are tools that define and thereby limit our understanding of things that may operate beyond those limits. We stand between the angels and the other creatures on this planet, able to recognize great and true mysteries of the universe, but never quite reaching the point of final understanding. The great poet Robert Browning immortalized this insight: Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?

I have had more than a few moments when I wonder if a grand intelligence is playing us somehow like characters in a video game. More to the point, as a simulation in the manner discussed by such thinkers as Nick Bostrom and Elon Musk. Of course, such a theory is not radically different from how medieval theologians understood the world. As they saw it, everything is part of God’s plan and God’s will. We are all just thoughts in the mind of God.

This book was never intended to provide final answers. It’s an exploration of possibilities. I have tried to elaborate scenarios that can make sense of the confusion of UFO reports and alien encounter cases. I have always thought of the UFO subject as an ocean. We can learn things simply by standing at the shore and observing the waters. We learn more when we can walk and swim in the shallows. But to explore the depths we must keep swimming and risk drowning in the treacherous waters.

Then again, nothing ventured, nothing gained. All exploration entails risk. And our world is unquestionably at a crisis point. We stand at the edge of societal meltdown, financial ruin, geopolitical insanity, and the impending global transformation of how humans have lived for centuries and millennia. We are standing at the doorway of a truly Great Change, something abductees have gleaned from their abductors but which we can see with our own eyes.

We are about to go through this Great Change, and yet the presence of highly intelligent and intrusive “others” is never openly discussed. What is their relationship to this transformation? Is it a coincidence that they are here too? Are they just watching the show with some popcorn? Or do they have a stake in the outcome and are acting accordingly?

Thinking through the complexities of this situation has always been difficult. So much information remains concealed from us by our own governments as well as by these beings, placing independent researchers at a severe disadvantage. We have to do the best we can with the information that is available to us.

There seem to be be “friendlies” and “hostiles” out there. We are at more of a disadvantage of knowing their policies than countless indigenous peoples throughout history were at divining the backroom intentions and relationships of policymakers in London, Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, or Antwerp. It’s not just a matter of who to befriend and who to oppose. The real question is how to formulate a plan going ahead. If friends and enemies have been identified, is it even possible to do much about them? That is a question that no one outside of the tiniest classified circles can answer with any knowledge, and it’s possible that they don’t know either. One can at least hope that the powers of our society have the ability to detect any “good guys” and pay them the equivalent of protection money against rival gangs. As far as I can see, that hasn’t happened.

The problem may end up being ourselves. I have a love of human history, and a deep appreciation of the many sublimities of the human spirit. But the violence, treachery, short-sightedness, selfishness, callousness, greed, insanity, and plain emotional damage we carry with us is also on full display everywhere we look, and always has been. Any alien group, no matter how “good” or “bad” they may seem to us, might well be fools if they think it’s a good idea to allow a newly transformed and powerful human race to roam freely throughout the cosmic neighborhood. For all of our beauty and occasional nobility, we are a dangerous bunch.

Having said that, I personally think it’s likely that all of them are anticipating our coming transformation into the next stage of humanity with a mixture of fear and curiosity. Perhaps hope as well, if our transformation conforms with their own ideas of what an advanced culture is supposed to look like.

That is because the transformation toward a transhumanist-AI-5G society is not just “more of the same.” It is the creation of something completely new. It’s entirely possible that most people living today will hate it, but they will have no choice even if they do. There is really no way to sugarcoat this: the coming transformation is a totalitarian revolution that will create an intricate and tightly controlled society in which everything on this planet, from natural resources to human beings, will be monitored and managed like so much inventory. The lack of future privacy combined with such heavy-handed digital control will create a new kind of human, especially once we move from cell phones to implants as a way to communicate. Future genetic engineering and especially ongoing social-cultural messaging will undoubtedly contribute even more.

No doubt there will be resistance to this movement, but so far that resistance has been ineffective. There is no reason to think that will change in the coming decades, especially as the technological transformations continue to deepen, and as each successive generation becomes increasingly accustomed to the new reality.

It will take a few more generations for this transformation to look complete, but it will happen. That’s when the Great Reset will be complete. When it is, we should expect the alien groups that are here to implement a new policy for dealing with us. That’s because our change will not be incremental, but more of a leap to a new level, one much closer to at least some of them.

It has been an odd experience writing this book, if only because of recognizing the vast disconnect between what UFO and abduction testimony tells us on the one hand, compared with the absence of any such discussion in public venues. As I mentioned at the beginning of this book, our public discussion of UFOs has indeed progressed significantly during the past few years. But we are still at a very basic and low level of recognition when it comes to the deep implications of what it all means. It is something that has been studiously avoided. This is not because people aren’t thinking about it privately, but writers are uniformly making a decision to avoid it publicly. We have become a society increasingly fearful of expressing candid opinions.

In looking at the sweeping levels of intellectual control that has been taking place in our most powerful forms of media, there is no reason to think that we will move any further toward a genuine, intelligent public discussion of this subject any time soon.

But back to the disconnect. There is on the one hand a powerful case to be made for actual alien intervention in our world and a near-total absence of public discussion of this. Therefore a book like this one can easily be dismissed by ignorant defenders of the establishment status quo as too fringe to merit consideration. Of course, the inherent difficulty and challenges posed by the subject itself make the problem worse. When such huge gaps in our knowledge exist about something so important, so revolutionary, so dramatic, the act of filling in the blanks is usually treacherous. So is it here.

And yet, upon rational consideration and reflection, it seems unavoidable that our species is dealing with a challenge that remains completely below the radar.

I used to consider that the great question before us was whether the aliens were here to observe our transformation or to control it. That remains a valid question. But there are others: Do they support this transformation or do they fear it? Do they even expect us to survive?

However we look at it, it is the transformation we are currently going through that drives everything. It is the reason why our world seems so crazy, why people have become so ideologically brittle and polarized, why the jobs are disappearing, and why people don’t know what to believe in anymore. We are unmoored, cut loose, drifting down a current we cannot navigate. And it is the reason that “others” are here.

The ultimate great irony of our situation may be this. At the moment the human race joins the local galactic community, it loses its very humanity.

There must be a way to retain what is best about us, even as we move toward an uncertain future that will surely effect deep changes on the very nature of our existence. To do this, we must retain a memory of our genuine history, of our nature as biological beings, and of the energy, initiative, and creativity that have made us so special. It will require that we retain a commitment to the qualities that make us unique, and a dedication to the fundamental rights of ordinary people against centralized power.

Doing this means swimming against the current. It doesn’t mean trying to stop something that seems inevitable. But there must be the possibility of different permutations of what lies ahead. For many, the future may feel like a long way off. But the future always catches us off-guard, just as inevitable death sneaks upon us before we are ready to face it. We are seldom prepared for what awaits us. In this case, the struggle to retain our truest humanity will require commitment, bravery, and compassion. The stakes are higher than even our relationship with alien beings, important though that is. We must navigate our way through a great change with all the humanity we know how to bear.