Introduction
I have been binge watching YouTube and listening to audiobooks after listening to Rick Strassman’s DMT The Spirit Molecule. I am on my 4rd Jacques Vallee audiobook as I write. Last week I finished listening to Ross Coulthard’s In Plain Sight – the best book on the UFO/UAP theme I have come across.
Coulthard’s conclusion is that the UFO/UAP phenomena are real but we don’t know who or what they are. Vallee, who worked on Project Blue Book, isn’t convinced that the operators of UFOs/UAPs are ET.
This matters to a huge extent because we are accustomed to imagining all visitors to Earth are from the same dimension – our familiar time-space sense of reality.
Vallee dissents – and is in good company. Strieber’s experience recounted in Communionis closer to Vallee’s interpretation. There is mounting evidence, in my opinion, that supports Vallee’s perspective. My direct experiences make much more sense if the Extra-Dimensional [ED] perspective is valid.
Of course, there is no suggestion that the ET or ED choice is a mutually exclusive option. The point, rather, is whether what is being reported in any given instance is generated by ET or ED.
Why does this matter? Well, sci fi has accustomed us to ET. Think Star Wars and Star Trek. The key is in the word ‘star’ – those things we can see in the night sky if we are far enough away from light pollution.
Star Trek 2nd generation introduced us to ED in a gentle manner. Whitley Strieber’s Communion doesn’t tackle the theme of ED in a specific way – but the hint is there. Strieber’s story isn’t a gentle introduction to ED. But then engaging with ED has always been perilous – as the many stories over human generations affirm.
What is relatively novel is associating ED with the ET/UFO. Strassman’s report of his DMT subjects encountering ET-like entities triggered my present interest.
The disturbing implication from all the claims and reports may be that our governments aren’t just secretly dealing with ET, but maybe also ED. It is this 2nd option that would most alarm – as it violates our model of reality – not just a sense of probability we have company in our dimension. The naïve question as to whether we are alone in the material universe is still being uttered – and believed as sensible.
Surveys suggest a lot of folks are cool with the idea that ET is real. There’s always a disparity between what we imagine and the reality. Saying that you believe UFOs are real isn’t the same as being cool with a face-to-face encounter. For the past 70+ years we have been culturally tuned to be okay with ET. But imagine there’s more.
Extra-dimensionality is a whole different ball game conceptually. ED intersects with religion in ways ET does not. On an existential level ED precipitates a trauma whose dimensions can’t be casually anticipated.
The roots of existential trauma
I have memories, as a child, of waking up with my pyjamas in disarray [inside out and wrongly buttoned] and being the wrong way round in bed – head in the bottom of a tightly made bed [my mother was a nursing aid for a time] and my feet on my pillow.
I have other memories of being terrified of going to sleep because I would find myself spiralling down a well. I would black out eventually, but that early stage filled me with dread because it was conscious and inexplicable. I tried telling my parents, but as 6yo I wasn’t believed. I imagined it all and when I persisted in this silliness, I was taken to see the doctor – who had no clue.
Many years later the bed mayhem was described in a magazine I was reading on ‘alien abductions’. It wasn’t a case of believing so much as discovering other people had the same experiences. What is involved in taking your pyjamas off, turning them inside out, putting them back on after unbuttoning them and rebuttoning them out of alignment? Add to that getting out of a bed made with hospital precision to do all this and then getting back into bed headfirst while being asleep/unconscious the whole time.
The idea that I did this from the age of 4-6 in some kind of stupor is beyond credibility. The idea that humans came into my bedroom, performed all this without waking me or my twin sister is equally so. My parents? Who else would engage in such an elaborate exercise?
My point is that the ET/ED explanation offers sense of sense – not that I buy it, yet.
Zoom forward to the early 1970s. I am in the Sydney suburb of Glebe and in a house known to us as Chez Ritz. It’s a squat. It is abandoned and the hippies have moved in. A fresh batch of very clean acid has just arrived from the UK. I have a very nice trip and toward the end, in the coming down phase, I find a bed and settle down. Initially I am touring a vast museum of utterly stunning craftwork from across the galaxy [or so it seemed], and then I am suddenly in what seems like an industrial clinical setting lying on a metal table and surrounded by entities now best known as ‘Greys’. I freak out, sit up and have a cigarette. Then I lie down again because I want to get back to the museum. But I am instantly back on the table. This time I decide to quit the exercise and go get a coffee.
At this time, I know nothing about UFOs or ET. I have been reading a lot of sci fi but haven’t the slightest clue beyond that. Because I have no context for doing otherwise this experience drops away from my awareness for over 20 years.
In Bathurst, NSW, in 1995 I am reading a magazine that features a woman’s account of what she describes as an alien abduction experience, and it exactly matches my acid experience. I am startled by article, and it triggers an intense flood of memories of the acid experience. Was it real? I had no idea, but I was intrigued.
Soon after there is an advert for a psychic fair on the grounds of a local motel. This wasn’t a thing I would be normally into, but I had a strong urge to go, so I did. There was a woman talking about Alien Abductions and I went to her presentation. I booked a hypnotic regression session with her in Sydney a few weeks ahead.
I was to drive to Sydney from Bathurst leaving around 05:00. But my car would not start. I had a Mazda 626 which had been utterly reliable for several years. Never a problem. But now it seemed like the battery was dead.
Around 09:00 I rang up to apologise and reschedule and got an alt time around 15:00. I made that call because my car started with ease once I had no chance of getting to the appointment. But then, when it was time to leave for the later appointment, I was invaded by a potent sense of threat. If I went ahead, I would be involved in an ‘accident’. It was evident that something was determined I should not get to the appointment. I rang and cancelled.
I wanted still to follow up with some connection with people who had experienced ‘abductions’ and was given a phone number of a guy who was active in setting up and running support groups. But my efforts to speak to him were confounded by a series of bizarre events, including the sound quality of a call going suddenly haywire. It became evident to me that there was an intentional effort to deflect me from that objective.
I decided it was smart to quit any notion of hypnotic regression. I had been warned off.
I don’t know for sure that my nocturnal childhood experiences were related to abduction experiences. But whatever it was it left me afraid of the dark and fearful of going to sleep. I was 8 or 9 before I got that under control.
The acid induced encounter with the classic abduction scene faded in my memory after the initial terror subsided. I had no context to make that experience anything more than a weird deeply scary acid thing.
Over 20 years later the reactivation of that memory triggered a series of events that culminated in the interferences and sense of threat that warned me off exploring hypnotic regression. It is interesting that shortly after encountering the magazine article on a Saturday morning in Bathurst I headed to my favourite café. I was walking past a bookshop that had just opened and suddenly found myself being steered into the shop. In a fog I picked up a book, paid for it and was in the café before I was aware of what I had bought. It was John Mack’s Abduction. I had finished it before lunchtime the next day.
At that stage I was still thinking in ET terms – because nothing else had come to me. however, I had been having ‘non-ordinary’ experiences all my life – but they were in a separate category – and equally incomprehensible.
Why I find the ED proposition more compelling
Sometime before the acid experience [circa 1970] I was in Melbourne where I fell in with a group led by a compelling woman. It believed it was being contacted by ETs and there were claimed sightings made by members, including an assertion that UFOs routinely hovered above the house in Sydney – to which the group had relocated.
There was, of course, no evidence of UFO activity beyond that claimed by members – or so I thought. I will briefly recount 3 events that fused the UFO theme with other paranormal elements. I have written at length on these elsewhere.
Around 02.00 I was walking back to the house after visiting friends and as I passed the Randwick Racecourse, I saw what appeared to be a UFO on the ground over a 100 metres away. There were ‘people’ walking around. They seemed neither short nor all. The UFO was between 2 buildings and there was a light source – about which I have no recall as to its nature – but that was what attracted my attention. I stopped and watched a few moments but then became aware that if I could see them, they could see me, so I moved on. I said nothing about this the next morning because I was aware that claiming to have such an experience would be impolitic. Though small, the group had an inner core who had the experiences and the outer group who believed. I wasn’t in the inner core, but neither did I believe.
Three of the core members departed north to Tamworth and Armidale where one had family. When they returned, they were furious at me for following them. They said they saw me in the street and when they approached me to admonish me, I walked into a newsagency and disappeared. That should have been a clue, but it wasn’t. I hadn’t left Sydney in the 3-4 days they were away.
One evening we were engaged in a group discussion. I was sitting at a small breakfast bar beside a woman. I remember the conversation being so interesting I ignored the promptings to go outside. These were becoming increasingly insistent, and I was being equally resistant. I wanted to stay. Suddenly I was hauled off my stool and frog marched down the back steps and deposited on the lawn. I sat there, bewildered, for a short time. There was no evident agency that so forcefully removed me. I went back to the conversation and returned to my stool.
The woman sitting beside me asked me what I was doing. I had no idea. My left hand had picked up a marker pen and was scrawling symbols over a newspaper. I was completely unaware. She called the group’s attention to my hand’s conduct and suddenly I was being handed page after page from notebooks as my hand covered each page in hieroglyphs at a furious pace. I was completely detached from what my left hand was doing. Eventually I think my hand just ran out of energy. I was able to write in this ‘script’ for about 6 months after.
The point of these 3 events is that while the theme was UFO/ET the events, as a whole were not necessarily so. The racecourse UFO does fit the ET theme but not the other 2 events. They belong to a different theme of spirit or sorcery.
It is possible to imagine that ET in nuts and bolts ‘flying saucers’ from our time/space continuum also possesses psychic powers. I am not saying this isn’t the case in any instance, just that I don’t think this applies here.
At the time I didn’t have any alternative frame of reference, so I bought into the language. But it didn’t feel right. I was a sci fi and fantasy devotee. I hoovered books in both genres. At this stage I had done little reading in intellectual disciplines or the paranormal etc. But, to me, what the group was into was less sci fi and more spiritual/fantasy – though I could make no sense of what that implied at the time. It would be a long time before I could.
I wasn’t, and still am not, an easy believer. I grew up having non-ordinary experiences as well as a passion for science. As a child I saw how belief and dogma betrayed a claim to moral integrity. I was to later learn how belief and dogma betrayed a claim to intellectual integrity.
Truth and reality seem always just out of our grasp. This is more evident in Eastern philosophy whereas our culture grasps for certainty of what is knowable.
I am on my 4rd Jacques Vallee book. He is the best overall advocate for the ED case – derived from a scientific perspective. At best he is a mere footnote in the wider ET/UFO discussion. I get that for most ET/UFO fans Vallee represents a position they know little about, distrust greatly, and find distracting/ irrelevant.
To appreciate Vallee’s work sufficiently there’s a lot of work to be done. I am fortunate that I am well read in the necessary areas. It isn’t okay to be expected to take an author on trust. I respect Vallee’s work because I feel confident that I am able to evaluate it from a position of familiarity. Its not my position to encourage the reader to believe Vallee. That’s a personal choice. In expressing my opinion, I am conveying information about my choice and why I made it.
What interests me is that until a few months ago I had ignored his books though I had been aware of him for decades. It is time?
Contrast or Contest
There is no way I can dismiss the idea of ET/UFO/UAP in/from our time/space continuum as wrong or irrelevant. I am not disputing we may also be visited by ET from our dimension.
My earlier reading on the UFO/UAP theme made it evident that there are devoted advocates of the proposition that all is ET. Its not a debate I want to get into for the simple reason that there is no point in having an argument with anybody who does not understand your position.
The ED proposition has been largely ignored, although it’s been around since at least 1969 since Vallee published Passport to Magonia [a book I still haven’t read – just bought a kindle copy]. And there have been hints in John Mack’s and Whitley Streiber’s works. In Mack’s Abduction there is a remarkable, but unremarked, account by a woman who complained that she was ushered, during an abduction experience on a UFO, into a standard terrestrial conference room. Her ‘ET’ hosts seemed miffed. She had telepathically said she had wanted to “conference” with them, so they created what they thought was a fitting setting. That level of ability to rearrange settings in this manner is more consistent with accounts of ED than a material craft. This is more like a VR experience where the setting is created by AI.
David Chalmers’ Reality+ is an instructive read at this point. Chalmers is a philosopher who is seriously into the nature of reality – with a great exploration of the idea of VR and the concept of what we call reality is a simulation. But this must be explored in the context of Thomas Campbell’s My Big Toe. Campbell is an OOBE veteran and a physicist. There’s an intriguing connection between Campbell’s theory that immaterial reality may be likened to computer generated realms and Chalmer’s thoughts on simulation/VR.
There are extant theories that merge ET and ED perspectives in ways that hurt our brains. It looks like our time/space dimension isn’t discrete, but just a POV – as seem through the eyes of organic beings in the perspective on reality.
The idea of ET or ED may be no more than an artefact of our mindsets and have nothings to do with the intrinsic nature our being. Huxley observed that our brains are ‘reducing valves’. It is said that incarnating souls have memories of past experiences normally blocked. From my own direct experience, it does seem that our dreams are masks for lucid levels reality.
In short, we have no idea what is going on in the wider environment in which we exist. Our conscious awareness is essentially 2 dimensional in a 3 dimensional reality. There’s a gem of a book called Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott in 1884 which is the ideal model to understand the limitations of our ordinary awareness.
We cannot anticipate what our material science will be like in 1,000 years. Maybe we might become adept in quantum dimensions. Maybe our understanding of psi, magic, spirituality, OOBEs etc will have merged into a coherent understanding of consciousness, psychology, and philosophy utterly unlike anything we can currently imagine.
Maybe, also, we are interacting with agents who are already at that level of sophistication and the ET/ED distinction is more about purpose and method than source.
Conclusion
Ross Coulthart’s In Plain Sight [July 2021] is the best UFO/UAP book I have come across in ages. It’s a great survey of contemporary themes and developments. But Coulthart’s conclusion is that we don’t know who ET is or where the come from.
That match’s Vallee’s conclusion re ED, though he does insist whoever they are have been engaging with humans since as far back as we can discover. Graham Hancock’s Visionary [2022] is a useful perspective, as is Rick Strassman’s DMT: The Spirit Molecule and DMT and the Soul Prophecy. Strassman will discourage casual readers. His work is highly disciplined and can be a bit dry but is immensely rewarding.
Whether you are an ET or ED advocate/devotee there is no certainty beyond dogmatic bravado and fanciful over-confidence about which is actual or dominant. We really are clueless. Now that’s not to say there is nobody who knows, just nobody anywhere close to the public domain – for the moment [and how long that moment will be is anybody’s guess].
Knowing isn’t just about intellectual smarts. There’s a psycho-spiritual level of development that is also necessary. We over-estimate the importance of intellect as a primary means of knowing. It needs balance because the ability to interpret data is equally critical. Psychological maturity and health and self-awareness are equally critical – if not more so. They are not easily won.
I have been motivated in my inquiry by 2 things. The first is an interest in the proposition that ET from elsewhere in our dimension is visiting us. I have been a huge sci fi fan since my late teens and this has always been a real prospect. The second is a need to make sense of my own direct experiences which have intersected with ET/UFO theme. For a time that was the only explanation available to me, so I went with it, albeit with reluctance. That reluctance was triggered by a gut feeling that it didn’t apply, at least to my experiences.
I had been formulating personal position more aligned to the ED theory for the past 6 or 7 years. But it has really only been in the past 18 months that my reading and thinking have converged upon ED with strong confidence. But as I have noted, I am not ruling out visitations by ET, and maybe even an intersection between ET and ED.
It is easy to be corralled by what we know and believe. This has been very much my own experience. My ability to see possibilities has been shaped by what I have been exposed to. Coming to Vallee late has triggered a cascade of insights because I had been exploring the ED option in an inarticulate manner. Vallee’s argument created a rational structure that suddenly made lucid sense, and jumble of notions and sentiments were able to become coherent and organised.
I am not ruling out that I could be way off beam, but this is where I am at the moment – still a million miles from certainty.
All this matters in the context of this blog because the ED explanation opens up extraordinary reflection on our ideas of gods and spirits. The presence of the ETs we call ‘Greys’ in DMT experiences [and my acid experience] can be taken to be one of 3 options:
- An intersection between ET and ED with massive implications for how we understand our history and the evolution of our consciousness.
- An intrusion of ET into ED with equally huge implications.
- ED masquerading as ET with ditto implications.
Whatever way we look at it, whoever is intruding into our ‘normal reality’ seems to have been doing so for many thousands of years, isn’t about to stop doing so, and most probably exerts a profound influence upon the evolution of our consciousness.
Denial of this actuality on religious, intellectual, or political grounds serves no good. To say or think otherwise suggests we cannot, and should not, live with what its true. This is a strange and very modern phenomenon that has been generated by Christian and materialistic dogma. The Christians deny what is rejected by their dogma, as do materialists.
This straitjacket of dogma seems to be what the tic-tacs in the US Navy are alerting us to. The mismatch in technological capacity is just ridiculous. They could take us out with embarrassing ease. But craft also seem to crash. Vallee reports terrifying interactions with ‘aliens’ that result in injury, sickness, and death, but they aren’t reported because….
The problem with being realistic about reality is that it disrupts the many folks who profit from delusions and illusions. On the one hand I think we are so far down the illusion/delusion rabbit hole that a harsh dose of reality would be so catastrophic to our ‘normal’ it would be better if that reality is leaked out [evolution by osmosis]. On the other I wonder if what is happening now is a determined leak against the death grip of dogmatists struggling to find a way of continuing their exploitation.
I have not been a fan of ‘disclosure’, not because I oppose it as an idea, but because I think the demands lack the needed subtlety of insight. Such ‘disclosure’ will not be pain free on any level – existential, political, or economic. But there’s a difference between a painful initiation and a catastrophic and traumatising revelation.
We are not evenly disposed or capable, so the one-size-fits-all scenario strikes me as reckless and immature bravado.
We could be at a watershed moment for some and a breaking point for others – and how that goes is down to all of us.