Sometimes when getting deep into the thick of things, you just need to stop, ask yourself where you are and where you're going. You need to step back, catch your breath and take stock of the situation. For me, the last few days have been like that. A rigorous schedule of clients, with some of their issues being rather challenging, sudden, unexpected death in the family, along with a few other bumps in the road of life - it feels like for the last month, the Universe has piled it on.
In addition, I have been reading several books on ET contact, disclosure and other topics in the field of UFO studies, many of which have severely challenged my own discernment. In the process, I've heard stories of fantastic coverups and conspiracies and extensive plots by huge but shadowy organizations. Much of this material has been less than believable, to say the least and all of it h to raise a lot of very deep, existential questions in my mind.
- What is really going on?
- How much of this is real?
- What do we actually know?
I think each of us has to ask ourselves these questions at some point in life. For me, they have been constant companions for many years. But they emerged full force into my mind last night as I was watching some new documentaries on the Science channel.
After a rather hectic week, with some rather unexpected travel - a funeral for my cousin, which was totally unexpected - I was catching my breath. I settled back with a cup of herbal tea and turned on the Science channel. The topic of the evening was one that was dear to my heart, the search for ET life and ET intelligence.
I'm a SETI junkie from day one. I was a little kid when Frank Drake and Carl Sagan began the effort with project Ozma, back in 1961. I came of age when the WOW signal occurred. Later, when business took me to Silicon Valley, a few years ago, I attended SETI Institute meetings there, as much as I possibly could, and they were fascinating. And now we have the planet hunters - this is the first hint that ET life could be real, and that science is finally recognizing it.
My saying this might sound really surprising, since I've been a UFO researcher for nearly 20 years. For most of that time, I've been researching close encounters, contacts and alien abductions. It's been a fascinating ride, and I'm forever awestruck by the deep level of mystery the phenomenon brings to us. But in a lot of the work I have done and in a number of ways, my own discernment has prevented me from accepting much of the phenomenon as a basic scientific reality.
While we have a deep, fundamental mystery in the UFO and CE4 phenomenon, I believe we really know very little about it. There are endless paradoxes, ambiguities and systems of belief inherent in the phenomenon. Yet solid understanding of who and what the visitors are, where they come from and why they are here, continues to elude us. Even evidence of their very existence remains tantalizingly elusive.
Then we have the wild allegations: Reptilian shape shifting aliens are secretly dominating world history. Human-like nearly-angelic beings from the Pleiades are here to bring us unconditional love. A massive government coverup is keeping the truth from us as a secret world cabal is spraying chemicals in our skies, for whatever reason. And the list goes on.
While I certainly can't tell you that any of these are false, I can also tell you that they are legion. They are amorphous and most of all, they are unprovable. Going too deep into them is like walking into a hall of mirrors, where the truth is hidden behind an endless maze of false doorways and reflections of one's own views. And sometimes we just have to step back and say ENOUGH!
Sometimes we need to go back to basics. Get rid of everything, wipe the slate clean and start from scratch with questions like:
- What do we know?
- What are some of the cases in our own case files that we know are true unknowns?
- What are the most solid physical evidence cases we've investigated?
- What are some clearly anomalous cases in the literature?
- What tells us the phenomenon is truly unexplained?
In short, it means getting back to basics. It means re-examining my own original motivation -- the fascination with the unknown. And in our present day, one of the biggest unknowns is the sky. What's out there? When you look up at the stars, who might be looking back? And as I was watching the Science channel last night, that was what returned to me - the basics.
After returning to the solid foundation - this is what we know - we can begin to review a few more of the sighting and encounter investigations in our case files. Keeping the discernment filter in place, we can once again build the picture of what might have happened. Once again, we can start to wrap myself around some of the amazing events people have described. Once again, we can begin to travel the pathways of the unexplained.
As we look at possibilities of contact with whoever may be out there, we need to always keep the question in mind - what is real and what is wishful thinking? What is supported by evidence, what is anecdotal, sparse and circumstantial, and what has more solid data and physical evidence behind it? And sometimes, when the noise gets too loud, the theories get too many and the conspiracies get too rampant, we need to once again go TILT, and say ENOUGH. We need to wipe the slate clean once more and start over.
Some times we just need to reboot, and once again get back to basics.
