Alien Twilight

Why is "Disclosure" so strangely unconvincing?

Steven Greer discussing some of the “good ETs” people have encountered at yesterday’s press conference.

To continue my reflections on the ongoing process of UFO / ET “Disclosure,” I want to consider why the entire subject has such a peculiar, murky quality to it. The sage of the downed spaceships, the recovered bodies, the abductions – all of this seems to take place in a foggy twilight, where there is nothing firm one can grasp or make sense of. 

I suppose that is what I want to propose: These events occur at a slightly less literal or dense, more archetypal or shifting, level of reality. Part of what we can learn from the phenomenon is to reconsider the lost category of the daimonic reality that Patrick Harpur explores so brilliantly in his work. 

For example, if aliens were able to reach the Earth from across the vast expanse of interstellar space, does it make any sense that they would crash their saucers, spilling their technological secrets into desert dust? Ufologist Jacques Vallee proposed this must be a kind of “kabuki theater,” an intentional set up for our benefit (if it happens at all). Also, considering the many thousands of sightings of UAPS or UFOs, it is extraordinary how poor the photo and video documentation is, even in this time when everyone has high-level recording equipment at their fingertips. When I check out new images or videos, I always feel this incipient excitement followed by let-down – vague frustration or disappointment seems to be inherent in the phenomenon. 

According to Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, we should always remember that all phenomena are, in the end, insubstantial and dream-like. Namkai Norbu wrote in Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light: 

In a sutra Buddha Shakyamuni describes the phenomenal world that we generally consider to be real through the use of multiple metaphors. These metaphoric descriptions liken our reality to a shooting star, an optical illusion, a flickering butter lamp, dewdrops at dawn, bubbles in water, lightning, a dream, and clouds. According to the Buddha, all aggregated existence, all dharmas, and in fact all phenomena are actually unreal and instantly changing like these examples.

Our lives in the world appear to have a certain degree of solidity and density compared to dreams. While our lives move at a somewhat slower and more predictable pace, there isn’t any intrinsic difference. Our dreams occur within our minds; our lives occur within the dream of the universal consciousness. Dreams also have different levels of clarity and apparent density: Some dreams are crystal clear and other are murky, ambiguous, vague. Similarly, there may be different levels, or gradients, of “reality.”

Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup explores the dream-like nature of the world in Why Materialism Is Baloney, The Idea of the World, and other works. Kastrup proposes that consciousness is the “ontological primitive,” that everything we experience occurs within consciousness, and that we ourselves are temporarily “dissociated alters” of this instinctive, unified field of sentient awareness, which, in a sense, dreams us into manifestation in order to experience itself from different angles and in many different ways. 

The modern history of the UFO / ET phenomenon is particularly dream-like and eerie. For Patrick Harpur, the world of UFOs and crop circles, as well as the thousands of accounts of strangely detached aliens who perform frightening abductions and often communicate with their victims in nonsensical riddles is an expression of the daimonic “other world”: The trickster likes to express itself outside of our limited conceptual categories of thought, breaking apart the distinctions we try to hold between real and fake, physical and imaginary. 

The UAP / ET phenomenon is inherently subversive and liminal. Rife with paradoxes and contradictions, it stubbornly wishes to remain on the margins. Most people are not able to hold their attention on it, to take it seriously, for very long. There is something about it that continually slips away from one’s grasp, one’s attention, even when you try to focus on it. It is like the black spot in your gaze after you look at the Sun for too long: You have to look away from this spot to see it, but it immediately starts moving away as you try to track it. 

While this is true today, the situation could change. Twenty years ago, the same could be said for psychedelic substances. They had been repressed and made taboo, relegated to the status of the rejected “other” in mainstream discourse. It was uncomfortable and unsettling to think about them.

When I started to write about them for magazines, the topic was peculiarly invisible, prone to mockery and ridicule. I quoted Terence McKenna in Breaking Open the Head: “The power of the Other is humbling and magnificent, but because it cannot be bent into power in this world, priestcraft turns away from it. It is the 'thrown away knowledge’ of the Luis Senyo Indians of Baja, California. It is only seeing and knowing.” 

(In fact, we are now seeing the psychedelic experience “bent into power in this world.” These days, companies with billion-dollar market caps seek to patent molecules and treatment methods. The discourse of psychedelics has been smoothed out, co-opted by the same psychology establishment that, for decades, rejected and ridiculed the psychedelics as useless and ostracized anyone who said otherwise. Like any new thing that needs to be assimilated into mainstream post-industrial society to boost new industries and careers, psychedelics have finally been overhyped. But I digress.)

As I write this (Monday, June 12), I am watching Dr. Steven Greer’s live press conference on Disclosure, leveraging the new interest. Founder of CSETI (Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence), Greer produced the original disclosure conference in 2001, where former military figures spoke about their UFO encounters. 

Speakers at Greer’s press conference include a marine Battalion member deployed to Indonesia in 2009 after an earthquake and tsunami. Alongside his platoon, he encountered a massive human-made UFO, reportedly engaged in offloading drugs and illegal weapons. Although he claims he was threatened with execution and coerced into signing non-disclosure agreements, he chose to come forward. A former Pentagon employee with access to deep black projects claims firsthand knowledge of an underground facility near Fort Sill in Oklahoma, where an extraterrestrial vehicle was being studied. A witness who served on the USS Eisenhower recounted an incident where a massive object caused all nuclear systems to go offline. And so on. 

Greer believes the “secret government” has been holding super-advanced technologies like time travel and gravity control, reverse-engineered from alien protocols, for decades. At the end of the conference, he proposed developing free energy technology, harnessing the quantum vacuum as the ETs do it. This technology will be given away in an open-source, transparent way to all of humanity using the blockchain, in 2026. This will, he claims, instantly solve most of the world’s social and ecological problems. 

It is hard to argue with this, of course.