An objective knowledge of the human self
Will only be possible through contact
With other mammals
Or with inhabitants of other planets
(Carl Gustav Jung)
Not a naive supposition, but a marvelous acknowledgment it has become: extraterrestrial life exists, and it's near. Provided we unite all the facts, testimonies and visual evidence, and don't answer to ridicule, a pair of scrutinizing eyes and a good deal of common sense inevitably lead us to this conclusion: UFOs are not entirely unidentified flying objects. What has been identified is that these objects are not from this Earth.
Personally, I had the same feeling towards UFOs as everyone initially has. Skepticism is not less than a healthy attitude; we must indeed take paranormal stories with a grain of salt, guard ourselves to the temptation for fantastic legend. My reasoning about life in the universe, however, outside the realm of ufology, has never been anything less than rational and scientific. I studied Philosophy for 4 years and terminated 1996 with a graduate thesis about the possible existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life. At that time — and I wish to emphasize this — I considered the whole ufo-story to be nonsense, interpreted it as disturbing sideband-noise in a virginal quest for exobiological truth. Hard data that backed up the hypothesis of extraterrestrial life were needed, and the word 'ufo' was mentioned only once in my 120 pages long essay. The thesis focused on the physical history of the big bang, of stars, planets, the emergence of life and the workings of intelligence on Earth, preceded by historical human views on cosmic life.
The eventual conclusion of the study, however, was unequivocal: the universe is a uniform and homogeneous place. The physical processes that lead to life on Earth should be occurring on other planets, given their congruence with the universal fabric of quantum biochemistry. Extraterrestrial life shouldn't even necessarily derail morphologically from this cosmic unity. What should be expected, is a universe with numerous intelligent civilizations.
Even with UFOs still out of the equation, this was an important argument. Despite its 10 billion mile diameter, the solar system is dwarfed by the Milky Way galaxy to which it belongs. But the Milky Way, containing 100,000 million stars, is only a mote in the universe. There are thousands of millions of such galaxies, most with their own myriad of stars, having their own planetary systems. If only 1/10,000 of 1 per cent of these planets harbor a civilization — and this is a very conservative estimate — the universe must teem with more than 100 million million civilizations. We can not be the only ones who develop space travel. The age of the universe, around 15 billion years, is counted in steps of millions of years. Civilizations with such a temporal advance on us will have developed ultra fast space travel, will have breached the distance gap with other civilizations, and undoubtedly will have discovered us long ago. Our own tender steps in the direction of supra-gravitational propulsion and exoplanetary spectroscopy clarify the huge probability that many other civilizations have been using similar technologies for probably tens or hundreds of thousands of years, and are therefore able to detect and reach the kinds of semi-advanced planets that we ourselves now inhabit. Forget science fiction stories — the presence of other cosmic life must be a natural reality.
Access to the internet exponentially and quite shockingly accentuates this new world view. The world wide web of computers is truly humanity's super brain, while the existence of extraterrestrial life is, as it now appears, more concrete than one ever dared to imagine. Researchers and governmental whistleblowers have welcomed the internet as a golden opportunity to finally release their knowledge to the world, without having to struggle and campaign, or without being laughed at in cheesy tv shows. Merely responding to search-engine feeding curiosity made these people come out. Their claims — stunningly convergent and international as they are — seem indeed to refer to something real. Needless to say: there is a lot of UFO chaff mingled with the wheat. But after filtering out the congruent testimonies, and after reading the scientific studies that exist on the subject, what remains contains a direct and uncolored set of facts, reflecting a truth sometimes too stunning for our minds to comprehend: that UFOs are indeed extraterrestrial spacecraft.
It's understandable, having been there myself, that we're not always swiftly coping with the implications of this conclusion. The surprise stands in the way of a reasoned approach towards the subject. But this inability to cope with the contextual depth of the testimonies and studies on UFOs, is not at all an intellectual deficit, but stems mostly from the originally conservative handling of the subject by our governmental and military representatives. One wrongfully thinks that the extraterrestrial UFO reality could never be hidden from the public. It's obvious that military and intelligence agencies can indeed cover-up information — i.e. prevent it of reaching mainstream media channels. The combination of stringent top secrecy oaths and bureaucratic compartmentalization are a most effective recipe for covering up any unknown phenomenon. The secrecy has also publicly been effectively maintained from the early 1940's on by the conscious debunking of the mental connection between UFOs and possible extraterrestrial spacecraft. The incredulity about the the extraterrestrial conclusion stems even more from its abandon to movie screenplays, in which the UFO subject incessantly got injected with a lethal poison of fantasy. The theme of ET life has so often been absorbed inside the fantastic realm of our thinking — instead of being studied scientifically — that a serious discussion on the subject is immediately countered by the weight of Hollywoodian fantasy.
The circuit is reconnectable: the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs is slowly but surely becoming a respectable viewpoint. On the basis of a series of credible testimonies — from Air Force commanders over nuclear guards to NASA astronauts — UFOs can now be considered as advanced aerospace shuttles from a non-Earthly origin, intrinsically not unlike our own shuttles (in that they are machines who travel through space), but of a remotely advanced character. If only we surmount the mental blockade and accept this to be a serious possibility, yes a reality based on the testimonies at hand, then our world view can climb up to a realistic degree, and we can finally come to the understanding that we are not alone, but that other occupants in the universe have visited us.
You, dear reader, will appreciate just as much as I did, that the extraterrestrial subject is of the utmost historical importance to mankind. You and I are so fortunate to live in an age where we finally but slowly are able to envisage the cosmos in a truer perspective than before. This enormous stretch of conscience appears to be the most fundamental mental expansion a species can make. Undoubtedly, the acknowledgment of the extraterrestrial reality will have the most profound impact on our lives. With the recognition of the true origin of UFOs, we can enter the adulthood of the cosmic self-awareness, begin to unravel the world of heavens for what it really is, and can finally start to appreciate our genuine place in it. We are merely one species amongst others. The fact that we are not alone constitutes the greatest adventure in intelligence we ever embarked upon. I wish you a stable leap of faith.
Thomas Deflo, MA in Philosophy