The UFO Singularity (7 page)

Much the same as math and numbers can be likened to being a universal language of the greater cosmos, the role of the
speculative physicist
is one who seeks to find “common ground” between disparate elements that exist throughout our reality. Why is it, for instance, that light energy in the form of photons being propelled through space will tend to behave differently in some parts of the universe as opposed to others? Though there may appear to be no physical mass present to influence their behavior, the light traveling along in such circumstances can be observed behaving as though there were, in fact, something else there. Hence, such strange and questionable behavior has lead us to the presumption that things like black holes and antimatter must exist, and that the latter
of these will likely share the same attractant forces that any “normal” matter would exert in terms of its influence on other objects. This, at least, has become a consensus among many in the scientific community, so far as being the most likely explanation for weird behavior that can be seen out there in deep space, and at times, perhaps even in our own backyard. The great challenge, however (or burden, depending on one’s viewpoint), always lies in the task of confirming such theories, a task that inevitably becomes daunting.

We are cursed with a very limited ability to physically lay our hands on such mysteries as antimatter—and the same goes for things we would perceive as being normal and everyday, such as light energy. We are unable to hold such things in our hands, turning them before our eyes and grasping them like any solid object, in order to observe their most miniscule and clandestine details. But because of this, can we say with certainty that light energy simply does not exist? Can we say that antimatter, despite its elusive nature, is not what we had originally presumed must be exerting its peculiar influences on other aspects of our universe? The modern scientist would scoff at the very proposition, right? And yet, that seems to be
precisely
how complex issues involving the UFO mystery end up being treated.

So why is there such a double standard here? How can bizarre concepts like alternate dimensions and time travel be completely acceptable, but only as long as there is a speculative physicist with a long string of letters after
his name who divulges such potentials—and often standing before a camera’s ever-watchful eye, presenting these bold “theories” to an audience of millions in some colorful science-themed television program? As soon as the humble ufologist steps up to the plate and begins to point out the scientific potentials that may surround things like UFO propulsion, or how intelligent life might travel through space, he gets laughed off the stage and called a lunatic.
Go back home, freak. And try fitting that tin foil hat a bit tighter next time; you’re going to need it to protect your brain from being fried by those aliens you spend all day thinking about.

Yet unlike antimatter, there have been a number of photographs, videos, and reliable eyewitness testimonies that have emerged throughout the years that illustrate quite clearly how an entire host of intelligently controlled objects have been observed, albeit at sparring intervals, soaring through our skies. And to wit, as addressed earlier, these objects have succeeded in garnering attention from intelligence agencies in the United States and elsewhere around the world time and time again. Despite the physical, observable nature of this phenomenon, the bottom line continues to be that, despite any amount of evidence promoting their existence, in large part the scientific community still seems to feel that
there is little or no scientific merit to continuing UFO studies.
After all, what could we possibly learn from the
speculative
study of things that appear so advanced that we can barely fathom what greater meaning or relevance they may keep for us as a species?

At this time, I suggest we put forth a new, different kind of bold idea: I say to hell with this “holier than thou” attitude toward the act of speculation, which we see so rife amid the greater scientific mainstream. Had Einstein or Oppenheimer never engaged in
reasoned
speculation, allowing their imaginations to drift away at times on the mere hope of possibility, then the proponents of things such as antimatter and alternate dimensions might instead find themselves employed among the ranks of one of your neighborhood fast food chains. Let’s give credit to some of our very finest speculators where credit is due.

Rather than to place limitations on thought and shy away from reasoned speculation, if we are to take on a greater, more complete understanding of what we call the UFO mystery, we must press on, pushing ahead by asking questions. Occasionally, we must fit variables into the gaps and spaces we uncover, fitting carefully molded ideas into the nooks and crannies of logic much like the steady hand of the mathematician, as he draws lines and symbols upon the powdery surface of his chalkboard. Above all, we must use this logic and reason we obtain to discern what we can from what sparring evidence we have been afforded at this time.

Remembering the words of Spock, Captain Kirk’s unexcitable science advisor aboard the Starship
Enterprise
in J.J. Abrams’s 2009 re-visioning of the
Star Trek
mythos: “Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” The same quote can, in fact, be traced to a much earlier
source: none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous sleuth, Sherlock Holmes. Regardless of the origin of the phrase, I’m certain neither character—Spock nor Holmes—would disapprove of the logic I’m advocating here.

Although UFOs had certainly managed to capture my fascination as a youth, I cannot claim to have seen the same appeal in many of the other things children my age were interested in. Whereas I think every young boy will go through a phase of thinking robots are extremely awesome with their mechanical workings and, as seen often in books and film, apparent shape-shifting abilities, characters like Optimus Prime and the popular
Transformers
cartoons had never quite succeeded in grabbing my attention. Instead, my enjoyment of the Autobots and their exploits would come much later, only after seeing the more recent film renditions directed by Michael Bay. In the films, a remarkably dramatic representation of the classic Hasbro figures and their morphing abilities was afforded to us as viewers, woven around a storyline that cast Earth as the battleground for an ongoing struggle between two warring factions: Optimus Prime and his noble Autobot kindred, and the evil and destructive Decepticons.

Although the Transformers might best represent any young boy’s hope for gratuitous robotic violence and destruction at its finest, they also present us with a unique circumstance worthy of further consideration: Optimus Prime and his fellow Transformers aren’t biological life forms, but are instead intelligent, conscious entities that
are able to change their physical shape and structure at will because they are mechanized, artificial beings. In short, the Transformers represent
advanced artificial intelligence from another world.

The notion that human interaction with non-terrestrial intelligences that might be artificial by design, rather than biological in nature, presents a number of unique considerations, many of which we will explore in greater depth later in this book. For the time being, our allusion to
Transformers
serves as a unique springboard, propelling us further toward our foray into attempts at better understanding the ways humans might one day intermingle with varieties of intelligence that exceed our own. In truth, this sort of interaction may already be occurring, though without arming ourselves with the proper cultural and technological frames of reference needed to recognize them, we may not even be able to perceive such interactions at present. Think, for instance, of the anthill situated mere inches from the shoulder of a busy roadway. With every passing vehicle, the busy workers and drones must feel an Earth-shaking rumble within their subterranean community, as they perform diligently for their queen. Few, however, would ever stop to consider the cause of the great tremors that might occasionally shake dust from the ceilings of their tunnels and burrows. Arguably, the sudden realization that there were enormous, intelligent beings only a few feet away would become a horrifying prospect for the lowly worker ant.

Then again, if humans were ever to learn that there were enormous, intelligent beings only a few feet away from us, occasionally pondering our existence—or maybe even our apparent
insignificance
—wouldn’t we be equally terrified by this unusual prospect?

This sort of analogy has been utilized before by the likes of Michio Kaku and a number of others, with attempts at reconciling the notion that human perception, much like that of the ant, may be very limited at times. Though we can conceptualize the ideas surrounding intelligent life like ourselves existing elsewhere in the universe, many of us nonetheless ridicule and poke fun at the idea of alien visitation as described in gross detail by the purported alien abductee. One may find this truism particularly interesting to note, especially after a careful examination of the work that is best known among all the alien abductees, Whitley Strieber, who shows that his own views regarding interactions he had with so-called “visitors” had not entailed the perception that they were necessarily extraterrestrial at the outset. In fact, his earliest suppositions involved a very terrestrial scenario, where his captors could have emerged, albeit covertly, from someplace right here in our midst:

It could be that the “visitors” were really from here. Certainly the long tradition of fairy lore suggested that something had been with us for far more than the forty or fifty years since the phenomenon took on its present appearance. The only trouble with this theory was that what has been happening since
the mid-forties seemed more than just a little different from the fairy lore. Now there were brain probes and flying disks involved, abductions and grey creatures with staring eyes.… Another thought was that the visitors might really be our own dead. Maybe we were a larval form, and the adults of our species were as incomprehensible to us, as totally unimaginable, as the butterfly must be to the caterpillar. Perhaps the dead had been having their own technological revolution, and were learning to break through the limits of their bourne.

Or perhaps something very real had emerged from our own unconscious mind…coming forth to haunt us. Maybe belief creates its own reality. It could be that the gods of the past were strong because the belief of their followers actually
did
give them life, and maybe that was happening again. We were creating drab, postindustrial gods in place of the glorious beings of the past. Instead of Apollo riding his fiery chariot across the sky or the goddess of night spreading her cloak of stars, we had created little steel-gray gods with the souls of pirates and craft no more beautiful inside than the bilges of battleships.
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Despite one’s own feelings regarding Strieber and his claims, credit must be awarded not only on account of his artful prose, but also for his ability to reasonably contemplate the various potentials surrounding him at the outset of his ongoing “transformation.” Fascinating though his ideas and ponderings were up to this point, he then
goes one step further, and puts forth something that, with direct relevance to our present discussion, is quite novel indeed:

Or maybe we were receiving a visit from another dimension, or even from another time. Maybe what we were seeing were human time travelers who assumed the disguise of extraterrestrial visitors in order to avoid creating some sort of catastrophic temporal paradox by revealing their presence to their own ancestors.
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Visitors from our future, he asks? Could such a thing even be possible, when considering all the other sorts of factors surrounding the UFO mystery? Perhaps, to be fair, this futuristic hypothesis is really as solid as any other, when weighing the multitude of potentials before us. And yet, despite the promise that emerges with it at conception, the burden of providing some kind of empirical evidence for visitors from our future—or virtually any other idea in the realm of the evasive and elusive UFO—seems next to impossible.

In
Communion,
Strieber highlights several of the immediate problems with the “time traveler” premise for us right at the outset. He supposes, for instance, that there could be some element of deception at play beneath what was apparently meant to appear to be some sort of abduction experience. Engaging in a thought experiment where his kidnappers might have donned an extraterrestrial disguise, Strieber then suggests that they could have done so in order to protect against “some sort of catastrophic
temporal paradox,” as outlined in the previous excerpt. But would an element of careful deception even this elaborate really allay the sorts of “temporal paradoxes” that Strieber supposed might emerge? In other words, could hiding behind the façade of an alien presence do enough to prevent the potentially harmful tampering of a future humanity, whose attempts at engaging with their past might yield destructive side effects in the chronology of human history?

Aiming to rectify the potential disasters associated with hypothetical “grandfather paradoxes,” where human travel backward in time could alter the future in dangerous ways, scientists have again found themselves caving to the damnable temptation of speculation. Even with no proof yet that time travel does or does not exist, the philosophical debate alone that has erupted around how it may be achieved has led to the creation of a host of remarkable new scientific theories. Arguably, one of the most popular among these incorporates parallel universes into the equation. Israeli-British physicist David Deutsch of Oxford University’s Mathematical Institute has argued since the early 1990s that if one were to succeed at developing a process in which reverse time travel were indeed possible, the hypothetical time traveler would likely end up in an entirely different “branch” of history, altogether separate from that which he arrived. This would mean that, rather than a single, linear plane of existence that constitutes time, there may be a number of alternate dimensions that result from the various possible outcomes of any given
situation. Each of these dimensions could follow very different courses, based solely on factors like chance and probability related with any set of circumstances that may transpire someplace in the universe. The resulting scientific theories formulated around such ideas have led to popular notions such as a
superstring theory
of alternate parallel dimensions, as well as a subsequent “M-theory” designed to unite the many problems associated with various string theories where only 10 hypothetical dimensions may exist.
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