Is NHI indifferent, at best?

The notion that nonhuman intelligence (NHI) might be utterly indifferent to us has gained some currency lately. For instance, check out these claims made in an Oct. 27th 2023 interview between Steve Sprague, who runs the UAPMax website, and a person he describes as “an inside source within the orbit of AARO”:

[Source:] NHI have been interacting with the Earth far longer than humanity has been here. We know that. We also know they interact with us in ways we can’t explain, but seem to literally give no shit about it at all, in any way…. What I am saying is they don’t care, but they don’t want to interact either…. On top of that, the interactions we have had, at least on our side, are not very meaningful. Everything we have learned about them has been through human efforts. Nothing has been shared. Ever. If it has, I don’t have that info.

They seem to literally give no shit about it at all, in any way.

Or here’s the estimable David Grusch, chewing the fat (01:39:24) with Joe Rogan on Nov. 21st 2023:

Dave: And it’s funny, you mentioned the Fermi paradox and it’s like, well, where are they? And okay, well, you know, if you’re sentient life, you’re certainly going to have sophisticated cover concealment and deception techniques that go back to like what Jacques Vallee’s work is, where, you know, the phenomenon is presenting itself in different ways.

But also, I live in the mountains of Colorado, right? So there is a mountain lion den about 10 miles from my house in Colorado, literally.

You know, they are lower predatory sentience; I’m higher predatory sentience — and I’m using this as a device or an analogy for NHI and us.

Well, on a day-to-day basis, I don’t care what a mountain lion is doing.

I may hike in that area to explore; but day-to-day, I’m afraid of it, and I don’t care; and I think that’s about what humans might be, unfortunately, to some of these higher sentience, where this monkey has a nuke: “Holy shit, keep them in the cage. We don’t want to go anywhere near them!”

And so people think that there would be some kind of open contact with some higher sentience that is either visiting Earth or from another dimension or whatever the origin is But they probably don’t care. They’re probably neutral at best and maybe actually fearful of us in some sense, or we’re the progeny of — [my] personal opinion — progeny of some experiments and the, it’s almost like living in the Matrix, but it’s not like an actual simulation.

It’s like, “We want the simulation to go. We don’t wanna intercede because we wanna see what, you know, Homo sapien sapien 2.0 is going to do after the great flood,” or something like that, right?

Joe: Yeah.

Dave: Yeah.

Well, Dave is a pretty nuts-and-bolts guy — and it’s a darned good thing he is — but whatever the origin and nature of NHI — whether it be extraterrestrial, ultraterrestrial (a remnant Terran race), transdimensional, or all or none of the above (it probably has multiple origins, I think, given the wide variety of reported races) — I just don’t think it should be all that difficult to counter the supposition that it doesn’t give a hoot about us (much less that we scare the pants off it).

It might be helpful to start with a barnyard analogy. My wife and I live on a small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Georgia. We raise goats, ducks, chickens, dogs, cats, rats — quite the menagerie. We have this old rooster, a handsome bird we call Rednut. The other thing about him is that he’s mean. A while back, he snuck up behind me as I was putting his food out, sprang onto my leg, and stabbed me in the ankle with his spur, puncturing an artery that shot blood two feet to the side — SQUIRT! SQUIRT! — as I desperately kicked him with my other foot and reached down to stem the flow with my thumb — I had to stumble all the way back to the house crouched over like that.

So, what did I do? Did I bind up my wound, pull out my Glock, march back out there, and dispatch his feathery ass? No, I did not, because I care about the stupid sonofabitch. He’s beautiful, for starters — amazing colors down his back and wings. And he’s important to me as the plenipotent fertilizer of the eggs our hens will lay and hatch come spring. His incessant, way too early conjuring of the sun each morning is a subliminal delight, to boot. And I really don’t hold it against him that he gets his ya-yas out by trying to take me down. (Although, if he tries it again, I might just have a change of heart.)

I am put in mind of the revelations recently aired in a conversation between Chris Lehto (host of the Lehto Files podcast and former F-116 pilot) and Michael Herrera, US Marine, ret., to wit, that clandestine UAP crash-retrieval and back-engineering efforts have led to the unfortunate pass that a worldwide cabal of dark-black scalawags have not only been flying around in crude flying saucer knockoffs that they can only operate with the help of psychically gifted assets who are typically recruited from the vast gene pools of the Third and Fourth Worlds, but also that they have been actively luring UAP into their sights and using focused EMP weapons to knock them down — employing technology, that is, that they obtained from those they are so eager to disable and kill.

Now, this may or may not be true — you will certainly come away convinced, I think, that Herrera believes he is laying his life on the line in his attempt to get the story out — but let’s just broaden the aperture a bit. Let’s say you are a race of beings with a long-standing, very active presence on a beautiful blue and green planet teeming with life. In fact, you have taken such an interest in this planet that, for millions if not hundreds of millions of years, you have been subtly and not so subtly directing the course of biological evolution there, with the aim of giving rise to creatures whose genetic makeup and humanoid form closely mirror your own.

But now, these upstart critters you have been so patiently shepherding have at last created a global civilization, and it’s threatening to burst at the seams. Internecine conflict — an unfortunate natural byproduct of reptilian and then mammalian evolution on this planet — remains pervasive and has been taken to the extreme of nuclear weapons. Wanton extraction of floral, faunal, and mineral resources proceeds largely unchecked; and the despoliation of the environment is now so extreme that these still-quite-primitive humanoids are finally recognizing it as an existential threat.

And now, damned if they aren’t popping away at you with their little cap guns.

What to do?

You have quite an investment in these beings — they are in effect your progeny. They are deeply beautiful in all their glorious imperfection, and they have so much promise. They’re starting to ask some very good questions about their origins, and a few of them are even waking up to the fact that their human bodies are really just vessels to harbor their souls as they participate in this grand evolutionary learning experiment on Earth. This spiritual kinship you share with them is finally the most important aspect of your connection with them. The long and short of it is, you’re not about to give up on them and, if push came to shove, you might not even let them do themselves in. In a word: You care.

But that’s not necessarily how it looks on the other end of the relationship. A small but now rapidly expanding number of we humans have found ourselves in contact with NHI, whether willingly or unwillingly; and our conclusion tends to be that while they may be inscrutable, they are obviously very powerful, terrifically quick-witted, and ruthlessly efficient. It’s not easy being in the presence of an intelligence that converses with you right inside your own head, knowing your every thought, feeling, and act before you do. You tend to feel preyed upon (more than prayed upon). Why aren’t they more nurturing? Why am I not feeling the love?

You tend to feel preyed upon (more than prayed upon). Why aren’t they more nurturing? Why am I not feeling the love?

Let’s bring it back around to the barnyard. I know a lot more about Rednut than he knows about me. I show up in his life twice daily, at mealtime. He has seen me deliver bags of feed with my truck, so he knows I have some fearsome technological capabilities; but he has no sense of my range of movement — that I might just up and drive to Atlanta Intl. one morning and then fly to Europe and not be back for weeks (I wish!) — nor of my social abilities — that I am able to be in touch with virtually any human being on the planet with just a few keystrokes. He’s scared of me, but he has very little idea of my deep involvement with him and his kind — that I read books about poultry husbandry and do business with people who raise chickens and with others who eat them, and that I spend an inordinate amount of time, energy, and money making improvements to the perimeter of his chicken yard to keep the coywolves, bobcats, foxes, and coons at bay. He does not know how much I care about him.

Rednut’s chances of figuring out much more about me and my fellow humans are pretty limited, but I do not accept that we are in the same fix with NHI. For starters, he’s a chicken and I’m a human — fellow two-leggeds, for sure, but that’s about the extent of it. Now, NHI and I, on the other hand, are both humanoid (even the reported reptilian and insectoid types sport the same fundamental phenotype — head, torso, two arms, two legs). And if you lend any credence to the testimony of the purported “molecular biologist for a national security contractor in a program to study Exo-Biospheric-Organisms (EBO)” who showed up on Reddit one day in June 2023 and dropped a 5000-word tract on the genome and proteome of the particular NHI remains he was tasked with deconstructing, then it seems we are deeply similar genotypically, too:

Their genetics are like ours, based on DNA…. They’re eukaryotes, which means their cells have nuclei containing genetic material…. Their genetics are not only based on the same genetic system, but they’re also even compatible with our own cellular machinery. This means that you can take a human gene and insert it into an EBO cell, and that gene will be translated into protein, and this of course works in reverse with a human gene inserted into an EBO cell.

He goes on, sounding ever more like a real molecular biologist. He elaborates on the genetics, protein expression, gross anatomy, and biological system (respiration, circulation, nervous system, endocrine system, etc.) of these beings, whom he identifies as small Greys. (Incidentally, this guy invited questions, answered just a few, and then deleted his account and disappeared [prompting 20,000 comments in the following weeks].)

My point in trotting out this improbable but impressively coherent account is simply that we and at least some NHI may literally be kissing cousins. You know — family. At which point, by the way, the term du jour, nonhuman intelligence, stops being very useful. It was a plus as we moved beyond the intense othering of aliens, then acknowledged that they could just as well be intra- as extraterrestrial, and then really started to get real about the fact that we are confronted, here and now, with an intelligence that is superior to our own. Yet, it’s going to turn out, I bet, that we share profound spiritual roots with that intelligence. It might be about time to upshift a gear to transhuman intelligence (THI), which does better at conveying our fundamental connection.

But before we get too carried away, let’s just pause to wonder over the fact that this ETI or NHI or THI or whatever the hell it is still prefers to operate by means of bodies — humanoid bodies.

Well, this isn’t really getting us anywhere, is it. No, way too many obvious holes in my argument, and I have a regrettable tendency to lapse into onanistic wordplay.

It looks like I’m going to have to resort to lobbing a few personal data points at you. That may not actually make my case any more convincing, since, for all you diligent scientist types, I can never be more than anecdotal; but at least you’ll see that I have a seriously held and fervently expressed opinion on the subject of being cared for by THI, based on some of the most powerful and meaningful experiences I’ve had. So take me for what you think I’m worth.

OK, it’s September, 1969, and I’m lying on a couch in a house at the corner of Fulton and Russell in Berkeley. It’s the only piece of furniture left in this three-story house, because I’ve been helping schlep the rest of it out all day, as the friends I shared the house with all summer packed up and left. I’m tired but very relaxed. I close my eyes and am instantly struck in the forehead by a beam of purple light that comes shooting right through the ceiling.

Was this a caring act? Was it THI? Hard to say, but not too many other actors had the means or motivation to precisely zap people from the sky in 1969. And let me tell you: It felt gooood! I was lit! But the burning question here is, of course, why would they bother? All I can figure is, I was pretty wild-assed and woolly-headed at the time, and maybe they thought I needed a bit of ethical guidance. Could be. And this event was one in a string of several strong contacts in the months before and after. No space here to roll all that out; but looking back on that occasion as the nexus, the pivot point, of a personal unfolding that was underway makes sense.

Maybe they thought I needed a bit of ethical guidance.

Moving right along, it’s the night of August 16, 1991, and I’m dreaming. I’m in a house full of broken mirrors, looking into a mirror, all cracked, walking on glass. Two other guys show up. The next thing I know, it’s pitch black. Then a broad, purplish beam of radiation shoots down from the southeast (for some odd reason, I always know exactly which direction I’m pointed in dreams) and bathes me, revealing as its source a flying saucer, sitting just above a hilly horizon. It’s of the type that is nearly as high as it is round and has three round dealybobbers on its underside, and it glows all over with an amber-white light.

I can’t see its occupants clearly, but I can sense them. There are three of them. They explain that a mistake was made (either by them or by me, I can’t tell which) on the previous occasion when the cancer in my upper right side was treated with their beam, and the treatment needs to be continued tonight and over the following two days. They seem stern, unemotional, as they tell me this. I’m not sure whether to trust them, so I turn to the two guys next to me.

“Is there any way they could be here other than to heal?”

“They’re OK. They’re just older and a little wiser — they’re basically like us. The treatment may be quite painful, though.”

I ask myself whether I’m afraid and see that I’m not. I face the ship again, and another beam flashes from it. It grows in diameter as it reaches me, but it’s still tightly enough focused that when it strikes me it only covers my right shoulder, arm and chest. There is an intense tingling, buzzing sensation that is deeply familiar, but there’s not nearly the pain I’d expected.

Then two more beams pulse from the craft. I rather dread their arrival and am relieved when they strike the other guys. They convulse and seemed to be feeling quite a bit more pain than I did.

I wake up calm and exhilarated, unafraid.

OK, I can hear you now: “It was a dream, dude!” Yeah, but let me ’splain something to you. In our normal, so-called waking, state of mind, most of us (including yours truly, verrr deff) are far too locked down and uptight to entertain deeply anomalous, not to mention powerfully energetic, experiences. Asleep and dreaming, though, our guard is mostly down (if at some expense of lucidity) and some shit can happen.

There’s also this little matter of bodies, as in “physical body,” “energy body,” “astral body,” “second body,” “soul body” — what have you. Yes, don’t look now, but you have more than one body. Not only that, but you’re a mighty spiritual being, not just a lumpen desk jockey. You came to Earth in whatever form you were currently rocking (although ultimately you are Empty and free of all you have helped to create, just like That Which Gave Rise to Us [might as well add to ever-growing list of appellations, though Mr. Dylan said it best: “I don’t call it anything”]), took up residence in a recently conceived human body, and have been hard at it ever since, little or no time off.)

When you do manage to vacate this crazy scene, if you’re like most of us, you’ll leave with some baggage, albeit temporary. You’ll have accreted a habitual self-image and accompanying behaviors — mere mindstuff, mind you, but persistent — and that is how you will present yourself as you ascend, descend, transcend, or head in whatever direction occurs to you. You will go on being you, as you grow into a greater, more intimate, more ecstatic and compassionate We-ness with all the rest of us. You will slough off the skins of past selves as you come to understand and integrate the lessons you invited and endured. But your coming to the party as distinctively you is an absolutely essential precondition for the love and joy — you know, the aerie faerie stuff — we will all share, by and by.

You may think I’ve gone right off the deep end; you may complain that none of this has the slightest thing to do with flying saucers; but I’m softening you up for the main event, so hang tuff.

OK, Berkeley again, over on Northside now, in the wee hours of December 19th, 1984. I’m asleep on the living room floor of the house where friends and I have just celebrated Hannukah late into the night. Out of nowhere, a voice, that of a little boy, cries “Flying saucer!” That wakes me right up, just in time for a bolt of purple-green energy to rip through the ceiling, strike me right in the groin, and then roar up my spine. In an instant, I’m party to the true agony and ecstasy of the entire arc of human experience, or as much of it as I can contain. The power of it pops me right out of my physical body. I rise several feet above it in my energy body, listing a little to the left (as is my wont), as the torrent of energy roars from my mouth in the form of a language so primal and powerful that to speak is literally to create.

A torrent of energy roars from my mouth in the form of a language so primal and powerful that to speak is literally to create.

I don’t understand a word of it. I know, though, that if I want the experience to unfold — and somehow I do — I have to leave my human body and brain lying right down where they are; and I do that. I go on rapping, but now I can see right up to the Berkeley Hills, just above which floats not a UFO but a small, light-packed cloud. The beam still pours from that, into my astral gut and out my astral mouth.

Now I’m floating south, toward Hayward, and it’s a bright sunny day, people all out on their porches, listening intently. This goes on for a while, until I finally begin to grok what I’ve been spewing. The gist of it is, we’re in for huge change on this planet — I can feel it being created and transduced through me as I declaim it (even if it will be awhile before it’s manifest on the physical plane). There will be chaos and suffering but also necessary growth, and if we all just do our best, everything will work out fine.

Then I fall silent, darkness settles over me, and I execute a tight arc to the right and land back in my meat body, sweating profusely. I’m confused, no idea where I am for nearly a minute, but then the experience sweeps back over me. I grope to feel the hardwood floor of the living room, then rise to my feet and go straight to the north-facing bay window. I gaze up through the bare branches of a tree and find a bright light dancing there in an erratic (won’t quite say erotic) way that is intensely, rhythmically familiar — just like those other times, going all the way back to age 3, when, as I sat on the carpet of my grandparents’ living room in Eureka, minding my own beeswax, that strange green buzzing-singing hit me from the sky to the south, and I cried out to Grandma, in the kitchen, “The airplanes are coming, the airplanes are coming!” She came running, flour flying from her apron, cocked an ear, then looked at me crossly and said, “I don’t hear any airplanes!”

This time, just like every other time, I feel I’m right on the verge of remembering something incredibly important. And then I do: I know in a flash that just before I got caught up in the kundalini, speak-in-tongues, float-down-south thing, I had another experience, at the very tail end of which the little being who was escorting me back from its world to this one remarked, offhandedly, “You humans think we fairies have only two orifices on our backs that we employ in the course of group sex, but in fact we have six such.” Its words, not mine.

Well, OK, quite the mnemonic boost there, not going to forget that one (even if I’ll be forever chary of trotting it out). But I couldn’t remember a single other thing about that outing, and it wasn’t until five months later that I chanced onto Jacques Vallée’s Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers.

“How will you go back?” said the woman.
“Nay, that I do not know. Because I have heard,
that for those who enter Fairy Land,
there is no going back.
They must go on, and go through it.”
 — R. Macdonald Robertson, Selected Highland Tales
(pg. 2, Passport to Magonia)

So, was I just being toyed with? Is that all these “faerie folk” are up to? Was the way they used me callous and uncaring? That’s not how it felt. For starters, that much power, that much primal creativity, is nothing if not real; and I will aver that the white-hot fire ripping through me was a carrier wave for the love inherent in these beings’ ancient, profound connection with the Earth and with us. I felt it as intensely as I have ever felt anything.

Well, but let’s get… real again. The weak link here is the one between you and me. We just can’t communicate effectively enough for me to transmit and you to receive and comprehend the reality and felt meaning of my experiences. What we need here is some good old-fashioned telepathy — instantaneous, unambiguous, smack-you-upside-your-soul talk. That’s what arrived from them to me, but the juice is all lost in translation when we’re just squeezin’ off wurd turds at each other. If we go face-to-face, we might at least get around to sharing a little honest e-motion; but there’s nothing quite like the immanence and intimacy of soulspeak.

What we need here is some good old-fashioned telepathy — instantaneous, unambiguous, smack-you-upside-your-soul talk.

All I have left for you is this:

In the 4 billion years or so that life has been evolving on this planet, we have steadily accreted a burden of glory and of pain. That lives inside every one of us, in every cell of our bodies. And it lives between us, in the ways we treat each other, sometimes caring, sometimes killing. Life has grown wiser, in and amongst us, and now we are quickening to a point of rebirth, with all the agony and ecstasy attendant thereto.

It is not the first time we have arrived at apotheosis. The Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in his great work The Phenomenon of Man, described a succession of planetary stages — lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, homosphere, noosphere. At each stage there is ramification and complexification, a building out of life and consciousness, that culminates in the “closure” or “unification” of that sphere; and then the thrust of evolution shifts to the next stage.

The noosphere was birthed when the first humans reflected on their own existence — it was the moment when evolution on this planet first became aware of itself. This self-awareness has been spreading over the Earth ever since, gaining in complexity and subtlty over the millennia. Now, we able thinkers and feelers, googlers and zoomers find ourselves poised before the imminent unification of the noosphere, which Teilhard called the Omega Point and equated with the advent of Christ consciousness on Earth — the moment when self-consciousness flips into Self-consciousness: humankind as a unitary being.

Unification is specific before it is general. It evolves through each of us and our relationships. The transpersonal must grow from the personal.

Kind of like, you know, the “hive mind” of the infernal aliens. Our molecular biologist had something to say along these lines. It seems that before he was turned loose on his specimen “biologics,” he was obliged to read some briefing documents, at least one of which had to do with their spiritual druthers. Here is what he said in response to a question from the moderator of the r/aliens reddit:

EBOs believe that the soul is not an extension of the individual, but rather a fundamental characteristic of nature that expresses itself as a field, not unlike gravity. In the presence of life, this field acquires complexity, resulting in negative entropy, if that makes sense. This gain in complexity is directly correlated with the concentration of living organisms in a given location. With time, and with the right conditions, life in turn becomes more complex until the appearance of sentient life. After reaching this threshold, the field begins to express itself through these sentient beings, forming what we call the soul. Through their life experiences, sentient beings will in turn influence the field in a sort of positive feedback loop. This in turn further accelerates the complexity of the field. Eventually, when the field reaches a “critical mass”, there will be a sort of apotheosis. It’s not clear what this means in practical terms, but this quest for apotheosis seems to be the EBOs main motivation.

Teilhard from the git-go!

Our scientist also reported, however, that his research team had concluded that the remains they were working on were those of clones. But if that’s true — and he’s far from the only one to say so — we shouldn’t jump to the further conclusion that they are all soulless robots (even if some may be). They might have just gotten very good at genetics and made the shift long ago from in utero to in vitro births.

And, it might actually be that these THI types care mightily that we join them in their endless journey into Oneness, bringing planet after planet into the fold as the eons roll by, in furtherance of the greater cosmic plan.

Yep, could be. Wouldn’t put it past ’em.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t put it past ’em to be so much smarter and more devious than I am that I don’t even have a freakin’ clue.

We’re all just trying to put this puzzle together.

The best I can say is, my encounters with THI to date — just a couple dozen, spread over a lifetime — have been helpful, not hurtful. I hope you’re having experiences, too, and will share them. We’re all just trying to put this puzzle together. I have a few little pieces; you have a few; every one of us counts in the attempt, and it’s slowly but surely coming into focus. Let’s put some heart and some soul into the effort — it’s important — while keeping all appendages crossed that the puzzle master actually wants us to succeed, OK?

Do They Care? was originally published in Point of Contact on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It was 1981 and the Voyager II spacecraft was about a month or more away from its “encounter” with Saturn. I was an investigative reporter at KCET, the PBS affiliate in Los Angeles, working on a series known as Newsbeat with Clete Roberts. It was a nightly show with extended pieces of fifteen minutes or more. I’d gotten the gig after my job as a CNN correspondent came to a crashing halt after the in-over-his-head Bureau Chief who hired me got sacked and the alcoholic new guy wanted his own people. That’s TV, folks, but it’s another story…

Space Was My Beat

In any case, because I’d covered some space stories at CNN, I’d convinced the powers-that-be at PBS that I should be the space reporter, and they’d said yes. That meant that I’d covered the Space Shuttle, actually going to Cape Canaveral with a camera crew back when the shuttle was brand new. It also meant that anything that happened at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena was my beat and, as an added bonus, a local story, meaning that no travel funds had to be expended for me to go there.

The Voyager II unmanned spacecraft had been launched in August of 1977. Now, four years later, it was due to make its closest approach to Saturn on August 25, 1981. It was even going to send back photos in almost real time.

I got an idea.

Reaching Out to the King of the Cosmos

The year before, in 1980, PBS aired Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, hosted by Carl Sagan, and it was a smash. Produced in 1978 and 1979 at KCET (the station where I was now working), it was ahead of its time in special effects, allowing Sagan to actually walk through environments, something unusual for the time. Good feelings were all around in those days. Emmys had been won. Sagan was as hot as hot could be.

I pitched my boss at Newsbeat on devoting an entire night of our show to the Voyager encounter. In my vision, we would reach out to Sagan, and appeal to his sense of cosmic fair play. PBS had done so much for him, and our station had been his home base for over a year.

Incredibly, he said yes. Instead of it being a night of our regular newscast, it was decided to turn it into a special, Saturn and Beyond. In fact, it grew so big, so fast, as an idea, that hosting the show was going to be given to our anchorman Clete Roberts and I was going to be the producer.

Clete and I got along. We were buddies. He told me that I reminded him of himself when he was getting started in broadcast journalism. That summer he did something amazing for me. He picked a fight with management over his salary to host the show, and then refused to do it, pretending they’d insulted him. He told them to let me do it. To my utter amazement, they said yes.

I got to host Saturn and Beyond, and it was going to be Carl Sagan and me “live,” without commercial interruption, for thirty minutes on a show that got picked up by PBS for broadcast across the United States. It was heady stuff. After all, he was designing the messages for extraterrestrial civilizations that would ride with that Voyager spacecraft on the “Golden Record” at the same time I was a hippie radio news jock in Eugene, Oregon during college. Now I was going to sit on the same stage with him and talk a little space travel.

Hot August Night

The show came together quickly. It was here that I first met my lifetime friend and collaborator Brad Markowitz, who was also assigned to the special. I had seniority so I got the producer title; he was a few years younger, fresh out of University of Missouri School of Journalism, so he got to be associate producer. It didn’t matter what they called us. We just worked our asses off and produced the shit out of it. We had all the graphics produced by NASA/JPL, interviews with scientists galore, and, burning a hole in our pockets, we had Carl Sagan who was going to come in studio and sit toe-to-toe with me and, if we got lucky, start rapping about “billions and billions” of planets out there like Saturn.

The show was great. Carl Sagan was great. He gave us everything we could want and more. We didn’t really have anything phenomenal in terms of photos coming in live just yet, but he made it sound so exciting anyway. I sure wish I’d taken a photo, or that someone had, just to prove it all happened because, for me, it was a magical moment in my news career, one that I’ll never forget.

As I recall it now, Sagan stuck around after for a few minutes, talking graciously with the crew. Everybody treated him like a movie star because not only was Cosmos nominated for five Emmys at the next month’s awards show, but he was like the conquering hero on his home turf at PBS. Weirdly, Cosmos did not win the next month. That honor went to Steve Allen’s Meeting of the Minds, a fine show, but one that no one remembers when almost everyone remembers Cosmos because, frankly, over a billion people have actually seen it.

Sagan was making the rounds that night. He’d done our show, and he had a few more stops at the commercial stations ahead of him. As these things go, as the show producer and the host, you could say that Carl was my guest that night. So I did what any gracious host might do. I offered to walk him to his car, and that’s just what was happening when things got really interesting.

Close Encounter of the Hollywood Kind

Supposedly, Carl Sagan’s ride was a 1970 Porsche 914. I’m not really a car person so I can’t tell you from my personal experience in that parking lot. I do remember thinking to myself that he was driving a considerably hotter car than the Datsun B210 that was getting me around Los Angeles.

If all I’d done is chatted amiably with Sagan and waved goodbye as he motored off in his Porsche that would still be a nice memory. Instead, things took a turn.

The thing is, in 1981, I was not a “UFO guy.” That would come later in my life and career when I created the NBC drama series Dark Skies about an alien invasion in the Sixties. I knew a thing or two about unidentified flying objects having grown up in Hillsboro, Oregon, only a few miles from where the now famous 1950 McMinnville photos were taken by farmer Paul Trent. I’d read a couple of books about them, including one by Donald Keyhoe as well as The Interrupted Journey by John Fuller. In 1975, as a radio morning news anchor, I’d covered the Travis Walton abduction. I guess you could say that I knew enough to be dangerous.

You have to understand that by this point, Sagan and I had done some pre-show chatting, done a thirty-minute live show, done some post-show back-and-forth. Neither one of us wanted to talk about Saturn any more, and we didn’t know each other well enough to get too personal either. I’d seen him on The Tonight Show a few times and he seemed like a fun guy so I just went for it. One of the things I’d learned to do as a reporter, and that serves me well even today, is to just ask people questions they are not expecting to see how they handle them. This is what I asked him:

“You’re famous for saying that there are billions and billions of stars out there in the Universe. You’ve actually said that you believe the Universe is teeming with life, and that some of it must be intelligent, probably more advanced than we are. But you also insist that none of these other beings could actually be here on Earth because the distances are too vast.”

Sagan’s smile left his face during this. He said, “What’s your point?”

“Well, only that you want us to look for radio signals coming from other civilizations out in space, but you say in Cosmos that UFOs aren’t really worth investigating, because they can’t be here in the first place. You’re a scientist. Why wouldn’t you want to investigate, particularly since it could prove we’re not alone?”

“I also said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof,” said Sagan. “The claims I’ve seen don’t come with much proof at all.”

We knocked the subject about for a few more minutes. It would be great if I had a photographic memory because this is one where I’d want to remember it word for word. What stands out, even today, is that Sagan was adamant that the vast majority of UFOs were misidentifications, something I agreed with. We talked about the Betty and Barney Hill case which he discussed on Cosmos, and which he gave zero credibility to and cited as an example of how unreliable witnesses were.

The truth of the matter, to me, is that he felt giving any quarter on the UFO issue could kill his career. He was a scientist, a popularizer of science, but he was no fool, given that he’d been denied tenure at Harvard for being a little too out there. And so he implied that if I started talking about these UFOs, then I wouldn’t be taken seriously either. I can’t specifically remember if he used the term “little green men,” but he definitely dismissed this as talking about flying saucers.

Sagan checked his watch, announced he was in danger of being late to his next interview which, if memory serves, involved him getting out to JPL to go live with Ted Koppel on Nightline. He thanked me for a great chat, shook my hand, and motored off onto Sunset Boulevard, heading for Pasadena.

I never saw Carl Sagan again in person but, as it turns out, I just couldn’t quit him either.

Writing Sagan into the Dark Skies Universe

Sadly, Dr. Sagan passed away far too young five days before Christmas in 1996 from myelodysplasia-caused pneumonia. I remember this date clearly because my NBC alien series Dark Skies had premiered just three months earlier.

By this point in my life, I’d moved onto my next career, leaving TV news for writing and producing one hour TV dramas and films. There is a constant need for new ideas to fill a series. When I heard about Sagan’s death, I thought back to that parking lot fifteen years earlier.

I remembered what I’d learned in the years since. That Sagan had been considerably more open on the subject of extraterrestrial visitation at the beginning of his career but his public statements on the subject had turned to the negative sometime in the mid-60s. During the 1947 saucer craze, a teenage Sagan had wondered if they might be alien spaceships. He went on to win a high school essay contest about ET contact here on Earth, advise NASA and even the Apollo astronauts, run symposiums on the subject of aliens, and talk openly about a Universe teeming with ET life. It seems, at least for a while, that he even had a Top Secret clearance with the U.S. Air Force. In 1966, however, he was part of the committee that reviewed Project Blue Book and recommended the study that became the now-infamous Condon Committee.

Then it hit me. What if Carl Sagan damn well knew that UFOs were a real phenomenon and the government reached out to him and made him a deal? What if that deal was as simple as this — Dr. Sagan, we will bring you inside our investigation and you can be one of our primary scientific consultants and, in exchange, we will need you to use your public persona to tamp down expectations about the subject, to act as a debunker?

So we wrote him into the series in a part played over multiple episodes by actor Joe Urla. The YouTube clip below gives you a chance to see his first and last appearance on the series. The NBC lawyers let us use his real name and say what we said because he was a public figure, now deceased. Remember Brad Markowitz, my fellow producer on Saturn and Beyond? We co-wrote the episode, along with my Dark Skies co-creator Brent Friedman.

Before you say, well, that’s just crazy, making him part of the Majestic-12 organization and a key player in the cover-up. All legit, but let’s remember Donald Menzel. He was the leading debunker of the 1950s and 1960s and, like Sagan, an astronomer of national reputation. According to research done by the late Stanton Friedman, Menzel also had a high security classification and led a secret life that was kept from even his wife, that he was a member of MJ-12 when it was formed after the Roswell crash recovery of 1947. And, here’s the kicker, Menzel hired Sagan as an associate professor of astronomy at Harvard back in 1961. Sagan later put him on one of his symposiums. These guys knew each other well.

So, a credible but currently unprovable argument can be made that our show’s treatment of Sagan as a man who lived a double-life, working inside the cover-up, yet publicly debunking UFOs, is at least a possibility. That was the low bar we had to clear for it to become a storyline in a dramatic TV series about an alien invasion in the 1960s.

A new wrinkle was added in 2010 when researcher and author Paola Leopizzi-Harris alleged that Carl Sagan revealed to the nearly as famous Dr. J. Allen Hynek that he believed UFOs were real but avoided any public statements to prevent the loss of academic research funding.

“My recollection is that Hynek said it was backstage of one of the many Johnny Carson Tonight shows Sagan did. He basically said (to Hynek) in 1984, ‘I know UFOs are real, but I would not risk my research funding, as you do, to talk openly about them in public.’ ”

Harris may have a leg to stand on with this story. She worked with Hynek from 1981 to 1985, after he had left Project Blue Book and was working for CUFOS, the Center for UFO Studies.

Who knows? It’s at least possible, based on this, that Carl Sagan might have been a closeted believer in UAP/UFO reality — professing one public scientific point of view yet maintaining a significantly contradictory personal belief. The next question might be why: just a fear of being shunned by his academic peers or because the powers-that-be brought him inside but made him pay a heavy price?

The proof here is thin, of course, based on hearsay. And, as the good doctor would say, extraordinary claims…

Dr. Sagan, I Presume?

Looking back now, however he came to have his opinions about UFOs, I feel privileged to have debated the subject with Carl Sagan, even if only for a few minutes in a parking lot. His was a brilliant, facile mind. To hear him argue that the Universe was teeming with life but that none of it could possibly be here was odd, but it did not lessen the intensity of this memory. That’s never left.

And if my Dark Skies television series turns out to be true in its dramatic interpretation of Sagan, one can only feel sadness for him. After all, he was our original scientific communicator, bringing complex issues to the public, talking about the likelihood of extraterrestrial life. People like Bill Nye and Michio Kaku and Neil deGrasse Tyson really just walk in his shadow, something they all acknowledge. What a great irony it would be that the thing Sagan probably wanted to most talk about was something he had to keep bottled inside. Is his successor as host of a rebooted Cosmos, Tyson, doing the same thing today? I think it’s possible. From Menzel to Sagan to Tyson… a lineage of denial and ridicule…

In any case, this close-mindedness from important scientific figures about UAP/UFO reality is something that has continued for the last 75 years. It’s a damn shame. In the name of science, they have held back science.

Extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence. The thing is, our own government, with the publication of the UAP Report, now says that we have it. If he’d lived, Carl Sagan would probably have consulted on that report, from the inside or from the outside.

In another world, in another part of the multiverse, I imagine myself hosting Carl Sagan on those PBS sound stages. Instead of talking about an unmanned probe of Saturn, we are talking about intelligently piloted craft from other worlds, other times, or even other locations on Earth itself. That would have blown Sagan’s mind.

Rest In Peace, Carl. It looks like that other intelligent life you were looking for has found us after all.

Trail of the Saucers is edited by writer/producer Bryce Zabel and published by Stellar Productions. Zabel co-hosts the popular new podcast Need to Know with Coulthart and Zabel that can be found on all major platforms.

• The Lost Honeymoon of Betty and Barney Hill
• The McMinnville UFO Photos Still Mystify
• Dark Skies 25th Anniversary

Debating UFOs with Carl Sagan was originally published in Point of Contact on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Disclosure genii is out of the bottle and ontological shock is very much a thing. How best to handle it?

As someone with a lifelong (if only occasional) personal connection with nonhuman intelligence (NHI), and as a cross-cultural psychologist, I find myself motivated by the big steps toward Disclosure that our community has taken in the past few years, and especially in the last few weeks. I want to contribute more to this movement, and I know many of us feel this way. We’re keenly aware of the global significance of the moment, and we’re scrambling to work out how we can help.

On the public-awareness and political fronts, we have great allies in people like Kean and Blumenthal, Coulthart and Zabel, Knapp and Corbel (and quite a few others, of course); and they are making very sure that the genii is not stuffed back into the bottle.

But what can the rest of us do?

Well, now that the genii is running loose, we are moving “On To Logical Shock,” as @Mark Hammons put it in this forum on July 31. And so, in the coming months and years — very abruptly, that is, in historical terms — virtually everyone on this planet is going to be obliged to start coming to terms with her or his own personal relationship with NHI. Because we each have one, whether we know it (or like it) or not. It simply comes with the Terra-story.

We each have a personal relationship with NHI, whether we know it (or like it) or not.

Thus, we will find ourselves working not only on societal Disclosure but also on individual psychological and spiritual disclosure, that is, on opening up to and securely establishing contact with NHI, one by one.

Before I get into the nitty-gritty of doing that, I have to note, of course, that NHI is almost certainly not a monolithic phenomenon. That is, there are quite likely a number of “races” present, and some have suggested there may be dozens. (And isn’t it interesting that virtually all of them seem to have a basically humanoid morphology. Richard Dolan does a deep dive on this and related issues in his Aug. 30 piece “Why Are They Here?”)

I still can’t say for sure which group or groups I’ve interacted with, though in one key experience I was accompanied by a being who closely resembled a small Grey.

Whoever they may be, I can tell you from my interactions with them that NHI is overwhelmingly powerful. Most of us are, I suspect, more than a little intimidated by the prospect of coming face to face (or, let’s say, soul to soul) with a consciousness so evolved. To bring this home on a feeling level, consider for a moment (or even for a minute, if you can stand it) your own relationship with that which we commonly refer to as “God.”

If God is, as commonly conceived, omnipresent and omniscient, then it follows that God is fully present in you, right down to your every last atom (and thought and emotion) — God is you! Yet, how aware are you, moment to moment, and how accepting are you that this conscious presence may actually be real? Or are you a person who entirely rejects the notion of an all-seeing and all-being creator? (If so, I have news for you — “good news,” as the Christians like to say — but that’s a conversation for another day.)

One way or another, I’m pretty sure that most of us are not quite ready yet to fully embrace the full, intimate presence, right within us, here and now, of a superior consciousness. But believe you me, that is what NHI is able to do; and deep inside is where most of us will most profoundly encounter this intelligence.

Now, NHI may or may not be synonymous with God — that is, may or may not have evolved to full cosmic consciousness, or Godhead — but I would say, based on my own experience and that of many others, that they are clearly a good ways further along the path to spiritual Oneness than we are. (It’s going to be very interesting, as we go along, to begin to see how much overlap there is between our traditional spiritual realm — “Heaven” or “Home,” or what have you — and the domain encompassed by NHI.

Certainly, with their apparent ability to come and go freely from what we call physical reality, they seem to be intermediary figures — Messengers, or Watchers, or Helpers. There is the distinct possibility, though, that they were directly involved, and remain involved, in the ongoing creation of not only our physical but also our spiritual evolution and all that happens in the course of it, including such minor matters as the playing out of personal and collective karma, reincarnation, and whether Humanity is actually to be accorded dominion over a planet. Whatever NHI’s role may be, I think it’s pretty clear that we are being asked to grow up into responsible co-creatorhood.

How do these ideas sit with you? One way and another, we may all find opportunities emerging to get answers to some of these profound existential questions. And there may be some among us — those with a more constant and open relationship with NHI than my own — who have already gotten some of these answers.

Meanwhile, most of us, including a whole lot of folks out there who subscribe to one or other of the world’s religions (not least among them the Church of the Military-Industrial Complex), may find ourselves more than a little reluctant to relinquish our ontological primacy. (I’m borrowing that term from the very able thinker Charles Eisenstein, who recently used it here; but he’s far from the only one riffing on the word ontological theze daze.)

So, as more and more of us experience direct contact with NHI, physically, psychologically, and spiritually — a trend that is seemingly inevitable — we are going to need resources on both the personal and group levels to deal with the challenge. To start with, we have each other; and, as @Bryce Zabel so eloquently argued in “Code Red for UFO Disclosure,” this challenge could be what finally impels us to find global common cause. In other words, it may be that Disclosure is absolutely necessary now, to help us counter the existential threat we face as we go on killing each other and our planet. It all hangs together, the questions and the answers, the problems and the solutions.

As more and more of us experience direct contact with NHI, we are going to need resources to deal with the challenge.

But, as we can already begin to feel, the challenge to grow our humanity, individually and globally, is going to take us to our limits and ask us to expand them. One resource that I have been looking to and getting involved with is the worldwide collective trauma awareness and healing movement, headed by people like Thomas Hübl and Gabor Maté, among many others. You might not have conceived our challenge with NHI in terms of personal and shared trauma, but I think you’ll agree that it is not a great stretch to do so.

I’m thinking now of Curt Jaimungal’s Sept. 1 summary of his 2021 and 2022 interviews with Lue Elizondo. Jaimungal’s title itself is revealing: “Lue Elizondo Reveals the Terrifying Truth Behind UFOs.” Curt asked Lue, “If the general public knew or saw what you saw, what would the next week look like? How would the public react?” Lue brought his hand up, rubbed his chin, sighed a bit, then looked straight at the camera and said, “Somber.” He scratched his chin again and added, “I think there would be this big exhale … for about a day, and then this turning inward and trying to reflect on what this means to us and our species and ourselves.”

Personally, I have found that, although I am still far from entirely comfortable with my relationship with NHI, there is a part of me that deeply recognizes and is able to positively respond to these beings. Partly, I think, that’s because I go way back with them — the first contact experience that I remember happened at age 3. (And I will not be too surprised to discover that the relationship goes back a lot further than that.) Since then, in many instances of contact, most of them quite brief, I have always felt helped, not hindered. Even in the most powerful interactions I have had with them, I have felt their presence as compassionate and deeply meaningful (if a bit hard to figure). They clearly want me to learn, and share what I learn.

However, I’m not so much interested in sharing the details of my contacts — we’re not talking book- or movie-grade material here, though there have been a couple doozys — as I am in making the point that there must be on the order of several million of us now who have had experiences with NHI on more or less the same level that I have; and we can surely expect those numbers (whatever they are) to grow by orders of magnitude in the coming months and years.

Getting Personal with Nonhuman Intelligence was originally published in Point of Contact on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.