The Truth About the UFOs
And the exact healthy amount of (not) wanting to believe
By MARTIN REZNY
Aliens exist. I mean, probably, given that the universe is at least near-infinite and has existed for billions of years, during a number of which life on Earth alone has also existed. The reason why I start like this is to make one thing clear right out the gate — the hypothesis that an intelligent alien civilization has existed long enough and developed far enough to be able to travel to our planet to observe us is not silly. It’s not settled yet and it is reasonable.
Why, then, do skeptics and scientists in general treat it and people who seriously contemplate it as inherently silly? What’s silly is that to your average scientific skeptic, the notion of alien life existing somewhere out there in the vastness of space is reasonable anyway, it’s only the part about them coming here that’s not. Even though even at our level of technology today, we could travel to another solar system, and specifically would to observe life there.
So, barring your standard apocalypse, we are already essentially guaranteed to be the UFOs to alien creatures somewhere else some day, even if it requires us to create them, which we totally will do one day if we find no other intelligent life emerging on its own to study. That’s completely scientifically plausible, rational, but the hypothesis of it happening to us is ridiculous? I don’t want to dwell on this, but being truly calm and reasonable is vital here.
When the topic at hand is so emotionally charged, so insulting to many people’s intelligence or beliefs, so political, so important if any of it were true, if you start from a position of bias and presumption, you’ll get completely lost and never find your way out. I’m saying it as someone who studied political science and wrote his bachelor’s thesis trying to define the genre of conspiracy documentaries. As someone who doesn’t want to believe, but know.
The Tricky Science of the Unknown
In case you’re wondering, no, I don’t know. But what I do know is that unknowns are still things that exist, regardless of what people believe about them, and as things that exist, they do impact people. One of the common logical errors that plagues the skeptical movement is the idea that if something cannot be proven to exist beyond a shadow of a doubt, the best course of action is to act as if it definitely wasn’t real. The thing is, it can be.
The unfortunate truth is that despite our inability to definitively prove what all UFOs are, or their unwilingness to show us their true nature if they are in any way intelligent, they can represent something massively important. The unknowns, even the unknown unknowns, still have to be managed. If, or more likely when, they reveal themselves in a surprise twist as the proverbial black swan, you’d still wish you had done something to prepare yourself in time.
And make no mistake, UFOs (as in unidentified flying objects) do exist, that’s not a reasonable point of contention — watch two or three new weird photos, videos, testimonies, or other findings from all over the world for example on the secureteam10 YouTube channel every week. By the way, this counters the common skeptical objection of why there aren’t many recordings of UFOs when everyone today has a camera. Yes, you’re right, there’s more all the time, if you care to follow through on your objection and do some research.
To take care of another common skeptical assumption, you may want to assume that absolutely all of them have conventional explanations. Typically, skeptics make this statement without reviewing even a representative sample of them personally, let alone absolutely all of them. Yes, many will turn out to be planes, or birds, or flares, or drones, or reflections, or meteors, or whatever. In terms of proportion, popular astrophysicist Michio Kaku believes that about 5% of the sightings are genuinely unidentifiable.
Of course, of these 5%, some are bound to be exotic weather or natural cosmic phenomena or other rare flukes of physics, while yet others are bound to be experimental military craft. But what you don’t know, what you legitimately don’t know, is whether there is any proportion of them that is aliens. I’m not saying it’s aliens, because I don’t know it, but be honest — it can be. There is a phenomenon that’s real and documented and a portion of it can be aliens.
Now, if there may be a portion of it that’s aliens, and you don’t know for sure that it isn’t, a reasonable strategy is to try to figure out, given all the available evidence, what could plausibly be their intentions that would be compatible with their behavior so far. You should want to prepare yourself for all possible eventualities of that to either be able to exploit it to your benefit, whatever that may be, or to make yourself minimally vulnerable to catastrophe.
If You Think You’re Smart, You’re Not as Smart as You Think
This is the key difference between the mentality of a typical academician and a typical military commander or intelligence officer. And that’s the beginning of why it’s so hard to figure out the truth about the UFOs — whether they’re aliens or not, there are militaries and black ops with all kinds of agendas that will do whatever they can to exploit what people want or don’t want to believe, making sure to confuse the reality with all kinds of disinformation.
It’s of course very easy to exploit wanting to believe, by planting false stories and faked evidence, but shallow or dogmatic skepticism is equally exploitable. The technical term for smart people who are being used, often without their knowledge, to serve the interests of governements or intelligence agencies is “useful idiots”. Their role in the UFO phenomenon, IF there is a legitimate cover-up going on, is to ridicule people and delegitimize actual evidence.
Given how many sightings of UFOs there objectively are everywhere in the world all the time, the systematic ridicule of the subject matter by academia (which is also objectively real, whether it’s designed or spontaneous) is useful only to the people who want the truth to be covered up (again, whatever that means). It prevents witnesses from sharing their stories with other people, it prevents evidence from being properly examined or acknowledged, and it makes it seem that it is a much less common phenomenon than it is.
Admittedly, what doesn’t help scientists examine this issue rationally is also the general vibe coming from the UFO community. Obviously, there are many lunatics, sharlatans, dupes, and people with genuine psychological disorders on the side that believes it’s aliens, or angels, or something even weirder. To many educated people, it must seem like they’re begging to be ridiculed. What that leads to is the logical fallacy of nut-picking, another skeptical favorite.
Nut-picking is a variant of cherry-picking, where you in this case focus only on the stupidest and craziest statements or behaviors of the obviously most ridiculous or crooked UFO believers or researchers. Or when even if most of what the given person says makes sense, you only pick the parts that don’t make sense. Or even if they actually do make sense in context, you focus on how funny they sound out of context, or on how unlikable the person is.
To be clear, this doesn’t have to be any kind of conspiracy. It’s legitimately difficult to not be biased like this for an educated, intelligent person. It can be a completely subconscious impulse. Unfortunately, no truth can be figured out on the level of ad hominems and origin fallacies — just because you don’t respect someone’s authority, just because they’re a flawed person, just because they’re inherently silly, it doesn’t make any of their statements wrong.
The Fairest Skeptic of Them All
Which finally brings me to the reason why I’m writing this article. Out of all of the popular skeptics today, my personal favorite is the Armoured Skeptic. He’s not as rigid in his disbeliefs as the old guard associated with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), as he seems to be genuinely open to be proven wrong. Which is partly why he has recently made a series about what he sees as a hard target, the whole alien thing that actually may have something to it.
In the first two installments, he very logically and factually dismantles the likely fake UFO disclosure project related to Tom DeLonge, a musician, called To The Stars Academy. Which, rather bizarrely, involves a bunch of people with legitimate military and science credentials who have presented several examples of supposed UFO footage captured by the military. However, this is something that even most other ufologists consider to be an obvious scam.
In the third video, he also creates a very nice typology of the phenomenon, a Venn diagram with overlapping belief circles representing UFOs as alien spacecraft, secret military projects, or divine or spiritual messengers. My only criticism of that is that there’s one more common UFO explanation branch — time travel. If you allow for FTL drives, you might as well allow for that. There are many more theories, in fact, involving parallel dimensions, underground civilizations, simulation theory, and more, on the fringe of the fringe.
And up until this point, I was completely on board with Armoured Skeptic’s analysis. That is, until he attacked the Disclosure Project represented by Dr. Steven Greer. This is something that Armoured Skeptic considers to be the worst of the lot, combining all of the above-mentioned UFO explanation categories. That may very well be the case, but the key question is why that would be, or how did he arrive at this conclusion, so let’s look closely at that.
But first, I encourage you to make sure that I’m not misrepresenting anyone:
The Curious Case of Dr. Steven M. Greer
Armoured Skeptic’s case is heavily focused on the person of Dr. Greer, which is already not a good sign, and frankly, it’s sub par argumentation when compared to everything else that I’ve ever heard from Armoured Skeptic on any subject. He starts by noting the connection between Greer and Laurance Rockefeller (guilt by association, the origin fallacy) and the superficial similarity between Tom DeLonge’s disclosure project and that of Steven Greer (again, guilt by association). And that’s just the beginning.
Then AS (it’s a long name, I’m going to abbreviate it from now on) only expresses his misunderstanding of why a random ER doctor would be chosen for something like this by someone like a Rockefeller, and how stupid it is that people seem to like and admire Greer so much. To these points, Greer says very reasonably in a number of his talks, even in the excerpt that AS quotes, that even in overall corrupt families or intelligence organizations, there will be indiviuals on the side of angels, but who, unlike Greer, aren’t expendable.
Greer is also clear about the fakeness of Tom DeLonge’s disclosure project, which, according to Greer, is only an attempt at hijacking the growing popularity and subverting the mission of legitimate disclosure movements like the one that Greer started. It is in fact an important point that DeLonge’s and Greer’s disclosures are not interchangeable, mainly in that the inside sources who work with Greer have disclosed information and testimonies while facing resistance or outright intimidation from the, let’s say, establishment.
While both To The Stars Academy and the Disclosure Project accept donations and promise to use them to further the disclosure of the UFO phenomenon and potentially produce advanced technologies that may have something to do with alien designs, the Disclosure Project has already produced two documentary movies and recently funded a genetic examination of a potentially alien specimen, not to mention that it involves regular attempts at contacting aliens and documenting it, but more on that later. At the same time, To The Stars Academy only seems to be paying DeLonge’s debts.
Greer also explains in one of his videos his origin story, which would explain why important people would take a “random” person like him strangely seriously. Now, all of this is not a proof of how things are, only the Greer’s side of the story, but it is important to be able to consider it fairly. Just because it sounds strange, it doesn’t mean it must be untrue, when, if it were true, it would have to be strange. Greer claims that at a relatively young age, he had figured out the connection between UFOs and what he calls coherent thought.
As Greer speculates (and yeah, he does that a lot), aliens use some form of telepathy as their main faster-than-light communication method. Using technological means, not magic. Presumably, it would make sense for them to also use telepathic interfaces to control their machines. The reason why he speculates this is because he believes that he, and anyone else who masters meditative techniques, can interact with UFOs and essentially summon them. No, not because you’re psychic, probably, but because they’re listening in. Now, IF he were able to do this as one of the first people to realize it, it would make him special. It would also explain his apparent messianic complex.
It would also explain why some people would admire him so much — if what he says is basically accurate, he’s doing something hard and admirable, regardles of how overconfident or egotistical he’s being about it. Despite what AS insinuates, Greer is not a cult leader figure, he doesn’t seek worship. AS doesn’t like that Greer always makes everything about himself, sharing a personal story, but what else is anyone supposed to do to move anyone to follow their example? Greer usually explains what he (thinks) he can do with the intent to show others that they can, and should, do exactly that themselves. What Greer “sells” doesn’t have to be bought for money.
Calling it a “UFO religion” as AS does is therefore more fair, as it does involve a lot of belief and some prophetic behavior, however not all kinds of belief or “prophecy” are equal. What AS calls trying to fit one’s personal experiences into the overall UFO canon can allso be trying to fit available evidence into an overall theory of all involved parties’ motivations and behaviors that makes sense. Greer’s knowledge must be incomplete, making him more of a visionary rather than an empirical researcher, however waiting until you know everything perfectly to take action can lead you to do too little, too late.
AS unreasonably demands, as most skeptics do, that the aliens physically and incontrovertibly show themselves, and implies that if you can’t make a particular technology work yourself and produce it, your speculations about how it probably functions are entirely worthless and shouldn’t be entertained. The example mentioned in the video is how Greer explains how alien suits are made, or rather worn, when they’re made of one piece. Greer speculates (admittedly way too confidently) that aliens must have the means to materialize whole complex objects, like with a teleporter-based replicator.
Now, does Dr. Greer have schematics for alien replicators? No. Why would you expect him to? IF secret services are covering this up using extreme compartmentalization and intimidation, even if there are whistleblowers, the spies would have to be retarded to allow anyone to actually steal the tech or its schematics. However, it would be damn near impossible to prevent all people who have seen or heard anything while working for the government from telling someone something about them. That’s all you’ll have to work with. And Greer has testimonies from soldiers, spies, and even damn astronauts.
AS also strangely hates that Greer is “all over the map”, or in other words, connecting all of the UFO story categories and data points together. Well, that’s exactly what the one correct theory is supposed to do, isn’t it — explain everything. AS mocks this by coming up with his own one theory to explain everything, which can be summed up as sillicon-based ancient godlike lifeforms are psychically projecting themselves to look like grays. Which is something that “bad storytellers who give dopamine highs to idiots who want to be fooled” would come up with, as AS sees Greer. But what is Greer saying?
The One Theory to Rule Them All
Since the Armoured Skeptic’s summary of the Greer’s UFO theory is beyond simplistic and almost crossing the line to flat out misrepresentation, here’s a summary based on watching hours upon hours of Greer’s talks and the two documentaries. But first, a little social science primer. Any paranoid mind can find connections between anything, seeing conspiracies everywhere. Figuring out how good this kind of theory is lies in the logical consistency of its details and lack of exaggeration or overgeneralization of the possible knowledge, ability, or motivation of the agents involved — no omnipotence, no pure evil.
Now, the best (though still speculative) UFO theory that I have encountered:
WHAT THEM ALIENS HAVE BEEN DOING
A number of advanced alien civilizations ranging between a handful and under a hundred (probably in the low tens) have discovered our solar system at least thousands of years ago and likely left probes here to observe the long-term development of life on this planet without any intention to interfere.
Given that most aliens seem to be humanoid by all accounts, perhaps they have engineered or tweaked life on Earth or modern human beings, but it may just mean that the evolution of intelligent life is highly convergent. Greer specifically mentions the morphic resonance theory proposed by the evolutionary biologist Rupert Sheldrake, which could work across any distance if all life or intelligence is entangled, as Greer speculates.
Whatever the reason for this reported similarity (a number of which are allowed even by quite conventional scientific theories), this long-standing minimal interference, not unlike the Prime Directive from Star Trek, indicates that these alien races are mostly peaceful and not a threat.
If there was any contact, it would be limited to what most ancient humans would understand as religious experiences, achieved via communication using the same entanglement of life or intelligence, which, IF it was real, would make sense to use for FTL communications. Or at the very least a wireless brain-machine interface, which can be developed even using fully conventional means. In connection with this, Greer mentions the recent wave of real experiments like the Global Consciousness Project, which suggest that the state of one’s consciousness can affect probabilities at a distance.
Moving on, the first period in history when the UFOs started being much more active, or at least much more frequently observed, was during WW2. Quite logically, it would be because of the rapid advancement of aerial technology and the advent of rocketry, or because of the mass slaughter on a global scale and the advent of weapons of mass destruction. After millennia of no significant development, it had to be quite a show, maybe even the most interesting one in the local region of space, if intelligent life is relatively rare.
After WW2, according to documents and witness accounts from the initial period before complete secrecy was enforced in the mid-50s, the alien activity was concentrated around bases that housed nuclear weapons, like Roswell. There are even accounts of UFOs interfering with nuclear facilities, specifically by disabling them. In fact, USA and USSR had plans ranging from putting military bases on the far side of the Moon to blowing up nukes on the Moon, but strangely enough, they decided to just keep weapons out of space. According to Greer, Neil Armstrong said that “we were warned off the Moon”.
Would you have done anything else, if you were a benevolent rational observer who doesn’t want to interfere with the development of an emerging spacefaring race, but who also wouldn’t want it to end itself or become a threat to other races? What else can be done? Landing on the White House lawn out of the blue as skeptics demand and causing mass hysteria? Giving us even more advanced technologies when all we’re doing is trying to kill each other in the name of xenophobia? Even cautiously reaching out to invidiuals who try to summon you just to let them know you’re there is dangerous.
Everything else that’s strange that people report to be happening falls into entirely different categories according to Greer, one of which is the cover up or disinformation campaign that tries to paint aliens as evil or scary, while the other is “interdimensional weirdness”. An incontrovertible example that very well could be one of these two are the surprisingly common and often quite strange dissapearances of people in American national parks which cannot be fully explained conventionally. People barely even theorize about that.
WHAT THEM GOVERNMENT TYPES HAVE BEEN DOING
So, what about us? According to Greer, we have only given aliens more reasons to be pissed, further proving their pacifism and non-interference. As skeptics often point out, you don’t fly to a planet across the vastness of space to then embarrassingly crash in the atmosphere. Apparently, we have shot a bunch of them down with something that Greer’s sources call “longitudinal” weapons, which is supposedly some kind of electromagnetic FTL beam.
Now you may object, armed with the knowledge of scifi, that a really advanced race should have shields or something, right? No, actually. Of all the scifi tech, shields are the one where there’s not even a good hypothetical way of making them work. There are ways to time travel that we can do at least in one direction, there are mathematically sound FTL travel methods, even the zero point energy almost-perpetuum mobile can maybe work. But not Star Trek-like shields. So, why did Greer make up all the rest, but not shields?
What’s interesting is that allegedly, these weapons are of our own design, dating back to 1920s or even further (think Tesla, I suppose). But regardless of how fancy the weapons are that are making the alien craft crash, I hope it’s obvious why any military would try to do this — a) you don’t want your airspace breached around sensitive facilities, and b) what you shoot down, you can salvage and reverse engineer using the good old human ingenuity.
It’s important to note that this means that the aliens are neither stunningly incompetent, nor infallible or immortal, which they would be in a looney conspiracy theory. At most, some of them may be sort of incorporeal, which Greer believes are the most advanced ones, more like AI rather than flesh and blood creatures. Which assumes that there are aliens concurrently at varying levels of technological advancement, which is also a detail indicative of a sensible theory. Just like keeping consistency between dresses and ships.
Greer says that because aliens can sort of 3D print objects out of thin air (or vacuum, more likely, since the power source should be zero point energy), they have clothes and ships made out of one piece, materializing and dematerializing even themselves at will. Which is, again, a nice detail that a crazy completely made up theory likely wouldn’t have, and it gets even more consistent — we don’t have this method of manufacture, which means that you should be able to differentiate a man-made alien reproduction vehicle on account of it being bolted together from individual parts. That’s good sci-fi.
As for the technologies that we have presumably managed to reverse engineer, we have first mastered the electrogravitics and then the zero point energy generator. There was a phase when we had to use nuclear reactors, and apparently, some crashes were of our UFOs due to reactor malfunctions. The zero point energy generator is of course kept under wraps because nobody wants a source of energy that’s too abundant, while the better method of propulsion is a nice ace up your sleeve for the next big war. As for tech that did trickle into commercial use, Greer believes it was mainly computer stuff.
What I’m not entirely clear on is if the man-made UFOs can already fly faster than light, though the mechanism allowing for the insane G-forces and turns should presumably be based on mass cancellation caused by the electrogravitics, and cancelling mass could count as the real world equivalent of an irrational number required to make the FTL (or time travel) math work.
But anyway, what’s not remarked on by Greer regarding this issue, but what I would add given my education in political science topics related to geopolitics and international security, is this — have you noticed how old is the American fighter jet and bomber technology getting? How seemingly uninterested they are in having means of their own to get stuff into space? Trillions of Dollars of dark money are being spent, so, on the development of what, exactly? It would make sense to maintain the old tech to keep the appearance of relying on conventional vehicles, while secretly having capabilities on the next level.
As for what the unacknowledged dark people are doing with these ARVs, the main thing according to Greer is faking alien activity in preparation of the independence day-type false flag attack that should unite the world under the one world government. This should include most, if not all, alien abductions, cow mutilations, and other aggressive presumably alien behavior. On a personal note, it may be the case that Greer is being too optimistic here, since there could be individual asshole aliens, while scientific observers are still motivated to perform experiments, but he doesn’t claim it’s never aliens.
This is all basically reasonable (if you were an intelligence agency/cabal and had this capability and knowledge, it would make sense to do it), but what impressed me the most was again a small, banal detail, too unexciting for a crazy grandiose conspiracy theorist to focus on, let alone to come up with. If you were an intelligence agency, a rather deep, black one, you would absolutely use your flying saucers for the boring stuff you do every day, like smuggling, which is what Greer says he was told by someone tasked with it.
Also, Greer often specifies what his sources’ jobs were, and it’s not just high-ranking officers, it’s also people who are sent to fish downed saucers from the ocean, transport alien cadavers, or operate the anti-UFO weapons systems. As an aspiring scifi writer, I can assure you that it’s not easy to come up with shit that’s this detailed that still makes completely consistent sense. Another thing that some skeptics demand, again unreasonably, is that all of these sources should identify themselves or they can’t be believed, but that ignores that if what they say is true, they’d be in mortal danger along with their families.
Speaking of mortal danger, along with the crashed ships come the dead bodies of aliens, which are of course studied as well. Presumably for science in general, but also in order to make the so called “programmed life forms” that should pass for aliens, again for the purposes of faking alien abductions or attacks. According to Greer, the saucer tech and the alien bodies are kept in separate facilities in the spirit of compartmentalization, which means that most people will only know about what they’re specifically working on.
And that’s basically it — we’re the assholes, the murderous apes, under quarantine by a coalition of peaceful advanced races waiting for us to start exploring space as a united people for peaceful reasons. The technologies that would get us there largely already exist, but are being suppressed, and the rather small and genuinely fascist international cabal of intelligence people and rich businessmen with Nazi roots and ideas who are in the know is planning a global takeover with the help of said tech. Heil Hydra, I guess.
So, what can we do, according to Dr. Greer?
How Far Are You Willing to Go Out of Your Mind?
According to Greer, there’s something absolutely anyone can do. And that’s the point where skeptics should take notice, but strangely don’t. Greer offers you an experiment that you can conduct yourself. He does claim that he can summon aliens, but that you can too, and he has this whole encounters-of-the-fifth-kind protocol. For a few Dollars, you can even buy an ET Contact Tool app for your phone with all the instructions, but the stuff isn’t kept secret.
What it entails is that you get yourself into a focused, meditative state, visualizing or vocalizing a flare-like signal or an inviting message for the aliens, while camping in a remote area over the period of at least hours. It may take them a while to appear, it may not happen every time, but what the contact protocol materials detail is what kinds of things you’re supposed to expect. Including footage and audio recordings. You may find the very idea silly, but the things that should appear should often be recordable.
There allegedly may be channelling-like hallucinatory experiences involving any number of senses, but not just that. You can try to follow the instructions and then try to document if anything happens in response, or at least take note of what you experience in response, and have an objective proof, at least for you, if what Greer says is complete bullshit, or not. You know, armchair skepticism is the easiest thing in the world. Besides, what do you have to lose? If you’re right and this whole thing is nonsense, then nothing will happen, only a nice trip to nature, ideally with a bunch of friends. Do it, for science! Just maybe steer clear of the American national parks, or “vile vortices”.
And if you’re feeling really comfortable in your armchair, then you can at least do me a favor and enlighten me about what exactly in the above Greer’s UFO theory is unreasonable. I recognize it is a speculation, but if it were true, there would be good reasons why we can only speculate. Before devising a bold new experiment to gain proof (like the above-mentioned example), one has to speculate, and thought isn’t necessarily wrong only because it is speculative. Is it an illogical speculation in any specific respect? Think about it like a spy.
As I said before, I don’t actually know how it is with UFOs, and I don’t think that IF it was aliens and there was a cover-up, anyone outside of a very few people would really know, let alone be able to produce sufficient tangible evidence. We’re all guessing, including Dr. Steven Greer. But in a world filled with unknowns, we can’t wait until we absolutely know for sure before doing anything. You can resent people just for making a living by doing any UFO-related work, but don’t we all have to make a living, regardless of what we do?
If you, whoever you are, were in the position of coming across something that definitively proves to you that UFOs are real and it’s aliens and there’s a conspiracy about it, you’d also want to a) keep yourself and your family, friends, and sources alive, and b) acquire sufficient means to at the very least make a living, while ideally being able to make a difference for the better. Or you’d join the dark side. Or an insane asylum. Or you’d actually fail and die.
The whole UFO phenomenon is only silly if it’s entirely fictional in all of its aspects, which realistically may not be the case. I dare you to prove that every aliens-related idea can be traced back to a movie or explained exactly by a mental disorder, and that it never was the other way around (movies being inspired by testimonies and people being driven insane by what actually happened to them). Reality is complicated. The best we can do in the face of the unknown is to try to anticipate in the absence of hard evidence and take actions that at best prevent worst possible outcomes and can provide proof, while at worst cause no harms at no significant expense, like Greer tries to.
