Aliens in the New World: A New Paradigm for Ufology
by Michael Miley
"Throughout history, many societies have acknowledged consciousness as something more potent than we have in the West -- as a sieve or receiver and transmitter of communication with forces, not always visible, other than ourselves. The contemporary Western tenet that we are alone in the universe, conversant only with ourselves, is, in fact, a minority perspective, an anomaly."-John Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens
Something very old is reemerging in the modern world, but it appears like something new. It appears to be new by a kind of amnesia, a centuries-long sleep, from which we're awakening. I'm not just referring to a belief in beings from the sky, though that's a big part of it. Rather, it's something much deeper, and in consequence, more troubling, so much so in fact that it's escalated into a war. An ontological war. A war of worldviews. On the one hand, we have the materialist perspective, enshrined in our universities, our laboratories, and think tanks. And on the other hand, we have the more "spiritual" view, awakening like Rip Van Winkle in the lives of ordinary people. For some, it takes the form of visitations from various beings -- odd, impossible creatures who come calling in the night. For others, it looks like quantum weirdness, or out-of-body experiences, or ET channeling. What it portends is the collapse of a worldview that has served us well for a time, but no longer. But that collapse is not going to happen without a fight. And that fight will extend to the field of ufology.
The thesis of this article is that the UFO/alien question is best answered by the transpersonal view of the world and a true "science of mind." This view posits other realms of being and states of consciousness, to which we have access. It postulates that the reason we haven't understood UFOs or alien beings very well is that our focus has been in the wrong direction. Dazzled by the phenomenon itself, by its trickster-like qualities, we neglect the being that it's happening to: us, Homo sapiens, but us as more than monkey or machine. The reason for this neglect is a mixture of brainwashing and fear, fear of a very profound and animal kind, a fear very akin to our fear of death. But then, there's no greater taboo than the one against knowing who you are.
The Case for the Hyperdimensional Theory
"If they are not spacecraft, what else could UFOs be? What research framework can account for the physical effects, for the impact on society, for the appearance of the occupants, and for the seemingly absurd, dream-like elements of their behavior?... I believe that the UFO phenomenon represents evidence for other dimensions beyond spacetime; the UFOs may not come from ordinary space, but from a multiverse which is all around us, and of which we have stubbornly refused to consider the disturbing reality in spite of the evidence available to us for centuries." -Jacques Vallee, Dimensions
A short review of the hyperdimensional theory of UFOs and aliens is in order here, because the theory attempts to account for observed phenomena of several different kinds. These are the behavior of the craft themselves, the beings purported to operate those craft, and the effect of an encounter on the people who have them. Encounter is not confined to abduction, though that's one of its most dramatic kinds.
Jacques Vallee was one of the first researchers to point out that UFOs often behave like no physical object or craft we know of, and yet they're able to leave physical traces on the ground or trees. Erratic flight at impossible speeds and trajectories, the merging of two craft, instantaneous disappearance and reappearance at a distant location, as well as many light and energy effects, led him as well as others (Davenport, Fowler, Randles) to speculate about other dimensions, or holographic light shows projected from those spaces, as well as hyperspatial, anti-gravity, and time machines. All these theories of UFO behavior imply some kind of hidden aspect to physical reality of which we have little knowledge.
Then there are the beings themselves, who come in various forms. Catalogues vary from a few (Moulton-Howe) to over 70 (Harder), but among the bewildering array of insect types, intelligent lizards, gray neonates, and beautiful people, are luminous sorts who can appear and disappear, pass through walls (bringing people with them), and communicate telepathically. Grays of the more solid sort, as well as "plasma-like" beings, are among the most common American types, for reasons which remain mysterious. Comparisons can be made between these alien types and apparitions of the past, in all climes and times, as ufologists, anthropologists, and folklorists are quick to point out (Vallee, Goodenough, Clark and Coleman, and Rojcewicz) -- though Thomas Bullard would say that abduction stories do not appear to be disseminated in the culture like folk tales, but have their own structure (Pritchard). More importantly for the hyperdimensional theory, however, is that these beings are understood to be all around us (and always have been), but are usually invisible and only seen under the right conditions. They may be extraterrestials for all we know, but they hide behind "the veil of matter."
Then we have to account for the effects of encounters on the people who have them, the nature of which are manifold. In the midst of an abduction or encounter, an amazing array of extraordinary experiences are reported, including apocalyptic visions or holographic shows, telepathy with the beings, psychokinesis, levitation, dematerialisation, out-of-body experiences (OBEs), and theophanies (Fowler, Mack, Turner). Beings are reported that resemble religious figures usually seen in mystical and near-death experiences (NDEs) (Turner, Fowler, Ring), while others shapeshift right before your eyes (Strieber, Turner). But the aftermaths are equally strange. People report electronic appliances ceasing to work in their presence, while poltergeist-like phenomena can invade their homes in ways similar to cases of disturbed pubescent teenagers (Jung, Talbot). Physical signs, such as lesions, scoop marks, and burns, as well as intimations of implants, imply hidden technologies at work; while rapidly healing wounds indicate paranormal forces similar to the ones that can be found in the lives of mystics, such as Padre Pio, whose stigmata disappeared upon his death (Grosso).
Finally, it's not remiss to point out that encounter is not confined to physical abduction, though that's what's getting the press these days. I bring this up because even at the Abduction Study Conference held at MIT in 1992, attempts were made to define abduction primarily in physical terms (Pritchard/Hopkins, Jacobs, Rodeghier). My view is that encounter is not solely defined by abduction, nor is abduction confined to physical removal to another location, usually a spacecraft. Interviews I've conducted in the San Francisco Bay area with experiencers Shri Yah, Kurt Mayne, and Su Piercy would seem to indicate that encounters are much more varied than abduction accounts would lead you to believe, and that encounters can occur in OBEs and in non-ordinary states of mind, even while you're lying in your bed. Of course, this view is controversial, though other researchers support it (Fowler, Mack, Randles, Ring).
Daimonic and Non-ordinary Realities
"When we hear of the shiny metallic skins or suits of the aliens, we naturally think of our own astronauts. But we might also remember the shiny little metal-men -- earth spirits and kobolds -- who haunted the mines and mountains; the hooded manikins called Cabiri who figure famously in Goethe's Faust; and the small but mighty Dactyls, gods of invention, who were known to the ancient Greeks. We have already seen that fairies and their like can travel the skies as lights resembling UFOs. But the ihk'al of the Tzeltal Indians in Mexico fly about with a kind of rocket attached to their backs. They are described as three-foot-tall, hairy humanoids who occasionally use their means of propulsion to carry people off." -Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld
The transpersonal view of encounter tends to position aliens within a loose pantheon of imaginal, folklorish beings, in the sense used by visionaries and mystics such as William Blake or Ibn 'Arabi, who see such beings as real, but not entirely physical (Corbin, Grosso, Ring). Nowadays, the average Western student of folklore is apt to think of its study as a mere literary exercise, akin to trolling world mythology for psychological themes (Campbell). Gods and spirits, as well as a host of mythical beings, are reduced to mere images and metaphors of the human psyche, relegated to the poetry of the mind. This is symptomatic of the naturalization of the daimonic world (not "demons," but the world of the "soul" according to the Greeks) that is the legacy of Cartesian thinking, with its radical separation of mind and matter (Harpur, Herbert, Goswami).
Things are not always helped here by the Jungian tradition, despite the fact that Jung himself took great interest in UFOs and admitted that a purely psychological interpretation of the phenomenon was perhaps inadequate to account for such things as radar traces and other physical effects. Even Jung's notion of psychoid phenomena -- events that are somehow both psychological and physical -- has never much caught on. This is because "the psychoid" and related concepts such as "synchronicity" have a hard time competing with the dominant scientific view that our mind is in our heads, and that consciousness is only a function of our brains. (What's more, producing "psychoid" phenomenon at will is not a talent our laboratory technicians have mastered very well.)
This is not to say that the work of all folklorists and mythologists is "mere literature," especially with regard to our topic. John Mack quotes from the works of Goodenough, Clark and Coleman, Eliade, and Rojcewicz in his book Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens, which point to tantalizing parallels to modern alien encounters in Hopi, Australian, Pygmy, Siberian, and Brazilian folklore. He also mentions the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, where lucid dreaming techniques can give way to OBEs, and where flights to "other dimensions" can mirror shamanic journeys, both for their evidence of other realms and the existence of normally invisible beings (Norbu). The Hindu tradition believes similarly, even to warning the practitioner of yoga against getting too enamored of the mid-realms of existence and the promises of the beings you can find there (Patanjali). Similar warnings can be found in the shamanic literature (Castaneda, Halifax, Harner, Kalweit). To these must be added the findings of research in psychedelics, channeling, transpersonal psychology, OBEs, and thanatology (the study of death and NDEs) (Grof, Kalweit, Klimo, Kubler-Ross, McKenna, Monroe, Ring), all of which point to a similar conclusion: nonordinary human experiences can occur "beyond the brain" in Stanislav Grof's emphatic phrase -- which translates to experience of nonmaterial domains and the beings that inhabit them.
I'll be more precise: NDEs and OBEs have been reported in the context of UFOs and aliens by a number of researchers (Fowler, Mack, Ring); while Raymond Fowler in The Watchers I and II (which concerns the experiences of Betty and Bob Luca) makes this very explicit: grays and tall robed "aliens" have been seen by Betty and Bob both in their bodies and out. This theme is sounded again in Whitley Strieber's Breakthrough, where the dead "astral" form of Michael Talbot is seen by Strieber in the context of alien visitations; while other experiences he recounts show him susceptible to OBEs.
Now, anyone who's had an OBE (and that includes me) knows how difficult it is to convey the experience within a culture that simply denies that such things are possible, or that they can be what they appear to be. Anything seen during an OBE can be put down to hallucination; while NDEs, with their revelations of "the beyond" (the light at the end of the tunnel, the luminous beings waiting on the other side with your dead relatives) can be attributed to chemicals in the brain going awry during the dying process, or to the wish-fulfillment of a personality frightened by its own disintegration at the moment of death.
The point to be made here, however, is that these are not "facts" of the case, but materialist hypotheses that need to be proven, and that they make an underlying assumption about causality and the physical nature of reality in order to frame an "explanation" for these peculiar phenomenon. But the opposite is also true: because their "spiritual" counterparts are also hypotheses, we're faced with the intriguing prospect that the right kind of experiments might prove quite the opposite of a physical explanation. And that's precisely the transpersonal position: nonordinary human experience, given its due, shows profound evidence for a nonmaterialist view of reality -- a kind of idealist monism, where consciousness, not matter, is the foundation of all things.
Contact in a Transpersonal Context
"It would appear that many ETs may have already entered and, at least in part, mastered the post-dualist, unified field stage of understanding and working with Creation. They seem to be interacting with us, entering at will our less open, less aware species-specific, state-dependent consensus reality. They do so in such a way as to inspire at least some of us to entertain what it might be like to live and move in their, not our, frame of reference." -Jon Klimo, from Zen in the Art of Close Encounters
Thus, the transpersonal view of UFOs and alien encounters has two clear virtues: 1) it places these experiences in an historical context supported by folkloric and esoteric traditions all over the world; and 2) it proposes that the realms of such experiences are accessible to human beings in non-ordinary states of consciousness. But it says something else, which is very provocative: that encounters, with all their trauma, may portend something startling about human evolution. Like the spirit trials of shamans, where a person is psychically torn apart and put back together only to emerge with new healing abilities, so too may UFO and alien encounters -- with the host of character changes and paranormal after-effects they induce in the lives of contactees -- portend some larger way of being-in-the-world.
What would that larger way of human being look like; and conversely, what might it tell us about the "way" of alien beings? (Perhaps during encounters the aliens are infecting us with their own abilities and perspectives, and that the more we're changed by them, the more we'll understand them.) Or maybe I should phrase the issue differently, namely: what kind of world is it wherein such things are possible? Clearly, not a world we've been taught to believe in, at least in the West, but a world that more closely resembles that of the shamans or yogis, where paranormal abilities are an assumed reality. In that world, consciousness is the fundamental fact of existence, not matter, and it's all-pervasive -- a view of existence that Aldus Huxley once called "the perennial philosophy." A yogi is a human who simply "has more consciousness" and is "tuned in" to its depths and range in the cosmos (Aurobindo, Radhakrishnan, Yogananda).
Seeing consciousness as the basis of all being is a very old mystical view of the world, versions of which can be found in the esoteric traditions of all world religions. But we're dealing here with a tendency that's also emerging at the cutting edges of quantum physics. A movement is afoot to view the observable traits of quantum weirdness (the wave/particle duality, uncertainty and the collapse of the wave function, the jump of quantum "objects" from state to state with no intervening stage, and the principle of nonlocality) as best explained by an idealist monism, where consciousness, as an implicit, fundamental reality, creates the explicit, material world as a kind of "dream" or hologram (Bohm, Goswami, Herbert, Talbot, Wolf).
It's in transpersonal psychology, however, where most contemporary evidence for a larger worldview exists. The premise here, as Grof reports, is that if consciousness is everywhere, conscious beings potentially have access to all the manifold realms of existence, including the mid-realms of daimonic beings -- the hunting ground of our so-called "angels and aliens." Fortunately, we don't have to take Grof's word for it. We can pursue nonordinary states of consciousness for ourselves by a variety of means.
It's not my purpose here to expound on the wide variety of non-ordinary states that people report, or about yoga, shamanic journeys, self-induced OBEs, or psychedelic experience. Readers are referred to the literature. My point here is to simply point out something rather obvious to consciousness researchers that seems to have escaped the attention of many ufologists: that if the hyperdimensional view of UFOs and aliens has any merit, and they inhabit the same realms we visit in nonordinary states, then we also have experiential access to the sources of the UFO phenomenon. And that's a rather startling conclusion, with profound implications.
Now the question of course becomes to develop these states systematically. I'm talking here about engendering nothing less a true "science of the mind," where nonordinary states of consciousness can be reliably explored, and where "objects" of nonordinary perception can be scientifically catalogued and objectively compared within a community of researchers (Murphy) -- even if those "objects" are as weird as UFOs and aliens. (The implications here for evaluating claims of so-called "channeled" ET communications are extremely relevant and might go far toward helping us discriminate between genuine channels and dissociated personalities (Klimo).) However, yogis and Buddhist monks have claimed for centuries that such a science of the mind already exists. It only needs to be applied diligently by competent and willing practitioners to prove or disprove it (Lodro).
And therein lies the crux of the problem. It's possible that we already have at our disposal the means to uncover, through firsthand experience, the true meaning of UFOs and alien encounters, if the transpersonal view of encounters is correct. What stands in the way is a materialist ontology that's rampant in most scientific circles -- the selfsame ideology that would pathologize alien encounter and the people who have it. Add to that a basic fear, laziness, and resistance to uncovering our "true identity" as transpersonal beings, with all the implications, and you have some powerful deterrents to finding a solution to the UFO/alien problem.
Transpersonal psychology is more hopeful than mainstream ufology in this regard, since it's aware of these non-ordinary states and domains in the first place. There are signs, however, among certain researchers that the "perennial" paradigm has again come of age (Fowler, Klimo, Mack, Pursglove). The process of discovering our own deeper identity may be the key to discovering the aliens' as well.
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-Michael Miley is a freelance writer and researcher of transpersonal philosophy, psychology, and the UFO/alien phenomenon. He can be reached at mmiley@pacbell.net
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