“Why don’t they just land on the Whitehouse lawn?” and “Why isn’t there clear cell phone footage?”

The intelligence behind UFOs operates in a shroud of mystery. Enough mystery that unless you’ve been confronted with a direct encounter with the intelligence, the average person can get by with ignoring it. If aliens are really here, some ask, why don’t they make themselves and their presence more known? “Why don’t they just land on the Whitehouse lawn?”

There are several problems with this question:

1. It’s a bit foolish. Why would we think that an intelligence as advanced as the UFO occupants cares who the president of the United States is? Are we so hubris to believe they should show deference to “The Whitehouse”? Considering the range of possibilities for who “they” are and why they are “here,” there are many reasons to believe they wouldn’t have the least concern for revealing themselves to the leaders of the United States.
2. John E Mack argues that we need stop projecting human intention onto the intelligence. Asking “why don’t the aliens just do this?” suggests the intelligence reasons the way that we do, and that we understand their reasons for visiting us. We simply don’t. The humanoid ET saying “take me to your leader” is the stuff of science fiction. (Personally I think they know who our leaders are and I don’t think they care.)
3. If the UFO occupants wanted to make themselves widely, indubitably known, they could. So they must not want to. Mack suggests from his study of encounters that the occupants work in a much subtler manner, influencing human behavior individually and personally, stimulating personal transformation in the consciousness of experiencers.

Experiencer Matthew Roberts, who was on board the USS Theodore Roosevelt during the now famous “Gimball Footage” has an interesting take.

“Well why don’ they just land on the Whitehouse lawn? This is a question I hear a lot. They don’t do this for the same reason our leaders don’t meet with dictatorial and fascist leaders. Why would you lend legitimacy to a government you view as quite illegitimate? Even here in the US our systems and social structures are built on emotions and concepts of the lower self,” (Initiated, 363).

Just because we seem to view “The Whitehouse” as the epitome of human authority (problematic for many reasons), does not mean that the UFO occupants do. There are a lot of ways the US government stifles genuine human advancement, and it’s likely the intelligence recognizes this. (Also, US military personnel have been ordered to fire on UFOs. Are we surprised they’re not eager to land on the Commander in Chief’s lawn?)

A second question from the clever skeptic is why, with everyone carrying around a camera in our pockets, isn’t there more clear video footage of UFOs? Perhaps a fair question from a casual observer, but this easily comes undone for multiple reasons.

1. There is video/photo footage of UFOs, some of it coming from cell phones. Become a member of MUFON and you can see the newest videos that are uploaded regularly. It isn’t always clear what you’re looking at. Sometimes UFOs just look like lights that don’t amount to much on film. But you can certainly see cell phone footage of unidentified aerial phenomena, if you take the time to look.
2. There have been reports of snapping photos of UFOs only to have the craft disappear when the photo is taken or sometimes it does not show up in the photo at all.
3. Many times observers of UFOs are completely awestruck, some feel themselves unable to move. Even if they can move their consciousness is completely caught up in what they are witnessing. Fumbling around with a cell phone to try to get it on video is not at the forefront of their minds. By the time they “come to” and are able to take a photo, the object has disappeared.

But the question itself misses a crucial point about the phenomenon: we are dealing with an intelligence. An intelligence that is clearly significantly more advanced than us. Suggesting we should just be able to snap photos like we were observing any run of the mill natural phenomenon is simply naïve and unrealistic. The intelligence shows up on radars when it wants to. It hides itself from radars when it wants to. It lets you take videos or pictures of it when it wants to. It appears and disappears, makes itself visible to us and invisible to us, when it wants to, by its own will, on its own terms, for its own reasons. There are no accidental sightings, and there are no photos snapped without it knowing.

We simply cannot observe or study UFOs and their occupants in the same ways we observe and study our natural world, and we cannot demand or rely on the same kinds of evidence. We should be thankful to the occupants for giving us some of the brilliant footage that we do have, such as Carlos Diaz’ ships of light.

In short, neither of these questions pose serious challenges for the need to take UFOs seriously. They are distractions that are ultimately out of touch with the nature and reality of the phenomenon.

The Ariel School and Taking Encounters Seriously

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with UFOs and possible alien intelligence. In my adolescence I was most intrigued by the Hopkinsville Encounter, primarily because of the number of witnesses and the lack of an alternative explanation. I consider myself a bit of a skeptic, and I found it hard to believe that a dozen people drove to a police station in the middle of the night clearly traumatized after destroying their property firing dozens of rounds because they were spooked by some owls. That just doesn’t add up.

But somehow an encounter had completely slipped under my radar until I stumbled across it in the 2020 documentary The Phenomenon. This encounter, known as the Ariel School encounter, occurred at a school in Zimbabwe in 1994. It caught the interest of Harvard psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize winner Dr. John E. Mack, who interviewed the witnesses and wrote about his findings in Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters.

In 1994, 62 children at the Ariel primary school came running back from recess to their teachers, absolutely panicked and terrified. The children reported that they had seen three silver orbs fly over their school and one of them had landed amongst some trees nearby. When they all ran over to look at it, a short, grey humanoid with big black eyes emerged on top of the craft. The children were mesmerized, and reported receiving telepathic communication from the being. Through it’s eyes, the being communicated with them the importance of taking care of the earth and the environment (a common message reported during encounters).

Teachers were apparently unsure of what to make of the children’s account, but the school soon began receiving phone calls from concerned parents whose children had come home terrified by what they had witnessed. In The Phenomenon one of the teachers says, “They came running up here in such a panic. Children just cannot make that up.”

Both Hopkinsville and the Ariel School are encounters that involve over a dozen witnesses. And in both cases the witnesses were seen as less than credible: in Hopkinsville because they were low socio-economic status, poorly educated people who reportedly used a lot of alcohol. In the Ariel School, because they were children. In my view, the fact that they were children makes the account even more credible.

Children can certainly exaggerate or act at times, but to put on a genuine display of panic/terror and keep it up for weeks is simply not something I am inclined to believe all 62 of them were capable of. Additionally, children don’t have the same fear of embarrassment and shame for reporting what they see. Many experiencers are afraid to report their encounters because they’ll be laughed at or seen as crazy. The children also clearly did not read about UFO/alien encounters and then all conspire to put on a hoax (accusations that have been made about other multiple witness encounters). The Phenomenon also features interviews with some of the Ariel experiencers as adults, who all stand by their original account.

We’re left essentially with three options of what to believe here:

1. That 62 school children are all pathological liars and talented actors, that they conspired to make up a story about seeing a UFO and alien being, that they were able to convince their teachers and parents and a Harvard psychiatrist, that they were able to keep this up for weeks/months/years, and that not a single one of them has had a guilty conscience and come forward to say, “Yeah sorry, we made it all up.”
2. That 62 school children all collectively had the same hallucination. This hallucination was so common that all of them gave the same description to the teachers, parents, and John Mack, drew the same pictures of the alien being, and have stood by this hallucination for decades.
3. That 62 school children witnessed a UFO land and the presence of an alien being of unknown origin, who communicated a message to them about caring for the environment.

As a skeptic, I simply cannot wrap my head around Options 1 or 2 . Quite interestingly, the Ariel School is mentioned in a scholarly article about mass hysteria in Africa, however, the article notes that the children were found to not have much prior knowledge to UFOS or popular UFO perceptions and that the Ariel School encounter does not fit the pattern of other alleged mass hysteria accounts. If it is the case that this many people can all hallucinate the same thing with such detail, this seems to have very dire implications for the use of eyewitness testimony in courts of law. I have to eliminate 1 and 2, which leaves us only with Option 3.

Such is the case for many abduction/encounter experiencers. The layperson or “skeptic” assumes that experiencers must a) be mentally unstable, b) be attention seekers, c) be talented/pathological fraudsters. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of people who report encounters are found to be mentally stable. Some actively search for there to be something wrong with them in order to make sense of what they saw or experienced, only to be given a clean bill of mental health. Even a 2002 article in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry that assumes all encounter/abduction accounts are “almost certainly untrue” is forced to admit that “there is currently no convincing evidence for higher rates of serious psychopathology amongst abductees compared to the general population.”

Experiencers are also very rarely attention seekers. After publishing Communion, Whitley Strieber received letters from over 100,000 experiencers from around the globe, many who had never gone public with their stories. Most experiencers are ashamed and embarrassed, sometimes traumatized, and worry that telling others what they saw will result in losing their jobs or losing respect. Experiencer Matthew Roberts, who was on board the USS Theodore Roosevelt in 2015 during the recording of the now famous “Gimball” Footage decided to go public with his experiences with alien beings that has occurred in the aftermath. He tells his story in his 2020 book Initiated even though he knew that it meant he would have to leave the Navy after 16 years of service, four years shy of receiving his retirement benefits. His courage should most certainly be commended, but it has come at professional cost that the average person often is unwilling or unable to risk. Last, the majority of experiencers seek nothing and gain nothing from their experiences: they receive no fame nor fortune, and do not con nor fool anyone. Many never talk about their experiences to other people or only to a very few trusted people.

In the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, we focus on what actually appears– what is experienced, leaving value judgments and meaning out of it– it is this approach that is necessary when discussing encounters. We can suspend judgment on the meaning or origin of what occurred and look at the phenomenon itself: what was experienced or witnessed? We start there and bracket everything else. From a moral standpoint, I believe we owe it to experiencers to try to make sense of their encounters in a socially recognized and acceptable way. They should not have to try to figure one of the most profound mysteries of our epoch in secret and in shame.

Drs. John E. Mack (who was tragically killed by a drunk driver) and Jeffrey Kripal are two respected intellectuals who have done just that: examined the experiences themselves and let them speak. The more controversial Whitley Strieber has also made great progress in bringing abduction experiences to light, although at great personal cost (as Kripal points out in The Super Natural: Why the Unexplained is Real, Strieber committed the error of being too honest about what he had experienced). But there is much more work to be done. We owe it to those who have faced public and professional repercussions for telling their stories, as well as those who have suffered privately, to take encounters seriously.

The recent UFO Report, and why this matters a lot (especially for philosophers)

Almost every media outlet that covered the recent government report on UFOs was quick to note that there was no evidence that the 5% of truly unexplained UFO sightings were alien spacecraft. The New York Times featured a technically true, but deceptive abbreviated headline of “Government Report Finds No Evidence UFOs Were Alien Spacecraft.” Again, technically true, but far from the whole story.

If the UFOs are not alien spacecraft, and it’s certainly possible that they’re not, then we must provide alternative hypotheses of what they are. The only other possibility presented in the NY Times article is that they may be advanced weaponry/technology that Russia or China have been developing in secret. I consider myself a bit of a skeptic, and this is simply too out there for me to believe. Let me explain why.

First, let us describe the typical behavior of a true UFO. While 95% of sightings can be explained by natural phenomena, weather balloons, planes, or other common objects, 5% of sightings are truly unexplained. Here is what they commonly involve:
– Some type of flying technological object, most commonly “saucer” shapes but other shapes have been reported such as triangular craft, pyramid, and cigar shapes
– The objects are often surrounded by or emit stunning, almost awe-inspiring lights, sometimes coming down from the craft in beams, surrounding the craft, or in orbs breaking off from the craft/object
– The objects have been witnessed moving in ways that defy the laws of physics a we currently understand them: accelerating at speeds thought to be impossible, plunging in and out of water, disappearing into thin air and then reappearing, and the ability to change direction at impossibly high speeds
-There are at least two accounts of military personnel firing at UFOs, (documented in Leslie Kean’s UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on Record). In one case, the UFO simply disappeared before the missiles hit. In the second, the missiles simply disintegrated when they reached the UFO.
-The objects/crafts are clearly under intelligent control: they follow (people, ships, planes), they interact/respond to our movements, they shoot down light beams to examine objects, and plainly move in ways that are clearly intentional.

UFOs have also been reported consistently since the 1940s, (some have been reported earlier, but let’s start there). If these are advanced weaponry developed by Russia or China, then they are advanced weaponry/technology that they have had since the 1940s. This simply doesn’t compute. Are we supposed to believe that China or Russia have had advanced craft since the 1940s that are capable of moving at impossible speeds and disintegrating US missiles? If this were truly the case, there is simply no way the United States would have been the dominant military power for the past half century. Additionally, this seems to be a severe, imminent security threat that should be addressed immediately. Lacking such immediate concern, I believe officials suggesting this is Chinese or Russian technology are being disingenuous. These objects/crafts are not of human origin. If they are, then China or Russia have been housing technology that is centuries, if not millennia beyond our own, have been doing so for decades, have done so without any of the intermediary technology becoming known to the public, and apparently have an advanced understanding of the laws of nature that they have been hiding as well. As a skeptic, I simply can’t accept this.

So if they’re not human craft, what are they? Who are they? What do they want? Why are they interested in us? These are as important questions as we as a species have ever confronted. What are some alternative possibilities?

There is, most obviously, the extraterrestrial hypothesis. This is the hypothesis that the crafts are operated by a species from another planet within our universe. This is the most common hypothesis (and indeed the one the French COMETA report said was the most logical) but let us briefly explore some other options.

The Time Traveler Hypothesis: Some have speculated that the UFOs are not alien spacecraft at all, but rather, time machines. The UFO occupants are our distant human descendants come back to visit and study us. This hypothesis is explored in depth in Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon by Michael Paul Masters. The most commonly described UFO occupants (short, grey humanoids with big black eyes) are our distant human descendants, who have mastered time travel and are interested in the lives of their ancestors. A variation of this hypothesis is that they are doubly alien, meaning they are both from the future and from another planet. It doesn’t seem implausible in my view that an intelligence that had mastered the technology to visit earth would also have mastered time travel.

Multiverse Hypothesis Some such as Pulitzer Prize winner John Mack posited the possibility of a multiverse, and that the technology possessed by the UFO occupants allows them to travel between universes. This is explored among other themes in Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters. Thus, they are “aliens” but ones that do not come from another planet in our universe. The fact that UFOs are often observed simply appearing rather than coming down from space lends some plausibility to the idea that they are not visiting us from another planet in our space-time.

The Super Natural Hypothesis: Note, this is not “supernatural” but Super Natural. I credit this to the work of Whitley Strieber and Dr. Jeffrey Kripal in The Super Natural: Why the Unexplained is Real. They hypothesize that the UFO occupants could be part of our natural world, but exist in a dimension/frequency that is generally imperceptible to our senses (and our instruments). However their advanced technology allows them to emerge into our physical world and manifest in a way perceptible to us.

It could, of course, be none of these things or a combination of these things. Given the variation in UFO shapes, it could be we have visitors from different places as well. What is most important is that we collectively start taking this seriously and make sustained communal efforts to find out. Part of the motivation for the Pentagon report was to lift the stigma in discussing UFO sightings and interactions, with the hope of a new era of transparency, one in which witnesses will not feel ashamed or threatened to report what they see and in which these topics can be publicly discussed without mockery.

There are profound philosophical, scientific, moral, and religious stakes here:
– The objects move in ways that seem to violate the laws of nature as we understand them– are our current scientific models substantially incomplete?
-If they come from another dimension, what are the implications for our current understanding of space and time?
-If there are other advanced intelligences besides human beings, what challenges does this pose for anthropocentric accounts of value?
– We may have to introduce ourselves to these visitors (although it’s likely they already know a lot about us): what do we tell them? What does it mean to be a human being? What distinguishes us from other intelligent species?
-How does the existence of the UFO occupants lend support for certain religious doctrines and challenge others?

I hope to explore some of these possibilities and questions in future blog posts. I do think the UFO phenomena should be of immediate, focused interest of philosophers. Philosophers use aliens often in our thought experiments precisely because we understand how much is at stake with the existence of an advanced non-human intelligence. But we seem underwhelmed by the very real possibility of some type of existing alien presence. This is not the stuff of QAnon conspiracy theorists. Former Senator Harry Reid and John Podesta are among those emphasizing the importance of taking this seriously. A great starting point is the documentary The Phenemenon, available for viewing on Prime Video.

Bioethics blog post

A blog post for the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics:

http://www.ijfab.org/blog/author/kengels/

News

Recent Podcasts:

I was recently featured on two podcasts alongside Dr. James South to discuss the philosophy and Westworld:

First, in “Philosophy Breaks Bread” we join Dr. Eric Thomas Weber and Dr. Anthony Cashio to discuss Westworld alongside the benefits of studying philosophy.

https://www.philosophersinamerica.com/2018/05/31/069-ep65-the-stories-of-our-day-westworld/

Second, in “Imaginary Worlds” we join Eric Molinsky in discussing identity and behavior as they relate to Westworld.  

https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/the-westworld-experience.html

Kimberly S. Engels

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