New theories may explain where UFOs are coming from

When a UFO is Not a UFO

by Marie D. Jones and Larry Flaxman

Millions of people over the history of humankind have seen something in the sky they could not identify. From the Biblical days of chariots in the sky to today’s mass sightings and mysterious lights appearing over cities to thousands of witnesses, we have sought to identify the unidentifiable. But the days of the simple “nuts and bolts” spaceship from another planet are long gone, thanks to new theories that may explain where these objects are coming from.

Times, and UFOs, have changed.

In the year 1947, two amazing events occurred that brought the possibility of alien visitation into the mainstream discussion. The first occurred on June 24th, 1947 when a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted several objects in the sky while he was flying his small plane near Mt. Rainer in Washington. He later described these mysterious objects to the press as “saucers skipping across water,” and a savvy reporter coined the term “flying saucers” as a result. 

The second event occurred in the early part of July when something crashed in the remote New Mexico desert near the town of Roswell, setting off a firestorm of controversy that continues even to this day. Witnesses claimed it was an extraterrestrial craft that crashed to earth and that dead alien bodies had been recovered and subsequently transported by the government, and hidden in some secret location. The US Government has maintained the position that it was simply a weather balloon that had crashed. 

The earliest explanations for UFOs tended towards the “nuts and bolts,” either a physical object or a natural one, and often easily explained with further study. People were misidentifying any number of things, from stars to planets to prototypes to gliders, and chances were good that the officials were correct. The most obvious type of UFO is usually an IFO, or Identifiable Flying Object, and the list of possibilities is long.

Stars and planets, especially Venus, have long been the culprit behind many misidentified flying objects (MFOs!), as have satellites, space stations and even the Shuttle. The human eye is not used to looking up, so what we often see in the sky looks unfamiliar to us. Many sightings of UFOs have been attributed to natural and manmade objects and phenomena found in the skies above, including bizarre cloud shapes, comets, meteors, birds flying in formation, kites, searchlights, weather balloons and military prototypes. 

But what about those closer encounters that just seem to defy natural explanation of any kind?

The most fun and far out explanation for UFOs has always been the extraterrestrial hypothesis, which states that some UFOs are extraterrestrial entities from other planets that are traveling here in spacecraft. This hypothesis has its origins in the UFO history from the 1940s through the 1960s and was first referred to by French ufologist Jacques Vallee in his 1966 book “Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma.” The term took off in popularity amongst the serious UFO research crowd, and was later defined by physicist Edward Condon in 1969 as the idea that “some” UFOs may be spacecraft sent to Earth from another civilization or space other than earth, or from a planet associated with a distant star. Condon is also credited with the more popular shortened term, “ETH.” 

Again, we are still talking nuts and bolts here. Actual physical, touchable craft and objects that travel from one location to another. Ships that leave marks on the ground, or other physical evidence. Craft that can be photographed, or appear to many witnesses at the same time or be knocked on or kicked. Objects that have mass, shape, and form. 

QUANTIFIABLE THINGS.

Many UFO reports speak of something not quite physical at all…

Why do so many UFO reports speak of objects that “flicker in and out of view,” or “appear then disappear” in a blink of an eye, as if materializing and dematerializing out of thin air? Jacques Vallee advanced the IDH, or Interdimensional Hypothesis to explain many UFO sightings. The IDH posited that alien visitation was coming from other realities or dimensions that co-exist alongside our own, and that this type of sighting might explain more of the supernatural, spiritual, and even mythological connotations often ascribed to UFOs in the past. 

The idea that UFOs could be coming from other dimensions of reality allowed UFOs to be tied into other supernatural phenomena such as angels, ghosts, demons, cryptids and even psychic abilities. Many of the craft and entity reports fell outside of the standards adopted for the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, including the shape shifting abilities of craft and creature, and the oft described holographic nature of sightings.

Aside from the motivations of UFO occupants, many human witnesses do attest to a very distinct “holographic” behavior of some craft and entities, as if they were being projected onto our three-dimensional landscape from a higher dimensional source. The word “projection” often appears in witness descriptions, stating that an object or entity appeared to be a projection, as if from a film projector onto a screen…the screen often being the night sky itself. 

Other researchers in the fields of Ufology and the paranormal have taken up the interdimensional cause, also suggesting that IDH might apply to demonic entities, angels and cryptozoological creatures as well, since many of them also appear in similar “projection” or holographic-like fashion. Noted author and researcher Brad Steiger once wrote in the 1977 “Blue Book Files Released in Canadian UFO Report” that “we are dealing with a multidimensional paraphysical phenomenon that is largely indigenous to the planet Earth,” a belief that is mirrored by many in the field of paranormal studies to this day. Ufologist and journalist John Keel was another who abandoned the ET hypothesis in favor of something more bizarre. In Keel’s case, his studies into UFOs and “fortean” mysteries led him to link UFOs to ghosts, demons and even monsters, which he documented in his book “UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse.” In 1971, he coined the term “ultraterrestrials” to describe UFO entities as shape-changing non-humans, clearly not of this earth!

Maybe, UFOs don’t come from anywhere out there at all. Maybe they come from “in here,” as constructs and creations of the human mind. Some scientists and those of a psychological bent have long shouted that UFO sightings were nothing more than “all in the mind” or even mass hallucinations involving dozens, sometimes hundreds of witnesses. But this explanation, while not accounting for physical evidence such as video and photographs, might not be entirely out of the realm of possibility. The human mind is indeed capable of doing and perceiving strange things, and as we authors wrote about extensively in our book “The Déjà vu Enigma: A Journey Through the Anomalies of Mind, Memory and Time,” the collective mind can lead to cults, mass hysteria, religious fervor, mob mentality and even shared visions, especially those of a religious or spiritual nature.

The only way we will ever fully come to identify just what UFOs are, in all their various presentations, and where they come from…not to mention why they are here, would be for full disclosure of all global government documents ALONG WITH full disclosure from the aliens themselves. Chances are slim to none that will happen anytime soon, and we will continue to witness, identify, misidentify and theorize about exactly what is going on in the skies above us.

Reprinted, with permission of the publisher, from EXPOSED, UNCOVERED, AND DECLASSIFIED: UFOS AND ALIENS © 2011 Edited by Pye and Dalley. Published by New Page Books a division of Career Press, Pompton Plains, NJ. 800-227-3371. All rights reserved.