Ep 24: UFOs & High Strangeness: The 6-Layer Model by Vallée & Davis
Sources & References
Incommensurability, Orthodoxy and The Physics of High Strangeness: A Six-Layer Model For Anomalous Phenomena by Jacques Vallée & Eric Davis
Them by Whitley Strieber
The Monkey Business Illusion
Episode Transcript
Welcome back to The UFO Rabbit Hole podcast. I’m your host, Kelly Chase.
Today’s episode is an important one, because it’s going to lay the groundwork for a lot of the things that we’re going to be discussing moving forward. In the weeks and months to come, this is an episode that I’ll likely be referring back to often.
And that’s because today we’re diving into an article written by two heavyweights of ufology that serves not only as an essential framework to support our understanding of the complexities and nuances of the UFO phenomenon, but that also—in a very real way—helped to lay the foundation for the recent push for UFO disclosure. In short, it’s not only important that we take the time to really understand the ideas presented in this article—but to understand where it fits into the history of modern ufology.
The paper to which I’m referring is Incommensurability, Orthodoxy, and the Physics of High Strangeness: A 6-Layer Model for Anomalous Phenomena written by Jacques Vallée and Eric Davis. Most people will already be very familiar with those names, but just in case they are new to you, you can find links to their bios and other work in the episode brief.
What is so significant about this paper is that it seeks to create a framework by which we can begin to analyze and integrate the parts of UFO encounters that rarely make it into sci-fi media, and even more rarely make it into serious discussions about the phenomenon itself—which is the undeniable and pervasive occurrence of events and effects that are traditionally relegated to the realms of high strangeness and the paranormal.
If there’s nothing else that you take away from this episode it should be this—encounters with UFOs and non-human intelligence are much, much weirder than you’ve probably been led to believe. As are the psychological and physiological effects on witnesses that often last long after the encounter is over—sometimes for the rest of their lives.
The details of actual UFO encounters—as opposed to the sanitized versions that the public is typically most familiar with—are full of profound absurdities and contradictions that are impossible to reconcile within the frameworks of our consensus reality. This has led many to simply ignore these features of the phenomenon in favor of a more traditional “nuts and bolts” approach, or more commonly, to deny the reality of the phenomenon entirely, writing witnesses off as being either hoaxsters or mentally ill.
And yet, when you look at the decades of data, these elements of high strangeness are perhaps the most consistent feature of encounters with UFOs and NHIs. If one is to throw out the high strangeness baby with the bathwater, in a very real way, you’re no longer talking about the phenomenon as it actually exists. What you’re left with is a contrivance constructed to keep people from feeling uncomfortable which ultimately bears very little resemblance to the actual facts of the situation.
In this paper, Vallée and Davis show no such squeamishness. Drawing on thousands of witness accounts collected over decades, they offer us a six-layer model that allows us to begin to get our arms around the complexities of this phenomenon—and offer insights into the path we must take to begin to make progress in our understanding of this challenging field.
I’m excited to dive into it. But before we do, I just want to note that, in many ways, this episode serves as a prologue to the next big series that I’m working on which will focus on Skinwalker Ranch. And more specifically, to its connection to AAWSAP (the predecessor of AATIP) and many of the leading figures in the current push for government disclosure including Luis Elizondo, George Knapp, and many others.
The reason that this paper is so relevant to that discussion is because it articulates some of the most critical conclusions of the experts who helped to shape the strategy behind AAWSAP’s investigations—as well as the reason why Skinwalker Ranch was identified as a place of significant interest. And if you’re not entirely sure what all of that means—don’t worry. We’ll get to the history behind all of that in an upcoming episode.
For now, this is the main takeaway:
A popular narrative within the debunking community, perhaps most popularly articulated by Steven Greenstreet in a series he did for The New York Post, boils down to the idea that the current push for disclosure is being led by a bunch of crackpots and grifters who tricked some gullible folks in Washington into giving them money back in the late 00s to pursue their paranormal pet projects. And the basis for this accusation, inevitably, comes back to their connection to Skinwalker Ranch.
As we’ll explore more deeply later on, Skinwalker Ranch in Utah has long been reported to be a location besieged by paranormal activity, of which UFO sightings are just a small part. The phenomena reported on the ranch include cattle mutilations, poltergeist activity, the appearance of portals, apparitions of strange cryptids, mysterious injuries to people on the ranch, and the notorious “hitchhiker effect” wherein visitors to the ranch seem to take some of these strange phenomena home with them.
For those in the debunking community who are furthering this narrative, anyone involved with the decades of investigations at the ranch are clearly compromised. They’re either crazy or they’re selling something. After all, anyone who would consider that these stories could have any truth to them—much less report having experienced them for themselves—must have a screw loose, right?
It’s an easy conclusion to jump to. All it requires is that you ignore literally all of the data about these encounters that has been collected for decades—not just at Skinwalker Ranch, but around the world,
What I hope to demonstrate through our discussion today, as well as in episodes to come, is that this simplistic understanding the UFO phenomenon is based on a profound lack of education about the reality of these encounters, and is more about propping up the least challenging version of consensus reality than it is about engaging objectively and fearlessly with the actual facts of the situation.
So without further ado, let’s dive into it.
Problems with SETI and UAP Paradigms
In this paper, Vallée and Davis frame their core arguments through a discussion of the orthodox approaches to both SETI and UAP studies. In both cases, they argue that the orthodox approach is flawed, and ultimately inadequate to truly grapple with the complexities inherent to understanding any kind of advanced, non-human intelligence.
In understanding what’s wrong with the traditional approaches and methodologies in these fields, we can begin to plot a new, and more objective, course forward.
SETI & The Assumption of Mediocrity
Let’s start with SETI.
SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and refers to all of the collective scientific activities undertaken to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life. SETI efforts involve the use of astronomical techniques to search for evidence of technology or artifacts indicating intelligent life beyond Earth—most commonly in other solar systems.
SETI uses several common techniques to search for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. One of the primary methods involves scanning the skies with large radio telescopes for narrow-band radio signals that are unlikely to be produced by natural celestial phenomena. Optical telescopes are also used to search for laser signals and other potential artificial optical emissions. Some researchers analyze the atmospheres of distant exoplanets, looking for chemical signatures that might indicate the presence of life or even pollutants that could be the result of an industrial society.
In their paper, Vallée and Davis argue that most of the techniques traditionally employed by SETI are based on what is ultimately a fundamentally flawed assumption—specifically, the “assumption of mediocrity.” The assumption of mediocrity posits that Earth and human civilization are not special or unique in the universe, but rather typical or average.
This idea has its roots in the Copernican Revolution which began in 1543 when astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published his paper “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.” In this paper, Copernicus proposed a heliocentric model, where the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system. This challenged the prevailing view that the Earth was at the center with the sun, planets, and other objects orbiting around it, which had been accepted for centuries.
This was a radical shift in perspective for the human race that impacted much more than just our view of the motions of the celestial bodies. Instead of being God’s most prized creation having dominion over a planet at the center of the universe, we suddenly had an awareness that we were smaller players in a much larger reality—and that everything might not be about us.
The shift away from Earth’s centrality in the universe led to a philosophical shift, as well. The prevailing wisdom became that our planet, and by extension humanity, is not privileged or special in the cosmic scheme. And therefore, our observations of the universe from Earth are not made from a unique or special vantage point, but rather one that could be considered typical or average.
This idea was only further reinforced as our understanding of the cosmos expanded in the following centuries. As we’ve come to terms with the sheer vastness of the universe, it has only contributed to the notion that there is nothing particularly special about humans or the planet on which we find ourselves.
And our approach to SETI over the past several decades has been deeply informed by this assumption of mediocrity. It’s been used to guide our search strategies and methodologies as we seek to find other intelligent civilizations. For example, we assume that other planets that harbor life will look more-or-less like Earth in terms of their size, atmosphere, and chemical composition. We define the so-called “habitable zone” around other stars to be the zone that could support life as we know it. And we assume that advanced civilizations would have evolved within a technological paradigm that is similar to our own.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. When you’re looking for signs of life in the universe with what are necessarily limited resources, you have to narrow your search down to the places where you think it would be most likely that you’ll actually find it. And to narrow that search down, you need to create a set of reasonable parameters based on what you already know. And since Earth is the only planet that we know of that has life, much less complex lifeforms or a technological civilization, it makes sense that we would use that as our starting point to define the parameters of our search.
And yet, as we’ve begun to discover and catalog planets orbiting other stars, what we’ve found should give us cause to reevaluate our assumptions about the averageness of our planet and our solar system. Of the nearly 5500 exoplanets that we’ve discovered thus far, only 200 (or .04 percent) of them might be similar to Earth. And two new studies released this year indicate that the structure of our solar system, with smaller planets orbiting closest to the sun and getting larger the further out you go, is actually the rarest classification of solar system that we’ve found.
It’s still early days, but the evidence that we’ve collected thus far seems to indicate that we might not be as average as we thought.
Anthropocentric Bias in SETI
And as Vallée and Davis argue in their paper, it’s not just assumptions about planets and solar systems that may be hindering our search for extraterrestrial intelligences, but our assumptions about the nature of those intelligences, as well.
The ironic thing about the “assumption of mediocrity” is that it ultimately leads us to adopting a view of reality that overly privileges the human perspective. Here’s what I mean by that:
The discovery that the Earth wasn’t at the center of the solar system, and that our solar system is just one of countless solar systems in a vast universe, led us to the humbling realization that there might not be anything particularly special or unique about our existence. However, in assuming that we are “mediocre” or “average”, we end up assuming that other intelligent species in the universe would likely be more like us than not like us.
This creates what is referred to as an anthropocentric bias—or a tendency to view reality, including the universe, through a human-centered perspective. And as Vallée and Davis argue, it’s very likely that this anthropocentric bias is more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to identifying other advanced intelligences in the universe.
And this argument makes a lot of sense. As we discussed at length in episode 3 of the Waking Up Inside the Cave series, the senses of any living organism don’t evolve in a way that is uniform across species. Rather, they evolve to give each species the ability to collect the information from their environment that is most relevant to their ultimate survival. The difference in the sensory experiences even between animals that live on the same planet and within the same environment are vast.
Therefore, we can expect that an intelligent species that evolved on a different planet and within a completely different environment would have a sensory experience that would be very alien to us. This inevitably means that they would be very different from us in a lot of other ways as well. The technology they developed would work very differently, they would likely have entirely different scientific paradigms, different cultures and values, and would construct their civilizations in ways that would likely have very little resemblance to our human experience.
And so it’s very possible that in designing our SETI efforts around the idea that a technological extraterrestrial civilization would look and operate much like our own is misguided—and that it’s causing us to filter out evidence that doesn’t fit within that paradigm.
Anthropocentric Bias in Ufology
Vallée and Davis argue that this sort of anthropocentric bias has inevitably made its way into ufology, as well. This is primarily due to the fact that, the default within the field has long been the extraterrestrial hypothesis—or the belief that the UFO phenomenon represents a highly advanced civilization originating on another planet.
I’ll pause here briefly to say that although this is still typically the assumption of the mainstream, we’ve made a lot of progress in ufology in the 20 years since this article was written. I’d say that most people who have even a casual interest in the field today are much more likely to be familiar with the many various hypotheses for the origins of the phenomenon, and tend to take a more agnostic view as to which one is most likely. But certainly, this was not the case when the paper was written back in 2003.
However, we still have a long way to go in pushing back against anthropocentric bias. Even among those who allow for a wider range of possibilities for the origins of the phenomenon, you’ll still see a tendency to assume that whatever non-human intelligences we’re interacting with would behave in ways that are more-or-less intelligible to us. We talk about their motivations in terms of human motivations and we talk about their timelines in terms of human timelines.
We wonder why the others don’t just make themselves known and tell us what they want. Rarely do we consider the vast chasm of meaning that likely lies between us, or how difficult it might be to construct a message that wouldn’t get lost in translation.
The Need For A Unified Approach To UAP Studies
Keeping in mind the lessons from SETI, and the overlapping insights about UAP studies, Vallée and Davis argue that we need a new unified approach to researching the UFO phenomenon. And for this investigation to be successful we’ll need an approach that takes into account the full scope and complexity of these encounters—while recognizing the truly alien nature of the intelligence that lies behind the phenomenon as we experience it.
Vallée and Davis further argue that, given the inability of our current paradigms to explain these baffling complexities, we need to be prepared to formulate scientific hypotheses with regard to the nature of UFOs that might be contradictory.
This is something that sometimes happens in science when our current models break down in the face of new discoveries and emerging paradigms. They explain this situation in the following way:
“In any scientific question it must be possible to ascertain to what extent a hypothesis, when tested and proven to be true, actually ‘explains’ the observed facts. In the case of UAP, however, as in physics generally, a hypothesis may well be ‘proven true’ while an apparently contradictory hypothesis is also proven true. Thus the hypothesis that the phenomenon of light is caused by particles is true, but so is the opposite hypothesis that it is caused by waves. We must be prepared for the time when we will be in a position to formulate scientific hypotheses for UAP, and then we may face a similar situation.”
This point is really important to be able to move forward with a deeper understanding of the UFO phenomenon. The seemingly contradictory nature of UFO encounters, and the seeming ability of these craft to operate outside of current scientific paradigms is often pointed to as proof that there is nothing more to this phenomenon than modern folklore. And it’s why, even among those who are willing to engage with the possibility that this phenomenon is real, so many have trouble moving beyond the traditional “nuts and bolts” framework that regards these objects as physical craft and nothing more.
And in this way, the example of the dual nature of light offered by Vallée and Davis is an apt one. As we’ve discussed in several previous episodes, despite the fact that quantum mechanics is one of the most empirically successful scientific theories in the history of physics, any physicist will tell you that we’re not entirely sure how it works—we just know that it does work and with stunning accuracy.
Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once famously said: “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” And yet, for the past century, we’ve been able to use this theory to make staggering breakthroughs in technology giving us everything from computers and smartphones to lasers and telecommunications to atomic clocks and GPS.
In short, Vallée and Davis argue that the absurdity and contradictions that reveal themselves in our analysis of the data around UFO encounters is not worse than the scientific puzzlement with regard to the most baffling aspects of quantum mechanics like particle/wave duality and quantum entanglement. And this contradiction is not the result of some misinterpretation of the data, but the inadequacy of our language and current m
The Six Layers of UAP Analysis
With this important point in mind, Vallée and Davis propose a 6-layer model of UAP analysis. Drawing on thousands of cases from Vallée’s decades of research, as well as from the National Institute of Discovery Sciences database, this 6-layer model categorizes the commonly recurring aspects of UAP encounters while allowing for the seemingly contradictory elements to co-exist.
Let’s talk through what each of these layers involves:
Layer I: Physical
The first layer is the physical layer. This is the layer that deals with the “nuts and bolts” of the actual craft and all of the data that tells us that UFOs do have some kind of a literal, tangible existence in the physical realm.
For example, UFOs have commonly been reported to:
- Occupy a position in space, consistent with geometry
- Move as time passes
- Interact with the environment through thermal effects
- Exhibit light absorption and emission from which power output estimates can be derived
- Produce turbulence
- Leave indentations and burns when the land from which mass and energy figures can be derived
- Give rise to photographic images
- Leave material residue consistent with Earth chemistry
- Gives rise to electric, magnetic, and gravitational disturbances
These are the aspects of UFOs that are most familiar to us and can be most easily and directly investigated by known scientific means. Although the other 5 layers deal with the aspects of the phenomenon that are more mysterious and less aligned with our current paradigms, the physical layer of UFOs suggests that, at least sometimes, these craft are operating in physical space and time as we understand it.
Layer II: Anti-Physical
The second layer is the anti-physical layer—and this is where things begin to get weird. Because although we know that UFOs can operate in a manner that is very similar to the kinds of physical craft that we’re familiar with, they do a lot of strange things that suggest that they are, at times and in a variety of different ways, operating outside of our current understanding of space-time.
For example, UFOs have commonly been reported to:
- Sink into the ground
- Shrink in size, grow larger, or change shape on the spot
- Become fuzzy and transparent on the spot
- Divide into two or more craft, or merge into one object
- Disappear at one point and appear elsewhere instantaneously
- Remain observable visually while not being detected by radar
- Produce missing time or time dilation
- Appear as balls of colored, intensely bright light under intelligent control
- Produce topological inversion or space dilation (which is when a craft is reported to be bigger on the inside than it appears on the outside, T.A.R.D.I.S.-style)
This suggests that what we’re dealing with is a phenomenon that doesn’t interact with the physical world in a way that is aligned with our current understanding of physics.
Layer III: Psychological
The third layer is the psychological layer which has to do with both the psychology of the witnesses and the social conditions that surround them. This is the layer about which the authors say the least—just a few sentences. They point out that human observers tend to see UAP within their normal social context, and that in these cases they often perceive the objects as non-conventional but then try to explain them away as common occurrences, unless faced with the inescapable conclusion that the object is truly unknown.
I’d like to expand on this point a little bit, because it represents what I would argue might be one of the most interesting, and hardest to study aspects of the phenomenon. And having experienced a version of it myself, I find it endlessly fascinating.
In the first episode of this podcast I shared an account of a UFO encounter that I had when I was kid while on vacation with my family in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. It was pretty standard stuff. I was sitting outside alone one night looking at the stars and I had the sudden thought—a thought that I’d never had before—that if I looked directly up at that exact moment that I would see a UFO. And sure enough, I looked up and directly above me a bright white light was moving much faster than any plane I’d ever seen. It performed two consecutive right angle turns and then shot off over the horizon at a speed that took my breath away.
I ran inside to tell my family what I’d seen, and of course, no one believed me. And by the next day, I wasn’t really sure that I believed myself either. What do you do when you see something that every rational person in your life tells you is impossible? And what do you do with an experience that doesn’t fit into any of your meaning-making models about the nature of your existence?
In my case, I never really forgot it, but I didn’t really have anywhere to put it either. It just floated there, a rogue data point with nowhere to go. Over the years I thought about it less and less, until eventually I didn’t think about it at all.
But after I’d been doing the podcast for about a year, I came to a startling realization—I’d actually had another UFO sighting that was much more profound and happened in broad daylight.
I don’t want to get too bogged down in telling the whole story here, but I have told it before on the Somewhere In The Skies podcast and I’ll link that up in the episode brief if you’re interested. For our purposes today, I’ll just share the highlights.
When I was 21, I was sitting on a hill with a friend at Virginia Kendall Park just outside of Akron, Ohio in the middle of a sunny afternoon when we saw something very strange appear in the sky just above the treeline. Everything about this object was disorienting. First of all, it seemed to come out of nowhere, as though it came out of a hole in the sky itself. From our vantage point on the hill we had a clear view of the sky above the trees in all directions, but we never saw it approach. It was just there.
The object was large. I estimated it to be about the size of the Goodyear blimp which is stored nearby and is a common sight in the sky on a clear afternoon in that part of Ohio. But it was more cigar-shaped than blimp-shaped. And although it moved slowly above the treeline in a manner that reminded me of the blimp, this was very definitely not the Goodyear blimp, or any other similar kind of airborne craft I’d ever seen.
The object was brownish and although it was very large and no more than a couple of hundred feet above the treeline on a clear day, it was somehow blurry. I don’t know how else to describe it. It had a distinct shape and size, but its edges were unclear. It was hard to tell exactly where the open air stopped and it began. It was strangely difficult to even look at it directly. Looking at it made me feel uneasy like I wanted to turn away.
It drifted above the trees for a short time, maybe only a minute or so, before it disappeared in the same strange manner that it appeared, as though through a hole in the sky itself. My friend saw it, too, and we both sat there for a while trying to make sense of what we had seen, but nothing seemed to fit. And interestingly, we never once considered that it could be a UFO or something of otherworldly origin. Maybe that was because it didn’t look like any UFO that we’d ever seen in movies or on TV, or maybe something else was at play there.
But for whatever reason, we eventually moved on to talking about other things. And as far as I can recall, we never talked about it again after that. And much like with my first encounter, I didn’t forget that it had happened, but I rarely thought about it. I knew I’d seen something, but I didn’t know what. And that mystery didn’t seem to have much relevance to my actual life, and so I just filed it somewhere in the back of my mind and moved on.
The fact that it took me over a year of in-depth research and devoting myself full-time to a podcast on the subject of UFOs before I uncovered that memory was and is surprising to me—and more than a little disturbing. I hadn’t forgotten that it had happened, my brain just never made the connection. The dissonance of that still sometimes makes me feel queasy if I think about it too much.
Could my experience have been a result of the psychological layer of UAPs that Vallée and Davis point to? I’m honestly not sure, but it seems possible.
In the last episode where I interviewed director of The Experiencer Group, Jay Christopher King, he shared a couple of different stories where people in his life who had been present for some of his anomalous experiences had either forgotten those incidents only to recall them decades later, or where multiple people had shared an experience yet only half of them remembered it the next day.
In his phenomenal book entitled Them, contactee and experiencer, Whitley Strieber, who also wrote the well-known book Communion, shares insights into his impressions of “the others” based on his years of interactions with these beings. One example that he uses throughout the book to illustrate the strange way in which the phenomenon seems to slip through the cracks of our perception is the famous “monkey business illusion”. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, I don’t want to give it away, but I’ll have it linked up in the episode brief so that you can check it out for yourself. It’s a short video, but it requires your full attention, so if you’re driving or operating heavy machinery, come back to that one. It can wait. But it’s worth your time if you haven’t seen it.
The thing about the psychological layer of UAP analysis is that it’s extremely difficult to study it directly. Like the field of psychology itself, it deals with a person’s subjective experience and relies on self-reporting. There is no way to empirically access the contents of someone else’s experience, and even if you could, how would you identify something that had entirely escaped their notice? It’s a slippery business.
And yet, it’s hard to deny that there is something to it. Probably most of you listening have experienced something similar, even if you’ve never had a UFO sighting or other anomalous experience. Just the fact that you are engaging with these ideas, whether or not you fully believe them, gives you a window into this aspect of this phenomenon. If you’ve tried to tell friends and family about the latest UFO hearing—or the other startling revelations coming out of Washington over the past several years with regard to this phenomenon—and seen how little interest most people have in something that is so undeniably interesting and profoundly weird, then you know what I mean.
The phenomenon is slippery. It’s seemingly very good at evading detection because it’s very good at evading our notice. And if meaningful disclosure does come, it’s likely that in future centuries we will look back at this time period with a greater awareness of just how strange that aspect of the phenomenon is—and wonder how we didn’t see it.
Layer IV: Physiological
The fourth layer of UAP analysis is the physiological layer. This layer deals with the ways in which the phenomenon interacts with our physical bodies and our senses.
The phenomenon is reported to cause things like:
- Sounds (including beeping, buzzing, humming, sharp/piercing whistling, swooshing/air rushing, loud/deafening roaring, sound of a storm)
- Vibrations
- Burns
- Partial paralysis
- Extreme heat or cold sensation
- Odors often described with words like powerful, sweet, strange, rotten eggs, sulfurous, pungent, musky, etc)
- Metallic taste
- Prickling sensations
- Temporary blindness when exposed to the object’s light
- Nausea
- Bloody nose and/or ears; severe headache
- Difficulty breathing
- Loss of volition (or the ability to act according to one’s will)
- Drowsiness in the days following a close encounter
What’s particularly interesting about the physiological layer is that many of the sensory phenomena described by those who have had UFO encounters overlap significantly with those reported by people who have had what we would tend to classify as paranormal experiences, as well as with those reported in more recent years by people who have suffered from Havana Syndrome.
In folklore, particularly in cases describing encounters with beings that might be considered to be demonic, you find countless reports of strange sounds, burns and wounds of unknown origin, a metallic taste in the mouth, strong odors like sulfur or rotten eggs, and loss of volition.
And the symptoms of Havana Syndrome include piercing sounds; strange vibrations and prickling sensations in the body; nausea, headaches, difficulty breathing; and drowsiness in the days following the onset of symptoms.
Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting here that these things all have the same origin. Although I’d argue that we can’t rule it out, the reality is that we don’t know for sure. The fact that the physiological effects of these different phenomena overlap, but don’t entirely converge seems to suggest that they don’t have the same origin. And despite their similarities, they may not be related at all. But perhaps the overlap between the physiological impact of these different strange phenomena might one day provide us with the key to discovering their cause.
Layer V: Psychic
The fifth layer of this model is the psychic layer, and it describes aspects of the phenomenon that are most commonly associated with parapsychology.
These include:
- Impressions of communication without a direct sensory channel, such as telepath
- Poltergeist phenomena, motions and sounds without a specific cause, which can occur outside the observed presence of a UAP
- Levitation of the witness of objects and animals in the vicinity
- Maneuvers of a UAP appearing to anticipate the witnesses thoughts
- Premonitory dreams or visions
- Personality changes promoting unusual abilities in the witness
- Healing
Layers four and five are particularly challenging because they fall so far outside of our existing paradigms and are associated with phenomena that we’ve been taught to doubt and ridicule. There are many who come to the study of UAPs being unwilling to even entertain these stranger aspects of UFO encounters because they are already prejudiced to believe that these things are impossible, if not outright silly.
But the reality is that when we look at the thousands upon thousands of UFO encounters recorded by serious and reputable researchers, these are the patterns that emerge. And we can’t just throw out the data points that we don’t like or that don’t comport with our current understanding of reality, especially when they appear again and again and again. Just as with the strange, and seemingly impossible aspects of quantum mechanics, it is possible to form extremely accurate models of how a phenomenon behaves without necessarily knowing why it behaves that way.
In short, if we ever hope to attain greater insight into the true nature of the UFO phenomenon, we are going to have to get over our squeamishness regarding its strange and contradictory aspects and take the data points as they present themselves. If you want to do ufology—and do it right—you have to be willing to get weird.
Layer VI: Cultural
The sixth layer is the cultural layer. And this layer is too complex for us to fully dive into in this episode.
The cultural layer is concerned with society’s reactions to reported encounters with UFOs themselves, as well as the way in which it both creates and responds to secondary effects (such as hoaxes, fiction and science fiction imagery, scientific theories, cover up or exposure, media censorship or publicity, sensationalism, etc.)—as well as to the attitude of members of a given culture towards the concepts that UAP observations appear to challenge.
So obviously, it’s a lot that we’re talking about here, and it’s a ball of yarn that is too big for us to untangle today. In their paper, Vallée and Davis only spend a few sentences on this particular layer of their model. Their main point is that the greatest impact of the phenomenon has been on general acceptance of the idea of life in space—and a more limited, but potentially very significant, change in the popular concept of non-human intelligence.
Although the authors don’t go further in this article, I think it’s worth our time to take a moment and look at the cultural aspect of the UFO phenomenon in the context of one of Vallée’s most enduring and challenging hypotheses—which is that the UFO phenomenon acts as a sort of a control mechanism that influences humans beliefs and perceptions.
According to Vallée, the recurring patterns of UFO encounters, as well as their elusive and contradictory nature, are more consistent with a control mechanism designed to shape human consciousness than with the activities of visiting aliens.
This system could be likened to a thermostat that monitors and adjusts human beliefs and understanding, creating stimuli that cause societal shifts. Whether these adjustments are aimed at enlightenment, disinformation, or something else entirely is unclear, and Vallée himself does not definitively identify the source or purpose of the control system.
What makes Vallée’s concept so compelling is that it seeks to explain the paradoxes and inconsistencies within UFO sightings and encounters. Rather than tangible evidence of extraterrestrial visitation, the phenomena might be purposeful manipulations, guiding or reacting to human development and cultural evolution.
Some have interpreted the control system idea as implying a sort of “cosmic trickster” that operates through deception, creating illusions to achieve its goals. Others see it as a more benevolent guide, nudging humanity along a particular path. It could be either, both, or neither—we don’t know.
But it’s an intriguing idea. And it suggests the possibility that the purpose and mechanisms of the phenomenon might be much more vast and complex than we can imagine.
Possible Nature of UAP Technology
So, taking all of the six layers we’ve discussed into account, what can we postulate about the possible nature of UAPs? Vallée and Davis propose the following (and I’m just going to read this part directly from the paper, because I think it’s important)
“Everything works as if UAPs were the product of a technology that integrates physical and psychic phenomena and primarily affects cultural variables in our society through manipulation of physiological and psychological parameters in the witnesses.
This single statement can be developed as follows:
- The phenomenon is the product of a technology. During the observation, the UAP is a real physical material object. However, it appears to use either very clever deception or very advanced physical principles, resulting in the effects we have called “anti-physical”, which must eventually be reconciled with the laws of physics.
- The technology triggers psychic effects—either purposely or as a side effect of its manifestations. These consciousness phenomena are now too common to be ignored or relegated to the category of exaggerated or ill-observed facts. All those who have investigated close range sightings have become familiar with these effects.
- The purpose of the technology may be cultural manipulation—possibly but not necessarily under control of a form of non-human intelligence—in which case the physiological and psychological effects are a means to that end. But the parapsychologist with a Jungian framework may argue that the human collective unconscious is also a potential source of such effects—without the need to invoke alien intervention.”
So as we can see, this model can help us to make some progress with regard to understanding the nature of the phenomenon, but we’re still ultimately left with more questions than answers. But it’s clear that the authors’ intentions with this article wasn’t to leave us with any easy answers, but rather to challenge us to push our thinking further into the zone of uncertainty in order to allow ourselves to grapple more fully with the full implications of the phenomenon.
Further Complexity
Because after presenting us with the six-layer model, Vallée and Davis proceed by presenting us with two other concepts that they argue are key to understanding the scope of the challenge with regard to UAP studies—the incommensurability problem and semiotics.
The Incommensurability Problem
Let’s start with the “incommensurability problem.”
One of the biggest challenges that we have in understanding the UFO phenomenon comes down to our ability (or more accurately, our inability) to decipher the meaning of its behavior and communication. And the concept of incommensurability gives us a window into how truly challenging that can be in the case of our interactions with non-human intelligence.
Incommensurability is a complex idea that has roots in both the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language. In essence, it refers to the inability to measure or compare two systems if there is a lack of common standards or terms of measurement between them.
To better understand this, let’s take the example of the Rosetta Stone. As you probably already know, the Rosetta Stone is an ancient stone slab that was found in 1799, inscribed with three versions of a decree issued in Memphis, Egypt in 196 BCE. It is written in three scripts: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and Ancient Greek. The stone’s discovery allowed scholars to decipher the hieroglyphs, which up until that point had been largely a mystery to us.
The Rosetta Stone gave us a set of common standards that allowed us to decode what the hieroglyphics meant. By comparing the texts, researchers were able to match the symbols in the hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts with their Greek translation. This paved the way for a deeper understanding of Ancient Egyptian language and culture. Without a common set of standards to help us decode the hieroglyphics—in this case the Greek script—all of that would have been lost to us.
However, the gulf of culture, context, and meaning that existed between the scholars who first used the Rosetta Stone to decipher ancient hieroglyphs and the Egyptians who used them, is nothing compared to the gulf that almost certainly exists between humanity and whatever intelligence lies behind the UFO phenomenon.
In short, we know very little about the intelligence behind UFOs. We don’t know where it comes from, what it wants, or what it values. We don’t know how its technology works or its scientific models. We don’t know what its sensory experience is like, nor the extent to which that sensory experience might—or might not—overlap with our own. And it’s very likely that in all of our attempts to try to conceptualize what this intelligence might be like, we are grossly underestimating how truly alien it might be to us, and unintentionally projecting our own anthropomorphized view of reality onto it.
Vallée and Davis frame the problem in the following way:
“At the core of the Incommensurability Problem is the view that no intelligent species can understand reality without making certain methodological choices, and that these choices may vary from civilization to civilization. If ETs and UAP entities have different biologies and live in considerably different environments from humans, they may well have different goals for their science, and radically different criteria for evaluating the success of their science. They’re explanatory mechanisms, they’re predictive concerns, their modes of control over nature might all be very different, and their means of formulating models of reality should be expected to differ drastically from ours.”
In trying to communicate, or even to understand the motivations of a non-human intelligence, we’re likely to run into a variety of barriers that would make it nearly impossible for us to make sense of these interactions.
Communication Challenges
First and foremost, we’d likely have communication problems. Humans and any non-human intelligence would almost certainly have entirely different modes of communication. Language, whether spoken, written, or symbolic, is deeply tied to the ways in which a culture perceives and interacts with the world. If the non-human intelligence operates with a completely different sensory and cognitive framework, it might be impossible to translate human languages into their communication system, and vice versa.
Conceptual Understanding
Even if some basic level of communication is established, there may be profound differences in underlying assumptions, ways of thinking, values, or even fundamental concepts like time, space, or consciousness. These differences can create a barrier to understanding that goes beyond mere language translation, rendering certain ideas incommensurable between the two species.
Ethical and Cultural Barriers
Incommensurability might also extend to ethical systems and cultural practices. The non-human intelligence might operate under a set of ethical principles that are radically different from human values. Trying to understand each other’s actions and intentions might be hindered by these fundamental differences.
Technological and Scientific Paradigms
Assuming the non-human intelligence is technologically advanced, their scientific paradigms and technological approaches might be completely alien to human understanding. Their technologies might be based on principles, methodologies, and even senses that are incompatible with human science.
The incommensurability problem highlights the profound challenges that can arise when trying to understand, compare, or translate between different paradigms, cultures, or even species. In the scenario of human contact with advanced non-human intelligence, incommensurability could pose significant obstacles to communication, cooperation, and understanding.
Addressing these challenges would likely require a highly interdisciplinary approach, combining insights from linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, and more. It might also necessitate a profound humility and openness to completely unfamiliar ways of thinking, living, and perceiving the world.
Semiotics
Vallée and Davis give us another way to approach the complexities of the “incommensurability problem” through an exploration of semiotics.
Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation. It’s not confined to written language alone but extends to various forms of communication like gestures, pictures, and sounds. In a broader sense, semiotics deals with how meaning is constructed and understood. According to semiotics, anything can be a sign as long as someone interprets it as ‘signifying’ something.
For example, the word “dog” is a sign that signifies the four-legged, barking animal that all know so well. However, although I can say the word “dog” and you know exactly what I mean, in reality, there is no innate relationship between the form of the message and the content borne by the message. “Dog” is just a word that humans invented and the only reason it means anything to us is because we understand and agree upon its meaning. We could have just as easily called them “schmoops” or “barky guys” and it would have worked just as well as long as we agreed upon the meaning.
In semiotics, when the association between the sign and the signified is arbitrary, as it is in the case of the word “dog” and the animal that we refer to as dogs, the sign is called a symbol. When we’re talking about symbols there is no intrinsic connection between the form of the expression and what is being expressed.
So obviously, if we’re talking about communication between humans and non-human intelligence, symbols—which includes written and spoken language—aren’t going to be very helpful. We just simply wouldn’t have the shared cultural, historical, or sensory context for us to be able to decipher any meaning in the message. Just like the hieroglyphs before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, these messages would be meaningless to the party receiving it.
An alternative to the arbitrary connection between sign and signified that is seen in symbols is an icon. An icon is a sign that bears a physical resemblance to the signified. So instead of the word “dog”, which is a symbol, you could use a picture of a dog, which would be an icon.
And it’s important to note that icons can be used even when the thing being signified is less concrete. For example, the scales of justice can be considered to be an icon because there is a similarity between the sign of the scales that balance two weights and the signified—the concept of justice which involves a balance between transgression and punishment.
Although, obviously, in the case of communication with a non-human intelligence, an icon of a dog wouldn’t do much to help an intelligence who’d never encountered a dog to understand what it is. And there is an even greater likelihood of meaning being lost in the more abstract case of the scales of justice. So just because icons have a more direct relationship between sign and signified, they still aren’t very helpful in a case of communication between intelligent species that don’t have a shared cultural or sensory context.
However, as I mentioned earlier, icons don’t just have to be visual. They could function in any sensory modality. Vallée and Davis use the example of a certain species of fly that beats its wings at a frequency that is very close to the wing-beat frequency of a very dangerous species of wasp. As a result, when the fly is in the vicinity of a group of these wasps, the fly gains some immunity from attack by insect-eating birds who avoid it thinking that it’s a wasp, too. So basically, the fly’s defense strategy involves producing a vibrational icon based on frequency.
But even when we use icons, the problem that we still end up running up against is that we have no real way of knowing what sorts of sensory inputs a non-human intelligence might have that might allow them to decipher the icon. If they evolved on another planet or in another dimension or even deep within our own oceans their sensory experience could have very little, if any, overlap with human sensory experience. In the same way that you wouldn’t be able to communicate with a blind person by drawing them a picture, communications between humans and non-human intelligences could be missing each other entirely.
Given that we don’t know which sensory modalities might be used by a non-human intelligence, our best bet would be to try to utilize a method of communication that is not reliant on any particular sensory modality.
For example, in SETI, electromagnetic radiation is often used as an iconic representation, allowing us to more directly communicate concepts including the chemistry of Earth, the organization of our solar system, human DNA, math, geometry, etc. in a way that doesn’t require us to encode the message into a format specific to a particular sensory modality. With this approach we are hoping to point the potential recipient of that message directly toward the thing that we are trying to describe instead of toward the models that we use to describe those things.
However, even this approach has major flaws and challenges. No matter how directly we try to communicate our message, the reality that we can’t escape is that the sign and the signified are always in a triadic with the interpreter of the relationship between the two. The relationship between any icon and the thing it is meant to represent does not exist independently of the intelligence that is perceiving the similarity.
At the end of the day, similarity is in the eye of the beholder. We can’t assume that a relationship or a similarity that seems obvious to us would be so obvious to an intelligence with a different biology, culture, and history. Our carefully coded messages could just come across as noise—and the same could be said for messages from them to us.
High Strangeness & The Abduction Problem
Based on the concepts of the “incommensurability problem” and semiotics, Vallée and Davis argue that although we may may interpret the behavior of UAPs as outlined in the six-layer model as being absurd, this apparent absurdity is likely merely a reflection of the cognitive mismatch between humans and the phenomenon.
Vallée and David explain their argument in this way:
“In this particular case, UAP are sending the messages and we are the recipients. The message(s) they are sending to us are icons—icons fashioned by the phenomenon and sent to us via various sensory modalities. The difference between our respective cultures, biologies, sensory modalities, histories, dimensional existence, physical evolution, models of nature and science, etc. is directly responsible for our lack of understanding of the phenomenon and its messages. We cannot see what UAP believe to be (iconical) similarities in the message that is intended for us. These stated differences directly impact our conventions of interpretation in such a way as to impair our recognition of the ‘similarity’ between the sign and the signified contained within the icons of the UAP message.
The difference between the sensory modalities of UAP entities and humans is responsible for our inability to properly detect the UAP message (or icons) and correspond with them. This difference may also prevent us from correctly interpreting what their icons are if we do in fact recognize them. In this regard, recall that we will project our own species-specific experiences onto their icons (messages) thus manifesting the appearance of ‘absurdity’ during the human-UAP interaction.”
Beyond just the elements of what we would typically categorize as “high strangeness” and “the paranormal” that are evident in the six-layer models of UAP analysis, Vallée and Davis further posit that UFO abduction cases may exemplify this cognitive mismatch. The seemingly “absurd” scenes, activities, and behaviors that abductees report from their experiences could be the result of some sort of misinterpretation or misunderstanding of the visual icons used by the non-human intelligence. Or, perhaps more likely, the abduction events could merely be the iconical defense mechanism that is deployed by the non-human intelligence in order to confuse and protect itself from the victim of the abduction much in the same way that a fly might protect itself from an insect-eating bird by mimicking the wing-beat frequency of a wasp.
Conclusions
So what conclusions can we draw from all of this? Vallée and Davis end their paper by putting forward two main points.
The first is that we need to be thinking in much less conventional terms about what the apparent absurdity of the UFO phenomenon may represent. After all, with our own current technology we’re able to create displays that produce three-dimensional images with color, motion, and perspective. We can assume that a more advanced intelligence would be able to deploy similar display technologies that potentially utilize a much wider range of variables and sensory modalities.
Therefore, it could be that UAP represent physical craft that have the ability to interact both with the surrounding atmosphere and with the senses of observers in such a way as to convey a false image of their true nature. It’s been hypothesized, for example, that microwave devices might be able to create perceptual hallucinations in witnesses. (And to return to an earlier point, such microwave devices are one of the hypothesized causes of Havana Syndrome.)
However, Vallée and Davis conclude their paper by arguing that even these potential realities fail to fully explain all of the reported effects and subsequent behavior changes in people who have close encounters with the UFO phenomenon. They write:
“We must assume something more, the triggering of deep-seated processes within their personality. The question then becomes: to what extent are these effects evidence of purposeful action of the operators? To answer this question, and to test more fully the hypothesis that UAP phenomena are both physical and psychic in nature, we need much better investigations, a great upgrading of data quality, and a more informed analysis not only of the object being described, but of the impact of the observation on the witness and their social environment.”
Interpreting “Them”
OK, so now that we’ve covered the full contents of the paper, I want to take a few minutes to talk through what these concepts might look like in practice, and how they are currently being deployed by some of the top minds in the field of ufology to further our understanding of the potential nature of the intelligence behind the UFO phenomenon.
Garry Nolan and Talking To Ants
Let’s start with Dr. Garry Nolan.
I’m sure that most of you are already familiar with Dr. Nolan and his work, but for anyone who is newer to the world of ufology, Dr. Garry Nolan is an American immunologist, academic, inventor, and business executive. He holds the Rachford and Carlota A. Harris Professor Endowed Chair in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine. In recent years he has become a prominent voice in the field of ufology and a strong advocate for UFO disclosure.
According to Dr. Nolan, his involvement in the topic began in 2011 when a few individuals from the CIA as well as from a private aerospace company came to his office at Stanford and asked for his help in analyzing the medical records of various members of the military and the intelligence community who had been seriously injured or even killed by close contact with UAP. We don’t have time to go into all of that now, but I’ll link up some of his interviews in the episode brief if you want to learn more.
But suffice it to say that as one of the world’s preeminent scientists in his field, who has not only had access to this kind of data but also prolonged interaction with members of the intelligence community who were investigating the phenomenon, he has gotten to see behind the curtain in ways that few other private citizens have.
In a few of his public interviews, including the ones that I’ll link up in the episode brief, Nolan has said that one of the hypotheses being considered by the intelligence community about the nature of the beings that are often associated with UFOs and abduction cases is that they may be some form of avatars or drones that are being utilized by a non-human intelligence.
He points out that the humanoid appearance of these beings would be highly unlikely if we are, in fact, dealing with beings that evolved on another planet or in another dimension of some kind. Basically, from an evolutionary perspective, we wouldn’t expect that another intelligent species that came from somewhere else and evolved under very different conditions would look so much like us. And yet,what is most commonly reported are beings that share our basic body schema. They have two arms and two legs, they walk upright, they have large heads with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth.
And the possible explanations that he offers for why this intelligence might be using avatars or drones in this way closely mirror the arguments made by Vallée and Davis. First of all, it could be some kind of a camouflage that hides their true nature, much in the same way that a fly might use a vibrational icon to fool an insect-eating bird into thinking that it’s a wasp. And, as Nolan points out, it would make sense for them to send drones to deal with us in much the same way as we use drones in dangerous environments instead of sending actual people.
But another possible motivation for using humanoid avatars could have to do with the incommensurability problem. A particularly compelling example that Nolan uses to explain this comes in the form of a thought experiment.
Imagine that you wanted to communicate with a colony of ants that live in your backyard. How would you do it? And how could you explain to them what humans are, much less explain to them about things like Wal-mart or Instagram or any of the other complex features of our daily lives? And then how would you translate that into the pheromones that ants use to communicate?
Nolan proposes that one way that you might do that is by sending an intermediary in the form of a drone of some kind that would look enough like an ant that an ant would recognize that it was potentially something that it could communicate with, but also, you would want it to look enough not like an ant that the ants would be able to immediately recognize that the drone wasn’t one of them, but something distinctly “other.”
Could that be the case with the humanoid beings reported by abductees and experiencers? Perhaps. It’s certainly an intriguing idea. And according to Dr. Nolan, it’s one that the intelligence community is taking seriously.
Whitley Strieber and The Visitors In the Trees
However, while scientists like Garry Nolan can potentially help us to understand the modality of communication that may be used by non-human intelligence, understanding the content of those communications presents an entirely different challenge, and one that is unlikely to be able to be tackled by science alone.
In order to understand the content of these messages, we need to have a deeper understanding of the cultural and historical references of these beings. We need insight into what they value and the models that they use to make sense of their existence. For us to make any kind of headway here, we’ll likely need to use an approach that is somewhere between anthropology and comparative literature. In short, the meaning of these communications is unlikely to be discovered in a lab, but rather through the oral histories of people who have interacted with these beings—namely experiencers.
One such experiencer is Whitley Strieber, who I mentioned a little earlier. Strieber is an American author best known for his works exploring his decades-long interactions with non-human entities including abductions. His 1987 book “Communion” is largely responsible for introducing the abduction phenomenon into the popular zeitgeist.
In the spring of 2023, he released a groundbreaking book simply entitled Them in which he seeks to lay the foundation for understanding the intent of these strange visitors. To do this, he draws upon thousands of accounts of close encounters shared with him by both civilians and military personnel, and draws upon the insights gained through his over 30 years of experiences to attempt to draw some conclusions about what it all might actually mean.
I have to say that it’s one of the most stunning and challenging books that I’ve read, and I recommend it to everyone and anyone who wants to have a deeper understanding of the phenomenon. Whether or not you agree with Strieber’s ultimate conclusions, the approach that he takes is entirely novel in the field and exemplifies the sort of anthropological and literary approach that we will need if we want to progress in understanding who these beings are and what they want. Perhaps not surprisingly, the foreword to this book is written by none other than Jacques Vallée.
In this book, Strieber first shares the accounts of experiencers as they were shared with him and then follows up with own analysis of what it might mean. So I want to take a few minutes to relay one such story and then look at Strieber’s analysis of it to see what this sort of process might look like.
The encounter we’ll be talking about today comes from chapter 6 of Them entitled “Visitors In The Trees”. It comes from a letter that was sent to Strieber and his late wife in the early 1990s. In the letter a woman relays the very strange events that were witnessed by her family at their house in the countryside.
Visitors In The Trees
It starts around 9 p.m. one evening when she is washing the dishes. She sees what she thinks are bright headlights coming up the driveway, but when she goes to look out the window there is no car there. She thinks nothing of it and goes to bed.
The next morning after breakfast she is standing at the sink again and looks out the window and this time she sees a woman in a red windbreaker jacket and white pants entering the stables on her family’s property. The lady appears to be holding some kind of a long stick in her hand. She asks her daughter to go outside and see what this stranger wants, but when her daughter returns she says that there was no one there.
The woman looks out the window again and this time she sees a man jump off the nearby pumphouse and then bound off into the woods. She describes him as being small with brown hair and says that he seemed to bounce in a way that had no relation to gravity.
This is all strange, but she goes about her day and leaves to run some errands. When she returns her husband comes up to her outside and says, “There are people in the trees! We’ve been trying to talk to them, but they won’t answer.” She goes to the front porch and her children are calling up to the people in the trees asking them to come down and promising not to hurt them, but there is still no answer. She looks up and notices that they have constructed some kind of a platform up in the branches.
Curious she goes inside the house with her daughter and up to the second floor which puts them at the same level of these people in the trees to get a closer look. She and her daughter both see two people in the branches, but one of them has what appears to be a very strange beaded antenna coming out of its head. The other she describes as wearing a very distinctive piece of jewelry which looks like a band striped in different metals of all colors including silver, gold, platinum, green, red, purple, and black. Strangely, these people continue to ignore them.
She goes back outside and she sees what she describes as a woman wearing a kelly green jumpsuit, but she notes that this woman is far too long and thin to be a human being up in the branches. She runs back inside and upstairs to get a better look at this strange woman. She says that she is impossibly thin and is wearing a fawn-colored leather flying hat much like the ones that pilots used to wear in the old-fashioned open cockpits of early planes. She was wearing goggles that also appeared to be from that same era, but they were shaped to fit her enormous, slanted eyes. She appeared to be using some kind of a black filming device which she pointed at the woman through the window.
Frightened, she closes the curtains as fast as she can. Just then her husband walks in and she asks him if he saw the strange, thin woman in green. He says that he didn’t. Determined to learn more she goes back outside and across her front lawn and then suddenly three feet in front of her she sees what she describes as the most incredible being she’s ever seen. She says that it was a “silver, crystal, moving mass of energy and light” and that it is wearing the exact same striped band of jewelry that she’d see on the person in the tree right around the place where their neck might be.
She reports that she and her family are pretty hazy on the events of the day after that. They know that around 4:00 pm some friends came over and they tried to show them the people in the trees, but they were gone.
Before concluding her account she notes that she got very ill after these events. She says that she lost 13 pounds in the following week and had to go to the hospital where she got 2 liters of intravenous fluids. She also had a sore throat, fevers, trouble sleeping, and nausea that lasted for a week. Finally she reports that her youngest child has ground her teeth down and pulls the covers entirely over head every night when she sleeps, but that overall her family is more at peace with the situation than they used to be.
Whitley Strieber’s Analysis
So what does Strieber make of this very strange account?
As he begins his analysis he notes that when he was first sent this letter that he had no idea what to make of it, but that three decades later he sees this seemingly arbitrary grouping of events as a well-organized story with a very definite aim.
I’ll do my best to relate his main points here, but I want to start by saying that any attempt to recreate Strieber’s masterful prose and analysis would undoubtedly fall short, and I really recommend that you read this book for yourself.
First of all, Strieber proposes that the appearance of the strange visitors at this family’s property follows a very clear and meaningful progression, that both allowed them to slowly acclimate to the enormity of events without immediate fear and which also likely was intended to communicate something very specific.
Starting with the first part of that, the first thing the woman sees is headlights in the driveway. This is seemingly a subtle signal that someone—or something—has arrived. The next morning the first person that she sees is seemingly just a normal human woman walking to the stables. This sight is so unremarkable and non-threatening that she sends her daughter down to see what the woman wants. The next being she sees is still seemingly human, but as he bounces strangely off into the woods as though he were less impacted by the force of gravity is her first hint that something stranger might be going on here. But still it is just normal enough for her to doubt what she saw, and to feel comfortable going about her day as normal.
When she returns from the store she has seemingly entered the second act of the story where things have become decidedly more strange. The people in the trees are not behaving the way that normal people would behave. When she goes upstairs to see them better through the upstairs window, the strange antenna sticking out of one of their heads is even more tangible evidence that what they are dealing with here aren’t, strictly speaking, human beings.
This is then immediately followed by her sighting of the long, thin woman with the large, slanted, wrap-around eyes that are so familiar within our modern lore as belonging to alien beings. This is definitely not a human. This is something else. And finally, there is the dazzling light being outside, that is by far the least human of all of these apparitions, seemingly existing in a way that doesn’t comport with anything that we’re familiar with in our normal reality.
Not only does this slow and progressive ratcheting up of the strangeness of this encounter seem to serve as a gradual initiation for the woman and her family that keeps them from immediately panicking and shutting down to the experience entirely, but Strieber hypothesizes that it may also contain a message about the ultimate destiny of humanity and our relationship with “the others.”
He suggests that the progression from visitors that are clearly human to very clearly not human and then, finally, to something that is perhaps entirely post-biological in the way that we think of it seems to suggest some kind of a connection between us and them. Could they be related to us in some way? Or might this progression hint at our own future evolutionary path?
That’s unclear. But Strieber’s novel approach to analyzing and seeking to make sense of the absurdity of these types of encounters gives us a place from which we can maybe begin to have a better understanding of what our encounters with non-human intelligences may be trying to convey.
And for those who may be struggling with just how weird this story is there are two quick points that I want to make:
First of all, in his analysis Strieber fully admits that he doesn’t know whether or not this was a series of events that literally happened or whether it was some strange shared hallucination by the family. And if we think back to our earlier discussion about the nature of the phenomenon, it’s clear that the answer to that question is ultimately not all that relevant as the phenomenon is something that can manifest both physically and psychically.
And second of all, the subjective experience of other people is not something that we can ever have direct access to. So if we find ourselves getting stuck on whether or not any individual person is telling the truth about an anomalous encounter, we’re ultimately wasting our time. That’s not something that we can know for sure.
But that doesn’t mean, as so many debunkers love to suggest, that we can’t learn anything from these sorts of non-falsifiable anecdotes. Because sure, any one particular story could be a lie or a hoax or a case of misidentification of prosaic phenomena. But just like a scholar who is engaged in anthropology or comparative literature, we won’t find the ultimate truth or meaning of this phenomenon by myopically obsessing about the veracity of one story or another. Rather we need to take a step back and look at the anecdotal data as a whole and then attempt to pull out the patterns that emerge to examine them more closely.
That is the only path forward. We just have to be bold and objective enough to walk it.
Until next time.
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