To graduate from the current cosmic and dimensional isolation we are going to have to stretch beyond our addictions to fossil fuels, corporate greed, and abuse and degradation of the planet itself. We need to become the “Mind at Large,” as Aldous Huxley named it, and bring forth our capabilities for lucidity. Only then might we be able to meet the “others” on an even playing field. The expansion of our mind beyond our limited personality will bring in a sense of super-conscious awareness of the implicate order, as Linda Moulton Howe and John Mack claim in this collection. In this way, meeting the others will make us more human and more humane. Additionally, as others in this collection — the Hurtaks, Mary Rodwell, and Caroline Cory — indicate, becoming multidimensional is becoming more of ourselves as human beings. Only then we will have what it takes to truly make contact. ~ Alan Steinfeld
I was offered an ARC of Making Contact from its publisher, and although it isn’t quite the sort of thing I might ordinarily pick up, I was interested enough to give it a read. Turns out, this is a collection of essays from various writers in the UFO community (curated by Alan Steinfeld, above) and that variety makes for a bit of a mixed bag. I found some of these essays to be quite compelling and some were...less so. I will say that these writers and their ideas don’t come across as dangerous or kooky conspiracy theories, and if this collection’s ultimate message is that there’s a higher consciousness out there waiting for humanity to treat the planet and each other better, and to then reclaim our birthright to enhanced love and understanding, then that’s a direction I can get behind. For another reader: I don’t know if “believers” will find much new here, and there wouldn’t be much to turn a “skeptic”, but for another open-minded general knowledge seeker such as myself, this is certainly interesting enough to fill some pleasant hours. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Do we know the rhythms of our world? What is a sigh of wind? Is it the breath of the dead? Are we visitors here on Earth? Have these white beings pierced this dimension? Those vehicles that we see in the sky — flying cigars, saucers, balls of light — do they slip in and out of our reality frames, time frames? Their motion is un-cognizable to us; they seem to slide, defying gravity as we understand it. There is no “thrust.” Imagine their huge and perilous adventure: What have they had to invent to get here? My mind chatters on . . . the intellect gabbles: “This stuff is nonsense. It doesn’t make sense.” ~ Henrietta Weekes
It’s common to dismiss the ideas of UFOs and alien abduction as “nonsense” and I appreciate that this collection begins with an essay that acknowledges that reality by Nick Pope. Having served as a civilian employee at the UK’s Ministry of Defense for twenty-one years, Pope opens with information on why governments might run secret UFO research programs — and why they would deny their existence. He then gives us perspective on the US government’s release of information, in December of 2017, that admitted to just such a program (AATIP), as well as releasing videos from Navy jets as they chased unidentified objects which travelled at impossible speeds and trajectories. Is this an acknowledgement of the existence of alien spacecraft? If the US government doesn’t believe in them, why do they fund research into their existence (especially as the funding goes to private aerospace companies which puts their findings out of the reach of FOI requests). And if the US government does have proof of alien contact, why wouldn't they make it widely known?
In a later essay, Dr. John E Mack — former head of the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who, while trying to determine the psychiatric basis for people’s alien abduction stories became a believer in the phenomenon of alien abduction — writes about the Politics of Ontology, “which has to do with how a society organizes itself, particularly through a certain elite group, to determine for the rest of that society what is real.” We know that UFOs and alien contact is nonsense because everyone knows it. However, as Mack wrote:
People know their own experiences, and know when they have undergone certain experiences that don’t fit the prevailing mechanistic worldview. Whatever polling methods you may use, it is apparent that large percentages of people seem to know there is an unseen world or hidden dimensions of reality. They may not call it that, but they know that the subtle realms exist. They know their own experiences and trust them. They are not fooled by NBC or by The New York Times or Time or other official arbiters of the truth and reality. We have a kind of samizdat of reality going on here, an underground of popular knowledge, that the universe is not the one we are being officially told it is. It is really going to be interesting to see when the official mainstream, the small percentage of elites who determine what we are supposed to think is real, wake up to the fact that the consensus view of reality is gone. We are, I think, getting near that moment.
However, while I did find such information compelling, not everything in this book worked for me. I have enjoyed Linda Moulton Howe's appearances on Ancient Aliens, I have always accepted her credentials as an investigative journalist, but I didn't know that she believes that she was brought to the moon at ten years old, where she was shown that it's a hollow, artificial satellite used for alien observation of Earth. Likewise, the second essay (Grant Cameron on his Theory of Wow) was so exuberant, to the point of kookiness, that I could have stopped reading there. I can sort of follow along with the contributors who explain that the aliens are coming from another dimension (and therefore not breaking the laws of physics as we understand them), I could easily be convinced that humanity is an alien experiment being run for their amusement, but I'm resistant to the idea of there being multiple alien races living inside the Earth, using humans as proxies in their conflicts. Ultimately: There’s a wide variety of tone, structure, and content in these essays, and while I found it hard at times to connect with that or that author’s ideas, I was never bored.
We know that there are trillions of stars, in trillions of galaxies, and that this is probably only one of an effective infinity of universes . . . which all probably have an infinity of mirror universes breathing neutrons back and forth between their realities like great, enigmatic hearts. And then there is this band here on this tiny speck of dust, touched with intelligence and struggling to find our magic as we sail through infinity on the coattails of a wandering star. ~ Whitley Strieber
