For those who’ve been working doggedly to see the matter of the UFO Phenomenon grounded in the awareness of the general public, the focus has long been on political engagement. That is to say, the aim has been to have the government disclose what it knows about these mysterious flying objects and the occupants who pilot them. Beyond the exposing of the details of the secrets themselves, the sense has been that only an official announcement from a podium will be sufficient to move this topic solidly into civilization-wide acceptance.

That said, what has—paradoxically—worked in opposition to that goal, has been the nature of the data themselves. Said more plainly, the issue often comes down to the high strangeness that comes part and parcel with people’s interactions with the anomalous phenomena. Simply put, these “inconvenient details” stretch credulity, and thus work against the hope of seeing official acknowledgement followed by societal engagement.

Here though, we should offer a clarifying qualifier. These elements of high strangeness—often bordering on apparent absurdity— only stretch credulity in Western circles. In other contemporaneous societies, as well as in Shamanic and indigenous societies of the past, these elements aren’t at all objectionable. They are, in fact, welcomed within a much more multidimensional model of relational reality.

Even as some disclosure advocates work to sanitize some of the data—so that the overarching Phenomena has a better chance of seeing official acknowledgment and engagement—people within Western society continue to experience the phenomena themselves; in all their inconvenient, paradigm-shattering, discombobulating glory. And this is resulting in what one might call a revolution of sorts, but one bubbling up from below, rather than descending from on high.

This of course includes—not just highly strange UFOs—but every experiential element that refuses to play by the rules of reductionistic materialism. Here I’m also speaking of elements such as synchronicities, altered states, psi phenomena, etc.. Because these elements are being both experienced and documented, they are playing a transformative, grassroots role in steering Western perspectives along more shamanic lines, even without acknowledgment from the ivory towers of our civilization.

What some particularly astute observers have asked is: is this perhaps by design? Is this an end-goal of the enterprise itself, to drop bread crumbs along the way so that a wayward civilization is able to find its way back into a more balanced understanding of its place within the interactive whole? This is a compelling argument; one deserving of a closer examination of just what’s involved. And that’s precisely what we’ll endeavor to do in this the 116th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.

While modern ufology has been a component of our cultural zeitgeist for decades and decades now, during much of that time it has generally been seen as a matter for astrophysicists and aviation experts. While ground-breaking researchers such as Jacques Vallee, John Keel and J. Allen Hynek, as early as the 1970s, suggested the anomalous and highly strange nature of the data takes us well beyond that kind of conventional inquiry, even today, the mainstream still tends to think of UFOs (now monikered as UAP) and NHI – the fancy new name for what we use to call “aliens”, as involving interstellar travelers arriving at Earth in sophisticated spacecraft.

For many, especially in still physicalist-centric Western civilization, this kind of enterprise represents, at least in potentia, a new kind of contact, and a new possibility for communication that takes us beyond what we’ve been limited to amongst our own species over the milenia. But, here again, the data – when one actually looks squarely into them – take us well beyond that notion. And that’s because – contact – and specifically contact with apparently non-human and non-conventionally human intelligences – has supposedly already been happening. The varieties of contact technologies or modalities that have meditated this non-ordinary kind of communication include mediumship/channeling, shamanic journeying, CE-5/HICE, dreams, psychedelics, and even fever states.

In other words, the issue seems to be not one of needing to wait for interstellar travelers to arrive to finally give us this opportunity, for it’s been available to us all along, with some cultures and people groups being more privy to this fact than others. Interestingly, these various modalities of contact and communication also seem to be possible regardless of what would seem to be the expected language and even species-specific differences. And that’s because mind-to-mind communication, known in parapsychological circles as telepathy, seems to be the general rule rather than the exception in these endeavors, thus bypassing the need for translation of written and spoken languages altogether.

But of course, these startling revelations raise further questions: if the issue is not one of needing to wait for interstellar travelers to arrive via superliminal (that is, faster than light) travel, then how exactly is this contact and communication happening? Have they been here – in our so-called “physical” space – all along? Or does the nature of this contact suggest space, and for that matter, time, is simply not what we’ve long assumed? How is it that these various contact technologies are able to connect us with alternative forms of sophisticated sentience, and what do they have in common that makes them effective? These are the captivating and consequential matters we’ll seek to engage with in this, the 105th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.

Since early in the 20th century people’s imaginations have been captured by the notion of visitors from the Great Beyond visiting our blue pearl of a planet. And of course, for the vast majority of people, and for decades and decades, this “Great Beyond” was assumed to be outer space: the vast array of galaxies, star systems and planets populating the immense expanse of the Cosmos.

When sightings of soon-to-be-branded “flying saucers” were first reported in the 1940s, it was taken as a given that these fast-moving flying vehicles, which were apparently unlikely to be the technology of terrestrial civilization, were examples of these visitors from outer-space finally arrived to make our acquaintance. Immediately the media was saturated with images of “little green men” from nearby planets like Mars, as our imaginations filled in the gaps as to who was piloting these advanced craft.

This view which suggested that these visitors were from outer-space held sway for decades more — even though the potential originating planet for these extra-terrestrials was pushed farther and farther away, as we began to understand more and more about the apparent lifelessness of the neighboring planets within our own solar system.

However, by the time the 1960s rolled around, and gaining steam ever since then, competing hypotheses emerged to explain the source of these apparent Others. And some of these hypotheses even began to question the assumption that these Others were actually really “Visitors” at all.

Researchers likes Jacques Vallee and John Keel, who had examined thousands of cases each, and who tended to be much more familiar with the totality of the data as compared with armchair enthusiasts, began to take note of data-points that suggested perhaps these “aliens” weren’t visiting from far-flung star systems after all. The way these Others seemed to blink in and out of existence, for instance, led some of these more nuanced researchers to wonder if perhaps these Others were popping in and out of different dimensions, almost instantaneously. And if that were true then they weren’t necessarily really coming from far away at all. In fact, they may be dropping in from a mirror universe; perhaps even from an alternate Earth, thus giving birth to what’s often referred to as the Interdimensional Hypothesis.

When researchers like the aforementioned Vallee and Keel considered the long history of the so-called UFO Phenomenon, they wondered if perhaps stories buried in the lore of distant history – here we speak of elves, goblins, the fae, etc., may actually be instances of contact with the same beings who are piloting the craft we see buzzing around our skies today, and who are interacting with modern human beings in consistently – and similarly – confoundingly mysterious ways.

There are various forms that new hypotheses take to account for all of the data we’ve described above, but a common term that’s arisen to describe these not necessarily extraterrestrial Others, is “ultraterrestrial”. This term is seen to capture the sense that perhaps these Others are native to the Earth after all, and may indeed have been here longer than us. But it also allows for the sense that they either: don’t seem to be necessarily tied only to the earth, in our experience of it anyway, and/or that they exist in a bandwidth of reality that only sometimes brings them into direct contact with us – or at least, into a kind of direct contact that we can actually perceive. Perhaps they can see us all the time, but we only seem to be able to “see” them when certain, as of now unknown, conditions are met.

The notion of these ultraterrestrial others is the topic of this, the 24th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.