For those who’ve spent decades searching for answers to the elusive yet seemingly ever-present enigma colloquially known as the UFO Phenomenon, the last several years have been a whirlwind of activity and revelations. It is well understood by those veteran to this field that elements within the U.S. government spent decades not only covering up details that made it abundantly clear that there really was a there there – that we were being visited by non-human intelligences operating craft of the most sophisticated nature – but they simultaneously sought to silence those who sought to proclaim this very fact to the masses.

Using a combination of scorn and ridicule, at minimum, and personal and professional tacks and even violence when necessary, at maximum, the U.S. government’s general approach to the matter of the UFO Phenomenon was to squelch public interest in this topic, while simultaneously doing it’s darnedest to understand it. Of course part of the reason why that approach remained static for so long is that the secret-keepers didn’t make much headway in terms of really getting to the bottom of the enigma.

Yes, there have been crashes and crash retrievals along the way, including of craft that evidence now seemingly suggests we did manage to bring down on occasion, and there apparently have been some major technological breakthroughs as a result. But the real root of this issue still remains elusive. And here I speak of the identity of the beings who are parading around our skies with impunity, and who are interacting with, and sometimes taking aboard their craft and into what appear to be other apparent domains of existence, civilians who the military is powerless to protect.

This is not to say that these so-called abductions are purely malevolent in intent, but merely to point out that, when you get down to it, part of the reason the government has kept this under wraps for so long is that they have zero ability to police the skies within our nation state borders, and thus they are failing in one of the core tenets of what makes a nation-state viable to begin with. In other words, why should a populace ascribe authority to a government when it is simply unable to ensure the smooth running of a society, with even the most basic guarantee as to citizen safety?

Not only is the notion of so-called “protected air space” rendered meaningless by these Others as they buzz in and around our skies, but so too are physical boundaries like locks, doors, walls and the like. When they want, these Others can appear in your room, in the middle of the night, and there’s nothing the government can do to prevent it. And here I really do mean literally nothing.

And this is because these Others have demonstrated the ability to control consciousness itself. Thus even if you stationed an entire military brigade outside a known abductee’s house, these alien beings would make child’s play of getting around these safeguards, including by putting the entire troop into a deep sleep, or simply putting them into a temporary state of suspended animation until they are done with their business.

As I mentioned at the outset, the government’s about-face in recent years really has taken long term ufologists by surprise. These veteran researchers spent so many decades trying to get the government to open up about what it knows about UFOs and the beings operating them, that many of them have been shocked by how quickly things have been changing of late.

For the first time in history, we really do seem to be on the verge of full-blown disclosure. And by that I mean, not only the acknowledgement that some of the craft and phenomena being spotted regularly in our skies are not the property of the U.S. military of any other known nation-state operator, but also that we are being visited by non-human entities, of a sophisticated nature, who seem to rank higher on the proverbial food chain than do we human beings.

Heady days indeed. And again, everything I’m hearing from my sources suggests this really is happening. We really are on the cusp of a civilization-changing series of disclosures. Announcements that will unquestionably and irreversibly change the way we human beings think about ourselves within the larger context of an immense, ancient and multi-dimensional cosmos.

But we again come to the real question at hand: who are these Others? Where are they coming from? How long have they been here? What are their intentions? How many of them are there? Are they one group, or many? These are the fascinating, yet daunting, matters we’ll seek to engage with, from the vantage point of a towering 30,000 foot view, overlooking the multidimensional landscape, if you will, in this, the 70th episode, of the Point of Convergence podcast.

For getting on for 80 years now, people have been trying to expose secrets kept under lock and key by deeply embedded, so-called “black ops programs” that many believe are holding back irrefutable evidence pertaining to knowledge of, and interaction with, non-human intelligence. These same people believe that when this secret is finally exposed to the world, it will bring about revelations that will mark a key turning in the course of human civilization, ushering in an era of inter-galactic cooperation with a larger family of civilizations.

Of course, that’s for the people who believe that these Others mean us good, and are here as part of a peaceful mission to help us ascend to the next development level. There are other people who agree that a secret is being kept from humanity, but that this is in part because the news is not good: that these Others are dominator races whose aim is either to conquer us via overt means and technology that greatly eclipses our own, or via some insidious plan that involves a hybridization program meant to turn humans into something else entirely.

But this picture still isn’t complete – because both of the above conceptions of what’s going on tend to involve intelligences believed to be extraterrestrial in origin. The thing is, even when one looks at the evidence that exists as part of the literature behind the so-called UFO Phenomenon that’s publicly available as a result of the work of tireless researchers, it’s not at all clear that what’s being interacted with are solely off-world races who’ve traveled here via sophisticated spacecraft.

In fact, even if one finds this topic because of a kind sci-fi interest in advanced spacecraft and alien biological beings originating on some exo-solar planet, the data one comes across – assuming one is diligently perusing the totality of the historical data, that is – quickly turns the picture ever more obscure and confusing. And that’s because, while extraterrestrials definitely seem to be “in the mix”, as it were, the total picture is much more complex and multifaceted. Some find this complexity intriguing and inspiring, while others are left feeling unmoored from what they used to believe defined “reality”, as a result of these revelations.

Some grab a-hold of these revelations with a fervor, feeling inspired to explore elements of a clearly multi-dimensional reality that makes our former conceptions look like child’s play, while others end up abandoning the endeavor altogether, convinced that the more mind-bending aspects of the data suggest a mixture of human fraud, ego, mental instability and the like have painted a picture that can’t possibly be accurate. Of course, this exposes the fact that what we’re willing to entertain as being part of the fabric of the larger reality, says as much about who we are – as individuals, and as different cultural groups – as it does about the true nature of all that is.

How are we to make sense of this disorienting complexity? How are we to walk what some perceive to be a minefield of competing and mutually exclusive hypotheses regarding the origin and nature of these mysterious non-human Others? These are the very matters we’ll seek to address in this, the 50th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.

For almost as long as human beings have been looking up and spotting strange aerial vehicles making astonishing maneuvers in our skies, people have been reporting a parallel experience that in most people’s minds, is even stranger. I speak of direct contact with the supposed intelligence controlling these advanced craft.

Sometimes the contact comes in the form of remote, telepathic communication – where human beings find themselves being communicated with by an apparently non-human intelligence not immediately present. Other times non-human entities seem to appear, in person as it were, wherever an experiencer is, making the event all the more concrete and ontologically disturbing.

Of course, the most — depending on your point of view — famous, or infamous, type of contact, is in the form most commonly referred to as “abduction”. This kind of event involves humans being taken — often reportedly against their will, and under a form of paralysis — and transported directly onboard UFOs — i.e. alien craft. The means of this transportation often involves bizarre elements such as levitation and the passing, seamlessly and effortlessly, through solid walls.

What is often termed “the Abduction Phenomenon” takes on an even stranger turn with the added consideration of an even more startling metric. Here I refer to the finding that many, if not most, of the people who have experienced such an event have come to realize, sometimes on their own, and sometimes with the aid of tools such as hypnotic regression, that these experiences are not isolated events, but actually part of a repeating pattern, often stretching well back into early childhood. Sometimes even a history stretching across generations of genetic lines emerge.

Even stranger than the revelation of this evidently alien intervention in the lives of reported thousands, if not millions, of people, right across the planet, is the reported nature of these contact events. These experiences are as utterly disorienting and paradigm-shattering as they can be ultimately illuminating and transformative. The sheer depth and richness of the experience has led author/experiencer, Whitley Strieber, to refer to the experience as “communion”. And, like Streiber, contactees/abductees are often left with artifacts, such as missing time and bodily implants, at the end of these uncannily bizarre episodes.

But make no mistake, while these experiences can ultimately play a deeply transformative role in the lives of experiencers, they are — perhaps of necessity, based on the reality-bending nature of the information being conveyed — also ontologically shocking, and often — at least initially — astoundingly traumatic. Perhaps there is no easy way to ease a human being into these kinds of revelations. They effectively pull the rug out from underneath a person, even if, what’s eventually put in its place, for many anyway, is something much richer and more inspiring.

To complicate matters further, the expanded understanding of both self-identity, and reality itself, often discovered in these visits to the realm of the Others, even brings into question our somewhat limited understanding as to the nature of free will, when a soul may have made participatory decisions about the nature of these interactions, even before birth into a human body.

The dual nature of these contact experiences: that are as soul-shakingly bewildering as they are ultimately illuminating and potentially deeply transformative, is the topic of this, the 14th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.