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.

When one considers the history of the UFO Phenomenon, both recent and going well back to the middle part of the 20th century, one thing is clear: subterfuge is an ongoing and ever-present element of the entire enterprise. When these elusive craft are seen, it’s often at night and, on average, in less densely populated areas. When they are spotted over city centers, some people will see these unidentified aerial phenomena, while others will not — because on top of being elusive, the intelligence behind these craft show a clear ability to manipulate human perception directly, in whatever way it sees fit. It is fair to say that you only see them when they want you to see them.

And then there are the witnesses, the abductees and the contactees: known collectively as “experiencers”. When these people do remember coming into contact with these apparently non-human intelligences, it’s often in fits and starts. The memories are foggy and disjointed. For this reason, many of these experiencers seek out trained therapists to conduct hypnotic regression, in hopes of pulling additional details from the ether of the deep subconscious. And when the embedded events do eventually arise in memory, it’s often clear that significant portions of the experiencer’s life have either been blocked from conscious memory, or masked as other events that didn’t tell the whole – or true – story. These shards of recall often touch on genetic manipulation, even the witnessing of apparent alien/human hybridization programs.

The question we’re left with is: Why? Why the secrecy? Why the hiddenness? What’s behind the stealthy nature of this alien intelligence? What can we tease from the data regarding the potential motivations behind these actions? Is this sign of a daunting, looming threat of enormous proportions? Or is a completely different future in play: one that involves a cooperative, inter-species relationship and a subsequently completely changed human civilization? These compelling questions are the topic of this, the 8th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.