Ever since human beings have had some sense of the immensity of the Cosmos, when we look up to the starry array above their heads in the dark of night, an enduring question emerges: How many other planets with sophisticated civilizations like ours are out there? With a thousand pinpricks of light coming through that black tapestry of the night sky, many of us logically assume the cosmos is likely teeming with life.

Of course, that initial impression, based more on a hunch perhaps than solid data, has only grown stronger and stronger as our understanding of the immense scope of the universe has come more fully into view. Dazzling as the earth, our home planet is, it is but one rock circling one star in one star system amongst hundreds of billions in our Milky Way galaxy alone. And likewise that galaxy is merely one of trillions scattered across the vast expanse of the cosmos.

The so-called Fermi paradox arises from the apparent conflict between the lack of clear, obvious signs of extraterrestrial life despite consistently high estimates for their probable existence. This paradox is named after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, who, as the story goes, in the midst of a casual conversation with fellow physicists Edward Teller, Herbert York, and Emil Konopinski, in almost the precise middle of the 20th century, exclaimed, when thinking on these matters: “But where is everybody?”, or something to that effect.

It is indeed a perplexing matter. As time has gone on, we’ve gathered more and more evidence not just about how gargantuan the cosmos actually is, but how, as Dr. Ian Malcolm, a character in the original Jurassic Park movie played by Jeff Goldblum famously says, “Life finds a way”. In other words, life seems to spring up even in the most inhabitable of environments. That being the case, and considering how many goldilox-like planets must exist, even amongst the many planets that are perhaps not suited for life, where are all those civilizations? Why are we not finding clear evidence of their existence?

Of course the Fermi paradox makes certain assumptions, firstly about the nature and ultimate reality of the spacetime construct we find ourselves seemingly firmly embedded within. But also about the notion that civilizations that are perhaps out there – and perhaps much more advanced than we earthlings, would not choose to interfere with our ability to perceive their existence. When you really think about it: this is a rather strange assumption to make. After all, we manipulate our environment almost the moment we gain the ability to. Why would this not occur with interstellar civilizations that have mastered interstellar and perhaps even intergalactic travel in the same way we’ve mastered intercontinental travel?

And of course, last but certainly not least, there is the clear evidence, gathered not just over the course of what you might call the modern UFO era, reaching back to the early to mid 20th century, but even to our distant religious lore and early Creation myths, suggesting these Others have been here for a very long time, perhaps even predating us as beings walking this blue pearl of a planet.

So, all this being the case, what does this mean? Why are we simultaneously being visited and interacted with by these various non-conventionally human others, while also being presented with a visible universe that appears starkly devoid of life? These are the compelling and head-scratching matters that we’ll endeavor to make sense of in this, the 71st episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.

In the long history of strange events occurring in the lives of human beings, the drive for understanding has been, not surprisingly, shaped by the model of reality prevalent at the time. Thus, while our distant ancestors saw the appearance of strange, awe-inspiring non-human intelligences as a manifestation of angels and demons: entities normally bound to the spiritual domain beyond this mortal coil, modern westerners have tended to see more recent appearances of these non-human entities as the arrival of extraterrestrial entities who’ve traversed the vast expanse of outer space to get here.

In both of these described kinds of encounters, the interpretation has less to do with the elements of the encounters themselves, and more to do with the overarching meaning-making model of a particular civilization. And, of course, this is not just a time-bound phenomenon. Because, even today, a Shamanistically-oriented culture is likely to see these Others in a very different light than a scientifically-minded society shaped by the values of the Enlightenment.

In fact, when the gatekeepers of a particular society are convinced that certain kinds of described encounters just simply cannot be – as in modern western societies – then when these encounters are cloaked in a particularly potent degree of what is often termed High Strangeness, the event is just suppressed altogether, lest the witness be deemed mentally unstable or of questionable credibility. This of course doesn’t mean that such events don’t happen, but merely that they have no place to be categorized and analyzed within a particular framework.

All this is to say, the annals of non-conventional encounters from across time serve as a kind of road map for our shifting collective attempt to describe reality itself. And to separate the understanding of these kinds of encounters from the overarching meaning model of a particular time and place in which they occurred is to miss a major point of the exercise; for these matters work hand in hand, in a coordinated and interwoven feedback loop of event and interpretation.

Typically, while a certain brave subset of pioneers are willing to question the meaning model of a particular time and place, the overarching metanarrative doesn’t begin to break down – making room for new and transcendent hypotheses – until the sheer volume of outlier data has created enough collective cognitive dissonance so as to make it clear that there is no other feasible way forward than to trail-blaze a new metanarrative.

Speaking of trailblazing new metanarratives, today we’re going to discuss the work of just such an individual. Donald Hoffman, an American cognitive psychologist and professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, with joint appointments in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, the Department of Philosophy, and the School of Computer Science, is someone who – decades ago – became convinced that the reality model that western society has been living under over the last several centuries simply cannot stand. From his perspective – and he is one of a growing segment within the scientific establishment – the data arising from diverse fields of study has made it clear that physicalism – the metaphysical view that all mental phenomena are ultimately physical phenomena, or necessitated by physical phenomena – is simply incorrect.

Make no mistake, Hoffman’s postulations are not based in imagination and wishful thinking. No, truth be told, mathematical theorems and the implications of the theory of evolution by natural selection are what drive this new line of thinking. These ideas, put forth in a model he calls Conscious Realism, have profound implications for our understanding of all that is. And as it pertains to the usual subject matter of this podcast, Hoffman’s work opens up new, tantalizing and explanatorily powerful ways of making sense of the strange encounters we’ve been discussing, while also offering a robust explanation to make sense of the so-called Fermi Paradox. It is the implications of Hoffman’s Conscious Realism as it pertains to the UFO Phenomenon and general paranormality that we’ll be doing a deep dive into in this, the 66th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.

Ventures into the skies above our heads may have begun with the Wright Brothers and their rudimentary attempts at flight, but within decades those initial crude experiments evolved into sophisticated spacecraft that could not only take humankind soaring only into the skies, but well beyond. Indeed, by the 1960s the future for humankind seemed clearly to be destined for space, and eventually the colonization of near and distant planets.

And as we gained in our understanding of spaceflight, and as our ever more powerful telescopes could peer farther and farther into the great expanse of the so-called Final Frontier of outer space, we began to wonder aloud about how long it would be before we would discover other civilizations, perhaps now traveling the stars as we hoped to do in the decades to come.

And yet, no matter where we looked, and no matter how far we looked, it seemed that, while every nook and cranny of that great expanse was filled with dazzling displays of starry splendor, life — that is, sophisticated, non-human, alien life, was nowhere to be found. Even something as primitive as bacteria remained elusive.

This of course, led to the obvious question: where was all the life we assumed was out there? If there were plenty of planets in so-called habitable zones, as all of our growing body of data seemed to suggest, why weren’t we discovering life? Why weren’t we picking up the transmissions of distant civilizations with our ever more powerful and far-reaching sensors and telescopes?

This conundrum is known as the Fermi paradox, which, according to Wikipedia, is states thusly: -The Fermi paradox, named after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial life and various high estimates for their probability (such as some optimistic estimates for the Drake equation).

Now, while this dilemma still troubles many – especially those holding to a more traditional understanding of how life in the Cosmos is likely to have developed over the last several billion years – there are others who have postulated that the reasons are obvious once one really looks at the question in the right way. In other words, the problem lies not in the apparent result, but in the very assumptions we make as to what advanced, non-human life will look like, how it would behave, and where and how we’re most likely to find it.

Not only do these refreshingly inventive, forward-thinking ways of seeing this issue help us to address the Fermi paradox, but they also open up intriguing possibilities as to how we humans may evolve to the point where we too can follow suit, perhaps finding passage into the fascinating realms these Others may already be existing in.

These notions also help those of us intimately involved with a topic such as the UFO Phenomenon to perhaps better understand a truth that we think is staring us in the face: a truth suggesting these Others are not only “out there”, but here, in and around the Earth, and perhaps have been for as long, or longer, than we have. These compelling ideas and the intriguing potential implications they give birth to, are the very matters we’ll seek to explore in this, the 45th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.