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.