When Americans (more resistant to this subject of extra-dimensional/extra-terrestrial contact than any other culture on Earth) try to get past their resistance, a common first question is, “What’s it got to do with me?” or “What are they up to?” (as if we must know this answer before we can assert their mere existence).  In the six years since I first became conscious of my connection to this phenomenon, I’ve developed some theories.

    Some of my favorite reading on the subject has been the work of Dr. John Mack, Pulitzer prize-winning author and Harvard psychiatrist and professor, and the first Harvard professor forced to defend his tenure for embarrassing his venerable institution – by writing on this subject.

    (The attorney who helped him successfully defend his tenure was Daniel Sheehan, who also worked on cases as history-making as Karen Silkwood’s murder, Watergate, and Iran-Contra.  Sheehan also made changes in his life to devote one-third of his professional time to studying and ending the government cover-up on these subjects.)

    Dr. Mack, now deceased, posited that we live in a world filled with non-material beings, to which people in Western cultures, he said, probably need to “wake up.”  He was sympathetic to Americans’ resistance to this subject, as even he, a scientist, was resistant at first.  Mack wrote often of the “ontological shock” of having one’s limited but comforting worldview demolished, as it often is for those who experience things “alien.”  I can testify to that shock (and will return to Dr. Mack in a moment).

    While nothing clearly “bad” happened to me in my first conscious encounters, and there were even aspects of the experiences that were familiar, comforting and sometimes blissful, the fact that my old worldview had become so wholly incapable of supporting my experience was terrifying.  It is a very challenging event to suddenly face one’s construct of the world no longer working, as well as realizing there are likely not going to be many people to confirm one’s perceptions – and yet those perceptions cannot be ignored.  They were simply too powerful, too deeply felt in my being, and sometimes there was physical evidence.  Besides, I had heard that others had also experienced this, which added to its reality, but I knew no one personally, so it was isolating, while ontologically shocking.

    Since my initial, shocking realization that our world is not only far more than the comfortable one agreed upon by society, but far more than I’d even experienced in my budding shamanic worldview, I have found it essential to read the accounts of others who’ve experienced things similar to my psyche-jolting events.  Thank goodness there are so many accounts that I haven’t been able to read them all, but those I have echo mine.  And then there are the many accounts of psychologists, psychiatrists, consciousness researchers and other experts who assure me this is not just my imagination.  But they go further:  they assert that these phenomena and other related events, both personal and historical, have been recorded since the beginning of time in every culture on our planet.  

    So, waking us up is, I believe, just one thing that some alien beings are doing for Americans acculturated to see little more than our mechanistic, materialistic, three-dimensional world.  But I believe it’s only a small part of the picture.  

    Other researchers claim that “aliens” (and please work to dismiss the cartoons you may have associated with this word) have other, more questionable (and some would say nefarious) agendas, such as using ova and sperm to create a hybrid race of beings.  I have to admit that this is the sort of claim that I long thought discredited the entire subject in the minds of most Americans.  Yet, I now cannot discount it entirely.

    Dr. Mack interviewed self-proclaimed subjects of “alien abduction” for over fifteen years and reported that most had no mental problems other than the stress of dealing with traumatic experiences for which they had little social or professional support.  He noted that there seemed to be many different agendas one might assert from his body of data:  1) medical and surgical activities that many believe indicates an alien hybrid program, 2) information and evocative visions that encourage human appreciation for our Earth environment and the need to change our wasteful ways, 3) transformational, spiritual and consciousness work, and 4) relationships between humans and aliens which many experiencers believe has preceded their life on Earth and continues.

    All of these possible agendas might have some truth, because the cosmos is likely populated with beings as diverse as our ocean.  For instance, you and I, on different trips to the Earthly ocean, might experience dolphins, sharks, lovely coral reef species, octopi, or scuba divers.  And cosmic ocean-goers might experience an extra-dimensional equivalent of any of these.  As all the oceanic life forms have different “agendas,” so it is in the cosmos.

    Some argue that this is the whole of humanity’s history:  creation by other beings, with regular genetic adaptations, those being the only explanation for the dramatic jump from Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon “almost overnight,” archeologically speaking, and many other archeological mysteries otherwise unanswered.  Science says that if there is no other answer, the best theory needs to be considered.  So, I’m willing to consider this.  Besides, we are beginning to master this science of genetic engineering; why doubt someone else might have accomplished it first?

    The second possible alien agenda is environmental education, which I can understand more easily.  As an environmental activist, I threw myself into this work for decades to educate the public on various issues, though I have no memory of ever being shown the sort of visions that other experiencers say aliens presented to them.  However, I’ve heard military whistle-blowers (those who have risked their professions and pensions) tell their stories that there is a very strong and positive correlation between UFO sightings and proximity to nuclear weapons bases, locations of some of the most threatening materials on Earth for our environment.  Indeed the entire American UFO phenomenon came into widespread popular awareness shortly after we dropped the first atom bombs.  The first suspected UFO crash near Roswell, New Mexico, was where Robert Goddard, “the father of modern rocketry,” had been testing rockets for the previous ten years; and it was near the Roswell Army Air Force Base, home of the only military unit in the world with atomic capability.  Many people, myself included, think this is no coincidence, and it supports the theory that aliens are indeed concerned about our treatment of this planet.  

    Other theorists assert that aliens are assisting humanity with the development of nuclear weapons and other advanced technologies.  Meanwhile those with a more benign interpretation of the alien agenda assert that they (different aliens?) are hoping to protect the cosmos from the catastrophe of a nuclear holocaust and other environmental disasters.  I fall into this latter camp.  I twice saw former Air Force Captain Robert Sallas (one of the men with his “finger on the button” to start a nuclear war from his bunker sixty feet underground) present testimony at two conferences, in which he claimed the ICBM missiles of which he was in charge went “non-operational” one after the other at the very moment his security guards, with great hysteria, reported from the ground above the presence of a glowing red object hovering outside the gate.  When he called his commander, he was told that “the same thing had happened” with another unit of missiles.  That act of decommissioning our nuclear capability gives me hope that at least some aliens are working for the good.

    Transformational, spiritual and consciousness work is a little harder to define, but something I can personally comment on and which has been described by quite a few other experiencers, including Whitley Strieber, Betty Andreasson, and Dana Redfield.  I told a friend the other day:  “If we are only conscious of our mechanistic, materialistic, three-dimensional world, and then we become conscious of a multi-dimensional cosmos, we have obviously had our consciousness expand.”  And as I wrote in the Preface of my book, “Survival, for any living being, requires that its perceptions of its environment be clear.”  So, despite the terror I experienced in my initial “ontological shock,” I’m grateful for having my consciousness expanded.  I feel more certain now of my soul’s survival.  And many other experiencers report the same, though not all.

    Finally, for this very brief overview of what all this might mean to us, there is the issue of relationship.  Many experiencers say they are told or simply know that they are related to these beings.  Since many alien beings appear, well, “alien,” you might think this would be disturbing, yet people feel very strongly that this is true, even when it wreaks havoc with their Earthly relationships.  Many also say that, even as children, they never felt like they belonged on Earth – and I relate to that sentiment.  Still, I considered these beings as “other,” certainly not family, until one day when I experienced a vision of a “cosmic ship” (the best description I could give to a huge, city-sized thing) moving in some other dimension, but toward us; and with that vision came the sense that I knew those people intimately and warmly, and they have known me for thousands of years, even though I can’t remember them, except in this most vague way.

    Admittedly, some assert theories beyond these four, for instance, that the Earth is a “prison planet” and we humans are the slaves or “cattle.”  I’ve entertained those ideas.  And I’ve wondered if all these possibilities might be true in a multi-dimensional cosmos, depending on where we put our energies – which reality we choose to create.  Since I do believe that we strengthen ideas and energies by our attention, I choose not to focus on the that particular idea, and thereby hope to help diminish any possibility of it, at least as it relates to me.

    I have, however, written on some other frightening topics, because I was forced to grapple with them personally for many years, and I wanted to offer others in the same boat the benefit of my experience:  the convergence of the US government with this phenomenon, as well as with mind control experiments, which happen to correlate coincidentally with the arrival of UFOs into our cultural awareness.  I’ll address this government connection more fully in another essay.