The Shape of Possibilities

Lately, to balance an urge to surrender to disappointment with certain earth governments, I’ve been exploring fiction and nonfiction about anomalies around our planet. People scoff, but I’d rather be too open than not open enough. After all, scientists and others are caught unaware almost daily by quirks of reality they didn’t predict. Given the perpetual clueless strife around the globe, it’s not comforting to know we live in a world that mocks our assumptions about animals, the cosmos, the oceans, our own consciousness, and the human body. Odd that we can be arrogant when we’re dead wrong so often. We might as well grin with delight at the rollercoaster ride.

We all watched with varying degrees of skepticism when the U.S. military admitted they have something like 350 incidents reported as UFOs since 2021,* reports they can’t dismiss out of hand unless they cheat and make up details. One is, of course, the UAPs, or unidentified aerial phenomena—dots or tic-tac shapes that seem able to accomplish astounding feats of speed, direction, disappearance, and an ability to function on land plus under water. I’ve mentioned civilian Chris Bledsoe who has a daughter Emily who, like him, has the mental ability to summon UAPs to appear before them. Together, their brain waves mirror one another as they relax into an unspoken but deliberate invitation. The most recent event was recorded by the TV documentary BEYOND SKINWALKER RANCH in the middle of the wild Everglades where there are neither lights nor electricity, except for the gear brought in for the taping.

The science fiction novel THE LIFE IMPOSSIBLE by Matt Haig leaps forward from real life anomalies with the aid of Haig’s creativity. He imagines a benign extraterrestrial presence waiting for humanity to grow up. Breakthroughs in perception seem to begin with imagination, so I feel justified in wondering if these glowing dots observed on SKINWALKER RANCH are advanced life forms and not space anomalies at all. What if some of the wonders we attribute to space aliens are foreign only to us, forms that evolved on this planet or maybe arrived here to settle long before we evolved? Many of us already accept the possibility of dimensions of being that could be our ultimate destination when our bodies here are worn out. The part most interesting to me is that these UAPs or lights or even beings seem to be far more advanced than we are. (If I were being cynical, I would say it wouldn’t take too much to be better than we are.) At least we haven’t been attacked yet, that we know of, so we temporarily assume they’re benign. And we’ve rarely been naïve enough to automatically conclude there are no other intelligences in this universe or beyond.

In the science fiction novel HAIL MARY by Andy Weir, a human astronaut encounters a life form far advanced from us in many technological ways but so naïve about the cosmos at large that the survival of its kind is threatened. Alien and human alike must learn to trust one another. We’re reminded that in spite of our tremendous hubris about ourselves, we humans are actually quite primitive in our grasp of the universe (or universes) around and beneath us. As undeniable evidence, we demonstrate only fragmentary efforts to preserve what makes our planet habitable although we don’t yet have the ability to transport our population to another livable location. The fabulously wealthy among us often assume they’ll be able to force their way onto any vehicle that becomes necessary before they purchase comfortable survival in its destination. Perhaps human survival is both frail and cyclical, hence the many “lost” civilizations that remain on earth only as ruins. We may discover that we, as a human race, should’ve been working far harder to develop our consciousness, the only part of us able to approach immortality.

*CNN: “US Government has received more than 350 new UFO reports” by Katie Bo Lillis and Kristin Fisher/January 12, 2023.