This week, I’ve been dragged away from my explorations of the consciousness frontier by a document put out by the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) – its ‘Report on the Historical Record of US Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP)’, an exercise mandated upon it by the US Congress.
When I set out to research consciousness – as I say in my introduction to The Light Beyond The Mountains – what I didn’t expect was to find myself repeatedly hauled back to the subject of UFOs.
But I’m beginning to accept this is how it’s going to be.
UFOs are a portal of entry into the consciousness story because you can’t get into the ‘science’ without eventually bumping into paranormality, of which, UFOs are a subset.
I’m putting quotation marks around ‘science’ because the only consciousness science officially unites around is the kind generated within the brain, a picture of how we view the world in a way that is broadly accepted as ‘consensus reality’. I need also to place quotation marks around ‘officially recognises’ because there’s another side to this story – one that isn’t recognised officially, despite an up-and-coming breed of scientists who say we need to pay attention to it.
This part of the story says that maybe – or, indeed, quite possibly – consciousness is an ‘offboard phenomenon’, a facet of our universe that floods everything (and everyone) and we just happen to tap into it, much as a TV or radio tunes into a signal.
What, then, might we be tuning into?
This question is just one of the waypoints on the journey explored by the book.
As paid subscribers will know, the story of The Light unfolds, chapter by chapter, every two weeks, and is constructed narratively; that is, it’s a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, with waypoints in each ‘act’ reflecting, essentially, the order in which I came across the data.
But it’s more than this too – because it’s not just the order in which I came across the information as presented that’s important, but the order in which, cognitively, I was able to assimilate it.
The subject of consciousness is fraught with complication. With no scientific consensus on its causes, confronting the issues can be extremely vexing – it was, certainly, for me. It’s no secret from a plot-spoiling perspective that I end up in the reality-is-stranger-than-we-can possibly-imagine camp. As a storyteller, I feel I’ve a duty to relay the information in a way that lets the reader know that, for me, this really has been (and still is) a journey – and that by recounting the events narratively I’m able to give a sense of how those ‘locks of understanding’ untumbled at key moments. In the meantime, I’m also getting to grips with a column – this one – that is more discursive around current, unfolding events.
This means, every now and again, I’m forced to give hints about the journey ahead, which puts the storyteller in me in conflict with the tech-writer part of me – the data-driven guy.
Does this spoil the story?
Hopefully, not.
Allow me to digress for a moment …
We know NASA’s 1970 Apollo 13 mission ended with the successful recovery of its crew – knowing this when we go into the movie theatre doesn’t (or shouldn’t) spoil our enjoyment of the film.
What makes the story compelling is the way its screenwriters and director (Al Reinert, Bill Broyles and Ron Howard), abetted by some great performances from its cast, unfolded it. A story that could have become swamped by an overload of geek science - NASA working every engineering angle to get the spacecraft home - ended up, as all good stories should, having a simple arc: against all odds, we ask ourselves, following that instigating explosion, how will the crew survive, let alone get back to Earth?
In an essay I entered in the Bigelow Institute of Consciousness Studies’ competition – its exam question (paraphrased slightly here): ‘Provide the Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death’ – I mention (on p.6) how strange it is that mainstream science dismisses data pertaining to ‘scientific anomalies’ – and specifically paranormal data – when its own models are riddled with them.
The causes of the Big Bang, the spark of Creation, are unknown; as are the reasons for the universe’s accelerating expansion – an observation, when it was recognised 30 years ago, that led to the adoption of ‘placeholder’ phenomena – dark energy and dark matter – to explain why we only know the composition of five per cent of the universe’s mass-energy content – the part we describe as ‘solid matter’.
What this tells us about science’s attitude to the paranormal, I go on to say in the essay, is that ‘we’re not just talking about a science problem here, but one of communication’.
We dismiss information that conflicts with our worldview for all kinds of reasons, but one of them is that, at a primal level, not knowing stuff scares us. By and large, we base our worldview on certainty – when we don’t know things, it rocks that certainty, causing destabilisation.
Sometimes, that instability is very visible; sometimes we internalise it. But one way or another, it finds expression – it gets out.
Storytelling a story about consciousness seems to me to be an appropriate way to allow the facts, and especially the gaps between them, a chance to breathe – as they did for me.
The corollary to this, of course, is that the format – a chapter getting posted every fortnight - relies on great patience on the part of the reader. So, for this, dear subscriber, I thank you.
Which brings me back to the release of the Pentagon’s UAP report.
There were a myriad questions I wanted answered that weren’t even addressed by it. And, while some may be answered in the report’s ‘Volume 2’, I’m not exactly holding my breath.
For instance, why didn’t Volume 1 even mention what is arguably the best documented UFO encounter of recent memory – the Tic Tac encounter of 2004, in which a craft of unknown origin came up against several aircraft scrambled from the USS Nimitz, and was observed on multiple sensors, both aircraft- and shipborne? Tic Tac formed a major part of the December 2017 New York Times story that set in motion the wave of current interest in the subject.
While the AARO report’s conclusions made out there was ‘nothing to see’, its many omissions engendered, in me at least, a kind of dissonance.
It wasn’t even as if parts of the report were off; the whole thing felt at odds with some of the more compelling pieces of data from the past 80 years, the period the report examined.
A few weeks ago, I interviewed aviation journalist Bill Sweetman about a period in his career that he devoted to hunting down evidence of classified stealth aircraft, whose existence was denied officially at the time – the mid-late 1980s - even though one type (the Lockheed F-117A) was subsequently revealed to have been flying in squadron strength at the time.
Semantics, Bill reminded me, proved to be an important component of the hunt.
The Pentagon was able to deny – truthfully, it turned out – that there was no ‘Stealth Fighter’ out there because, in reality, the F-117A was an attack aircraft.
Observers of the UAP report point out that, in its denials of any evidence of – quotes - ‘aliens’ or ‘extraterrestrials’, AARO may have pulled a similar trick.
Proponents who say there is ‘something to see’ assert the real question revolves around something all-encompassing: whether AARO found evidence for the existence of a ‘non-human intelligence’ that may already be here - and interacting with us. ‘Non-human intelligence’ was a catch-all term employed in draft language featured in a ‘UAP Disclosure Bill’, which ended up at the end of 2023 being much watered down from its original form.
Semantically, aliens or ET may be something quite different from NHI.
We’ll see – for sure.
Because uncertainty finds expression, one way or another.
That’s something else consciousness has taught me along the way.