Talking about UFOs

It's Saturday night, 10:30 PM.  I got back a little while ago from dinner with the Yang family.  This time I invited them out, dinner on me, although as usual they drove, picked the restaurant and the food, and in this case, brought a bottle of wine that Yungnane and I split.  (I think his wife doesn't drink -- I've never seen her do so.)  Yungnane had given me a choice of red wine or Kinmen Kaoliang "white wine," which is definitely a misnomer since it is really a 58-proof liquor that they make in Kinmen, which is where Jose and I visited last weekend.  I explained all about it in the post that got deleted -- we had dinner with the vice-president of the company that makes it as well as one of the guys directly involved in making sure the liquor comes out tasting the way they want it.  They of course brought along a bottle to our dinner together, so I had enough Kaoliang liquor that night to last for awhile.  I was happy to drink red wine tonight with what turned out to be a rather spicy dinner.

My trip with Jose was good.  We rented a scooter and essentially spent our two days there riding round the island of Kinmen as well as a smaller island, Lieyu or "little Kinmen," that was a short ferry ride away.  Kinmen is right off the shore of mainland China, across from the city of Xiamen, whose skyline across the water is already impressive and still growing -- we could see the big cranes building some new skyscrapers.  Our sightseeing experience was dominated by the presence of the military on the two islands, and their role as Taiwan's first line of defense against potential Chinese aggression.  Back in the 1950s, China and Taiwan took turns shelling each other, with tens or even hundreds of thousands of shells hitting Kinmen over an extended period of time.  The people in Kinmen realized at some point that the high-quality steel from the shells could be refashioned into knives, so after awhile Kinmen became known as a place where excellent knives are produced.  In August of 1958, China actually stormed the beaches of Kinmen with 9000 soldiers (maybe even more, but that's one number I read), but the Taiwanese mounted a successful resistance that led to the surrender of the Chinese troops after a couple of days of fighting in and around the villages dotting that part of the island.  (My deleted post explained how this battle and the on-going tension between the two sides was actually a continuation of the Nationalist vs. Communist civil war that resulted in the Nationalists essentially retreating to Taiwan with the Communists taking over the mainland in 1947.)  Somewhere in the midst of all that tension little Kinmen was well-fortified in terms of preventing an attack, including a large number of land mines buried along the coast of much of the island.  As we traveled on our scooter along the road circumnavigating the island, there was a constant presence of barbed wire fence with little red signs warning that there were land mines buried on the other side.  Jose told me that some company had been contracted to remove the mines, and later on we did indeed come across a crew of  men who had been hired to do that work -- their orange jumpsuits and metal detectors gave them away!  Jose stopped and asked a guy a question, but he asked it in English so I figured he assumed the guy was not Chinese.  When he asked where they were from, the guy said Cambodia.  I thought that was a pretty interesting case of outsourcing by Taiwan's government...

It's now Sunday night -- I knew I wasn't gonna get too far last night, and that I'd likely be writing this post in bits and pieces over the next couple of days.  On Friday, I finished a rough first draft of the paper I'm writing with Yungnane, which now means putting lots of finishing touches on before it is really ready to go.   He and I are meeting next Wed. to go over lots of details I wanted to discuss with him, and in the meantime I'm checking references, tracking down citations, etc. -- the detail work that makes academic writing a bit of a grind.  I gotta admit, I kinda like the freedom of a blog, where I can pretty much say whatever I want however I want.  (Well, OK, no, not in Chinese.)  There's a blogger named Les Visible, who has the Smoking Mirrors website I link to under Favorite Blogs, who actually has four, I think it is, different blogs that he writes, each with a voice a little different than the others, maybe targeted to slightly different audiences.  I've read a lot of his Smoking Mirrors posts, and he frequently verbalizes the very same sort of things I've just been reading and thinking about.  If I want to keep blogging after I'm done in Taiwan, I think I'm going to either have to create a new blog or this one will indicate that I am still "in Taiwan" even though I'll really be in some other part of the world.  With a new blog, maybe I could use a different voice -- hmm, have to think about that.

I've enjoyed writing the descriptions of some of what I've been doing here, but I also have to admit that, with all the interesting, crazy things going on in the world, it was always tempting to write about global events rather than the ultimately pretty trivial details of my experiences here in Taiwan.  I did try to provide links to lots of interesting material that I came across in my daily scanning of news and information and opinions on the internet, but also made the choice to just provide the links without saying much about them in the posts.  I have no idea if anyone has clicked through on any of those links, but I suppose just scanning the titles provides a pretty good clue of some of the things that I'm interested in and intrigued by. 

One of those, obviously, is UFOs.  Back in 1995, after I got tenure at USC, all of a sudden I had a little more free time and flexibility than I'd had for the previous six years.  And during those six years, the "world wide web" pretty much came into being, with all sorts of information now available online and easy to get access to.  With free time to explore a bit, one of the things I was curious enough about to start looking into was the UFO phenomenon.  Starting that search with an open mind, it wasn't long before I had seen enough information and evidence to draw the conclusion that Earth probably is being visited by entities from places beyond our world, and that "the government" (and this could mean some sort of "shadow government" that is really calling the shots) has been covering up their knowledge of that fact for quite some time.  For a number of years now, there have been groups actively working to try to get the government to "disclose" its knowledge about the existence of aliens and, presumably, their access to alien technology.  (This ties in to the "free energy" issue, which is the "game-changer" technology we need to move global society forward into a new paradigm.)  These folks are not kooks -- a number of them are serious researchers who have done the hard, time-consuming work of trying to track down and verify UFO events, get access to government documents, build the case about a cover-up, etc.  Anyway, that's one storyline that I've paid a little attention to over the years -- keeping my eye out for new evidence (eg, an astronaut being quoted as acknowledging that there are UFOs, the story of lots of folks in Stephenville, Texas seeing a UFO traveling near Bush's ranch at Crawford, cool videos of UFOs that people post online, etc.) and for information about efforts to expose the long-standing cover-up (eg, a press conference at the National Press Club where lots of reputable people provided information about their contacts with UFOs, news about governments providing access to their UFO files, and the first story I posted when I started this blog, that Chinese TV announced that the Obama administration was close to making the disclosure announcement). 

With that as a little backdrop, it was interesting to me that, on the way home from dinner with the Yang family a couple weeks ago, Yungnane translated his wife as asking me, out of the blue, what I thought about UFOs.  So I said that I believe they're real, that there's lots of evidence from lots of very credible witnesses that something is flying around our skies that transcends the technological capabilities of the human race (to the extent that we know), and that there's good reason to believe that the government is covering up information relevant to the above.  I explained that this had been one of the issues I had paid some attention to over the years, but when Yungnane concluded that I must then be an "expert" on the subject, I assured him I wasn't at all.  But then the next morning I got an email from him asking me if I would talk to his class about UFOs!  The request surprised me, first just that he would allocate time in his class to this topic, and second that he would want me to come talk to his students about it.  So I assured him again that I am not an expert on the topic but that I'd be glad to talk to people about what I've learned over the years.  That class is tomorrow night.  The plan is for me to first give my talk on collaborative governance, which I presented in Taipei with Yungnane as translator, and then after that to talk about UFOs.  At first I thought it would be a funny juxtaposition, but the irony is that my interest in collaboration and my interest in UFOs sort of came along at the same time in my life, and the two topics are kind of fused together in my own personal narrative as they relate to the "new paradigm" I've been talking about since way back then.  So I'm hoping it will be easy enough for me to segue from one to the other tomorrow night...

It's Monday night now, and I've finished the class.  I gave the collaborative governance talk, with Yungnane translating as we went, and then there were a fair number of questions afterwards, so when all that was done it was about 8:30, and Yungnane told them that I was now going to talk about UFOs til class ended at 9, and there was sort of a collective "oooh" from the class.  And these were mostly working professionals in their 30s and 40s, not a young crowd, so without much introduction or segue, he just let me start talking.  I told them some of what I explained above, about my search for information and the conclusions I drew, and then I elaborated on a few specifics that I think are interesting and thought they might too.  Once I had agreed with Yungnane to do this, I looked around on the internet a bit for useful information, and somewhere came upon a documentary video made by a guy named James Fox that I watched last week (its' the history channel documentary on UFOs that I gave the link for under Cool Videos).  This documentary focused on a press conference held in 2007 at the National Press Club in DC where a bunch of high level military officers, pilots, etc. shared their first-hand information about UFO sightings (some pretty up close and personal).  It also included some  conversations with many of those guys as they elaborated on the stories they told at the press conference.  I had read about some of those stories before, but certainly not all, and to see and hear these guys explain what they know, all I can say is that it would be pretty hard for anyone but the most narrow-minded skeptic to watch this video and not take the UFO phenomenon seriously. 

Yungnane's class is on public policy analysis, but I used the time I had left (actually, nobody got up to leave at 9 PM so we went a little long!) to cover some basics of the story and only scratched the surface on some of the relevant policy issues the existence of UFOs suggests.  But that's what's kind of crazy to me -- the implications of an alien presence, with whatever advanced technologies they have, are just ASTOUNDING, and yet we are collectively indifferent about the whole subject.  Sure, individually, everyone's got their beliefs, their stories, their curiosities, their best guesses, but collectively we have essentially decided not to talk about it.  Fine, you've got your tabloid stories, but everyone knows that's not "real" news, and people can talk about UFOs among friends and family, but a major news organization is not likely to touch the topic with a ten-foot pole, and our "leaders" are happy to act like they've never really given the matter much thought at all.  Apparently the military denies doing any investigations of UFO phenomena, which seems kind of remarkable if it were actually true!  Essentially they're saying that they just don't care enough about it to look into it, which is undoubtedly a lie, but my point is that they can claim to be disinterested and apparently that just seems fine or normal.  Even when there are major events, sightings seen by hundreds or thousands of people -- like the famous "Phoenix lights" from back in the 90s -- they make the news for awhile, no one really comes up with a good explanation for what everyone saw, but pretty soon life moves on and people go back to focusing on what they normally focus on and eventually the mystery and intrigue fade away and the event itself retreats into irrelevance.  Really, it boggles my mind how Americans can remain agnostic and indifferent about a potential alien presence in the midst of all the evidence suggesting something funky is going on.  I suppose maybe it's really just denial -- I guess the fear associated with the idea of advanced space beings hovering in our atmosphere is enough to make people just want to ignore the whole situation.  Understandable, maybe, but not very wise.

Besides, why should we assume that any space visitors would inevitably have negative intentions towards us?  Why not expect that they would come in peace, or even to give us some help?  I figure the main answer there is that we are projecting onto them what we believe about ourselves -- that humans are inherently selfish, competitive, and warlike with an innate drive to expand our domain.  And of course the media play on this perspective, by giving us blockbuster movies about fending off alien attacks that subtly or not just serve to feed the fear.  So yes, if aliens are anything like what we expect them to be, like what we believe humans to be, then we could be screwed.  But I'm going with the hypothesis that it's not so simple, that there might be some "good guy" aliens and some "bad guy" aliens, with different motives and modi operandi, but including some who really would like to help us get out of our mess and have some means at their disposal to do so.  One version of events, that I mentioned in class tonight, is that the ETs started paying a whole lot more attention to us earthlings after we demonstrated our capacity for nuclear weapons -- the explanation being that nuclear explosions are a greater risk to the whole space-time fabric than our scientists are aware of, such that explosions here can cause problems elsewhere in the cosmos where some of these space brothers are trying to live their peaceful happy lives.  Once earth humans started putting them at risk, I guess they felt a need to monitor things here a little more closely and make sure we didn't do anything stupid out of our ignorance about how the whole system works (ie, the "unified field" the physicists discovered last century).  The ETs' interest in things nuclear also seems to have been demonstrated in the frequent UFO sightings in Japan around the time of the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown.  I would bet money that they are working "behind the scenes" to prevent that radiation from being as bad as it otherwise would have been.

On the other hand, really, I have no idea what's going on.  I feel very confident about the claim that living entities from beyond the confines of our little 4D world are appearing in our biosphere, as the evidence in support of that hypothesis is overwhelming (especially compared to the alternative explanation that everyone who "sees" a UFO is crazy or hallucinating or on drugs or just confused by some optical illusion).  You can't explain away the Phoenix lights that way.  Or the officers and pilots in the documentary, at the National Press Club.  Something is out there, of that I'm sure.  Who they are and what they're doing here -- well, I've got my conjectures and conclusions based on my filtering of all the information on the topic I've digested over the years, but I have no way of knowing yet how much of that is right and how much of it isn't.  But to be honest, I'm kind of expecting to get some answers about all that before too much longer.  As I told the students tonight, and as I say one way or another to lots of students I teach, any day now...

Given my confidence that we are being visited by beings from elsewhere (footnote here:  elsewhere doesn't just have to mean some other part of the physical 4D universe as we know it, but could include other dimensions that essentially co-exist with ours but beyond our perceptual awareness), a corollary conclusion is that the government has indeed been covering up their knowledge of, and probably some interaction with, some of these beings (dead and/or alive).  When I brought this possibility up in class tonight,  one of the ladies just spontaneously asked "why," and the first answer I gave was because of their fear that there would be mass panic if the populace knew that aliens were hanging out within range of contact.  If things really did get started with Roswell in 1947, it's easy enough to imagine that the powers-that-be would want to keep the story under wraps at that point to prevent any kind of large-scale panic, right in the wake of WWII and the beginning of the Cold War, etc.  But I suggested to the students that all those governments that have contributed to the cover-up are now in a bit of a double-bind.  Even if they wanted to let the people know that the UFOs are real, if they felt we could now handle the info without going nuts, they would essentially have to confess that they've been lying to us all these years.  And what government (read: politician) is ever going to do that! 

On the other hand, an argument can be made that there is a slow process of "disclosure" already underway, as at least a few governments around the world have been opening their UFO files, making them accessible to those who want to review them, which will have the effect of letting "official" information spread out to the public, adding credibility and legitimacy to whatever information is contained there.  In the US, I don't think they've gone that far yet, but there are a number of researchers who for years have been asking for and gaining access to US files through FOIA requests, in an ongoing effort to get the government to provide more information than it has shared about what it knows about the phenomenon.  The 2007 National Press Club event was affiliated with a group called The Disclosure Project, which I think was founded by some of the key researchers who have for years been documenting the government's cover-up efforts and trying to uncover the secret entities that have had responsibility for dealing with UFO activities.  By getting extremely credible witnesses to insinuate that the government withheld information from the public about real events that they were directly involved in, The Disclosure Project keeps making it harder and harder for the government to continue to pretend that it doesn't have any interest in or information about the topic.  So rather than just coming out and admitting it, all at once, like I guess the Chinese were predicting Obama was on the verge of doing, it seems like the strategy is to let the realization about the reality of UFOs diffuse more slowly and incrementally -- open up the information bit by bit, let people get acclimated to the idea over time rather than have to deal with the strong reactions of a sudden and explicit verification of the facts...

OK, now it's Tuesday night, time to wrap this up.  I've gone back and read what I wrote above, so I guess now I have just a couple more things I want to add, to try to bring a little closure to the story.  If there is an alien presence, and if the powers-that-be are aware of that fact, then it is reasonable to conclude that our present circumstances are likely to bring that information out into the open one way or the other.  Between the Gulf oil spill and Japan's nuclear disaster, the planet has taken two huge, serious blows to the health and well-being of the global ecosystem that keeps us alive.  The full-scale effects of these events may still take some years to do their damage, but that damage is likely to be severe.  In the short-run, it will likely contribute to higher food prices and economic problems more generally, which will probably result in even more widespread unrest around the world as the masses get more and more angry at the banksters and their corporate minions who are the cause of most of these problems. 

If there is a systemic economic collapse, there will be the need for some kind of monetary system reform, of the kind Soros and his crowd as well as the BRICS partners have all been discussing over the last few weeks.  That may be a moment of truth for the planet, to see whether those implementing a new system create one that continues to privilege the financial elites or one that is more populist in its design.  In other words, that's sort of the crux of the matter as to what the nature of the "new world order" will be.  Will it be a new world order still run by the elites for the elites, or will the new monetary system signal a change to something new and different?  I think that, behind the scenes, at the top level of the game, there is a sort of battle going on around this issue.  To the extent that our bankster rulers represent and embody the dark forces on the planet, I have a feeling there are also some lightworkers, some "white knights," who are operating at high levels of the game countering the efforts of the dark cabal to impose their system of world-wide control.  If that's true, if there really are two alternative strategies that are being proposed and offered to global leaders as a way to get out of our current financial fiasco (ie, systemic bankruptcy -- so much more debt spread throughout the system than there is money to pay it all off), then the geo-political alignments that are in play these days may very well reflect who's aligning with whom on which side of that fight.  (That's just a hunch, I have no information to that effect.)

I guess my point here is that the big issues taking place in the world right now, here in our 4D material plane, may actually be manifestations of a more metaphysical battle between light and dark, with the latter doing everything they can to maintain control of a system they created that is now falling apart all around them, and the former working diligently to wrest control of the planet away from this dark cabal.  My understanding is that the ETs are not indifferent to the outcome, nor just passive observers of the process.  While there may very well be some ET types (eg, the "reptilians" that David Icke has brought to the world's attention) that are conspiring with the dark forces, there appear to be some who are working to help free humanity from the constraints imposed upon us by the dark, constraints that they've been developing for most of the last 12,000 years or so.  And part of humanity gaining this freedom is to become aware that we are not alone, that reality is quite a bit more expansive than we have been led to believe, that our little 4D reality is embedded in a very complex, multidimensional universe (multiverse) that is filled with all sorts of beings "living" at lots of different levels of consciousness.  And some of those beings are here now, at this "moment in time," to help Gaia and her inhabitants transition to the next, higher level of consciousness (5D).  It's this jump to a higher level of consciousness that is the essence of the paradigm shift I've been talking about for so long.

Over the years, teaching about the new paradigm in my classes, and the possibility that it could arrive more quickly than anybody ever thinks is possible, I have sometimes joked that if a UFO ever decides to land and aliens get out, the paradigm is going to change immediately.  But it's not a joke.  If a UFO ever decides to land and aliens get out, the paradigm is going to change immediately.  The impression I've gotten is that, up til now, they have largely been constrained from doing this, that there is some kind of rule that says they are supposed to wait until they are invited, in a sense.  Thus, disclosure -- if it ever comes -- will almost be tantamount to an invitation, because once the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, there won't be a lot of good reasons for them to remain mostly hidden and elusive.  They may as well land so that we can start figuring out what's really going on, and step over the threshold into a new era of human civilization.

The dark forces running the planet want to avoid disclosure, because it essentially means that they have to give up control.  In other words, the dark forces have been actively working against the process of our evolution to a higher level of consciousness, because the only way they can maintain their power, and in some sense maybe even their existence, is to keep us functioning at this lower level.  Rumors are they would rather "take the planet down" than give up their control, which may well explain why in the case of both the Gulf and Japan they made decisions that increased rather than decreased the amount of damage caused by the original disaster.  Other rumors are that they have planned a mass population die-off, maybe in part to bring the world back closer to its carrying capacity of human beings, and that they've built huge underground bunkers where they think they could go live for a few years if things got too unbearable here on the surface.  I don't know how much if any of that is true, but I would have to say that whoever is calling the shots on the planet sure seems to be doing more to mess things up than to make things better.  Maybe that's intentional.

If the dark forces want either control or destruction, and are doing everything they can to pursue those goals, then the light beings are here to make sure we transition successfully into 5D consciousness.  One of the cool things about 5D consciousness is the recognition that darkness is an illusion, a perceptual error associated with not having enough light.  In 5D there's enough light that there is no darkness, which means that the global transition to 5D consciousness -- which may well be the event implied by the end of the cycle in the old Mayan calendar, which of course has become associated with the year 2012 -- will entail the removal of the dark energies from the planet.  That's why lots of old control systems are falling apart, or losing their legitimacy, or facing a crisis, or whatever.  If there really is an "end" to a cycle that is giving rise to a shift in collective consciousness, then it could be that there is some point in time when this process is "supposed" to be completed, such that more and more events are likely to transpire that move the process along more and more quickly.  The Gulf and Japan have increased the urgency of discontinuing our destructive patterns, and to the extent that these toxins in some way also threaten the health and well-being of Gaia herself (not to mention all life on the planet), there is probably growing urgency among the light beings to escalate the process of transformation. 

So, I guess what I'm saying is this -- don't be surprised if UFOs start making themselves even more obvious, if the media start giving a little more serious attention to the possibility of their existence, if governments continue to let out more information about what they know, if insiders or whistleblowers come forward with more information about what's really going on.  And who knows, maybe one day a UFO will  land, and an alien will get out and say something like "yo, wassup" and then the new paradigm will begin!