Too many people are trying to apply a material interpretation to the UAP and contact phenomenon, trying to position it as beings which have travelled here in spaceships from another planet. Then they debate endlessly how the craft might operate, how the beings evolved, what their motivations would be, and things of that nature.
That falls far short of the position held by many of the most prominent researchers on this subject which note that the phenomenon occupies a liminal state that straddles the physical and non-physical, and that the way it appears to us has as much to do with our own expectations as what the phenomenon requires. It is an entirely different ontology than the day to day physical world, and any attempt to understand it requires a person to let go of those materialist expectations.
This position is not only held by the researchers but by the testimony of the people whose research it is based upon, namely the contactees themselves (Experiencers).
I’ve compiled a list of quotes related to this, some of which are below. This list is far from complete or comprehensive. Feel free to add your own in the comments.
Jacques Vallée:
“Beliefs identical to those held today have recurred throughout recorded history and under forms best adapted to the believer’s country, race, and social regime.”
“Perhaps the physical reality may serve only as a kind of triggering device to provide images for the witness to report.”
“The report is extremely important for its symbolic content. It can help us understand what kinds of images are coming through.”
“If you’re trying to express something which is beyond the comprehension of a subject, you have to do it through statements that appear contradictory or seem absurd.”
“I think we are dealing with something that is both technological and psychic, and seems to be able to manipulate other dimensions.”
“It may be entirely determined by laws that we have not yet discovered.”
“Paranormal phenomena like UFOs are one of its manifestations.”
“I have found as many rational elements as absurd ones, as many that I could call friendly as I could call hostile.”
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Diana Pasulka:
“These sound like the same thing, just interpreted using the meme of the day.”
“For us, it’s a science fiction narrative about beings from outer space. For a medieval nun, it was spirits from purgatory.”
“Maybe the phenomenon is the same, and we’re just reading it differently.”
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John Keel:
“I abandoned the extraterrestrial hypothesis in 1967 when my own field investigations disclosed an astonishing overlap between psychic phenomena and UFOs.”
“The objects and apparitions do not necessarily originate on another planet and may not even exist as permanent constructions of matter.”
“It is more likely that we see what we want to see and interpret such visions according to our contemporary beliefs.”
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John Mack:
“I don’t think it should be looked upon so literally.”
“I think that there are some kinds of energies, entities, and daimonic agents that our culture is unaware of.”
“If you were in an African society you’d have a whole different perspective on this.”
“The beings are completely real in their experience, but they wouldn’t be real to our culture.”
“How we define reality is something far beyond simply the manifest material world.”
“My struggle is, in what sense is it real? In other words, how material? From what domain does it emanate?”
“It just doesn’t work to look upon this as purely literal physical matter in the physical universe as we understand it.”
“There are simply forms of self or body that are not just materially real, and yet are powerfully experiential.”
“There can be beings, ancestors, spirits, creatures, entities, animal spirits—you name it—that can manifest, materially, in this world.”
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Kenneth Ring:
“The imaginal realm is not only ontologically real; it is also a world that has form, dimension, and, most important for us, persons.”
“The imaginal realm is a self-existent world…It is accessible through altered states of consciousness…It is populated by ontologically real personified beings…It interacts with the everyday material world, albeit often in ways that defy rational understanding.”
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Patrick Harpur:
“Daimonic reality is like the unconscious, but daimonic reality came before the unconscious.”
“It is like fairyland. It is a shifting, legendary world; always elusive, always shape-changing, and, accordingly, you can never pin it down.”
“That’s exactly a feature of all apparitions and visions worth their salt—like UFOs, for instance, which are absolutely daimonic, because they embody all these qualities.”
“Reality is always psychic, lying between us and the world, partly inside, partly outside; partly personal, partly impersonal; partly material, partly immaterial.”
“There are clearly points of contact between fairies and so-called aliens. They seem to behave in similar ways.”
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Terence McKenna:
“I think there are aliens, but I think they can only reach us through our minds.”
“The human mind has always been haunted by sprites, gnomes, nixies, elves…I don’t see the UFO the modern way [as] anything more than the latest wave of this mysterious relationship that we have with disembodied minds through the imagination.”
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Garry Nolan:
“This could have just been an archetype of a Jungian collective unconscious.”
“I don’t know whether it’s a technology per se, because I’m leaving open the idea that it’s some form of consciousness that is non-material.”
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Eric Davis:
“If we get an ontological shock, we’re confronted by something that we can’t explain normally within our traditions and culture of our upbringing…”
“That limbic system is going to want to overlay a religious explanation or religious meaning to that experience.”
“It’s not that they’re spiritual, it’s that our brain wants to make it spiritual.”
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Graham Hancock:
“What we are dealing with here is one phenomenon, which has been with the human race since we first became human, and which we have interpreted in slightly different ways at different periods of history.”
“We see this phenomenon through our cultural spectacles.”
“It’s the same phenomenon all the time—whether we call them spirits, whether we call them fairies, or whether we call them aliens.”
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Bernardo Kastrup:
“What we call aliens now is just the same thing that we used to call fairies and before that angels and demons. And all the way back into primordial history. This stuff has been around us.”
“The phenomenon takes the shape of the expectations of a certain juncture in history in a certain culture.”
“At some point, the phenomenon were fairies. At another point, late in the 19th century, it was airships. And then it became flying saucers and then triangles which resemble stealth bombers.”
“The thing seems to take the clothing that appeals to us symbolically at a certain juncture in history, given a certain cultural milieu.”
“Your dreams evoke symbolic meaning by taking on the clothes of the cultural paraphernalia that you can relate with.”
“That’s even how near-death experiences operate. If you’re a Hindu, you see Krishna. If you’re a Christian, you see Christ.”
“They are as much physical as they seem to be mental.”
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Kimberley Engels:
“The entities simultaneously appear to take on trans-physical and psychical qualities, mediating the space between physical reality and non-ordinary realms.”
“The liminal Other has no clearly defined boundaries. They inhabit a liminal register, mediating the boundaries between physical and mental domains, empirical reality and the imaginal, the natural and its ontological excess.”
“The contact phenomenon appears as polysemous: experienced as technological, corporeal, liminal, psychical, spiritual, symbolic, relational, or initiatory—and sometimes all at once.”
Source: r/aliens · by /u/MantisAwakening