American Cosmic

My 22 highlights

• I realized that I functioned as such a cultural authority for The Conjuring, when the director James Wan tweeted that they had hired a consultant for the movie.

• His early work revealed that UFO events function like contemporary artificial intelligence, “under the radar,” and almost invisibly—as in the case of contemporary social bots.

• “Synchronicities are one aspect of the phenomenon,” he elaborated. “If a researcher does not experience them, he or she is not really doing the research right. But—and this is important—a researcher doesn’t have to accept that the synchronicities mean anything.

• Within ufology, there have arisen two main schools of thought. One emphasizes material issues, and the other addresses subjective and spiritual issues. The materialist school focuses on the empirical effects of UFOs, like radiation burns on material objects or on people, blips on radars, and sightings. This school focuses on “the nuts and bolts” of the UFO event. The other school arose with the advent of the application of hypnotic regression to experiencers and with the contactee and abduction movements; it focuses on the experiencers themselves and the content of the extraterrestrial messages.

• As James was speaking, I thought about my own family. A cousin in law enforcement has always possessed what I believe would conform to James’s definition of anomalous cognition. His abilities have helped him out of many dire situations where his life or the lives of others were in danger. One of my students, José, a Marine and author who has seen active duty, wrote about it in his book about his experiences on the front line.

• His father, a police officer,

• Jacques wonders if the absurd elements of the UFO event could be like a koan: something that allows humans to attain a state of mind quite different from that which characterizes normal consciousness.

• there is a parallel research tradition within the field of the study of the phenomenon, and that there always has been. There are public ufologists who are known for their work, there are a few academics who write about the topic, and then there is an “Invisible College,” as Allen Hynek called it and of which Jacques Vallee wrote—a group of scientists, academics, and others who will never make their work public, or at least not for a long time, although the results of their investigations impact society in many ways

• In the movie The Great Martian War 1913–1917, Impossible Factual uses realist montage to simulate World War I, creating a war with an alien race that (obviously) never really happened. The movie took social media and television by storm.

• David, of all the researchers and scientists I met, is the least likely to draw any conclusions whatsoever about the phenomenon.

• basically believe, and there is evidence for this, that our DNA is a receptor and transmitter. It works at a certain frequency—the same frequency, in fact, that we use to communicate with our satellites in deep space. Humans are a type of satellite, in fact. So, in order to receive the signals and to transmit the signals, we have to tune our physical bodies and DNA

• James once observed that “Jacques has achieved his status precisely because he has never concluded the phenomenon is anything specific. In fact, Jacques has infuriated most ufologists because he won’t fall in line. All Jacques has ever claimed is that the phenomenon seems infinitely variable. Every time you claim it is one thing, he shows you twenty counter-examples. But, per Jacques, the overarching message the phenomenon appears to send is ‘you are not alone’—styled to the level of your cultural understanding and abilities.”

• anthropologist Cynthia Nelson, who studied apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Zeitoun, Egypt. “As phenomenologists,” Nelson writes, “we suspend judgment as to whether the apparition is really real (a question for scientific naturalism) and attempt rather to understand what people do when confronting stress. If men define situations as real they are real in their consequences.”17

• James, on the other hand, is the consummate professor—a teacher. He could explain how he accomplishes seemingly impossible feats, and he could document and describe the process.

• Then, I just ask the subconscious processes in my head, which I laughingly refer to as little ‘elves,’ to work on the problem while I sleep. You can call them elves, but I don’t know what they are—I used to think they were just some version of the subconscious processes that help you navigate a room of people while talking to a friend or trying to avoid an overly chatty colleague at a party. Call them anything you want. Either I wake up with the answer or out of the blue it just pops into my head in the next few days, more often just after waking. And I know I am not alone in this. But the point is, there is a process and I think it can be trained. I am beginning to wonder if the information comes from somewhere else at times—because for the life of me I can’t figure out from where the inspirations arrive sometimes. I seem to be given a part of the puzzle for a problem to which I simply did not previously have access. I wonder sometimes if the ability is somehow related to brain structure and the phenomena.” “Wow.” I was envious. That sounds so easy, I thought. It also sounded like a protocol, somewhat like the one Tyler had told me about.

• other words, there are two datasets, one of which consists of empirical and material effects, the other of which comprises the psychic or subjective aspects of the phenomenon. What keeps these two datasets separate—one secret, the other told to authorities—is the fear of public ridicule, or worse, the loss of one’s job or credibility

• They maintain their silence for important reasons, one of which is national security.

• One of the best examples of this trend can be found on the popular website If Star Wars Was Real (ISWWR).

• The interpretation of the monolith as a screen, and particularly a movie screen, was first advanced by Rob Ager on his website CollativeLearning.com.

• hierophany is a manifestation of the sacred. It occurs when a nonhuman intelligent being descends from the sky to the ground or otherwise reveals itself. The burning bush that Moses witnessed on Mt. Sinai, as recorded in the Bible, is a classic example of a hierophany. Locations like Roswell, New Mexico, function as sacred places, or sites of hierophanies, to millions of people who believe in extraterrestrials

• A 2015–2016 study by the Stanford History Education Group looked at the online reasoning of youth about civics and “the ability to judge the credibility of information that floods young people’s smartphones, tablets, and computers.”44 The researchers studied middle school, high school, and college-level young people. Many of the participants were unable to distinguish between sponsored content and content supported by legitimate sources. “The students displayed a ‘stunning and dismaying consistency’ in their responses,” the researchers wrote, “getting duped again and again”—

• book by Harvard researcher John Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens