Encounters, page 12
“We tend to assume that the physical phenomenon is its most important aspect and that everything else is just a side effect and much less important,” Jacques said. “But perhaps we’re facing something which is basically a social technology. Perhaps the most important effects of UFO technology are the social ones and not the physical ones. In other words, the physical reality may serve only as a kind of triggering device to provide images for the witness to report. These perceptions are manipulated to create certain kinds of social effects.”12
Placing this idea within the context of epigenetics provides a new framework of interpretation, one that Jose finds helpful.
“To me reincarnation is epigenetics, or activation of genes by way of histones through chemical tags. Epi (above) genetics is the holder of our biological predecessors’ experiences, to assist with the age-old cosmic battle of good versus evil. Epigenetics is cosmic intelligence.”
Jose states that within our biological heritage there is information that is passed down through generations that enables us to survive long enough to evolve a spiritual body. The traditions of philosophy and religion, from Plato through Aristotle and traditional religion, Jose explains, are social memes that allow humans to tether into the organic network, something much akin to the etheric network described by Allen Hynek’s Rosicrucians.
“Platonic and Aristotelian ethical frames are epigenetic prescriptions. The philosophical and religious traditions are prescriptions to allow this unseen, that is, junk DNA to sequence and guide us toward the Omega Point. Memes are social programs, and UFOs, like Saint Michael, are images that describe an experience that is being had by millions of people.”
The “Omega Point” is Chardin’s term. It has been interpreted in various ways. It can refer to the point in the future when the Homo sapiens lineage breaks off into a new branch and merges with a technological/biological sphere, or it can refer to human evolution that merges physiological and spiritual states. Jose equates the experience of seeing the archangel Saint Michael with the UFO encounter as a natural interpretation, a symbol for this coming shift. He identifies mental health as the most important resource people have today to withstand these natural social shifts.
“Mental health is about balance and epigenetic viability. Our predecessors lived through chaos and gave us the template to survive. Without proper protocols and philosophical or religious frameworks, there are bad experiences. Sadly, this is what we see today. The battlefield is both physical and virtual; there is no difference. What happens to people in virtual spaces impacts their physical and mental health. AI and machine learning can help reframe mental health.”
He was referring to social media and the ubiquitous use of phones as creating bad experiences. Years ago, before the internet, Jacques Vallée warned that the use of new technologies advertised as products would feed off human behavior. Humans, essentially, are the products, not their phones or computers. He restated these predictions as actualities in his 2010 essay, “I, Product.”13
“What does it mean to live in a world where the behavior of an entire population can be accurately mapped from minute to minute?” Vallée asked. “A world where whole new social, political or religious ‘memes’ can be injected into the culture to mold it into new forms? People used to be up in arms when local authorities put fluoride into the water supply to strengthen kids’ teeth but very few object to intelligence agencies experimenting with massive social engineering intrusions into the flow of ideas on social networks.”14
Vallée wrote about technologies as means to consume human behavior but not necessarily as weapons. Jose teaches his students about the use of social apps as weapons, literal Trojan horses, that appear to be gifts but cause physical damage externally to human environments and internally to human cognitive abilities.
“Within our borders and just a few miles outside, women, young and old, are kidnapped and raped while working for factories serving Americans and their endless consumerism. After being violated, many of these women are then killed and buried in the desert. Who is there to remember them, their names, stories, hopes, and dreams? I don’t see that happening in the ghettos of America, Creekwood, or downtown; I don’t see that happening behind gated communities. Then there are families in cages, many of whom just wanted a better life or were brought here because of farm work or for the promise of making money to send back home.
“The most valuable resource to the big players is data. However, the players understand that the mind is the most critical resource needed to access data for their profits. So they have endless armies of bots, social engineers, and algorithms to tap this resource—the mind. The mind is externalized into worlds today, and that makes us all targets. We inhabit these worlds. The battlespace is these worlds.
“It’s up to us to disrupt those operations. This is why mental health is so important.”
Jose works with high school students. He disrupts the operations of tech warfare by teaching kids how to work out, how to be alone, how to unplug from social media for just a little while, and to feel their bodies and their feelings. He teaches them how to be outdoors. Through biofeedback he teaches them how to identify invasive feelings and how to redirect them. He created a platform that focuses on mental health, to give young people a fighting chance against the armies of bots and algorithms trained on the destruction of their self-esteem and their cognitive abilities. I’ve seen and heard Jose’s lectures to college students. He provides statistics to back up how “bad actors” benefit financially from the data offered up by millions of young people’s clicks. He reveals how they have created fake websites, fake jobs, fake people—sock-puppet accounts, to target vulnerable populations—and to direct them to target other vulnerable people and populations. The old strategy of divide and conquer has been streamlined and is being used on civilians. It’s trained on us.
Jose’s program focuses on the mental health of youth and veterans and teaches them to hook into the organic network, the one that predates the internet. This is the network that Jose became aware of as a young marine in the war zone, and which he recognized he was always a part of. Digital natives—people born after the internet became available to almost everyone and who have never known anything other than being plugged in—are not aware that there is another network, because they have never felt it. Their bodies are their means of tethering in, so Jose’s strategy is to wake them up to the fact that their bodies react to their technologies.
The body as a tethering device to a world network, as Chardin described, is something that can be found in many religious traditions. In a conversation with novelist Marie Mutsuki Mockett, whose work on Japanese culture and technology offers insights into nondualistic ideas of technology, she described her experience of learning Japanese Buddhism.
“When I went to Eiheiji, which is the head monastery of the Soto Zen sect in Japan, we were put through protocols. When I went, I had thought we would discuss the meaning of Zen (dumb American). But no. We were put through physical training and dietary training; that is the way that you start if you want enlightenment.
“It does make one wonder what the human body actually is.”15
Just as the monks of Eiheiji scrub the human body clean to enable it to receive the teaching, Jose’s program focuses on the body and mind as a site of resistance.
“We need to create a field of resistance,” Jose said. “We need to help young people maintain their bodies and their gray matter, enough to resist the digitized weapons that are a constant onslaught today.”
Jose was born plugged in. What need has he for esoteric practices? He lives within an enchanted field of information. His UFO encounters, which he neither likes nor dislikes, are one part of the fabric of this ongoing story.
* * *
In this deep exploration of the lives of experiencers, I realized the answer to Jacques’s question: What did we learn from Tyler? I learned that Tyler is a mystic. He utilized physical and monastic-like protocols to access a network wherein he acquired information and insights, and he interfaced with the phenomena directly. He did this without any knowledge of esoteric traditions. As Jacques noted, and as Jose’s life reveals, the knowledge is available for those who bother to look for it.
Throughout my research of UFOs, I’ve received constant correspondence from wealthy investors and curious scientists from all over the world who want access to “UFO data.” For good reason, people want the data. They want to reverse engineer UFOs to create the next game-changing technology. I understand this motivation. The problem with this, however, is that it seems that the data doesn’t come just from the physical parts. It seems to come from the human interface with the phenomena. This suggests that the data storage is not a computer database but human beings, and probably particular types of human beings, like mystics. And mystics are rare. They don’t crash-land in the New Mexico desert.
7
MOON GIRL
It seemed to me some time ago that you could sort of think of humanity as a biological boot loader for digital superintelligence.
—ELON MUSK
RE-CONNAISSANCE
“While still in the stratosphere above sixty thousand feet, I was mesmerized by the curvature of the little Earth beneath us. It was surreal,” Simone said.
She related her experience of the Overview Effect while on board the Concorde jet.
“I was flying for work with a small entourage—CEO and CFO of a company we were taking public—and happened to get on the jet with the Rolling Stones. They all shared a bottle of single malt scotch, The Balvenie, that I had just picked up at the distillery in Scotland, on our way to New York. I was just mesmerized the entire journey looking out the window at the small Earth below.”
Simone shared this anecdote within a collection of technical notes about AI technologies we’d discussed. This was typical of our correspondence. It was outside of my discipline, but I somehow managed to keep up with her language, and occasionally, she inserted a remarkable aside that revealed an extraordinary life. The people who regularly filtered in and through her life included political figures like prime ministers, famous actors, technologists who are household names, and Nobel Prize winners. As with my conversations with papal advisors at the Vatican, it was all business until the brief, casual mention of a person, or an event, jolted me into a recognition that I was in conversation with someone who has influenced the course of history.
Simone believes that our time, this era, is a beginning—and an end. It is an apocalypse, which, when translated from the original Greek, means “revelation.” She is one of many experiencers I’ve met who believe that AI can assist the next iteration of species of which Homo sapiens is a part, or extend the consciousness that has used Homo sapiens to enable its existence. It is also more than that. They believe that it is the “alien” or nonhuman intelligence of the UFO. Are we creating our successor or, more hopefully, our future selves? As David Bowie suggested, digital technology is an alien life form, a nonhuman super intelligence. AI is the extraterrestrial, not from another galaxy, but from outside of space-time. Its revelation is currently in process. Simone is optimistic.
MOON GIRL IN A TECH BRO’S WORLD
Simone invests in companies focused on AI, quantum computing, space, and decentralized technologies. She worked with the leading pioneers of the internet in the 1990s. In one of her first start-up companies, she helped commercialize technology developed by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
She continued on to cofound start-ups pioneering big data and cloud computing, and was one of the first adopters of decentralized technologies. She is the moral voice amid her extended network of associates, who include people who engineer AI systems. She is also a faculty member of a United States–based university specializing in AI. The projects in which she invests sync up with her mission, which is to bring AI into alignment with some of humanity’s highest aspirations—that of promoting positive human impact and equal access to knowledge. She is part of a group of high-level AI creators who view AI as an extraterrestrial nonhuman intelligence from beyond space-time.
Simone reached out to me because she had read about Tyler D. and his experience of “the download.” She knew about the process firsthand and wanted to provide more information about it. She wanted to know more about it from me, as I had met more than a few people who engaged in it and they had all created revolutionary and viable technologies. Of the experiencers I’ve met, Simone was most like Tyler D. She even speaks like him, preferring to call people “humans” or Homo sapiens. I had edited her language and replaced “humans” with “people,” but she corrected my edits. Throughout her chapter I will use her terms, as she uses them intentionally and precisely. Like Tyler, she attributed her success not to her brilliance (which she clearly possessed), but to her protocols and her ability to connect with an external intelligence that sounds much like Chardin’s network.
Tyler’s work as a mission controller and a space and biomedical researcher spanned the entire history of the space shuttle program and the current US Space Force. In his off-duty hours, he was engrossed in the study of what he believed are debris from UFO crash sites. He is the scientist who took me and Dr. Garry Nolan to New Mexico to an alleged UFO crash site. When I knew him, he had more than forty patents and technologies that he’d created through a process of memory retrieval, or what he dubbed “the download process.”
I was curious about the connection between his belief system and his innovative creativity. I wanted to know if there was a relationship between what he believed and his success as a space and biomedical technopreneur. What I found was that there was a direct connection, and he was not the only person to enjoy unusual success in this way. I compared Tyler’s creative process with that of one of history’s greatest mathematicians, Srinivasa Ramanujan. Ramanujan was an early twentieth-century mathematician who believed that he received his math equations from the whisperings of the Hindu deity Lakshmi. To this day, scholars are still working on the concepts Ramanujan so effortlessly accessed.
I wondered about Tyler’s references to external agents and his practices of protocols. If external agents are at work in this process, what could we know of their nature? Are they concepts or part of a collective unconscious? Or did Tyler’s brain somehow access information that “felt” to him like it was not within his own consciousness, as some scholars of creativity propose? Or was this process similar, or maybe even the same thing as what the Western philosopher Plato had worked out a few thousand years ago—a retrieval of information located somewhere outside of normal consciousness but accessible through recollection? When I met Simone, I knew that she could provide some, and maybe many, of the answers to my questions.
One of the important points Tyler made was that his knowledge felt like a memory. He was not aware of the history of philosophy, so he was very surprised when I told him that one of the most famous philosophers of all time, Plato, wrote that knowledge is produced through a process of recollection. For Plato, knowledge comes from a process through which a person engages in an internal retrieval of knowledge through memory. Because Tyler’s method of knowledge production did not appear to be like that of those around him who had MAs and PhDs, he attributed it to external agents. His understanding of the external agents, however, changed over the few years I knew him. He still believed they were external to his consciousness, but what they were, he wasn’t sure. He emphasized that they are benevolent.
“Some people can communicate with them,” he said. “They have also become a part of us through technologies.”
From the history of the space program, I knew that many scientists believed that they could communicate with their “external agents,” whether they were Jack Parson’s extraterrestrials or, in the father of Russian rocketry’s case, angelic beings. I did wonder, however, about the point Tyler made about how the external agents manifest through our technologies, especially his idea that they become “us” through technology. Simone, immersed in the communities of computer scientists at the cutting edge of innovation, the most vocal and visible of who have been men, provided a map of the download process, as she’d been doing it her whole life. Unlike Tyler, she’d studied the philosophical texts about the process as well as learning through mind-to-mind transmissions from her Buddhist teachers. She is rare in that she is initiated into a gnostic tradition and is knowledgeable about the gnostic traditions of the Western and Asian traditions.
EARLY LIFE AND FIRST DOWNLOAD EXPERIENCES
Simone first became aware that she could download information when she attended school and saw how other kids struggled to learn. She had assumed that she was normal and that all people experienced learning in an effortless way—through a direct downloading of information.
“I did feel alone for most of my life, from a very young age. I grew up in a very Catholic family, and my parents had immigrated from Europe. I was drawn to study Buddhist and Hindu practices, like meditation and yoga. These helped me because, once I began to see how this process worked, I had all these tools to fall back on. I used these tools, which included prayer and meditation, mantras, and chants, and I immersed myself in mathematics and art to focus and train my conscious mind.”
Tyler’s download process was facilitated through physical and mental protocols too. He engaged in yoga, weight training, and meditation and prayer. He spent a lot of time alone. I recognized that Simone was engaged in similar protocols. Unlike Tyler, however, she understood why these protocols worked and the intention or goals they helped her achieve.
