re: NY Times: Pentagon’s UFO Program - aerospace/esoteric/quantum mechanics/future

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THE TRUTH AND LIES ISSUE |
By D.W. Pasulka; illustrated by Johanna Burai | Mar 15 2019, 6:02pm

How the Increasing Belief in Extraterrestrials Inspires Our Real World

According to research by psychologists, belief in nonhuman intelligence is increasing in unprecedented ways, and many contemporary technopreneurs are being inspired in their work by it.

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I first met Thomas* through a mutual friend. By most societal standards, Thomas would be considered “normal”—he’s a successful biotechnologist with a partner and kid, he enjoys long walks on the weekend and eating out. In his work, he helps create technologies that help people recover from illnesses, such as cancer. But the inspiration for some of Thomas’s most successful technologies—such as implant devices that are etched with a laser and coded so that human tissue recognizes them as itself, and not a foreign agent, or the use of an ancient stem cell that appears to help alleviate pain associated with cancer—is not something he openly shares. Why? Because, he explained to me, the implants were inspired by “nonhuman intelligence.” In other words, it wasn’t his own brilliant idea, nor was it another human’s. He believes that it came from a supernatural source, perhaps extraterrestrial.

His research protocol was, to be blunt, not transparent. He never told any of the scientists he recruited to his team where he acquired the idea for the new technology, because, according to Thomas, “First, they would have thought I was really weird, and second—and most importantly—it would have prevented them from being successful in implementing the necessary steps to create the technology. It would have been so far removed from their own belief systems that it would have been impossible for them to implement my vision. So, I keep that part secret.”

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Perhaps the first technopreneur who has long been “out” concerning his belief in UFOs is Jacques Vallée, who worked on ARPANET (the proto-internet), a program funded by the military. In fact, he was working on this new technology while experimenting with telepathic phenomena, what some would call “woo-woo” science. Vallée was so well known for his study of UFOs that Steven Spielberg asked him to consult on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (the French scientist played by François Truffaut in the movie is based on Vallée). He was one of the first vocal technologists to advocate for the study of UFOs, and he paved the way for a slew of other Silicon Valley scientists and biotechnologists who believe that the secret to their success is alien technology—in other words, artifacts found at alleged alien spacecraft crash sites or information provided to them through mental downloads.

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The gaming expert, technologist, and investor Rizwan Virk confirms this new direction in the belief and practices associated with UFOs. In an article on the website Hacker Noon, he wrote, “I can say that I have personally spoken to researchers from top universities (Stanford, MIT, Harvard) who have seen the “artifacts” that the article references, and other similar ones that are even more secretive (and perhaps more functional).” In my own research, I have also met scientists who believe in these artifacts; I’ve even accompanied several of them on an expedition to an alleged alien crash site in New Mexico, which, I was told, was “not Roswell.” But I couldn’t tell you where, exactly, we were, as I was blindfolded so I wouldn’t be able to identify the location.

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New work has suggested that human beings might be the “new technology” that will eventually populate other planets, galaxies, or universes. A recent presentation at the Harvard Medical School’s Consortium for Space Genetics argued that the people who would be best equipped to explore space would be those whose brains were attuned to nontraditional forms of knowledge, who have the ability to know things beyond normal means, somewhat like a sixth sense. These brains were referred to in the conference as “hyper.” The professor giving the presentation was Garry Nolan from Stanford University, a molecular biologist with a specialty in genetics. He explained that space exploration is fraught with danger: Radiation, the slowness of propulsion rocket technologies, and other factors are deterrents, thus NASA sends rovers and other exploratory technologies. Nolan argues that people who are best equipped to make correct, split-second judgments should be the ones chosen to investigate extraterrestrial destinations.

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