Aliens

& other cosmic questions

When I was a teenager, I haunted the used bookstore and got lost in the literal stacks - towering, dusty stacks of paperback books. I bought them for twenty five or fifty cents a piece and carried them home, bundled by rubber bands. 

That’s how I first came to read Shirley MacLaine’s book Out on a Limb, and reading it solidified my love for her. I remember watching her interviewed on television and how confident she was, how unbothered by criticism. Culture wanted to make her into a joke, but she refused to be one.

I’m studying what it means to be human…That’s why I’m so interested in UFOs and other civilizations. They’re there! So what can we learn from them?…Sometimes I’ve [been mocked], especially my discussions about UFOs and reincarnation. But, okay, let’s discuss it. The more we discuss it, the less grounds for humiliation it serves. That’s never bothered me much anyway… I just love the study of it. I’m just ultra-curious about everything. - Shirley MacLaine

When I was a child, we had a den built-on to our house. Prior to its creation, we had a formal living room with fancy couches and a green glass light fixture and a piano. But this was a room for guests and opening presents on Christmas morning. We didn’t hang out in it. 

Our house was in a subdivision out in the country. So, we had neighbors, but we were surrounded by farmland. The new den had big windows that looked out over our backyard and the farm behind us, a fireplace with a brick hearth, and a wall of bookcases. This room became the heart of our house. This is where we played records on the cabinet stereo, watched television at night, burned fires, laid around on the couch, and ate bowls of popcorn and Saturday morning cereal.

Both of my parents were heavy readers, so we had a lot of books. The same way I loved to flip through and study the record albums, I liked to explore the bookcases. Of particular interest to me and my brother, was a little section of my dad’s. These were books about aliens. 

My brother and I stood out in our driveway at night with our father and watched the skies. I remember him smoking his pipe and scanning the stars for unusual movement, sharing with us his ideas about aliens and UFOs. So, this was something we discussed in my household, along with philosophy and physics, Bigfoot, mythology. We talked about the possible origins of UFOs and life on other planets. It was not an idea that ever felt far-fetched to me. Quite the opposite. It seemed ridiculously unlikely that in all of the cosmos, Earthlings would be the only life.

One night, driving back from my grandparents’ house, all of us in the car, my dad pulled over on the side of the road and told us to lock the doors. (At that time, car doors had little silver knobs that you pushed down and pulled up in order to lock and unlock your door.) He pointed toward the sky and we all saw it - a carousel of lights, hovering above us. We were stunned and excited, but we weren’t afraid. In my house, there was a theology of aliens. If they are so technologically advanced that they can travel here, my dad would say, they will have evolved out of violence. They will be peaceful.

In elementary school, I had a bright and creative friend who not only introduced me to the music of the Beatles, she also created an entire world, a game of sorts for us to play. She made lists of attributes and color associations for each planet and we chose which planet we were from. I don’t remember the attributes, but I chose Venus, mostly because I loved the word Venusian. 

I didn’t feel at home in the world or in my skin. I didn’t feel I truly belonged anywhere, except perhaps inside the books I read or when I was walking on my grandparents’ farm. I didn’t belong in my Sunday school class or my classroom or my subdivision where the kids played kickball in the evenings. Did this sense of being out of place contribute to my interest in the vastness of the universe and possible visitors from other realms? I honestly cannot say. But I enjoyed the idea of being Venusian.

I was too young to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the theater, but the tonal music was everywhere, even in our music room at school, and it captivated me. I remember listening to it and feeling a resonance in my body. I remember everyone talking about this movie as if it had been a documentary. There was an eeriness about it but also, hope. 

It was my brother who turned me on to Coast to Coast when we were in college. Art Bell was the host then, and we listened to the radio on actual radios. This was before the paranormal entertainment boom or the dawn of podcasts. I was aware of the vaguely right-leaning politics, aware of the penchant toward fear-mongering, but I listened anyway. I listened to people tell their stories of mystery and encounters. I listened, glad there were others in the world who knew there was more to reality than what we were shown on the nightly news.

One night, when my brother and I were in our twenties, he and my mother and I were in a car traveling on the Interstate late at night. We were coming through Pennsylvania, and we were listening to Coast to Coast. Suddenly there appeared an enormous triangle of lights low in the sky on the right side of the car. It seemed to hover there for a moment, then the lights went out one by one. My brother, who was driving, pulled into a rest area. He went in to ask if anyone else had seen it, but no one had.

I was living in suburban New York attending graduate school when the Hale-Bopp Comet made its appearance. The poet Stanley Kunitz visited our campus and read his poem Halley’s Comet. I’d not been so moved by anything in my life. When I read the poem to my then-boyfriend and he said he didn’t get it, I wondered how we’d ever even been remotely attracted to one another. 

I was walking one evening from the train station to my apartment. I was on a footbridge that crossed over a highway when I looked up and saw it. I saw the comet and its tail. It stopped me. It knocked the air out of my lungs. I started to cry, stunned by the beauty of the cosmos.

I was aware of what some people were saying, that there was an unidentified object trailing behind Hale-Bopp. It was surely a spacecraft, some believed. I didn’t know. Maybe it was. But then, the Heaven’s Gate suicides happened. I watched the video footage on the news, the black sweat suits and tennis shoes, bodies shed like vehicles, no longer needed. It was a tragedy but it was treated like a punchline. There was such contempt for the members of the cult, as if they hadn’t been human beings led to their deaths by persuasive doctrine, as if they hadn’t died searching for meaning, believing. I confess there was a part of me that hoped they were right and had been picked up by a mothership. 

In the eighties and early nineties, alien-talk was mostly about abductions. Whitley Strieber published Communion in 1987. A guy I went out with at the time read Communion and was terrified by it, so I didn’t read it, but much later in life, I watched the movie. If I hadn’t known it was a movie based on actual events, I would have assumed it was about childhood sexual abuse. I’m certainly not saying that was the case; I’m saying it’s possible that some experiencers may have false memories.

But I’ve heard enough experiencers talk about their experiences to convince me that visitations, abductions, all sorts of activities are real and have happened and continue to happen.

I grew up hearing the story of Betty and Barney Hill and believing them, but I now think it’s possible they didn’t have an alien encounter. I don’t think they were lying, but I do think they might have been persuaded into a false memory. Another story that may or may not have actually happened, the crash in Roswell, has been turned into a roadside attraction, green paper cutouts and cartoons of aliens in every shop window. There’s a town in Kentucky that hosts a Little Green Man festival every year. It’s based on an actual, though dubious event, but again, treated as a joke.

It’s as if we want to believe in UFOs and visitors from outer space but we can’t quite believe it’s possible, so we create for ourselves these games that allow us to explore the idea without appearing foolish. Fiction feeds reality and reality feeds fiction and speculation feeds both. Does culture absorb science fiction and begin to live it, or is science fiction commentary on culture and glimpse into the future?

The show Ancient Aliens was fun when it first premiered. It felt like a throwback to my Chariots of the Gods childhood. It wasn’t particularly sound science and required huge leaps of imagination, but it was fun and intriguing to watch.

I began to follow content creators who claimed to be channeling off-planet beings, who said their spirit guides were aliens, who even called themselves Starseeds - souls who originated on other planets. This was a fascinating idea to me. Why not? I wondered.

But I was traveling in England with my mother when one morning, I sat on the bed with my coffee to check in with the online world. I saw that an account I followed on Facebook had posted a video update, so I tuned in. I can’t remember this woman’s name, but I had followed her because she talked about energy currents in an interesting way. She was a bit older than me and I liked her vibe.

In this video, however, she was frantic. She was talking about how the Queen of England was actually a Reptilian, how the entire royal family were reptiles, how Buckingham Palace had mistakenly released then retracted a statement confessing this was true.

I eventually unfollowed her. I stopped watching Ancient Aliens, as well. They had begun to give a platform to people like David Icke and David Wilcox, Holocaust deniers, and were now promoting the idea of the Reptilian agenda, a conspiracy theory rooted in anti-semitism and Nazi propaganda. 

I’d long since stopped listening to Coast to Coast for the same reason. What had once felt like a safe space for the exploration of the paranormal had become a bunker for the radical right - a platform for doomsday preppers and white nationalists.

I’d seen softer versions of this in other well-loved sources of extraterrestrial theory, the work of Dolores Cannon, for instance. I noticed that many people who claimed to have insight into alien races and history told stories based on hierarchy and skin color, slavery and dominance, as if somehow justifying our own horrendous human history.

The idea that some Earthlings were not Earthlings but, in fact, Starseeds began to feel unhealthy to me, a way of setting oneself a part in specialness. I was still deeply interested in the subject of off-planet life, still a believer that we have not only been visited, but that extraterrestrials live among us, sometimes serving as our guides in spirit. But it seemed to me that alien theory had become dangerously entangled with fear-based conspiracy theories.

And then Q-Anon emerged into the mainstream. Many of the “Starseed” creators I had followed on Youtube began to push a sort of paranoia. It was clear that whomever Q was, they were rehashing theories about the New World Order in a way that appealed to the New Age mindset. I watched people I loved disappear into hatred and fear, watched them relinquish their humanity to racism and cruelty. I watched their personalities change.

As Covid loomed, a Starseed intuitive, who had always given me a bit of an uneasy feeling, to be honest, started telling people not to wear masks, not to put the masks on their children.

Not long after George Floyd’s murder, the handful of Starseed people I’d continued to follow on social media despite my growing dis-ease with their content, all said the exact same thing in the exact same way, as if someone had turned on a switch. It was right-wing racist conspiracy theory phrased in a way that spiritual people would find palatable.

When it comes to the nature of reality and our off-planet counterparts, I love to listen to people with big expansive theories and wild experiences to share. But I will not tolerate anyone of influence spreading right wing propaganda or medical disinformation. Our situation on this planet and in this country is too dire for that. Racism dressed up in New Age language is still racism.

So where does that leave me and my quest to know the truth about off-planet life? I am drawn to things that are weird… really weird. I am not someone who accepts mainstream thought without consideration. I make space in my mind and heart for concepts and possibilities that many other people might find too incredible or ungrounded or farteched to consider. I have my whole life been interested in what lies beyond the stars in the sky and what lies behind our collective notion of reality. 

I have no doubt that Earthlings are not the only life in the cosmos. I have heard harmonic sounds in the middle of the night that felt to me to be of an extraterrestrial origin. I have seen the two UAPs. I’ve even encountered people before and thought…hmmm…might be from another planet.

I am also deeply skeptical. I have watched countless hours of faked footage. I tuned in for a couple of minutes of that Congressional hearing and immediately felt it was performative and dishonest. Is it possible that some of the information presented was true? Of course. I’m sure some of it was true, but I pay attention to whom I am giving my attention.

I reject Reptilian conspiracy theories outright, not because it’s so unbelievable to me that an alien race could be reptilian in nature and living in tunnels underground, but because these are theories born out of anti-semitism. The idea that there are good aliens and bad aliens and the good ones just happen to be the white and Nordic in appearance, is just white supremacy.

I do believe that some people have been abducted. I also believe that many alien abduction stories are false memories, the mind’s way of protecting itself against memories of abuse. I believe there are humans who have been on ships, humans who have access to alien artifacts, humans who interact with aliens. I even believe we have reverse-engineered alien technologies.

And, who knows, maybe there are aliens living underground. I like the theory of underwater space stations and think there’s some evidence for that.

Are we now in a time when we will see more and more lights in our skies? I believe we are. 

We’re certainly in a time of hoaxes and fear-tactics.

Will there come a time when there will be actual disclosure, events and encounters that will provide undeniable proof that we are not alone in the universe? I believe we are close to that time.

But we have to be discerning and vigilant against propaganda designed to lead us into violence or control us through fear. We have to be careful we are not persuaded to become the enemy of life itself.

I believe many of the stories about alien abductions, animal mutilations, and crop circles that have made their way into pop culture are hoaxes (like the recent Miami mall aliens,) but some are indeed alien activity. Some humans and animals have been taken aboard ships and some have experienced frightening, even painful things.

Is it possible that human life is some sort of experiment? I think it’s possible. Perhaps in a sense, all Earthlings are Starseeds. If the origin of human life on the planet Earth is a story that includes off-planet beings placing us here, then there is truly nothing alien about being an alien. 

Maybe, just as humanity is diverse and humans come in different forms, so do off-planet beings. Just as different people have different motivations, intentions, and personalities, so do alien people. If not all aliens have good intentions toward humans, perhaps most do. Other life forms have a vested interest in the survival of human life on the planet Earth and perhaps there are off-planet beings attempting to assist us or redirect us.

Or maybe we’ve created the collective delusion that our cosmic neighbors have come to help us because it’s too frightening and too heartbreaking to accept that we are alone, rapidly rendering our planet inhibitable and ourselves extinct.

When soft disclosure began a couple of years ago, with stories showing up on NPR indicating that NASA had acknowledged life on other planets, I had a conversation with a friend. She said she couldn’t cope with the news because it sent her into an existential crisis. I understand that is how a lot of people feel. But that isn’t how I feel. I was raised on the idea of aliens, so they don’t cause a crisis for me. 

Personally, I find comfort in imagining Shirley MacLaine beneath the stars in Peru opening her heart to Pleaidian assistance, and I appreciate the voices who are willing to speak openly about their alien experiences. I like to dream outward, push at the walls of convention, and imagine ships of peace in our skies. The bottom line is, I do believe. And in that belief, I bear a responsibility to love and to the greater good.

Notes

Halley’s Comet, Stanley Kunitz

The New World Order: The Historical Origins of a Dangerous Modern Conspiracy Theory

We Were Teenage Conspiracy Theorists - American Hysteria Podcast

Pseudoarchaeology and the Racism Behind Ancient Aliens

Strange Arrivals Podcast

Edgar Cayce and the Hopkinsville Goblins

Shirley MacLaine: Extraterrestrials and JFK

Protocols of the Elders of Zion