The following transcript is a condensed excerpt from a two-part lecture titled “UFOs and Consciousness: The Fantastic Facts About UFOs, Altered States of Consciousness, and Mind-at-Large.” The lecture sought to highlight the literature supporting areas of research I think could be most useful in moving UFO investigations forward and which support some of the speculative hypotheses that I find the most compelling. It has been edited to focus solely upon the probable use of the UFO for Covert Folklore Warfare by all too human actors.

~ In this talk, I’ll give you an overview of what I call ParaCryptoUFOlogy—the alternative theories of the UFO phenomenon that suggest a covert socio-cultural control system of earth lights and ball-of-light phenomena that interact with human consciousness in parapsychological ways. It may also interface with the collective unconscious of humanity and other species as well as some sort of a planetary mind, or Gaian consciousness, that some have described as a GeoPsyche and Planetary Poltergeist.

We’ll also discuss the potential misuse of these mechanisms for “Grand Deception” stratagems that manipulate the phenomenon and we’ll reconsider classic strange encounters in light of known government mind control programs. Finally, we’ll discuss the probable fake, false, faux UFO campaigns and concocted contact narratives being created by certain human agencies for reasons that have to do with socio-cultural control rather than extraterrestrial aliens.

I must stress that I am not trying to convince you that my perspective is the right one. That, to me, is the hallmark of somebody from whom you should run screaming. I am here tonight to tell you about the many different areas of exploration I’ve come across that I think point to something more interesting and more complicated than simple extraterrestrials in nuts-and-bolts vehicles whose tires you can kick physically. That is not to say that there are not these types of encounters happening. In fact, many of the ideas I’m going to talk about would provide the perfect cover for such traditional extraterrestrial encounters.

This is the problem I have with most people who claim to have an answer to the UFO phenomenon: they pick a theory, but it only fits part of the data. That’s also why I advocate for a multi-theory interpretation of the UFO phenomenon. I don’t think there is any one explanation that accounts for all the data. I think there is a number of things going on simultaneously.

My obsessive search for information about UFOs occurred during the height of the 1990s “Zine Scene” as desktop PC-enabled publishing was expanding upon the photocopied Samizdat networks. Great magazines like Crash Collusion, from here in Austin, Excluded Middle Magazine in California, Arcturus Books catalog in Georgia, inspired my own foray into self-publishing. Those were great heady times, which led me to publish my first issue in the summer of 1994. It was called E.L.F. Infested Spaces, after Terence McKenna’s phrase, “Elf Infested Spaces;” E.L.F. because of the ubiquitous stories of mind control I kept coming across and research about the psychoactivity of electromagnetic fields, and how these various psychotronic mind-influencing technologies could be used to manipulate people, and theories of E.L.F. waves serving as the conduit for psychic information.

Over the years, I reprinted in ELFIS a number of really important UFO studies that speak to these alternative theories of UFOs: “UFOs: The Pineal Connection” by Serena Roney Dougal, “Topographic Brain Mapping of UFO Experiencers,” and, one of my favorites, “A Testable Theory of UFOs, ESP, Aliens, and Bigfoot” by Synchronicity author Alan Vaughan looking at correlations between geomagnetic activity and reports of various types of phenomena.

Another is the “Bibliography on the Psychoactivity of Electromagnetic Fields,” which is an incredible resource. It is page-after-page listing scientific papers about the effects of ELF and other electromagnetic radiation on physical and psychological responses. A number of the research projects were at military bases near where, gee, there’s been a lot of UFO activity. See also, “ELF Magnetic Fields and EEG Entrainment: A Psychotronic Warfare Possibility?” by Robert C. Beck.

It was likely Whitley Strieber’s first book, Communion, that got me thinking about psychotronic effects and the role of the earth. He wrote that the human brain and various body parts give off electromagnetic fields and that perhaps these could be manipulated: “A more acute technology than our own might be able to mediate mental and physical function to a great degree.” His intimations of an interplay between these energies and a planetary consciousness inspired the romantic animist in me.

Terence McKenna also encouraged that notion when he said, “one possible view of the flying saucers is that it is a kind of projection from the consciousness of the planet, that is Gaia,” and “I think in that sense, Jung was really onto something when he saw it as coming from the unconscious … almost as though the UFO is a manifestation of Gaia as mother goddess.”

In his “Five Arguments against the Extraterrestrial Theory” paper, Jacques Vallée said that “... it could be Gaia.” He provided two variants on this idea. “An alien intelligence, possibly earth based, could be training us towards a new type of behavior. It could represent the visitor phenomena of Strieber or some form of super nature,” like Lyle Watson talked about, “possibly along the lines of a Gaia hypothesis.”

It is, perhaps, Paul Devereux’s research that has most influenced my romanticized thinking of UFOs as organelles in a Gaian ecosystem. For years he’s researched these weird earth lights phenomena—luminous lights that are generated by the earth due to earthquakes and tectonic stress. In 1995 he wrote a passionate article called “Beyond UFOlogy: Meeting With the Alien” in which he talked about the importance of altered states of consciousness, the DMT research of Rick Strassman, and Terence McKenna’s perspectives that this is some kind of history-haunting phantasm that is somehow tied to the earth. He also cites Dr. Kenneth Ring’s work, and includes many other little known bits of data regarding the effects of these electromagnetic fields on human physiology and consciousness.

The environmental issues related to “fracking” have made headlines in recent years. Did you know it may be relatively easy to trigger such luminous phenomena? There’s been research into this since at least 1992 with fluid injection causing luminous phenomena. It seems highly likely that various human agencies have noticed this and may be using this to their advantage.

Another researcher whose books I’ve been really fascinated by and who cites all the medical and electromagnetic literature on the physiological and consciousness effects of such EM fields is Albert Budden. His book is called Allergies and Aliens: The Electromagnetic Indictment. You may have heard about people who are hypersensitive to chemicals: they can’t get near the fumes of gas, or various other types of chemicals cause them extreme reactions. Well, there are also people who are electromagnetically hypersensitive who can’t wear a watch, can’t be near computers, can’t be under 60 Hz frequency fluorescent lighting. His contention is that the phenomena represent the collective unconscious trying to, as several other people have suggested, make us believe in them but that it’s a result of electro pollution. Another aspect of his “Electro-Staging” hypothesis is the phenomenon’s ability, like a poltergeist, to manipulate telekinetically the physical environment and use everything from water vapor to dust particles to larger size physical objects to cobble together a physical form through which to interact with the witness. He says, “the unconscious responds to external geo-generated EM fields during altered states of consciousness and presents perceptions and realities that are dramatizations of alien contact in order to establish an acceptance of the unconscious within society.”

Paul Devereux speaks of humanity’s Shamanism technology—lost techniques for accessing the world around us. He and others have documented the worldwide belief that Balls-Of-Light represent disembodied consciousness and spirits. Certain classes of BOL accounts are closely associated with miners and the earth’s interior. Within all the UFO-lore and the contactee stories, whether it’s belief in some kind of ascended masters under Mount Shasta or ideas about Shambhala or the Vril, or even in the science fiction pulp of Shaver and Ray Palmer, there is this consistent imagery of inner earth mythology. I believe this and other Gaian overtones are due to the probable source—the earth herself.

The buzzing sounds associated with UFO close encounters and the hive mindedness of the beings reminds me of ancient traditions that deal with the oracular, the dispensation of prophecy and wisdom from the gods. Their messengers were often heard in association with the buzzing of bees. I think it’s not just the electromagnetic technological aspect of the sound but that there is obvious symbolism there that points to this idea of the hive, like the bees, and this hive mindedness; this hierarchy that is so often evident in the Theosophical traditions of so many esoteric groups, whether it’s the Ashtar Command and the various levels of their command structure and ascended masters and white lodges. I think, perhaps, these are reflections of the onion-like layers of Jung’s collective unconscious and more than merely analogous to the hierarchical taxonomy of biological classification.

One of the most important things that abduction researcher Karla Turner added to the dialog on UFO abduction reports was the idea of the Virtual Reality Scenario. She talked about this a lot in her lectures and gave examples where the abductee, the experiencer, would see and experience one thing, but nearby witnesses would see something quite different but still anomalous and weird.

There are a few examples of this in the literature where the researcher followed the abductee as they drove somewhere and watched them sit and never leave their car, but later on the experiencer would relate that, “Oh, the UFO came down, and I had this experience.” It’s not that these people are necessarily lying. They seem to have had some sort of fugue-like state, some kind of Out-of-Body-Experience. So many of the descriptions of these close encounters have the quality of OBEs. Karla Turner also believed that “abductees report alien-controlled information” and this alien Other force controls the perceptions of the experiencer.

Back in the 1990s, Rupert Sheldrake’s book, A New Science of Life, was declared by Nature as “the best candidate for burning there has been for many years.” More recently his lecture was initially banned from the TED-Talks YouTube channel. I find a lot of the ideas that Sheldrake has espoused really important in trying to understand UFOs and related phenomena. His ideas about fields (not the physical electromagnetic fields that we’ve been talking about) involves looking at them more as an abstract idea. I think that they have relevance to the realms of Psi and remote viewing, Jung’s Collective Unconscious, and Aldous Huxley’s Mind-at-Large. I’ve often tried to put it this way: To me, morphic fields and morphic resonance theory are akin to the various esoteric ideas about the Akashic records and the collective unconscious. I suspect that pretty much any idea can be its own field and that such fields can be accessed non-locally by consciousness. I’m reminded of the famous incident where former military remote viewer of much ill repute, Ed Dames, was fooled into remote viewing a mythical character, but thought it was a Soviet missile attack because, well, he perceived that there was some metal object rocketing across the North Pole. It was red, and it was heading to the United States so of course, he saw it as a Soviet missile attack. But what had he been tasked with remote viewing? Santa Claus! If something as unreal or as quasi-real as Santa Claus can be remote viewed, well, then that pretty much means to me that these Akashic fields can be tapped, and I suspect that may be one way of communicating across vast distances in a way that we think of SETI doing but without the electromagnetic radio waves. Vallée suggested as much in his 1992 book, UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union: A Cosmic Samizdat, when he spoke of the Soviet technique of “biolocation,” or biological-field dowsing.

“TRUFO VS. UFAUX: PLANETARY POLTERGEISTS & WEAPONS OF MASS ENCHANTMENT” by SMiles Lewis is an extract from his contribution to UFOs: Reframing the Debate edited by Robbie Graham.