A.D. After Disclosure: When the Government Finally Reveals the Truth About Alien Contact (36 page)

Ultimately, besides simple life expansion, the Others could conceivably help us achieve immortality by mapping the chemistry of the human brain like a hard drive, and facilitating its implantation into a new cloned body that is younger, healthier, and yet still the same person. Sort of.

Still, nothing is more likely to fan the flames of paranoia and hostility more than the thought that the Others have been messing with our bodies, for whatever reasons. This returns us to our premise that the decade after Disclosure will borrow some inspiration from the 1960s.

The Next Generation

Today, as our world is observed and acted upon by unknown intelligences, humanity is mostly asleep at the wheel. Disclosure will rouse many of us. That deeply felt shock, the presence of Others, will cause great masses of people to question their values, to question how they had been living their lives. The knowledge that there is another species operating here on Earth, a species that lives and thinks in ways that may well be beyond what humans generally reach, will be sobering and liberating at the same time.

Imagine that billions of people, upon considering the presence of beings that are exceptionally intelligent and maybe telepathic, possessed of magical technology, and possessing a cosmology of far greater sophistication than our own, are here now. Many will ask a basic question:
Have I been wasting my life?

This feeling, aggravated by political assassination and misguided war, is what triggered the change that started in the United States and spread globally as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s.

Reliving the Sixties. Peace, love, and understanding won’t be any easier to find this time
. Photo courtesy of Jacom Stephens, iStockphoto.

Wherever we are going as a society, as a world, we will not arrive there on the Day of Disclosure, nor even 10 years later. The changes inherent in such a mind-expanding way of seeing life will create ripples of hope and fear for many years. It may be unclear for decades which emotion will prevail.

We remain optimists. Eventually, humanity will find its way home. New ways will take root, and life will go on.

Most change—to become firmly entrenched—requires the arrival of a new generation that no longer remembers the old ways. This will be true of Disclosure.

This time around, perhaps the new incarnation of the 1960s really will usher in a time of peace, love, and understanding.

Chapter 7
Paradigm Shift: Our New Place in the Universe

The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the Earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge
.

—Daniel J. Boorstin

There are times in human history when new information and new revelations can transform the world. Ideas that had been held as timeless truths can shatter overnight. In our world, Disclosure will be that trigger. It will usher in a time comparable to the era of Copernicus and Galileo, when humankind first realized that the universe did not revolve around the Earth.

The word
paradigm
was coined by the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, in his 1962 study,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
. He used it to describe a coherent theory of reality. When scientists obtain data that fails to conform to the dominant paradigm, the data are considered anomalies and normally discarded. Kuhn agreed that sometimes this is reasonable to do, but when too many anomalies litter a paradigm, something is wrong. Every now and then, a great thinker comes along who sees the world differently. This new vision makes sense of the anomalies and incorporates them into a larger, more complete, more accurate paradigm. Newton was such a thinker, said Kuhn. So was Einstein.

In this chapter, we discuss how the impact of Disclosure will affect the dominant paradigms in scientific thinking, as well as that other great interpreter of reality: religion.

Five centuries ago, it was the religious institutions that resisted the paradigm shift. The issue was whether the universe was Earth-centered or Sun-centered. The Polish astronomer, Nicolas Copernicus, was so fearful of Church reprisals to his great work on this subject,
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
, that it was published only after he died in 1543. It was an important theological issue, because the Catholic Church had taken a stand on the matter. The Church maintained that, as God had made humankind the centerpiece of his Creation, mankind’s world was at the center of the universe. Science, however, made it clear that this was not so.

Incidentally, the issue of extraterrestrial life was raised at around the same time, and received even greater resistance. The Italian scientist and free-thinker, Giordano Bruno, had the audacity to believe that the stars were in fact like Earth’s own Sun (he was the first known person to argue this). He believed in the existence of other worlds and of other beings created by God. In other words, Bruno said that there were extraterrestrials in our universe and that they, too, were God’s children. His reward was to be imprisoned for seven years, then burned alive for heresy in the year 1600.

During most of the ensuing centuries, Christianity in general has been silent on the matter of extraterrestrial life. Since the modern UFO era began, however, we have seen interesting developments on the matter. Christianity is a large umbrella, encompassing an impressive number of branches and sects, and its adherents have expressed every position on ET life and UFOs one can imagine.

Today, the greatest blind-spot regarding Disclosure belongs to the scientific community. Despite the evidence, it has steadfastly ignored the UFO mystery. Indeed, establishment science has hampered the search for truth by joining the chorus of naysayers who have made the experiencers of extraordinary events feel shunned, ridiculed, and possibly insane.

The situation regarding religion is different, if for no other reason than there is such a variety of them around the world. People’s spiritual beliefs may have certain things in common, such as the existence of a reality beyond the physical one of our five senses, but beyond that, almost anything goes.

Yet we should distinguish the science and religion from their institutions. Science, despite its institutional shortsightedness and conformity, is ultimately based on empirical observation and testing. That is why so many scientific conclusions, no matter how firmly believed, are called “theories” (Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution). As the philosopher of science Bertrand Russell pointed out, scientific conclusions are always provisional. They are subject to change when new evidence is presented. This may be an emotional drawback for those who demand certainty in their lives, but Russell argued that it is an advantage over the long term.
¹

Religious truth, on the other hand, at least when it is based on revealed statements from Holy Books, is not so easily subjected to modification. As a result, we may expect certain of those religions to push back when confronted with a reality as shattering as Disclosure. Many of their adherents will undoubtedly see this unbending quality as a strength, a firm shelter within the raging storm around them. Even so, there is reason to believe that many of the world religions will show the ability to adapt.

The End of Religion?

Many analysts have concluded that the announcement of intelligent life in the universe would destroy traditional religious faith. They point out that many of Earth’s religions continue to be heavily anthropomorphic, seeing humanity as the center of God’s plan. The announcement (or arrival) of sentient beings, therefore, would be too much for them to bear.

Other analysts, such as astrobiologist Paul Davies, theorize that visiting aliens might have discarded theology and religious practice “as primitive superstition,” and would persuade humanity to do likewise. Or, “if they retained a spiritual aspect to their existence, we would have to concede that it was likely to have developed to a degree far ahead of our own.”
²

These assumptions seem to have become a mantra in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) community and elsewhere, repeated so often that it feels as though they were established fact.

No Fear

In 1994, researcher Victoria Alexander conducted a survey of clergy from Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish congregations that asked, “Would you agree that ‘official confirmation’ of the discovery of an advanced, technologically superior extraterrestrial civilization would have severe negative effects on the country’s moral, social, and religious foundations?” She concluded that ministers did not feel this would threaten their faith or that of their congregations. Religions would not collapse.
³

Eight years later, in 2002, a Roper Poll similarly asked, “Would an announcement of extraterrestrial Intelligence precipitate a religious crisis?” Not only was the answer overwhelmingly “no,” it actually rose with age. Ninety-three percent of respondents over age 65 said it would not be a big deal. Roper concluded that “very few” Americans thought that an official government announcement on extraterrestrials would cause them to question their religious beliefs.
⁴

In early 2010, another survey examined the issue, this time with respondents from around the world. The results put another nail in the coffin of the SETI claims of religious berserkers running amok over Disclosure.

The survey was designed by Ted Peters, a professor at the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, California, and was called
The Peters ETI Religious Crisis Survey
. With his colleague Julie Froehlig, Peters interviewed 1,300 respondents, including believers from Roman Catholicism, mainline Protestantism, evangelical Protestantism, Orthodox Christianity, Mormonism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Atheists and agnostics were also included. The survey tested this hypothesis: “Upon confirmation of contact between Earth and an extraterrestrial civilization of intelligent beings, the long established religious traditions of Earth would confront a crisis of belief and perhaps even collapse.”
⁵

Here are some of the responses they received.

“Finding ETI, I believe, would be a profound and wonderful event.”