What on Earth is going on?
Another essay on how little we actually know
I’ve only been around for a handful of decades, and this last month of July has been the most head-spinning 31 days of disclosure/misdirection in my life.
More than three years after Scripps Institute star virologist and Anthony Fauci’s go-to expert, Kristian Anderson, authored the controversial paper in Nature Medicine that manufactured consensus around the dubious zoonotic origins hypothesis which he and his co-authors offered as irrefutable fact, he was finally forced to answer some difficult questions in an open session of a Select Subcommittee on the Corona Virus pandemic.
He and co-author, Robert Garry, sought to explain their abrupt flip-flopping around the possibility of a lab-leak once Fauci and then director of the Wellcome Trust and now W.H.O. chief scientist, Jeremy Farrar, got involved.
The hearing centered around email exchanges that imply collusion between “the science” and “the government”, two entities that usually sit at opposite ends of the spectrum of credibility. The cross-examination could only go so far. Why would these scientists ever admit that their integrity was compromised by governmental directives?
Why would Dr. Fauci ever admit that the vast resources of which he was in control may have funded the creation of a pathogen that harmed millions and shut down the world for two years? Recall that when Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) asked the former NIAID director about this possibility one year ago Fauci responded indignantly, “…quite frankly, and I want to say that for the record, you do not know what you are talking about.”
Unfortunately, an equally specious aspect to Anderson’s paper remained outside the scope of the questioning. Why would Anderson and his co-authors declare in their published analysis that an “engineered” virus was unlikely because the conformation of the spike protein did not match their computer model’s optimal receptor binding “solution”? Isn’t it obvious that if the virus was the product of human ingenuity for bioterrorism purposes those involved would have picked a different “solution” to hide their fingerprints?
To me, this was the biggest reason why Anderson’s paper wasn’t a legitimate effort to get to the bottom of things. It was an elaborate cover-up that percolated through the scientific community and outward as the opinion of an irreproachable scientific establishment as challengers were not only deplatformed but smeared.
This leads to a different congressional hearing which centered around the evidence that our own government pressured media platforms to censor any opinion that ran counter to “official” positions around pandemic response.
Vicious attempts by Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL) and other Democrats to prevent a member of their own party, Democratic presidential candidate, RFK Jr., from testifying in open session on censorship demonstrate that the American public is being held hostage by a ruthless censorship/disinformation machine that transcends party affiliation.
Meanwhile, corporate sponsored media platforms focused on alleged machinations of two different Presidents of the United States. Unsurprisingly right-leaning outlets emphasized how the sitting President repeatedly used his influential position to support his son’s business dealings with foreign governments while those on the left continue to draw attention to Trump’s possession of classified documents and incitement of the J6 “insurrection”. Announcements from each faction came in near lock-step with each other.
Also of note, during this extraordinary month of disclosure, the NYTimes has published at least a half dozen features and opinion pieces on the new Barbie movie.
With all this stuff going down, is it possible that the public is missing the biggest story of all?
An ex-USAF and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency intelligence officer and now whistleblower, David Grusch, came forward two months ago claiming that our own government has been in possession of spacecraft, technologies and even bodies of non-humans for decades.
In yet another July congressional hearing, this one on UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), Grusch, flanked by Navy pilots who have personally encountered UAPs, explained in open session what he has seen and heard in his career as an intelligence officer.
What should we make of this?
There are those who believe that the idea that there has been a recent or ancient ET influence over humanity has been repeatedly debunked and nothing but more fabrications were offered. According to them, Grusch’s story is getting covered to distract us from the more important stories of government corruption listed above.
It is also possible that the opposite is true.
If Extraterrestrial civilizations are here it would be the biggest story in the history of our species. Before going any further, I invite you to listen to what Grusch has to say in his own words in this extended interview with NewsNation:
In the interview Grusch claims that
Secret programs embedded in the deeply funded military complex have been in possession of ET technologies for decades
These technologies have been “reverse engineered”. This means that these technologies have been available to a secret and select few for quite some time
He has reason to believe that ET species are not all benevolent.
Other countries are likely in possession of such technologies of non-human origin as well, suggesting that the cover-up has been orchestrated by interests that transcend nation-states
He can only publicly disclose a part of what he has seen and what he knows is just the tip of the iceberg
He has come forward out of a sense of duty to the American people and to clear his conscience
The full transcript of The House Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs for unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP) hearing where Grusch testified can be read here:
What should we make of these potentially revelatory admissions from an intelligence insider?
Here I would caution us to not make a common mistake when confronted with information that supports a conclusion that we consider to be not credible from the start, which is to dismiss the evidence because we cannot accept the conclusion that follows. In other words, because we know that ETs on Earth is hogwash, we can conclude that any evidence that supports that idea must be hogwash too.
The problem is that we don’t know anything with certainty, and this approach puts the cart before the horse. We don't throw away evidence based on foregone conclusions, we throw away conclusions when the evidence doesn’t support them. It’s the difference between dogma and rational thinking.
There are many reasons to reject the notion that ETs are here. At a time when our agencies of public health, media, past and present Presidents are being cross-examined and indicted for violations against the public and our Constitution, this would seem an ideal moment to throw in a distraction. Given what we have heard last month why should we believe anyone who is affiliated with our government about anything?
There are other reasons too.
Who would be comfortable with the idea that advanced civilizations capable of “warp speed” have been out there watching us for who knows how long?
What would that mean for those who subscribe to certain religious beliefs around the exclusivity of being human? As children of a God/creator are we now to accept that we have cousins from Vega?
Human beings haven’t played very nice with each other, but it’s been comforting to know that we have been at the top of the food chain for quite a while. We seem to have little problem tinkering with the genetics of our crops and domesticating and slaughtering billions of animals a year. What if we have been the subjects of a grander experiment that we are only now becoming aware of?
An ET presence on the planet stirs up a lot of stuff that we don’t like to talk about in polite company. It’s easier to maintain our “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)
But there is really only one scientific reason to reject the possibility of ETs on our planet. The nearest star systems are just too far away and the energy required to propel a spaceship at velocities that would make such a journey feasible is difficult to accept, based on our present understanding.
Then again, Commander David Fravor (Ret), one of the F-18 pilots involved in the now famous “tic-tac” encounter in 2004, testified in the hearing that as he approached the 40 foot long “propane tank” with no wings or discernable propulsion system which was hovering at 12,000 feet, it suddenly disappeared from view and reappeared on radar 60 miles away.
These craft, if they exist, don’t move around like they are supposed to. Is it possible that the postulates formulated in Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity 117 years ago may be dated?
It turns out that non-linear motion and the absence of any sounds of a propulsion system are aspects of many UFO sightings going back decades. Is this really how they get around, or is this just a part of a deceptive story that conveniently allow the feeble-minded to throw away everything we know about space-time and fall for another crazy notion that our government wants us to believe?
How (on Earth) are we to understand what is going on right now?
Here I would like to highlight the work of my friend and collaborator, Josh Mitteldorf, PhD. He recently wrote a thoughtful synopsis of the evidence that ExtraTerrestrials have gone Terrestrial:
Some of his points:
Grusch’s testimony is not new. Similar claims have been made by ex-military going back decades. Twenty-two years ago dozens of military witnesses with similar claims as Grusch’s came forward.
Bob Lazar, a bright young engineer who tried to bring attention to the project he was working on in a secret location in Nevada more than 30 years ago has also been dismissed by skeptics. Lazar claims to have actually sat in a recovered ET craft and was tasked to understand how its propulsion system worked. He regrets having come forward because he no longer had access to the most advanced technology on the planet. I invite you to listen him recount some of his experiences on the Joe Rogan podcast here:
There are enormous mysteries in plain sight on our planet. We still have no idea how the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. Whatever technologies that were used are beyond our own. How certain can we be that that structure, consisting of more than 2 million blocks of red granite, some weighing more than 70 tons which fit together with hair-breadth precision, was not in part the result of ET assistance?
The list goes on and on. What about crop circles that are acres across, esthetically and mathematically exquisite that appear overnight?
Or The Lines of Nazca, which were thought to have appeared 2000 years ago depicting zoomorphic designs that are only fully appreciated from hundreds of feet in the air?
We don’t know how these things came into being. We acknowledge that building the Giza pyramid is beyond our present capacity yet we assert that our predecessors living 5,000 years (or more) ago could, did, decided to stop there and then hide any traces of the technology and tools they used (maybe to tease mainstream Egyptologists?).
Or perhaps whoever built the Great pyramid decided to leave after the project was finished…
Can we pause for a moment to sit with the possibility that high above, advanced beings who may have constructed these physical wonders have been quietly watching us come to grips with the signs they have left for us? What would they be saying now?
“Good grief, mates! What’s it going to take?!”
The Biggest Mystery
The biggest mystery on the planet is not the pyramids nor the pretty patterns in the desert and fields; it’s us. How did we and the biological systems that we completely depend upon come into existence?
There seems to be only two acceptable answers, both of which are exclusive of the other:
Life is the product of an omnipotent creator or
We came from pools of “primordial soup” that resulted in the formation of self-organizing organic compounds which eventually, by chance alone, over billions of years, resulted in the diverse fauna and flora that we see around us.
Once again we are stumbling into topics that are best avoided lest we risk losing credibility or friends. Though we are reluctant to openly discuss these hypotheses, many of us have extreme certainty about them. Contrarians are either
Heretics or
Delusional
We are stuck. There is no way to disprove the existence of an all-powerful (and invisible) creator. There is no way to prove that given enough time and the right conditions an amoeba won’t appear. Can we say something intelligent about the likelihood of the two possibilities? We cannot.
We can, however, say something intelligent about one of them. Mitteldorf summarized the complexity and sheer improbability of the emergence of life from inorganic compounds in his essay “The Origin of Life…Unsolved or Unsolvable?”
The biggest difficulty in defending an evolutionary hypothesis is not the possibility that rudimentary life forms could give rise to more complex ones. Given our understanding of genetics and the challenge to survive in an ever changing environment it is entirely feasible that traits which confer an advantage to a given individual organism would preferentially propagate and eventually give rise to the various forms of life we see today.
The problem lies in the jump from inorganic to organic molecular compounds or a set of chemicals that each catalyze the formation of some other chemical in the set, such that the full set can copy itself in a pre-biotic environment. Such a set of chemicals is called a hypercycle.
He introduces the problem:
“The synthesis of even simple molecules like pentose (one part of one building block of RNA) is far more difficult than you might think. And all the work has been done in racemic mixtures, meaning equal quantities of right-handed and left-handed molecules. Life (all life on earth) has been observed to make proteins exclusively out of left-handed amino acids and to make DNA exclusively out of right-handed nucleotides. Furthermore, hooking these simple building blocks to make the macromolecules on which life depends sufferers from the “chicken and egg” problem — we don’t know how to string together the building blocks to make a macromolecule except by starting with pre-existing macromolecules. Proteins are necessary to replicate DNA, and DNA is necessary as a template for proteins.”
“All present life on earth is made of cells, and even the simplest living cell is so complicated that it is unimaginable that one could have arisen by chance. Living cells today all have both proteins and DNA. The proteins are workhorse molecules that direct metabolism. The DNA provides information necessary to construct the proteins. So today’s life cannot make proteins without the information in DNA, and DNA cannot replicate without protein-based enzymes. This alone is sufficient to argue that today’s cellular life is too complicated to have arisen by chance. In addition, the structure and organization of even the simplest bacteria makes the assembly of a living cell by chance processes implausible.
A virus is much simpler than a cell, but it reproduces by hijacking a host cell’s machinery. Viruses could not replicate in a prebiotic environment.
But we can imagine that life preceded cells and viruses. All that is required is auto-catalysis — that is, a chemical that can seed creation of copies of itself; or, more likely, a hypercycle = a set of chemicals that each catalyze the formation of some other chemical in the set, such that the full set can copy itself in a pre-biotic environment.
Such a hypercycle may bear little resemblance to anything we call “life” today, but it would be capable of Darwinian evolution, which means that all the questions about the provenance of life’s complex chemistry can be deferred — they are not about the origin of life, but about the power and plausibility of evolutionary processes. There are legitimate questions about evolution, which have been the subject of heated disagreement; I hope to put those questions aside and limit today’s discussion to the very first self-reproducing system, which I define as “life”, and which by definition must have arisen by a pre-Darwinian process of chemistry and chance without the benefit of natural selection.”
Mittledorf asks: What is the simplest auto-catalyzing hypercycle?
Answer: We don’t know because no one has been able to construct one.
To put it bluntly, we cannot prove that God doesn’t exist. Neither can we prove that life as we know it came out of inorganic matter. But it is worthwhile to try to wrap one’s head around the plausibility of the latter. It’s a lot less likely than you might think.
Could there be a third explanation to the mystery of life on this planet? We experiment with life forms around us. We endeavor to build robots that look, move and think like we do. How would an advanced civilization billions of years ahead of us have regarded a planet like Earth when conditions on its surface became compatible with carbon based life forms?
Is it possible that humans beings were, in fact, made in the image of their creator?
Even if ETs seeded life on the Earth we are no closer to understanding how self-replicating organic molecules formed from inorganic compounds. In other words, if we came from ETs, where did they come from?
Neither does this possibility preclude the existence of an omnipotent Creator. In the end, creationists get to keep their God and materialists get to keep their mystery.
Nevertheless we can appreciate why this topic is so charged and why we may be having some difficulty in seeing things clearly. It’s also a reminder to have empathy for those who are in strenuous disagreement. Nobody can be certain of anything right now, and we generally don’t have a good relationship with uncertainty.
Conclusion
The point of this essay is to caution against knee-jerk reactions to what is being slowly divulged and probably spun. When we throw away the possibility of ETs on Earth we must also dismiss thousands of accounts of encounters over the decades from around the world. It may also leave us interminably searching in vain for answers to our biggest questions.
We simply cannot know if Grusch is telling us the truth. If what he is saying is true, our biggest concern shouldn’t be that “they” might be here. Our biggest concern should be that there are secret factions, highly funded and without oversight, that have access to technologies that we cannot possibly fathom. We may never know whether a flying saucer that we see skimming the treetops and disappearing into infinity is one of theirs or one of ours. Imagine how this possibility could be leveraged by those in possession of this kind of technology.
But this is not a new concern to those who have openly examined the extraordinary amount of evidence supporting an ExtraTerrestrial presence on our planet and the lengths entities within our government will go to conceal it. The new concern is about timing. Why now?
If anything, the past month should be enough to convince us that we can’t trust anyone. Furthermore, what evidence would ever suffice around such matters? A photo? A video? Sworn testimony? A piece of a flying saucer? How can we authenticate any of these things without trusting somebody else?
Are you waiting for a personal encounter with an alien before you will believe they are here? If you did happen to meet one, would you trust your own eyes? There is at least one alleged contactee who temporarily lost his wits as a result of such an experience (see the Pascagoula Incident of 1973). Calvin Parker was one of two men who claim to have been taken aboard a spaceship and examined by non-human creatures. Their story cannot be proven or disproven either. Nevertheless, at some level Parker’s mind could not accept what he experienced.
It’s not unreasonable to think that an advanced civilization, one that is capable of interstellar travel by bending space-time to their will, would appreciate how a species which likes to point their guns at each other would react to their arrival. If they were here we shouldn’t expect them to land on the White House lawn. They would know that the mere knowledge of their existence would probably traumatize those of us who are simply not ready. Their reluctance to show themselves is better interpreted as a sign of benevolent intentions and not the opposite.
Some elements of our society paint “the aliens” as a military threat. When asked if he thought UAPs posed an existential threat to the national security of the United States, Grusch responded affirmatively.
On the other hand, if they made it here from another star system they probably could have their way with us if they wished. Although Grusch alludes to information that suggests that some “non-human” entities have been unfriendly, his position reflects something that seems to be hardwired into our thinking. If there is something or someone that is more powerful than us we will always consider it a threat. Is this really our nature? Or have we been taught to think this way?
In any case, maybe we should reconsider our overtures or at least put someone with half a brain in charge of our welcome committee if we have one.
There is another source of information besides Congressional testimony from insiders, media reports and the musings of popular influencers (hint: it’s in the first image). I will save this topic for another post. For the moment we are left with having to trust our intuition. What is it telling you (please comment)?
Excellent article. Logic must be a ruling principle. As a Christ-follower, I think everything has to be interpreted taking into account the internal and external evidence of the accuracy of the Bible. As one who has seen the transforming power of Jesus in my own life and the lives of others, not to mention the astounding number of fulfilled prophecies in that Book, I agree with the questions, but within a different framework. Since I believe 1) that the existence of God (Author of logic)is supremely logical, based on natural laws (which are the closest things to scientific fact that we have) and 2), that ALL of God’s prophecies will come true, how will all of this “evidence” (of which 100% is secondhand, as far as I’ve seen; hearsay and anecdotal) fit into the prophecies yet to be fulfilled? Don’t forget AI, which can be used for deception as well as good, and as you’ve said, no “truth” can be interpreted without standards of Truth. Keep your minds open to ALL possibilities, even those of the Bible.
Thank you for this essay. I am of the opinion that there are some salient contributing factors that prevent productive discourse on topics such as this. They include:
1. Hubris
Excessive, overbearing pride, presumption or self-confidence; arrogance.
2. Thought Terminating Clichés
A form of loaded language, often passing as folk wisdom, intended to end an argument and quell cognitive dissonance. Its function is to stop an argument from proceeding further, ending the debate with a cliché rather than a point. Some such clichés are not inherently terminating; they only become so when used to intentionally dismiss dissent or justify fallacious logic.
3. False Binaries
Based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available. The source of the fallacy lies not in an invalid form of inference but in a false premise. This premise has the form of a disjunctive claim: it asserts that one among a number of alternatives must be true. This disjunction is problematic because it oversimplifies the choice by excluding viable alternatives, presenting the viewer with only two absolute choices when in fact, there could be many.
The humility to reasonably suspend disbelief requires an inherent confidence in oneself that, imho, is often lacking among the peddlers of The Truth™ , The Science™, and other settled subjects.
Flexibility of the mind is necessary if we are to move beyond the boundaries of the "decided facts", as these boundaries do not, and cannot, include all of the evidence with which we are presented.
So thank you, for so succinctly entertaining a discussion that seeks to expand these boundaries.