the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

Dr. Jacques Vallee is a French-American computer specialist with a background in astrophysics and had written what I think are the finest books on the UFO phenomena.
I'd like to point you to this interview with him where he discusses his views. They are quite different then what you might expect.

Here is a sample..

But by 1969, when he published Passport to Magonia (Regnery), Vallee's assessment of the UFO phenomenon had undergone a significant shift. Much to the consternation of the "scientific ufologists" who had seen him as one of their champions, Vallee now seemed to be backing away from the extraterrestrial hypotheses and advancing the radical view that UFOs are paranormal in nature and a modern space age manifestation of a phenomenon which assumes different guises in different historical contexts.

" When the underlying archetypes are extracted," he wrote, "the saucer myth is seen to coincide to a remarkable degree with the fairy-faith of Celtic countries … religious miracles… and the widespread belief among all peoples concerning entities whose physical and psychological descriptions place them in the same category as the present-day ufonauts."

The complete interview..http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc608.htm

Interesting. Thanks.

Read his book years ago. Frightening stuff, particularly from a cover-up point of view.

fringe topic, huh? Along the lines of 'aliasing' the ufo phenomena to other 'known' quantities...here's another data point for ya.

dem don' know jah

but yeah... non-corporeal supra-terrestrials. that's about right, i think.

Graham Hancock wrote a great book not so long ago called "Supernatural" about this very topic, hypothesizing that the creatures depicted in ancient rock art, experienced in DMT (that stuff again?!) visions, celtic faery stories and alien abductions are all the same phenomenon - some sort of non-physical or sometimes/semi-physical beings or possibly part of our "collective unconscious" but which whatever they are or aren't they are only experienced by people in altered states of consciousness. It's a good read!

Could something geological, on the scale of a planet, have consciousness?

The planet is not only geological. The biosphere is part of it so we, the humans, are part of the planet. Our common consciousness, which I suppose that exists, is part of the planet.

We are only a part of the planetary and universal systems. Therefore, these systems posses our individual capabilities PLUS the whole complex interaction of them. Therefore, they must be way beyond us in any domain. We understand that a system with a complex structure and complex interactions between its elements is more than the sum of its parts. That's why I believe that the universe and probably the planet are beyond our capacity of understanding as a whole. Sure, we have glimpses of this and that, but I don't think that we can ever be able to get the whole picture for the simple reason that we are parts of it, probably very tiny ones too but that may be open to debate.