Something happened one night that changed my life.
I saw a Grey alien standing right in front of me, one night on the Hopi Reservation many years ago. I was there as a volunteer art teacher at a summer camp for the tribe. It was about 4 feet tall, impossibly thin, with a massive almond shaped head, large, black almond shaped eyes, long arms with longer palms than us and long, tubular fingers. Its neck was too thin for it to be a kid playing a prank. It stared at me and I stared back. Then it turned and walked away, behind a large piñon tree, a black mass on the moonlit mesa. It never came out the other side. I ran round to it, but it was gone.
Without realizing it at the time, everything was different. I no longer had the luxury of disbelief. But my mind had other plans.
Like so many people confronted by something beyond their world view, I was in ontological shock and didn’t know it. In the most bizarre leap of faith, I didn’t think about it at all. It was out of this world – and out of mind. When I saw something about aliens on TV I’d think, “Oh yeah I saw one didn’t I? They’re real then.” But then like an automaton, I’d stop thinking about it.
Twenty years later, I had an idea for a book about the impact that global first contact would have on our scientific, religious, political and social institutions. I sunk into my research. One character was an abduction experiencer, and I wanted her perspective to be taken seriously, so I started reading hypnosis regression transcripts – and I was transfixed.
People from all over the world, from all walks of life, with no trace of psychosis, and who stood to lose more than they gained by opening up about this embarrassing enigma… were describing the same things. Exactly the same things. The same procedures, performed by the same beings, in the same order, with the same instruments. They were even told the same things.
They were troubled more by having no-one they could talk to, than by the outlandish nature of the experiences themselves. This is in part due to the concrete nature of what they went through. Waking up from a truth-shattering event is best written off as a dream – until you find scoop marks, puncture wounds, and other physical trace evidence… of something that shouldn’t have happened. Not to you. Not at all.
So my book turned on its head, from being a rather flashy exposé of societal bias and demagoguery, to becoming an exploration of our subconscious search for enlightenment. A journey I didn’t realize I was on, until I saw by my own denial that it was the same one we were all on. In the blissful oneness of being unaware together, we accepted parameters that erased the questions before they could be asked. In fear of our own aloneness we reached for a light we could turn off, rather than a light which could expose everything we feared most. Our fear of being alone, rejected by our peers. The fear of being alone in this vast, daunting Universe. Under the cloak of acceptability, lurked a presence that defied all reasonable explanation, and yet, it isn’t going away is it?
What is this presence? Where does it come from? What does it want? I kept on searching, reading now 75 books on the abduction phenomenon, UFOs, ancient civilizations, forgotten history and forbidden science. A through line began to emerge, as my tolerance for high strangeness deepened, and the sense of my place in it all took form. We are all in this unraveling together, whether we accept it now, or face it later.
I realized I had not one but two stories to tell. There was the impact that first contact could have on us, on the world. But there was another that had to come first – a leap into the dark: why we needed to know.
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Image by Adam Jesse Burns with AI layers.