I think this has pretty good explanatory power! I think I have updated towards thinking that these videos represent physical craft with the claimed abilities.
That winter, I had a three-month period of downtime where I decided that my time was best spent giving myself an ad-hoc education in neuroscience. During the day, I was a good student. The laser printer ran hot, and the stacks of papers on neuroanatomy and neurochemistry piled up around the living room. Towards the end of the day, as the sun went down and my mind grew tired of behaving itself, I would feel the need to blow off some epistemic steam. It was in these moments of weakness that I turned my attention to reddit.com.
If you spend enough time on specific subreddits, the algorithm will start recommending you posts from adjacent communities. So, despite starting starting out on the explicitly skeptical r/UFOscience, over time my browsing habits strayed to places like r/Abductions – and onwards into kookier realms like r/Experiencers and r/HighStrangeness, communities where people shared their encounters with the paranormal.
I began to realise why I found reading this sort of content so addictive. Without adopting any particular metaphysical stance, reading tales of the paranormal feels like reading pieces from a grand act of collective storytelling, one where the reader may form a patchwork headcanon where everything connects together locally but when one tries to look at the whole picture it never entirely coheres into a whole. Stories about crash retrievals blur into stories about alien abductions, which blur into stories about sasquatch sightings, and so on…
Sketching out the state of play in the broader UFO memeplex as of August 2022. As we go from left to right, the models required to explain the given stories shift from the physical to the metaphysical. Anyway – if you like collaborative world-building and global knowledge games, you’d probably love this sort of thing.
There’s a Coast to Coast with Art Bell show from 11 September 1997 which perfectly exemplifies this dynamic. In this particular episode, Art invites current or former Area 51 employees to call in to the show. Callers include a low-level supervisor who claims that the flying saucers stored there are “broken junk”; a time-traveller from the future where Area 51 is capital of the world government; and a security guard who challenges other callers to prove that they work there:
Caller 6: Here’s how you find out – ask them how they pay for their meals, and ask them what colour the second door is as they go in, and ask them how they get there. Just ask them those three questions.
Caller 9: I was let go on a medical discharge about a week ago, and and I’ve kind of been running across the country. Oh, man, I don’t know where to start. They’re going to, they’ll triangulate on this position really, really soon.
Art Bell: So you can’t spend a lot of time on the phone. So give us something quick.
Caller 9: Okay. What we’re thinking of as aliens are – they’re extra-dimensional beings that an earlier precursor of the space program made contact with. They are not what they claim to be. They have infiltrated a lot of aspects of the military establishment, particularly Area 51.
He predicts that wide-scale disasters are coming, and right as he gets into the details, Art’s satellite connection mysteriously cuts out—
Art Bell: Something knocked us off the air, and we’re on a backup system now.
Caller 10: Is it the government – or…?
Art Bell: I don’t know!
It turned out that the GE-1 satellite had rotated in its position, losing its ground lock. The coincidental timing of this event and caller’s compelling nature meant that this story lived on, effectively canonised in the Coast to Coast legendarium.
Similar dynamics play out on the modern internet. Compare the story of redditor u/Throawaylien, who became a subcultural touchstone himself with his claims of being repeatedly abducted by two aliens known as “Jack” and “Gina”, who appear to be running some kind of research program on humanity:
Gina said that there are a lot of different beings out there. I can’t remember if she said thousands or millions, but I think she said millions. And there are millions of planets with life on it, she said, and then there are some forms of life that don’t even have planets. Some planets have just like fungus on them or some fish or plants. But there are I think she said millions of civilizations out there.
Many of them are as advanced as hers she said. She said that there are only 7 planets in the whole world that are like the earth where the dominant life form has the simple problems. She called them the simple problems, not me. She didn’t tell me a list of the simple problems, but she told me some of them that were prayer and faith healing and churches and sorcery and magic and all that kind of stuff, mostly all stuff about religion. And of those 7, she said there were only 3 where people experienced deja vu, or believe in prophecies, or that worship idols.
We are one of those three and that’s why the Friends of Friends are here. That’s why the others were here, too, and that’s why the next group is coming in July. Gina says that they know that the whole world isn’t really what it looks like but it’s actually the creation of a single intelligence and that we and everything exist inside that intelligence.
I asked her if it was like the Matrix and then I explained to her what that was and she said it wasn’t like that at all and so then I asked her if was like when that hospital show ended and it turned out to all be a kid imagining it in a snow globe and she said it wasn’t like that either. But she said that it’s the one thing that everyone in the world agrees on, all these thousands and thousands of advanced civilizations, they apparently all have proof that the world is imaginary or a dream or a computer program or something. And they study earth and the two other planets like it because they are pretty sure that these three planets and the intelligent life on them are either mistakes, like accidents, or else one of them might be the center of the whole thing and everything else is a mistake or an accident. They want to figure out which is which so that they can better understand the intelligence that creates the world.
While the prose is simple, the story hangs together well – it’s mostly compatible with existing abductee tropes while also containing enough bizarre details to keep it interesting. His comments over the years attracted a large amount of commentary and speculation – but unfortunately his prediction of mass alien contact on 18 July 2021 failed to come true.
What started me reading was the lore, but what kept me reading was the phenomenology.
When reading such content I find there’s a number of different hats I can wear. Either I can be a skeptical-minded party pooper, or I can loosen my epistemic standards in order to evaluate how compatible a specific claim is with a given metaphysical headcanon. Often it feels pointless trying to criticise unverifiable forum comments too harshly, so I tend towards the latter – but past a certain point that’s more entertainment than truth-seeking.
There is a third hat available. If I remain metaphysically agnostic, and adopt a nonjudgemental attitude towards what I’m reading – and if I make the perhaps overly charitable assumption that the author is not outright lying for attention – then to dismiss people’s experiences as just hallucinations would be missing the point. Instead I take such data at face value as pure phenomenological reports of something someone experienced.
Abduction or hallucination – does it matter? What does interest me is that when I read enough of these reports I start to spot weird trends. For example, why does tinnitus – specifically, transient, unilateral tinnitus – come up so frequently in reports which are ambiguously paranormal, psychotic, or perhaps even Havana syndrome?
Why do alien encounter reports share so many common elements? Why do so many people report the experience of being restrained on an operating table in a room with sterile, geometric interior design, where pale-skinned aliens with skinny bodies, large heads, and big black almond-shaped eyes conduct tests, extract biological samples, and communicate telepathically with a cold, emotionless demeanour?
Here’s a typical replication, made by redditor u/Het_Harbinger:
The bottom part represents the edge of a table or bed kind of thing. I was lying on something that was recessed into the ground and walled, almost like a surgical observation deck around a bed, but I couldn’t really see it since I was facing up. It was kind of round and I made my best guess about the texture.
I made the alien model in Blender because I like its sculpting tools and layout, but I’m terrible with using its lighting system, so I import it over to Cinema 4D and do the texturing and rendering there :)
Many of these reports date back to very early childhood or before this specific archetype entered popular culture – so if people are to be believed, some cases can’t be easily explained away by priming effects. In that case, what might account for these specific commonalities?
Communion by Whitley Streiber, first published in 1987. If you read around, you’ll find that many older experiencers claim that when they ran across this book it was the first time they had encountered a picture which matched what they had seen.
The more I read, the more I noticed alien encounter phenomenology coming up across completely different contexts – sleep paralysis episodes, near-death experiences, as well as DMT trip reports. This is fairly old news; the DMT researcher Rick Strassman, author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule, found himself dealing with the same puzzle during his clinical trials in the 1990s. His assessment is worth reading in full:
I was not at all familiar with the alien abduction literature before beginning the DMT study. Neither were many of our volunteers. I knew almost nothing about it, and had little desire to learn more. It seemed much more “fringe” than even the study of psychedelic drugs! However, once we began hearing so many tales of entity encounters, I knew I could no longer plead ignorance of the larger phenomenon. Despite my better judgment, I now feel compelled to weigh in with my opinion regarding the experience of contact with “alien life-forms”.
Let’s review the popularly reported “alien abduction” experience. We will see the striking resemblance between these naturally occurring contacts and those reported in our DMT study. This remarkable overlap may ease our acceptance of my proposition that the alien abduction experience is made possible by excessive brain levels of DMT. This may occur spontaneously through any of the previously described conditions that activate pineal DMT formation. It also might take place when DMT levels rise from taking in the drug from the outside, as in our studies.
Our current culture is fascinated with the alien abduction experience. Psychiatrist John Mack has published many reports from “abductees”, people whom he now calls “experiencers”, in his books Abduction and Passport to the Cosmos.
As the event begins, Mack says, “consciousness is disturbed by a bright light, humming sounds, strange bodily vibrations or paralysis … or the appearance of one or more humanoid or even human-appearing strange beings in their environment”. Mack emphasizes the sense of high-frequency vibrations many abductees report, which may cause them to feel as if they are coming apart at the molecular level.
Some find themselves in familiar environments, like “a park with swings”, and figures “emerge” out of the background. Abductees also often find themselves on some type of examining or treatment table. Experiencers are absolutely under the aliens’ control. Despite the obviously unexpected and bizarre nature of what they are undergoing, there is no doubt in their minds that it really is happening. Thus, they describe their experiences as “more real than real”.
The “typical” alien looks like the ones portrayed commonly in the media: large head, skinny body, big eyes, small or no mouth, gray skin. However, Mack also reports frequent descriptions of reptiles, mantises, and spiders.
Some abductees feel there is some kind of neuropsychological reprogramming, or an enormously rapid transfer of information between the beings and experiencer. Aliens may communicate using a language of universal visual symbols rather than sounds or words.
The resemblance of Mack’s account of the alien abductions of “experiencers” to the contacts described by our own volunteers is undeniable. How can anyone doubt, after reading our accounts in these last two chapters, that DMT elicits “typical” alien encounters? If presented with a record of several of our research subjects’ accounts, with all references to DMT removed, could anyone distinguish our reports from those of a group of abductees?
Aliens, celestial beings, and extra-terrestrials were encountered in 281 experiences (16.3%). Included within this thematic phenotype were beings made of light or energy and jeweled beings (n = 74, 4.2%); geometric, fractal, or hyperdimensional entities (n = 61; 3.5%); grey aliens (n = 18, 1.0%); and aliens or celestial beings not otherwise specified (n = 130; 7.6%).
The fact I was reading a lot of neuroscience papers around this time made me feel compelled to understand this as a neurological condition. I have no strong opinion about Strassman’s theory that the pineal gland synthesises endogenous DMT during signficiant life events, but I do believe there are strong links between the phenomenology of psychosis and psychedelics.
If there is a meaningful comparison to be made, then I would very much expect alien abduction, sleep paralysis episodes, and so on to share other tell-tale aspects of their phenomenology with DMT states – the striking resemblance, as Strassman says – it’s just that people tend not to report on them often, as this would require a fair amount of clear-headedness in the moment. Here’s an example of someone who is asking the right kind of question:
Question for abductees with less than perfect vision – are you abductions clear like a dream or do they reflect your actual eyesight?
Some of my personal experiences seem to reflect my actual eyesight, which is pretty bad. I can still distinguish colors and light without contacts or glasses, but it’s pretty blurry. I try and brush off interactions with the “visitors” as dreams or imagination, which isn’t too bad since I don’t really see much anyway with my own eyes, except for their black eyes against their lighter faces.
Sometimes an odd detail will stick out though, so maybe I’m actually seeing them in my mind’s eye like a dream? I don’t know. The more I think about it, the more confused I get. Thought I’d see if I was alone on this.
One such tell-tale similarity would be the overall aesthetic. DMT-induced hallucinations tend to have a quite glossy, high-resolution look and feel to them that is absent in other psychedelics – I think this is what makes people describe them as more real than real. This is an example of what I suspect is such an experience as described by someone working at a nuclear weapons storage depot in Nevada:
While I was working up there on the night of July third, I think it was 2006, I saw a massive American flag appear in front of a nearby mountain. It covered the entire face of the mountain, was there for maybe a second, and disappeared again. Nobody else saw it, it happened so fast. Thing is, the resolution was perfect – the colors crisp, focus and detail crisp like a 4k monitor – and of course if you project an image over such a massive area it’s bound to lose resolution.
It wasn’t like a waving flag or anything, literally just looked like a jpg of an American flag that appeared and disappeared a second later. Damn near crashed the vehicle I was driving it startled me so much.
I figured that I would have to experience an alien encounter for myself in order to confirm that this was the case. I never expected that I actually would, until the following happened:
My relationship was going through a rough patch, and I’d taken to sleeping on the sofa in order to give my boyfriend some space. I’d been stressing myself out, I wasn’t sleeping well, and I recall regaining awareness sometime during the night.
I first noticed that the lounge room ceiling appeared grainier than normal. This was not the first time I’d had sleep paralysis, and I’d noticed a similar effect before, discovering that I was able to make the level of graininess fluctuate by tensing the muscles around my eyes. I inferred that my eyes were actually closed and that what I was seeing was actually just a hallucinated rendering of the familiar room around me.
The next thing that happened was that a grey alien popped its head over the back of the sofa. It looked exactly like Thor from the TV series Stargate SG-1, except it had menacing black eyes with crisp specular highlights. I was overcome by a deep, primal sense of all-encompassing fear.
For fuck’s sake, I thought. I’m finally having one of these.
Thor, supreme commander of the Asgard fleet. Puppet from the TV series Stargate SG-1. Unlike the alien in my encounter, Thor’s one of the good guys.
My understanding is that loving-kindness meditation can be used to neutralise negative entities, but there was no time for that in the moment. We stared at each other for about three or four seconds. Then the alien glided – impossibly fast, this happened in about 200 ms or so – around the sofa and bent its head over my stomach. If I hadn’t been completely paralysed I would have screamed loud enough for the whole house to hear – but instead I simply woke up.
I was deeply unsettled and had to get up and stalk around the room to ensure nothing hostile was lurking anywhere before I could go back to sleep again, and in the morning I needed a debrief with my friends.
I can confirm for the reader that the alien itself had the characteristic crisply rendered, photorealistic, high-resolution DMT look to it. It’s hard to describe if you’ve never seen it – you might say that in this altered state my visual field contained higher spatial frequencies than my unaltered vision system is normally capable of generating.
I figured that if my visual system was able to generate a photorealistic rendering of my lounge, then it should be unsurprising that it should be able to generate a photorealistic rendering from a character from a television show that I had seen many times before. I had to update towards popular culture having a greater influence over this class of phenomena than I had otherwise assumed – either that or Stargate SG-1’s prop department is staffed by genuine experiencers, which is not impossible.
The question remains as to why this archetype is an attractor state in the first place. Why large-headed, pale-skinned aliens as opposed to purple-skinned, long-nosed ones? Is the grey alien archetype a remnant of hospital ward birth trauma? A later DMT-induced encounter gave me some clues.
It had been some years since I’d been interested in using DMT on a frequent basis, but I was trying to get back into the habit – there was an experiment that I wanted to run. I’d taken to sleeping with a DMT pen on the bedside table, expecting that at some point the impulse would strike. This was one of those mornings.
I put my eye mask on and took a short rip from the vape. Visually, on the come-up what I often see is many overlapping circular wavefronts of random colours encompassing my visual field – as if being emitted from many randomly positioned point sources. The way these waves behave – it’s as if they need to figure out how to “latch” or phase-lock in order to facilitate the phase transition to the Chrysanthemum or Magic Eye levels.
This doesn’t always happen, though, and this time around they failed to latch. The waves themselves began to get quite sharp – like triangle waves, but with a very clean spectrum, few dissonant overtones – and the colour drained out of them, until all I saw was neutral grey.
I began to develop the impression that there were two beings with big heads and big eyes peering down over me, like I was a patient on some operating table. I felt that they wanted to reach down, perhaps into my head – for what purpose, who can say.
I realised that if I continued putting my attention on them then these beings would soon be reified quite crisply. I decided that it was too early in the morning for this kind of bullshit and that I was not interested in where this was obviously going, so I pulled off my eye mask, hoping to end the trip.
As my attention flooded back into my body, the entities morphed in a complementary manner, their bodies filling out into stereotypical feminine beings of love and light – and what was grey before now turned a warm shade of peach. I realised the error of my ways – I’d simply been putting too much attention on my head, rather than my body.
I was still cooling down when the DMT taught me a second lesson about just how malleable my body map can be. I got bored and started scrolling Twitter – sloppy, I know – and it was too late before I realised that the way in which I was concentrating my attention was also squashing my my face into the same shape as a rectangular iPhone screen. My parents were right – square eyes is kind of a real idea. Before it solidified like this, I had to grasp my ears and tug in order to stretch the shape of my head back out again – but it was still kind of a mess for the rest of the morning.
What if the grey alien archetype did not originally come from popular culture at all, but emerges naturally from the constraints of human neurology? Could it be an artifact of how our visual system degrades during altered states?
A speculative model for understanding what psychedelics do is that they might shave off the long tail of this harmonic spectrum. This could explain why low-dose psychedelics cause ringing artifacts, or why medium-dose DMT simplifies volumetric geometry into cartoon-like forms.
There’s specialised hardware in the associative cortices for handling human faces and human body parts – it’s possible that if these lose their high-frequency detail during altered states, then they might settle into predictable attractor states. Imagine a soap bubble shaped like a human body, settling into equilibrium by minimising surface tension – the attractor state being a simple eigenhuman of sorts, which then gets fleshed out again using whatever facial features and cultural symbols are most accessible to the individual experiencer.
This is missing something, which is that I think that this process is modulated by attention – the “soap bubble” becoming more or less inflated depending on where I direct my attention. If I concentrate attention in my head – then my head distorts and my body diminishes into something like the archetypal grey alien shape, which is then reflected in the shape of the entities I encounter. If I focus on my phone, then I get something boxy and rectangular – but if I let attention flood my body, then I get something more curvaceous and feminine.
This seems important for emotional modulation. People often associate a terrifying emotionlessness and psychopathy with grey aliens. See this report from u/forbiddensnackie:
I don’t want to really get into that, bur they’ve repeatedly forcibly taken me from my home in the middle of the night, operated on me without sedatives or painkillers, tried to make me dissect a dying humanoid on a table, and tried to condition me to completely lose touch with my emotions, rendering me somewhere between a psychopath and a sociopath and I just, I fucking hate all of it. I don’t care that they’re from space, that they’re some ‘ooo space civilization’ I don’t give a shit that their tech is advanced. I just want to make sure they never try to ‘visit’ me again.
I think this is simply down to their body shape. Personally, I feel emotions in my body, as many other people say they do – but only after years of teaching myself to avoid cerebralising my emotions.
Aggregate data from online survey participants who were asked where they felt different emotions in their bodies. From Maps of subjective feelings (Nummenmaa et al., 2018)
If we view the body map as a kind of resonator, and emotions as vibrations within this structure – then changing the shape of this resonator should change the efficiency with which emotions propagate. If I had a big head attached to a vestigial body, then I would expect this to seriously impede my ability to cultivate emotions.
Anyway – my updated headcanon for grey alien physiognomy is now very simple. It may simply be a reflection of what happens when we get stuck in our heads.
Of course, this is all speculation. I also have no strong opinion about whether any of these reports represent actual alien contact versus neurological phenomena – insofar as they are not outright fabricated. The best I can do is be cautious about making any conclusions drawn from internet comments load-bearing. Epistemic status: I read it on Reddit.
I guess that what I do can be considered consciousness research, and from time to time I get asked why I’m not also researching kookier phenomena, given that good models of consciousness should be complementary to understanding the paranormal. I guess this is to be expected if you spend a lot of time interacting with psychedelic communities! I recently got into a conversation about it on Twitter, but I’ll repeat myself here.
I do not consider active investigation into the paranormal to be a personal priority compared to research into lower level, more fundamental phenomena like visual field dynamics.
I wish to actively avoid making belief in the paranormal load-bearing. My standard sanity check is as follows: If I believed in the paranormal, would my behaviour be different? If the answer is no, then I’ve done my job.
To combine these two statements: Even if I was to regard investigating magick or manifestation or suchlike as a priority, then I have to assume that these are higher-level patterns which are emergent from the lower-level dynamics which I am already researching.
I also believe it is virtuous to be able to single-mindedly pursue one line of research over the course of many years, even if it may become unfashionable, or those around you grow weary of your obsession. Research into the paranormal is one of the most obvious attentional attractors on the side of this particular path, and so it’s one which I remain cautious of.
As of late I’m mostly pretty checked out from the UFO memeplex – writing this essay is my way of getting it out of my system. I’m also starting to see more AI-generated content spread across the relevant subreddits, so I figure it’s time to move on. I hope something can be done about this. Reddit has been a wonderful phenomenological resource over the years, and it would be a tremendous shame if we got to a point where we can no longer tell the genuine human weirdness apart from the slop.
