How sad, is it not, to see a whole municipality attempt to certify the truth of folk tales… the philosophical reader will draw his own conclusions regarding this document, which attests to an apparently false fact, a physically impossible phenomenon.
— Pierre Bertholon, editor of the Journal des Sciences utile in Montpellier, Regarding “fiery stones falling from the sky” circa 1790
The Experiencer Disclosure Initiative is a collective of Experiencer activists and allies. Our work explores, amongst other things, the hidden role worldviews play within the mainstream discourse about “alien abduction” encounters — interactions we refer to as… Contact.
Our Mission is to establish the credibility of a diverse, international Experiencer community and further humankind’s understanding of the Contact phenomenon.
ExDI has undertaken this endeavor on behalf of abduction-experiencers who — in being honest and forthcoming about the high-strangeness of their Contact encounters — have been consistently met with incredulity, condescension, and ridicule. Decades into the 21st century, the subject matter remains so epistemologically problematic that people who report incidents of Contact are usually presumed to be mentally ill, lying for personal gain, or simply confused about a sleep paralysis event. In other words, they are pathologized for telling what is quite literally, an unbelievable truth.
The exasperation and insult of this dynamic notwithstanding, many abduction-experiencers readily empathize with just how challenging it can be to accept claims of “alien visitation” at face value. In a dearth of corroborating physical evidence, accounts of unidentified aerial phenomena that defy Newtonian physics, and tales of otherworldly grey beings who appear to blink in and out of material existence at will, have proven nearly impossible to reconcile within the dominant western worldview. The reflexive response to narratives that land well on the wrong side of what is generally considered defensible within mainstream consensus reality, is by now a cultural cliche…
Alien abductions? That’s ridiculous. I don’t buy it. Those people are crazy. Or desperate for attention. If UFOs are real, where’s the proof? Where are the high-res pics? Why don’t the aliens just land on the White House lawn!?”
Rather than rationally contemplate the existence of exotic non-human intelligences who demonstratively prefer to operate from the safety of liminal realms that elude detection, we reflexively assume a priori that UAP witnesses are inherently uncredible or that abduction-experiencers are simply incapable of accurately evaluating the ontological reality of what happened to them. And so, it would seem, our existential angst is a dish best served cold.
Of course, one needn’t believe in a thing for it to be true. Human history is rife with examples of the establishment’s unwillingness to investigate reports of “unnatural occurrences” that didn’t align with a prevailing worldview. Reference the Church’s condemnation of Galileo as a heretic and the 300 years it took Science to formally accept his discovery as fact. Or, consider the “fiery falling rocks” described by laypeople in a southern French countryside during the late 1700’s, repeatedly dismissed by the elite as “folk tales” about “an apparently false fact; a physically impossible phenomenon.” Meteorites, as we now know them, were anything but the mass hysteria they were presumed to be at the time.
All to say, physicalists have for millennia enjoyed a rather comfortable homeostasis in their assumptions about the boundaries of the atomistic universe we inhabit. While scientific knowledge has evolved through the centuries, truly consequential paradigm shifts have been few and far between. Indeed, one could argue that humankind hasn’t been this close to an upgrade in our collective psyche since Galileo used his telescope to confirm that Earth wasn’t at the center of the cosmos after all. Compelling as this might be, our reptilian brain appears to be triggered by the very premise that Homo sapiens’ dominance — an evolutionary advantage we have long taken for granted — might soon be called into question.
Perhaps it is in this, largely unconscious, primal fear that so many of us instinctively eschew any suggestion that life on Earth might currently be of interest to technologically advanced non-human beings who, rather inconveniently, appear to be in complete control of both the manner and timing of their interactions with us.
Apparently, it’s easier to kick the evidentiary can down the road when the burden of proof is on a small community of experiencers who are utterly incapable of providing any at all.
That said, it is important to recognize that we are not acting in our own best interests in refusing to take seriously a very provocative data set; one that has been incubated by UAP witnesses and abduction- experiencers alike since at least 1947 when nine shiny unidentified saucer-shaped objects whizzed by pilot Kenneth Arnold at supersonic speeds. One could argue that we should be directly engaging these anomalous events with the same tenacity, curiosity, and ingenuity our species has been tapping into since the dawn of our existence. After all, we do have the capacity to move through our fear of the unknown, and we are fully capable of suspending disbelief for the purposes of scientific and academic inquiry. That so many of us have been unwilling to even contemplate the Contact phenomenon with a reasonable, rational, open-minded skepticism, is unfortunate to say the least. For there can be no doubt, this reticence remains an ongoing influence in our civilization’s inability (thus far) to meet such a uniquely profound moment in human history.
Perhaps most critically, we have been languishing in the dialectical waters of a conversation that has consistently failed to connect with the noetic struggle of a cognitive minority whose Contact encounters have defied both imagination and belief. Even now, abduction-experiencer claims continue to be evaluated against long-established orthodoxies upheld by the gatekeepers of human knowledge — venerable scientists and scholars who authoritatively preside over the dialogue with the full weight of centuries-old institutions behind them. When few rational people would argue against the erudition of such learned authorities, where does that leave us in a discussion about the very real possibility that life on Earth is being monitored by a biological intelligence superior to our own?
To find out, we must first wrest the discourse from the mire of abstract philosophical rhetoric where it often bogs down in intellectual debate. We must then systematically construct a rigorous investigative model that will enable researchers to:
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1. Establish universally accepted criteria for UAP witness/Experiencer credibility.
2. Question underlying suppositions of various scientific hypotheses long presumed to be incontrovertible.
3. Relax the boundaries of materialism to allow for the development of an expanded physics model and the emergence of a new worldview that accommodates the high-strangeness of
Contact.
4. Define and respond to the complex epistemological challenges that inevitably arise when perfectly sane people remain insistent about the veracity of their Contact encounters.
5. Develop a new referential language to more accurately describe the peculiar phenomena and physics of Contact.
6. Devise novel research methodologies to capture the data set currently held by numerous UAP witnesses and Experiencers.
7. Implement a cross-sectional, observational approach in the study of the Phenomenon. Since empirical science cannot reproduce in a lab the appearance of UAP or the cause and effects of Contact, we require a multidisciplinary research instrument that utilizes pattern recognition and data linkage for a robust analysis of UAP and the Experiencer mythos as a whole.
The magnitude of the task before us cannot be overstated. It is in fact, monumental. We, therefore, urgently call upon intellectually courageous scientists, academicians and cultural leaders around the globe to step forward in the spirit of collaboration. The truth must be pursued wherever it leads; even if that turns out to be beyond the limits of spacetime, into the shimmering folds of a deeply enigmatic universe wherein the highly improbable is actually real and happening — right now — during this pivotal hour of our species’ evolutionary journey.
A Call to Action… ExDI is currently cultivating partnerships with reputable organizations, forward- thinking scholars, and researchers committed to upholding rigorous protocols in their investigations of the Phenomenon. If you are interested in contributing to the development of Dr. Mack’s work with Experiencers and have a professional or research background that you believe might be usefully applied in our efforts, please don’t hesitate to reach out and introduce yourself.
