What are “Ultra-terrestrials”?

Hal Puthoff has suggested an approach to UAP research.

Here’s why, when Hal Puthoff sends us a message about UFOs and “ultra-terrestrial” life, we should listen.

He remains an active researcher and public figure at 88 years old. He was trained as an electrical engineer, and has written scholarly works on foundational questions of quantum physics and cosmology. Most famously, he worked 14 years for the Defense Intelligence Agency as a director of Project Stargate at SRI. This was a program of clairvoyant spies, telling us what the Soviet military was up to without ever leaving the Stanford lab.

He probably knows more about UFOs than he’s willing to tell us. Nevertheless, this article is an open-ended perspective on what we don’t know about the alien presence in the human environment; it suggests that coming revelations may be so foreign to our received reality that we will not be able to assimilate the messages or make sense of them.

We may think of spiritual beings from the Pleiades using wormhole technology to visit the earth and guide our human evolution at a pivotal moment in the history of life on earth? I suspect that the truth is much stranger.

Ultraterrestrial Models, by Hal Puthoff, Journal of Cosmology, 2022

Puthoff’s central thesis: There is plenty of evidence that something strange is going on, but the evidence is so diverse and contradictory that we can’t choose among several very different conceptions of the UFO phenomena.

Part of the problem is that there has been such an extensive and varied campaign of deception and disinformation. For a topic that is better grounded in known science, it might be easy to separate the disinformation from the credible evidence. But whatever is going on, it defies physical laws and known scientific paradigms in one way or another, so we can’t rely on the scientific evaluation of plausibility that serves so well in most other subject areas.

What phenomena is he talking about?

• Sightings of UFOs, including vehicles that disappear into the sea

• Vehicles that land. Vehicles that crash.

• Reverse-engineered technologies

• Claims of recovered bodies

• Thousands of people claim to have experienced abductions

• Livestock mutilations are commonplace in the American west

• Crop circles that cannot be created by any publicly known human technology

Here are six frameworks for understanding UFOs that Puthoff identifies:

1. The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis. They are visitors from a distant planet orbiting a far-away star, who arrived in vehicles that we would identify as machines with propulsion systems, but probably based on physics more advanced that we currently understand.

2. The Breakaway Civilization. There are colonies of humans (underground or undersea or in Antarctica) who have advanced technologies that they are not sharing with the general public nor publishing in the open scientific literature. They are responsible for the observed UFO craft and other phenomena.

3. (Combination of 1 and 2). There are colonies on earth of human-like beings who originally came from a distant planet but have lived a long time (secretly) on earth.

4. The ETs are actually time-traveling humans from earth, perhaps our descendants from the future, visiting our present and then disappearing back into their own era or another.

5. They are visitors from parallel universes or other dimensions who have found wormhole connections to come into and out of our world.

6. Mythical beings like leprechauns, angels, elves, fairies, jinn, and dryads are real in some sense that bridges psychical and physical reality. ETs are the version of this phenomenon that fits the modern imagination.

Puthoff emphasizes that it is difficult to make scientific judgments about the plausibility of these alternatives because they are all inconsistent with the present state of (open) scientific knowledge at a fundamental level.

His proposal is that we adopt one of the six perspectives as a hypothesis and pro-actively seek evidence that would confirm or falsify it. Different groups might focus on different hypotheses, and stress-test the paradigm rigorously against known facts.

As an example, he goes deeper into hypothesis (3) and kickstarts our investigation with evidence for and against.

Puthoff doesn’t mention the work of Graham Hancock and Robert Schock, citing pyramids and megaliths and precision carvings as evidence of a lost advanced civilization. [read more] I’ll use “Atlantis” as a stand-in, without intended implication about its location. Mainstream geologists have come to acknowledge a flood during the Younger Dryas period (beginning 12,700 years ago). Sea levels rose 100 meters in a short time, and this plausibly would have wiped out a global civilization (like ours) whose largest cities are mostly on the coast, and which relies on global supply chains for the essentials of life. All the technical and scientific knowledge was lost. Civilization rebooted from a primitive state, and perhaps Gobekli Tepe represents one of the earliest manifestations of a rebirth.

What if there was a small group of Atlanteans who survived, and continued to live in secret, somewhere on or below the earth, not sharing their knowledge with the rest of mankind? What if there have been secret societies through the ages that carry this knowledge and hope to keep it to themselves and rule the world with it? Maybe the strange phenomena that we associate with spirits and UAPs, abductions, and livestock mutilations are all perpetrated by a small community of surviving Atlanteans. A part of the idea not mentioned by Puthoff: Secret societies such as the Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Bohemian Grove and the Bilderbergers may be collaborating with the Atlanteans, doing their bidding in the human realm, distorting our politics, bringing terrorism, pandemics, and grand deceptions into our world in exchange for technology and powers granted by their sponsors. Maybe the recent bioweapon pandemic and other assaults on humanity have been organized at the behest of Atlantean overlords.

In favor of the Atlantean hypothesis:

• It explains one of the biggest mysteries: Why reported ETs tend to look like humans and have behaviors we recognize, even (perhaps) genetics compatible with our own.

• We have concrete evidence of advanced ancient civilizations, capable of moving huge stones. It is plausible that part of their technology was what we now call psychokinesis, and that mental technologies survive in a small group that has kept, for the most part, out of public view.

• The small size of their population might explain their need for infusion of genetic diversity from our larger human population.

• Without an interstellar component, no wormholes or faster-than-light travel or exotic new physics is required.

• A common theme in ET stories is that they are concerned about destruction of our global ecosystems and that they have intervened to prevent nuclear war. This would be a natural motivation if they are closely related to us and sharing the planet.

• Perhaps the globalist campaign toward granular control of our lives by a One World government derives from an (understandable) fear that when the Atlantean technology becomes widely available, humans may become too powerful for our own good.

And against:

• It explains why the ETs look like us, but not how they can look so different. The little greys, for example, are certainly more different than 12,000 years of evolution can account for.

• Why would they be taunting us with UFO displays, e.g. recent lights in the sky and the Phoenix event of 1997?

• Some of the UFO maneuvers captured on radar defy conventional physics; if they can drop instantly from 100,000 feet to sea level without crushing occupants with G forces, they must have mastered gravity, in which case interstellar travel becomes plausible, and the Atlantean hypothesis is not needed.

• It leaves unexplained the motives of the Atlanteans and the relationship between paranormal powers of the mind and what we think of as technology.

Each of the last 5 years has confronted us with mysteries stranger than the last, and forced those of us whose eyes are open to consider there is much we thought we understood, but which doesn’t jive with present realities. I expect that 2025 will continue the high strangeness, and I hope that new paradigms concerning the human condition begin to emerge from the fog.