Science has had a great run over the years and has accomplished plenty. Still, to adequately explain UFO/UAP reality, scientists are going to have to step in some Woo. Will they? Can they?

Science is the endeavor to determine the difference between the real and the unreal.

A surprising number of people take comfort in science. After several centuries of progress in understanding our place in the universe, the scientific method has become the gold standard of reliability in many people's minds. You expect those who do science, those who are trained in the procedures and protocols of scientific investigation, to be committed to the world view of their profession. But their numbers are small relative to the larger population of human beings who rely on what scientists tell them. Scientists are supposed to get it right because other people count on what they say.

So, scientists have a system of peer review in place to hold them responsible for being factual, accurate, and, most importantly, that their representations are reproducible (if you have the means). The edifice of science is built on continued validation of discovered evidence, one experimental investigation upon another. The scientific approach is a triumph of ingenuity and critical thinking intended, so we are assured, for the benefit of everyone.

The benefits have been plentiful. Thanks to the progress of science terrible diseases like smallpox and polio that scourged humanity for millennia have been eradicated. Most people alive today don't have to forget many horrors they never knew courtesy of science.

Everyone enjoys their smartphone, and a dazzling set of technical functions called the Internet is the key to modern life. Transportation is another big achievement based on science, with airplanes and motor vehicles — never mind spacecraft and submarines— making possible almost unlimited personal mobility and supporting a vast global commercial economy that has lifted billions of people out of poverty. Science is a winner.

With valuable success upon success, the scientific community has become vested with cultural authority. Scientists advise in most spheres of human affairs. Politicians, business people, the military, health care professionals, just about everyone running every practical aspect of our civilization now consults scientific understanding in their decision making. Scientific knowledge is real power.

Scientists have assumed the role in our world as augurs of what is possible, what is not, and what is likely to happen. Even when individuals possess little to no education in scientific fields, the benefit to their lives from scientific progress is tangible and ubiquitous enough many (not even close to all) have come to trust that the application of science can solve their problems, and indeed any problem that might afflict the world.

What ordinary people have is faith in something they don't understand for themselves because they believe in others who say things are so.

What happens to the prestige of the scientific establishment when something fundamentally important that was dismissed as non-existent is shown to be present in actual experience? The answer to that question is to be found in the presence of the Phenomenon.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Wrong is on the way to right.

At the root of scientific research sits the idea that the material world as it has been conceived is all that exists. This exclusionary attitude occurs, ironically, because science is based on evidence. Evidence in science requires shared objective observation. This is done through the physical senses.

If something cannot be measured, quantified, and described within the way the physical world is "known" to exist, either as matter or energy, it is considered imaginary and disregarded.

Science has created elaborate descriptive systems to catalog objects and events encountered in what is called the natural world. Overarching principles, termed laws, have been determined to govern the interplay of states of being from cosmological to quantum scales. As a conceptual model, this predictive system of thought is consistent, efficient, and useful.

There are, however, two unspoken parts in the arrangement.

First, existing stories are preferred. There is a bias for what has come before as it has been understood. Scientific thought is primarily a consensus. The approved conceptions found in science are assumed to be correct interpretations of the available data because there is agreement among scientists on the meaning. This group thinking tends to accumulate affirmation through experiments designed with the existing authoritative view or way of doing things.

Breakthroughs that are convincing enough to change the established fundamental narrative are rare. Data disagreeable to a favored concept can be rejected out of hand simply from intellectual habituation. Status among scientists is almost medieval in terms of hierarchy, particularly in academia. Deference is given to the silverback, who usually determines what younger subordinates are allowed to do. Careful control, including weeding as necessary, is exercised to keep compliance with the authority structure intact.

Such defensive posturing serves to discourage challenge to the status quo. While this resistance to change is on one level intended to protect hard won gains in scientific understanding from shoddy thinkers, it also has the effect of suppressing innovative reinterpretation of existing data and quelling unsanctioned lines of inquiry. Money is often a blunt instrument.

Second, the explanations of science are incomplete. Scientists still need laboratories and experimental devices because they continue to have work to do. Researchers delve constantly further into the fabric of material existence, from the minute world of subatomic particles to the inexhaustible sweep of the universe in the sky above. Newly acquired pieces of the puzzle are then integrated with the picture already assembled on the table.

Scientists have built a substantial, complex, and often highly abstract load bearing intellectual structure. Their array of knowledge sets is so extensive and refined that specialization to a single field of study is usually required to advance a career. In general, there is too much detail to learn in any one area for someone to cultivate multiple disciplines and be considered authoritative. This stovepiping fractures the possibilities of complementary insights from others, just as happens with the highly classified Special Access Programs (SAPs) in the Department of Defense. It is self-defeating in a significant way.

To outsiders, the scientific community often presents a monolithic certainty in their understanding of the way things exist. Yet within their circles, discussions can be contentious. This jousting is part of the consensus process, but it also reflects sometimes deep conflict over basic questions that lurk below the shiny polished surface shown to the public. Remind me, are eggs good for us today?

Caveats applied, the achievements attained through the scientific method are still what have defined the present day world as the most powerfully advanced civilization known (by us) in human history.

Science has triumphed. Huzzah. But, in case you haven't noticed, scientists have also failed us.

Nothing Unreal Exists

Life is more than what people tell you to believe.

Scientists dropped the ball on the investigation of Unidentified Flying Objects. Worse, science was used as a cloak of respectability to project the view that UFOs did not merit attention. The notorious failure of the Condon Committee report from the University of Colorado in 1968 to summarize accurately contrary data (that was then purposely lost in the back pages) is a well understood example of the authority of science being used to propagandize the subject to the American people and the world.

The influence of that corrupt exercise still reverberates today in the skepticism and ridicule toward UAP that is entrenched in the scientific establishment, which in half a century has done nothing to rectify the disinformation. Even though a few scientists at the time did take exception and called out the report for its failings, the shame of this stain on scientific credibility hardened into place. Discussion of UFOs was forbidden through a false denial.

UFOs became taboo in science. Even today, after the U.S. Government has confirmed to the public that UAP exist and we don't know what they are, scientists are institutionally and professionally discouraged (emphatically) by their peers from undertaking research into the topic. The habit of misrepresentation is built into the scientific world. UFOs are far from the only example.

As it happens, the Phenomenon may become the instrument of — well, I hate to say revenge but there is some schadenfreude here anyway —calling out another area where science has long willingly come up short against the reality of human experience.

UFOs are apparently physical intelligently controlled craft that can out fly anything in the human aerial machine inventory (I take Top Gun Navy Commander Dave Fravor at his word). That would be easy to handle without any really destabilizing challenge to the scientific world view. If all that is required is the adjustment of some equations, the refinement of a few physical laws, and determining a point of origin in the known universe, scientists have got that covered. No sweat.

Except, wait, there's significantly more to UFOs than that. Inexplicable effects on human consciousness during encounters, including among other things mind-to-mind communication, the inability to move, missing time, and altered memories, are commonplace in UFO accounts. Nobody likes this, but the data is persistent. Any real understanding of the Phenomenon will have to deal with it.

The only problem is science knows squat about the nature of the human mind.

Mind Your Head

What used to be called the beyond is still there. Ooh, scary.

The great success of science exists only in the material world, which scientists affirm adamantly constitutes all of reality. As noted, this is because of their business model. Yet for as long as human beings have been alive, cultures across the ages have gone to great lengths to define and provide means of working with what cannot be experienced through the physical senses. This was always done as a guide to the world of consciousness.

In this realm of being, modern science is out of its depth.

With great flourishes of self-assurance, scientists have for centuries — but particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries — rejected anything they can't measure objectively through repeatable tests as having meaningfully relevant existence. That encompasses the unseen, untouchable, but imminently present world of experience occurring in your mind.

The mind is immaterial. You can't point to it, stretch it out on a dissection panel, or put it in a test tube. But, are you going to say you don't have one?

Here is the dark blind spot in Western awareness, but it wasn't always so. Like with the Condon report, scientists boxed themselves into what is essentially a political position and have hung out (to dry) there ever since. As I detailed elsewhere, the scientific establishment had to endure more than a few burnings at the stake, both figurative and literal, to gain freedom from the intellectual oppression of religious dogma.

Miracles, bah humbug.

Science had to barge its way out of ignorance by disproving assertions made by Church authorities about the physical world. In a nutshell this was the scientific metier, so things went well indeed. While many religiously motivated people stepped out to dig up ruined places in the Middle East for "scientific" evidence of the truth of Biblical history, scientists proceeded to do away with the need for a deity altogether to explain the workings of the natural world. They succeeded.

Because of this wholesale rejection (for good reason) of religion, the entire notion of a spiritual world was discarded as a sentimental fairy tale (pun intended). And they were just getting started. Over the decades, scientists would use their increasing social authority as conquerors of the material world to belittle a wide assortment of inner experiences human beings have always had.

Science could only see you are born out of nowhere and you wind up as nothing in the end. Life after death (no souls or ghosts!) and reincarnation were dismissed from consideration. Information not derived through physical senses was deemed impossible, so out went telepathy, prescience, discarnate presences who might communicate, and a whole range of other psychic manifestations. These were tossed on the junk heap with angels, sprites, djinn, elves, fairies, gnomes, efrits, nagas, and an entire host of beings that were for millennia reported to come and go in worldly human experience. Baby, bathwater, out.

House cleaned.

Raise Your Hand Politely

Please, sir, may I ask a question?

Scientists were in their happy place. Not only had they succeeded in building a thriving garden, they had also erected strong walls to keep out pests. Periodically, though, someone would try to use the scientific method to investigate phenomena of the mind.

Such inquiries were sometimes spurred by scientifically eminent people. Among those who formed the Society for Psychical Research [SPR] were psychologist William James, Nobel laureate Charles Richet, chemist Sir William Crookes, and physicist Sir Oliver Lodge. Oh, those sillies! Created in 1882 and still going, SPR describes itself as the "first society to conduct organized scholarly research into human experiences that challenge contemporary scientific models."

Dr. J. B. Rhine at Duke University pursued scientific experiments with what was by the 1930s starting to be called "extrasensory perception". He obtained viable results with some subjects, but his research was basically ignored. He hadn't done himself any favors with the psychical society crowd in America by exposing a highly regarded medium as a charlatan, so they weren't going to have his back. Sniff, sniff.

Over the past century, there have been phases about every 30 years of research focusing on what has now, thanks in part to a Bruce Willis movie, become a vernacular term: the sixth sense. This is simply the sense that comes through the functioning of the human mind. And it is not physical, though it can (obviously, as when you pick up your coffee cup) interact with the material world. Surely, that is worthy of understanding?

As I say, people have tried to do so in scientific terms. It's not easy to use techniques designed to deal with the material world to interact and derive data from an immaterial one. Anytime people made serious attempts, though, scientists had a ready pejorative to spray out like an exterminator called for cockroaches: pseudoscience. For best effect, spit when you say it.

The common definition of this word is "any of various methods, theories, or systems, such as astrology, psychokinesis, or clairvoyance, considered as having no scientific basis." [I won't get into how that is a hot mess itself, conflating a conceptual system, astrology, with innate functions of mind, psi]. When even the definition of the problem is wrong, experimental methods are undermined at the start.

The most recently concealed and then revealed surge in this research area came, not surprisingly, from California. The Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park hosted a CIA sponsored program for "psychic spying" that was applied to active military surveillance needs. This famously involved "remote viewing", what was in earlier decades called "clairvoyance" or seeing at great distances with your mind. Seems you can develop a certain skill with the right protocols.

The program was maintained in various formats from the 1970s to 1995. 25 years, millions of dollars, and they got nothing? No, the data says otherwise, such of it as has been declassified. They keep the good stuff to themselves, no doubt — somewhere near the shelf with the 25 minute up-close-and-personal UFO video, maybe? There's a view among the cognoscenti that something useful has simply been removed into the shadows where practical application continues.

Even if science wants to look the other way and ignore how the mind works — or that it even exists —awareness of the immaterial world continues to be a fertile field for study.

Along Come The UFOs

Gimme shelter.

Do you remember hearing that one of the reasons the Air Force is so doggedly dragging its feet on disclosure has to do with some in high ranking command positions who believe UAP are the work of Satan?

As was true for many people, I have little doubt, my response was seriously? Like, dudes (maybe even dudesses), it's the 21st century. The national security of the United States — already at risk on so many fronts, external and internal — is being predicated on the attenuated confusions of medieval Christian theology (they didn't like the concept of zero, for example)?

And, very likely, Radical Protestant or Evangelical sects to boot, given distant memory of a 60 Minutes episode about cadets at the Air Force Academy being hazed and shunned if they didn't attend such church services. Get them them while they're young, Evita, they're on a career track.

I was aghast, dumbfounded, pick a word, to understand that answers to one of the most important questions before all humanity could be hogtied by someone who reportedly huffed, "You're not supposed to know about those [UAP] until you die!"

Then I got to thinking about it. Here's someone at least, but maybe a group of people, capable and smart enough to have risen to the top of the military establishment of the most powerful nation on Earth (even still). They have the highest security clearances and access to the best information. They may have given the Condon report to everybody else, but FOIA documents show they have kept their hand in the game from the very beginning.

Have these people realized something with which I might actually agree?

Sure, they have interpreted what they know with a particular filter and fit UFOs into an old tale of good versus evil to which they are passionately attached. Scientists aren't the only ones with bias for the stories of their ancestors. But in that there is the unmistakable recognition that UFOs represent something more than just transmedium vehicles with power drives that can scoot along at tens of thousands of miles an hour.

Yes, UFOs are a physical phenomenon as we define the material world. They cause effects we can detect and measure. But, as hard as it is going to be for most people to swallow, that might not be their primary mode of being.

In a way, they out exist us.

Their movements here, their technology or what appears to us as technology, may first originate in what we call an immaterial world. Then they pick up their coffee cups and drop over.

Pseudoscience! Cockroaches!

And yet, someone holding what is probably the best hand of information at the table has played the spiritual card. You can feel the shudders go through the room.

Oh, no! Not that. That doesn't exist! You're going to be mean to me.

Scientists, who have spent a long time reinforcing their belief that there is nothing they can't detect with some sort of ruler, do not allow the possibility. It verges on being a religious conviction with many folks who take refuge in the scientific world view. There will be hostility. That attitude might also be a factor in the foot dragging by the Air Force nabobs, because they don't want to either justify their faith-based responses and lose control to others on how the subject is viewed.

It's like at the end of the movie Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, where a surviving individual is detected by the pod people aliens who are taking over the human race. There is this horrible screech that comes out a zombie mouth as it points a finger. In my vision of the scene, scientists and their cultural retinues just stand there with the same look of shocked look of surprise. Not everyone who believes in the reality of the psychic world has been neutered. Horrors.

For all the scientific endeavor to ignore and discredit the world of the mind and all that realm of experience has entailed for human beings since the beginning of time notwithstanding, there is a twist at the end of the story. There may be something quite profoundly meaningful coming first out of the realm of the mind, after all, that then has the ability to cause or influence material events. No fair! All that was cancelled!

But show me how the mind hasn't always been so, even though the scientific establishment stuck its collective head in the sand.

The Keys to the Kingdom

If you'd like to wait at the bar, we'll call you when your table is ready.

Even if UFOs aren't agencies of the Christian Devil, they seem certainly to be doors into a world beyond the commonly accepted frame of material reference. Their capabilities exceed our understanding. They appear to be present in ways that are detectable to us in material form, but which do not comply with what we call the laws of physics. On the face of the data, they are dimensionally variable. To us, therefore, they are partly immaterial.

So, evidently the beings in UFOs know something about the nature of space we haven't yet recognized. There is a kind of insubstantial quality to the behaviors of these apparent vehicles that goes beyond our human perspective.

One part of this is how they can directly effect human consciousness. UFOs are apparently psychoactive. Even the Defense Department is visibly concerned about psychotronic manipulation of consciousness when talking about UAP (Slide 9). Meat on the bone can be found in the AAWSAP investigations reported by Colm Kelleher and George Knapp in their book Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, which reports on the "contagious" or "hitchhiker" effect. Weird, basically unpleasant things happen to people and they take them home.

A good overview on how this happens can be found in a recent episode of Theories of Everything, where Kelleher and Knapp are interviewed. Surprisingly, this effect goes all the way back to the daughter of Kenneth Arnold, whose report in 1947 started the UFO era. What that shows is there is some active, volitional presence involved with UFOs in which psychic events are inextricably bound.

Dare to suggest there might be something important beyond material substance and you get slammed with the word woo woo, meaning "unconventional beliefs regarded as having little or no scientific basis, especially those relating to spirituality, mysticism, or alternative medicine." Pay no attention to that mind behind the curtain.

Don't step in the woo!

And, to me, that's exactly what happens with people who report effects on their consciousness during encounters with UFOs. These inconvenient aspects are usually disregarded as faulty (unreliable) perceptions, whereas they might in fact be of primary importance to the meaning of UFOs.

Just my speculation, of course, but I consider UFOs may open, or reopen, what was once called the spiritual plane. That just means the immaterial realms where our minds perceive what is beyond our physical senses. Many historical cultures told us there are mysterious intelligences who have interacted with human beings. Maybe they have flying saucers.

In any event, consciousness is likely prime, not secondary to reality. No doubt this will have levels and degrees and all sorts of distinctions we will need to come to understand. Whether we find correspondences in our own experience with ancient scriptures, cosmographies, or commentaries remains to be seen. We might invent an entirely new taxonomy. But what we have to investigate is nothing new to human experience.

And that brings us to the role science may be able to play. I suspect that the epiphany about these immaterial planes of existence that is due in science will come through quantum mechanics. Before that happens, though, I think scientists have a mea culpa or two to deal with. Yeah, we missed something. And then we fibbed about it. Don't hold your breath. I suspect this is a kicking and screaming matter.

Do you think Dr. Edward Condon knew he was squandering the reputation of science when he wrote his devious summary of denial? Would it have mattered in the first place to someone who had the arrogance to do that? The worst of the long lasting damage done was to his professional colleagues, in the end. All those people who had yet come to trust in science? They are likely to double down, once it becomes clearer what UFOs mean to them. And again, remind me about eggs.

The scientific paradigm is going to have to change at a foundational level to discover the meaning of UFOs. I think I am ready for that. Are you?

Trail of the Saucers is published by Stellar Productions and edited by Bryce Zabel, co-host of Need to Know with Coulthart and Zabel.

Please follow Ross Coulthart and Bryce Zabel on Twitter at @RossCoulthart and @HollywoodUFOs.