For getting on for 80 years now, people have been trying to expose secrets kept under lock and key by deeply embedded, so-called “black ops programs” that many believe are holding back irrefutable evidence pertaining to knowledge of, and interaction with, non-human intelligence. These same people believe that when this secret is finally exposed to the world, it will bring about revelations that will mark a key turning in the course of human civilization, ushering in an era of inter-galactic cooperation with a larger family of civilizations.

Of course, that’s for the people who believe that these Others mean us good, and are here as part of a peaceful mission to help us ascend to the next development level. There are other people who agree that a secret is being kept from humanity, but that this is in part because the news is not good: that these Others are dominator races whose aim is either to conquer us via overt means and technology that greatly eclipses our own, or via some insidious plan that involves a hybridization program meant to turn humans into something else entirely.

But this picture still isn’t complete - because both of the above conceptions of what’s going on tend to involve intelligences believed to be extraterrestrial in origin. The thing is, even when one looks at the evidence that exists as part of the literature behind the so-called UFO Phenomenon that’s publicly available as a result of the work of tireless researchers, it’s not at all clear that what’s being interacted with are solely off-world races who’ve traveled here via sophisticated spacecraft.

In fact, even if one finds this topic because of a kind sci-fi interest in advanced spacecraft and alien biological beings originating on some exo-solar planet, the data one comes across - assuming one is diligently perusing the totality of the historical data, that is - quickly turns the picture ever more obscure and confusing. And that’s because, while extraterrestrials definitely seem to be “in the mix”, as it were, the total picture is much more complex and multifaceted. Some find this complexity intriguing and inspiring, while others are left feeling unmoored from what they used to believe defined “reality”, as a result of these revelations.

Some grab a-hold of these revelations with a fervor, feeling inspired to explore elements of a clearly multi-dimensional reality that makes our former conceptions look like child’s play, while others end up abandoning the endeavor altogether, convinced that the more mind-bending aspects of the data suggest a mixture of human fraud, ego, mental instability and the like have painted a picture that can’t possibly be accurate. Of course, this exposes the fact that what we’re willing to entertain as being part of the fabric of the larger reality, says as much about who we are – as individuals, and as different cultural groups - as it does about the true nature of all that is.

How are we to make sense of this disorienting complexity? How are we to walk what some perceive to be a minefield of competing and mutually exclusive hypotheses regarding the origin and nature of these mysterious non-human Others? These are the very matters we’ll seek to address in this, the 50th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.