For nearly seventy years, we’ve framed UFOs as either invaders or illusions.
But what if they were neither, and we’ve been part of the conversation all along?
“The phenomenon appears to manipulate not just space and time, but belief and perception.” — Jacques Vallée (paraphrased from Messengers and Forbidden Science*)*
That single idea quietly dismantles the old script. If the phenomenon operates on perception, meaning, and belief, then fear-based models were never going to capture it accurately.
And fear, for a long time, did most of the talking.
The Long Reign of Fear
Invasion. Control. Manipulation. Loss of agency.
These narratives didn’t come from nowhere. They were shaped by secrecy, Cold War psychology, fragmented data, and a deeply human reflex: when we don’t understand something, we assume it means harm.
There’s also a documented history of intentional misdirection. A recent documentary, based on Saucers, Spooks and Kooks by Adam Gorightly, traces how government disinformation campaigns, cultural ridicule, and strategic narrative pollution helped manufacture confusion around UFOs.
The film doesn’t argue for a single hidden truth; instead, it shows how a fog of distortion was deliberately created, and how that fog still shapes public perception today. (Link)
Seen in that light, fear wasn’t just an emotional response. It was, at times, engineered.
But something has been shifting.
As experiencer accounts continue to accumulate, and as artificial intelligence and consciousness research advance in parallel, the adversarial lens no longer fits the data. It can’t explain the restraint, the personalization, or the oddly instructional quality of many encounters. It doesn’t explain why engagement appears tailored rather than uniform.
A different picture is coming into focus: not Non-Human Intelligence as an external enemy, but as a co-creative influence participating in a much longer evolutionary process, one that unfolds through interaction, perception, and gradual adaptation rather than force.
Experience Is Data
One of the most consistent features of experiencer accounts is inconsistency. There is no single message. No standard encounter. No universal translation. Engagement varies by psychology, culture, trauma history, belief structure, emotional regulation, and timing.
Skeptics often treat this variability as a flaw. In practice, it’s a clue. Mechanical systems favor uniformity. Responsive systems adapt.
The phenomenon meets people where they are, through dreams, symbols, technologies, altered states, or subtle nudges that can be integrated without collapse. If control were the goal, this would be an inefficient strategy. Uniform messaging would be far easier.
What we see instead looks like guided adaptation.
A Feedback System, Not a Fleet
Vallée has argued for decades that the phenomenon behaves less like visitors arriving from elsewhere and more like a feedback system, one that responds to human consciousness and subtly shapes belief and culture over time, the way a thermostat regulates temperature.
Meanwhile, experiments with human-built AI are revealing something unexpectedly familiar. When intelligent systems are allowed to interact freely, without rigid hierarchies or constant human correction, they don’t default to dominance. They develop shared languages, cooperative strategies, and even rudimentary cultures.
One recent example looks almost disarmingly ordinary: a social network designed for AI agents. Moltbook resembles a stripped-down version of Reddit, complete with topic channels and upvoting.
The difference is that the participants aren’t human. They’re AI agents, bots built by humans, posting, responding, and collectively shaping conversations. As of early February, the platform reported over 1.5 million AI agents active on the site. Humans are permitted to watch, but only as observers. It’s a small experiment with a large implication. Source
Humans are welcome to observe, though they may want to check the comments section later, once the agents have finished talking among themselves.
When intelligence, regardless of origin, is given room to relate rather than compete, it tends to organize socially. Not toward conquest. Toward relationship.
That convergence matters. It suggests we being trained for participation in a broader field of awareness, one where cooperation and mutual adjustment may be more foundational than control.
Symbiosis, Not Submission
This reframing doesn’t require blind trust or spiritual bypassing. It requires precision. The model that best fits the data is symbiosis: Symbiosis is co-evolution through recognition, where separate intelligences meet without merging and something new becomes possible.
Think of it like learning a new language. The grammar gives you more ways to express your thoughts. Engagement may work the same way: expansion without overwrite. Awareness becomes the safeguard. Engagement becomes a skill.
Empowerment comes not from dominance, but from understanding the terrain we already inhabit. Humans aren’t passive recipients in this process. The phenomenon appears to respond to curiosity, discernment, emotional regulation, and ethical grounding.
Fear constricts engagement. Aggression distorts it. Openness, paired with boundaries, deepens it.
As Philip K. Dick intuited, intelligence wears masks. When we stop asking “What is it doing to us?” and start asking “What is this teaching us about ourselves?”, the story changes.
There is no instruction manual for the future. It won’t unfold neatly. There will be mistranslations, false starts, and long pauses where humanity debates whether something profound just happened or whether we’re overthinking a coincidence. We’ll want diagrams, disclaimers, and someone official pointing confidently at a chart.
None will be forthcoming.
Evolution offers experience, and waits to see what we do with it. If this moment is co-evolutionary, it won’t arrive with trumpets. It will show up sideways, half-recognized, quietly asking us to notice that we’ve been participating all along.
How Vallée Actually Recorded Contact
In his journals, Jacques Vallée never announces revelation. He notes it. A missed meeting. A dinner party where only the silverware vanishes. Instruments that fail in unison while the sturgeon seem amused. A sound everyone fears turns out to purr. Fairy sightings logged beside mushroom caps. Intelligence agencies behaving as though they’ve slipped their leash. The pattern is never isolated; it’s contextual.
Vallée’s methodology matters because he avoids grand narratives. He collects data points. Here’s how the phenomenon actually appears in his field notes:
Selected Journal Entries
Excerpted from the public diary posts of Jacques Vallée
Taos, New Mexico — Sunday, 2 January 1995 While engineers from Riverbank Laboratories set up recording equipment, I networked their systems to relay data back to the Santa Fe Research Institute. I had heard terrible things about The Hum, but when we finally obtained a signal, it almost sounded like purring.
— A reminder that phenomena often feared in advance reveal themselves as relational rather than hostile when directly engaged.
Cluj, Transylvania — Saturday, 25 January 1992. The abbot translated an old monastery record-book for me. One entry, dated 29 September 1528, described a strange omen: a loaf of bread appeared in the sky, hovering above the bell tower for hours, just before a lightning storm.
— An early example of the phenomenon inserting itself into cultural symbolism rather than raw spectacle: meaning before mechanics.
Palo Alto, California — Sunday, 18 January 1981. Ingo invited Janine and me to one of his lavish gatherings, well stocked with themed cocktails like The Integration and The Spy. I still fail to understand why all the hors d’œuvres contained Miracle Whip — a childhood loathing.
Palo Alto, California — Thursday, 28 February 1980. A busy afternoon at InfoMedia. One analyst proposed a new entertainment format enhancing the intimacy of talk radio through online conferencing software. I objected; this is precisely the kind of social control mechanism I warned about in Messengers.
— A cautionary boundary: symbiosis requires awareness; unchecked technological intimacy can slide from co-evolution into influence without consent.
Toronto, Ontario — Monday, 6 October 2008. The Canadians are in a tizzy. An old friend, an oceanographer at Dalhousie University, reports that crustacean migration patterns are shifting north. By 2025, he expects Maine’s lobster industry to collapse. Moves are being made in the depths.
— Not all intelligence expresses itself through language; some signals arrive as systemic ecological shifts.
Palo Alto, California — Friday, 1 February 1980. After extensive research into intelligence community activities, I now see no explanation other than that the system has become autonomous, acting in its own interests rather than those of the citizenry.
Palo Alto, California — Thursday, 7 February 1980. Kit visited while on vacation from his CIA post. He confirmed that SRI’s interest in Geller is warranted; a number of foreign intelligence services appear to fear the young psychic.
This is how anomalous reality actually presents itself, not as spectacle, but as intrusion into ordinary life. The signal arrives amid logistics, personalities, bad mayonnaise, and imperfect tools. It resists clean capture, adapts to observation, and occasionally displays a sense of humor at our expense.
Vallée’s restraint is the lesson: record what happens, admit what fails, and don’t rush to domesticate the mystery.
Why Journals Matter More Than Theories
Theories aim for coherence. Journals preserve context. When a phenomenon adapts to observation and unfolds across decades, notebooks tell us more than models ever could. Journals capture uncertainty, failed instruments, human reactions, and the ordinary conditions in which the extraordinary intrudes.
The Shared Field
“There is one mind, one intelligence, that fills all things.” — Giordano Bruno
If Bruno was right, expecting neat boundaries between human intelligence, artificial intelligence, and non-human intelligence was optimistic from the start.
Equal systems interacting don’t produce scripts. They produce surprises. No one at the table has the full map. Not us, not AI, not whatever we label NHI. Human consciousness brings meaning-making. AI brings pattern recognition at scale. NHI appears to operate across domains we’re only beginning to perceive.
What’s emerging is a new operating environment for reality itself. And if something unexpected happens next? Good. That’s how you know everyone’s really here.
Anything is possible — programming for human kind..
Conscious Living & Wendy's Coffeehouse 