The Birth of FATE

Raymond Palmer’s Flying Saucers & the Stymie Factor - Revisited

by Alan Steinfeld

Is it our fate that the truth shall forever evade our conscious awareness or are we at the threshold of awakening to the greater secrets of the cosmos? Is this our collective moment for coming into harmony with the rest of the manifest universe? Are we ready to meet whatever is out there? Or is it our fate to be eternally grasping at straws hoping our efforts will lead us out of ignorance?

This article celebrates 75 years of FATE bringing to the public a deeper awareness about the true fate of this planet and its human inhabitants. It is also a tribute to the knowledge and foresight of FATE’s co-founder and first publisher, Raymond A. Palmer. One researcher still active in the field which began with Palmer’s investigations, Dr. James J. Hurtak, said: “Ray Palmer was the best and most trusted investigator of his day. His emanant research was vital for setting the tone for serious UFO studies from the 1940s through the 1970s.” Years before the historic Kenneth Arnold sighting Palmer was already speculating about the presence of alien spacecrafts in our skies as part of his fiction publication, AMAZING STORIES. One of his biographers said Palmer “pretty much started the whole UFO craze.”
 

Palmer’s quotes, highlighted in blue below, are taken directly from his final public appearance at the Chicago UFO convention on June 25th, 1977, where he focused on his last book Flying Saucers & the Stymie Factor. The lecture was a culmination of a life dedicated to everything other-worldly. He died a few weeks later with many projects still in the works. His five-decade career began with his first story, “The Time Ray of Jandra,” published in the June 1930 issue of Wonder Stories. After establishing other magazines in a similar pulp format FATE was founded 1948. He also began a string of occult periodicals such as FLYING SAUCERS, SEARCH and MYSTIC. As well as making available to the public important paranormal books such as OAHSPE, THE SMOKY GOD, and A JOURNEY TO THE EARTH’S INTERIOR.

Dave Truesdale, in the Introduction to the Stymie Factor remarks how central Palmer was in establishing the budding UFO field. He writes: “I say, as have others, that if there is any one person responsible for promoting the existence of “flying saucers,” or UFOs as they are more widely and generically known today, it is Raymond A. Palmer.” He goes on to say that without RAP there might be no awareness of the UFO mystery today. Not shy about bragging what other admirers liked to share Palmer would say about himself that “for most of his life he claimed to be the true pioneer in the saga of UFOs.”

However, I was unaware of his influence when I curated the collection of essays for my latest book on UFOs called Making Contact: Preparing for the New Realities of Extraterrestrial Existence. After learning more about his work, I can say that the scope of RAP’s impact on sizing up the phenomena was key in setting the tone for sincere and intelligent investigation into the UFO phenomena. With that level of respect, I am in tremendous agreement with much of what Ray put forth in his 5 decades of scholarship. However, in the second part of the article I will highlight how I think the contemporary field of UFOlogy has gone beyond much of Palmer’s original considerations. To begin, I want to point out how astute Palmer was in his initial analysis of what is still an inexplicable and speculative field. For instance, one of the issues Palmer raised in his Stymie Factor speech was: “The flying saucers cannot be a multitude of things — they have to be a singular thing, although they may possess many facets. We have been looking at the facets, and have both failed and refused to see the thing in its entirety.” This statement explains precisely why I chose to take a collaborative approach in Making Contact. The book is a multiplicity of opinions concerning the “contact” question. With original essays from people, I consider the top in the UFO field - Linda Moulton Howe, Grant Cameron, Nick Pope, Whitley Strieber, a previously unpublished essay by Professor John Mack and a few other notables. The collection offers the reader an overview of the “facets” that have been studied in order to synthesized their onw understanding of the subject. One of the most veteran investigators in the field, Linda Moulton Howe’s personal essay in book admits that even after forty years of research the phenomena is like “a house of mirrors with a quicksand sliding floor.” This is because as we have learned from Palmer’s time and onwards - no one person or organization has been able to coherently explain the multiple facets of that these mysterious crafts reveal.

Furthermore, I am also in firm agreement with Palmer’s statement: “We cannot differentiate between UFOs and occult phenomena, or precognition, or telekinesis, or astral travel, or mental telepathy, or the power to bend spoons with the mind, or the killer who runs amok for no reason at all or because God told him to do it!” I think what Palmer means is that there must be a cohesive explanation that connects all the inscrutable mysteries that human beings have encountered for millenniums. Both Linda Howe and Professor John Mack cite in their essay the theories of physicist David Bohm’s “implicate order” that connects all phenomena in an underlying unity. Palmer might have agreed with such a proposal, but as will be revealed later in the article, he offered a far more materialistic explanation of the mysteries. Nevertheless, what is still the case today is the declaration he made decades ago: “We have enough investigators who have amassed thousands of clippings, thousands of reports of sightings, thousands of fuzzy photos of blobs of light and formless shapes in the sky; all of which accumulated junk is totally worthless. What has all this proved except what was positively determined in the very first few months of the flying saucer phenomenon — that there was something being seen that we could not identify—but was there whether we could explain it or not? Why should we have more of the same?” In other words, after 75 years of ongoing confrontations with this startling occurrence, involving millions of witnesses, photographs, radar and film footage, we know little more than Kenneth Arnold did on June 24th, 1947, when he spotted nine shiny discs in a V formation skipping over the Cascade Mountain range. Palmer proclaimed that our failure to comprehend what is really going on despite amassing all the documented evidence is one of the greatest examples of the “Stymie Factor.” Yet, I am more hopeful than Palmer in thinking that the pieces of the puzzle can provide valuable insight into what has been going on in the skies and on the ground most probably centuries before the modern UFO era. I could cite hundreds of examples historic cases of the same described phenomena like large flaming swords that appeared before a ancient Roman army, Columbus strange light in the sky on his way to the Americas, or the black orb invasion depicted in the Nuremburg wood cut from the 1500s. For a more detailed sense of the millennia of global reports see Jacques Valle’s and Chris Aubeck’s book Wonders in the Sky.

Getting back to birth of the “flying saucer” movement, the story begins with the pilot, Kenneth Arnold coined the term when he saw the “strange motion of the flying discs like stones that skipped over water.” His causal reporting of the event when he landed, went viral causing a tremendous media commotion around the country. A week later, the Roswell Daily Record used the phrase in the headline: “CAPTURE OF FLYING SAUCER AT A RANCH IN ROSWELLL REGION.” Henceforth with Arnold and Roswell, along with Palmer’s drive for understanding all levels of anomalous reality, he launched the new-born publication of FATE. An illustration of Arnold’s saucers graced the cover of the first edition and an exclusive narrative inside recalling the entire event, pushed the magazine and the whole flying saucers topic onto national attention.

to strange occurrence, the atmosphere of the times was perfect to

Afterwards, Arnold and Palmer became quite friendly and collaborated in a number of ways, as in the first serious books on the subject: The Coming of the Saucers published in 1952. Arnold was also given by the editor $200 to fly to Tacoma to investigate the Washington State’s Maury Island Incident that happened 4 days before saucer sighting also in Washington state. Even with the suspicious fatalities of the investigators who accompanied Arnold, the official FBI final word on the case was that the incident never happened. Calling it an elaborate hoax with nothing except a few people wanting to make the news, was the time Palmer first suspected the stymie effect.

Frustrated by the government indifference Arnold put out a strong statement that also appeared in the original Fate article: “I look at this whole ordeal as not something funny as some people have made it out to be. To me it is mighty serious and since I evidently did observe something that at least Mr. John Doe on the street corner or Pete Andrews on the ranch has never heard about, is no reason that it does not exist. Even though I openly invited an investigation by the Army and the FBI as to the authenticity of my story or a mental or a physical examination as to my capabilities, I have received no interest from these two important protective forces of our country…”.

So, in spite of 75 years of denial, silence and ridicule this past year brought some progress in revealing the puzzling nature of phenomena. At last, what most have doubted, and some suspected has become a mainstream reality for all. Again, as fate would have it, seventy-four years after Arnold’s historic sighting, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) issued an official document titled Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). The report was created in response to the Senate Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA) for Fiscal Year 2021 upon the requested from the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the Secretary of Defense (SECDEF) to submit an “intelligence” assessment of the threat posed by the “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP. The report though publicly celebrated by a few researchers and much of the media, still miserably failed to clear up who, what and why we are being visited by some non-human indigence.

The Assessment specifically draws attention to the “stymie-azation” in reporting the phenomena by military personal. Page 4 in the government document directly mentions:
 “Sociocultural stigmas and sensor limitations remain obstacles to collecting data on UAP… Narratives from aviators in the operational community and analysts from the military and IC describe disparagement associated with observing UAP, reporting it, or attempting to discuss it with colleagues.” The report goes onto say that: “Although the effects of these stigmas have lessened as senior members of the scientific, policy, military, and intelligence communities engage on the topic seriously in public, reputational risk may keep many observers silent, complicating scientific pursuit of the topic.”

Ironically, the report was released on June 25th 2021. Thereby making it exactly 44 years to the day that Office of the Director of National Intelligence vindicated Palmer lasting declaration in Chicago of being “stymied.” Palmer knew that “stigma” was part of the problem in denying a substantive assessment of the phenomenon. The risk to one’s reputation and “the fear of being ridiculed” was how Palmer explained a key aspect of “the stymie factor”
 

Another stymie factor in refusing to name what is truly going on - is what is found on page 5 of the UAP Report. “With the exception of the one instance where we determined with high confidence that the reported UAP was airborne clutter, specifically a deflating balloon, we currently lack sufficient information in our dataset to attribute incidents to specific explanations.” This shamble of an “assessment” goes on the say: “Our analysis of the data supports the construct that if and when individual UAP incidents are resolved they will fall into one of five potential explanatory categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, USG or industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall ‘other’ bin.” Did the DNI overlook the widespread testimony of Navy pilot Davide Favor from the USS Nimitz? Favor specifically states that what he saw with his own eyes and labeled as a giant tic toc looking objects was neither a “natural atmospheric phenomena,” nor a “US government or industry developmental program; nor foreign adversary system;” and definitely not “airborne clutter!” Palmer was right about what was and still is in the way of the US government not being able to define or confront the situation.

Patheticly after continuously being haunted by unidentified objects in our sky - the US intelligence community can only come up with is one reasonably explanation of a single incident of airborne clutter determined to be with high probability to be a large, deflating balloon. The other 143 reported UAP cases to the ODNI since 2004 were classified as not having enough information to be placed with confidence in one of the proposed categories. It seems to be embarrassing Intelligence failure that after nearly a full century of engagement all forces of government manage to say is that this phenomena falls into the “catchall ‘other’ bin.” Does “other” mean anything? Either the military cannot say what is really going on for their own reasons, or they don’t know. They just can’t come out and say they don’t know what it is going on, because how would the public feel about paying for the most expensive military industrial complex ever created? Here Palmer would be happy to see the forces of control stymied again! Well, not totally. Even though the report was vague and muddy, it does state, in an official way, that there are things in the sky that have not been identified. So even in a puny acknowledgment of “other” there is progress towards Disclosure - better than no progress at all. We have moved a half step forward a half a step with a very juvenile “categorization.”

This slight movement towards truth is progress compared to the height of denial in Palmer’s day, whern he quoted the hilarious whitewashing of the 1969 Condon Report. In his talk he sportingly mentions how “the final effort of the powers that be in the military arm of government to lay the saucers in their grave, but the answers were exactly the same — the stymie factor had overwhelmed them both. The official stance of the Air Force remained unchallenged and as valid as it had from the very beginning: 1. The flying saucers do not constitute a menace to national security, and 2. There is no evidence that spaceships are visiting us from other star systems.” The foolishness of Condon’s statements are obvious, if we reverse the sentences. For instance: “There is no evidence that spaceships are visiting us from other star systems and… the flying saucers do not constitute a menace to national security.” Logically if there is no evidence that we are being visited from other star systems, then what is Condon referring to “that does not constitute a menace to national security?” Palmer accused the Airforce of being “simply stymied and haven’t got the stamina to admit it! … The Air Force didn’t want to face the stymie factor and be forced to admit they were so incapable of protecting our national security in the skies.” He concludes this section of his speech with: “And that is exactly where the Air Force stance remains today — in the realm of total fantasy!”

So where are we now after 45 years from Palmer’s assessment in the game of hide and seek with the government’s acknowledgment of UFOs? Well - a front page article in the NY Times in December of 2017 broke the glass ceiling with the headline ‘Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program”. The report of a secret black-budget study on the subject was followed by a trove of media and political talking points addressing the subject publicly.
 

Previously for over seven decades, any suggestion about the reality of ETs was faced with severe ridicule. The Times’ article toppled the wall of denial and finally brought serious consideration of the phenomenon into mainstream awareness. And last year, even though the Intelligence report basically admitted nothing, a former intelligence (and counterintelligence) officer, who led the secret government’s program has come forward to tell some more truth. Lue Elizaondo, after quitting the Pentagon’s Advance Ariel Threat Identification Program (ATTIP) has come forward to spearhead a more public Disclosure movement. He has admitted on national television that UAP are not a “US Government or industry developmental program”, nor are they a “foreign adversary system” - meaning not Russian, Chinese or some rogue nation with new technology. In an interview, last year for 60 Minutes, when Elizondo was asked incredulous by reporter Bill Whitaker if UFO are real - the exasperated former Intelligence officer responded by saying: “Come on Bill, we are already past that point. I am not telling you UFOs are real. The US government is saying this.” Yet even after official confirmation Palmer’s hard core investigations - the questions still remain: Who, how and why are we being visited?.

Part 2 – Beyond Stymied

“No account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight.” - CS Lewis

Up until this point I have been in agreement with Ray Palmer’s assertions regarding the stymie factor of the government, media, military and the general public in facing the UFO conundrum. In this section of the article, I want to draw a sharp distinction between what Palmer’s resolution to the spectacle was and what I feel could lead us out of the paradoxical puzzle towards a greater truth.

I will start with the ‘nuts and bots’ of Palmer’s materialistic perspective. In the speech about the Stymie Factor he makes an all-encompassing proclamation: “I said that no metal machine would ever be captured, no flesh and blood space visitor would ever land on the White House lawn, and no shred of physical evidence would be unearthed to prove that the flying saucers actually existed.” On one hand, I subscribe to the notion that “no flesh and blood space visitor would ever land on the White House lawn,” because it seems that is not how this phenomena of ‘hide and seek’ operates. On the other hand, another headline in the New York Times of July 23, 2020, states: No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public. Again the reporters who were part of the first article, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, write that in fact the US government is in possession of alien vehicles The article focuses on Defense contractor Eric K. Davis of an unnamed Aerospace Corporation, who in October of 2019, briefed both the Senate Armed Service committee and select members of the Senate Intelligence Committee about – as the Times so clearly states “the retrieval of off-world vehicle not made on this earth.” This is not only a rebuttal to Palmer’s accusations, but a breakthrough in revealing what the US military has been hiding probably for a very long time. So RAP there is more than a “shred of evidence of physical evidence” that we have in our possession metal machines from another worldly creation. According to Blumenthal “some material from these objects have been studied by scientists who can find what accounts for its odd properties.” Linda Moulton Howe speaks about how she came to own a strange alloy of a meta materials that she offered to the government related organization, To the Stars Academy (TTSA). In an interview she describes the way her and Art Bell acquired samples of the materials in 1996, along with a handful of letters from a sergeant in the United States Army whose grandfather yanked the metal off a wedge-shaped craft that crashed in 1947 near the White Sands, New Mexico. She said “blasting the metals with a magnetic field would cause it to turn into a lifting body.” Likewise, the Chief Operating Officer for To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, Steve Justice put forth in a press release that chemical analysis of the material displayed “…extremely thin layers of bismuth and magnesium. Such a structure and composition is not from any known existing military or commercial application,” Linda’s own research showed that “the isotopic ratios of metal were impossible to be of Earthly origin. The nano-scale of the material was so thin and so precise that human beings simply don’t have the technological capabilities to produce them.” She indicated that when exposed to specific tera-hertz frequencies of electromagnetic waves, the sample exhibited “anti-gravitational or levitational” properties.

Besides not having the up-to-date news on the phenomena available to formulate fresh insights, the principal differences between Palmer’s approach to UFOs and mine comes down to his predilection for being a “determinist.” His speculation was based on the Newtonian laws of cause and effect. He loved saying about himself: “I am, and always have been, a strict materialist. Let me tell you why. If anything exists, it is REAL.” I, however, am more a mystic and a believer in indeterminacy, which is bases of quantum physics theory that says there are apparently no isolated incidences where a specific ‘cause’ results in a specific ‘effect’. Every cause is generated by a previous effect - and each effect goes on to create a series of causes. This pairing spans out to affect wider and wider systems throughout the universe ad infinitum. This means that there are no insular actions, only indeterminate (and uncertainty) which cannot be separated from the flow of all time and space.
 
  One of the leaders in the quantum science field Frija Capra wrote in The Tao of Physics: “Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated ‘basic building blocks’ but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between various parts of a whole.” The premise of interconnectness is an aspect of another quantum indeterminant theory of Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. As opposed to Newton’s laws motions the simultaneous position and momentum, cannot be measured exactly.[4] The wave–particle duality cannot be determined in wave-like systems, has been shown to apply not only to photons but to more massive particles as well.[5] This supported by another component of QT in the Schrodinger’s Cat theory of superposition, that suggests that the observer not only affects the system being observed, it quantifies it. Meaning that only when an observer measures the results of action, does the quantum wave function results in the appearance of the concrete world. I will address later how I think quantum physics gives us the key getting a handle on understanding the mechanism of UFOs. However, what we see in QT is in direct opposition to the Palmer’s rational mechanistic stance.

  Another key issue to how I look at the UFO phenomena beyond the stymie factor is the fact that we are absolutely in a new era of government acknowledgement with many mainstream media outlets talking about “something out there”. Initially I agreed with Palmer in 1977 speech: “Thirty years ago I said that the paraphysical was a proper term to use in describing flying saucers.” What he means by para-“physical”, will also be discussed later. Nevertheless, as a “strict materialist” Palmer asserted that whatever is out it must be firmly physical. Although he had mystical experiences of lucid dreaming, prophetic awareness of future events, and claims to “ have been in that “enchanted land in the sky” many times, I have seen and ridden in the flying saucers, I have talked first-hand with hundreds of departed friends and relatives,” He goes on to say: And those investigators who are now talking about the paranormal are placing it in a limbo of the unreal, the phantasmic, the non-material.” But his good friend, Kenneth Arnold, reported a litany of paranormal events unfolding in his life after his epoch-making sighting. One incident that his daughter Kim Arnold related was how “a ball of light appeared in her home…shortly after the saucer sighting. It first appeared in the older sister’s bedroom, it went down the hall and appeared in my mother and dad’s bedroom.”

Still the debate on all fronts comes down to the origin of those crafts? In this regard, I will explain why I feel Palmer’s logic is faulty logic when he goes in to say: “Let’s define reality as material and begin searching with something other than our eyes and ears and nose.” Then comes the bold accretion for both Arnold and Palmer that “the flying saucers do not come from outer space, and the Air Force knows that.” Arnold simply theorized that UFOs were “living things whose existence we do not suspected, because they inhabit our atmosphere.“ Palmer justifications was more emphatic: “You are asking me to stretch credulity to the incredible point of accepting that in the immense numbers of possible star and planet systems in the total galaxy, literally thousands of separate civilizations concentrate their attention on the most insignificant and remote and even impossible to find speck of dust in the entire cosmos. You are asking me to locate the UFO anywhere, but where they are actually seen — purely locally, in our own atmosphere, at the limited heights attained by our own aircraft.”

  Palmer’s explanation is a modified version of a materialistic worldview. His ultimate conclusion was: “We must consider that the flying saucers are native to this planet. If we demand that they be alien, there is no longer any mystery — only the question of who they are and their intentions toward us.” Palmer’s blunder, in my opinion, is based on a protracted theory of physicality: “I exist, you exist, the flying saucers exist. But WHAT are all these things? That is all we should consider — our own reality, and our relationship to everything else that is real. Therefore, we must consider what there is about up to consider — and refuse to limit it to a physicality of matter that is limited to what we can touch, see, smell, hear and taste.” Palmer goes on to explain how this reality of UFOs is based on a scientific hypothesis coming from a group of scientist out of Japan. He defends his tangibility stance when he states how “flying saucers have been tracked on radar. What is it that is being tracked? Not a NOTHING! Not an empty void. No, they are tracking a substance which is capable of reflecting an electronic echo. Perhaps the same as the Japanese “sub-atomic” matter?” I guess Palmer never knew that some (and maybe most) UFO sightings evade radar detection completely.
 
  For the materialist Palmer to go beyond the stymie factor and understand what was truly happening with UFOs. He needed a mechanistic theory so he postulated that a superimposed physical world exists in our midst. It is just composed of increased empty space within the atomic and molecular structures. Hence, Palmer sees UFOs as solid, but an expanded aspect of gross matter making them unidentifiable and undetectable in our level of density. He goes on to say: “Relatively speaking, nothing would have changed. Matter would still be matter. But what would this greatly expanded matter be to those whom you left in their more condensed, or less empty space…” He is saying is that flying saucers are of a civilization that exist somewhere on or above the Earth with a technology to expands or contract the void of space to come in and out of our plane of existence at will. On one hand I must admit that fundamentally this theory is as good as any that have been invented to excuse the inexplicable of the past 75 years. On the other hand, I take a stance, confirmed by recent astronomical calculations in looking at the universe as a whole – physical matter is merely a fraction of a greater universe composed primarily of “dark energy”.
 
 An inventive approach in which Palmer’s materialism can be considered inside the greater worldview was put forth by Professor John Mack from Harvard University in his essay for Making Contact by overcoming the cultural programming which forces us to think in an “either or” kind of way. He says: “It's either, literally physical; or it's in the spiritual other realm, the unseen realm. What we seem to have no place for—or we have lost the place for—are phenomena that can begin in the unseen realm, and cross over and manifest and show up in our literal physical world…”

In Mack’s compromising position a further statement challenges the limiting belief Palmer adhered to. Mack added: “We're dealing with a phenomenon which violates our sense of reality, and which operates in this gray area between the physical world and the subjective or mythic or other-realm world. We're being asked to prove this by the methods of the physical sciences alone. But those methods, in my view, will not yield its secrets, until we discover other ways of knowing.” Additionally, I feel Palmer’s argument completely falls apart with the parting words that closed his last public appearance: “If there is a subatomic universe, and it is adventuring into our universe, it might be a good idea to go at it with everything we’ve got.” Well, what we have discovered since Palmer’s time is that “everything we’ve got” must be based on exactly on what Mack referred to as “other ways of knowing.”

  It seems Palmer was rather ignorant about the 20th century ideas about the subatomic world, which conflicted with the logical deterministic laws Newton developed in 1700s. Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg among others, discovered that the certainties of classical physics were inoperable on the micro level and had to be replaced by the non- rational science of probabilities. This shift in knowing is demonstrated clearly in the testimony from the founder of quantum physics. Max Planck explains the transformation that emerged when he looked deeper into the structures (of Palmer’s) concrete world: “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clearheaded science, to study matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about the atoms this much: There is no matter as such! All matter originate and exits by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.” Another physicist Frijot Capra adds: “At the subatomic level, the solid material objects of classical physics dissolve into wave-like patterns of probabilities, and these patterns, ultimately, do not represent probabilities of things, but rather probabilities of interconnections . . . subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections . . . “ In the miniscule world of quantum indeterminacy (which is the building blocks of this world) Capra declares “reality is a process - complex and interdependent.”
 

The quantum approach is also how the afore mentioned government insider Elizondo looks at the UAP/UFO phenomena after viewing hundreds of hours of top-secret films in the Pentagon’s archives. In an interview with FOX News, the anchor asked the former Intelligence officer about the incompressible movement of the craft: “I am sure you have the top physics experts in the world working on this. Can they come up with any explanation?” Elizondo replied that what he has observed about these objects “are not breaking the laws of physics. They are breaking our current understanding about the laws of physics. If you look at a lot of modeling of their performance, it can be explained if you have a deep understanding of the laws of quantum physics.” Indeed, those looking at the ariel performance of UFOs absolutely confirm that these craft cannot be operating under the prescribed laws of motion of Newtonian physics. Their sudden acceleration, appearance and disappearance, high-speed right-angle turns can only be accounted for with concepts from quantum physic – such as: superposition, particle/wave duality, non-locality, and not collapsing the wave function. Consequently, the greatest stride that has been made in moving beyond the stymied effect towards an integrative understanding of the phenomena comes with this new take on the immaterial building blocks of the material world.

Another contention of Palmer ‘s was: “The so-called para-physical realms (which are variously termed “astral”, “spirit world”, “higher frequency realms”, “different vibratory levels”, “psychic world”, “planes of existence”, etc.) as being just as physical as the condition in which we all exist at present, it should be easy for you to think of them all as “matter”, as material as the bones in your head.” RAP’s assertion vis-à-vis other planes of existence as being “material as the bones in your head” - is in direct opposition what is currently trending from up-and-coming UFO researchers. This is another aspect of the new science that he was probably unaware of or regrettably would have been opposed to - called “quantum entanglement.” One of the contributors this theory comes from the eminent physicist John Wheeler in The Participatory Universe. He declares that “we are not simply bystanders on a cosmic stage; we are shapers and creators, living in a participatory universe.” This is exactly the stance Canadian researcher Grant Cameron takes in his Making Contact essay about UFO sightings. He writes “There are no innocent by-standers. Everyone is a participant. If you see a UFO, you were meant to see. And when you do there is an entanglement of consciousness that makes you part of the phenomena.” The act of observation entangles you in a way that you become part of the phenomena and will always be connected to it in some way. It seems that the US (as well as the British military) were revealing a level of entanglement with the rebranding of traditional name of UFO or flying saucer to UAP (Unexplained Ariel Phenomena). Due to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) the Pentagon had been forced to release previously classified documents illustrating how the phenomena is much more complex than just objects in the sky. The use of the term UAP is more appropriate because the documents layout peculiar physiology and neurology effects that are generated just from witnessing these odd objects in the sky. These include paranormal activity, increased psychic awareness, both positive and negative health effect and the general sense of a larger reality The notion of a “phenomenon” here validates the famous line of long times researcher, Jacques Vallee who has said for years that if he “finds out UFOs are merely visitors from another planet, he will be greatly disappointed.”

Part 3 – The Mind

“The materialistic point of view asserts the existence of reality outside of consciousness, although nobody has ever experienced this, nor could they ever experience it.”

– Advita teacher, Rupert Spira

The scope of entanglement that occurs with observers of UAP is indicative of another way of knowing suggested by Dr. Mack in the 1990s. It just might be the key to un-stymie the mystery of the UFO phenomenon. For instance, the key factor differentiating quantum physics from classical physics is based on the “obverse effect.” More precisely it appears that conscious observation is a paraphysical presence that is entangled and influences the reality around us. This was as initially discovered from witnessing the results of the mind-blowing “double slit experiment.” The experiment demonstrated that when scientists were “observing” the flow of photons through a double slit they appeared as particles. Conversely, when “no one was watching” the flow of photons the final analysis revealed them to be a wave. Somehow the act of observing affected the external motion of the photons. The results completely upset Newtonian laws of motion and those in denial of the mind’s ability to affect the material world. However, in taking the results to another level, some physicists have interpreted these finding to mean “the consciousness of the observer” creates physical existence by collapses the wave function in matter.

Particularly in the realm of human affairs -the intention of thought has practical consequences. Some readers may have heard of the “Maharishi effect.” This is when a group of meditators go to a crime infested community and meditate the way the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi taught them. The upshot is a definitive lowering of the crime rate. It seems that the peaceful vibrations of meditators emanate a field that impact the local area. The “field effect” is similar to how observing flying saucers can induce what has been called “the Oz effect.” There are numerous cases of how observes seeing a craft in the sky experience an altered state of awareness – like a feeling of atmospheric-like changes distorting their sense of reality. This is evidence of a more energetic nature of the phenomena rather than the less dense physical world Palmer postulated. Moreover, this points to the fact that the reason flying saucers are so elusive is because they have possibly mastered what Nikola Tesla called “the secrets of the universe in the form of vibrations, frequency and multiple dimensions.” Such concepts are scoffed at by the determinism of. Palmer’s worldview. He proudly rejected (or was totally unfamiliar) with the proven nonlocal capacities of the nonlocal mind, or as Aldous Huxley called it “The Mind at Large”. Still there is a growing number of UFO researchers who now suspected that the application of intention to time, space and dimensions affects the operational force of extraterrestrial craft allowing it to appear and disappear instantly. Manipulation of matter by the immateriality of thought would be vehemently contested by Palmer who said: “I DON’T AGREE with any of the premises of those who are swinging over to the paranormal, psychic, spiritualistic, other-dimensional, sort of theory!” Nevertheless, the contact cases in Chapter Three of Making Contact by Drs. JJ and Desiree Hurtak specifically highlight the presence of spiritualistic, higher dimensional beings referred to there as Ultra-terrestrials and Extra-Celestials inhabiting other “vibratory levels and higher dimensions of existence.” Palmer would have strongly reacted against such notions because he implored people not “to accept “spirits” or “life after death” or invisible “islands in the sky”. I don’t attempt to postulate other worlds existing in mysterious other dimensions, fourth or fifth or ninety-second. I don’t point to such things as “vibrational levels” or “concentric spheres” of reality.”
 
 

Consciousness as the major aspect of the phenomena was also framed by Professor Mack. He would humorously joke that “UFOs are like an outreach program from the universe for the consciously impaired.” He solidified an anti-Palmer position, because he felt that: “The phenomenon stretches us. It asks us to open to realities that are not simply the literal physical world, but to extend to the possibility that there are other unseen realities from which our consciousness over the past several hundred years have closed us off.” Hence even it if Palmer was aware of “the observer effect”, he surely would frown upon Planck’s principal premise in devising quantum theory. Planck’s revolutionary hypnosis declared: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Nevertheless, Palmer loved to insist that “those investigators who are now talking about the paranormal are placing it in a limbo of the unreal, the phantasmic, the non-material. In their thinking there is no place for a single atom of matter — not even an atom of hydrogen.”

But what is consciousness? In one manner it is an assault on Palmer’s notion of a solely material world, because forms the backdrop of a cosmos existing in an “Implicate Order” as David Bohm described. But in another way Palmer’s intuitive sense about the all-encompassing nature of the phenomena is right on. He said: “We cannot divorce them [UFOs] from such things as the Bermuda Triangle, holes at the poles, strange lights on the moon, comets or taffy candy. We cannot set them apart from the ancient civilizations, such as Egypt, the Maya, China, the Middle Ages, because they were seen and recorded then also.” Still Palmer offered no solution towards unifying these occurrences into a comprehensive thesis.

I feel to make sense of the implicate order RAP implied we must consider the words of biologist Bruce Lipton which I include in the epilogue to Making Contact. In the 1999 interview I did with Lipton, he summed up that the integral, next phase of human evolution “ is to recognize that we are all cells in a larger community coming together to create one living organism that would be called humanity. We are not humans until we create humanity. This is when we all recognize that we’re all cells in the same living organism and work in a coherent fashion—then humanity is complete. When humanity is complete, the Earth as an organism completes its evolution. It becomes a living, breathing, pulsing Gaia . . . When we come together in a unity, with a voice that will allow us to speak as one - this will allow us to speak with other Ones.” To state it more plainly, consciousness is the unity makes all sentient beings relatable.

Perhaps it was due to the to his maverick assertion of individuality, or his fierce outsider stance in pushing the UFO story publicly, or maybe it was just the circumstances of the times, but Palmer never considered the oneness of consciousness as the bond behind all levels of phenomena. He lived in at a time when our pre-occupation with physicality separated us and refused to see the power of a collective awareness. But this is the essence that futurist and one of the founders of the human potential movement, Willis Harman, spoke about in his vision of a greater humanity: “Because of the interconnectedness of all minds, affirming a positive vision may be about the most sophisticated action any one of us can take.” In this way UFOs have everything to do with expanding the definition of ourselves. We must reset the compass of the deeper mind to navigate through a paranormal hyperspace to follow the ubiquitous UFOs in their coming and goings. Perhaps at the core of who we are where others exist as well. Max Plank explained it this way: “All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.... “

Summation
 Science is all about cause. Now, if really everything is connected to everything, if there really is only a oneness, everything then affects everything, and the whole idea of causality has to be revised. -- Willis Harman
 

Anyone, even semi-awake, knows something strange and unprecedented is happening in our skies. I don’t just mean the weather and climate change. The greater population of the planet is now aware of what Palmer passionately pursued in his investigations and scientific speculations. His long career of advocacy “that we are not alone” set the stage for the public to now cope with manifestation of the situation at hand. Therefore, we see everywhere in the news, government inquiry, and in the mind of just about everyone on Earth the results of Palmers efforts to make unfathomable fathomable.

In summing up this comparative analysis I must acknowledge the wisdom of Palmer’s acute insights. One point is something everyone reading this magazine would agree upon: “No doubt that the UFO phenomenon is real.” Yes of course, an unidentied presence has been occupying our skies since 1947 and most likely for the previous centuries. Furthermore, I absolutely concur with the allegation that “Yes, the saucers belong here, and they belong to all ages. But for some reason, in our present time-period they are assuming gigantic proportions and importance, far more vital than in any past era in recorded history.” Indeed, there has been an increase in the global activity of UFOs in the past two decades. According to Cheryl Costa Desk Reference for UFO sighting (2000-2020) there were over 100,000 reported sightings in the US alone. For every reported sighting to MUFON or the National UFO Reporting center (in Washington state), there could be as many as 500 unreported sighting for each one. The reason for this worldwide activity will be addressed in upcoming articles and my next book.
 
  For now, as Fate would have it, we are living into new times with a firmer grasp of the UFO topic. For instance, on April 5th, 2022, the Pentagon released 1500 pages of classified UAP reports specifying neurological and physiological effects on human observers. Finally, confirmation has come leading the way towards an era where we are no longer stymied by government denials. Unfortunately, the phenomena itself will mostly likely continue to stymie us until we reach an greater sense our own connected realities. Again, referring to Grant Cameron, he says in the essay “The Theory of Wow’: “If the “intelligence” wanted to know what was going on they would come out and tell us, but they are not. They are giving us an indirect approach because they want us to think. They want us to reach a level of higher consciousness on our own. We won’t be able figure any of this out until we realize it is a demonstration of what can be called “the nonlocal Mind.” When we all realize that we are essentially aspects of that greater, infinite reality—it will certainly be a Wow.” In order to graduate to the next level of consciousness, we must realize our entanglement with the intelligence behind the phenomena as part of the uni-verse’s integral oneness. Only then can we collectively grow up to be on an even ground with our cosmic companions. First, we have to gain solemnity over the petty warlike dramas that have infected the human race in its battle with itself. One day we will awake from the nightmare of our petty aggressions and discover the harmony of a creation that life itself.

As we become aware of our true nature, the myths and religiosity that have isolated us from each other can now be rewritten. Jeffrey Kripal in a book he co-authored with Whitley Strieber says it this way: “It is time to tell a better story about the whole pantheon of the unknown, their gods, miracles, angels, demons, aliens and mysterious objects in the sky.” I take this sentiment to mean that we must be born anew. Perhaps we are embryo aliens gestating for a coming world. “A new vision of the unexplained” is beckoning us out of the birth canal. We are larval consciousness unaware of our place in a cosmos alongside a myriad of related intelligences. Our job, as voyagers of the unknown, is to aggregate anomalous activities as it relates to the larger sense of an immaterial Self.

Despite Ray A. Palmer’s contention that there is only physical reality, the disruptive energy of our troubled little planet is like a mosquito bite upsetting the peace of the larger superorganism of the local universe. UFOs are banging on the doors of our separateness, but before we can embrace them (or be embraced by “them”), we must start “making contact” with ourselves, each other, the Earth and the greater unknown. Only then will we realize who and what we are, and that there are no others, will we be welcomed into the greater cosmic community. It was just due to the pre-occupation with our own self-indulgences we never considered it.
 

Conclusion

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
 The darkness drops again; but now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep…
 what rough beast its hour come round at last slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
  – William B. Yeats

 One day human civilization will awaken to find that we have been living alongside the rest of the cosmos the whole time. Then we will know that we are the ones we have been waiting for. And once this consideration is alive in us as a race of human beings, nothing can stymie us again.

In the end it doesn’t matter what I or Palmer think of flying saucers - UFOs – UAP- the paranormal – or anomalous phenomena of unknown possibilities. But as a mystic I side with Max Planck who in the final analysis, said: “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” Nonetheless, I will give Palmer the last word to honor the length of his genius in taking a stab at deciphering the most bewildering spectacle humanity has ever faced: “The flying saucer phenomenon is a multi-faceted thing, and is in fact the total reality of our planet and its inhabitants in all its complexity of existence.”

author of Making Contact: Preparing for the New realities of Extraterrestrial Existence