By Jose Antonio Caravaca, Unlocking the Truth magazine, issue

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10/2/2021

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Let’s suppose that as soon as tomorrow, a gigantic, multicolored flying saucer lands in the gardens of the White House, in front of millions of citizens, cameras, and mobile phones, and in this way the existence of extraterrestrial life beyond our planet is officially confirmed. Even then, it would still be extremely difficult to explain the nature of the thousands of UFO cases reported over the last seven decades all over the world.

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This is because the UFO phenomenon presents various unknown facets that would be hard to resolve, even if we now had “on the table” the certainty of extraterrestrial life.

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Above all, because in its countless manifestations, the UFO phenomenon has displayed features seemingly incompatible with mainstream science as we know it, and it also appears to be a phenomenon that is half “physical” and half “psychic”, blurring the boundaries between imagination and reality.

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Extraterrestrials trapped in a spiral

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If we compile an archive from the information gathered by researchers worldwide, we seemingly end up with thousands of extraterrestrial “races” visiting us: witnesses speak of a multitude of “ufonauts”, very different in height, size, physical appearance, clothing, etc.

In addition to that, we are dealing with an entire armada of flying saucers in every size and shape imaginable, worthy of the Star Wars saga.

Not to mention the paradoxical and disturbing behavior shown in countless cases by UFO entities, who in many incidents appear to behave like maniacs, or at least to have a rather peculiar sense of humor.

And if these strange intergalactic visions were not enough to generate chaos, ufologists have not, in all these years, managed to establish a single global framework that could weave even a dozen of these events into one meaningful story let alone all the side phenomena that accompany these “extrasensory” extraterrestrial encounters: telepathy, strange dreams, paranormal phenomena, poltergeist activity, etc., all of which sow confusion and completely contaminate our original, simple idea of what’s going on.

Undoubtedly, in this whole “extraterrestrial” affair, it is very hard to answer the key question: what exactly are we dealing with?

Are we dealing with astronauts from another world, or with something else?

Many researchers suggest that the UFO paradigm has little or nothing to do with the hypothetical presence of extraterrestrials on our planet, and that the available data offers us plenty of strong indications pointing to a psychological component in the phenomenon despite the fact that, apparently, it also possesses an undeniable physical reality (supported by photographs, radar detections, ground traces, etc.).

Building on this hypothesis, the Distortion Theory aims to go further in that direction, examining cases and trying to find the “hidden key” that opens new questions.

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After a detailed analysis of hundreds of events, I have concluded that close encounters with UFOs would be the result of a “psychic architecture” that exists as a kind of fusion between an external, unknown factor and the witnesses’ own psyche. And as the primary “fruit” of this fusion/communication, a three dimensional image is “produced”, indistinguishable from the surrounding reality and observable by more than one person.

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However, we must make it clear that most of this “scenery” is created out of psychic material, which the unknown factor extracts from the observers’ own minds (in the form of memories, for example). This seems logical, as we see in the ufological archives. It is as if the UFO phenomenon restarts from scratch in each new episode, showing endless variations and deviations of a single basic concept: an extraterrestrial visit. What could be summed up simply as “something strange” that someone saw in the sky later lands, and from this “something” its occupants disembark.

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But we cannot expect much more, because the content of each experience is “aesthetically” different, according to the testimonies. The beings and objects that appear within this projection are created and modified by the individual involvement of the witness. Each close encounter with an alien form of life is personalized, shaped by the interaction between the witness and the experience. And beyond any socio cultural perspective, the bulk of what we call a close encounter with UFOs rests upon the personal, individual psyche of the witnesses: the entire informational content is integrated in a distorted way into the projection of the phenomenon, such that the witness no longer recognizes it as his or her own.

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The phenomenon can also draw from various ideographic sources, not only those directly related to UFOs, science fiction, or extradimensional journeys. Researchers can detect the aesthetic and narrative sources of these experiences in the witnesses’ unconscious or surroundings.

How exactly does this distortion work? It is very likely that, at the moment they are formed, many strange encounters in any category, including ufology are rooted in an ideographic base that may lead to a metaphysical event, a cryptozoological sighting, a sea monster, or an extraterrestrial contact, depending on the interpretation or influence that the witness attributes to what he or she perceives.

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Everything starts the moment the potential observer “tunes in” to the phenomenon. The beginning of the entire experience may be nothing more than a strange light in the sky, a shadow, or simply a feeling of fear and unease, even an inexplicable shiver or panic. And it is exactly at that moment that the witness’s mind is flooded with a barrage of questions: What is happening? Where does this silence come from? Am I alone? What is that light? Is there some spirit near me? Could it be my deceased grandfather? A flying saucer? An angel from heaven? A horrific creature? The Virgin Mary?

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This whole interaction between witness and event emerges from the unconscious itself in other words, both the questions and the answers are generated by the witness. And it is precisely these answers that provide the content of the narrative, both aesthetically and structurally.

The external factor has no particular interest in transmitting clear experiences or messages to us: rather, it is the witness who unconsciously builds and elaborates and sometimes creates entirely from scratch the story, based on hundreds of operative elements present around him and in his mind at that specific moment. Thus, if the observer’s inner world is chaotic or confused at the time of the phenomenon, the outcome may also be unpredictable and “bizarre”, to the point that specialists find it impossible to classify.

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Faced with the stimulus of a strange light in the sky, the vision of a shadowy entity, or an odd sensation, the witness may unconsciously predetermine the “origin” of the experience: extraterrestrials, the realm of ghosts and shadows, religious beings, etc. In other words, once alien encounters are stripped of fabricated details, exaggeration, supposed advanced technology, and hypnotic lights, they appear as a hypnotic psychic phenomenon intimately linked to the witness in such a personal way that we cannot exclude their close kinship with the growing range of strange and supernatural visions recorded in texts throughout history. We have been misled by appearances the superficial trappings and “wrappings” of each case into assuming that these manifestations could only be explained as visits to Earth by civilizations from other worlds.

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Therefore, if we are dealing with a kind of contact produced by a psychodimensional process, this would help explain why the majority of cases are intangible or fleeting, where the “occupants” and their “craft” leave no traces and can pass through solid matter. This suggests that nothing perceived during a UFO experience obeys the empirical reality (at least not in the way we understand it), nor does it maintain a physical consistency in our space time once the encounter is over. In other words, the “ufonauts”, their craft, and any recorded actions in UFO incidents have no genuine existence beyond their fleeting presence in front of the witnesses.

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For this reason, nothing that is reported is ever repeated in exactly the same way in another UFO case, simply because nothing that appears or is observed has any existence beyond the contact point, which is real only for the specific witness. The existence of these experiences is ephemeral. In the next UFO incident, with a different witness that is, a different source from which the central visual elements and narrative details are drawn the story practically begins again from zero…

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UFO researchers can only study the duration of each event, because the “before” and “after” simply do not exist in any objective sense.

Due to this psychic mechanism, we have not been able to construct coherent theories about extraterrestrials: their actions are unpredictable and essentially orchestrated, not so much by the phenomenon itself as by each witness’s imagination, interacting with external factors.

Everything is created and projected at the moment when the human psyche comes into contact with the unknown stimulus from the alien aesthetics to their behavior and reactions.

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In each ufological incident we insist on reconstructing the stage anew, but always through the witness’s lens and “decoding”, which change the fundamental structure of the event depending on his or her standpoint. We must emphasize that the witnesses’ unconscious manifests before their eyes in distorted form, without them recognizing it as such. And the phenomenon does not feed only on ideas and theories derived from ufology or space travel, but can use virtually any “raw material” suitable for such an auto generated process (for instance, alleged encounters with angels, fairies, elves, etc.). That is precisely why ufologists are falling behind: because they are trying to apply solid reasoning to a shifting psychodimensional process that probably neither contains nor provides any final answers about the true nature of the event, since it is the product of an internal chain of associations a fantasy.

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The absurdity factor: a cosmic theater?

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For decades, various researchers have highlighted the countless absurd elements the UFO phenomenon exhibits, elements that have been grouped under the category of the “paradoxical.” The famous ufologist Jacques Vallée, together with a group of students, argued that this absurd component so widespread in many UFO cases functions like a self defense mechanism of the phenomenon itself, so that witnesses’ stories are not believed by ordinary people, let alone by the scientific community. The brilliant researcher Ignacio Darnaude defended the existence of a vast “cosmic theater” to explain the strange, incomprehensible behavior of ufonauts.

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However, it may be that this absurdity is the inevitable consequence not of some Machiavellian control system, but of the inherent influence of the psychic structure, precisely because this psychic architecture (the projection) develops through a process very similar to the one that unfolds when we sleep and dream. Therefore, it would have no particular transcendent or supernatural meaning.

Experts believe that during dreaming, the brain regions connected to the frontal lobes responsible for logic and what we consider rational reality are deactivated.

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This is why paradoxical experiences seem normal while we dream, but as soon as we wake up, we recognize the absurd and illogical nature of much of what we dreamed (which is nothing more than expression of the unconscious). I am convinced that UFO experiences project onto the witness a sequence of impressions very similar to the dream world in which we plunge when we sleep, even though they correspond to a different phenomenon. As a result of this similarity, to compare or analyze all alien encounters is like trying to understand and decode thousands of dreams from thousands of different people, assuming that all encounters must obey a specific causative rule or, conversely, assuming that all these dreams come from the same common source that communicates with thousands of sleepers to transmit one single message.

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In our bizarre quest to extract a common pattern or universal explanation from such a number of cases nearly as many as there are dreams we would end up with so many disparate elements that our goal would become impossible.

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We would irreversibly transform purely subjective experiences into a complex belief system. Moreover, to complicate things further, as in the study of extraterrestrials, all this cataloging would lead us to a multitude of questions and theories for which no answer exists, because in reality we are not facing one single question. So, in a global conclusion, we can say that close encounters with UFOs are random, coincidental, and personalized phenomena, and we’ve made the big mistake of trying to analyze and compare UFO cases as a whole, while the real meaning of these experiences can only be interpreted at a personal level, always taking into account the unconscious influence of the witness on his or her testimony. Once we understand that we are dealing with experiences that are worldwide in scope yet subjective since the psyche of each witness participates actively a part of the mystery begins to clarify.

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At their core, extraterrestrial encounters are psychic processes, extremely malleable, arising from the contact between witnesses and unknown layers of reality that open gateways and communicate with our deepest inner worlds.

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The physical elements

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That the UFO phenomenon also has a physical side is beyond doubt: UFOs are tracked on radar, they leave traces, and they can even injure witnesses.

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The strange thing, however, is that under the same conditions reported in the phenomenon, we do not find the same results. We are dealing with a dual phenomenon. In other words, flying saucers sometimes leave traces, and other times they leave absolutely nothing, as if they were proper ghosts. Sometimes they cause electromagnetic disturbances, and other times they parade by without causing any disruption they seem to display a constant duality in every manifestation.

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What causes this ambiguity?

First of all, we must remember that UFO manifestations do not belong exclusively to the psychic realm, but the phenomenon seems to “use” some kind of energy to generate these scenes. Thus, the intensification of these projections into our environment would occasionally produce the materialization of certain elements in the projection.

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This could obviously cause all sorts of physical effects on witnesses or the surrounding area. From my point of view, the phenomenon “overlaps” momentarily with our known universe, and only the involvement of certain witnesses would succeed in producing physical effects in our reality, since not everyone reacts in the same way to this sudden intrusion of an unknown universe, nor do all possess the same “qualities” or “capacities” to tune properly into the phenomenon. The most interesting point, from the standpoint of the Distortion Theory, is that the alleged physical traces left on the ground after UFO landings are still distorted versions of concepts already familiar to the witnesses even before the event: holes, crushed grass, burn marks, metallic debris, oil stains, radioactivity… all completely predictable.

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Why has no evidence ever been found of another type something that would be hard to fit into our psychological or scientific parameters?

For example, why has no flying saucer, on taking off, ever transformed its surroundings into a bluish hue, including trees, soil, and ground?

If we are facing an extraterrestrial technology almost inconceivable to our science, once their “craft” interact with our atmosphere they could cause all kinds of effects, from transforming ordinary stone into diamond, to making it rain in the desert. But none of this has happened, for a simple reason: no one has imagined it as something “logical and likely” to occur after a flying saucer landing.

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And since such information does not exist, even implicitly, in the witnesses’ unconscious knowledge, the external agent cannot represent it in the ephemeral projection.

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We must not forget that the image transmitted by the phenomenon seeks to simulate a supposed extraterrestrial contact, but always (as I imagine it, at least) within strictly human cultural concepts. Witnesses and investigators, on the other hand, find it perfectly logical and therefore consider it less absurd and theatrical that UFOs leave behind screws, oil stains, etc.

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Thus, as stated by the Distortion Theory, nothing that appears before the witnesses is entirely unknown to them. From this perspective, the presence or absence of traces or other physical effects on the environment or on people might depend not so much on the phenomenon itself, but on each witness’s capacity to “intensify” the encounter so that part of the projection acquires some physical component.

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Otherwise, in all UFO cases we would find residue and evidence in short, far more uniformity between cases. But this is not what we see, because each encounter involves a different witness, and each witness, through his or her participation, shapes the content displayed to a much greater degree than we had thought. In the same way, when ufonauts communicate with us, we do not receive any information that truly interests us: there is no message or data that even remotely matches the spectacular visual display shown to the witness. It is as if all the effort and intent of the UFO phenomenon were focused on a single aim: to construct an overwhelming, dazzling, almost transcendent scene, in which the visual element always dominates everything else.

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What is the origin of the UFO phenomenon?

As for the origin of all these strange manifestations, we can say that throughout the centuries people have reported various contacts with beings and unknown entities (demons, angels, mermaids, fairies, and many other creatures with different “labels”) that probably follow the same logic as extraterrestrials a logic that has evolved/changed over time. This change in appearance is not the result of some camouflage to conceal a higher purpose or elaborate plan, but rather the outcome of human participation in their creation.

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It could hardly be otherwise, since nearly all apparitions in their historical periods are contemporary with the interests, culture, and worldview of their era. Likewise, the information we have obtained from various witnesses must be nothing more than a distorted reflection of human ideas and concepts. The external factor is simply a catalyst, a complex yet perfect “wrapping”, so that our soul has sporadic “contacts” with another reality that escapes our normal senses.

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From these unknown dimensions that coexist alongside ours, the so called “external factor” would have to be examined and understood through these many contacts, showing us aspects that merely “sleep” within the collective unconscious or, at times, serve as a veiled guide to the unknown universe of the subconscious. Because so far, in the vast majority of cases, we only perceive the “interference” caused by our uncontrolled plunge into this astonishing psychodimensional universe.

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And everything we have recorded in our files which we interpret as clumsy interventions by hypothetical extraterrestrial astronauts is really produced by our own strong impulse to interpret and understand these phenomena through powerful cultural, social, philosophical filters, etc., which have generated various beliefs about the supernatural.

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Perhaps, up to now, we have merely amused ourselves listening to the background noise created by these imposing manifestations while ignoring their true transcendent message…