When I was a kid, maybe about 6 or 7 years old, I was spending Christmas vacation at my Grandparents’ farm. On Christmas Eve that year, myself and several of my siblings and cousins saw what I would later understand to be a UFO. The object was a perfect sphere of soft blue light, but somewhat smaller than the full moon which was on the other side of he sky at the time of the sighting. It remained in a fixed location in the sky before abruptly vanishing.
The idea that what we had seen at the time was Santa, or the Star of Bethlehem was discussed among us, being children from a religious family. It wasn’t until years down the road I would begin to piece together the concept that what we had seen that night wasn’t a magical phenomenon, but had a more “scientific” explanation: it was quite obviously a spacecraft piloted by extraterrestrials who are observing us for some unknown reason.
It again wouldn’t be until several more years and experiences later I would develop the current theories I hold for the explanation of these Unidentified Flying Objects that people have been reporting for centuries or more. Ironically enough, I came full circle in a way, as I now feel that the strange lights and objects are perhaps something more mystical in nature that most ufologists say.
The idea that a race of super advanced biological creatures have traveled farther than our current technology can even see, simply to annoy and/or scare the hell out of people without any observable gain or advantage or logical reason seems a bit much for me. I’m sure in some cases secret military projects could be the cause for some sightings, but by and large, when the military wants to keep things secret from the public, they don’t fly low to the civilians and flash their lights at them. Also, I tend to side with what Stephen Hawkins said on the matter, that if the government is hiding the existence of aliens from the public they are better at that one thing than anything else they do.
Now, say for a theory what we are seeing up there is not really a physical craft at all, but something from outside of the current reality we exist in. The idea of portal to other dimensions is not a new idea, but what that might really look like is a subject that is often misunderstood. This concept involves a variable that is outside of what our senses and analytical ability are designed to process. While it is easy to picture a two-dimensional shape (a line) growing longer or shrinking from both ends, and a three-dimensional cube growing or contracting height, width depth, etc. We can even stretch our minds a little to visualize the fourth dimension of “time” or entropy by seeing that same three dimensional cube dispersing into smaller cubes and spreading out into space, or doing the opposite and forming a lager cube from smaller constituent cubes coagulating together. In this way, our minds and senses are designed to observe and process information defined within these dimensions. Now, try to expand that same cube into the fifth dimension. Which direction does the edge of the cube go?
The hypercube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercube is one illustration of how another dimension would interact with space as we know it, but as far as what something existing in this type of space would look like, well…
When the light is dim, our minds will “fill in the blanks” so to speak to provide us with the most accurate perception possible. Sometimes, however people overlook details because this perceptual phenomenon can cause us to see only what we were expecting to see, rather than getting the true input from our sensory organs. This might be why when a person is confronted with an object existing in 4+ dimensions, our minds put together strange impossible objects in the sky, like a mishmash of “close enough” approximations of what we are actually seeing, but our minds and sensory organs are not highly enough developed to process yet. That might also explain the feelings of awe or terror that people have prior to and just after a UFO experience. The overload to the nervous system has to find the closest match to be expressed or processed.
That’s all fine and well you say, but it doesn’t really explain what people are seeing does it? What would cause an additional dimension to suddenly spring into a observer’s perception? It could be a naturally occurring thing like lightning or mineral hot springs, just occurring for a period of time when the conditions are right then vanishing, or they coul be part of a machine or occult metaphysical process operated by independent entities of an unknown nature, they could be psychic projection created in our collective subconscious and displayed in the skies for our group benefit. Or it could be mass hallucinations, which is kind of the same thing.
Although many people may pass off the idea of mass hallucination as a debunking and move on, in a way, isn’t that an even more profound than hidden master races from distant planets, or mystical apprehensions of the Nth dimension, just the fact that having belief in something, even against conventional logic, if shared in a sincere and open way can have a true and powerful effect on everyone participating. If a person can just have an experience that makes the universe feel bigger and more meaningful, and then to be able to share that with another human being in such a fundamental way that it becomes a simple matter of fact, wouldn’t that be the most magical phenomenon of all?
The Burning Satyr 