The Sentience of UAP: Reviving an Unjustly Neglected Approach

Could UAP be alive? Kenneth Arnold thought so. The pilot whose 1947 sighting ushered in the modern UFO era came to regard the phenomenon as a kind of living energy (Keel, 1970/2013, p. 37). According to his daughter, Arnold was perplexed about the general belief that he saw alien vehicles near Mount Rainier on that clear June day. They certainly weren’t “saucers.” A local reporter had garbled Arnold’s description of the way the UAP moved — “as if they were skipping over water, like a pie plate or saucer.” Arnold actually said their shape and undulating motion reminded him of stingrays (Thompson, 2024, p. 26). They seemed to pulsate, akin to the beating of a heart. He therefore believed “they were not mechanical in any sense at all” (Thompson, 2024, p. 29).

A US Air Force report in 1949 observed that UAP “acted more like animals than anything else” (Rogo, 1977/2006, p. 87), but the theory of their actual being alive never gained favor. In the 1950s and 1960s, the public embraced the idea that UAP must be extraterrestrial vehicles – despite contrary arguments by the likes of science fiction luminary Arthur C. Clarke, who emphasized the phenomenon’s tendency to violate all physical laws a normal machine would be subject to (Keel, 1970/2013, p. 33).

Arnold actually said their shape and undulating motion reminded him of stingrays. They seemed to pulsate, akin to the beating of a heart.

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An Urge to Look Up

Let’s consider several reports indicating how UAP behave:

On the afternoon of November 7, 2006, at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, numerous United Airlines personnel reported a dark metallic object hovering directly above gate C-17. The UAP was silently rotating just under the cloud ceiling; it appeared to be disc-shaped but with no lights or any other distinguishing features. One mechanic who was on the tarmac at the time said he felt inexplicably compelled to look up. Other people saw it from an adjacent roadway and took pictures. The UAP stuck around for perhaps 10 or 15 minutes, then shot rapidly upward, creating a circular hole in the cloud layer as it disappeared (Bullard, 2010, pp. 1–2; Carbonneau, n.d.).
A woman set out to catch her bus one morning in 1980. She suddenly felt the urge to look up: “It was almost as if a voice in my head told me to do so.” She then found herself looking at a saucer-like object hovering above some trees. She felt “spellbound” by this spectacular thing, which emitted a beam of light, rotated, and then shot away (Randles, 1983, p. 73).
A man was in his kitchen around 11 pm when he “felt the urge to go and look outside the back door…To the northwest I saw a red light, almost as bright as the brightest star or planet in the sky, moving in a most peculiar manner.” He and his brother “watched the Iight weaving and bobbing for about ten minutes, then it suddenly dropped like a stone and disappeared from sight” (Rogo, 1977/2006, p. 94).
A family was outside playing with a soccer ball, “when suddenly all four of us looked almost vertically upwards for no apparent reason.” A fraction of a second later, they saw a large, bright orange object. Considering their experience, they “couldn’t understand why we had all looked up at the same instant” (Rogo, 1977/2006, pp. 94–95).

The last of the above examples puts me in mind of an account related by physician and author Larry Dossey (2001) to demonstrate telesomatic occurrences, where one or more people suddenly feel something striking, poignant, or odd. In that instance, eight members of a farm family in upstate New York arose one morning, had their breakfast, then went off to begin their day’s work on the farm. Later that morning, each began to experience a strange sense of foreboding. Thinking they were becoming ill, each one independently stopped working and returned to the kitchen, unaware the others were feeling the same. This unusual situation coincided with the accidental death in Michigan of a son in the family (Dossey, 2001, p. 254).

It seems that, in all these situations, the individuals were being “beckoned’” by something outside of them – something portentous.

“Organic” Interactions

Let’s consider another example of UAP behavior:

On May 19, 1986, over several hours, five Brazilian fighter jets fruitlessly chased a series of lights near Sao Paulo (Tahir, 2022). Around 2,000 cadets and officers on the ground saw the lights, as did the pilots of two passenger planes flying nearby. In all, 21 UAP were reported that evening, an observer noting that they played cat and mouse with us. The antics were not reserved solely for the pilots. An air traffic controller found that when he dimmed the lights on the nearby airport’s runway, the UAP would come towards the control tower and when he turned up the brightness, the moved away. “Whether they were trying to interact with me, I don’t know,” he later commented. “What I do know is that they behaved intelligently” (Tahir, 2002, para. 12).

This is one of numerous instances where the witness ascribes a rudimentary intelligence to UAP through the sense that he or she is being mimicked or played with – or even observed. Consider a case recounted by Jacques Vallée. The witness said he had walked within 75 feet of two disk-shaped craft that were hovering in a field:

He had the intense feeling of being under observation, even at that distance…“But how could you tell?” I asked him. “You have mentioned no window, no indication that there was life on these objects.” “Have you ever been close to a whale?” the witness asked me, implying that he had the vague feeling that the [UAP] somehow was aware of him, as a large animal is aware of the presence of a man [even] while appearing to ignore him. (Vallée, 1975/2014, pp. 19-20)

My contention is that the phenomenon is observant – a quality based on sentience. Time and again, the phenomenon appears to either initiate interactions with people or be drawn into doing so.

Furthermore, the quicksilver movement of UAP reminds me of nothing other than thoughts or feelings. Consider their trademark ability to accelerate to unbelievable speeds in the blink of an eye, to come to a complete stop just as suddenly, to glide, hover, tilt, float, to vanish from one spot and then reappear in another, and to be singular at one moment and multitudinous the next. Does this not track the propensity of our own feelings and thoughts to emerge, rise and fall, race, converge, and subside?

Parapsychologist Michael Grosso (1997) precedes me in this observation. Having witnessed a UAP himself (along with two friends), he remarked that it “moved in a way that was more organic than mechanical. What we saw appeared to fly with the swiftness of thought itself” (Grosso, 1997, p. 66). If this parallel is more than an analogy, it might help us decode them.

A Lower Form of Intelligence

One assertion I feel fairly confident in making is that the underlying phenomenon goes against the common “advanced” claim. This will undoubtedly seem strange given that the most prevalent comment UAP people make about them is how technologically advanced they must be. An object that can accelerate to supersonic speeds in the blink of an eye. A craft that can materialize and dematerialize, levitate, make hairpin turns with no visible means of propulsion, and with G forces that would squash a human being like a pancake. The technology, it would seem, must be mind-boggling – a harbinger of a civilization far more advanced than ours!

Interestingly, no such comments are made about telepathy or poltergeist effects, nor any of the panoply of psi manifestations that leave witnesses equally open-mouthed. These wholly different interpretations appear to stem from two distinct assumptions. The first (in the case of UAP) is that the phenomenon is technological. The second (in the case of psi) is that the phenomenon is paranormal. The former assumes some fantastic mechanical capability, while the latter assumes something intangible, beyond understanding or possibly even faked. However, it is likely we are dealing with essentially the same phenomenon

However, it is likely we are dealing with essentially the same phenomenon [regarding UAP and psi].

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Furthermore, while many people are inclined to attribute a lofty “cosmic consciousness” to UAP or the promise of their ushering humanity into a new evolutionary era (Vallée, 1975/2014, pp. 153–154, 196–198), I myself suspect that any such intelligence is more along the lines of bodily intelligence, similar to a reflex or an innate disposition. It could even be that the intelligence of UAP resembles that of savants who are able to do extraordinarily offbeat things (e.g., recite entire pages of a phone book from memory, or play a classical piano concerto flawlessly upon hearing it just once) (Treffert, 2009) but at the cost of being unable to navigate social interactions or even take care of themselves. The intelligence of UAP could be of a similarly stunted, even though breathtaking, kind.

Sense of Presence

Interestingly, people who have interacted with killer whales often remark upon their awareness and sense of presence. One woman said that she apprehended something so astonishing and deep in an orca that it took her breath away (Safina, 2015, pp. 358–359). That sense of communion is mirrored by a researcher who states that he and his colleagues “felt tested and our intentions probed by the orcas” (Safina, 2015, p. 357). Whale researcher Ken Balcombe relates that “when you lock eyes with them, you get the sense that they’re looking at you. It’s a steady gaze. And you feel it. Much more powerful than a dog looking at you. A dog might want your attention. The whales… it’s more like they’re searching inside you… A lot transmits in a very brief time about the intent of both sides” (Safina, 2015, p. 351).

The following anecdote, related by marine biologist Alexandra Morton, also speaks to something very close to telepathy. She and a colleague decided to teach a pair of captive orcas, Orky and Corky, how to slap their dorsal fins on the water – a trick neither whale had ever demonstrated. They agreed to work on the trick with the whales the following week. “Then something happened,” Morton (as cited in Safina, 2006, p. 356) said, “that has made me careful of my thoughts around whales ever since.” Corky immediately slapped her dorsal fin on the water’s surface. She actually did it several times, then charged around the tank, exuberantly smacking the water with her dorsal fin. “That’s whales for you,” said the colleague, smiling. “They can read your mind. We trainers see this kind of stuff all the time” (Safina, 2006, p. 356).

As applicable to UAP, such interaction featured prominently in the reports of several residents of the town of Kadima, Israel, in 1993. One woman found herself awake at 6:30 in the morning and impelled to walk outside. There, she “had the feeling as if something was staring at me.” She subsequently saw what appeared to be a small, silvery-suited being surrounded by flickering lights. The woman said something to him out loud and heard a reply “in my head, so to speak” (Michaels, 1997, p. 115). Two other people had similar telepathic experiences (Michaels, 1997, pp. 111–112, 114).

If UAP do employ telepathy, my interpretation is that they are sentient. Alternatively, their vehicles – if they are vehicles – respond instantaneously to the thoughts or feelings of whatever entity is at the controls, and function organically as one.

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Evidence for this assertion of sentience, or for the amalgam I am proposing, can be found in the supposed “hitchhiker effect,” where poltergeist occurrences and other strange phenomena seem to trail certain people who have experienced UAP (Bell, 2023; Bigelow, 2021). Such anomalies have not been well studied, but again there may be a parallel with animals. Consider the ability of some dogs, cats and birds to traverse long distances to reunite with their owners. Not only have these animals been known to traverse hundreds or even thousands of miles of terrain unfamiliar to them but, in some cases, to find their owner after having moved to a new home. The capacity is known as psi trailing (Morris, 1970; Sheldrake, Smart, & Nahm, 2023).

For all these reasons, I believe the time is ripe to reappraise the idea that UAP are alive.

The Biology of Parapsychology

Zoologist Ivan Sanderson (1967) entertained this possibility in the 1960s. He was intrigued by UAP characteristics that paralleled the offbeat capacities of the creatures he studied. The multicolored lights of UAP, for example, reminded him of a South American beetle larva that has green lights at the front and red behind – and of other beetles “that have two blue-green lights at the top of the thorax… and an amber light beneath their abdomen, which they flash on landing or taking off” (Sanderson, 1967, p. 87). The “searchlights” that often figure in UAP reports reminded him of a fish in the East Indies that, when scanning the seabed for food, casts “two bright and concentrated beams” downward (Sanderson, 1967, p. 88). He remarked on creatures that can change their size and shape (including viruses) (Sanderson, 1967, pp. 65, 75) and on the ability of flies, bees, and wasps to hover motionless or to go “forward, backward, up, down, to either side, or in any other direction” instantaneously (Sanderson, 1967, p. 77). Sanderson also compared the buzzing noises of UAP to the mechanical thrum of cicadas (Sanderson, 1967, p. 85).

Another zoologist who took parapsychology seriously was Lyall Watson (1973, 1979). His books include the bold Supernature and Lifetide; the former is subtitled “A Natural History of the Supernatural” (Watson, 1973) and the latter is subtitled “The Biology of the Unconscious” (Watson, 1979). In a similar vein, John Randall taught biology and produced a book entitled Parapsychology and the Nature of Life (Randall, 1975). I note these researchers because they were not psychologists first and foremost, but biologists interested in all manner of flora and fauna. They pursued offbeat subjects because of their overriding curiosity concerning living things and life processes. The same is true today of biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who has courted ridicule by investigating phenomena as disparate as the sense of being stared at (Sheldrake, 2003) and of pets who seem to know when their owners are coming home (Sheldrake, 2000).

I recently read that scientists have found more than 5,000 new species living at the bottom of the sea (Harvey, 2023). The only reason we know they’re there is that companies are looking to mine that particular zone of the Pacific. In fact, an estimated one-third to two-thirds of all the species in the ocean are still undiscovered. When deep-sea explorers find one, it feels like “encountering some alien species” (Deweerdt, 2024, para. 5).

Perhaps UAP coexist with us on the earth in a similar way – but with the ability to connect with individuals’ thoughts and feelings in a manner we can only classify as telepathic. If so, UAP would point to psychic capacities not in the express province of human beings.

References

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