There has finally been a shift in consciousness for which many of us have been waiting for decades: the public acknowledgment of the existence of extraterrestrial life in the Universe by the U.S. government, that we are ‘not alone’ but in a vast complex of life in different forms throughout the cosmos.

Surely the Pentagon doesn’t put it that way, but there is a clear and explicit acknowledgment by the Pentagon and CIA that has been long-awaited and now is fully on the table.

To be more specific, the CIA has made a few thousand pages of documents available for public view. This also lets us know that they have been ‘on the case’ for a long time. And how long they have been hiding this information from us, the people they are supposed to be serving and who have paid for the data-gathering, as well.

Around the world, governments have been trying to hide their explicit knowledge of not just spaceships, but of the intelligent life that built these ships, some of whom have been found upon certain sightings, accidents and crashes at least since Roswell.

The emphasis is almost always on the ships and their remarkable characteristics: speed, instant direction change and ability to appear and disappear, like a series of inexplicable, magic tricks that wow the audience. But very little has been discussed who is in them, their intelligence, language, culture, emotional life or what they look like. The question of just who are they remains a mystery that so many of us are eager to uncover.

So ironically, even though there has been a disclosure, there remains ‘a cover-up’. But by all appearances, in relatively short order, I believe that we will be learning a lot more about our off-planet brothers and sisters themselves and them us.

The funny thing is that no matter how hard governments have tried to hide their knowledge, citizens of all countries have seen UFOs—unidentified flying objects—for what might be hundreds and thousands of years.

No government, try as they might, has ever been able to convince their citizens that what they’ve seen with their own eyes, sometimes ‘up close and personal’, wasn’t true.

This is an alarming phenomenon in itself of governments, experts or in some cases, medical doctors seeking to convince people of what they know to be true and real of something else. “Do I believe what my own senses are telling me or what certain authorities are telling me is true?”

It begs the question of how do we know what we know and who do we trust? The answer is a pivotal one in our own maturation and personal development. This is a phenomenon to be highly attentive to and deserves its own query and article, especially in this era of rampant “fake news”, not infrequently with a profit motive, skewing sound science, facts, knowledge and intelligence.

The Pentagon has now publicly acknowledged the existence of UFO phenomena being reported by pilots on missions, on naval ships in operation and more. The New York Times published an article on this. Public radio in NYC just did a substantial segment on this.

For decades, Dr. Steven Greer of the Disclosure Project has been reporting on having amassed dozens of fighter pilots, upper brass of the military and many others who have reported seeing these phenomena ‘as clear as day’ over the course of their long careers, and in most cases, have been commanded to “hush it”, hence, be part of the cover-up. Mufon is another major organization that has been researching UFOlogy. One of the most influential in this space is Luis Elizondo, who actually worked in the Pentagon conducting massive UFO research.

But there have also been many courageous military personnel and others who have come out boldly and have told what their experiences have been without shying away from the facts or judgment of their bosses.

Laurence Rockefeller funded a group in the 1980s with the purpose of disseminating information about the existence of UFOs and compelling the government to make their knowledge public.

One of the leading figures of this group, Command Sergeant in the U.S. Army, Robert O. Dean, had been part of the cover-up while stationed in Europe and appeared on A Better World TV numerous times starting in around 1993 to disclose the cover-up in detail. His disclosures were so compelling that I flew to Arizona to meet with him and a few of his military colleagues to further detail the experiences these officers had of UFOs while on duty.

A Better World started then to focus on this significant subject that might be the most important revelation to humanity of all time. We may find that it was our stellar relatives who were behind the Old Testament and the heavens opening in Sinai when God Himself was said to communicate to Moses and all present. We are beginning to ‘cut to the core’ of reality itself. And its multi-dimensionality.

In fact, with SETI Institute and others going back to at least the 1970s, there has been an international effort by scientists, academics, and interested parties to identify, explore and investigate extraterrestrial life and the origin of life in the Universe.

Erich Von Daniken’s earth-shaking, brilliant book Chariots of the Gods, published in the early 1970s, posited that some Biblical stories, such as that of Ezekiel, were really about encounters with intelligent forms of life from other parts of this or other galaxies. In this single book, the author provided such convincing perspectives that anyone encountering these ideas walked away from a little wiser and a little more open to these possibilities.

But long before that, going back to Roswell, New Mexico and beyond, the experiences of many across the world of both encounters with the ships and in some cases like Roswell, the beings themselves of which there is film footage.

Going long before that, indigenous wisdom across the world, Native Americans to the Australian Aboriginal, referred to The Star People. This is ancient and archetypal in our ancestry.

Man’s gazing upward and wondering “just what is what” is as old as man himself. It’s a totally natural, appropriate and expected ‘gazing and wondering’ that all curious people do. It’s actually so natural that if someone did not do that, one could wonder about the person’s level of intelligence and state of health.

In a true sense, there is a biological need to assess one’s environment for threat or safety related to survival. On Earth, we tend to look primarily horizontally but also need to look vertically, from trees to mountaintops and honestly, to the stars. How big do we conceive of what it is we call ‘home’?

On this note, the Dogon Tribe of Africa were aware of the Dog-Star Sirius’ companion star going back long before there were telescopes (that we know of) and long before Western scientists detected it. How did they know this?

True enough, ego-centrism is pandemic a good deal more than the current virus that has gained so much popularity, but for all I love Mother Earth, so is eco-centrism in respect to the larger, Universal picture. Loving Earth is integral to our biology, mind and soul, and if we allow ourselves the freedom, this same relationship can be established with the rest of the outer and inner Universes.

When one does look upward, they are interestingly organically allured to look inward—the gazing in each direction invites the other. Certain questions instinctively emerge:

-“Who am I?”
-“Where do I come from?”
-“What am I here to do?”
-“Am I truly separate from everyone and everything else in the Universe or just the opposite: integrally and indivisible from it and everyone?”
-“What is life?”
-“What’s it all about Alfie?”

As a young teenager, I was not only interested in these questions, I was obsessed by them. A day didn’t pass when I wasn’t asking myself, my friends, parents or teachers, “What is reality? Why are we here? Who is ‘we’?” I couldn’t let it go because I realized that meaning relied upon and danced inside the answers.

I read books on UFOs, ESP, Lao-Tse, Buddhist teachings, the Vedas, looking for answers. I even prayed to UFOs to pick me up for a galactic visit.

I knew life existed on other planets, in other galaxies, not because I saw them— but by force of simple logic. The Universe, as vast as it is, one enormous eco-system, could have biological life on one single, planetary surface of truly uncountable trillions. Without a telescope or first-hand, direct experience, simple logic would bring one to this conclusion.

It stands to reason that If life is found in one place, it can be found in another—that’s how it works. Almost 12,000 feet below sea level in the ocean, three times deeper than any human diver has been able to go, in totally freezing darkness, algae were found. We don’t know that what we call ‘Black Holes’ might also be teeming with a form of life. In fact, if we look at Earth, life shows up everywhere!

So the very thought that out of the vastness of the Universe, life on this one single, tiny planet is it, is about as ego-and-eco-centric as it gets. But the human mind tends toward parochial but due to increasing public disclosures and revelations, the parochial will likely be blasted open to new dimensions.

Once we break through that barrier, which was easy for me and should be for you, it’s not just the world that opens up but the Universe and one thinks not just locally, not even just globally, but galactically and universally. Or it could be thought of as local has considerably expanded as space collapses as a dimension?

This is where we’re going, this is where this ship is heading, so this is what we want to start opening up to if, that is, we’re going to ‘plan for the future’.

Not to mention what lies ahead, now that we’ve ‘broken the barrier’ in society and discussion of UFOs is becoming “dinner conversation” not just by ‘crazies’ but by rank-and-file, ordinary people. I believe that we’re going to start seeing a whole new ‘way of thinking’ a new, dawning, hopefully, more intelligent consciousness starting to ‘break open’ at a time on Earth that we do need it because we are destroying our beautiful planet and really need to see our actions from a higher, more enlightened point of view. Contemplation of life everywhere in the Cosmos that we are not ‘alone’, can do it. Logic and science alone don’t seem to be doing it.

Albert Einstein asked the intelligent question, “Is the Universe friendly?” It’s up to each of us to answer it as we see it. If we say yes, we can open our hearts and minds to the extraordinary possibilities and opportunities that lie ahead of space travel and exploring new ‘galactic cultures’.

If we say no, we will gravitate toward the reptilian fear brain and miss out on all the adventure, extraordinary potential, technology and possible fun—it’s up to us—but I’m certainly encouraging an open, curious and grateful perspective as a way of welcoming our long-awaited visitors.

If this works the way much of the Universe works, how we think of it is what we’ll get, just like here on Earth.

By contemplating the reality of life everywhere, we re-contextualize our lives on this planet from a larger perspective and can appreciate its preciousness all the more. We can also have respect for those who have traveled likely quite a distance to visit, on spaceships that seem to appear and disappear in a flash and seem to have a form of propulsion that is far more sophisticated than anything we have to date. Maybe there’s a lot for us to learn. A new physics perhaps, or farther reaches of quantum physics?

And very likely, they want to learn about us from us too.

Colleague and long-time friend, Alan Steinfeld has been studying UFO phenomena also for decades, and in his book, Making Contact, one of the excellent points he makes of many is that our ability to see, sense and communicate with off-planet beings is related to our own ability to increase our own frequency, like tuning a radio to a station you want to listen to. It’s an ‘inside job’.

This presses us to develop our minds, hearts and consciousness to be able to ‘tune in’ telepathically, perhaps the way dreams speak or messages received. No more how ‘far out’ this may seem, it is becoming “far in’ and will likely, as is often the case with things, become the norm yet with a sense of adventure and gratitude that our long-lost, long alienated brothers and sisters are back to perhaps help us understand what might really be our ancestry and origins.

The contemplation of the reality that life is everywhere in the Universe can also unite us as a human species instead of all the bizarre in-fighting that happens among people of different genders, colors, sizes, shapes and forms.

This could unite us in a way that nothing else has. It could also help to move us beyond war (on all levels?) and the destruction of our habitat, perhaps even elegant solutions for re-building it before we make it wholly uninhabitable.

Dr. Carl Jung suggested this in his book about UFOs—that it has/would have a uniting tendency for us all to come together.

To the extent that we allow these disclosures and the reality of our having ‘long-time awaited’ brothers and sisters to more fully make themselves known to begin to expand and evolve our consciousness, to that extent, I believe we stand a chance to become fuller human beings more closely realizing our identity and potential.