I made my media debut on Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland podcast recently. It was both fun and challenging. Being a novice, I expected to stumble a bit. And I did. Thankfully, Whitley was there to pick me up, dust me off and put me back on my feet. Every time. Thank-you, Whitley!
I have to admit that I was a little bit overwhelmed by his effusive introduction. My book is the product of twenty years work. The journey was long, open-ended and always uncertain. Arrival was never guaranteed and never assumed. There was a lot of life that happened along the way that put everything in doubt. I really didn’t think about it all that much as I was living it– I was single-minded, focused on the next step, and then the next, and so on – until I heard Whitley welcome me to Dreamland- and then it hit me – all at once – that I’d actually gotten there.
The journey began around the 50th anniversary of the Roswell Incident. Colonel Philip J. Corso published The Day After Roswell and there was a real sense that Disclosure was right around the corner. I was following the story closely. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of the UFO phenomenon thanks to my own experiences starting when I was a kid. So it was a very exciting time. It was also a very trying time for me personally. Through a confluence of events, including my Dad’s sudden, unexpected death, I reached an inflection point in my life. I was miserable at work. Corporate America can be soul crushing. The writings of Carlos Casteneda had a big influence on me and I could hear the words of the Yaqui Indian Sorcerer Don Juan in my head. “A path is just a path, without heart.” My path no longer had a heart. I needed a new one. So I quit.
I was unmarried with no children so I could just take my life in a new direction and I did. I had family in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the time, so I packed my bags and moved to New Mexico. I looked at it as a life ‘reboot.’ My plan was to just relax and let my head clear until I was ready to figure out what to do next. I did that for a while, keeping my eyes open for a new path forward. Then one day I was reading the paper and an ad caught my eye. Whitley Strieber will be appearing at an Albuquerque bookstore to sign books and give a talk. I had read his books Communion, Transformation, Confirmation, etc., so I went to see Whitley.
When I got to the bookstore, all the seats were taken and there was a crowd standing behind the seats, so I joined the crowd in the back. We were all waiting for Whitley to begin speaking when I realized I was standing next to Richard Hoagland. I had been following the latest controversy regarding the ‘Face on Mars’ and the infamous “Cat-Box” image, which had just been released by NASA. I introduced myself to Richard and explained that I’d been a graphic arts specialist in the publishing industry and had processed countless images in the course of my career. I knew exactly what had been done to the image and told Richard that no junior person in my field would have ever applied that filter. It seemed a transparent attempt to distort and obscure The Face. I knew I wasn’t telling Richard anything he didn’t already know, but it was a bonding opportunity. I understood his outrage over the “Cat-Box” trick.
Long story short, I ended up going to work for Richard and The Enterprise Mission. Before I left my Corporate America j-o-b, I’d made the transition from print to digital. I learned to design websites back when html was hand-coded. It was really not my thing, but I also got into 3-D modeling and animation, which I enjoyed. I had a unique skillset (especially in Albuquerque, New Mexico back then), a high-end Mac and some exotic software that not many others had. Richard was planning a documentary film about video from NASA Space Shuttle mission STS-80 showing multiple UFOs zipping about in the Earth’s atmosphere and what looked like some sort of exotic weapons test, so he hired me to do the CGI for the film. It was the first of an unlikely series of coincidences.
I built 3-D models of the space shuttle and the Earth and did some tests shots, but nothing ever came of it. Richard went to Florida to investigate some archeological controversy and had a massive heart attack while there. He spent months in the hospital. It was a miracle he survived. The documentary did not. When a film production shuts down, crews scatter quickly, looking for the next gig. I was rooming with a local PBS director who was directing our documentary and I no longer had family in New Mexico, so it was back to California for me.
I knew I could make a living as a consultant, while I kept an eye out for my next opportunity. I’d gotten a little taste of the Disclosure movement and I wanted more. My next chance came in 2001 in the aftermath of the original Disclosure Project press conference when Dr. Steven Greer took his Disclosure show on the road. I contacted Greer about arranging a film crew to cover the August 4th, Disclosure press conference in L.A. I had well-placed friends in Hollywood, who helped arrange a crew of young, up and coming filmmakers to cover the press conference.
My plan was to use the footage to make a short film on the desktop. I mixed Disclosure testimony with CGI antigravity craft and called it Beyond 2001. It was an attempt to envision the post-Disclosure world. My hope was that some of the young filmmakers would catch the Disclosure bug and maybe show the film to some of their bosses, resulting in a budget and full-length film. That was the plan.
Things did not go as planned. I’ll just hit the highlights: The partnership with Greer didn’t work (creative/philosophical differences). He didn’t like the short film I made. And the young Hollywood up and comers didn’t catch the Disclosure bug. They only saw the project in terms of their careers. It didn’t seem like the right move. They weren’t sure it was for real was another factor. Almost without fail, the first response I would get upon screening was, “Is this for real?”
What’s interesting is, while things didn’t go as planned, they still went. Through sheer happenstance I was introduced to documentary film director Suzanne Bauman, who was very knowledgeable about the subject. She liked my short film. We became partners, which was a big coup for me. Suzanne is an Academy Award Nominee for her film about Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Jackie: Behind the Myth, and is among the most brilliant filmmakers in the world. And Richard was back in the saddle! Hoagland, after having recovered from his brush with death, came out to California, met with Suzanne, my friends, etc., we had dinner meetings and strategy sessions and still it went nowhere. I thought maybe a documentary just wasn’t sexy enough for the Hollywood types. I wrote a fictional screenplay about the UFO cover-up. That didn’t fly either.
I am not a businessman. People in Hollywood who get movies made are businessmen. I did the best I could. I made blistering arguments about the size of the Universe, the inevitability of advanced extraterrestrial life, Fermi’s paradox, etc. In the end, none of it mattered. It was just a bridge too far at the time. Fortunately, my Hollywood friends had some practical advice- “you’d be a lot more marketable if you’d written a book,” they told me.
I thought, okay- so, I’ll write a book. I knew how to produce one from my days in the publishing industry. I just had to figure out how to write one. The great visionary Arthur C. Clarke once said you have to write about a million words before you’re any good at it. Well, if Sir Arthur had to write a million words, how many would I have to write before I got good at it? Ten million? A hundred million? The first couple drafts were not good.
My plan was to use Fermi’s paradox as the framework for my Disclosure narrative. I would make the case that Fermi paradox theorists were right that someone before us should’ve already colonized the Galaxy- and they have, including Earth, meaning we are part of a much larger civilization spread throughout the Galaxy. I had the Moon data suggesting it was an artificial satellite made from a hollowed-out planetoid. I had LaViolette’s work on pulsars suggesting a radio message for Earth. And of course, the “embarrassment of riches” that is UFO evidence. I had the Disclosure project testimony. I thought I could make a pretty good case. Then I discovered the technological Singularity.
There’s a well-known Buddhist saying that the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. I felt like I’d travelled a thousand miles only to came upon a sign that said: Must walk another thousand miles. I don’t remember exactly how I first heard about the Singularity. I think it was probably an article on the Internet about Google Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near. Whatever the case, once I got my hands on a copy of Kurzweil’s book, I had both a Eureka! moment and an “oh crap,” moment.
As I read Kurzweil’s take on Fermi’s paradox that we’re alone in the Universe and we’re going to be the civilization that colonizes the Galaxy and eventually the entire Universe, I realized he was completely unaware of the Disclosure movement, UFO evidence, Moon data, the pulsar beacon network, etc., and ironically, the post-Singularity world he envisions is very similar to what close encounter experiencers have reported: direct mind-to-mind communication, the blurring of the lines between biology and technology and between what’s real and what’s not. What’s more, I realized Kurzweil was unaware that the type of evidence he expects should exist if ETs had achieved post-Singularity civilization circles literally right overhead every day (made explicit by the Total Solar Eclipse). And when I discovered his prediction that there would be a non-random group of stars somewhere in the heavens if extraterrestrials had already been through the technological Singularity, I knew I had to rewrite my book – yet again – because I knew of just such a grouping of stars, thanks to Dr. Paul LaViolette’s work on the pulsar beacon network laid out in his book, Decoding the Message of the Pulsars. And I knew that I was facing another thousand miles… but I knew I had it.
I never really thought about it all that much, but it all flashed before me like a near death experience, as I listened to Whitley’s introduction. Then the interview went by in a flash. Whitley had said it would go smoothly beforehand, and it did for the most part, but afterwards all I could think about were the things I forgot to mention, the things I left out.
One regret was the 1991 Total Solar Eclipse (TSE) in Mexico when hundreds of Mexicans had video cameras at the ready for an appearance of the ‘Masters of the Stars,’ as foretold in the 1,200-year old Mayan prophecy known as the ‘Dresden Codex.’ I’m glad I told the anecdote about the wild coincidence that brought the Dresden Codex to my attention on the day that I’d been writing about the 1991 eclipse, but I failed to explain the deeper significance of the UFO/TSE event in Mexico beyond the old Mayan prophecy and how it’s our Rosetta stone for understanding life in the Universe.
The great science populist Isaac Asimov once called the Total Solar Eclipse the greatest coincidence in history. He was wrong. The TSE occurs because the Moon is 1/400 size of the Sun and 1/400 of the distance between the Earth and Sun, but it’s not a coincidence. UFOs appearing during the Total Solar Eclipse draws attention to the engineering of the Earth-Moon-Sun system. The TSE reveals the Sun’s corona, which acts as a natural coronagraph like astronomers use to block the Sun’s glare so they can study its atmosphere. Understanding solar weather is critically important. Solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) are a threat to civilization/life on Earth. There’s an even greater threat to the solar system. Dr. Paul LaViolette discovered a warning encoded in the non-random location of pulsars around the Galaxy’s one radian point. The galactic core occasionally erupts, sending out a superwave of cosmic dust and radiation that could cause the Sun to send lethal flares our way. The Sun could even go supernova. By periodically calling attention to the Sun’s corona, the TSE reinforces the warning embedded in the pulsar beacon network. It also implies the ‘Masters of the Stars’ are the Builders of the Moon, who seeded life here on Earth in the aftermath of some distant technological Singularity, somewhere else long, long ago.
My interpretation based on Webre’s context communication theory is that UFOs seen and videotaped at the Dresden Codex Total Solar Eclipse event point to a new model of the Universe based on the technological Singularity, which posits that life in the Universe is engineered by a post-Singularity civilization. It’s an update of the Extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) for the UFO phenomenon that I call Post-Singularity Extraterrestrial Transmigration hypothesis (PSETH). Simply put the idea is that we’re not merely being visited by aliens from afar, we’re part of this post-Singularity extraterrestrial civilization that has been colonizing the Galaxy and probably the entire Universe since the original technoSingularity.
Wow, now that I read what I just wrote above, I’m not so sure I regret not trying to explain all that. I’m not sure my book translates all that well to media interviews and sound bites. At least, I haven’t figured out how to do it adequately to this point. I guess that’s why I had to write a book in the first place, and why a documentary or a screenplay just wasn’t going to cut it. I hope everyone that may have found me somewhat incomprehensible at times will read the book.
All things considered, I think Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland was the perfect venue for my debut. Whitley was a very gracious host. I was totally blown away by his introduction and I’m so grateful to him for that. It was a humbling experience. Thank-you, Whitley!
For me, the journey that led to The Day After the Singularity began by happenstance with an ad for a book signing and a lecture in Albuquerque, New Mexico. How fitting that I’d get my first media exposure on Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland- also by happenstance!