UFO in Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) offered a more philosophical portrait of a UFO encounter. (Image courtesy of Columbia Pictures)

If you’ve seen a UFO and know first-hand they exist, then the long-awaited declassified Pentagon report on UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena), collected by the Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI, reveals only what you and millions of Americans already know – UFOs are real and aliens love to visit Earth for the fireworks and a day at the beach. Beyond stating the obvious, analysis of the published data – sparked by fresh visual evidence – does not reveal where the UFOs come from, nor who or what is operating them. Those questions still remain unanswered. If the government knows more, their lips are sealed until someone asks the right question.

According to a 2019 Gallup survey, 30% of Americans believe UFOs are real, but most don’t believe that UFOs are alien spacecraft – they’re balloons, secret U.S. or Russian test vehicles from reverse-engineered alien craft, or perhaps weather phenomena. At the same time, almost 50% believe that alien life forms exist beyond Earth and there are “people somewhat like ourselves” living on other planets. Almost 75% said “life of some form” exists elsewhere in the universe. But not here!

As for the actual, in some case remote-controlled pilots or operators of UFOs, the report does nothing to shed a ray of light on the existence of aliens, whether aliens are traveling here from distant planets or galaxies, whether they live on our planet today, or to refute that we ourselves are designed, raised and controlled by an alien race like genetically-engineered tomatoes. Many people believe aliens not only exist but are walking among us undetected, and that the real question the Pentagon needs to answer is not ‘do UFOs exist?’ but how do we communicate with them?

Surprisingly, according to experts, communicating with aliens is no more or less difficult than man communicating with himself, which has historically not gone well. Reacting to what’s missing from the Pentagon report, psychologist and UFOlogist Dr. Richard Sperling, Professor of Linguistics at Cambridge University, and author of the book The Aliens Among Us, emailed TOAST: “An old friend of mine read about the Pentagon report and told me, ‘It’s enough to make you homesick. I know I’m not from around here, so I must be from out there. You can never really know where you really come from until you explore your inner alien.’ He was, of course, talking about the benefits of looking at yourself from the alien point of view, if finding out who you are means anything to you. You can’t connect with anything or anybody outside of yourself until you connect with the ‘you’ inside, and you’re not going to connect with yourself until you begin your language lessons and learn how to talk to aliens.”

As a mental exercise, think about it from the alien point of view, Sperling suggests: Why would an alien ever want to talk to you? Why would an alien ever want to talk to a human? Humans are clueless and unconscious, he declares. So to an alien it’s a total waste of time talking to a human. “I mean, if you can’t hear anything but the sound of your own voice,” he reasons, “how can you expect to hear the voice of the voiceless? You can’t hear aliens with your physical ears, only though an open mind.”

How do you get started with lessons? Here are a few tips and notes, courtesy of Professor Sperling, to speed you on your way:

  • If finding out what you’re doing here on this planet at this time, if discovering who you are and what your true purpose is here… if finding out with such certainty and clarity that you could express it openly has any meaning for you, then you can begin your universal language lessons. From this point on, if you make as much sense to aliens as you do to yourself, then you’re ready to learn.
  • The first alien one must learn to talk to is oneself. This is not difficult for most people. Whether they would admit it or not most everyone already does talk to themselves, but do not for the most part understand the importance of it.
  • If you want to talk to aliens you have to learn how to listen. Alien communication begins where human communications end, and since aliens don’t talk with their mouths, reading their lips wouldn’t help any more than asking an alien where it’s from and how long it plans to stay in town. You can only strike up a conversation with an alien by not talking. All you can do is listen and listen well. What you hear when you stop talking and start listening is the beginning of communication with yourself and others besides yourself.
  • You won’t remember meeting them, even if you see them, because aliens are highly polished mirrors in which we see no one. In the presence of aliens, men forget everything. All memory is erased. For mankind to talk to aliens they must first remember why they are here, and to accomplish that mankind must wake up from its long, deep sleep, one by one, over a period of time as long as the sleep itself.
  • One might wonder why there have been so few actual physical encounters compared to the number of sightings. The answer is obvious: Extraterrestrials just do not have the time to waste on human contact as it presently is. In a world ravaged by continual war, poverty, hunger, disease and over-population, an intelligent and/or evolved life form would appear to have little interest in communicating with humans until these man-made or -enabled scourges are eliminated. Everyday man will not have contact with aliens unless enlightened, and even with a crash program it will take a million years for man to learn how to talk to aliens.
  • The idea is to become so observant that you can free yourself from the necessity of having to be aware of extraneous facts that are ‘alien’ to your progress. It’s like saving electricity by turning off what you’re not using. To do this you must know what appliance you have. The goal of all such systems is the eventual quieting of the observing apparatus so that acquaintance with new information becomes possible. It is only is this silence that alien conversations occur. Close scrutiny of the majority of people reveals that most Americans have not yet attained this special place, nor are they aware of its existence; hence the chances of coming into physical contact with any alien is reserved for those able and ‘prepared’ for open-ended contact and conversation.
  • Finally, should you have an alien encounter, offering aliens gold or money in exchange for whatever you imagine you have to bargain with is not going to help, warns Sperling. “Aliens have no use for money. They don’t have a word for money in their language because aliens always get what they come for. They can’t be bought. What aliens want to know most about you is what material you’re made of, not what’s in your wallet. I saw that with my own eyes… at least I think they’re my own eyes.”