A few weeks ago, I was on vacation in another country, halfway around the world, driving down the road and thinking about ET. Because apparently my brain does not understand the concept of vacation. Cars were passing in the opposite direction, ordinary people going about ordinary lives, and I caught myself feeling almost jealous of them. They were probably thinking about lunch, traffic, where they were going next, whether they remembered to turn off the hotel air conditioner. Meanwhile, I was thinking about off-world visitors and wondering whether our entire civilization may maintain some crumbs of freedom after they come.
It was a depressing and lonely feeling. Here I was, thousands of miles from home, supposed to be relaxing and enjoying time with my family, and these ominous thoughts kept creeping back into my consciousness. What happens when they make themselves openly known? What happens afterward? What happens if humanity is gradually incorporated into something much larger than itself, and not necessarily on terms that benefit us? Most frightening of all is the possibility that there may be very little we could do about it.
I hope I’m wrong. I really, really do. Nothing would make me happier than to someday reread this and think, Wow, Greg, you were spectacularly pessimistic. But over the years I’ve read the work of researchers I consider more credible, listened to experiencer accounts, and tried to compare those claims with my own strange experiences. Add to that my unfortunate habit of becoming obsessed with a subject, reading a small library about it, and emerging several months later as an extremely annoying amateur expert.
Taken together, those things have shaped the way I interpret what may be happening. And one possibility frightens me more than almost anything else: the idea that these beings may be able to manipulate human perception, thoughts, and behavior. As I discussed in my previous post, if even some of those reports are accurate, that ability would be an extraordinary advantage. Forget death rays. If you can influence what people think, what they want, what they fear, and what they decide to do, conquering a civilization becomes considerably easier. That’s one hell of a card to have hidden up your alien-jumpsuit sleeve.
Preparing Humanity for What Comes Next
My suspicion is that when open contact happens, it won’t begin with a flying saucer landing on the White House lawn while a Gray walks down the ramp waving. It would probably be much more gradual. First, humanity would need to become accustomed to the possibility that we are not alone. More sightings (like the New Jersey drones), more government disclosures, more scientists openly considering the idea, more cultural normalization, and then perhaps something more official.
And if the hybrid accounts described by researchers such as David Jacobs are correct (and I think he is correct), it might make more sense for human-looking intermediaries to appear publicly rather than beings with giant black eyes. After all, which introduction sounds less terrifying? “Hello. I’m basically human-looking and would like to answer your questions.” Or: “Hello. Please ignore my enormous black eyes and complete lack of facial expression.” Marketing matters.
But this leads into something darker. Jacobs has argued, based on abductee testimony, that human-looking hybrids have integrated into human society. Within that framework, one could imagine how valuable influential positions in government, finance, technology, media, or industry would be. If such beings possessed unusually high intelligence, and especially if they also possessed some ability to influence human thought or behavior, climbing institutional ladders might not be particularly difficult. In fact, it could be frighteningly easy. Very, very easy.
Jacobs has suggested that hybrids would occupy positions where they could exert influence while remaining in the background, unnoticed. If there were some long-term agenda involving humanity, shaping culture before openly revealing themselves would make strategic sense. You wouldn’t necessarily conquer the world with tanks. You might simply make the world gradually more compatible with the system you intended to introduce.
That possibility leads me somewhere I don’t particularly enjoy going. If humanity were eventually placed lower within some larger hierarchy, then human societies might first need to become more accustomed to hierarchy itself, to systems where decisions flow downward and ordinary people have less ability to challenge those above them. That makes me wonder about democracy. Would a highly hierarchical non-human civilization even tolerate it? Would humans still vote on how society is governed if the truly important decisions were being made somewhere far above us?
I look at democratic institutions struggling in different parts of the world and sometimes catch myself wondering whether any of these broader trends could somehow fit into such a process. That doesn’t mean I know they do. Human beings are perfectly capable of damaging democracy all by ourselves. We certainly don’t need extraterrestrial assistance. Still, when extremely influential people openly question democracy or advocate systems where greater power is concentrated among a small technological or economic elite, it catches my attention. Peter Theil, for example, has publicly criticized aspects of democracy (and fits perfectly with what a hubrid would be according to David Jacobs). Maybe that’s entirely human political philosophy. Probably it is. But when you’ve spent years wondering whether some outside intelligence could influence human systems, you start noticing things you probably would have ignored before. And sometimes I wish I could stop noticing.
Lucid Dreaming, Resistance, and My Child’s Experience
All of this talk about influencing consciousness reminded me of something that recently happened with my daughter. We were talking about lucid dreaming, the ability to realize you’re dreaming while the dream is still happening and, sometimes, consciously influence what happens next. I’ve had a couple of experiences where I suddenly “woke up” inside a dream and realized what was happening. It’s an amazing feeling. You’re no longer just being dragged through whatever ridiculous screenplay your sleeping brain has written. Scary monster? Nope. You’re a mouse now. Poof. Congratulations on your new pet. Want to fly? Fine. Up you go.
My daughter was fascinated by the idea, so she started learning techniques for becoming lucid in dreams. And then something happened that frightened her. One afternoon, after taking a shower, she looked into the bathroom mirror and told me she saw what appeared to be a transparent blue being behind her in the shower. She described red eyes, no visible nose, and only the head showing. It scared her badly.
She came and told me about it, and after asking her several questions, I tried to create a rough visual approximation of what she described. What caught my attention was the timing. Her sudden interest in lucid dreaming had come immediately before this experience. I began wondering whether there could be some connection. Was this simply an unusual visual experience that happened at roughly the same time? Very possibly. But given my own experiences and the material I’ve spent years reading, another possibility occurred to me. Could something have been trying to frighten her away from exploring lucid dreaming?
That question sent me down yet another internet rabbit hole. My natural habitat. What I found was particularly interesting. Some experiencers and contact researchers have proposed that becoming lucid during unusual states of consciousness may help a person regain a degree of awareness or control. Daniel Rekshan, for example, purports gaining lucidity acts as psychic self-defense, allowing the individual to establish rigid mental boundaries, overcome telepathic control, and force the entity to abort. Now, that’s a handy tool for any abductee.
Other experiencer accounts describe moments in which people suddenly became mentally clearer during an encounter, resisted what they perceived as telepathic influence, changed their emotional response, or altered the direction of the experience. To be clear, this is experiencer literature and speculation, not established scientific proof that lucid dreaming can defeat extraterrestrial mind control. But the concept fascinates me.
Lucid dreaming trains a person to recognize that something unusual is happening, that they are conscious, and that they do not necessarily have to passively follow the experience. That mental shift alone is powerful. Instead of being swept along by an altered state, the person becomes an active participant. And some experiencers believe that awakening that sense of willpower may help them resist the mental paralysis or influence they report during encounters.
Which made me wonder again about my daughter. If there really is something to these reports, could her growing interest in lucid dreaming have mattered? Could whatever she saw have been intended to discourage her? I don’t know. But I would be lying if I said the thought hasn’t stayed with me.
As for the blue figure she described, I later found other experiencer reports describing blue entities, although they appear much less frequently than the familiar Gray-type beings. I’ve included an image (below) with this post that resembles what my daughter described. It isn’t exact, but it is close enough to illustrate the general appearance she reported.
The Loneliness of Believing This
Behind all of these theories, research rabbit holes, and attempts to connect dots is something much more personal. I feel sad, sometimes deeply depressed, and profoundly alone. There are moments when I look at everyone around me living completely normal lives and I almost envy them. They worry about jobs, mortgages, school, vacations, sports, dinner plans. Normal problems. Human problems.
And I find myself wondering about something so enormous, and potentially so consequential, that I can’t even comfortably talk about it with most people without sounding insane. That creates a particular kind of isolation that is difficult to describe. It’s like standing in a crowded room while believing you can see a storm far beyond the horizon that nobody else notices. Maybe the storm isn’t coming. And I really hope it isn’t. But if you genuinely believe there’s even a chance that it is, pretending the sky looks perfectly clear blue becomes difficult.
And when I think about my children, that feeling becomes much, much worse. What kind of world will they inherit? Will they have the same freedom and independence that I grew up assuming were simply part of being human? Sometimes I catch myself hoping that, if some enormous transition really is coming, it happens very slowly. Slow enough that my daughters have decades to live ordinary lives. Slow enough that they fall in love, build careers, travel, laugh, argue about stupid things, complain about their parents, and enjoy all the ordinary freedoms people rarely appreciate until they imagine losing them.
That’s where the fear stops being intellectual for me. It becomes parental. And that hurts.
Trying to Make Peace With What May Be Coming
For years people have asked why governments, or anyone else supposedly aware of this phenomenon, would keep something this enormous secret. I used to assume the answer would simply be panic. Now I sometimes wonder whether another explanation, if any part of these darker interpretations were true, would be helplessness.
Imagine discovering that another civilization was not merely hundreds of years ahead of us technologically, but potentially thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions. Imagine discovering that it may have interacted with other civilizations before ours. Maybe many times. If that were true, humanity wouldn’t be dealing with an opponent learning how to do this. We would be dealing with professionals. We would be the amateurs.
And perhaps the people keeping the secret would eventually reach the same horrifying conclusion I’ve occasionally reached in my darker moments: there may be very little we could do. Maybe secrecy, in that scenario, wouldn’t be about preventing the inevitable forever. Maybe it would simply be about buying time. Another year. Another decade. Another generation in which ordinary human beings can wake up, argue about politics, take their kids to school, go on vacation, fall in love, and believe that the future still belongs entirely to us.
I don’t know whether any of that is true. I sincerely hope it isn’t. But these are the thoughts I’ve been struggling with. So lately I’ve found myself trying to make peace with uncertainty. Trying to accept that I may never fully understand what I’ve experienced. Trying to remind myself that my interpretation could be wrong. And desperately hoping that if there really is another intelligence interacting with humanity, its intentions are far less frightening than I sometimes fear.
Because after some of the experiences I’ve had, optimism doesn’t always come easily. But for the sake of my children, and frankly for my own sanity, I’m trying very hard to leave room for the possibility that I’m wrong. I’ve never wanted to be wrong about something more.
