The Humaniverse Guide: Will ET Talk with Us?

By Keith Seland

Do you think that humans are naturally reactive to situations they encounter in society, without regard to their enormity and potential impacts? Or do you consider us a proactive design?

By all accounts and historical evidence, our species waits until the situation has presented itself to us before we act. The body of evidence in reality supports that we are reactive by design.

In the situation that is the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), as applied to first contact, we are moving very close to monumental discovery of other life in the universe. But no plan exists that will guide us through this situation toward a beneficial acknowledgment of and introduction to extraterrestrial intelligences (ETI).

The Humaniverse Guide(r): Will ET Talk with Us? will immerse you into a most detailed and thoughtful investigation of the hypothesis that is proactive planning for first contact. Being proactive in starting a first-contact plan design now will offer our civilization many benefits and advantages that are impossible to achieve by waiting until after the contact-event occurs.

Will ET Talk with Us? explains all these benefits and advantages from many perspectives, and offers the most complete thesis of first-contact planning in existence today. Reading this work will enlighten, increase your awareness and consciousness to the need for formation of a plan design and its implementation. It will also introduce you to the many benefits you can utilize to your advantage as an individual and to the many communities in which you are a member.

Are you ready to explore these futures and learn how to be proactive?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781684980642

Book preview

The

HUMANIVERSE

GUIDE®

: Will ET Talk with Us?

KEITH SELAND

Copyright © 2022 Keith Seland

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-68498-063-5 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68498-064-2 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Knowledge is gained only by

the actions of the one who wishes to acquire it.

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: What, with Whom, and When

Chapter 3: How and Where

Chapter 4: Why Should You Care?

Chapter 5: Reactions to Enduring Contact with ETI

Chapter 6: Guidance for Our Human Condition

Chapter 7: Constraints

Chapter 8: What ET May Want to See from Us

Chapter 9: How We Need to More Effectively Prepare

Foreword

The remarkable information contained in this new book seeks to address some of the broad-based questions I posed in an article for Fate Magazine about its founder and first major UFO investigator: Ray Palmer. I asked, Is it our fate that the truth shall forever evade our conscious awareness? Or is it our fate to be eternally grasping at straws, hoping our efforts will lead us out of ignorance toward solving the greatest mystery humankind has ever faced? I must also add that it is plain to see for anyone, even those half awake, that something unprecedented is happening on planet Earth. I don’t mean only with our weather but with the breakdown, and perhaps breakthrough, that Keith A. Seland’s The Humaniverse Guide poses with the right questions that the human race must ask about if and how ET will talk with us.

For a long time, people delving into the UFO mystery have been stymied by the incomprehensible displays of great aeronautics technology in our skies. Seland works hard to achieve a comprehensive overview of what some of the best minds of our generation have sought to understand with very limited results. This introduction is a brief look at how the guide presents a practical approach on what researchers dealing with the complexity of the subject have shied away from. Equally, a whole litany of intellectual authorities have suggested human beings may not even have the mental finesse at this point in our evolutionary development to understand who or what is visiting us. Back in the early 1900s, the father of American psychology, William James, in his lecture on the variety of religious experiences, makes this corollary statement: We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all. Seland triumphs over such challenges by directing the reader toward a focused level of inquiry. For instance, the second chapter called What, with Whom, and When brings forth a consistent, detailed approach of what we need to know to expand our knowledge about the phenomena.

Nevertheless, another great psychologist, Carl Jung, taking a different slant, took great pains to explain how the appearance of UFOs in the twentieth century was predicated on our developing the inner tools of the psyche in regard to knowledge of the outer world. Jung felt that before we can understand what these mysterious flying saucers are about, we must first clarify our relationship to our deeper unconscious mind.¹ He said that if the visitors [or the UFO] were to become fully real [physical and, hence, identifiable whether as ETs, time travelers, or whatever], they would no longer serve as emissaries of the impossible.² However, due to Seland’s years of in-depth study on the subject, this focused analysis is about making the impossible possible with practical examination. This is what is so vital about the guide—because it speaks to people like me, who has seen these objects and know they cannot be all in the mind.

Despite his initial stance, Jung himself suspected a physicality to UFOs beyond being a psychological archetype of the mysterious unknown in the modern age. In his definitive book on the subject, Flying Saucers: Modern Myth of Things in the Skies, Jung concedes that one can hardly suppose that anything of such worldwide incidence as the UFO legend is purely fortuitous and of no importance whatever. Seland takes up the torch for this integration by acknowledging that a concrete existence must be merged with a seeking of other aesthetic, spiritual and ethical cognitive universals, which Gullemo Lemarchand outlines in his paper, Speculations on the First Contact: Encyclopedia Galactica or the Music of the Spheres? The book brings forth the strategy Lemarchand suggests in proposing the participation of a broader community of scholars from natural, social, artistic and humanistic disciplines to explore all the possible universal cognitive maps that eventually might favor the detection of extraterrestrial intelligent life.³ Seland proposes that this is exactly what is needed at this time to meet the challenge that has stupefied great thinkers on the subject, who are trying to comprehend the unfathomable.

The intellectual groundedness of the text also surpasses what another renowned explorer of consciousness failed to grasp in defining the mystery. For example, the celebrated orator and philosopher of the late twentieth century Terrence McKenna could only fathom the UFO phenomena along Jungian lines as being a guiding mythic image for an evolving civilization. Even after his own sighting in the 1970s, when he and his brother were deep in the Amazon rain forest, McKenna surmised his encounter with a poetic quip. In an unusual ordinary state of consciousness and in broad daylight, he witnessed a mist of clouds above the jungle canopy, which suddenly morphed into a physical metal spaceship that flew overhead. He summed up the experience this way: The whole of historical possibilities was compressed into a mercurial holographic disc; part bios, part machine, part syntax, part mind. The categories dissolved. The world was not what it appeared to be. An observer needs to exist for reality to be observed at all. It is all psychological. Was it real?⁴

Seland gets underneath the need for mythography of the altered statesman McKenna by calling for a more nuanced constraints that may be imposed upon the human effort to succeed in initial talks with ET. Keith calls on the work of anthropologist Ben Finney, who likens our present situation to the cargo cult of the Pacific islanders during World War II. Finney writes, "It appears that when the native populations encountered visits from Allied ships, planes and soldiers, the impulse was to worship the soldiers and technologies that had brought a variety of strange foodstuffs, new improved materials for shelter and other gifts. A quasi-religious practice began building replicas of the planes and ships in the hope of attracting the soldiers back and to bring more food and materials when they left. The soldiers never came back. The practice continues today, seventy-five years later, among the more isolated cultures." Isn’t this what Mckenna and Jung are doing in labeling the phenomena a mytho-quasi-religious representation of the human psyche? Could it be that we are faced with a conundrum that must be sequentially and intellectually explored from a greater level of cognition? Seland suggests as much by bringing in the astounding historical profundity of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who, in the 1700s, sized up our current situation.

Kant brought forth a solution that could avoid the devout impulse humans tend to have for storytelling about enticing stimuli we have yet to understand. Kant appropriately stated, It seems, that the problem of indicating the character of the human species is absolutely insoluble, because the solution would have to be made through experience by means of the comparison of two species of rational being, but experience does not offer us this.⁵ While being an accurate assessment of the current ET incredulity, Kant’s argument also, unfortunately, reflects the human failing to adequately sense an equality in the deeper intelligence of nature. This is what Seland transcends by showing how we can rise to the occasion in creating a relationship with a cosmos that is more complex than we ever suspected. In other words, what James, Jung, McKenna, and Kant hesitate to address is valiantly pursed by Seland with some very matter-of-fact rejoinders.

We have lost any resonance with our human nature with the perception and awareness of the overview effect as described by the astronauts to the phenomenon of consciousness-raising by seeing Earth from an orbital perspective.

I can’t help to think about how our obsessions with rationality will never be sufficient to make sense of ET realities. Something needs to shift for our imaginative grasp to meet our academic reach. I think a consideration of what I label quantum thinking might help in meeting the ET conundrum in a new way. The idea was inspired by Professor John Mack’s writings in the book Making Contact: Preparing for the New Realities of Extraterrestrial Existence. He says that we’re dealing with a phenomenon which violates our sense of reality, and which operates in this gray area between the physical world and the subjective, or mythic or other-realm world. We’re being asked to prove this by the methods of the physical sciences alone. But those methods, in my view, will not yield its secrets, until we discover other ways of knowing.⁶

This is indeed the comparable conclusion Keith comes to in confronting the archaic values of the old guard’s refusing to see the monumental transformation our perceptions are going through to finally converse with ETs.

The inability or unwillingness of many groups and institutions on our planet to engage a positive consensus on the possibility that ET exists and could visit us someday is itself a constraint to first contact. Skeptics of this theory are still widespread and come from most walks of life. However, they have been steadily decreasing in numbers since the last half of the twentieth century.

I feel this is what is so refreshing about The Humaniverse Guide. It clearly and concisely points the way for a drastic overhaul of our current worldview. This is similar to what Jeffrey Kripal declared in the book The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained, cowritten with Whitley Strieber: It is time to tell a better story about the whole pantheon of the unknown, their gods, miracles, angels, demons, aliens and mysterious objects in the sky.⁷ One way the better story will manifest is by going on the journey this intensive guide to the humaniverse offers and arriving at the beautiful prose of its concluding pages: Attaining a cosmic perspective seems as far-reaching an objective to humankind as ever before. Recognition of this crisis is a full first half of that battle, attainable after we accept the reality of this state of affairs. Seland succeeds in setting the stage for the second half of the battle, which is to awaken the greater human soul to stand as equals, shoulder to shoulder with ETs (if they have shoulders), and converse in an open dialogue about the path of technological advancement, the nature of the universe, and the great mystery of creation we are all kin to.

Alan Steinfeld

Author of Making Contact: Preparing for the New Realities of Extraterrestrial Existence

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the guidance and inspiration I received from the following people, who made the road to the creation of The Humaniverse Guide: Will ET Talk with Us? much easier and motivating.

To Erich Von Däniken for taking personal time to offer me both initial and follow-up encouragement, direction, and instructions to develop and follow my research dreams. His wisdom and personal experience helped mold and direct my path of engagement in the UFOlogy field of endeavor.

To the Roswell, New Mexico, community and to the Roswell International UFO Museum and Research Library for their kindness, accessibility, and permission to allow me to help tell their story. The knowledge and experiences these people have shared with me over the years remain seminal to the end point of eventual global acknowledgment that there are other intelligent beings that exist and that we will forge new relationships with them sometime soon.

Chapter 1

Introduction

In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us?

—President Ronald Reagan, United Nations General Assembly, September 21, 1987, Address

Key words: extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), prokaryote, eukaryote, enduring global acknowledgment (EGA), enduring global relationship (EGR), Biosphere I, the Brookings Report.

Are we alone in the universe? Our intelligence and our capacity to feel allow us to recognize and gives us potential to appreciate the innumerable qualities that this universe does and will offer to us. We have a lot to learn about our universal home.

Do we perceive the universe in common with other life-forms? By logical extension and of other types of reasoning, the answer is yes. We would have all of it in common. For many, all that remains is to have irrefutable knowledge that we do share our universe with others.

When and if we do meet up with ET, how will this most historical encounter influence our human condition? All the elements which constitute the living parameters of our civilization, consisting of many cultural communities, define our human condition, as well as those of all life on Earth.

It is worth considering whether some of the history we wrote about our civilization in the twentieth century and have yet to write today could occupy a place in interplanetary annals. Have certain events, like exploding atomic bombs, two world wars, many smaller ones and their aftermath, and environmental damage to our planet, been considered so important that the galactic community archives have recorded these? Are they, right now, watching these evolutionary events unfold? Reflection on these events could decide how extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) will deal with us during upcoming visitations. Could this be an explanation for the ever-growing catalogue of UFO/UAP encounters throughout recorded history?

Various opinions are offered as to the shaping of these worldviews toward cosmic meaning, perspectives, and challenges of possible recurring communications with ET. One continuum was discussed by NASA engineer and contributor to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Mark L. Lupisella. This spectrum denotes that, of the philosophical paths we could take in designing a strategy from a pragmatic to a cosmocentric, or a hybrid bootstrapped course, Lupisella suggests that the cosmos and culture co-evolve and will increasingly co-evolve with culture playing an important role in the overall evolution of the universe (Lupisella 2011).

The coronavirus pandemic of 2020, popularly known as COVID-19, is an example of a phenomenon that has affected everyone within our entire civilization. Another example relates to the effects from worldwide climate change.

You should take pause and reread the quote from President Ronald Reagan at the front of this chapter. The prophecy of his words strikes an acute resonance that exponentially multiplies when you live through one of them. How true do you think his message is to an end point of humankind’s merging attitudes, worldviews, and effects on our human nature and our human condition?

There is a certain existential importance that wisdom and nature assign to addressing for types of phenomena that could arise. These are just two examples. Another one is defined by the potential eventuality for encountering a first contact with life from outside Earth. We know from the reception to and aftermath from the COVID-19 pandemic the deleterious consequences with which a lack of preparation can cause from a situation. Designing a plan of action in advance of a potential and probable significant event that affects a large populous is one task that our human communities appear deficient in practicing, much less mastering.

Though established only after World War II, the debate aligned with humankind pursuing a strategy of a first-contact event has existed for centuries. Among the early pioneers of message-transmission development include the mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss, in the 1830s, and astronomer Joseph Johann Littrow. Both used contrived geographic apparatus in their testing protocols. Gauss used the Siberia tundra and plots of trees to draw out the mathematical shape of squares and triangles on the landscape, while Littrow used the Sahara as a sort of blackboard to dig twenty-mile trenches into similar giant mathematical shapes (Seland 2020, 166).

With humankind’s twentieth-century explosion in technology advancement, new and varied means of message transmission developed and evolved. The transmission debate today has been infiltrated with new topical concerns. Among these are ideological considerations of a scientific, philosophical, sociopolitical, ethical, cultural, and sizeable risk assessments that often generalize into arguments about the benefits of contact.

While the list of these debate points of contention is long and growing longer, there is one particular constraint worth introducing here. The near-unanimous opinion that contact attempts will be fruitless due to the impossibility for us to communicate across the vast interstellar distances that separate any ET from us is particularly fatalistic and naive. Remember, this same opinion of impossibility was popular before the respective discoveries of humankind breaking the sound barrier, escaping Earth’s atmosphere, landing on the moon, splitting the atom among numerous other achievements. This sequence of events is exemplary of the fallacious logic that exists to explain the current impossibility of interstellar communication. Our current knowledge has developed very rapidly during the last century; on this, all are in agreement. The quantity and scope of what will be discovered, on a time line sooner rather than later, may significantly change this great debate once it is discovered that these vast interstellar distances are not a barrier to message transmission and communication.

It appears that satisfying the empirical critical thinking needs of the science and engineering communities drive the thought process in this way. If some scientific theory or engineering objective is not yet achievable by us, such as faster-than-light travel or interstellar communication, we tend to perceive and express our opinions in ways that support the impossible theory and also make claims that if it is impossible for us, it must be impossible in nature.

The noted examples are just two of many that exist in the dialogue. Just because humankind has not yet figured out how to conveniently travel to, say, the Zeta Reticuli binary star system, a mere thirty-nine light-years away, we tend to structure our arguments in the way that declares it impossible for any other intelligent being to accomplish, or for nature to allow. It is a type of arrogance that is part of our species’ nature, our human condition.

But in the discourse of nature and the existence of phenomena, are we missing out on many monumental discoveries and postponing many achievements by years, decades, and centuries because of this arrogance? What exists in nature exists despite our arrogance, anthropocentrism, or egocentric nature.

*****

As noted, the points of disagreement are numerous, complex, and lengthy. Long-debated arguments continue to rage on in the literature about a multitude of controversial areas in the subject of the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH). These include, among others, whether our civilization is sociologically ready for contact; how science, the government, and the military shape the framework of discussion; philosophical controversies over a better use of knowledge and resources to improve our own living situation; ideologies over globalization; society’s individual freedoms; and the large number of perceived risks to a contact scenario. All these conversations will be part of your subsequent reading.

The preceding statements are salient in that, when it comes to a discourse over a plan design process for a particular project with such far-reaching scope and implications as this one, they present the need for involvement of many different communities that comprise our civilization. Thus far, the actors to the debate and more general theme of actual first contact have involved only the government, science (particularly astronomy), and the military. While these cohorts to the first-contact stage are necessary participants, many other communities in our civilization require representation.

I will be discussing, at length, a concept of the human condition and how it is applied to this notion. I am presuming here that there has been no prior contact with ET, as per the declarations of our government and the regimes that assert this declaration, such as NASA’s active search for new life, SETI’s search for new messages undiscovered, and others. That said, I will be exploring the efficacy of whether some or all of Earth’s communities can assist in preparing a plan designed for a meaningful first contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life. I will also be exploring the efficacy of creating a plan design itself as a natural prerequisite of the other inquiries.

These other communities in the definition of the human condition constitute the many professional fields of study: the social and astrosciences, philosophy, theology, fine arts, legal and sociopolitics, ethics, and economic