NASA Announces How It Will Report ET Contact
NASA Chief Bill Nelson says looking for extraterrestrial life is part of NASA’s mission, as its top scientists call for a detailed system for classifying ET life.
In a huge departure from the US government’s historical treatment of UFOs and possible ET life, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in an interview with University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato, “[W]ho am I to say that planet Earth is the only location of a life form that is civilized and organized like ours?”
Meanwhile, top NASA scientists are calling for a scaled system for reporting any evidence of extraterrestrial life modeled after NASA’s progressive scale of Technological Readiness Level already in use for new spaceflight equipment.
Instead of the binary “life or no life” way of looking at off-planet discoveries, these scientists are suggesting a more nuanced way of reporting what they find. Cheryl Costa, retired journalist, UFO statistician, and author of the UFO Sightings Desk Reference, thinks it’s about time.
“I think it’s long overdue, they’ve been talking about this stuff for years. They know that there have been unidentified things in our skies since biblical times,” Costa said. “The fact that they’re finally owning up to the idea of classifying alien life. Their scale is going to have to run the range of organic molecules all the way up to sentient beings, so it needs to be a pretty big scale, and it’s nice to start seeing bonified scientists looking at this issue and saying ‘OK, we need to do this.'”
And what about NASA Administrator Bill Nelson’s comments?
“I think it’s refreshing that the NASA chief came out and said ‘Yeah, maybe’ on the UFOs and off-world life. I think they still know more than they’re telling us. I’m happy NASA is coming out with this stuff, I think they’re trying to feed it to us a little spoonful at a time. They don’t want to scare the populace,” Costa said.
This seems to be a big change from the past when, during the Cold War, the government ran a concerted effort to discredit anyone who spoke out about UFOs, what was the mood like in the country back then?
“Let’s go back to the Cold War, post-WWII, yeah we had foo fighters, I’ve interviewed former vets flying B-17s and things who said ‘Yeah, we saw those things and we thought it was the other side,’ then after the war, they found out the other side thought it was us,” Costa said. “The more common aspect of UFOs being reported in the last two generations started with us setting off three nukes back in 1945. Within two years we suddenly had them on scale, what they called the “massive wave of 1947,” and that was a big deal. Then what happened a few years before the Roswell incident? In 1938 on Halloween Eve, Orson Welles scared the snot out of the country.”
“So here we are in 1947, we’ve got this wave of UFOs going on, think about those guys, barely 10 years before talk of aliens scared the heck out of everybody. So, there was this whole idea that maybe the American public isn’t ready for this.”
Now in 2021, not only are governments exploring space, but private companies are in their own space race. Now that we appear to be “ready” for this, could we see Disclosure in our lifetime?
“I think we will have to, we’ve got so much going on with our environment. And two things the ETs who have talked to people on the ground have said “Take care of your planet,” that’s been a continuing thing, and the other driving thing is they’re very concerned that we have a proliferation of nuclear weapons. And our whole present-day sighting is driven by the fact that we set off three nukes back in 1945 and the aliens have been very touchy about that. They don’t want us off this rock with our current politics and all that,” Costa said.
And there is hope with the latest developments at NASA and existing departments within the agency we may see evidence of off-planet life.
“There’s a whole division in NASA that looked at the idea of what some of these exoplanets had for gravity and atmosphere. They’ve gone out and postulated what kinds of life might survive in those environments, and it was very creative how they looked at it, and a very possible thing because life always seems to find a way,” Costa said.
Do Thousands of Alien Contact Accounts Share Same Message?
Though UFO sightings have been traced to the days of prehistoric man — with ancient drawings of spacecraft, mysterious symbols, and humanoid creatures depicted on cave walls all over the world — the overwhelming number of encounters are only now starting to receive the attention they deserve. UFO abduction stories and alien contact have poured into the mainstream for decades, even while those who claim to have had these experiences find themselves as targets of social mockery.
UFO Abduction Experiences
Detractors who disbelieve abduction experiences often fail to take into consideration the character of the individuals who claim to have been abducted. A vivid stereotype stands in the way of fair treatment for experiencers: a delusional hillbilly at a rural bar rambling about far-fetched stories, or a drug-addled person ranting to no one in particular in the middle of a populated city center. But these abductee tropes are unfair and antiquated.
Giving actual credence to contact claims are the accounts of respected professionals who’ve come forward with their own stories, including military personnel, media personalities, and political figures. There are many people from all walks of life who have reported abductions and contact, such that a new generation of dedicated researchers has emerged, interested in learning more about these vivid and often terrifying experiences. Meanwhile, a number of psychologists have attempted to understand the lingering trauma and emotional scars of these abductees who work to cope with the ensuing trauma and disruption in their daily lives.
Harvard psychiatrist John Mack observed that the fear of social rejection and invalidation can often be more traumatic to an abductee than the actual experience of abduction. He said, “Every other culture in history except this one, in the history of the human race, has believed there were other entities, other intelligences in the universe… why are we so goofy about this? Why do we treat people like they’re crazy, humiliate them, if they’re experiencing some other intelligence?”
Similarly, physicist and UFO researcher Stanton Friedman noted, “I check all my audiences [on the lecture circuit] and find that, while in agreement with polls, 10% have had a sighting but only 5-10% of these witnesses have been willing to report what they saw. Biggest reason? Fear of ridicule.”
L. Harvard Psychiatrist John Mack R. Physicist Stanton Friedman
Photographer Kim Carlsberg was a few days into working on the set of the hit television show “Dallas” when she went home and saw her first UFO, which she dubbed the “Moon Over Malibu.”
A few weeks later, Carlsberg went to bed and woke up in a spacecraft, which would be the first of a series of abduction events that continued for seven years. During abductions, she says she was the subject of experimentation and claims to have been impregnated to create hybrids of aliens and humans. She says she has learned profound spiritual lessons, having been shown the oneness of the universe and all of its species. And she reports a resounding mission among the extraterrestrials “[T]hat it is time to save Mother Earth from her inhabitants.”
Carlsberg’s first book, “Beyond My Wildest Dreams,” discusses her personal UFO abduction story, while her second book, “The Art of Close Encounters,” serves as a forum for 150 people to tell their UFO abduction stories.
