Contact Project Watch By Eric Habich-Traut

February 2026

We don’t just live in the present. We also live in the past. From the here and now, can we influence our past selves? I believe we can.

Disclosure culture assumes time moves in one direction: evidence accumulates, files are released, truth arrives. But what if meaning doesn’t work that way? What if the past is not fixed, but a living story whose significance is shaped by how we understand it now?

This idea sits at the core of The Contact Project. My own timeline became a test case. The project crystallized on April 14, 2016—but its roots were planted in 1995. That year, I photographed a UFO—two frames captured on a dark motorway. I also encountered a potent symbol in a VHS documentary asking, “What did the Germans and Hitler know about the universe and UFOs?”

The most striking image was the so-called Black Sun, associated with Vril mythology. The symbol lodged in my mind, unresolved.

It then disappeared from my conscious life. For 21 years.

On April 14, 2016, it reactivated. I was looking at a NASA SDO image of the Sun, darkened by coronal holes—someone online called it a “Black Sun.” The old memory snapped into place. I paired the two Sun images on Facebook and named the symbol the cryptwheel, because it contained glyphs of unknown origin.

As I stared at the post, something strange happened. I imagined the cryptwheel turning clockwise, gaining momentum. Everything went dark unless I resisted, applying an equal and opposing force. My senses sharpened. I felt a vibration—as if reality itself were trembling. I turned on the television.

Tectonic Pulse
The first alert barely registered. Japan. Magnitude six. Details pending. Then more alerts followed: another quake in Japan. Then Myanmar. Then a massive 7.8 in Ecuador. The sequence unfolded in near real time. I remember thinking—half-joking, half-alarmed—“I feel a disturbance in the Force.”

Experts later explained this correctly as statistical clustering. I agreed. Earthquakes are not messages. But something still shifted—not causally, but interpretively. Tremors flickered across North America—California, Oklahoma—nothing unusual on their own. Together, they felt like punctuation marks.In that heightened state, a sentence arrived—unbidden—in German:

Im Widersatz ist Gegensatz
Die Aussage ist Gegenstand
Der Gegenstand ist gewaltloser Widerstand

Loosely translated: In resistance lies opposition. The statement is the object. The object is non-violent resistance. My reaction was immediate and unambiguous: What the hell is this?

Understanding the message unfolded less like solving a puzzle and more like moving through a curriculum. I discovered that April 14 was the birthday of Erich von Däniken. The VHS series that introduced me to the Black Sun? He had been involved. That series was distributed by Stargate Ltd. Von Däniken had told me privately in 1995 that he consulted on Roland Emmerich’s Stargate. A strange triangle emerged—linking symbol, date, and modern “ancient alien” mythology. Later, the cryptwheel itself resolved into something even stranger. The script wasn’t ancient at all. It was a modern fabrication—a trigger, not a key. That distinction matters.

In Carl Sagan’s Contact, the first human TV signal imagined to reach the stars originates from 1936 Berlin—a broadcast of fascist ascendancy. My cryptwheel eerily resembled early mechanical television from that era. Whatever it represented, it provoked one clear response in me: No.

That refusal revealed the core of the experience. The message was not about aliens or hidden technology. It was about non-violent resistance. Non-violent resistance is itself a signal without transmission. It does not impose change through force; it changes how events are carried forward. It refuses to let harm define the final meaning. Resistance is not reaction—it is completion.

So where is “the contact”? It’s not in the sky. It’s in the interpretive act. The message pointed toward ethics, not metaphysics. I later saw this embodied when a community in Minnesota stood in peaceful solidarity after tragedy. The grief was real. The loss was real. But meaning did not collapse. It was answered.

This reframes the disclosure struggle itself. For decades, the goal has been to receive the transmission: the files, the data, the final truth. But what if the real task is to complete the signal?

The moving goalposts, the controlled drip, the bureaucratic resistance—this is not merely obstruction. It is the interface. It demands a response. Completion lies not in what is released, but in what we become through sustained, non-violent resistance to secrecy and disempowerment.

The symbol’s afterlife confirms this. “Thule” is now Pituffik Space Base in Greenland. Frontier mythology reappears in projects like Praxis, where empire returns disguised as administration. The struggle is not against ghosts—it is against power. Counter-semiotics—making these narratives legible—is the work. The Contact Project exists to expose how symbols function, how meaning is shaped, and how clarity becomes a form of resistance.

Offer Wave, Confirmation Wave: How Meaning Completes Itself
In the Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics, particles form through a handshake across time. An offer wave moves forward from a source. A confirmation wave moves backward from a receiver. Only when they resonate does the event become real.

This provides the central framework of The Message. The past event is the offer wave. Our present ethical understanding is the confirmation wave. Meaning is not received—it is completed.

The Message was an offer wave born of tension.
Our stance now is the confirmation wave.

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Erich Habich-Trout is the Founder of The Contact Project: https://contactproject.org This, his new WOW! Signal Column Contact Project Watch will examine the political, scientific, and cultural dimensions of UAP disclosure.

The Message: A Signal Without Transmission