Why Don’t People Want To Believe?
By Nick Blake
It’s easy to be skeptical of unusual experiences. The human tendency is to ignore anomalous sightings or greet them with hostility. For example, when Captain Cook sailed into Botany Bay in April 1770, onboard botanist Joseph Banks was surprised that the members of the Dharawal Nation on the shore appeared to ignore the HMS Endeavour. Instead they continued with their daily work as though nothing unusual was there. When the Europeans came closer to shore to land, they were greeted with two armed men of the Gweagal clan who threw spears at them.
Compare this to modern UFO sightings and it’s easy to see the similarities. Here in the USA, we’ve been taught for decades — and generations — that UFOs and paranormal experiences aren’t real. They are, at best, figments of the imagination or the result of drugs and mental problems. Just ignore them. Nothing to see here.
In a galaxy filled with hundreds of billions of stars, in a universe with billions of galaxies, we’ve allowed ourselves to be convinced of mainstream culture’s arrogant assertion that intelligent life has uniquely appeared only on our planet. The rest of the universe is lifeless rock, bacteria and chemicals.
The sci fi worlds of the Star Wars movies and Star Trek franchise (not to mention Doctor Who and Red Dwarf) made more sense to me growing up: abundant life and life forms everywhere, advanced technology, and galaxies waiting to be explored. But this was all science fiction, right? Pure fantasy.
In the past decade this has changed, starting with the NY Times headline in 2017 about one of the Pentagon’s UFO-related research projects and the US Navy releasing footage of craft they have tracked. We are now being told that UFOs are indeed real, and are a threat. The armed men are showing up on the beach with spears to let the HMS Endeavour know that we are prepared to defend ourselves from the UFO invasion with our primitive defense technologies. As Rice University religion professor Jeffery Kripal says, good luck shooting down souls.
During the pandemic my mother-in-law, who loves Christmas gifting, got me a stack of UFO-related books. Everything from Philip Corso’s The Day After Roswell to Kathleen Marsden’s book about the Betty and Barney Hill abduction case to Robert Temple’s Sirius Mystery. There were over a dozen books in all, and I spent the better part of the next year digging through them. My wife wanted nothing to do with the subject, so I suspect my mother-in-law saw in me an opportunity to connect to a fellow open-minded thinker who was deeply curious about the strange world and universe we live in. That Christmas got me seriously interested in the subject as I devoured book after book. The evidence presented was overwhelming, with a surprising amount of actual science and critical thinking.
The usual skeptical answers weren’t satisfying, and I entered a period of cognitive dissonance. These books appeared to be discussing real phenomena, but I’ve been told all my life this stuff isn’t real. It was hard for my brain to take. I wanted to believe, but my skeptical brain kept telling me it wasn’t possible.
To give myself some balanced perspective, I decided to read the award-winning classic of debunking literature, Carl Sagan’s Demon Haunted World. Finally, I thought, a “serious” scientist would convince me that, indeed, UFOs aren’t real and there were perfectly reasonable explanations for all these anomalous experiences. I flipped directly to the chapter on crop circles, eager for Sagan to set me straight.
What I discovered, however, was that Sagan believed that every crop circle that has ever been made all over the globe were created by two guys from England in the 1970s. Stating Sagan’s argument like this makes it obvious how ludicrous that assertion is. Worse, his explanation ignored the very strange science results from some crop circles, like plant abnormalities and eyewitness reports of orbs. It’s easy to dismiss eye- witnesses, but not so easy to dismiss plant abnormalities that appeared to be caused by radiation. Did those two guys from England 50 years ago use radioactive plant-flattening devices? Sagan’s explanation was deeply unsatisfying.
I read through the rest of the book, hoping beyond hope to find some meaningful arguments and/or logic that would help convince me that all the books and scientific evidence I had been reading about related to UFOs were indeed the results of mis-identified natural phenomena or human delusion. Alas, I continued to encounter spurious assertions and poorly argued explanations. Unfortunately for Sagan, I came away from his book convinced that UFOs were indeed real and that there were serious flaws with mainstream science.
The only people Sagan’s book will convince are people who don’t want to believe. Anyone openly curious to the UFO topic — and especially anyone who has had experiences with craft, occupants and/or the paranormal — will find the book to be a waste of time, full of the usual flawed debunking rhetoric and misinformation.
Noted UFO experiencer Chris Bledsoe said in a recent interview that UFOs will show themselves once you are ready and have disengaged your knee-jerk skeptical responses. Perhaps this is true; in my case, it certainly has been.
A few months after reading Sagan’s book and coming away convinced that the UFO phenomenon was real, I started seeing them myself. And that changed everything.
What happens when you are not on drugs, are not having a psychotic episode, and you see something anomalous in the sky that you are able to take photos of and record video footage of? How do you make sense of experiences that your skeptical brain cannot explain with conventional answers?
These are the questions I’ve been wondering ever since seeing my first anomalous sighting, an intensely bright light in the sky in the middle of a cloudless, clear night in April of 2022 that bobbed up and down in the sky in a slowly expanding sine wave. When it responded to my thoughts, my perspective on everything shifted. How in the world could that light in the sky respond to my thoughts?
The rumors are true, I thought. Telepathy is real. Anything is possible.
I have since had well over 2 dozen sightings in the past 3 years, each one presenting a cognitive challenge. I’ve seen everything from lights in the sky to flying saucers to strange flames to a weird blurry white object outside Las Vegas that swayed back and forth in the distance as my son and I hiked over a rise on our way back to the car from a petroglyph hike. When I pointed to the object to get my son’s opinion — “What do you think that is?” — and my son looked up, the unusual object turned on its side and vanished into thin air.
What the crap?
Recently I joined The Hollywood Disclosure Alliance, partly to make sense of my own experiences and connect with others who have had similar experiences. The HDA’s new documentary entitled INSIDE HOLLYWOOD: ALIENS, UFOs AND THE QUEST FOR DISCLOSURE poses the question: "Why don't people want to believe?"
This is a question I struggle with every day. My wife does NOT want to believe. She shuts down any conversation about the topic — and she's seen anomalous lights with me. The three times I saw flying saucers she was in the passenger seat of the car while I was driving, and each time she didn’t see it. It’s not that the saucer wasn’t there or couldn’t be seen; her attention would always be elsewhere and she would not allow herself to look in the direction I was looking.
Prominent lawyer Danny Sheehan tells a similar story about a science team that the military flew up to Greenland many decades ago. During the flight a massive UFO appeared from the North Atlantic and approached the military plane. 11 of the 12 scientists on board rushed to the windows to observe the craft. When a military officer left the cockpit to check on the scientists, he asked the 12th scientist why he was standing on the other side of the airplane with arms folded, ignoring the massive, illuminated craft outside.
His response: “I’m a scientist. I don’t believe in those things.”
He would not look. The craft was real but ignored.
There was a weekend about a year ago when I saw bright luminous lights three days in a row in the middle of the afternoon. One of them I filmed, and the light is clearly hovering in a steady spot as the clouds drift past it at high speed, a very windy day. During another sighting that weekend, my wife was in the passenger seat of the car and my daughter was in the back seat. We came over a rise driving south on PCH in Manhattan Beach, and all three of us clearly saw a bright lighted object flying over South Redondo and then disappear over Palos Verdes. This was no military vehicle or helicopter or plane or balloon. There was no sound, it was insanely bright, and if flew south while the wind blew eastwards off the ocean.
And yet, my wife does not remember this sighting and doesn’t like when I talk about it, or any of the other sightings I’ve had. Several of my sightings have filled me with so much excitement and energy that I just babble for days about them. When this happens, my wife angrily leaves the room and tells me to stop talking. Remember the scene early in Spielberg's Close Encounters where Richard Dreyfus, as the husband, is excitedly telling the kids about his recent experience, and the wife, Teri Garr, walks around the house telling him it's not real and shutting down the conversation? That is my daily life.
One day I watched a documentary about UFO experiencers and one of them talked with awe about how incredible it was to see a craft fly overhead.
“Ludicrous,” my wife commented from the other room. “No one’s ever seen a UFO up close.”
“Would you like to see the documentation about the Rendlesham Forest incident in the UK?” I asked. “The Ministry of Defense released much of the paperwork, Nick Pope is quite vocal about this incident. Several American military personnel stationed there saw craft and documented them.”
“Sure,” she said, half-heartedly, though she has never followed up about this. She would rather not know. She does not want them to be real.
Similarly, my brother also refuses to believe in this topic. I used to include him in my private email list that I send UFO sighting reports to, until I learned that he won’t even open those emails. He is a devotee of the holy word of Carl Sagan. I mentioned my concerns with Demon Haunted World once and he went ballistic. A critical analysis of Sagan was sacrilegious, he would not hear any of my concerns. For my brother, the mainstream dogma is his religion and he refuses to look at any evidence that might contradict it, including my own sighting experiences, videos and photos.
I'm very patient with the disbelief of my family. It doesn't bother me because (a) I know what I've seen multiple times and (b) I can recognize by their reactions that what's really happening with them is a fear response based on cognitive dissonance. For generations, we've been told this stuff isn't real by people we've been taught to trust. Many/most people will cling to that, despite any evidence to the contrary.
Something that would really help us, I feel, would be a new generation of trusted authority figures. But given the state of the world currently, I don't know what this looks like. American economist and political consultant Jeffery Sachs, who is not a conspiracy theorist nor does he have any interest in the UFO subject (that I know of), has lately given high profile talks around the world where he publicly laments American media and how filled with garbage it is. We are routinely lied to and denied true, objective reporting. According to Sachs the media we have grown up with here is controlled by certain powers and designed to fill our heads with misinformation. Every serious researcher in the UFO field has come to the same conclusion. This is an urgent cultural crisis that the HDA community can help with.
The UFO topic is strange, sometimes scary and violates our models of Newtonian physics. Navajo ranger Stanley Milford mentions several times in his book The Paranormal Ranger that paranormal experiences like UFOs are frequently traumatizing to experiencers. A good deal of compassion and empathy are needed when talking to people who don’t want to believe.
For my part, with the disbelieving members of my own family we have adopted a wary tolerance. My wife and I have plenty of other topics to talk about, like our kids and busy schedules. My brother and I enjoy talking at length about game coding and the misadventures of our children. So long as we don’t discuss UFOs all is good. Even if we don’t see eye-to-eye on one topic, we still have lots in common.
During a call with Dr Hussein Agrama at the University of Chicago last year to discuss the paranormal, I asked him for advice: what do I do when I’m surrounded by disbelief, especially since I’ve been seeing craft and anomalous lights myself?
His advice: Don’t try to convince anyone. Just work on overturning one assumption at a time.
For those of us who are actively working toward big “D” Disclosure, let’s hope that our collective efforts will result in our closest relatives and friends understanding the incredible truths that we already know – and are doing our best to share.
