My own thesis is both absurd and simple: We’re sharing the planet with a home-grown intelligence that took a critically different evolutionary route in our own prehistory, exploiting consciousness itself as a technology while the recognizable “we” contented ourselves with the immediate, tangible world of physical matter. These others — call them “aliens,” simply for lack of a better word — can access our own level of perception if they choose, but they don’t inhabit a “parallel universe” of the type considered by theoretical physicists such as Michio Kaku. Our own universe is probably big enough for a far-flung ecology of nonhuman beings; we’re just limited to an incredibly small portion of it, for reasons both biological and “spiritual.” (John Keel’s electromagnetic “superspectrum” is an especially useful metaphor, if nothing else.)
Maybe the reason we don’t hear the incessant chatter of extraterrestrial radio transmissions or see megascale engineering works etched onto the dome of the night sky isn’t because alien intelligences have uploaded themselves into addictive virtual environments; perhaps they’ve shed their physical forms, but in an altogether different fashion. They might inhabit a previously undetected cosmological substrate, enmeshed in the universe’s deep structure as we twitch feebly on the surface, so many bacteria in an intergalactic Petri dish.
Mac Tonnies via aboutsetti.
I am embarrassed to admit that I had never really contemplated the possibility of UFO having in them anything else other than extraterrestrial aliens. I certainly have never considered the above as a possibility.
Not ever having considered this before, I also have yet to form an opinion about this. It is entirely possible that we share this world with a species who is not physical, and then again, it is entirely possible that we don’t.