Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup early this year wrote a long article entitled "UAPs and Non-Human Intelligence: What is the most reasonable scenario?" Contrary to the typical claim that UFOs are from some other planet, Kastrup argues for the idea that UFOs come from some intelligent life that previously evolved on Earth. There is a good alternative to the "metal spaceships from other planets" idea of UFOs, but that alternative is not the implausible theory Kastrup suggests.
Kastrup starts by citing some recent reports about UFOs that seem hard-to-explain. He quotes some 2023 evidence that is mostly not first-class observational evidence. He mentions some blurry videos released by the Pentagon, and some testimony before the US Congress by pilot David Fravor, pilot Ryan Graves and intelligence analyst David Grusch. For reasons I discuss at length in my post here, the testimony of the July hearing before the US Congress was not very compelling as evidence because it was mainly second-hand stuff. Grusch claimed that he has heard people say sensational things about captured UFOs. Similarly, Fravor's testimony was mostly second-hand testimony of what others supposedly saw, not first-hand testimony of what he saw first-hand (although he did give one "juicy" description of a first-hand sighting of the so-called "tic tac" UFO). Graves presented no clear first-hand testimony, although he made some ambiguous "we" references that may or may not have been about what he personally saw. In his three paragraphs discussing the testimony of Fravor, Graves and Grusch, Kastrup sounds too impressed by the mostly second-hand congressional testimony of Fravor, the not-clearly first-hand testimony of Graves, and the entirely second-hand testimony of Grusch.
Someone following best practices in analyzing claims of the paranormal will tend to act differently, by paying the closest attention to whether an account is first-hand and whether it was written or committed to video very soon after the observations. Accounts in which people wrote down what they saw (or recited what they saw) soon after they saw it and publicly published their account are examples of first-class observational evidence. Some account in which someone says he heard something from someone else (who he does not mention) at some unspecified time is an example of second-class or third-class evidence. In the early part of his article, Kastrup writes as if he is not looking for the hallmarks of first-class observational evidence, and acts like he is very impressed by some second-class or third-class evidence.
We then hear from Kastrup this very dubious claim: "Recently retired US Army Colonel Karl E. Nell—currently an aerospace executive—along with Christopher Mellon, who spent nearly twenty years in the US Intelligence Community and served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Intelligence, have lent credibility to the claim that there are active UAP crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programmes." Within this quote he links to a Debrief.com article by Leslie Kean in which we actually hear nothing of substance by Karl E. Nell backing up claims that there are "active UAP crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programmes." The Kean article merely quotes Nell as saying that he think Grusch's claim about such things is correct. Kastrup's claim that Nell has "lent credibility" to Grusch's claim about such things is not correct, based on the link Kastrup has given. It sounds like what may be a mere case of wild rumors spreading around that both Nell and Grusch believe in. In the same Kean article Mellon says nothing very substantial, just more claims to have heard interesting stuff from other people. Some of the reasons why Grusch's claims have yet been well-supported are discussed here.
After citing a video which may or may not show a metallic orb moving around mysteriously, Kastrup makes this claim: "I submit to you that the following tentative premises are justifiable: firstly, there is an engineered technology in our skies and oceans that is not human." Nothing that Kastrup has discussed in his previous paragraphs justifies the claim that we have discovered examples of "engineered technology" that is not human. Very many reports have been made of strange things in the sky, but no one has shown that they are produced by "an engineered technology," nor has anyone proven that UFOs or UAPs are of non-human origin.
Shortly thereafter, Kastrup continues further in his "nuts-and-bolts" line of thinking, saying, "if there is non-human technology in our skies and oceans, then there must be Non-Human Intelligences (NHIs) active on our planet, engineering and controlling the UAPs." No, mysterious things appearing in the sky do not have to be the result of engineering and technology. When such things seem to act purposefully, we may be entitled to presume that there is some kind of agency or power behind such things. But we are not entitled to presume that there is engineering and technology involved. Humans accomplish impressive things by engineering and technology, but some non-human power could have different ways of accomplishing things.
Consider the supposedly metallic orb that Kastrup mentions. We have no reason to presume that inside such a thing is some fancy technology or electronics causing it to move around in such a way. A sufficiently advanced power (divine, extra-dimensional, extra-terrestrial or angelic) might have the power to move around in the sky rocks or spheres of solid metal. The words "technology" and "engineering" are presumptuous and too-specific when talking about the cloudy realm of mysterious things seen in the sky. It's much better to use more general terms such as "agency," "power" or "purpose."
Kastrup then discusses some work by UFO researcher Jacques Vallee discussing how UFO observations go back very far in history, and discussing how there often seems to be a psychic or psychological aspect of such sightings or encounters. In my post here I discuss the high number of cases in which UFO encounters seem to have a spiritual or paranormal character. Kastrup seems to fail to realize that such a discussion undermines his very claim that UFO/UAP observations involve an encounter with a "technology" or "engineering." Ignoring what he discussed in his paragraphs mentioning Vallee, Kastrup goes back to his "nuts and bolts" thinking, saying this:
"One clearly discernible class of observations, which I shall henceforth refer to as ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAPs, entails physical craft that can not only consistently be seen, filmed, and tracked by radar, but also—if we are to believe Mr. Grusch’s informants and other sources in a position to plausibly know—stored in hangars for decades, drilled into, analysed under a scanning electron microscope, etc. The bodies of their occupants can also—again, if we are to believe the sources—be kept in freezers and harvested for biochemical analysis. This means that the phenomenon in question has a physical aspect as consistent and stable as our own body and the car in our garage."
There is no robust evidence that anything stored in freezers or "analysed under a scanning electron microscope" has anything to do with UFO or UAP sightings. Rather than making a deep dive into the area of reports of the paranormal, such as you might do by citing very many original source materials, and rather than having the most careful search for first-class first-hand testimony of what was seen shortly before the testimony was given, Kastrup seems to be believing in not-well-established second-hand or third-hand accounts of weird things like alien bodies in freezers, accounts that could be mere wild rumors.
Kastrup then announces he will first ignore all the Jacques Vallee-style cases of UFO encounters that sound like encounters with spiritual beings, and he will pay attention to "nuts and bolts" type cases. Kastrup then leaps to the idea that UFOs and UAP come from some beings "terrestrial and ancient." He states this:
"The idea is as follows: our planet has existed for about 4.5 billion years, with life on it for about 4 billion years. The genus Homo, to which we belong, has been around for less than 3 million of those 4 billion years; the blink of an eye in geological terms. And modern humans—Homo sapiens—for just 2 or 3 hundred thousand years. There is, thus, plenty of time and opportunity for other non-human species to have arisen on Earth, developed to a level of technology far beyond ours...My claim is that, based on what we know, such civilisations are not impossible or inconsistent with the geological record....Such a culture will be wary of the planet’s surface, for the latter is a notoriously exposed and volatile region: it undergoes far more extreme temperature swings then, say, the deep oceans and underground caves; it is prone to severe weather that can ruin crops and flood entire cities; it is exposed to irradiation from solar storms and other cosmic events, which can ruin technology and life; it is extremely vulnerable to comet and asteroid impact, as the dinosaurs found out; etc. And since such a post-apocalyptic culture would have been reduced to relatively few members, their requirements for living space would also be relatively modest. Depending on the surviving level of their technology, they could have made a home for themselves underwater or underground."
So now we have the core of Kastrup's UFO theory. He theorizes that UFOs come from some earthly civilization that arose long ago, and then for some reason started to live deep underground or at the bottom of the ocean. It's a very implausible idea that rather reminds me of the plot of the cheesy low-budget 1950's movie Superman and the Mole Men, about strange humanoid creatures living very deep underground.
We can imagine no reason why some non-human civilization arising long ago would have moved to live deep underground or at the bottom of the ocean. The speculative reasons Kastrup gives are not credible. Given that the surface of planet Earth is such a great source of beauty, fresh water and solar energy that helps drive agriculture, we cannot reasonably imagine some creatures arising millions of years ago saying something like, "Let's all move deep underground -- our culture will be safer from asteroids or solar flares." As for the idea of some civilization moving to the bottom of the ocean, Kastrup seems to have forgotten about the crushing pressure that exists in such an area.
Individual members of a society do what is best for them as individuals. It is extremely implausible to imagine that members of some civilization existing on the surface of Earth would have all abandoned the surface of Earth (with all its beauties and pleasures and advantages) to move underground or to the bottom of the ocean, because of some alleged better survivability of their culture over a vast time frame. And you never would make any culture more survivable by abandoning the surface of a planet. You might increase the survivability of a culture by having, say, 10% of it move underground. But there are so many disadvantages in moving underground or undersea that you would never increase the chance of a species surviving by having all of it flee the surface of a planet.
Besides the fact that it is so implausible to imagine some earlier race of civilized beings all moving underground or undersea as Kastrup postulates, there is another huge credibility problem with his theory. The problem is that if you imagine such a theory, it multiplies the explanatory difficulty of explaining the arising of intelligence on planet Earth. Scientists lack any credible explanation for the appearance of any mammal species on our planet. The claim that such appearances are explained by Darwin's ideas is one of the many groundless boasts of biologists. Darwin never advanced any credible theory of the origin of very complex and very well-organized biological organisms, and his idea that such things are explained by mere random variation and survival of the fittest was an explanation attempt as lightweight as a fortune-cookie slogan. The more we have learned about the stratospheric levels of hierarchically organized and information-rich fine-tuned functional complexity in creatures such as humans, the more untenable Darwin's explanations seem. Anatomically uninformative DNA, nonfunctional intermediates and useless early stages are some of the reasons why Darwin-style gradualism does not work as an explanation for bodies and biochemistry as fine-tuned and organized as humans have.
Darwinism never had any credible explanation for the origin of the intellectual riches of the human mind. This was pointed out very clearly by the co-founder of the theory of natural selection (Alfred Russel Wallace) in his essay "The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man." Among many other very good points, Wallace stated, "Natural Selection could only have endowed savage man with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one very little inferior to that of a philosopher." Darwinists attempted to bridge this huge explanatory shortfall by telling us huge glaring lies such as the glaring lie that "there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties," and the very big lie that DNA or the genes in it are a blueprint for building human bodies. (I see that today in the scientific journal Nature we finally have a headline saying, "It's time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life," a point I have been emphatically making since 2018.)
The origin of humans is an unsolved mystery, for reasons discussed here and here. Now, what happens under Kastrup's theory of UAP/UFOs? The explanatory problem becomes twice as bad. Now instead of having one unsolved miracle of origination by which we got a human intelligent species, we have two unsolved miracles of origination by which we got two entirely different intelligent species arising at different times on the same planet.
Ironically, Kastrup suggests the possibility that you could help verify his theory if you were to discover some totally different type of biology not based on the genetic code that underlies all earthly biology. This amounts to an appeal to a second abiogenesis event. Scientists lack any credible explanation for how life could have originated from non-life, a hypothesized event they call abiogenesis. Imagining two separate abiogenesis events is making your explanatory difficulties far worse. For then you have to imagine two separate "miracles of organization" in which life arises from non-life. Such imagined events can be fairly called "miracles of organization" because of the very high organization and information richness of even the simplest one-celled life, which would require a very special arrangement of more than a million atoms, a special arrangement of about 100,000 amino acids.
We should not be making too-specific claims such as claims that UFOs are examples of technology and engineering. There is a good abstract way to consider UFOs and UAP: as possible manifestations of a mostly unknown and telescopically unobservable realm of reality that can be called the paraverse. The concept is explained in my post here. The idea of a paraverse largely overlaps with the concept of a parallel dimension that can interact with our reality.
- The multiverse concept postulates many other universes, while the paraverse concept postulates only a single other realm of existence (without excluding the possibility of other such realms).
- The multiverse idea typically postulates universes that are completely isolated from each other, without communication or interaction between any two of the universes; but conversely the paraverse concept says there may indeed be interaction or communication between our universe and some other realm of existence, with perhaps causes and effects sometimes flowing between the two.
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