Voices From The Cosmos

by C B Scott Jones

  “Affirm that the possibility of reclaiming a peaceful future for humankind and a safe environment on Earth is intimately linked with curbing violence toward each other and Earth, and with preparing to survive as Gaea heals herself, and that counsel and support from Cosmic Civilizations thousands of years our senior would be exceedingly helpful.”

  “Are inspired by the great prospect of Earth taking its rightful place in the Cosmos and the citizens of off-Earth realms sharing the fruits of their cultures with humankind.”

  “Understand that this space Treaty is now verifiable and enforceable via applying monitoring, observation, and information sharing techniques existing and forthcoming”

  “Realize we are one interconnected and interdependent human species, and we are determined to live in peace with all our neighbors on Earth and in the universes,”

  The above seven declarations in the Treaty are those that make a direct references to Cosmic Cultures and their enduring role in our lives, now and in the future. The other fourteen declarations also address the importance of the Treaty but without making reference to Cosmic Cultures.

  When this Treaty becomes international and space law, Earth will have stepped back from a perilous future. It will do more. The process of getting it into the corpus of international law will also be a pathway to create the political cover needed for academe to play a leading role in starting the essential dialogue about disclosure. The plan is simple, but dependent upon invitation to meet with Heads of States in order to formally present the Treaty and to get it signed.

  The strategy to secure invitations to meet with Heads of States involves establishing partnerships with individuals, businesses and organizations that share the vision that the Treaty will accomplish and who already have the necessary international contacts.

  The first order of business is to get the Treaty signed into law. In that undertaking the existence and role of the Cosmic Community in the Treaty will be most obvious. We fully anticipate that advisors to the Head of States and the Head of States themselves will have questions about how the Cosmic Cultures became involved. This will open the door to more than the Treaty/ET link.

  But Wait – There is More!

  To the degree that Heads of State show interest in learning more about the current Earth/ET nexus, we will move into the ET request to start a global dialogue about the challenges and opportunities of that relationship. We will ask the Head of State to identify one or more university in his/her country who he/she thinks would be qualified to research and write a White Paper about the short term and long term impact on his/her country and culture of recognizing contact. The response to that question could provide the ultimate political cover for one or more White paper being created.

  When Head of State approval is given for the White paper, we will meet with the identified university or universities and establish a working relationship with the designated leader of that program and provide support with presentations and documentation to assist the effort. We will suggest the four month delivery time, and link them with universities in other countries involved in the White Paper program for their country.

  We have been given additional information about future communications between Earth and the Cosmic Community that we will share first with interested Heads of States. The background is that approximately 5,000 years ago Cosmic Cultures placed communication devices in four different Earth locations. Each of them is destined to be activated at a different future time period. Activation will be essentially determined by the level on consciousness on Earth. I was directed to the location of the first of these locations where the device will be activated. A protocol has been given about how the system will work when Earth is qualified to use it. Explicitly, when the Outer Space Security and Development Treaty becomes law, the White Paper supported global dialogue is underway, and other economic and political policy decisions are made that move Earth away from current levels of violence, the odds of activating the communication device will be increased.

  The messages are clear. We are responsible for our own survival. Unconditional help is in the wings when we prove we deserve and can handle it. Cosmic Cultures have seeded the minds of thousands on Earth with knowledge about technologies capable of ameliorating every potential civilization- ending problem we are enduring. In that sense, the technologies are “free.”

  If the status quo keeps them from being developed and made available throughout the world to bring relief where needed and when needed, it is very likely that the Earth experiment will end. I have no idea if Earth will be missed, but I have been assured that greed and lust for power has resulted in the demise of many civilizations throughout the Cosmos. Earth is not an exceptional planet and our failing struggle to survive our sophomore era is not exceptional.

  In the chapters to follow you will hear from some of the cosmic voices. The search for them is part of a respected pattern of human conduct. The urge to discover is a powerful part of the human consensus trance, and more than one group is involved in making contact with life in the cosmos.

  Chapter 2

  Vision And Discovery

  Angela T. Smith

  According to Allen Tough, Ph.D., and Scarlett Wang, Ph.D. (2006):

  “The desire for communication with extraterrestrial intelligence seems to be normal, natural, and widespread. Several individuals and groups have tried to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence in recent decades. A successful effort could have a profound impact on humanity’s future.”

  Tough and Wang organized a group of 100 scientists who have similar goals to ours titled Invitation to Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ieti.org). Further in their writing, Tough and Wang noted that:

  “Humans of all ages have a strong desire to communicate with others. Listening, talking, reading, and writing are normal, natural human activities. Most human communication is with other humans. But people also experience some form of two-way communication with their cats and dogs and horses. Many people wish they could experience communication with a benign alien intelligence that developed somewhere else in the universe.

  Many reports of UFO sightings and abductions include communication with the alien beings, often through mental telepathy. Although such reports may well result from wishful thinking and other quirks of the human mind, their frequency does suggest a widespread human interest in aliens. Finally we should note that many people pray; that is, they communicate (one-way) with God, Yahweh, Allah, the Creator and Ruler of the Universe, or some other supernatural being or force. Some report a response (two-way communication). It is clear, then, that the desire for dialogue or other communication with a superior or alien intelligence is a common, normal, and natural human desire.”

  Putting our Goals into Perspective

  There is an amazing graphic on the Internet that depicts the size of our Earth in relation to the rest of the Universe. You may have seen it. In relation to Venus, Mars, Mercury and Pluto, Earth is the largest planet: twice as big as Venus, around eight times bigger than Mars and much, much bigger than either Mercury or Pluto.

  This relationship, to planets smaller than Earth, gives a false sense of our place in the Universe. Next compare Earth to Uranus, Neptune, Saturn and Jupiter and you can begin to see that the Earth is a marble in comparison to a basketball, putting our position in the Universe in greater perspective.

  Now comparing all of those planets to our Sun reveals that the Earth is but a blip in comparison! And when taken to the next step our sun is dwarfed by Sirius, and the even more massive Pollux and Arcturus. Further out into the solar system our Sun becomes the equivalent of a pixel on a page compared with Rigel, Aldebaran and the even more massive Betelgeuse and Antares. Our tiny world, Earth, appears insignificant within this massive solar system and its giants.

  Humanity and the Need for Exploration

  Living on this tiny blip of Earth is a magnificent people: Humans. Over the millennia we have been explorers, discoverers, and innovators. We h
ave explored our own world from the deepest ocean trenches to the highest Tibetan peaks. We have made discoveries ranging from the tiniest physics particles to our greatest galactic companions. Humans are sending probes out in the farthest reaches of our nearest universal neighborhoods and exploring inward to the deepest levels of the human psyche. To understand where we are going, it is important to understand where humans have been as explorers.

  Over the past few thousand years the Earth and its seas have been the focus of intense exploration: the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, and the Vikings all initiated brave land and sea expeditions. The Chinese were one of the earliest, premier countries of exploration and had a huge impact on western civilization. Famous explorers can be found in every century: Alexander the Great in the late 1200s, John Cabot and Christopher Columbus in the 1400s, Francisco Pizarro in the 1500s, Abel Tasman in the 1600s, James Cook in the 1700s, and Lewis and Clark, and David Livingstone in the 1800s.

  Robert Peary discovered the North Pole of the Earth and Robert Falcon Scott discovered the South Pole, both in the 1900s. Also Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay climbed the highest peak on Earth in the 1900s. Humans reached out to space exploration in the mid-1900s with the first Moon landing by the crew of Apollo 11. Exploration of the seas, air, and space is continuing with oceanic and deep-space explorations.

  The Four Focuses of Exploration

  Traditionally, such land and sea explorations were championed and supported by European royalty such as King Henry VIII of England, and King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain and later, in the 20th century by the European and American governments. There was a vested, economic interest in who could find new routes first and who would come home with new discoveries and riches. Another motive during this and later era’s was the desire to spread Christian beliefs and practices.

  Expeditions focused on several layers of inquiry: the First being a mapping of the new territories, the Second; active exploration, the Third; initiating contact with indigenous peoples and lastly trading and sometimes assimilation. Our human quest to map and explore the galaxies (focuses One/Two) has already begun and active exploration is already in place.

  The Third Focus: that of initiating contact and communicating with our universal neighbors has not yet been formally initiated. Or if it has, it has not been publicly announced. With any contact it is important to find the most appropriate forms of communication.

  Anecdotal evidence has indicated that races living outside of the Earth do not communicate in the traditional, verbal manner. There is anecdotal evidence that communication is non-verbal and constitutes mind-to-mind contact. While being very controversial, this type of communication has a long history and research background that has been found suggestive of a real occurrence taking place.

  Currently, this form of non-verbal communication takes two forms: spontaneous; where individuals feel that they have received communication from other non-Earth races and purposeful; with proficient individuals initiating two-way communication.

  The Fourth focus: that of off-world trading is a vague area. There are rumors of such communication going on since the end of the last World War, focused on exchanges of information and technology with off-world civilizations.

  Earth Ambassadors

  As with early seafaring and land explorers, this new wave of explorers can be seen as ambassadors who can act as both receivers and senders of information: an exchange that could benefit both sides. There is a long history of civilian ambassadors being used in contacting and communicating with local citizens of other countries on Earth. There is a place for human civilian ambassadors to contact and communicate with off-planet races. It is audacious of us to assume that civilization exists on Earth alone. It is reasonable to assume that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe and that humans can communicate with this intelligence. Governmental and private organizations, such as SETI, have been operating for decades with ever-increasing complex and expensive technology. The human mind is a simple technology; it is a cheap technology, and one that has great potential for exploration, discovery, and contact.

  It appears that there is an increased energy between the building level of ET/ Earth communication and, to some this has been seen as a push/pull situation. Both fear and compassion can be motivators in this dynamic. These ideas should be part of our dialogue as we communicate. There may be a rich mixture of fear and compassion involved. The potential failure of Earth civilizations to survive may be more important to ETs than we realize and should be part of the dialogue.

  The Purpose of our Journey

  What has been the purpose of our journey of exploration? It is aptly summarized by Tough and Wang: “When humankind does finally achieve communication with another culture, the new perspective and new knowledge that we gain will be valuable, deep, exciting, pervasive, and high-impact.” We are walking the same path as the early seafaring and land explorers as we seek answers from some of our universal neighbors. It is an exciting journey of discovery!

  Dr. Tough constructed a list of potential questions that humans should be asking of our neighbors and some things that our neighbors might like to know about us. It was an ambitious list and it was based on over 100 answers received by a group called Invitation to ETI from 224 people in 12 countries. The resulting 10 clusters of questions were designed to ask ETI what knowledge they would like to share with humans and how the dialogue should proceed.

  Our journey of discovery could follow along the same charted path. This group has similar goals to ours: “that the information given and received should not be used for destructive or harmful purposes but to increase our understanding of the universe, to build a better world for future generations and to enhance our sense of meaning and purpose.”

  Conclusion

  The original Exobiology Project, that began in 2006 and took nearly a year to complete, charted unknown waters and mapped new lands and civilizations that, until now, have remained un-contacted through purposeful interaction. Our human society has explored and mapped these locales and we are now talking to the local people in those charted lands. This is an important step in our understanding of the universe outside of our Earth and our dialogue will continue.

  The Invitation to Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI) team appears to have dissolved following the passing of Dr. Allen Tough but their work is still available at: http://www.ieti.org/index.html

  Chapter 3

  The Flat Earth Society

  C. B. Scott Jones

  Consensus about the spherical shape of Earth is profoundly overwhelming. The contrary view that the Earth is flat is so marginally supported that the term “Flat Earther” is safely used to describe someone who is not only incorrect about a subject, but implicitly stupid as well.

  An example of this came from President Barack Obama in June 2013, during a major speech on energy policy. He mocked skeptics of climate change as ‘flat-Earth believers.’ The President said he lacked “patience for anyone who denies that this problem is real. We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat-Earth Society. Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it’s not going to protect you from the coming storm.”

  This mini dustup inspired a reporter to contact the president of the Flat Earth Society in the United States. He commented intelligently about his agreement that there was an important anthropogenic input to climate change. He responded to Obama’s dig at the Flat Earth Society by saying that it didn’t surprise him, and that he didn’t take it personally.

  There are a number of reasons why “contrary” positions on facts are held and defended. Religious orthodoxy is an important one. Embarrassment about lack of knowledge can result in someone huffing and bluffing instead of simply admitting he does not know. Governments have security and diplomatic reason to walk and talk around the truth and reality.

  Having just mentioned President Obama, the following example is appropriate to this discussion and central to the purpose of this
book. The situation was the result of the commendable policy of the Obama administration to demonstrate openness and transparency with the “We the People” program. The rules are simple. Any citizen can petition the White House to respond to a question of interest. If that petition was supported by a reasonably sized number of other citizens enrolled in the program, the government would respond.

  It didn’t take long for a number of petitions to appear that requested the White House to address the extraterrestrial issue. When one of these reached the required number of supporting votes, the White House had to make an important decision: how not to tell the truth. None of us following this intriguing drama had any expectation that the White House would use this vehicle to make the disclosure announcement. How the White House handled it is indeed interesting. The date of the following online response from the White House was November 7, 2011. This was eighteen years after Lawrence Rockefeller and I met with President Clinton’s Science Advisor, head of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) as discussed in Chapter 1.

  A brief assessment follows this 2011 White House response:

  “OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE RESPONSE TO: formally acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race - Disclosure.

  Searching for ET, But No Evidence Yet

  By Phil Larson

  Thank you for signing the petition asking the Obama Administration to acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence here on Earth.

  The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race. In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.