Self-Fulfilling Evolution

Explaining Non-Human Intelligence With Human Intelligence

Theories 

Maintaining as much transparency as possible I should start by saying I am 95% convinced that non-human intelligences (NHIs) exist.¹ What some would consider a UFO realist.² Aside from the November 13th US Congressional hearing on the topic, and the accompanying “Immaculate Constellation” document, aside from whistleblowers and very intelligent advocates with little to gain and a lot to lose, I have always maintained the opinion that there is more out there than what our limited observational lenses allow us to see.³

Having said that, anyone claiming absolute knowledge should be cautioned against. I am agnostic to answers surrounding who/what they are, where they come from, what they want and when/how they arrived. Agnosticism comes out of epistemic humility, not for lack of potential explanations. Perhaps too much humility is a bad thing. That is why I am here, to test that theory and, against my better judgement, provide a counter-argument to my own 95% certainty. Before we get there, let us quickly catch up with everything in this very grey area.

Theories surrounding NHIs are notoriously abundant: 

They (referring to whoever NHIs turn out to be) have come to inhabit our planet, forcefully or otherwise, because theirs is no longer habitable: the “Relocation Model”.⁴ They are coming here from somewhere else in the universe because they use the resources (especially water and minerals) available on our big Blue Planet to power themselves as they continue on to their next intergalactic destination: the “Gas Station Model”.⁵ They have always lived here, a species adjacent to yet hidden from us, possibly for hundreds of thousands of years (if not forever): the “Ultraterrestrial Model”⁶ (of which the“Silurian Hypothesis” and the “Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis” are both subsets of). They have been here for as long as we have, helping to create us, aiding in the creation of ancient marvels whilst remaining veiled, hands on the steering wheel of historical cycles and civilisations: the “Ancient Astronaut Model”.⁷ They are us, but us from the future, perhaps trying to restore genetic information lost in a future cataclysm (or simply popping back to mess with us in the process, because they are at the end of the day - at least according to this model - human): the “Extratempestrial Model”.⁸ They have been hidden by powerful factions of the global security apparatus to feed advancements within various military industrial complexes: the “Breakaway Civilisation Model”.⁹ They are dimension-surfing superbeings: the “Interdimensional Model”. They are involved in a simulation. They are psychedelic. They are archetypical.¹⁰ They are fantastically nonsensical.¹¹ They are deceptive.¹² They are a living example of Kardashev’s “Type-3+ Civilisation”. They are spiritual.¹³ They are super natural.¹⁴ They are a new religion.¹⁵ They are collectively recalled through humanities myth.¹⁶ They can be summoned upon request (nowadays there is even an app). They arrive through “portals”.¹⁷ They do not abide by the laws of gravity (nor physics for that matter). They are plasma. They are just another species. They are multiple species. They are grey.¹⁸ They are green. They are tall.¹⁹ They are infamously short. They are humanoid. They are reptilian. They live under our oceans. They live underground. They live under volcanoes. They have a base on the Moon. They have a base on Mars. They are infallible. They crash. They crash on purpose to “gift” us.²⁰ They are responsible for modern laser, night-vision and military stealth technology.²¹ They are attracted to nukes.²² They can shut nukes down. They can begin the nuclear launch sequence. They are related to consciousness, and electromagnetism.²³ They are related to zones of seismic density.²⁴ They are material. They are meta-physical. They are technological.²⁵ They are planning an invasion - just ask the US military industrial complex. They can, whether accidentally or on-purpose, harm us. They come in peace - just ask some abductees.²⁶ They have come to educate us on our immature ways - just ask others.²⁷

Suffice to say, there is no shortage of possible explanations for who they are. 

UFO fatigue is a real condition. Perhaps you began to feel its effects. People spend their entire lives, mostly hidden, but some out in the open, trying to work out the answer to what many believe is one of the biggest conundrums that humanity has ever faced: are aliens real? And, if yes, then what in the name of all that is sweet and holy are they?!

As I stated at the open, I air on the side of NHIs being real. However, with all that being said, I would not be completely dismayed if I was incorrect in this assumption. Don't get me wrong, aside from feeling like I have been gaslit my entire life - from governments telling me once upon a time, “Don’t be daft! They certainly do not exist!”,²⁸ to governments now telling me, “Get with the times! They certainly do exist!” - I admit that I would be a bit sad if life on Earth turned out to be the only life amongst the unfathomable Cosmic Web. Existentially, it is just a little bit triggering.

But, returning to that 5%, I have come to offer another explanation which brings me a bit of hope if the other 95% does turn out to be all in our heads and NHI’s are actually non-existent. Now, I know what you are thinking: please do not give me swamp gas. Alright, some of the unexplained aerial and trans-medium phenomena reported on might be black budget super-tech from China or Russia. Ball lightning can’t strike twice. Freaky cloud formations? I have seen enough of them.

No, my explanation is predicated on human intelligence rather than non-human intelligence, and that is why it still gives me hope. And, to be honest, as of this minute, it is the only non-NHI explanation for the NHI phenomenon that I am willing to accept. 

Will that stay the same forever? Nothing does. But, grabbing my horns and pinning on my tail, in begrudgingly playing the role of Devil’s Advocate I would be remiss if I did not at least mention my 5% take on an alternative explanation to the NHI phenomenon.

Self-Fulfilling Evolution

After all that preamble the concept is quite a simple one. But first, think about the answer to the following question: what separates our species from others on our planet? 

Not intended to be a trick question, I am aware that the possible answers are innumerable. Brushing our teeth? Making pancakes? Creating complex governance organisations? Flying supersonic? Sticking our head in a large particle accelerator? 

If we think about it, all these things arise from one glaringly big elephant in the room: an exceptional ability to a) think and b) act in novel and exceptionally sovereign ways. And therein lies your answer: both our individual and collective cognition is what separates us from other Earth-bound species. Metainduction is part of this innate ability to recognise historical patterns, transferring observations from the past to the future in order to make predictions or make inferences on unknown situations in order to then be acted upon at various scales (e.g. individual or collective action).

Suffice to say that our metacognitive states - our ability to think about thinking -  have not become so consciously heightened that we collectively avoid succumbing to the corruptive pull of greed, to the seduction of power, to the manipulation and control of desires, to the brutality and destruction of war. But it is undeniable that, taking a birds-eye view, us humans are the ones manipulating our environment and changing the biosphere in an incontrovertible manner. Forcefully integrating our own spheres of influence (e.g. techno/socio/political spheres), we do so whether other species on Earth like it or not. 

What causes us to be able to accomplish these feats? A severe combination of thought and action which, for starters, leads to human organisation. Following generalised human organisation throughout the ages, we can see that three predominant modes have encapsulated us: 

God²⁹ → State³⁰ → Network³¹.³²

Before monotheistic Gods we saw deities within the natural elements - seasons, ocean cycles, the movements of the sun and moon. Seeing deities in the natural world provided the means for our species to organise and advance agriculture (seasons and sun cycle) and transoceanic voyage (ocean and moon cycles). Sociospheres expanded, until someone, then multiple people, saw and experienced God (or different versions of the Holy Spirit depending on time and space). What followed, when all is said and done, was a framework for progress into new spaces of morality and ethics, opening up the sociosphere to further development.³³

For over 5,000 years, we have glimpsed the Leviathan.³⁴ Tested time and time again, on the subject of how the State came to be, whether you agree with Hobbes (fear of violent death), Locke (wanting to maintain private property), Rousseau (accepting a Social Contract), Carneiro (coercive geographic circumscription) or Turchin (inter-group warfare), the point remains that following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, principles of state sovereignty in international law was firmly established and our species collectively shifted into a set of new power dynamics, organising accordingly, giving away total freedom in exchange for other securities. Politicalspheres expanded alongside the sociospheres as God and State merged. Larger social groups led to appeals for centralised authority. Capital punishment selected for proactive aggression.³⁵ What followed was a new means of supercharged socio-political order: stateness, which took the world by storm. 

Years rolled on, wars came, leaders went, until we saw, coming out of the haze of a new dawn on the horizon: the internet; decentralisation; the Network. Networks have been around for thousands of years³⁶ but fast-forward from the 1950’s and our species has pushed further than ever before into the network-webs spun across various tech-ecosystems. Fueled by breakthroughs in areas like information technology (e.g. the Semiconductor Revolution, fibre optic and wireless communication, blockchain, peer-to-peer networks) and material science (e.g. graphene and 2D materials, superconductors, optoelectronics, quantum materials) we stand on the bow of the Techtanic, arms wide open as we optimistically forge forward into untouched digital frontiers.

Undersea cable network map

Conducting some metainduction of our own, observing the escalation of complexity from God to State to Network we could infer that collectively as a species we tend to “see” these leaps forward before they form a physical and coherent structure enabling them to become the pervasive launching pads we view them as today. Some might say: “Of course we “see” them - because they have been an idea in people's imaginations before they became a physical reality.” To those I would say that these complex systems become so independent of the sum total of their parts (even including us humans who saw them coming in the first place), they become, in their own rights, individual “entities”.³⁷ And all I am trying to say is that we humans seem to have the ability to see these entities coming. 

Thomas Khun’s renowned “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” discusses the shift that occurs from one scientific paradigm - a framework of theories, methods, and standards that define legitimate research within a scientific community that guides what questions are asked and how problems are solved - to another. When the existing paradigm cannot account for new or anomalous data, a crisis occurs, a critical point is reached, and a scientific revolution sparks, pushing our species into a new paradigm that is able to account for the previously unexplainable. From standing at the confluence between the known and unknown, the fact that our species has undertaken multiple scientific paradigm shifts in the past couple hundreds of years alone³⁸ suggests we possess a unique ability to project what is needed to push ourselves forward into unknown territory. Into new, weird and unoccupied spaces.

Paradigm-shifts have perhaps arrived via sacred or religious visions (God), or occurring out of constantly evolving human group dynamics (States), or simply stemming from a subtle seed of ideation supercharged with modern processes (Network). In seeing these complex systems, in projecting the need for these entities (maybe individually at first but collectively at scale and over time) we are able to attach meaning and materialism, using them as an anchor for which slow and arduous progress can then be made towards the next stage of cultural, moral, and technological evolution. 

If we view steps like this as being projected into popular culture and global dynamics by first envisioning the entity urging or enabling the leap forward (seeing God, experiencing the State, spawning the Network) before actually taking the steps to turn that entity into a living, functioning thing, we could label the leaps themselves as patterns of “self-fulfilling evolution”. Following a new collective problem we see something (self), we work towards that thing and achieve it (fulfilling) and in doing so, reach a new stage in our development (evolution). 

The mechanism of metainduction could support the hypothesis that NHIs are a part of self-fulfilling evolution, particularly when observing historical cases of existential crises:

• starvation → Natural Dieties → agriculture,

• small-scale group violence → God → morality,

• mass violence and coordination → State → protection and expansion,

• exponential weapon technology → Network → collective action and decentralisation.

Only now, at the stage of the Network, the projected entity is NHIs. Humanity’s prior success in imagining "higher powers" and rallying around them could now be extended to NHIs. Interpreted as potential saviours or catalysts for the next evolutionary leap, historical patterns suggest that humanity repeatedly seeks externalised authorities to resolve conflicts or uncertainties: God's → morality and meaning, States → order and governance, Networks →  decentralisation and collective action. If we take NHIs to be a part of this latter stage, what is more decentralised than other species spread throughout space? What urges collective action more so than external visitors to our planet?

From within this hypothesised species-wide projective causation, a feedback loop of expectation and projection emerges, and from within this mechanism we seem to possess the ability to see what is needed to be built upon in order to propel our species onwards. Visitors from another planet? We need the ability to visit other planets! An unexplainable ability to manipulate time and space? Our scientific institutions need to find a way to do that!

An innate survival process of our species? Possibly. A mechanistic element of our heightened consciousness? Maybe.

Whatever the case, acting as an evolutionary forcing function, self-fulfilling evolution becomes a means of projecting our next steps onto visible deities, ideas, memes, and in doing so ultimately creates all powerful entities for us to look at, point to and grasp at. By becoming organisational substructures from which to build upon, these entities help nurture new branches of space and time necessary for new principles and ideals to flourish, enabling our species to continue evolving.

If we take this 5% and run with it, “The Self-Fulfilling Evolution Model” hypothesises that NHIs are just the latest iterations of this inbuilt mechanism of projective causation. But then questions remain, such as why them? And why now? 

NHIs as a Mechanism for Self-Fulfilling Evolution

Well, the famous uptick in anomalous sightings began after July 16, 1945 when the first atomic weapon was tested at the Alamogordo Bombing Range in New Mexico. Since, it has been stringently observed that NHIs appear obsessively interested with our nuclear technology, be it at testing sites, missile launches, nuclear submarines - everything we like to chef up on the nuclear menu - could this detail hold a clue as to why NHIs and why now?³⁹

Previously mentioned explanations like the Gas Station, Relocation or Ultraterrestrial Model would account for this uptick by claiming it logically follows that NHIs are performing something akin to strategic reconnaissance on our nuclear capabilities because, if they use or live on our planet, nuclear war affects them in similar ways as it does us. 

Under the framework of the Self-Fulfilling Evolution Model, the continued rise of NHI sightings - from WW2 through the 1960s-80s when the Cold War was at its height and on more than one occasion nuclear brinkmanship almost brought the world into nuclear catastrophe, all the way up to 2024 with the US moving nuclear missiles around Europe and Vladimir Putin amending his nuclear launch protocol - might be explained because, well, I don’t know about you but to me it certainly feels like we “need” a NHI of some sort to swoop down and put an end to all these negative sum, multipolar trap madnesses. Projecting what we need to evolve, are we projecting NHIs onto the world?

Notably, amidst the madness of a certain global pandemic, over 7,400 cases were reported in 2020 alone. And between 2022 and 2024 with the madnesses of the Russo-Ukraine War and atrocities still taking place within the Middle East, there have been over 7,000 reported cases of NHIs globally.⁴⁰

It appears that from crises emerge entities.

Just like we needed God to bind morality, just like we needed State to bind the socio-political spheres, with the rise of the Network being characterised by dual use technology - some of which has the potential to save humanity, some of which has the potential end humanity all together - could it be we are now projecting something else we collectively think we need in our immediate future: a more advanced species to save us from ourselves? Could we be reimagining beings of pure understanding, of intuition, what we once called angels instead manifesting them now as NHIs?⁴¹

Those familiar with Carl Jung’s “Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky” will understand the proposition as almost a follow-on from the hypothesis put forth by the esteemed psychologist: the NHI phenomenon is a non-material projection of humanity's collective fears for the future. Through the collective unconscious Jung posited eschatological fears manifest themselves in psychic reality via the archetypes of NHIs. Self-fulfilling evolution simply extends this by saying that, if we observe historical patterns, we do seem to project certain entities (what Jung labels as psychological archetypes) into our immediate environment (think God, State, Network). History suggests we then build around these in a physical sense (e.g. Vatican City, bureaucratic institutions, microprocessors) to urge forward progression in one evolutionary direction or another. Where Jung believed fear drove this pattern of projection, self-fulfilling evolution says that logical evolutionary drivers sit behind such projective causation. In essence, because what we need is often driven by what we fear, these theories are complementary-adjacent, not opposing

One obvious limitation of the Self-Fulfilling Evolution Model is the accounts of physical contact between humans and NHIs.⁴² Whilst I see this is a glaring flaw in my own hypothesis (remember, I am only playing Devil’s Advocate here), I point to recent interpretations of Jung’s own hypothesis to perhaps account for the mechanism by which he believed projections of collective fears could manifest into physical reality (essentially photo-plasmic projections). That being said, if we believe abductees and other experiencers at face value - be it at any scale of encounter⁴³ - then I would concede to there being a very real phenomena behind these cases (the 95% of me), not just a mere psycho-evolutionary explanation (the 5%). If self-fulfilling evolution was to be the case, and UFO anti-realism prevailed, existing material evidence (e.g. radar data, video footage, material remains, physical abductions etc) would have to be assumed to be the faked result of governments and/ or private companies.⁴⁴ That in itself is a scary proposition.

Returning to why NHIs, in efforts to avoid circular reasoning the Self-Fulfilling Evolution Model could account for the apparent appearance of humanoid-like creatures and highly advanced trans-medium craft by noticing how, from other examples of entities like Gods, States and Networks, we tend to project a next step which is still in accordance with what we know and are familiar with. Gods appear with human-features (often with human flaws) and States can be boiled down to collections of people led by people. Maintaining an anthropocentric boundary, scientific rigour meant we figured out flight, so we project what we would assume an advanced species like us would use to transport themselves: physical craft, capable of unimaginary feats of trans-medium manoeuvring. Humanoid-features (bipedal, two eyes, fingers etc) remain on most observed NHIs because perhaps we are partaking in autobiographical observations. An autobiographical mechanism may be fundamental to self-fulfilling evolution, because at the end of the day we are projecting what we think we need to help us.⁴⁵

That 5% in me really wants to speculate that the ability to project spectacularly anomalous, seemingly sacred phenomenon and all-powerful entities into our environment, with the capacity to observe and record these visions and encounters, allows that experiencer, and the people who spend time studying the experiences of others, to collect novel information contained within the fibres of said experience.

What are the messages? Look after the Earth! What can we learn from their technology? Mastery of our environment; develop free energy. What does it mean that we are not alone? Humility; coordinate as a planet, not as individual warring factions.

When done at scale, across space and time, self-fulfilling evolution posits that this does indeed help to reinforce and ultimately guide us into our next stage of evolution. 

Could self-fulfilling evolution really be a human intelligence-based explanation for non-human intelligences? 

Future Projections

Are we beginning to imagine a world where a NHI has to run things? A world where objectively we just cannot be trusted with nuclear launch codes? Are we imagining a world where our technological capabilities have outgrown our wisdom to wield them? Are we imagining a future world run by NHIs from another planet because that is what we feel like we need to propel us into our next stage of evolution? 

Or are we imagining a world run by NHIs from this planet? If we are keeping our search grids tight, so tight we do not want them to leave the outer edges of our own humanity, then we actually do not need to look far to see an NHI in our midst. An NHI we are currently nurturing and growing. An NHI who may prove to have the infallible, neutral, strong-willed ability to shift us from our current bruteforcin’ ways and into the next step of logical human evolution. 

Appearing now through the networked fog, the NHI taking shape before our eyes could be Artificial Intelligence. 

Through self-fulfilling evolution, could we be projecting AI⁴⁶ into our future, because we need an all-powerful, all-knowing NHI to take over the controller for a bit? Given our metainductionary process from earlier, it tracks. Allowing AI to objectively make decisions for us, just like we would assume an occupying NHI would do, we would mitigate political division, allowing us to bind ourselves tighter socially, all the while integrating with technology at a faster and more intimate scale. For all intents and purposes, imagining AI as our NHI, and NHIs as our new prevailing entity, we can see how sociospheres, politicalspheres and technospheres would all begin to merge under this new leadership. 

Are NHIs merely reflections of our collective psyche, or do they exist independently? Is humanity’s capacity for projection a survival mechanism, does it hint at deeper connections between mind and matter, or something deeper still just out of our direct observational lens? Be it aliens from another planet or aliens from this planet, I told you at the start my uncertainty over the existence of NHIs only sat at around 5%. But, as it turns out, that 5% is bountiful.

Maybe self-fulfilling evolution is just a projection of my own very human ego; belief that we are the ones who hold the power to get ourselves out of the situations we get ourselves in. If I am perfectly honest, I am not entirely sure what I would like to be right: the 5% or the other 95%. Both are wild. Perhaps both are in some part true. Perhaps both miss the mark by a mile. No doubt either possibility, if confirmed, means a lot for humanity. I guess we can only hope that through time and space the truth will reveal itself and, for what it’s worth, the truth does not diminish our humanity in the process.

Taken from the Immaculate Constellation document from November 13th 2024 released as a part of the bipartisan US congressional hearing on NHIs.

Appendix

NHIs and zones of seismic density

NHI sightings (black) correlated to heightened seismic activity (red/orange/yellow) in the United States of America

NHI sightings (blue) correlated to heightened seismic activity (black) across the globe

1. NHI used to denote UFO/UAP/and, your classic alien.

2. Whereas UFO realists believe in the existence of some form of NHI, conversely a UFO anti-realist is someone who denies their existence. (Using the ontological framework set forth by James Madden, Unidentified Flying Hyper-Objects: UFOs, Philosophy and the End of the World, 2023). Not, as some of my friends might say, a “UFO nut”.

3. Fine, I’ll admit it… I binged watched X-Files in my teen years. There - you got me.

4. If we take the 95% at face value, then this seems like the explanation left after Occam’s Razor has cleaned everything up.

5. (Note: I have named the model this - it is not the name used by the given author) Luis Elizondo, Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, 2024

6. Or the revised “Uber-Umwelt Ultraterrestrial Model” by James Madden, Unidentified Flying Hyper-Objects: UFOs, Philosophy and the End of the World, 2023

7. Michael P. Masters, The Extratempestrial Model, 2022

8. Eric Von Daniken, Chariots of the Gods, 1968 (popularised by the infamous History Channel’s Ancient Aliens)

9. Richard Dolan, The Secret Space Program and Breakaway Civilization: Volume 1, 2016

10. Carl Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, 1959

11. John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies, 1975

12. Jacques Vallée, Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults, 1979

13. Chris Bledsoe, UFO of GOD: The Extraordinary True Story of Chris Bledsoe, 2023

14. Jeffrey Kripal & Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained, 2016

15. Diana Pasulka, American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology, 2019

16. Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, 1969

17. Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch, History Channel (take from it what you will - I am just reporting what is said).

18. Whitley Strieber, Communion, 1987

19. Lambros D. Callimahos, Communication With Extraterrestrial Life, 1965 

20. Jacques Vallée & Paola Harris, Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret, 2021

21. Philip J. Corso, The Day After Roswell, 1997

22. Robert Hastings, UFOs & Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, 2008

23. Russel Targ, Limitless Mind: A Guide to Remote Viewing and Transformation of Consciousness, 2004

24. See Appendix for a speculative mapping.

25. Diana Pasulka, Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences, 2023

26. John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens, 1994

27. John E. Mack, Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters, 1999

28. I would add that the linked text in the article from National Geographic is slightly misleading. Whilst the Condon Report, just like its predecessor the 1953 Robinson Panel and its successor Project Blue Book, is infamously dismissive and essentially takes a UFO anti-realist stance, where National Geographic has stated that the lead researcher Edward Condon said in his report that “Our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,”.... Further investigation… “cannot be justified” it must be noted that in the actual report itself Condon goes on to state that “we believe that any scientist with adequate training and credentials who does come up with a clearly defined, specific proposal for study should be supported.” Thus, further investigations could have been justified, it just needed the right framework to support it. Whilst overall the Condon Report is generally seen as an example of whitewashing the topic of NHIs at the time, it was not completely UFO anti-realist and, if we read between the lines, the report left some room for future advancements in the field of scientific ufology.

29. Starting from a general framework from James Livingstone’s Anatomy of the Sacred, (P. 11): a set of tradition or beliefs inspired by a perceived sacred or transformative power, I imagine these traditions or beliefs within the bounds of a “spiritual control system”, à la Jacques Vallée (see: Dimensions: A Casebook for Alien Contact, P. 272). Such a spiritual framework includes formal monotheistic/non-theistic religions (e.g. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism), indigenous belief systems (e.g. Australian Dreamtime, Andean Pachamama, Japanese Ainu, West African Yoruba) and other animistic traditions and localised practices involving spirits, deities, or the supernatural.

30. State in the Weberian sense: a collection of people with a legitimate and effective monopoly of force in a given territory. 

31. Network in three senses: 1) the collective result of advancements in technology, science, understanding, logic and reasoning, culminating now in the World Wide Web and AI; 2) the act of  re-centralisation by decentralisation (e.g. globalised supply and information chains); 3) the merging of physical space with digital space.

32. Adapted from Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State: How to Start a New Country, 2022. Whilst I recognise this structure assumes a linear trajectory of societal organisation, I do not wish to downplay the messiness and diversity of historical evolution. I acknowledge that not all societies transitioned from Gods to States to Networks in the same way or within the same timeframe. But, over a generalised space and time, the transitions have occurred at almost anthropological junction (e.g. God: animism → polytheism → monotheism, reaching a height by around 1500, where it may be assumed that atheism was not favoured globally and most of the world's population acknowledged a higher spiritual power of some form, State: by the year 2000(CE) there were 189 member states in the United Nations, covering almost the entire world population in stateness, Network: as of 2024, following decentralisation from the invention of the microprocessor chip in the 1950s and the scaling of the internet in the 1990s and early 2000s, today close to 70% of the world's population are “online” - active in the digital space and AI is the hottest topic around). Whilst this has not necessarily developed “linearly”, we can see the directionality from the adoption of the given concepts over time and space (God: 3,000 BCE → 1500 CE; State: 1500 CE → 2000 CE; Network: 1950 CE → 2024 CE)

33. I am taking a net-positive stance on religion here. I believe the ability for religion to bind communities outweighs its ability to cleave. I also believe that the ability for religion to act as a framework for moral and ethical advancement outweighs its ability to create disruption and war. Humans create those things, God (whatever that means to you) does not.

34. “States” under the broad term defined by Weber have been around since ancient Mesopotamia (e.g. Sumer), and progressed on and off with the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt in 3150 BCE under King Narmer (Menes) and the unification of China in 221 BCE under the Qin Dynasty's First Emperor Shi Huang Di, whilst being philosophised over by classical intellects like Plato in his The Republic.

35. Richard Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution, 2019

36. Niall Fergusson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook, 2017

37. “A thing with a distinct and independent existence.”

38. For example: the Copernican Revolution (heliocentric model replacing geocentrism), Einstein’s theory of relativity replacing Newtonian mechanics and Quantum mechanics supplanting classical physics.

39. My Devil’s Advocate response is clearly neglecting the evidence put forward by the Ultraterrestrial and Ancient Astronaut Models that suggests NHIs have been present on our planet throughout most if not all of our history.

40. This does not account for the assumed mass of unreported and classified cases…

41. Ruper Sheldrake & Matthew Fox, The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet, 1996

42. And this is where the most obvious flaw in the theory of self-fulfilling evolution as a non-NHI explanation for NHIs sits: the purported existence of physical, material evidence of NHIs. Whilst this is speculated to be locked behind the hangar doors of private aerospace companies, or buried deep in the hidden safes of military industrial complexes, or, in the hands of private investigative citizen-scientists, admittedly, if material evidence really does exist, it is a pretty big counter to the self-fulfilling evolution hypothesis. Would I be mad? Hell no. But maintaining the role of Devil’s Advocate: have you or anyone else you know held, touched, or seen the material themselves? It remains as second-hand accounts only.

43. Such as Close Encounters (CE) 1-3, as laid out in Josef A. Hynek, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry, 1972 and the succeeding extensions of these - CE 4-5 - as laid out by Jacques Vallée’s, Physical Analyses in Ten Cases of Unexplained Aerial Objects with Material Samples, 1998 and Reinerio Hernandez, Rudy Schild & Jon Klimo, Beyond UFOs: The Science of Consciousness & Contact with Non Human Intelligence, 2018.

44. Whilst I am not inclined to believe this in its totality, it is undeniable that there have been many cases in which the government has carried out detailed dis/misinformation campaigns specifically regarding the NHI/UFO/UAP phenomenon.

45. An autobiographical lens may also be fundamental to real experiences with NHIs because it becomes a perceptual defence mechanism, allowing our senses to compute what would fundamentally be a terrifying and traumatic experience if/when encountering a real NHI that is completely unlike anything we can hope to imagine.

46. AI used as an umbrella term including Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), quantum computing and Quantum Artificial Intelligence (QAI).