Great to have Micah Hanks back with us on Examiner. Micah has also appeared multiple times on my radio show The Church Of Mabus. As well as being involved with Scott Alan Roberts on the Paradigm Symposium convention returning in 2013 regarding greats from the field of Ufology etc. Micah Hanks has a new book out called, "The UFO Singularity: Why Are Past Unexplained Phenomena Changing Our Future? Where Will Transcending the Bounds of Current Thinking Lead? How Near is the Singularity?". I am fortunate enough to get to share this interview with all of you regarding its arrival. Presenting.
1. What exactly do you mean in your perspective by "the UFO Singularity?"
MH: What the book outlines is essentially a point humanity will reach in our future, perhaps within just a few decades, where any existent anomalous phenomenon we might equate with UFOs today will be met by emerging technologies of our own. In other words, there may be a leveling of the playing field, so to speak, and the apparent highly-advanced technologies we perceive today (i.e . UFOs) may no longer be so far-removed from us.
2. When you talk about World War 2 being a pivotal period for Ufology in your book, are you referring to the UFO technology developed that is now our Drone technology?
MH: Well, WWII is a significant period for a number of reasons, each with very different potentials underlying them. For one, right after WWII is when we first began to perceive UFOs as a cultural phenomenon. Thus, it becomes highly suspicious that such objects would begin to appear just after the conflict. Did we manage to flag the attention of extraterrestrials with our use of atomic weaponry? Or did the appearance of UFOs represent some nascent, clandestine technology stemming from right here on Earth? If these craft, whatever they were (and still are) had been developed by any of the major superpowers during the war itself, wouldn’t they have been used for military purposes? Since this was not the case, we must assume something else was going on… but understanding what this may have been becomes rather difficult indeed, based on the scant evidence available to us.
3. So what are your thoughts on Roswell? You speak briefly about it in the book, but how do you feel about the Douglas Deitrich approach of it being downed Japanese craft?
MH: There is always that potential, that the object had been some downed aircraft of earthly origin. But rather than being Japanese, if I were to follow that sort of logic, I would have to note what Phillip Corso wrote about, and what researchers like Joseph P. Farrell and others have mentioned as well: that many of the varieties of advanced technology that were allegedly observed at the site of the Roswell crash had been things the Nazis had been perfecting during the war years; not the craft itself, per se, but certainly other items said to have been found amidst the wreckage. So yes, the object that crashed at Roswell (if a crash did indeed occur at all) could have very likely been of earthly origin, rather than extraterrestrial... whose it was, specifically, again remains a mystery.
4. Could you tell us about the Locus Grove, Georgia sighting that happened near a power sub station? Georgia is my home state and I had many encounters there myself.
MH: The Locust Grove sighting took place in 1973, and involved a flying saucer seen hovering over a power substation by a man named Mike Reese, who witnessed this along with several family members. The story is not very different from a plethora of other reports in the annals of ufology, but I found it interesting, and included it in the book, because of the accessibility this case provided me; I was able to get to know the witnesses, and thanks to Mike Reese’s keen memory, I was able to toy with a number of the details in my mind, and speculate as to what kind of technology could have been at work in this instance. Also, why had the craft been hovering in a well-lit area directly above a power substation? This all seemed curious. At least one of the early reviews of The UFO Singularity referred to my research into this case as unnecessarily thorough, perhaps to the point of banality. But I chose to do this for a couple of reasons: for one, too many UFO researchers today will sit back and do all their “research” from behind a computer. While I do a good bit of this, there is also fieldwork involved, for which this case helped facilitate an opportunity. Also, I felt that by focusing on examining a serious, almost “archetypal” case that involved a stereotypical “flying saucer” (and one which had not previously been reported elsewhere), I felt that it would provide a unique framework from which to try and ascertain new details about an existent, and already well-known area of study within ufology.
5. What are your thoughts on Time Travelers and UFOs exactly?
MH: I don’t think that UFOs are necessarily “time travelers” like we see in the movies, although I have wondered whether advanced technologies of the future might be capable of “evading temporality,” in a sense, which would allow them the ability to perhaps bend or warp time in ways which might be perceptible to humans of today. Think about an animal swimming beneath the surface of a dark pool… one may not be capable of seeing the animal itself, but a bubble might rise to the surface occasionally, betraying its presence. Much the same, the effects of such activities our eventual future-dwellers may engage in could cause occasional rents in space-time, which we might perceive as being UFO craft, or reports of high-strangeness.
6. Your book deals heavily with what futurists call trans-humanism, and the concept of technological singularity. What do these things have to do with UFOs?
MH: Transhumanism is essentially the concepts or study related to humankind’s eventual path, whether through natural evolution, or more often, through changes, or even manipulation of ourselves through the use of advanced sciences. Singularity, within a technological framework, could be defined essentially as the emergence of greater than human intelligence, presumably through creation of synthetic technologies like artificial intelligence. Since we’re discussing an eventual variety of intelligence surpassing our own levels of natural human intelligence, a number of reported UFO cases already would have us believe humans are interacting with intelligence that exceeds our own. Hence, the connections between these two concepts to me seems obvious, and thus worthy of greater consideration.
7. Despite the potential future connections, you also look at technology of the past. Tell us about the nineteenth century airships, and how those relate to your premise regarding UFOs.
MH: The early reports of airships must be taken somewhat anecdotally, as I realize (along with the majority of UFO researchers) that many were, in all likelihood, simply hoaxes. But if we were to assume that what, for the time period those sightings were taking place, were highly advanced technologies that weren’t being designed for military purposes, or by officialdom in any other capacity, we then might do well to consider how secretive technologies, and especially those with large amounts of private funding, might potentially have gotten “off the ground,” so to speak (and pardon the pun) much earlier than most aviation historians have thought. This sort of research has been presented very well by authors like J. Allen Danalek, and I find the notion that private industries might have been interested in producing advanced aircraft over the years to be a fascinating one.
8. You also discuss artificial intelligence and synthetic life forms a great deal in The UFO Singularity. How does the study of artificial intelligence help us learn about UFOs, or are the two really connected?
MH: Much as I’ve stated earlier, I think that the parallels between A.I. and UFO technology stems largely from the question of how greater than human intelligence might come to exist; whether it be through the creation of A.I. on our own part, or the introduction of advanced intelligences through interactions with extaterrestrial beings, it is likely to be something we’ll have to take seriously on down the road. Both Ufology and the study of A.I. and advanced “Singularity” sciences offer philosophical frameworks for the potentials that may await us in a world where humans are no longer the biggest fish in the pond.
9. I am curious to how you feel about the government using the alien agenda to their advantage when covering up their own technology. It’s easier to label someone a UFO kook than to explain black ops programs. Your feelings on this?
MH: I agree with you completely, in the sense that if world governments were, for instance, hiding away their own technologies, one of the simplest ways to cover them up would be to create a framework of disinformation, as well as a set of cultural stereotypes that allowed anyone who claimed to know of, or to have witnessed this sort of thing, as being a being a crackpot. And with guys like Stephen Hawking claiming that UFOs are only seen by “cranks and weirdos,” it would certainly make that sort of job only that much easier!
10. What can we expect from Mr. Hanks in the future book wise and events wise? Thanks.
MH: I was asked a similar question right after my book Magic, Mysticism and the Molecule came out a couple of years ago, at which time I felt my next offering would cater to the field of ufology. And so it was, as we now see. Thus, today I would have to “predict” that my next book will be about psychic phenomenon, and how advanced science of the future may create a sort of “psychic singularity”, where we reach a point where emergent technology begins to allow functional psychic abilities through the use of brain-computer interfaces, etc. It’s an exciting prospect, as well as a terrifying one; especially since some reports state that the military is already exploring the use of such things for use in the battlefield, or perhaps for surveillance and other things. But our technology definitely appears to be headed in that direction. Part of me thinks that certain aspects of the world we know simply will never change, and that the sort of grand-scale “singularity” that many of the transhumanist ilk expect will simply never happen (i.e. those who look at it almost as a religion). But regardless, the potentials here are fascinating… and maybe that will be the next installment. Who knows… I tend to get bored with sticking to just one subject for too long.
The UFO Singularity finally reveals what UFO phenomena can tell us about greater-than-human intelligence, and offers provocative theories of where such intelligence might originate. You'll explore the most challenging metaphysical questions and the latest scientific thoughts about them, including:
What is the singularity, and how does it relate to UFOs?
Could some UFOs be from our plane? Could they actually be time travelers from our future?
What current scientific trends are leading us to the kinds of advanced technology we've observed in various UFO reports?
Are there other ways in which UFOs could be considered "extraterrestrial visitors" in our midst, even if they didn't get here in the way that most people think (via interplanetary space flight)?
You can purchase Micah's new book at Amazon.com and find many more fine books at New Page Books.
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Jeffery Pritchett is the host of The Church Of Mabus Show bringing you high strange stories from professionals in the carousel of fields surrounding the paranormal.
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