“People have vivid experiences of phenomenon that do not take place in any classical sense, and this is a common feature of human cognitive experience, from dreaming and visualizations to trance and psychosis. Often they attach bizarre descriptions to these phenomenon, and become deeply confused thereafter.

On a related note, one thing I find fascinating and suspicious about encounters with what humans are describing as aliens in spacecraft is the shocking lack of anything interesting taking place. I have read over 500 accounts of encounters from all over the world, and never once do the ‘visitors’ do anything that seems even moderately interesting, interested, or ‘advanced’. Generally there is a lot of flashing lights, possibly some telepathy, strange sensations or medical interventions, and a glaring lack of what one might expect from encounters as relatively ordinary as those between a human and an intelligent animal. Why does nothing interesting ever happen? How could beings this advanced be this boring?

Could actual aliens be more insipid than the flat caricatures of our science-fiction stories? Could the nature of the universe be that vapid? I doubt it. I do not know precisely what these phenomenon represent, but if they were beings from other worlds, the impact and results of their visits would be staggeringly more interesting than they are.

This is the kind of mystery where the mystery is that everyone is pretending that a shadow is a monster. There’s a problem in the dimensionality of these experiences… the relational dimensions are missing or distorted. When examined from this perspective one gets the impression that these events may often have the nature of feedback of some kind… a feedback event having to do with human activity and cognition perhaps? I think the phenomenon are confusing, but it can’t be aliens. They simply aren’t interesting enough.”

— an anonymous informant