Sorry, I'm just so busy and it's very complicated so difficult to know what to say, or where to start. When I first wrote the op, I was convinced, as per my education, that reality can be explained based on what can be seen and measured i.e., deterministic materialism. It seems reasonable enough, but actually the reason I studied psychology is because I was interested in the nature of consciousness, and there are plenty of materialists who are interested in this question, many of them trying to create AI.
However, it was many years later, that I learned that consciousness isn't emergent from the material world, but that it creates the material world, including the brain.
Actually, these days, it's reasonably easy to reach this conclusion because it's gaining popularity and so more people are presenting the case, and finding ways to present it. For instance, here is a description of a declassified CIA report that is analysing Bob Monroe's gateway experience: https://youtu.be/HOFq3ruef7I
Although, my personal journey into understanding consciousness was very different. I did come to the gateway experience but not before I had explored other examples of people who were having conscious experiences without the body. Indeed, it's not clear that the gateway experience separates consciousness from the body with a simple glance. Whereas, it's very clear that someone who is practicing MindSight can have a conscious experience without the body, in this case the ability to see without their eyes. e.g., https://youtu.be/SSs7vj0zg6c
Other examples that I looked into included near death experiences e.g., https://youtu.be/DRc430cTkQk; remote viewing which has even been verified in blinded and controlled experiments and then published in scientific journals such as Nature, past life memories, astral projection and probably other examples.
Although the gateway experience was key, because you can read about this stuff until you're bored of it, but nothing compares to practicing and having the personal experiences for yourself. There was a time in my life, before I had children, when I was meditating every day and using the gateway experience tapes and I was having out of body experiences. And so then I knew consciousness wasn't emergent from my brain, as I had believed.
This was a time in my life when I wasn't interested in UFOs or aliens anymore. I didn't really know why this knowledge was snowballing in this direction, but it later became useful in understanding the question that comes after accepting some UFOs are alien spacecraft, it helps to make sense of why life exists everywhere. And why people who explore consciousness often run into non-human life forms e.g., remote viewers such as Ingo Swan and John Vivanco or indeed participants of the Gateway Expeirence and the Monroe Institute.
I noticed that when I wrote the op in this thread, that I was interested in what authorities had to say, and I associated authority with credibility. I think this is a mistake that many people make, because the truth is that the most repeated narratives that we hear in society don't understand consciousness and the non-material aspects of reality. The most repeated narratives we are exposed to are from authoirty figures, but they are actually clueless and so the reason I'm posting about consciousness and not aliens, as a first step, is because anyone who is reading this has consciousness and therefore it's perfectly possible for you see how consciousness is not emergent from the brain and with practice experience how it is not emergent from your brain. You can experience it for yourself and see how wrong the ideas of materialists are, because if you want to fully understand how ETs interact with humanity then you have to be open to the idea that materialism and all its rules are laughably incomplete. Reality is not fundamentally material as consciousness is fundamental to matter. Matter is realtively fixed, where as ideas are far more free flowing, therefore reality is far more creative and free flowing than any ideas that are held within materialism; these are just basic characteristics that go with their respective frameworks.
For example, death is an illusion, from the material perspective your physical body will cease to be alive i.e., will cease to move and start to decompose, but from the perspective that consciousness is fundamental, you will remain conscious upon death as you have experienced countless times and you will go on having more lives and not only on Earth. Going deeper, the consiousness that drives your experiences is the very same consciousness that creates experiences in other worlds, some of which interact with our own. So wherever you are in the universe, whether you are in an isolated tribe in a primitive world and only interact with other members of your species, whether you are on Earth and mostly interact with members of your own species, or whether you are living in an interstellar society and interact with members of countless species. All you are really doing, is interacting with yourself, because deep down all people everywhere are the very same consciousness, they are all your other lives. All the people reading this are other lives of mine as I am another life of yours. So you see, how you must change your perception of reality from what is reinforced by our society, to start grasping what is going on, it's strange to begin with but then eventually it seems obvious.
And you can't just read this and follow a few links to really appreciate it, you have to put in the effort to understand and to experience it for yourself. Many of you won't be interested, because it's not of interest to you, which is perfectly valid. Everyone here is or was at some point interested in computers and building them, so that's why this community exists. Therefore, it was ambitious or stupid of me to expect a thread about evidence for UFOs being alien spacecraft to gain any traction in a place like this. And the reason I'm updating this thread now is because I'm updating the time capsule, I don't expect a single person reading this to be interested in the nature of consciousness.
It's funny, there was a program being run by ETs between 2008-2016, shortly after this thread was created, in which thousands of them used the internet, in places where there could be interactive written chat e.g., facebook, twitter, youtube comments sections etc. And all of the ETs were from humanoid species i.e., they generally looked just like us and had fingers to type with, but they were mainly female, because women are more interested in social interaction, so the ETs who signed up were mostly female. So between 2008 and 2016 all these female ETs were trying to start conversations with people online and the greatest obstacle to their success, apart from the fact they were trying to convince people that they were ETs, which as this thread shows isn't a concept that is taken seriously... was, that most of the people who would engage with them were men who were trying to find women for dating etc. So the men were making advances towards these female ETs in project "first contact", and the female ETs wouldn't behave like human females who weren't interested e.g., blanking the men or blocking them etc. The female ETs accepted their advances as a way to continue the conversation, to keep trying to have meaningful dialouge between humans and themselves, with the purpose being to see if humanity was ready for ET contact. But these men didn't care about the womens beliefs, they were just interested in one thing, sexting, meeting up, having them send pictures etc. And the whole programme was a disaster, because of course the ETs wouldn't send any pictures, the rules of the program meant only written information could be exchanged, no pictures, no audio, no physical meeting etc. And then, the outcome of this experient was that humanity wasn't ready for ET contact. On reflection, some of the ETs think that wasn't a correct conclusion and it just so happened that the results were biased because they were interacting with men who were only interested in dating, but actually, I have this time capsule and I can read all the responses to the idea of ETs existing, both from 2006/7 and from 2023 when I bumped this thread. I can see that the conclusions of the first contact project were largely true, although the reason why it's true is actually far more interesting to consider and has to do with what sort of experiences consciousness is using this planet and humanity to acheive.
That's what consciousness does, through life on any world, anywhere in the cosmos, it basically uses people to have experiences. The word person, is derived from the Latin, persona, which means mask. So a person is a mask that is worn by consciousness and it is consciousness that wears all the masks. The cosmos is a grand play full of actors wearing their specific masks, so that consciousness can generate infinite experiences to play out the infinite ideas that it contains, including the idea that project first contact would end in failure because the men of Earth were too busy flirting with female ETs to give them the impression that humanity had any interest in ET matters. lol...