We humans think of ourselves as the Earth’s most intelligent species. But what if that’s not true? Evidence is emerging that more advanced species are among us, visiting from elsewhere in the universe.

Until recently, claiming to have seen an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) or having a close encounter with an alien being was met with ridicule, threats from men in black, electric shock therapy, and the likely loss of gainful employment. Now, reputable people, including high-ranking military and intelligence officials, say it’s time to acknowledge that extraterrestrial species (ETs) are here and have probably been here for thousands of years.

If that’s true, then humanity is about to experience the greatest discovery of all time. It would also be our greatest challenge. We are a violent tribal species. Humans have been at war for more than 90 percent of recorded history.

We have equipped our primitive propensities with technologies that threaten the planet’s ability to support life. We have not shown sufficient resolve to avoid avoidable disasters. Countries have agreed to more than 3,700 legally binding environmental treaties, but few have achieved their goals. The result is the Sixth Great Extinction of species on the planet, exhausted soils, lost forests, polluted freshwater supplies, and dangerously depleted oceans.

Geologists suggest that the human influence on the biosphere has become so consequential that we’ve entered an epoch of anthropological ecological degradation, ending the 12,000-year period during which the planet’s conditions were ideal for civilization’s development. Despite the warnings of the world’s best scientists and the availability of clean energy, we are making the Earth’s climate more violent by burning fossil fuels.

The Federation of American Scientists reports that over 30 countries have or are trying to acquire nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons of mass destruction. Despite signing a treaty in which they promised not to develop or use nuclear weapons, nine nations are known to have them, and several more are thinking about acquiring them. We have avoided using them these last 80 years only by threatening each other with mutual assured destruction.

Yet, even our most advanced technologies would not compare with those of alien beings who traveled many thousands of light-years across the universe and whose abilities defy the known laws of physics. As if to underscore that fact, UFOs have stunned veteran military pilots by stopping in mid-air, changing direction so radically that humans could not withstand the G-forces, and zooming away at speeds of 280,000 miles (450,616 kilometers) per hour. Military pilots have videotaped them, recorded them on radar, experienced near-misses in mid-air, and watched the craft disappear into oceans.

How plausible is this? Some studies suggest there could be over 15,000 “communicative civilizations” among the 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Ufologists say they have identified 80 different alien species so far.

This begs many obvious questions. Why are they here? How will they use their technologies? Do they want to save us, or enslave us? Some archeologists believe alien species have helped humans make progress at critical times in history. Maybe they see we can use their help again. And maybe we can take comfort in the likelihood that if these advanced species wanted to hurt us, they would have done it long ago.

Another question: Will our visitors and we recognize that we are related? Nearly all life and matter in the universe is made from the dust created when stars exploded 14 billion years ago. Human bodies contain about 7 octillion atoms that spread through space. They have been recycled through countless organisms, possibly including extraterrestrials. We share this origin story with them.

Skeptics will point out, with justification, that we humans are even more closely related, but it hasn’t stopped us from fighting with each other. Modern science views all human races as one closely related species. The Human Genome Project determined we are 99.9 percent genetically identical, having evolved from the same ancestors who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. Some geneticists say there is no biological basis for race. Every person on the planet is at least a 50th cousin, making us a large extended family.

Nevertheless, our fragmented view of our own species, our fractured tribalism, and our competition for resources have been responsible for the cruelest and most vicious violence between people, races, and countries. Immigration is a politically charged issue in dozens of countries today, where citizens worry about the impact on their cultural identities, economies, and jobs, and where racism is still a factor. This does not bode well for their receptivity to extraterrestrials that are not only exceedingly strange but also millions of years more advanced than we are, with abilities and technologies that “seem indistinguishable from magic.”

During their Geneva summit in 1985, during a private walk together, President Ronald Reagan asked Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, “What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?” Gorbachev reportedly responded that he would.

Speaking to the United Nations two years later, Reagan mused, "In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world."

But the acknowledgment of ETs should not begin with the assumption that they are here to attack us, despite all the movies about alien invasions. We can assume that aliens learned eons ago to defend themselves or to eliminate the need.

Again, they could have done so already, and the many signs of ancient aliens indicate they helped humans with evolutionary leaps in knowledge, astronomy, architecture, and engineering. We would clearly benefit from such a leap now.

Several modern interactions with ETs indicate they are here to save us from ourselves. UFO sightings have been reported for centuries, but they increased after World War II, especially after the development and testing of nuclear weapons. Military officials and incident reports describe numerous cases where UFOs interacted with or monitored nuclear weapons tests and installations. UFOs reportedly have hovered near missile sites and rendered them inoperable.

ETs could take the deterrence of mutual assured destruction to new heights and prevent countries from going to war. Military spending, which reached an all-time high of $2.7 trillion in 2024, could be redirected to peaceful purposes, such as achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, including the global shift to clean, limitless energy.

Maybe we would learn that our small tribes are members of many larger tribes, interconnected and interdependent, extending from our neighborhoods and ethnic groups to all nations and into other life in the universe.

Are these outcomes idealistic? Absolutely. But they are not inconceivable. In fact, they may be our only rational choices.

Ufologists, as they call themselves, say we have entered the “age of disclosure” about ETs. Large cracks are appearing in the wall of secrecy that has surrounded sightings of UFOs and ETs. The governments of the United States, France, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Russia, and the UK are said to be actively investigating the phenomena, often from the standpoint of potential threats to their security. In the United States, government officials have traditionally claimed that UFO sightings were weather balloons, atmospheric anomalies, human aircraft, or the result of overactive imaginations. But the government acknowledged there were some sightings it could not explain.

In 2004, naval pilots videotaped a craft shaped like a tic-tac with no wings or visible propulsion system. A former U.S. intelligence official leaked the video in 2017. The same year, the New York Times – America’s newspaper of record – ran a front-page story that the government was taking UAPs more seriously. Three years later, the U.S. Department of Defense confirmed that the Tic Tac video was genuine.

Contemporary evidence, including videos, shows that UFOs exist in space, the atmosphere, and in oceans, and can travel between all three. As a result, they are now called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs).

In 2023, Congress passed a law requiring the government to release its secret records regarding UAPs. The archives reportedly included over 2,000 reports of UAP encounters and studies going back to 1945. However, the law gives the government 25 years to do this and allows presidents to keep secrets they consider necessary for national security.

In 2025, Congress held hearings in which former military and intelligence officials testified under oath that the government has recovered crashed UAPs, as well as dead and living alien beings. The government has reportedly worked secretly with the aerospace industry to reverse-engineer UAP materials and technologies.

If so, the space race is no longer confined to space, and the arms race could turn into a competition among nations to develop advanced weapons systems powered by alien technology. Assuming that extraterrestrial intelligence is here, willing to come out of the shadows and to share their knowledge, the preferable possibility, of course, is that all nations would agree to use ET knowledge only for peaceful purposes and the benefit of all humankind. New technologies would be open source, with no country or corporation claiming proprietary rights.

That has not been the arrangement so far. One noted ufologist, Dr. Steven Greer, released a documentary claiming that a covert coalition of U.S. military and corporate entities has already developed anti-gravity technologies that make our known energy resources obsolete and that would solve the climate problem. Greer says the powerful fossil energy industry and its allies are preventing the use of those options.

Countries would have to avoid the temptation to seek military or economic advantage with ET knowledge. The closest current example of such an agreement is the aforementioned 1968 Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). All but four countries have signed it, promising to use nuclear technologies only for peaceful purposes. But it hasn’t stopped nine countries from developing and modernizing nuclear arsenals, and several others are considering it today. Any new global agreement on advanced technologies must be verifiable and more strictly enforced.

President John F. Kennedy’s vision of space exploration should guide interplanetary research. When he launched the U.S. space program in 1962, he said, “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people...(S)pace can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.”

In reality, the Age of Disclosure began 350,000 years ago. It has never ended and probably never will. Limited by our five senses, we humans understand very little about ourselves or the universe around us. The human eye sees only 0.0035 percent of the light spectrum; we cannot hear most sounds around us, and 90 percent of our brain’s deeper functions remain a mystery. Humans cannot hear the sounds readily detected by moths, bats, owls, elephants, cats, horses, dogs, pigeons, or rats. Dogs detect smells 10,000 times better than humans.

We still have not discovered 86 percent of terrestrial and 91 percent of marine life that we believe exists on Earth. More than 70 percent of the planet’s surface is oceans, 80 percent of it unseen and unexplored. A teaspoon of soil contains an entire world, with over a billion bacteria and 10,000 different species. All told, it holds more living organisms than there are people on Earth. We don’t see or sense it.

One of America’s top former intelligence officials, Luis Elizondo, points out that we know so little about the domains beyond our normal awareness that some non-human contacts may come not from outer space but from earthly beings that exist in those places.

In the macrocosm, the universe is said to be infinite. Even with our best technology, we can observe only a fraction of it. There are said to be more stars in space than grains of sand on Earth, as well as more atoms in a grain of sand than there are stars. About 95 percent of the known universe is composed of dark matter and dark energy that we cannot see and don’t fully understand. We know more about subatomic space, but not much about why it behaves the way it does. And while we have only begun to explore the Moon and Mars, we know more about them than about Earth’s oceans.

This is an extraordinary time to be alive. While we are learning about extraterrestrial intelligence, we are also discovering extradimensional realms through accounts of near-death experiences. Their number is growing because medical advances allow the resuscitation of more patients, and the stigma of talking about them seems to be disappearing. Those who experienced near-death tell remarkably consistent stories of encounters with the divine and direct communication with the source of all creation. The experience changes the rest of their lives for the better. It could change how we all view life.

Entire universes are waiting to be explored around, above, within, and below us. Human knowledge is doubling every 12 to 13 months, 25 times faster than in 1945 and 100 times faster than before 1900. Some predict that the internet and artificial intelligence will double the amount of knowledge every 12 hours.

However, as our knowledge accelerates, so must our respect for all life and for one another. Unless we outgrow our primitive propensities for fear, selfishness, competition, and violence, we pose an existential threat to worlds of which we are part, but don’t even know exist.

The most important advances of our species are not in laboratories, corporate boardrooms, or secret government agencies. They are in our souls and consciousness. The space and arms races must give way to races between love and hate, fear and communion, and enlightenment and ignorance. Perhaps the species that have evolved and survived for billions of years can teach us about this. Maybe that’s why they seem to be here.