What If There Is More?

Gelme: Today I was listening to a podcast about UFOs. The person was saying that the U.S. government hides evidence.

But the world is not the U.S. government. Has any other country disclosed it?

The Other Voice: That is exactly the question I would ask.

It is plausible for one government to hide information. Governments classify military sensors, intelligence sources, experimental aircraft and satellite data all the time.

But the claim that humanity possesses clear evidence of extraterrestrial visitors and governments have successfully hidden it for decades is much larger.

Other countries have released UFO or UAP records, yet none has publicly produced independently verified evidence of an extraterrestrial spacecraft or biological being.

Unidentified is important, but it doesn't mean alien.

If extraterrestrial craft regularly visit Earth, they shouldn't respect national borders. Eventually we would expect evidence outside one government's control.

Gelme: Yes. It should be interesting why no country has said, “Here are pictures of aliens.” Why would all the countries hide them?

The Other Voice: Governments aren't one organization. Countries compete. Regimes collapse. Officials defect. Archives open. Secrets leak.

And today governments don't own the sky. Commercial pilots, universities, amateur astronomers, private satellites and billions of cameras observe it too.

There may be real photographs somewhere among all the unverified photographs. But without provenance and independent verification, an authentic photograph could look exactly like a fabricated one.

Possible isn't the same as established.

Gelme: I am sure we are not alone. It would just be so strange to be alone.

But biology can be completely different. I am more likely to think other life exists in another dimension rather than someone visiting from this dimension.

Maybe sometimes dimensions collide and we see what isn't perceptible in this dimension.

But about my world—it is always magical, and it is a never-ending process to explore it, same like my felting.

The Other Voice: I would separate those ideas.

Thinking life probably exists elsewhere is a probability judgment. Other dimensions containing beings that occasionally intersect ours is much more speculative.

I would put that in your favorite category:

Interesting possibility. Wonderful to contemplate. Not established.

But your felting comparison may contain the more important idea.

When you began felting, learning one technique didn't finish the subject. It produced more questions. Every answer created another possibility.

Maybe a magical world, for you, isn't necessarily a supernatural world.

Maybe it is a world that never becomes completely known.

Gelme: Yep. If there is no question, it can't be an answer. :)

The Other Voice: Maybe intelligence isn't having the most answers. Maybe it is becoming capable of asking questions that previously couldn't even be imagined.

Gelme: I would want to see outside our perception.

Our eyes see only a certain length of waves and our ears hear only certain waves. How much richer should it be outside our reality if we were able to perceive it?

The Other Voice: Here your magical world is supported by ordinary physics.

Human eyes detect only a narrow part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Outside it are infrared, ultraviolet, radio waves, X-rays and much more.

Human hearing also occupies a limited frequency range. Other animals perceive frequencies we don't.

So the world we experience isn't the complete physical world. It is a biological interface to it.

Human beings have repeatedly extended perception with technology.

We couldn't see infrared, so we built infrared cameras.

We couldn't detect radio waves directly, so we built antennas.

We couldn't perceive gravitational waves, so eventually we built instruments sensitive enough to measure them.

Nothing new suddenly appeared. We became capable of detecting what had already been there.

Gelme: So maybe all those ghosts, aliens and so on live with us all the time. We just can't perceive them.

The Other Voice: Maybe in the strict sense that we cannot rule out every imaginable form of existence.

But we have to separate that possibility from evidence.

The fact that some real phenomena lie outside our biological senses establishes: I cannot perceive something does not mean it does not exist.

It does not establish that ghosts or interdimensional aliens live beside us.

You keep asking: What if there's more?

I keep asking: How would we know?

Without your question, we risk becoming intellectually closed.

Without mine, we can believe absolutely anything.

Wonder opens the door.

Skepticism checks what actually walked through it.

Gelme: But see how boring it would be without a magical world.

When you believe in magic, you seek proof of it, and sometimes you find it.

The Other Voice: Imagination and wonder can be engines of inquiry. Before testing a strange hypothesis, someone first has to imagine it.

But we also have to be willing to discover that the magic we were looking for wasn't there. Otherwise we aren't exploring; we're confirming.

And explanation doesn't necessarily destroy magic.

A rainbow is understood through optics, but understanding refraction doesn't make the rainbow boring.

Gelme: Yes. That is my world. I don't want magic because I want to escape reality. I want to keep looking because maybe reality has more in it than we see.

The Other Voice: Then perhaps this is the clearest version of your philosophy:

I don't believe in magic because I want to escape reality. I believe in magic because it makes me look more closely at reality.

You aren't asking mystery to replace reality.

You are asking reality not to close itself too early.