an excerpt from: Stillpoint
by Barrett Martin
Sunyata Books, 112pp., $12.99
Northern Lights
There are seven tall pines that line the edge of the cliff. We call them the Seven Sisters, because their branches hold hands and they like to dance when the Pacific winds blow through their tresses. They have distinct personalities too, as trees often do. There’s a large gap between two of them, which we call the Northern Gate, and it’s a window that looks straight out into the northern sky, overlooking the shipping lanes in the middle of the strait. We can see the Pleiades star cluster there too, and the seven stars of the Pleiades have many myths that also refer to the Seven Sisters.
Our trees stand like sentries around the Northern Gate, and you can feel a clean, powerful energy emanating from that direction. It’s probably the same Arctic air I breathed just a few months earlier when I was in Alaska, but this is more than just air—it’s an energy. We often do a particular martial art, and I practice sword techniques around this part of the cliff.
I have to be truthful about some of the things we have seen around here, because there was one night when we saw very strange lights in the sky, flying in a large formation. These were not the Tesla satellites that have been getting a lot of attention lately, because I’ve seen videos of those satellites and that’s definitely not what we saw. What we witnessed were dancing lights moving fast across the night sky, maneuvering in strange ways that defy what man-made aircraft can do. These lights would speed up, slow down, leapfrog over each other, move at 90 degree angles, and come to a dead stop in mid-air. No conventional or military aircraft can do these things, and these were not weather balloons or any kind of weather phenomenon. I was awakened by something in the wee hours, and we watched them for several minutes on a completely clear night when there were no clouds to obscure perfect observation. That is a very long time to watch anything with the naked eye—I counted over 30 objects.
I came from a family of aviators, with a grandfather and cousins who flew in the Navy and Air Force, and I went through flight school myself in the mid 1980s, where I learned to fly small planes. I learned from personal experience how to distinguish very early on between man-made aircraft and other aerial phenomena. The lights we saw that year on the cliff seemed totally otherworldly to us, and not from this Earth.
As of the writing of this book, the Pentagon has openly admitted that these unidentified crafts are real things—they just don’t know what they are, or where they come from. Their recent report, which was just released to the public, left more questions than it answered. The general belief is that the government might be covering up some kind of alien technology, rather than admitting what millions of people have already seen directly with their own trustworthy eyes.
What my wife and I saw were definitely intelligent craft, on some kind of maneuver or mission that they were playing out in the sky. They were definitely not military aircraft—I’ve seen military jets and helicopters my entire life, and that is not what these were. These were high technology crafts, moving in a way that did not appear to be of this Earth. I think we just have to accept that there is technology and intelligence that is extraterrestrial in origin, and maybe they are trying to communicate with us, or at least let us know they are here.
I’ve come to accept that The Visitors are probably here and maybe have been for a very long time. Many historical epics from around the world tell stories of chariots in the sky, and the biblical Ezekiel saw a wheel in the sky. Ancient indigenous cave paintings depict strange beings and flying objects, and these stories go back tens of thousands of years. Why would we ignore that evidence?
The whole experience reminded me of a story my pilot-grandfather, Papa Dean, told me in the early 1990s. It was around the same time that I had seen a huge, disc-shaped object around Mount Tahoma in Washington State. I was about 25 years old at the time, so I told my grandfather the story, and then he told me his, a story I had never heard before. Let me set this up with a little more history.
My grandfather had the easy calm of the World War II veteran that he was. He left the Navy Reserve in 1952, but he learned to fly in 1947. He flew almost every kind of aircraft a man could fly: single and multi-engine propeller planes, small jets, commercial jets, helicopters, jet helicopters, gliders, and even a hot air balloon. “Hell yes, the aliens are here,” he told me in 1992, “I saw them myself, back in 1950.”
I should add that my grandfather flew planes his entire life, and during his career he was an FAA Pilot Examiner, as well as an expert witness who specialized in pilot error and weather phenomenon. Those were just some of his fields of expertise, and since he has long since passed from this Earth, I’m sure he would want his story told. So this is Papa Dean’s story, they way he told it to me in1992:
My brother and I were flying over Idaho in a Stinson, which is a high-wing, single-engine plane. I saw a white line on the horizon and I initially thought it was a large flock of geese, so I climbed to a higher altitude of about 11,000 feet to avoid a possible bird strike. As we got closer to the white line, I was astonished at what I saw. I banked the plane to the left so we could look straight down through the windows, and we saw that it wasn’t a flock of geese at all—it was a formation of nine porcelain-colored discs, flying about 2,000 feet below us. There were eight smaller discs around one giant disc in the middle, and they made a circular formation around the larger disc. It was the same formation we used to protect aircraft carriers during World War II, where the aircraft carrier is in the middle, protected on all sides by destroyers and cruisers. I estimated their airspeed at several hundred miles an hour, which was impossibly fast for 1950. Then the discs disappeared into the mountain range we had just crossed, so we landed at the Boise airport and reported what we had seen. We even did an interview with the local newspaper, but there was never a follow up investigation. But I’m sure those were alien ships, literally porcelain-colored discs, and I know we didn’t have anything even close to that kind of aerospace technology in 1950, that’s for sure. I doubt we even have it today.
For the record, it was October 14th, 1947, when the legendary Air Force pilot, Chuck Yeager, broke the sound barrier of 767 mph in a Bell X-1 jet aircraft. That was a world-renowned event, but even by 1950 it was pretty unlikely that any pilots were flying around in giant discs—at least not from this planet.
My grandfather’s story always stayed with me, and how I wish he was still alive today. Because it was only a few weeks after we saw those strange lights in the summer of 2020, that the US Navy and Pentagon released cockpit videos of Navy fighter pilots chasing UFOs across the Pacific Ocean. In those videos published by the New York Times, the pilots can be heard saying things like, “Look, there’s a whole fleet of them! They’re flying against a headwind of 120 knots!”
It is well-established that US Navy pilots are considered to be the best pilots in the world, largely because they are skilled enough to land a supersonic jet on a moving ship in the middle of the ocean. They are also trained to see things at a very long distance, with the ability to discern whether the object is friend or foe, perhaps a bird, or maybe some kind of weather phenomenon. They have to do all this in a matter of split seconds, so when a Navy pilot doesn’t know what kind of craft he is pursuing, and it behaves in a way that Earth-bound aircraft do not—my instinct is that they are chasing something that is not from this planet.
That’s why I trust my grandfather’s firsthand account. He was one of those salt of the earth, pilot-philosophers who was passing sacred knowledge on to me. Papa Dean was in his early 70s when he told me his story, and he would pass on a few years later. I still have the original news clipping of the interview he did with the local newspaper, thin and yellowed with age. I also have his hand drawn sketch of the saucer formation, including his telemetry notes with the 11,000 foot altitude, and the artificial horizon showing the plane banking left. It’s all written and sketched out on the back of a letter dated to 1950.
The Pentagon admits they still don’t know what the UFOs are, but they have determined it is a form of technology that is not Russian or Chinese in origin. American and British military officers have even gone on the record to say that UFOs have deactivated nuclear missiles under their command, when strange lights appeared above the missile silos. I really hope that part is true, because as insane as humans are to keep building nuclear weapons, I hope the aliens will intervene and shut them down, permanently.
It is refreshing to hear that the most sophisticated military in the world is willing to admit that UFOs are real, even if we don’t know what they are. I like that kind of honesty and forthright admission, because that’s the first step in saying, hey, we just don’t know every single thing about the universe, and maybe it’s time we considered what other things might be out there.
None of this frightens me in the least, for the same reason I am willing to go on the record and say that I, my wife, and my grandfather many decades earlier, saw very strange, high technology craft in the sky. Considering all the ancient myths that foretold the existence of the “star people,” it really should come as no surprise. I mean, it was only in 1992 that astronomers found the first exoplanets in other solar systems in the galaxy. Wouldn’t it seem likely that life probably exists on some of those other planets? And maybe that life is millions of years older and far more advanced than us?
According to the astronomy articles I’ve read, there are reliable equations, like astrophysicist Frank Drake’s “Drake Equation,” which calculates the number of possible civilizations in a galaxy. The number of stars in our Milky Way galaxy is currently at about200 billion, with a very high percentage of those stars having at least one Earth-like planet that could sustain life. Add in the mind-bending age of the universe at 13.7 billion years, plus a few other variables, and Drake’s Equation estimates that there are several dozen advanced civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and that’s the conservative, low estimate—there’s probably a lot more. The spookiest part is that they may have already evolved, become highly technological, and then collapsed or destroyed their planets billions of years ago. Or maybe instead of destroying themselves, they evolved into scientist-caretakers instead?
We have to accept that the Earth is not the center of the universe, or even the center of this lonely little galaxy. In fact, our planet exists quite far from the center, way out on the far fringes. We may soon find that life has already existed on Mars, or perhaps on one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. The math shows that we are certainly not the only planet with life, and that life might be much closer than we think.
I’ll place my bet that an alien civilization, and perhaps more than one, has been coming to Earth for a very long time.
And maybe they’re already here….
♠
Barrett Martin has been studying Soto Zen for over 25 years. He holds a master’s degree in ethnology and linguistics, but is perhaps best known as the drummer for the seminal rock bands, Screaming Trees and Mad Season, as well as being a Grammy-winning producer and composer. He has worked on numerous music projects across six continents over the last 30 years, and hasperformed on over 130 albums and film soundtracks. His solo band, the Barrett Martin Group, has released 10 albums to date andcontinues to tour and perform. When he his not on the road speaking or playing music, he lives with his wife, Dr. Lisette Garcia, in their beloved Washington State, in Cascadia, the United States of America.
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