I have argued in this space that ufology is going mainstream. Because our government and media are openly admitting that ET visitation is real, the disclosure movement has now gained unstoppable momentum.

A prime example is last week’s Contact in the Desert (CITD), which attracted over 3,000 attendees and 70+ speakers, including prominent whistleblowers, academics, researchers, and journalists. In this piece I only cover my appearance on a CITD panel, but stay tuned for my free seminar for paid subscribers that will cover other developments from this historic event.

The disclosure movement is making real progress, but a peculiar dilemma is also unfolding: this crucial new field is handicapped by erroneous cosmologies. I refer here, of course, to the tragic fact that so few have been exposed to the Urantia Revelation.

I could sense the deep confusion of many CITD speakers, for example, about the nature of the divine and angelic presence in the universe, and its relation to inhabited worlds. I was also saddened by the distorted narratives about human origins too often used to frame CITD presentations.

The imperative of open dialogue with ufologists

For this and other reasons, we Urantians simply must get into dialogue with ufology leaders and their massive following.

These folks are sincere and open-minded people, as indicated by the easy success of the Fellowship’s booth at CITD, where our team sold (or gave away) 30 books.

By the same token, ufology has much to teach our community. This burgeoning field works with a vast array of verifiable facts that goes far beyond what was revealed to the Contact Commission decades ago.

This year’s CITD was like a constant reminder that there is so much to analyze in the many hundreds of books, myriads of government disclosure documents, and thousands of well-documented sightings and contacts on every continent. Thus, it’s little wonder the first accredited PhD program in extraterrestrial studies has just been announced by Ubiquity University. Another hopeful sign is that a veteran reader, Dr. Sioux Oliva, now sits on the leadership committee of The Visible College, a network of scholars of the UFO field.

Knowing all this to be true, I’ve attended CITD many times going back to 2015. I knew the original founders, who accepted my proposals to lecture there in 2015 and 2016 . But I received no additional invitations during the period of the vogue of the “ancient aliens” series on the History Channel, which was eerily devoid of any reference to UB teachings about pre-Sumerian history.

To my surprise, at this year’s CITD I was offered a platform, a plenary panel to speak from, plus a spot in a workshop with three other presenters led by disclosure impresario Steven Bassett. This time I brought a unique lens to these discussions: I represented the UB through the prism of exotheology—a new subfield that considers the impact of extraterrestrial visitation on contemporary theology. Professor Ted Peters (now retired), cofounder of the Center for Theology and Natural Sciences at UC Berkeley and a mentor who’s well aware of the UB, and has long been a pioneer in exotheology.

Are ETs entrenched in our ocean trenches?

I was honored and a bit overwhelmed to be one of six speakers on the panel entitled “UFOs and USOs: Unveiling the Mysteries of the Skies and Seas.” Among those sitting on the panel was the pre-eminent UFO author, Richard Dolan, plus famed lawyer Danny Sheehan (founder of the New Paradigm Institute that heroically promotes disclosure legislation in Washington). Dolan has written two recent volumes on the topic of USOs, or “unidentified submerged objects,” which is hailed as a landmark study.

Dolan’s writings analyze scores of solid sightings by military personnel and mariners of all kinds. Thousands have witnessed discs submerging into and emerging from the waters of Urantia—with sightings going back to the eighteenth century!

These facts may or may not relate to the revelators’ fascinating passage in Paper 49. Here we learn that among the elemental types on the inhabited worlds in our local system, “seven per cent are [of] water,” though not quite “human fishes.” (See 49:2.18).

Whatever the case, it can no longer be denied that certain ET visitors pilot their spaceships down through our atmosphere and submerge themselves in lakes, rivers, and oceans. The evidence is abundant and rather shocking. And as far as anyone can prove, we have no diplomatic relations with these intruders from other worlds.

Indeed, it’s now an open secret that these off-worlders not only patrol our skies but also inhabit our waters.

Before listening to Dolan’s opening statement, I was unaware just how entrenched some USOs are. In particular, these ships have long occupied humanly inaccessible underwater locations, far too deep to be reached by our most advanced submarines. And they are not exactly friendly invited guests eager to exchange warm greetings with those who have evolved here over the last million years.

According to Dolan, ET groups occupy bases in the deepest trenches on our world, including the Tonga Trench (10,000 meters deep) and the Puerto Rico Trench (8,000 meters). Plus, there are a myriad of other sites, such as a likely underwater base just off the coast of Malibu, California, where numerous observers and military personnel have witnessed USOs.

Now, it’s one thing to observe ET ships zigzagging across the sky and then blipping out of sight, but quite another to realize that they have, more or less, colonized our planet deep under our own bodies of water.

In a friendly universe, why is secret ET colonization permitted?

So, when the moderator called on me for a statement, I found myself moved by a righteous indignation that surprised me.

According to the general tenets of exotheology, we live in a friendly universe pervaded by the love of God and supported by ministering angels, a vast cosmos governed by Golden Rule ethics and cosmic law.

Advanced ET races live according to these great truths in some form—unless they come from exploitative planets that, according at least to UB cosmology, must be rebellion worlds or otherwise rogue spheres. Think of the Romulans, Klingons, and Borgs, fictional Star Trek versions of such loveless and secretive ET groups.

In my own opening statement, I did my best to get across the idea that, at least according to the Urantia revelation, we live in a well-governed universe whose advanced worlds live in interplanetary harmony and worship the same God on Paradise. The UB even provides sample prayers from such worlds!

Further, I argued on the panel that ET races learn to honor universe ethics through eons of planetary evolution. They presumably have enjoyed biological uplift by their own Adam and Eve and were graced by visitations from Paradise-origin teachers—though I did not get that far in my presentation.

As in the Star Trek example, civilized worlds are sovereign, peace-loving, and self-governing, and at some point they federate with neighboring planets. They all surely know that benevolent local universe deities and celestial administrators oversee the activities of mortals on all worlds and benignly regulate the intercourse among such worlds.

Should it be allowable, I asked the panel and the audience, that off-planet races can disregard human sovereignty on our own home turf? How can they inhabit our planet without formally introducing themselves to our leaders and asking permission to become residents alongside us? Ultimately, why are they hiding so far out of reach in bases located many miles down in our oceans? Is it possible that our leaders have entered into secret agreements with them that are undisclosed?

What rules apply when ETs visit an immature world?

The responses to my queries by Dolan and other panelists were eye-opening. At first they seemed to set aside the ethical implications of USOs, perhaps on the unspoken assumption that there is no shared moral ground with these strange beings. But a few panelists warmed to my exotheological observations derived from Urantia Book cosmology and ethics.

Richard Dolan argued on the panel, and privately to me afterwards, that the ETs’ far greater power accounts for their apparently amoral behavior. He questioned whether human concepts of ethics should be relevant, given the vast scale of differences between our immature planet and an advanced world. He further opined that ET visitors may at their discretion exercise their superior power and technology, comparing this behavior with our heartless treatment of the domesticated animals of our realm. The implication was that we must accept extraterrestrial intrusion because, in some sense, might makes right.

In the conversations I had with speakers and audiences at CITD, I did my best to get across that, according to epochal revelation, all of God’s creatures are one grand community of universe siblings. We are all equally loved, all indwelled by a divine spark, and a universal ethics surely must apply on all inhabited worlds.

If I had more time to speak, I would have explained that we are a rebellion planet greatly weakened by a double default, and therefore vulnerable to ET intervention. I might have argued that we attracted these interlopers because we don’t yet exercise political sovereignty over our home world as a unified humanity.

Over the years I have discussed the UB with Dolan in brief encounters. He told me on the last night of CITD that, in light of my arguments, he would return to his copy of The Urantia Book and look deeper. I urged him to start with Paper 49 (“The Inhabited Worlds”) and Paper 72 (“Government on a Neighboring World”)—and to stay in touch!