Introduction
I was initially a little worried about The Fourth Mind, fearing Whitley had gone off the ranch a little. But no. He’s still pushing boundaries.
I take a very critical approach to any material on ET or Visitors, so I am listening carefully. Conveniently Erik Davis just posted an interesting Substack piece – The Wild Awake: Animist Awareness in the Ventana Wilderness that reminded of a vital perspective to take. He makes two particularly relevant points for me.
Davis notes that Times have changed. Consider the following developments, springing up like kudzu, thrusting through the cracks of consensus materialism:
- A post-humanist appreciation for the embeddedness, interconnection, and complex hybridity that surrounds and shapes human subjectivity. Doesn’t the “we” who we think we are include the creatures in our gut biome at least as much as it includes our social media feeds?
- The rise of AI and the explosion of simulacral humans, autonomous drones and robots, and extraordinarily persuasive conversations with digital agents. This tsunami of algorithmic Others is forcing us all to grapple with once sci-fi ideas about technological minds and beings.
I have argued elsewhere that we seem to have an animistic impulse. We are using our prowess with tech to ‘re-animate’ our now increasingly human-mediated environment. Are we trending toward organic tech?
In The Fourth Mind Whitley makes two compelling arguments:
- The Visitors’ primary state of existence is non-material
- They come here in what seem to be engineered organic forms.
Wrapping our brains around these ideas
What we believe is primarily to serve our psychological needs, even though we love to imagine we are engaging in rational activity. Our beliefs are formed from culture (past and present) and our experiences (life generally as well as culture and family of origin). We might be sceptical, susceptible to authority or needing to conform to ensure membership of a culture or community.
Reason doesn’t play as big a role as we like to imagine. It’s just a word that means what we believe it to mean. Developments in cognitive science and neuroscience suggest that we generally aren’t very good at thinking, and doing so is very demanding. We should be modest, and careful about our capabilities.
This matters because how we respond to Whitley’s arguments will depend on the degree to which they unsettle our psychological equilibrium and threaten our beliefs.
The Visitors’ primary state of existence is non-material.
Whitley reminds us that so is ours. Materialists will immediately have a difficult time with this. So too will believers of various religious persuasions for whom the non-material realms of their belief system might be highly ordered and do not include Visitors.
There is a wider body of thought which entirely comfortable with this idea. There are many expressions of it. I found content in the Theosophical movement, the Western Mystery Tradition and in the writings of Robert Monroe, Frank DeMarco and Stewart Edward White.
They come here in what seem to be engineered organic forms.
This is a more problematic claim. Whitely asserts he has access to confidential or highly restricted material that includes autopsy reports. He also refers to a reddit document. Unfortunately, I must have been distracted when he first mentioned it, so I can’t make any comment. This is a downside of audiobooks. He is of the opinion that this document is credible.
My willingness to allow this position may have merit rests some long held reservations that the apparent physicality of some ET doesn’t appear to have any biological sense behind it. I suspected that maybe they were more metaphor than form.
We have an intellectual tradition that asserts our organic forms evolved from primates but also religious traditions which asserted humans were created. Abduction reports include efforts at hybridization between humans and Visitors – and this also has traditions in religion and mythology.
Whitley observes that the autopsy reports say the bodies examined appear not to be well-designed. Maybe flawed but still fit for a limited purpose, I guess. There’s a difference between guided evolution and bio-engineering to create a single purpose vehicle. He says that Visitor bodies are more akin to diving suits. Perhaps if they are something you put on and then take off soon after its like a distinction between off the rack clothing and tailored outfits? Some don’t have to be finely crafted.
Thinking about brains and intelligence
The Visitor’s brains are apparently 20% larger than ours, and differently structured. Whitley doesn’t think this means they are more intelligent. I am not sure of his argument for several reasons.
The first is that I am not at all sure that there is a clear divide our non-organic and organic beings, so intelligence can’t be brain-based. In any case there’s a lot of evidence of intelligent activity with brain around.
The second is that the brain has a function in relation to the body’s being in the world, so it’s reasonable to assert that a brain that is the product of evolution in our ecosystem may have a different structure and function to one that might be the product primarily of bio-engineering in an entirely different setting.
So, we can say that brains have a vital role in some organisms, but we cannot assert that they are sum of evidence of what we imagine to be intelligence. As Davis reminds us intelligence may be all around us and we maybe should stop thinking of it as something separable.
Personally, I think we are a long way from understanding ‘intelligence’ and we too deeply mired in what we might call ethnocentric biases to have any hope – for the moment.
A reason for non-disclosure?
Whitley’s efforts to make sense of the evidence he has, and the experiences he has had demonstrate that our current intellectual paradigms do us no favours.
I suspect the reason ‘disclosure’ has taken so long is that our capacity to adapt isn’t as robust as the more confident brashly assert. Whitley asserts that the Visitors are in control of this. This kind of makes sense. The radical non-ordinary has always been carefully managed. It is traumatic and is cordoned off by boundaries marking the sacred and the taboo.
ET has been engaging with humans for a very long time and it, so far as I know, has never been like Star Wars or Star Trek. Although some stories from the Indian tradition and elsewhere do give reason to wonder what it was like before.
We are so entrenched in a human-dominated cultural mindset that we even imagine our measure of our sense of humanity and intelligence would be impressive to Visitors. Now I have no idea what they think, but I would be very surprised if impressive came to their minds.
As I write this in July 2025 the world seems dominated by tyrants, the psychologically very unhealthy, the ridiculously wealthy and people willing to swallow propagandistic swill and conspiracy theories – as well as the many who have just quit trying to do anything other than survive in their fog of desires and beliefs. In the meantime, systems of all kinds are in crisis. Evidence of ‘intelligence’ is very unbalanced.
Whitley’s struggle to make sense, even with his access, suggests to me that the last thing we’d want is ET or Visitors ripping off our psychological roof and exposing us to the existential reality with no protective filter.
We need to clearly understand the devastating impact of European invaders on indigenous peoples around the world. Yes, spears have been replaced with rifles and cars have replaced long walks. But the psychospiritual wounds have not healed, even after centuries.
Given the long history of engagement between humans and Visitors that has run as an undercurrent in our cultures for millennia, demands for ‘disclosure’ seem imprudent and ill-informed. Steady evolution of our awareness makes much deeper sense.
There’s a kind of cargo-cult mentality at times. ET has tech that can save us. That naïve sci-fi saviour delusion is painful to encounter. If that was the reality it would have happened already, you’d think.
Predators?
Whitley makes some confronting observations about the Visitors as predators. Such notions are not exactly what we want to hear. There are plenty of stories of ET terrorising humans.
I used to fish, and I detested the celebrations of those who thought they were superior because they fished only for the sport and practiced ‘catch and release’. I thought that was sadistic. So, the idea that we are prey doesn’t bother me too much. It’s part of the way of things.
We humans were routinely prey in times gone by, but we got good at eliminating most predators. These days death by predation is relatively rare – even if the predator might be a Visitor.
The psychological difficulty this idea presents is that while we might be ‘top dog’ on this planet we could be way down the pecking order on a cosmic scale. That switch in status could trigger a trauma response – because it would unravel our whole existential framework. Experience-based trauma is what we call PTSD. It is precipitated by a radical violation of our norms.
The imagined encounter with ET is the stuff of sci fi entertainment and we imagine that we’d be cool about it. But that’s what fantasy is about. We can be better than we are.
If ET suddenly appeared in our living room how many norms would be suddenly shattered? Would that experience be traumatic? Our exposure to sci fi would induce us to think not. But imagine ET as a predator rather than a saviour? How different is your assessment now?
They have motives you don’t understand. They have tech that makes ours look positively stone-age. And Whitley tells us that they pretty much do real magic as well. These are agencies that were cordoned off from our normal as either sacred or taboo.
They have always been dangerous to us. We need to remember that our predatory instincts have led to farming and animal health and welfare standards. Our prey have, in one sense, benefited from our predation. We have a massive complex system based on our predatory impulses.
So, predation isn’t an implicit evil, but realisation of it might be traumatic. Pause a moment and consider Christianity which promises safety from the predatory forces of evil – the Devil and his minions. If, suddenly, that promise is rendered ineffective? ET arriving into shared public awareness would likely precipitate such a crisis.
Conclusion
Whitley is speculating, which suggests that his Visitors haven’t told him anything directly about their nature, origin and purpose. He says he is also visited by discarnate entities, with whom he engages.
Mystery about nature, origin and purpose of mysterious beings is common, perhaps because it is meaningless without deeper understanding. An inner plane teacher I spoke with many decades ago was blunt. He hadn’t turned up to tell us things, but to teach us how to learn. He forced us to wrestle with habits of thought and become more open to deeper ideas. I see something similar going on with Whitley.
I must be blunt. He has read some commentaries and said a few things that are, to me, metaphysically naïve – more like a philosophically romantic take on things rather than a more critical analysis.
That said, however, where are you going to find such a sustained and focused meditation on the who/what/why of ETs/Visitors? The fact that I disagree with Whitley isn’t criticism. He is speculating from his standpoint and I from mine. It should be a collaborative endeavour, not a competitive one.
When we encounter the radically disruptive, our sense of normal is often injured and we resist being obliged to change. There’s a reason veterans have a bond. We prefer being normal – uninjured and unchanged. But that’s not an option for many. Hence the company of those who shared the outrage against our normal can become a critical community of a special sense of ‘one of us’ needed to feel okay.
It interests me that those who are calling for disclosure do not appear to be experiencers of any kind. Rather they seem driven by ‘rational’ demands. That should tell us something important
This isn’t a book where you to go to get information so much as get provoked. If you are not reacting emotionally to the ideas and still staying with the text, you are missing an opportunity to have your reality bias (we all have one) rattled.
I do recommend The Fourth Mind as an excellent and challenging disrupter – but only if that’s your jam.
And Erik Davis is a thoughtful and stimulating author whose Substack posts are fun and provocative.