When I wrote Justice Is Mind in 2010, I don’t think I believed that the technology I postulated in the story would come true. While videos of memories haven’t entirely come to market, the technology of thoughts into pictures certainly seems to have become a reality.  The advancement in mind-reading technology doesn’t surprise me. I remember what I learned all those years ago from scientists involved in the development of this process.  But it’s the potential reality around elements of First Signal, that are the subject of this post.

Last week the House of Representatives Subcommittee on National Security at the Border and Foreign Affairs held a hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) or as the general public refers to them—UFOs. At the center of this hearing was a UFO whistleblower by the name of David Grusch who is a former military intelligence officer and was with the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force.  With testimony about “aircraft of nonhuman origins” and “biologics” that were “recovered from some craft,” at some point we must assume that those testifying are telling the truth as they know it, have witnessed it, or been told it. The time for blanket denial is most certainly over.

Let us now assume for a moment the following from First Signal—what if alien spacecraft and extraterrestrials are here on Earth? If we are to take the testimony of last week on the face as fact, then we can easily apply it to the story in First Signal. Let’s take it a step further, in First Signal only the President, certain members of the executive staff, and Air Force Space Command (now Space Force) are in the know about this alien presence. Is this fictional secrecy any different from last week’s testimony from Rep. Jared Moskowitz, “…the American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence and unexplainable phenomena.”

While we know there is a sizable element of the population that wants to know the truth about extraterrestrials, we also know that there is another side of the population that would rather remain, sorry, ignorant as they simply can’t fathom, or don’t want to fathom, the possibility that off-world technologically advanced civilizations exist. It was General Reager in First Signal that stated, “Do you think it’s a good idea for the public to know about this? Do you? They can barely handle bad weather. That’s the one downside of a democracy. Disclosure. There are some things that just can’t be disclosed. And to ensure compliance with any ridiculous Freedom of Information Act requests the documentation has been removed from government files. Call it what you want. I call it protecting the people from themselves. And before you utter one more word the President will agree with me on this.”

I believe between the hearings on this matter, combined with the discoveries the James Webb Telescope is revealing almost on a daily basis, we are on the cusp of some sort of revelation. Now, what the revelation may be is anybody’s guess.  But I ask you, would we, with all the conflicts our world is experiencing, be worse off with this knowledge? Let’s remember what President Reagan said at the United Nations, “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.” While Reagan may or may not have been referring to the threat of communism as the outside threat or extraterrestrials, we don’t know. 

I prefer to believe the following comment from one of First Signal’s followers on YouTube, “Loved the message of your movie, I do think if aliens were to came [sic] to contact us, they would be benign. I think if they were evil, they would have destroyed themselves long ago. Who knows if they are watching us still?”