Did you have a specific religious or UFO-related experience that sparked the idea for The Great Filter? Where did your curiosity begin?
Regarding the UFOs, I never had any firsthand experience. But although it is safe to assume that they don’t exist, or at least are not alien spacecraft, they do have very significant importance in the modern landscape, as they represent a form of modern folklore. They can be seen as a natural evolution of fairies or gnome tales and as such hold a very important place in our society. As Jung would say, they represent a modern archetype of our collective subconscious.
They also represent a challenge to the materialism of our time, something that cannot be really measured or caught, except with the classic out-of-focus, blurry picture by a lucky witness in a rural part of the States. So if these things live only in our mind, they represent an alternative reality, a reality that lives in the psyche, which nonetheless can hold as much value as the material world.
The same can be said for religious ideas or experiences. I am agnostic but have had many “religious experiences” where I felt a deep connection with the world and an elevated plane of consciousness. This can happen during rituals or certain music.
So, to answer your question, probably some of the ideas came to me and not the other way around. In the beginning, the book’s focus was just on the folkloric aspect of ufology. But then one day, as we were driving on a highway in California, I saw a burning car on a lane. I stopped and took the picture. This would later spark the idea of connecting the book also to the environmental crisis and the possibility of human extinction.
In a second instance, we stopped by Mono Lake in California. It formed 1 million years ago and is one of the oldest lakes in North America. It looks like it’s from another world with its tufa formations and highly saline waters. I took a picture of a dead bird in it and just thought it looked eerie and beautiful. When doing the final edit for the book, scientists had just discovered a previously unknown microscopic organism in the lake, offering potential insights into the origins of complex animal life on Earth. This again related to the subject of my book.
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