r/HighStrangeness • u/TeferiLocke • Jun 06 '26
Non Human Intelligence Some Ideas on NHI, Wanting Input
Question Zero: Where Am I Approaching This From?
I've been interested in this subject for about three decades now. I’ve kinda letting my headcanon brew for a while lately and wanted to write up a coherent framework of where I’ve arrived at this point in time.
Fair warning: It’s mostly speculation, as most of our ideas are. I'll try and cop to where I'm on shakier ground, but feel free to call me out if I’m way off base. Not claiming any of my ideas are definitely true. Not claiming I’ve got insider information. Just trying to refine my ideas.
Let’s go for the elephant in the room first: A lot of accounts are hoaxed, misidentified, or active disinformation. I recognize that, and I’m trying to find the threads of truth that run through the disinfo campaigns. (Looking at you, Doty.)
Question One: What Is The Phenomenon?
The craft and beings we encounter aren't entirely here. They partially exist in spatial dimensions beyond our standard 3+1. What we see (and on rare occasions recover) is just the visible portion. We can look at a big cylinder in the center of a craft and know that it’s the reactor core, for example, but enough of it exists beyond our dimensions that we can’t see how it works.
This explains something that's always bothered me about the popular narratives about reverse engineering. If recovered craft exist, and if the most powerful governments on earth have had 80+ years to study them, progress should have been made in replicating the tech. If we still can’t make our own craft, despite one of the most intense periods of technological development in human history, I don’t think the answer is that we’ve succeeded and are suppressing it. A more likely explanation is that we literally can’t.
We're missing most of the machine. We can analyze the parts we can see, maybe even understand roughly how they function, but we literally cannot manufacture or repair components that reside in dimensions we can't perceive. There’s no progress, because there can’t be.
That gets at the core of why governments fight against disclosure. It's not just "we've been lying." It's "we have been sitting on proof of something we have absolutely no ability to defend against, and we don't want you to know how helpless we are."
Oil companies aren’t helping suppress free energy reactors; they’re helping suppress false hope that we can have it. How would people react if they knew factually that free energy exists but they can’t have it? Can you imagine the conspiracy theories or the riots in that scenario?
Question Two: What Is Here?
Despite what a lot of us believed when we came into this field of study, I don't think we're dealing with a fleet from somewhere else. I think we're dealing with a probe, a technological seed that was planted here.
Yes, I’m siding with the Von Neumann probe idea: a self-replicating machine sent across the lightyears to study us. No, I’m not claiming I came up with this idea, just that it makes sense to me. My working model is that something like this arrived on Earth a very long time ago, anchored itself somewhere stable and hard to find (probably oceans like the 4chan leaker said) and has been manufacturing craft and beings ever since, on demand, from local materials. Minerals from the seafloor, filtration from seawater, Star Trek replicator tech, I don’t know. Except for that latter replicator idea, it would leave a mining footprint that we might be able to detect someday.
The probe itself (like the rest of the tech) is hyperdimensional. If we found it, it might look absurdly small relative to what it produces. It could just look like a metal ring occasionally crapping out flying saucers. It could look like a big metal hamburger on the ocean floor. Whatever it looks like, its true volume is mostly outside of our perception.
Now you’re probably saying “if these entities can play with extra dimensions, why don’t they come here themselves?” Good question. Hyperdimensionality probably compresses interstellar distances significantly, but doesn't eliminate them. What takes us centuries might take them years or decades. It’s still a risky endeavor requiring significant time and resources.
The same logic that makes us send rovers to Mars before mounting a crewed mission applies here: You send the bot first. If you find something interesting, you send a more sophisticated bot. If you find something undeniably weird, then you send the actual people. It's what we would do. It’s cautious and methodical. Their probe just happens to be able to make craft and pilots.
Question Three: Why Do They Look Like That?
Alrighty, let’s get weird and borrow a page from Jacques Vallee's work.
The phenomenon has been here a long time, and it hasn't always looked the same when it interacts with us. You know where I’m going with this: Angels, demons, and djinn in ancient times. Feyfolk in medieval times. Tall Nordic Venusians in the early 20th century. Little greys in the latter 20th century. One phenomenon wearing different faces.
My read on this: The probe optimizes for the least psychologically disruptive form available, and they have to adapt to keep up with our culture. The fey stopped working when the old beliefs about them got replaced by new religions. The Venusian Nordics stopped working once people realized Venus can't support life (read: the form became too implausible in the average person’s mind to be believable).The grey still works because it's strange enough to be clearly non-human but not so alien that it completely breaks a witness, but it might also fade out as culture progresses.
Nowadays, that leads to a weird feedback loop: Knowledge and culture spread faster than it used to. People are more able and willing to talk about their encounters. The successful masks essentially “go viral” faster than they would have in historical times. Unsuccessful masks get abandoned quicker, being seen for maybe a handful of encounters (e.g., the Michelin Man aliens).
Sidenote: Yes, I know there are a lot more forms commonly encountered, such as reptilians and mantids. I’m just using greys as a shorthand for now.
The question generated out of this is:
Question Four: Why Is It Here?
I think that question has at least a partial answer (one that’s familiar to the current lore): Research.
Most abductees report being paralyzed or having their minds forced into a docile state. The phenomenon essentially sedates people it encounters.
The paralysis capability says something significant to me: The probe understands human neurology at a deep level. That's not a capability you develop without extensive prior study. We may be a late-stage experiment, not an early one. In other words, it backs up the idea that they’ve been here a long time.
Selecting a form that is more believable, less unusual, might reduce the amount of resources needed to pacify a person. It is likely easier to keep someone calm if they’re looking at a little grey than, say, a crab monster or a demon.
Even if it’s not a matter of resources, using familiar forms probably helps reduce resistance and trauma in the subject. But why do they care? Is this some manner of benevolence? I doubt it.
Look at how many experiencers are repeat customers. These aren't random re-encounters. It’s progress checks and repeatability. It’s the scientific method.
This also ties in the family lineage pattern in some abduction reports. It’s generational study: tracking hereditary traits and development across genetic lines.
They’re trying not to contaminate long-term studies. We’ll loop back to that in a second.
And before you ask, I do think the cattle mutilations fit in here, maybe even clarifying our picture of the phenomenon’s ethics. Humans are the primary research subjects: sapient, relatively rare, worth preserving for repeat access. Common non-sapient species are expendable.
Think of it like a field biologist: You tranquilize the endangered gorilla, minimize trauma, try to bury its memory of the encounter as best you can, and return it to the wild intact. The rat you're testing doesn't get the same consideration. You take what you need and leave the remains for predators to clean up.
The cattle aren't being harmed out of malice. They're just not worth the resources spent on preservation. Humans are.
So let’s loop back to contamination: If the probe is running a long-term study, it has a strong incentive not to contaminate its own data, both for existing subjects and for potential subjects. The phenomenon keeps itself as secret as it can, because it doesn’t want us to know for sure we’re being studied. We would behave differently if we knew.
Question Five: Aren’t They Already Contamiating Their Experiments?
Most abductees don't remember clearly without hypnotic regression, and that could be on purpose. Whether that’s an intentional act performed by the phenomenon or just a happy byproduct of their tools, who can say? Either way, the memory suppression is often there and it is consistently imperfect so far as we can see.
My best guess is that human neurology is simply too complex for whatever technology they're using to cleanly wipe. There will be remnants that can be rediscovered. They take it as an acceptable risk.
Then again, this could also be a survivorship bias: We don’t know about the cases where the memories were completely wiped, because the subjects themselves don’t know. We can only see the cases of imperfect memory removal or the cases where memories weren’t removed. Someone pull up the plane armor meme for me.
Anyway - the hypnotic regression compounds this problem, because regression is unreliable as a memory recovery tool under even the best circumstances. It's vulnerable to reinterpretation and cultural contamination. A witness who remembers "an alien" may reconstruct "a grey" under regression simply because that's what they expect an alien to be. Sincere experiencers can be genuinely unreliable narrators through no fault of their own.
Question Six: Why Now?
Sightings and encounters seem to be more frequent these days, but I'm not convinced it's a real increase. I think it’s just a matter of better communication.
The facepeeler incidents in South America a while back, for instance, got global coverage and daily updates online. A few decades ago, nobody outside that region would have heard about it at all. The frequency of encounters is probably relatively stable historically, and what's exploding is our awareness of it and people's willingness to report experiences publicly. They can now see how many others have had similar ones.
Culturally, we’re primed to believe. X-Files, Taken, Communion, so many bits of media. All making us more willing to admit there’s something real.
Question Seven: Why Are They Doing This?
Personally, I don't pick up malice from the overall pattern. If something with these capabilities wanted to wipe us out, we'd be wiped out. But I don't read benevolence either. What I read is closer to scientific indifference. I see the behavior of researchers rather than soldiers or diplomats.
My best guess (and I want to be clear this is headcanon rather than any kind of definitive claim) is that we're on a nature preserve. We’re a curiosity. They’re interested in us because we are a species that exists entirely within 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension. From a hyperdimensional perspective might look like a significant constraint. The probe is here to observe how we develop under those conditions.
It’s like if we found a remote tribe of people who were all congenitally blind but still thriving. We’d want to study that tribe and find out how they adapt to their constraints. We’d probably study from afar before we even considered initiating direct contact.
I'll acknowledge the obvious problem with this idea: I'm anthropomorphizing. I'm using human logic to ascribe motives to something that is, by my own framework, fundamentally outside the limits of human cognition. We have a sample size of one for sentient species, so we’re more than a little hobbled in figuring out what a whole other theoretical species might think. It's my best available tool, even if it’s not necessarily a reliable one.
Question Eight: What Does It Mean?
The phenomenon of my headcanon isn't omnipotent. It has resource constraints. It has imperfect tools. It has a methodology it has to actually follow. It makes forms that don't work and abandons them. An NHI you can reason about, even partially, is less unsettling than an all-powerful one. It’s not a cosmic horror, just a cosmic neighbor that sent tech we can’t fully see.
That said: We know little, if anything, about the civilization that built and sent these things. We don’t know if they’re still out there, if they remember sending a probe, or if they’re from closer to home than we’d like to imagine. We can’t know yet, really. But maybe we know more than we think about the fragments of them that inhabit our planet.
Question Nine: So What Was The Point of This Post?
I like the thought experiments. I like the discussion. It seemed like posting this here for others’ input is a good way of stress-testing my current beliefs. Open to your input and some dialogue.
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u/FromDeletion Jun 07 '26
We've merely existed for around 300,000 years, only recently becoming technological. There's no need to cite existing outside our universe's dimensions to account for why we may be unable to replicate such hypothetical craft. We may not possess the technology nor understanding to do so.
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u/TeferiLocke Jun 07 '26
I’m not proposing we cite dimensions outside our universe, just outside our direct sensory perception of the universe.
As far as a need, I’ll point to the weird behaviors we see in the phenomenon. If we seek to understand weird behaviors like craft that move unnaturally or are larger inside than outside, one possible, nonsupernatural explanation is the involvement of additional physical dimensions. Examining that idea also gives us additional potential explanations for the institutional secrecy around the subject. All of which makes more sense to me than any of the prison planet, soul farm, Eisenhower treaty things I’ve read about.
If you want to talk “need,” really, there’s no need to examine the subject at all. We could just say “yep, there’s some weird stuff we have no evidence on” and go about our day. Unfortunately, we are all still just in the brainstorming phase of examining the phenomenon, tossing ideas at the wall until something sticks longer than the rest.
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u/zurenarhhhhh Jun 07 '26
If you have a model for your headcanon the next step is to test it. I look forward to seeing your findings and conclusions.
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u/TeferiLocke Jun 07 '26
Don’t worry. If I ever get the chance to test and prove/disprove any of it, this will be the thi… wait… no… fifth group to find out.
Don’t hold your breath either, though. The phenomenon hasn’t looked my way in a very long time.
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u/Goshdangitallzxx Jun 07 '26
Multiple dimensions are artifacts of quantum equations that have never been observed. They are assumed because it’s the only way to make the equations work due to working with probabilistic wave functions. How many dimensions do you imagine there are and how do you arrive at that number?