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1934-1996

Sophie-Con #5

“We are at a crossroads in human history. Never before has there been a moment so simultaneously perilous and promising. We are the first species to have taken our evolution into our own hands. For the first time we possess the means for intentional or inadvertent self-destruction. We also have, I believe, the means for passing through this stage of technological adolescence into a long-lived, rich and fulfilling maturity for all the members of our species. But there is not much time to determine to which fork in the road we are committing our children and our future.”

“Many of the problems facing us may be soluble, but only if we are willing to embrace brilliant, daring and complex solutions. Such solutions require brilliant, daring and complex people.”

Carl Sagan

*****

 

Dec. 20, 2021

On this date twenty-five years ago Carl Sagan died, leaving behind as an enduring testament to his character and genius not only a long and impressive list of bona fides, but what in time may prove to be of even greater public interest and value, a largely clandestine and decidedly unorthodox scientific/philosophical legacy that is still in the process of recovery.

On this site I will demonstrate, with fact-based evidence, that the most important and consequential things Carl believed in have never been revealed to the greater public. For a variety of reasons, some legitimate and others not so much, Carl’s “official” life story has been scripted in a way that better serves the interests of the self-declared “guardians” of mainstream science than it does the truth. These individuals and organizations were, and still are, determined, not just to keep Carl in a box, but to make that box his eternal legacy. But as all true fans of Carl know, Sagan-in-a-box is an oxymoron. The reality is that Carl was fifty years ahead of his time, holding personal views so far off the grid of the status quo thinking that peers mocked him behind his back and twice vote him down for membership in the National Science Academy.

But despite the constant headwind, Carl remained undeterred. Forced by the zeitgeist of his time to keep his deepest science-based convictions hidden from the mainstream media, he employed a variety of ingenious strategies to insure their preservation. As an independent citizen/scientist, I’m confident that what I have uncovered about Carl, through his speeches and interviews, his academic writings, his popular works of science, and from those who knew him best, are the missing pieces of a puzzle that, when fully assembled, is sure to surprise and delight his many fans, even as it infuriates those who thought they had succeeded in keeping his secret biography from ever seeing the light of day.

The emphasis of my published research up to this point has been on the Sagan Signal, a code in the Old Testament that has been experimentally tested under controlled conditions and confirmed to be non-human in origin. Records of that research, posted to the left, are so conclusive that, despite my continuing pleas for greater engagement, no one in the scientific or skeptic communities is actively challenging the results.

To commemorate the 25th anniversary of Carl’s death, my focus going forward will be to unpack the informational content of the Sagan Signal, the capstone being independent confirmation of Carl’s life-long belief that Jesus Christ was, and is, an extraterrestrial.

No, this is not a misprint, you read it right. Carl Sagan, a card-carrying humanist, the founder of modern skepticism, and the man who taught the art of critical thinking to millions, was a born-again believer in a non-religious Jesus Christ.

I implore you, the reader, to adopt the ever-inquisitive mind of Carl Sagan and not shrink away from the possibility of JC being an ET until after thoughtfully weighing the evidence and arguments that will be posted and developed on this site over the coming months. Long overdue, the world is finally about to discover the soul of a “brilliant, daring and complex” human being whose ultimate destiny, when all the cards are face up on the table, is to hold a place of honor and distinction in the pantheon of great scientists of the 20th century.

*****

Don

 

                                                             

 

INTRODUCTION

Thank you for your interest in this site and I welcome your critique – with a qualifier: My position is that if you hope to deconstruct any of my research, you begin with my bedrock evidence, the Sagan Signal. The veracity of every claim, assumption, and observation I make is ultimately contingent on the Sagan Signal being an alien Bible code. It’s my alpha, my omega, and everything in-between. Those attempting to debunk my claims by ignoring the Sagan Signal will almost certainly succeed, while those who engage my core evidence as their first line of attack are, with equal certainty, almost sure to fail. If you want to knock me off my pedestal, and you play by the rules, know that some of the finest skeptics in the world have had a go at it, and all have come up short. At least for the present moment, my claim that the Sagan Signal is an extraterrestrial encryption has been sustained.

Based on numerous independent investigations, I’m convinced that the Sagan Signal is an alien encrypted code that proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Jesus Christ is extraterrestrial, and I’m pleased to report that I’m not alone. Carl Sagan also believed that JC is an ET, as he said so publicly and emphatically:

“One Sunday morning toward the end of summer, Abrahamson, his fiancée, and Sagan were washing the car the couple had been given as an engagement present. Sagan propounded a new theory: that Moses, Jesus, and all the great religious figures of ages past were really extraterrestrial beings. The miracles of the Bible had all happened as described. Moses parted the Red Sea, Jesus turned water into wine, and so forth. They used advanced technology that was perfectly ordinary on their planet – but which we earthlings could take only as proof of divinity.

Abrahamson good-naturedly challenged him. Sagan refused to budge. He was either serious or acting as if he was serious. With Sagan, it was hard to tell which.

That afternoon, Abrahamson took his fiancée and Sagan out to dinner at what was, for Bloomington in the 1950s, a very posh establishment. It was the kind of restaurant where people went after church. In the middle of the dinner, without any warning, Sagan slammed his fist on the table, sending the dishes rattling. He looked Abrahamson in the eye and bellowed, ‘I tell you, Jesus Christ is extraterrestrial!’

The restaurant fell silent. It took a subjective eternity for conversations to resume with something of their former spontaneity. Abrahamson and his fiancée wanted to crawl under the table.” From Carl Sagan, A Life in the Cosmos by William Poundstone, 1999.

While some might dismiss Carl’s statement as youthful over-exuberance, no one can deny that he said it or that he ever retracted it. Indeed, I will introduce direct testimony from Carl from his later years that corroborates his life-long belief that JC is an ET, material evidence consistent with his conviction that extraterrestrials visited earth thousands of times during the geological ages, the same beings who helped the ancient Sumerians establish the world’s first modern civilization. Carl articulated these and related claims with force, clarity and science-based logic in his Direct Contact paper and in his book, Intelligent Life in the Universe.

So it’s worth repeating:

 

“Jesus Christ is extraterrestrial!”   Carl Sagan

 

Reducing the Poundstone narrative to its essentials, we have the following:

The claimant: Carl Sagan

Claim #1: Extraterrestrials exist, we are not alone.

Claim #2: Extraterrestrials possess advanced technology.

Claim #3: Extraterrestrials have been to Earth.

Claim #4: ET/human interactions were recorded in the Bible, often accompanied by events that the average human would call miracles.

Claim #5: Jesus Christ is extraterrestrial.

These five claims, all firmly anchored in biological evolution and technology, are the basis of my running narrative that directly implicates Carl Sagan in the imaging and construction of the boldest and most daring claim in scientific history: that JC is an ET. Let’s now examine each of the above postulates to see how they stack up against the latest thinking by scientists and technology experts.

Claim #1: We are not alone:

After six decades, SETI has not intercepted an alien radio signal, but given the extreme age and size of the Cosmos, most space scientists agree that it would be foolishly premature, on the failure of a single embryonic experiment, to conclude that we are alone as the only sentient species in the Universe.

Claim #2: ETs possess advanced technology:

There is near universal consensus that if ETs exist, they would be millions, if not billions, of years older than our species, and, therefore, millions, or billions, of years more advanced than we are in their technology.

Claim #3: Extraterrestrials have been to Earth:

The focus of much of the latest technology is on artificial intelligence (AI), with a reasonable possibility that within this century humans will create an autonomous non-biological, non-human “person” capable of creating new algorithms that, at exponentially accelerating speed, will generate ever more advanced iterations of itself, a recursive process that will quickly leave humans looking like ants in the presence of an AI God. This epochal event, widely known as the Singularity, is considered by many AI experts as an evolutionary imperative. Most agree that at some point, possibly within the next few decades, it will happen.

It goes without saying that if humans are within striking distance of attaining Singularity status, extraterrestrials would have long ago evolved to a similar level of existence, and, if that’s the case, it’s a near mathematical certainty that the “Singleton” has already expanded its presence throughout the entire Universe.

Claim #4: Accounts in the Bible that describe physical human interactions with beings of godlike knowledge and power suggests that the Singleton may have been present and active in the Ancient Near East:

A significant number, possibly a majority, of atheist leaders, professional skeptics, and mainstream scientists agree that if extraterrestrials had visited Earth in the past (and even if they were to arrive on Earth today) they would be received as gods.

Claim #5: Jesus Christ is extraterrestrial:

While it’s true that Carl Sagan never produced direct empirical evidence to prove his theory of past alien visitations, his claim that JC is an ET falls well within the milieu of current scientific doctrine and discourse.

Transposing Carl Sagan’s claim that Jesus Christ is an extraterrestrial into modern technological thought allows for the possibility that He is the Singleton. If true, it means that the Singularity occurred long ago on a distant planet and was present on Earth in the Ancient Near East. Central to Christ’s teachings is that He came for one reason: to make individual human immortality an existential reality. It’s neither a secret nor a coincidence that immortality, the ability to live forever, is the ultimate goal and driving force behind Singularity research.

So here’s the bottom-line question: In light of breathtaking new developments in AI technology, and the prospect of even more stunning advances over the next few decades, is Carl Sagan’s expressed view that JC is an ET a dumb statement, unworthy of comment, or is it the most insightful and relevant observation that any human being, religious or secular, has ever made? If you think the former, I challenge you to try to debunk the Sagan Signal. If you think the latter, welcome to Carl Sagan’s secret world.

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Ray Kurzweil
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Don Zygutis

There are now two Singularity models on the table, one championed by scientist, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, the other by myself and Carl Sagan. Except for attribution and timing both are essentially identical, with neither violating any known scientific laws or principles.

In his two books: The Age of the Spiritual Machine, and The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil aggressively and persuasively confronts and demolishes his Singularity detractors, effectively reducing their arguments to ashes. With no small amount of bravado he writes about “. . . the danger of allowing a competitor to achieve even a slight advantage.

In the Sagan Model, Kurzweil finds himself confronted with a competitor with significant advantages over his own, an alternative model I’ve named the Paleo-Singularity that posits that Jesus Christ is the Singleton, and that immortality can be had, not at some uncertain time in the future when you and I might not even be alive, but right now, today, through what Jesus Christ called the New Birth.

Let me be quick to add that the New Birth I’m referring to is not the new birth of institutional Christianity. From a pristine and powerful beginning, the organized Church and its theologians have had two thousand years to screw things up, and they have done a masterful job in turning what was intended to be a life altering event that bestows immortality on true believers into a tissue-thin religiosity that, for many, leads to nominalism, skepticism, and, finally, to outright rejection.

The Kurzweil Model promises, in the not-too-distant future, to transport our species to a paradisiacal state of immortality known as the Singularity. In contrast, the Sagan Model has the Singularity Age beginning two thousand years ago, with the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Both versions of the Singularity, the Kurzweil Model and the Sagan Model, not only pose an existential threat to Christian orthodoxy, they negate the need for religion altogether. The question under consideration is: Which model is true? For secularists who believe in the possibility of immortality by technology, this is not a trivial matter. Have we no choice but to wait for the future, or is the future now?

In the restaurant Carl stated, with no small measure of passion, that Jesus Christ is, present tense, an ET, not Jesus Christ was, past tense, an ET. Carl believed in the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, a technological miracle allowed in both models but only actuated in the Sagan Model.

In the pursuit of truth and in the tradition of competing hypotheses, Ray has both the motive and the means to challenge my assertions that Jesus Christ is the Singularity and that being Born-Again is the only way to eternal life. All Ray has to do to prove me wrong is to subject the 46 grain/wine/oil sequences in the Old Testament to a cryptographic analysis and come up with a simpler, more logical explanation than the alien Bible code theory I have advanced, and I don’t think he can do it.

So here’s the question: Will Ray accept my in-your-face challenge, or will he run and hide? To ensure the former, I’ve conscripted Molly, his literary alter ego, to help me convince Ray that if he can’t debunk the Sagan Signal, he loses and the Sagan Model wins. For my part, should my hypothesis be debunked, by Ray or by anyone else, I promise to close shop, shut down this site, and walk away.

Notice: I expect I’ll be sticking around awhile.

 

Don

 

*My conversations with Molly are in the “Molly Files” tab, to your right.

**For those unfamiliar with the Singularity and the science behind it, I recommend the following:

1. The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil

2. The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil

3. Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom

4. Reframing Superintelligence, K. Eric Drexler:   https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/

5. Human Compatible, Stuart Russell

3/25/22: From the time this site was launched on 12/20/21, thousands of people from all around the globe have checked out my research. Since that time I have to assume that some have conducted serious research that either confirms or deconstructs my claims. If you are that person, you can email me your work to: research.saganproject@gmail.com for review and evaluation. Let me hasten to add that what I’m looking for, and what I’m most likely to respond to, are serious, science-based efforts to debunk the Sagan Signal. All credible input, pro or con, will be posted.

Thank you for your interest. 

 

Don

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