fair enough, Michael... I mean I think this is what it all boils down to.
so I look at Diana Walsh Pasulka picking up spaceship junk in the New Mexico desert with Tyler... and then finding the same unearthly materials that Jacques Vallee finds... as being proof of a nuts-and-bolts reality behind the tic-tac videos that the dod keeps pumping out. how do you see this?
First, I believe everything is, at bottom, mental. Second, I believe that communication can occur between minds, either telepathically (not frequently), or perhaps more often, "unconsciously" in the realm of the collective unconscious. Also, of course, communication can and does occur in the usual way via speech or writing. If DWP and JV find artifacts that are similar, there may be some cultural influence, but beyond that, they could be generated by the collective unconscious, which, I suspect, is able to a degree to create mental processes that we may interpret as "unearthly". Hence we have the nuts-and-bolts interpretations of phenomena that even go so far as to appear to leave behind unusual metals, etc.
I'm not questioning whether or not such artifacts are tangible to the senses; I accept they probably are. But seeing as I believe that everyday artefacts that seem very much "earthly" are equally tangible to the senses, I have to say that that doesn't make them literally any more real either. The senses are about perception, and they present to us things that have apparent concreteness -- that impression is overwhelming and lies, I believe, at the root of the naive realism of many materialists. Drop a brick on my foot, and I see it and feel it when it hits -- that's how my senses work, can't help but.
Put in idealistic terms, some mental process that I perceive as a brick, obeying another mental process that is termed gravity, interacts with a third mental process (actually a group of many mental processes) that I think of as me. There's no doubt
something is happening, but people are so used to thinking in terms of a literal world in which there are bricks and gravity and people, it's quite hard to interpret things in any other way. I like Donald Hoffman's idea that bricks, gravity and people are merely
icons for something (which I believe to comprise mental processes) that lies behind them. These processes can't be directly apprehended as they actually are, and in that sense, everyday ways of perceiving reality are illusions; often remarkably consistent illusions -- but why wouldn't they be if what they're representing is reality -- a reality in which our own collective unconscious may be able to some degree to create "things" that we can perceive just as we can perceive what we think of as stars and planets?
I think it's important to realises that if we have creative abilities, they're limited; our dissociated, seemingly individual consciousnesses can't create what we think of as stars or planets, which are created by Mind At Large. But they can, or at least I suspect so, collectively create seemingly nuts-and-bolts phenomena such as bits of alien spacecraft made out of what appear to us as "unearthly" materials that in everyday "reality" we don't come across.
We live in an apparently regular world. Most of it seems to be governed by the inherent patterns and regularities of M@L; but to a small extent, I suspect we can create on our own account -- probably always within the overall schema created by M@L's mentation. These days, we often think of that schema in "scientific" terms, but science is just the latest way of describing what we perceive. If I find a piece of exotic alloy purportedly from an alien spaceship, I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I'm rather saying that it represents something we collectively ("unconsciously", or without reflective awareness) may have created, and most things that are actually created can be perceived, in much the same way that M@L's creations can be perceived.
Thinking dualistically (even moreso materialistically) is what often throws a monkey wrench in the works. It leads to a lot of contradictions and puzzles. For me, the most productive way of thinking, the most parsimonious one with the least contradiction, is idealism. I could be wrong, of course, but for what it's worth, that's how I see things. Hopefully this addresses your question.
Edit: Just watched the following video (h/t a posting at Bernardo's forum
here). I think it weaves in and out of some of the points I've made -- not saying it's about exactly the same thing, but, like I say, it touches on them:
And here's a more extensive interview at Batgap: