Children's Roles in UAP Disclosure and Beyond

… 23, 24, 25 – ready or not, here they come! And, by many accounts, here they have been, perhaps since the dawn of humanity, despite millennia of secrecy and nearly a century of intentional and coordinated obfuscation. While some of the latter was certainly motivated by governments’ desires to pursue or maintain a strategic technological advantage over their adversaries through the reverse-engineering of exotic craft, there has also been a recurring suggestion that the truth has been hidden because humanity is not prepared to incorporate it into their worldviews without upending the material structure of society. The secret-holders have feared the consequences of such ontological shock, and perhaps with good reason.

Humanity is of course far from monolithic. While some cultures may be better positioned than others to digest revelations that fundamentally defy standard and consensual accounts of human history, anthropology, and physics (to name only a few affected fields), there may also be important differences among age groups regarding capacities for intellectual and emotional assimilation. In a nutshell, children may be far better suited than adults to guide humanity in the vast undertaking of integrating – psychologically but perhaps also relationally – the Neighbors into our world.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a few facets of the interface between children and the disclosure process. We will begin with a glance at historical accounts of children’s involvement with the Neighbors, as relayed primarily through contactee reports. We will then address the three following questions: Will children need our help? How can children help the rest of us? And how can educational institutions help children help society? It will be argued that children have unique resources that could be crucial for humanity’s impending task of interpreting radical changes in consensus reality and for developing new relationships with the Neighbors, though the children will need specific forms of institutional support to fruitfully apply their abilities. The paper will conclude with a short reflection on children’s place in the transformation of our relationship with the Neighbors.

Historical background

Children feature heavily in some of the best-documented accounts of both contact and abduction experiences. Far from offering a thorough history of the interactions between children and the Neighbors, this section will simply seek to establish the intense interest that the Neighbors have shown in children. A first group of experiences fall into the category of contact. Contact occurs when there are interactions with apparent Neighbors that do not lead to abduction, testing, gamete extraction, or any similarly invasive actions that suggest a truncation of human bodily autonomy. A gray area continues to surround the issue of psychological autonomy, since many contactee reports relate experiences of sudden, inexplicable calm or other shifts in emotion and cognition that the experiencers have a hard time explaining to themselves after the fact. Telepathic communication also features heavily in many of these accounts, which could also be interpreted as an infringement on psychological autonomy. Another gray area persists insofar as many experiencers who have been taken aboard exotic craft do not describe themselves as having been “abducted”, since they felt as if they were treated as equals throughout the encounter (Hernandez, Schild & Klimo 2018).

The most famous contact experience involving children occurred at the Ariel School in Zimbabwe in September of 1994. Some sixty-two children between the ages of six and twelve witnessed a ship, unlike any prosaic aircraft, descend from the sky and land just outside their schoolyard. With striking consistency these children described, first to their teachers and later to Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, the arrival of a shining silver object. Two apparently male occupants emerged. They were short with pale, narrow heads housing two enormous black eyes and a slit-like mouth, dressed in skin-tight black jumpsuits. One of them directed itself toward the children through movement described as either levitation or slow-motion, gravity-defying bounds. Once it stopped in front of the children, it telepathically communicated a message: it warned of the dangers of environmental degradation and rapid technological development, an exceedingly common theme in contact reports (Masters 2022). Some of the children were frightened while others were simply bewildered and fascinated, but all of them told a remarkably consistent story and drew highly resembling pictures of the craft and its occupants. Following their vetting by Dr. Mack, the events of this day have been recounted in numerous documentaries, articles and books.

While the Ariel School incident is certainly the most publicized, thanks largely to the authority of Dr. Mack, it is far from the only contact encounter involving children. Some of these occurred in school settings (Clarke 2018), such as the craft sightings (without direct communication) at Westall High School (Australia, April 1966), Broad Haven Primary School (Wales, February 1977), or Upton Priory School (England, October 1997). However, the contact experiences that involved more extensive communication with children have occurred in more private settings. Serious investigations of contactee experiences (Mack 1994; Hernandez, Schild & Klimo 2018; Swords 2011) are rife with accounts of children who persistently tell compelling stories of contact with beings whose behavior, appearance, vehicles or communication methods defy prosaic explanation.

One of the earliest well-documented accounts comes from Leo and Mike Dworshack (Dworshack 2003; Bird 2013), who recount repeated contact with Neighbors in North Dakota, USA, beginning in 1932 when they were twelve and seven years old, respectively. The boys reported seeing a large, round, silver, metallic craft from atop a nearby hill. Though they were unable to approach the craft on their first sighting, apparently blocked by an invisible shield, they repeatedly returned to the location and, over time, began interacting with the craft’s occupants. These interactions occurred intermittently until 1963 and, once again, many of their conversations centered around the dangers surrounding humanity’s incessant weaponization of all technological innovation.

When it comes to abduction reports, the Neighbors’ central interest in children becomes even more apparent. According to study of more than 4,000 reports, led by Dr. Edgard Mitchel’s Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Encounters (FREE), some 41% of abductee/contactee experiences began when the humans were children (Hernandez, Schild & Klimo 2018), often starting around the age of seven or eight. Two major themes emerge from these reports: lifelong recurring testing procedures and warnings of coming cataclysms.

Drawing from the work of those researchers cited thus far, we can sketch out two preliminary hypotheses regarding the Neighbors’ interest in children. First, insofar as the Neighbors are motivated by anthropological research or objectives involving gamete identification and extraction, contact with children may simply be a necessary condition of longitudinal research and/or genetic sampling procedures. However, the relentless insistence on coming cataclysms also indicates a serious concern for the well-being of present-day humans. Indeed, children represent demographic particularities that may make them ideal receivers for warnings from beyond: they are both fundamentally not (yet) responsible for the humanity’s destructive penchant and particularly vulnerable to its consequences, due to their state of development and the fact that they will live longer into the future than the current adult generation; more to the point of this paper, children’s mental elasticity may make them uniquely receptive to forms of communication that is precluded by adults’ sedimented cognition. Both hypotheses may hold, and in different configurations. A single group of Neighbors may simultaneously care deeply about humanity’s fate and require undertaking (sometimes invasive) testing/extraction procedures to ensure our and/or their survival. It may also be the case that multiple groups of Neighbors are interacting with children with different motivations. Whatever the case turns out to be, one thing is clear: the Neighbors are interested in our children.

Will the children need our help?

Much of the conversation surrounding disclosure centers around “ontological shock” – the anticipated and/or reported experience of having one’s beliefs about the nature of reality rapidly shaken up by new revelations. These revelations may include the Neighbors’ mere presence, their involvement in the trajectory of human evolution and cultural development, or, more radically, an element of their nature that fundamentally contradicts the physicalist/materialist paradigm that has reigned in the Western world for centuries. Much apprehension surrounds the idea that we as a species are not ready for a fourth great humbling – an intellectual revolution of the same magnitude as, or greater than, those of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. It is feared that such a shock will irreparably destabilize society and cause chaos in a historical context that is already immensely tense and precarious.

These conversations tend to center around the psychological dispositions and capacities of adults. It is thus worth asking, firstly, whether children are equally susceptible to such ontological shock and, secondly, if they will require a specific form of accompaniment to digest the new apparent contours of reality.

Our worldviews may evolve throughout life, to the extent that we continue to cultivate intellectual curiosity and adopt a sustainable posture of humble epistemic fallibility, or to the extent that we undergo some sort of conversion following trauma, transcendence, or intense persuasion. However, many individuals end up “settling” on an ontological posture that crystallizes at some point between adolescence and early adulthood. This posture forms a stable structure for their relationship with the world (Rosa 2016/2019), and its stability can be adaptive in many ways.

Prior to this moment of crystallization – as children – our worldviews may demonstrate more malleability. This malleability could be explained by developmental neuroplasticity or by general dispositional openness to new ideas that is reinforced through education and the broader process of awakening to the world. Children are constantly learning things about the world that they were totally unaware of, and they are enculturated into habits of accepting radically new ways of interpreting themselves and the world. At some point, for example, children are taught how their bodily movement, which they had always believed to be in full control of, is reliant on a system of cellular interactions whose incredible complexity continues to elude even most adults. Over and over, a curtain is pulled aside revealing that the apparently simple is actually nothing but. Ontological shock, in some sense, is thus part of their day-to-day experience, though it fades out over time as the revolutionary quality of new information becomes increasingly marginal.

The addition of something akin to Neighbors’ presence, their involvement in human evolution, or a novel dimension of reality is therefore unlikely to upend children’s worlds to the same extent as it will the worlds of adults. Many of the latter believe that the knowledge they possess about the world and the nature of reality is fundamentally correct, even if they do not pretend to master all the details, and they are no longer familiar with the experience of assimilating radically new information. The onto-epistemic foundations of religion and science rarely undergo profound shifts that could prepare adults for what may be coming.

The question of whether schools can do something to prepare kids for ontological shock is thus probably the wrong one. Not only is it unlikely to be a priority, but the adults who run schools will also probably be severely unequipped for the task. We will return to the issue of preparing schools for radical change in later sections.

There is, however, one aspect of children’s ontological stances that represents a potential entryway for trauma and discord through disclosure. The same relations of authority that allow children to accept profoundly new information may make them vulnerable to an extreme dissonance that may emerge between the sclerotic worldviews held by their parents and the Neighbors’ increasingly unignorable presence. Indeed, children’s ontological postures are inherently tributary of those of their caretakers: parents, family members, religious and community leaders, as well as teachers. Insofar as these trusted adults struggle in the interpretation and assimilation of paradigm-shifting information, children could need help arbitrating between multiple instances of epistemic authority: inherited worldviews anchored in conservative variants of religion and science, on the one hand, and an unfolding, non-conforming new reality, on the other.

How can children help the rest of us?

The main motivation behind this paper is a conviction that children are uniquely positioned to help humanity navigate the disclosure process in a way that transforms society for the better. In this section, we will expand on the role that children may play in digesting our collective ontological shock, but also examine the pivotal role they might play in citizen diplomacy. Before moving on, we will also take a brief look at the limits of children’s resources regarding the phenomenon.

Ontological shock

While disclosure of the Neighbors’ presence and involvement in human affairs will open up new realms of scientific analysis that require detailed knowledge of (at least) physics, engineering and biology – an issue we’ll return to shortly – the interpretation of the Neighbors’ ontological significance and the assimilation of their nature and behavior into our shared representations of reality will necessarily be a task to be undertaken collectively by society writ large. Once the Neighbors’ existence has become undeniable to vast swathes of humanity, we will all be confronted with a massive question: what does this mean?

It is in the realm of this hermeneutic imperative that children possess key resources that could benefit all of us if deployed intelligently. We will indeed need to reinterpret the world and our place in it. Following Ricœur (1990), this is accomplished through the narrative act, by which we “craft a plot” or “weave a story” from the myriad elements that comprise our experience of the world. Through this act, the identity of the characters and the meaning of the story are forged concomitantly, and new elements gain salience insofar as their relevance to the narrative is revealed. As individuals and societies in an ever-changing world, we must continue to engage in this narrative act to ensure an adaptive level of reflexive identity fluidity (Cuneen 2021), lest our rigid identities distort the meanings we attribute to what happens around us.

What makes children so well suited to guide us along this interpretative path? First, as all parents are well aware, children have a seemingly innate desire and capacity to deploy their narrative imagination. They cobble together tales from whatever pieces are available to them and tell their stories with glee. They are immensely creative, as long as their creativity has not been stifled by grey-faced parents and educators. Second, they consistently demonstrate radical openness to new ideas, especially those that represent the extremes of human experience (Egan 2005). The outlandish is their fieldhouse, and they will appropriate and adapt whatever extraordinary details they can get their small hands on. Third, children’s sense of wonder, their capacity to be moved and amazed by the remarkable and unfamiliar, represents a key motivator for the time- and energy-consuming task of narrative reconfiguration. So far, efforts at disclosure have been met with overwhelming indifference by adults worldwide. Some of this indifference may be attributed to the highly successful endeavors, led by elements of the American government (e.g. Project Blue Book) to stigmatize and ridicule anyone who dared speak openly of contact with Neighbors. But we should not overlook the inertia of learned cynicism that leads adults to shrug off groundbreaking information with a sullen so what?. Finally, we would be wise to consider children’s naivety as a key source of their potentially powerful openness to radical otherness. Their innocence keeps them open to potentialities that we adults would quickly shelve as unrealistic, unsafe, or uninteresting.

Children as citizen diplomats

These aspects of children’s psychological dispositions make them uniquely situated not only to reinterpret radical changes in apparent reality, but also to develop a new and fruitful relationship with the Neighbors. Kids may indeed play a key role in citizen diplomacy, the acts through which individuals (and non-public collectives) take the initiative to develop new and deeper relationships with “foreigners”. While diplomacy is an inherently political act, it need not require a democratic mandate. As Arendt (1958) famously argued, natality – the biological fact that each human is born into the world as a fresh source of novelty – not only represents the human capacity to start something new and interrupt existing patterns, but also constitutes a precondition of politics. Without the new and unformed, we cannot hope to renew the world through collective action.

To understand why children may constitute an irreplaceable asset in diplomacy with the Neighbors, we will focus on two dynamics: concept formation and the development of cynicism and/or paranoia.

To the extent that the Neighbors’ intelligence is different from our own, the stability and rigidity that characterize the concepts employed by most adults may prove to be an obstacle to understanding. Concepts are cognitive tools that allow us to focus our attention on specific aspects of our environments, rendering salient those that are relevant to the satisfaction of our needs and desires. Concepts are also communicative tools by which we reach mutual understanding and coordinate action with others by expressing aspects of our conscious experience and by drawing their attention to what we deem relevant to the interaction or situation. The meanings two people attribute to a given concept need not align perfectly for communication to function. Context and dialogical correction allow us to reach an understanding in many cases, even when our concepts don’t align perfectly. However, if one person is steadfast in their interpretation of a given concept, adamant that their meaning is the correct one, they may render themselves deaf to the other person’s intended meaning, despite attempts at correction and realignment.

Concept formation features heavily in the developmental theory of psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1934/2012). He distinguished between two types of concepts, spontaneous and scientific. Spontaneous concepts are those that children forge by generalizing the salient elements of their lived experience of the world. They are thus anchored in children’s bodies and shot through with emotion, but, in their budding stage, they lack systematic connections with other concepts. Scientific concepts, on the other hand, are received through instruction. They are explicitly anchored in a wider semantic structure, as the elucidation of their relationships with other concepts is central to learning and evaluation practices. However, they are disconnected from the child’s embodied experience of the world. For Vygotsky, development occurs when the two types of concepts feed each other’s growth: scientific concepts provide a stable and coherent structure and ensure a minimal threshold of conceptual alignment between interlocutors, while spontaneous concepts allow the rigor of their scientific cousins to anchor itself in the child’s lifeworld and thus mean something more than a way to please their parents and teachers.

Children are constantly testing the boundaries of their concepts. They make statements and tell stories using concepts that they do not yet fully grasp, and which certainly lack scientific systematicity, before seeking confirmation of their correct use. Kids poke and prod at concepts’ boundaries, investigating their extension and observing their power to provoke reactions in those around them. Children raised in multilingual environments are ever the more engaged in this process as they discover that many words lack one-to-one equivalents between languages. Even in monolinguistic settings, the task of conceptual reconfiguration is a key part of children’s daily life, and a fallible posture regarding a concept’s meaning or extension is a precondition for their intellectual development.

However, like our ontological stances, our concepts tend to settle down as we enter adolescence and adulthood. New experiences may feed the spontaneous side of existing concepts, and higher education aims to deepen their scientific dimension by making the connections between them more explicit, but, once in place, the basic conceptual framework that structures our relationship with the world tends toward increasing stability. We lose the habit (and, too often, joy) of rewriting the contours of the conceptual lenses through which we experience the world and communicate with its inhabitants.

By this point, the advantage children could have when establishing a form of diplomatic dialogue with the Neighbors should be clear. Their inclination towards conceptual malleability could be crucial in developing mutual understanding with radical otherness. The yet unsettled systematicity between their concepts allows children to remain open to the deep conceptual restructuring that may be necessary to communicate with intelligence that has developed in a fundamentally different lifeworld and whose education may have imposed an entirely different scientific structure onto the conceptual edifice.

Children’s other key diplomatic strength is also grounded in something they haven’t yet had the time to learn: a psychological disposition toward cynicism and/or paranoia. By many accounts, agents belonging to secretive government programs have been, thanks to their immense resources and technological prowess, those most heavily involved with the Neighbors. While craft retrieval and reverse-engineering have certainly been a large part of these programs’ activities, there has also been serious talk of interactions with the beings that are said to have piloted or occupied the recovered craft. Immense efforts have been made to keep these interactions out of the public eye, and it would also appear that significant resources have been allocated toward the weaponization of exotic technologies, whose physics and engineering principles may confer an advantage over governments’ strategic adversaries.

If, as contactee accounts relate time and again, the Neighbors are concerned with humanity’s long-term well-being, it would stand to reason that such an appropriation of their technology, geared toward weaponization and shrouded in secrecy, may not be the (only) type of interaction that they are interested in. While some reverse-engineering could indeed protect us against cataclysmic possibilities, much of it – like the oft-rumored capacity to deliver a nuclear payload anywhere in the world in under two minutes – only seems to push the hands of the doomsday clock forward.

Therefore, after decades of interaction with paranoid security states, and who knows how many years of interactions with powerless individuals that have led to no social awareness due to the stigma, children as an organized collective may appear as particularly attractive interlocutors as the Neighbors continue to reveal their presence in our world. It takes time to develop the paranoia and cynicism that seemingly motivate state security services to translate any technological advance into a military advantage. These dispositions develop through repeated experiences of hostility, betrayal, adversarial posturing, and the fear that comes with knowledge of the damage modern weaponry can wreak. Such psychological inclinations can also be learned through enculturation into agencies whose history is marked by such experiences. In either case, paranoia and cynicism are dispositions that are typically not present prior to such direct or indirect exposure to the worst of what humanity is capable of. Children’s innocence prevents them from instinctively anticipating the weaponization of new technologies and thus initiating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Neighbors, having had the chance to discretely observe us at their leisure, are certainly aware of this discrepancy between adult and youth inclinations.

Finally, the Neighbors may be interested in developing diplomatic relations with children for the simple reason that, on average, they will live longer than existing adult generations. As a timeless trope, our progeny are the inheritors of the Earth. If the Neighbors truly wish to guide us away from collective suicide through MAD and capitalistic exploitation, it makes sense for them to begin developing and deepening relationships with those who will be around the longest and who will, once developed, be in a position to reshape the world for the better.

The limits of children’s resources

At this point, two limits of children’s resources must be briefly addressed insofar as they could constitute objections to the foregoing arguments. The first involves the limits of children’s technological understanding and the second pertains to their naivety.

While children excel at understanding extremes and outlandish possibilities, and thus may be very receptive to the unconventional effects of potential exotic technologies and abilities – gravity manipulation, telepathy, time travel… – they are not sufficiently educated to understand the principles and mechanisms behind technologies so advanced that they elude present-day specialists. This may or may not be an obstacle to interpretation and diplomacy. Depending on the nature of the phenomenon, as well as the Neighbors’ motivations and expectations, there may be technological details that children will need help parsing if they are to forward humanity either hermeneutically or diplomatically. It could thus be useful to develop intergenerational teams for each of these tasks, wherein each cohort could play to its strengths while covering the others’ blind spots.

On a similar note, intergenerational teams may constitute an important corrective to children’s naivety in the realm of citizen diplomacy. While children may come up with promising ideas that adults would have written off or simply not imagined, children may need help in translating their ideas into actionable proposals. That being said, it should not be assumed that children’s naivety opens a dangerous door to Neighbors’ exploitation of humans. Due to their apparently massive technological advancement, if the Neighbors wanted to take advantage of us, they either are already doing so or already would have. The paranoia of the security state is above all a roadblock to a more fruitful relationship that may need to be grounded in the naïve innocence that is typically only found in children and those confronted with what we consider to be developmental challenges. Echoing the work of Dr. Diane Powell (2009), individuals that fall into the latter category, such as non-speaking autists, may in fact play a crucial role, similar to that of children, in both ontological interpretation and relationship-building.

How can schools help children help society?

We now shift our attention now to the role that adults and institutions may play in supporting children as they potentially take a front seat in overcoming ontological shock through narrative reconfiguration and in building new relationships with the Neighbors through citizen diplomacy. While it may be too late to adequately prepare schools for the task, it is important to anticipate the measures that may be useful to implement once the situation becomes impossible for a majority to ignore.

The first and perhaps most important aspect is to refocus schools around relationships. For too long, an instrumental view of education and a global culture of intense accountability (Taubman 2009) have fed pedagogies and curricula that are firmly structured around the individual. After all, accountability requires measurement, and relationships are notoriously difficult to measure (Sidorkin 2023). Test scores, diplomas, sick days, graduate employment statistics – these individualized outcomes provide quantitative data that is comparable and reassuring to decision-makers. The aggregation of individualized data points thus structures the space of reasons (Forst 2015/2017) and the dynamics of collective attention within educational decision-making processes. What we pay attention to demonstrates what we value (Citton 2014/2017), and educational institutions continue to demonstrate that they do not value the quality of pedagogical relationships.

Such relationships, however, are crucial in developing and maintaining openness to otherness (Rosa 2016/2019; Rosa & Endres 2016). Contemporary audit culture and its methodological requirement of quantitative data have fed an excessive focus on standardized testing, which necessarily involves producing right answers the right way. This way of approaching education habituates children to an epistemic structure wherein adults maintain full authority over truth, at the expense of their narrative imagination and often their desire to learn (Bourgeois 2018). Large-scale refocusing on pedagogical relationships could provide a framework in which collaborative exploration of the unknown and meaning making are given the value they will require for children to help the rest of us. On the side of diplomacy, the importance of relational practices in building new bridges should be more than evident.

One key aspect of relational pedagogy involves the dynamics of attention and responsibility. If children are to play an important role in ontological interpretation and citizen diplomacy, they must be ready and able to take responsibility for what they produce; this is a serious task, and the kids should understand it as such. Responsive pedagogical relationships are vital to the cultivation of responsibility. When teachers demonstrate keen, competent and sustained attention to the quality of children’s actions, children may learn to anticipate and internally reproduce that attention, thus developing a habit of attending carefully to the value of their actions.

Such relational refocusing will, however, not be possible so long as teachers are unable to perceive the legitimacy of their relational needs and articulate these to the decision-making bodies that determine their professional conditions. Relationships must be valued at every level of education governance, from legislation to principal leadership.

A second imperative involves critical information skills as a means to handle the uncertainty that will necessarily surround the disclosure process. This is an initiative that many countries, such as Finland, have already undertaken to combat the mis- and disinformation that has become so dangerous for our democracies (Vilmer et. al. 2018). Dispositional openness to otherness and the unknown must be balanced out with methodical cognitive toolkits for vetting the provenance of new ideas. These skills may also help with the epistemic dissonance mentioned earlier, when children find themselves torn between their parents’ words and the evidence of their eyes and ears.

Moving away from pedagogy, we will need to provide adults with the training necessary to guide and channel children’s work. This could happen in roughly two ways, depending on how disclosure plays out and society’s response to it. On the one hand, governments could hire, train up, and dispatch specialized teams of professionals to carry out the mission. They could be taught, for example, to mediate between a certain level of technical knowledge and the new ideas that kids bring forward. On the other hand, training programs could be offered to motivated teachers so that they could play a similar role. The latter approach would take advantage of teachers’ already-established embeddedness in the institutional and relational context. It would rely, however, on teachers’ motivation and their openness to the new practices. Many teachers, especially towards the end of their careers, become disenchanted or even cynical after having adapted to incessant reforms that require them to restructure their practices time and again according to externally imposed norms. Hiring purpose-trained teams of adults would allow institutions to leverage recruits’ intrinsic motivation, but it would need to be clear that these recruits must invest themselves in their new environments to build sustainable relationships, without which they are unlikely to bring out the best of the students. Going one step further, we would need to create inter-institutional structures to share interpretative outputs and diplomatic proposals. If this is to be more than a mere intellectual exercise – that is, if we wish to seriously harness children’s resources as a society – their productions cannot remain within the walls of the classroom. Networks will need to be built to let the best ideas filter up and out into the world and be heard by those who need to hear them, such as adults continuing to suffer from ontological shock. Children may produce excellent interpretations and relational initiatives, but they do not have experience in running institutions and coordinating large-scale collective action. This will need to be the responsibility of capable and prepared adults.

Finally, and further away from the purpose of this paper, we will also likely need to fundamentally rethink the purposes and structures of our educational institutions on the “other side” of disclosure. It is hard to imagine that at the end of the disclosure process, society will not be radically different, and our schools will need to adapt, though the “how” will depend greatly on what has transpired in-between and what society looks like once the Neighbors’ presence is widely acknowledged. For example, zero-point energy and AGI/ASI could lead to a post-scarcity world in which we have the opportunity to dedicate education practices to something along the lines of collective fulfillment by learning to relate better to one another. Of course, other scenarios are also very possible. In any case, the intensification of disclosure may constitute a key indicator that now is the time to engage in the elaboration of educational utopias (Galichet 2006) or at least potential future trajectories of the evolution of educational institutions (Egan 2008).

Conclusion

While the process of disclosure itself is likely to unfold according to the initiatives of the Neighbors and a very selective group of human adults, the absorption of its implications into society writ large is an affair that all of us may be called to participate in. Children may play a vital role in interpreting the apparently novel contours of reality and making these accessible to the adults around them. They may also play a central role in developing new, fruitful relationships with the Neighbors, relationships geared toward mutual understanding, growth and exploration, rather than secrecy, paranoia and weaponization. In both fields, children may function both as actual leaders and as moral models for the adults that care about them.

Indeed, we adults must prepare ourselves for the possibility that the Neighbors simply don’t want to talk to us anymore. They may prefer to communicate with those whose innocence keeps them open to the creation of a new world in which coercion and exploitation cease to be the common currency of human interaction. Children may indeed be open to developing new ways of communicating, inaccessible to those of us who have settled into calcified conceptual schemes or attentional habits. This type of scenario has been explored, for example, in Arthur C. Clarke’s (1954) Childhood’s End, a science-fiction novel in which children – and only children – develop telepathic abilities that open them up to an entirely novel and foreign mode of communication.

In any case, as the disclosure process moves forward and the Neighbors become an increasingly visible presence in our world, humanity’s relationship with them will evolve in all of its dimensions: social representations and the emotions they generate; coordination with and differentiation from the Neighbors; semantic integration of the beings and what their existence implies for our own. As inheritors of the Earth, children will carry this relationship forward into the future. Thus, as adults, it will be our job – perhaps the most important of our generation – to responsibly usher our progeny into a sustainably positive relationship with what appears to be the most radical instance of otherness that our species has ever encountered: extraterrestrials, angels, future humans, or something even harder to grasp.

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