Understanding is becoming aware of the fact that civilization itself is in trouble and we have done it by overpopulating the planet, and by moving toward self-service and greed. These sort of things are directly the wrong approach.

On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious.

I also see an undercurrent - and perhaps the Indigo Children are another aspect of this â€" that's moving in the right direction that I thought was really predominant during the last 35 years since I started Noetics. So we do see quite a few people bucking the tides. At the moment, however, the political system, in my opinion, is going in the wrong direction.

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were less than 3 billion people on the earth, closer to 2 billion. By all measures that we can come up with right now,. with the lifestyle and consumption pattern of the Western industrial civilization, we can probably sustain about 2 billion people on this earth. We already have over 6 billion. China and India are aspiring to come on as industrial nations, aspiring to the lifestyle of the Western world, and it simply can't happen.

I believe we have these capabilities. It doesn't mean that we will use them. Our future is not assured here. It's not clear that we will survive our own folly, but we have a rare opportunity to do that if we listen and see the messages that nature is showing at us right now, that the finiteness of our own resources and our own planet are showing us right now.

I call it "the big picture effect." Getting to see earth as a small planet and to see it in that perspective, seeing it in the heavens as a planet as opposed to being down here among it, most of the people, in fact, I guess all of the people who have had that experience, shift their thinking.

I have been privileged to be briefed and to know that we have been visited [by aliens]. I do not have first hand experience in this regard, but I have been on investigating teams and I have been briefed by insiders who do know.