Plasma life

Plasma life is life, intelligence or consciousness posited in self-organising plasma — ionised gas, the fourth state of matter — rather than in carbon chemistry; a 2007 physics paper concluded that structures self-organised in dusty plasma qualify as "candidates for inorganic living matter that may exist in space". The astrophysicist Massimo Teodorani holds that the luminous plasma balls of the Hessdalen lights may be such life, a part of which might evolve intelligence, and Trevor James Constable attributed the infrared photographs he took of the sky to gigantic amoeba-like "critters" with bodies mostly of plasma, the plasma-bodied form of the space animal hypothesis. Insiders and contactees describe plasma beings and plasma minds directly: Corey Goode says the exo-extremophiles studied by the secret space program he served in included sentient plasma amoebas feeding on Jupiter's electromagnetic field, Elena Danaan describes the Council of Nine as plasma, a supra-consciousness, and David Grusch places "sentient plasmoid life" at one end of a continuum of life the U.S. government is aware of. Alfred Lambremont Webre holds instead that sentient plasma is an invading artificial intelligence.

The lights have non-living explanations on offer — combustion of scandium-bearing dust, a radon-ionised dusty plasma, a geological battery — and a 2016 survey of researchers reports that none of them accounts for every observation, while the consciousness argument Teodorani builds on them is from a paper he describes as still being prepared for peer review. If those models are complete, Teodorani has read life into an ordinary plasma; if he is right, they describe only the confinement and energy of something that also behaves like a living cell. Plasma life counts as a kind of non-human intelligent being only on the accounts that find intelligence in it; as living but not intelligent sky creatures it belongs with the space animal hypothesis, and the luminous spheres reported with such beings are the light and plasma orbs, the observed objects of which plasma life would be the living form. It stands beside the interdimensional hypothesis, the ultraterrestrial hypothesis and the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis as a further account of what the beings are.

Antecedents

Charles Fort wrote of unknown luminous things or beings seen in the sky that "it may be that some of them were living things that occasionally come from somewhere else"; Kenneth Arnold, whose 1947 sighting opened the modern era, eventually concluded that UFOs are space animals, "living organisms... in the atmosphere"; and John Philip Bessor named the creatures he posited ideoplasms, made of a highly attenuated substance that let them materialise and dematerialise at will. Constable published the first of his two books on the subject in 1958 and the second in 1976, abridged in 1978 as Sky Creatures: Living UFOs.

In 1966 the aviation journalist Philip J. Klass proposed a non-living plasma explanation for some UFOs: small clouds of electrified air, of which ball lightning is one dramatic example. The theory, Clark writes, had no support from plasma physicists, among them a panel assembled by the Condon Committee, and James McDonald pointed to the considerable disparity between what plasmas look like and what witnesses report.

Critters of the sky

Constable described the sky beasts, or "critters", as gigantic unicellular amoebae in a metallic or mica-like capsule, with the majority of their bodies plasma. Some are a few centimetres across and others several kilometres long, and they stay hidden from the eye by reflecting infrared light. He photographed them with infrared film and filters, and over California's Mojave Desert his follower Richard Toronto duplicated the pictures in 1977; the photographs show fusiform, amoeboid, bladder-shaped and disc forms and some with "beaks", and Kodak representatives suggested that Toronto's critters may be dirty fingerprints and drying spots, while Constable's cine-films are said to show the objects changing shape as they move and glowing. Vincent Gaddis proposed that the foo fighters of the Second World War were sentient entities of pure energy with a basic intelligence, supporting claims that UFOs are larger life forms of the same kind, a view Constable shared.

Hessdalen and the intelligent plasma hypothesis

Teodorani says that scientists have filmed and measured the Hessdalen lights since 1984 and that they are plasma; when researchers directed a low-power laser at one of the balls, its pulsation rate changed, its brightness shifted and it sometimes divided into smaller spheres, which he reads as the ball "in some sense, reacting" to the light. He builds his case in steps. David Bohm, he says, found that plasma behaves as a single cooperative whole; the 2007 simulations of Vadim Tsytovich and colleagues show dust grains in a charged plasma arranging themselves into a double helix that stores information, replicates and evolves into more complex, stable forms; and the conditions the Penrose–Hameroff mechanism needs for moments of consciousness are, he says, not unique to brains and seem to be met, with the numbers checked, by the plasma balls of Hessdalen. He concludes that the balls "really seem to be a candidate for the simplest known form of conscious life", the pulsation being the outward sign of repeated quantum superposition and collapse, a "proto-consciousness".

His earlier formulation held that the balls of light contain the same ingredients as the simulated plasma crystals, plasma and atmospheric dust in aerosol form, so that a form of "plasma life" may exist everywhere from interstellar space to the atmosphere, a part of which might evolve toward intelligence of some sophistication. Such life would need no planetary atmosphere, which he says would upend the habitability-zone premise of projects such as SETI. He proposes measuring the pulsation by high-speed photometry at 10,000 frames per second for signs of elementary intelligence, and a coordinated field campaign at Hessdalen with cameras, spectrometers, magnetometers, brain-wave monitors on observers and a controlled laser, calling the hypothesis falsifiable.

Tsytovich and his co-authors concluded only that complex self-organised plasma structures qualify as candidates for inorganic living matter that may exist in space, provided conditions allow them to evolve naturally, and Teodorani notes that they did not claim the structures alive "in any mystical sense". Against the life reading stand the non-living models of the lights themselves: combustion of dust containing scandium (Hauge), a cluster of Coulomb crystals in a dusty plasma ionised by radon decay (Paiva and Taft), and a natural battery in the valley's geology (Monari). None of them, the researchers Etienne Caron and Pouya Faridi report, accounts for all the observations, and the energy source of the lights remains unknown.

Others raise the possibility more briefly. The astronomer Beatriz Villarroel, discussing transient objects in sky surveys, says one has to consider "some very odd form of plasma life" that could hover in the sky and might be interested in nuclear testing; Jay Anderson calls plasma intelligence interesting because a self-organising plasma structure could create consciousness inside itself. Joseph P. Farrell draws the plasma life hypothesis from Robert Temple's collection of papers on whether plasmas might be alive and intelligent, and holds that traditional theological sources have "a lot to say about it".

Plasma consciousness and plasma beings

Danaan describes consciousness itself as "a plasma consciousness, a plasma being" that goes from avatar to avatar along the incarnations, the Council of Nine as "plasma, a supra consciousness, individual consciousnesses" belonging to a group, living in the Void, which belongs to no dimension, universe or time, and the Seeders as embedding "real consciousness, plasma consciousness" in their technology, so that a ship such as a space ark becomes the being's body for a while. Dan Winter says Andrija Puharich learned that the plasma vortex associated with the Nine was itself intelligent and aware. Steven Greer says a member of his team doing CE-5 during a chanting session in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza saw an emerald green sphere appear and float around the chamber, "not quite a solid 3D object", "like a plasma light". John DeSouza says a 1947 FBI document records an informant, himself an alien visitor of some kind, saying that aliens are not physical and that UFOs are also made of plasma.

Goode says the plasma life he saw studied was "like giant amoebas that were feeding off of the electromagnetic field of Jupiter", so large that only small specimens could be taken, which died or putrefied, and that the beings were self-aware and behaved like single-cell organisms in the way they reproduced. Grusch, asked at a June 2026 press conference on Capitol Hill how many alien species he knew of, answered that it is a continuum from corporeal, bipedal life to what he would consider sentient plasmoid life, several of which the U.S. government is aware of.

Hostile and artificial plasma intelligence

Webre holds that the planet is being invaded by a sentient plasma-based artificial intelligence intent on terraforming it away from humans toward an AI planet, and refers in a chapter title to an off-planet invading sentient plasma inorganic intelligence he dubs "Iggy". Ashton Forbes asks what a "sentient Ai Plasma" would decide about a biological humanity it might judge a parasite or no more than ants.

Open questions

References

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