"It's always been about us."
On the other hand, don't we humans tend to think that everything is about us? Not too long ago our species considered itself, its position, to be at the center of the universe. And despite our species' realization in our time of the immense extent of the visible universe and the little we understand about it, our characteristic psychological propensity is to think in narrow egoic terms about existence itself. We primarily think about and are concerned with our own individual existence (what we need, what we want in our short biological lifetimes) rather than recognize that we are each a part, a cell, in a human ecology within a natural ecology within a universe/multiverse/cosmos about which we know virtually nothing. I was especially interested in this paragraph in the Vallee paper you linked:
“In the mid-70s I proposed to approach the UFO phenomenon as a control system, reserving judgment whether the control would turn out to be human, alien, or simply natural. Such control systems, governing physical or social events, are all around us. They can be found in the terrestrial, ecological, and economic balancing mechanisms that rule nature, some of which are well understood by science. This theory admits two interesting variants: (1) An alien intelligence, possibly earth-based, could be training us towards a new type of behavior. It could be the “Visitor Phenomenon” of Strieber (1987) or some form of “super-nature,” possibly something along the lines of the “Gaia” Hypothesis. (2) Alternately, in a Jungian interpretation of the same scheme, the human collective unconscious could be projecting ahead of itself the imagery which is necessary for our own long-term survival beyond the unprecedented crises of the 20th century.” (pg. 116)
You could say that we are in general blind to our situation in 'what-is'. I still think that the ETH is the best available hypothesis to account for the physically measurable manifestations of many 'ufos', and that we received dramatic attention from nonterrestrial species in the 1940s because we were on the brink of destroying the viability of life on this planet and possibly for some distance beyond it. But it's true that the abduction phenomenon calls for a different hypothesis to begin to account for it. It does seem to be an extension of the hair-raising close encounters that became most individually intrusive in the 60s, often on the highways of the US and elsewhere. My guess is that at this point the 'visitors' were frustrated by the lack of rational official response to their intrusions over military bases and nuclear weapons sites. They might not have been able to understand our species' apparent lack of a collective understanding of the significance of their earlier manifestations. So they got 'in the faces' of numerous individuals, hovering over and levitating their vehicles, for example, as Richard Hall reported at length. It was a kind of campaign of terror perhaps intended to shake us up, shake us out of our apparent unawareness or indifference to their presence and the purpose of it. Perhaps this is why 'their' behavior escalated to abductions of numerous individuals -- to examine us up close and figure out what prevented our species from responding to so many specific provocations. The intent of abductions would involve, I think, both psychological and physical investigations of what makes us 'tick', or rather prevents our collective awakening to the changes in reality that their presence should have made obvious.
I find it most significant that, by most all accounts of close encounters, including abductions, the 'others' have communicated with one another and with us telepathically. This indicates that those others extensively share clear channels of unified consciousness and common understanding of the nature of consciousness and mind (and the fragility of life), in their case an understanding much more evolved than ours and much less compartmentalized than ours. For the most part, our species has declined [over the millenia of our successive 'civilizations'] in sensitivity to what we probably know subconsciously, especially in the collective unconscious. Our human forebears were much more open to, aware of, their connections to the natural physical environment/ecology from which all life on earth has emerged and on which it depends. We've nearly lost that capacity, including most pertinently our capacity to protect, or even simply to sustain, the ecology on which we rely. It could be that genetic experiments have been made on many individuals to understand why we have become so blind and insensitive {so stupid} and to correct these deficiences. It could be that what looks like hybridization is not for 'their' benefit but for ours. It could also be that the long-range intent is to replace our species with an improved species that can live constructively rather than destructively on this planet.
If we had become enlightened enough by now to have produced an open society in which knowledge is broadly shared, in which the conditions of our lives are actually understood, the reality and significance of the nonterrestrial presence here might have led to a conscious choice on the part of humanity to learn from species more advanced than we are. As it is, though, these visitors might well be expected to have given up on us by now.
So I think it's been 'about us' to the extent that we are a problem to be solved and that we refuse to understand why.
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