Plato anticipated The Matrix and UFOs?

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the Socratic “Cave Allegory” in Plato’s Republic.

But you might re-acquaint yourself with the material, and note that the scenario provided by Socrates via Plato gives a protracted metaphor about intellectual enlightenment that looks an awful lot like a run-down of what appears to be a computer simulation or Matrix, just not in technological terminology:

Human beings live in a den (cave), chained at the neck and legs, and they can’t turn heir heads. Behind them is a fire which casts shadows on the den/cave walls. Men move between the fire and the chained humans, carrying vessels and statues which provide the shadows on the walls. This is deemed to be reality by the chained humans.

When some of the humans are liberated, they strive towards a light at he opening of the den/cave, and arriving at the opening, they, painfully, see the Sun and real existence

Becoming acclimated to the displayed real reality, humans realize that the shadows on the walls, that contained their captivity, were an illusion. And they now must ascend into the intellectual world of reality. {Paraphrased from Philosophy Made Simple by Popkin and Stroll, Dooubleday, Garden City, NY, 1956, Pages 122-123]

Is this not what we experience now: the illusion of reality, which we strive to overcome, the simulation (Matrix)?

As for UFOs, in Plato’s doctrine of Forms or Ideas, he writes that “Forms are eternal patterns of which the objects that we see are only copies.” [Socrates to Sartre: A History of Philosophy by Samuel Enoch Stumpf, McGraw-Hill, NY, 1966/1975, Page 61]

That is, Forms “have more being than things … the real world is not the visible world but rather the intelligible world. The intelligible world is most real … because it consists of the eternal Forms.” [ibid]

UFOs are Forms, obviously, and seem, as the record shows, to be eternal; that is, present in our reality from the inception of planet Earth’s pre-historical life (those images on cave walls) and historical life (as recounted by UFO lore).

That UFOs cannot be explained, in any sensible way, they mimic Plato’s Forms and represent a reality that is above our reality, the simulated reality that we are subject to, as we are held captive in The Cave.

The Platonic dialogues are not, and could not be, technological but if we extract Plato’s ideas from them (the dialogues), we may apply his concepts to help us determine the Real Reality that eludes us at every turn.

RR