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EXCLUSIVE

INSIDE AARO’S UFO HUNT

The Pentagon’s former top UFO investigator tells PARADIGM that he worked with a Lockheed Martin executive to trace claims that the company possessed alien craft back to a group of people trying to profit off of human-made aerospace technology.

Arguing that profit motives are driving false claims about alien life, the investigator also alleged that a congressional staffer once called him and told him to direct millions of dollars in funding to three people with ties to government UAP investigations and aerospace startups.

The comments by Sean Kirkpatrick, former director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), are the latest salvo in a years-long fight that has split Congress and the executive branch over claims that government officials and private contractors are hiding evidence of alien intelligence.

Kirkpatrick’s comments follow the publication this month of a new memoir by Jay Stratton, another former top military UFO hunter, that has renewed controversy over these claims.

In the book, Stratton, who has clashed and traded allegations of misconduct with Kirkpatrick, alleged that former Lockheed Martin executive Jim Ryder confided in him in 2009 that the aerospace giant possesses a dozen alien craft and has been working to reverse-engineer them. Stratton’s book also alleges that the Central Intelligence Agency blocked a move by Ryder to transfer possession of one such craft to the military.

Kirkpatrick said that he looked into claims related to Ryder, who served as a senior Lockheed research executive, including Ryder’s alleged contacts with the CIA.

“We confirmed he didn’t speak to those people, and any stories that came out of that period of time are just that—stories perpetrated by the same people who tried to claim Lockheed was involved,” Kirkpatrick wrote. “They also claimed other companies as well, but changed the story every time they were pinned down for any evidence.”

Ryder retired in 2011 and died in 2018. Anwesha Basu, the publicity contact for Stratton’s publisher William Morrow, did not respond to a request for comment.

Kirkpatrick’s comments offer new details that go beyond what is disclosed in a 2024 AARO report about the lengths to which his office went to investigate claims about Lockheed Martin, as well as offering a new explanation for alien technology claims: profit.

“As for the Lockheed allegations, I investigated that with Lockheed’s Chief Tech Officer and found it [to] be connected with people who had both misled the company and were trying to make money on aerospace tech unconnected to aliens,” he wrote. “It is convenient that these stories and allegations always involve someone who knew it all but has died.”

Lockheed Martin’s press office did not respond to a request for comment. Steven Walker, who served as the company’s chief technology officer from 2020 to 2025, did not respond to requests for comment sent via LinkedIn or SRI International, a research institute that lists him as a board member. Before his stint at Lockheed, Walker served as the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Asked to elaborate on the alleged profit motives driving claims about alien technology, Kirkpatrick said he was pressured to direct government funds to people making such claims.

“There were the earmarks that they tried to get Congress to put in to direct me to funnel money to these people to ‘investigate’ UAP,” he wrote. “I had one staffer call me up and direct me to send several million dollars.”

Kirkpatrick named three people with ties to government UAP investigations and aerospace startups who were supposed to be the recipients of those funds. He did not respond to follow-up queries seeking more details about his claims, and PARADIGM is withholding the names pending further reporting.

“I told them to put it into writing and I’d run it by legal,” Kirkpatrick wrote, recounting his alleged call with the unnamed staffer. “They backed down.”

Pentagon spokeswoman Susan Gough, who handles queries about AARO, did not respond to a request for comment on Kirkpatrick’s allegations.

AARO’s 2024 report found no evidence that the government and private contractors were reverse-engineering alien technology. The report, which looked into claims the CIA had blocked transfer of alien material from private contractors to the military, largely attributed such claims to “circular reporting from a group of individuals who believe this to be the case, despite the lack of any evidence.”

A second AARO report, which is expected to provide more details on historical UFO investigations and military disinformation about aliens, has been in the works for years but has not been published.

In a statement to the Hill published Oct. 23, Rep. André Carson, D-Ind., said the Trump administration had slow-walked UAP transparency and demanded the release of AARO’s findings.

“I’m calling for the immediate release of this report, which is expected to provide additional findings of historical military and intelligence investigations of UAP including how incidents were investigated, the role of classified programs, and whether relevant activities were appropriately disclosed to Congress,” Carson said in his statement.

AARO’s initial findings have not satisfied a group of lawmakers who have been pushing unsuccessfully since 2023 to pass a law that would assert eminent domain over “technologies of unknown origin” and “biological evidence of nonhuman intelligence” held in private hands.

In June, Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., two co-sponsors of the original 2023 eminent domain provisions, again proposed an amendment to the annual defense authorization bill that would assert government ownership over alien material.

In July, the House of Representatives passed an amendment to its version of the defense bill that contains eminent domain provisions.

It remains uncertain whether the provisions will survive in the final version of the bill, which is expected to pass before the end of the year.

OF NOTE

A new report describes a near collision in June between a British Airways jet leaving London’s Heathrow Airport and a “shiny silver object” roughly the size of four toasters. The pilot described the object as a drone, while a British air safety board concluded the object’s nature was “unknown.” (Metro article; safety board report)

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Song of the week

Welcome back to Signs of Life, PARADIGM’s weekly briefing tracking all things UAP and NHI (UFOs and aliens).

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THE BIG PICTURE

The UFO subject is so sprawling and so mystifying that it is easy to lose sight of the important through lines.

One of those through lines is the nearly 20-year fight that has divided lawmakers, as well as the military and intelligence bureaucracies, over two simple questions:

1. Is there good reason to believe that Lockheed Martin or other private contractors possess alien technology?
   

2. Should the federal government move to take possession of any such technology?

The outlines of this fight have emerged gradually, and in fragmentary form, over the past nine years, in leaks, podcast interviews, congressional proceedings and tell-all memoirs.

The memoir published last week by Jay Stratton, a former military intelligence official who investigated UFOs extensively for the Pentagon, is full of strange tales that provide plenty of fodder for skeptics of the whole subject.

But — for anybody trying to make sense of this fight from the outside — Stratton’s account of his alleged interactions with a late Lockheed Martin executive also provides what appears to be an especially useful piece of the puzzle.

Close followers of this subject should already be well-acquainted with the contours of this fight. But I think it’s a clarifying exercise to lay out, chronologically, some basic facts and allegations.

Even as attention has turned to the Trump administration’s activities in the executive branch, this fight is still playing out in Congress, which will have to resolve a big part of that fight between the midterm elections and the end of the year.

So, to get you up to speed…

The background: For years, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid holds a belief that a private contractor possesses alien technology (“I was told for decades that Lockheed had some of these retrieved materials,” Reid told the New Yorker before his death.) Reid’s friend Robert Bigelow, an aerospace magnate with a longstanding interest in UFOs, encourages the senator’s inquiries.

2008: Aided by colleagues, Reid secures funding for a Pentagon program to study advanced aerospace threats. The contract for the program, AAWSAP (pronounced “AH-sap”), goes to Bigelow’s aerospace company.

Early 2009: According to Stratton’s memoir: senior Lockheed Martin executive Jim Ryder, who died in 2018, briefs him at length, saying the government has been retrieving and reverse-engineering alien craft since the 1940s. According to this account, Ryder says the program is overseen by the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, and is supported by Lockheed and other contractors, who have collectively pried some control of the program away from the government over time.

Ryder, according to this account, says that Lockheed possesses a dozen alien craft, complains that technical progress is slow, and offers to deliver one of them out from CIA oversight and into the hands of the military.

If true, Stratton’s account of these interactions sheds light on some of the evidence underpinning this long-running political fight.

June 2009: Reid sends a letter – allegedly ghost-written by Stratton – to Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn III requesting that AAWSAP be granted the status of a Special Access Program. Proponents believed such a change would provide the higher level of security needed to take possession of an alien craft.

November 2009: The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) rejects Reid’s request.

2011-2012: Veterans of AAWSAP resurrect the effort, pitching the Department of Homeland Security on a program called Kona Blue. Kona Blue would create a Special Access Program for taking receipt of “advanced aerospace vehicles.” DHS provisionally approves the proposal before ultimately rejecting it.

In both cases, people pushing for these programs have blamed the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology for allegedly using its influence to block the transfers, though the official rejections cited other reasons.

July 13, 2023: six senators co-sponsor an amendment that would assert eminent domain over any “biological evidence of nonhuman intelligence” and “technologies of unknown origin” in private hands.

The amendment defines “Legacy Program” to mean any government program that might have been charged with reverse-engineering alien technology. To this day, it is disputed whether “the Program,” as believers refer to it, is real or mythical.

The amendment passes the Senate, but after encountering resistance from House members, the eminent domain provisions are ultimately stripped from it. Subsequent attempts to revive those provisions have, to date, failed.

July 26, 2023: David Grusch, a former military intelligence official, testifies to the House that the government has been secretly retrieving and reverse-engineering craft for decades.

March 2024: The Pentagon publishes a report finding no basis for claims about government programs involving alien technology. The report suggests that such claims arose from various misunderstandings. It also states that a former CIA official accused of blocking the material transfer signed a statement denying doing so.

2025-Present: A growing chorus of former government insiders make public claims about “the Program,” other alleged government UFO activities, and a host of more mind-bending subjects like telepathy and fights between different “species” of aliens.

June 2026: Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds, two co-sponsors of the original 2023 bill, propose a new amendment to the annual defense authorization bill that revives the eminent domain provisions.

July 2026: The House passes an amendment to the defense authorization bill that also includes eminent domain provisions.

The fate of this new attempt to assert eminent domain over purported alien technology will likely remain unresolved until after the election, when Congress finalizes the annual defense authorization bill during the lame-duck session.

In Washington, people love to debate whether the earnest drama The West Wing or the satirical comedy Veep better captures official life in the capital.

This saga raises a different question: Is this Seinfeld, a comedy that is famously, in the end, about nothing? Or is this a proper mystery about something?

More than any eyewitness reports or videos of things seen in the sky, it was the human and institutional behavior around this fight that triggered my political journalism instincts.

The fight strikes me as too big and too enduring to, at its root, be about a misunderstanding over nothing.

For what it’s worth, I spoke recently to somebody who spent a lot of time looking into this for the government and enjoyed an extraordinary level of access. This person is outside the well-known cast of former government insiders with high-profile memoirs and podcast interviews. They were clearly weary of the spectacle and antics that this issue has attracted.

And despite their access and considerable effort, the person has not been able to corroborate that “the Program” exists.

But they also were clearly not satisfied that “the Program” does not exist. They said the subject remained worthy of investigation, though they were not optimistic that I would crack the case.

Their message to me: “Good luck.”
****

ICYMI: I appeared on the UAP Files podcast to talk about PARADIGM and the reporting so far. Jimmy is an excellent, well-informed interviewer. I recommend giving it a watch.

OF NOTE

The War Department released its seventh tranche of UFO records on Friday. It includes an account of a quiet, triangular UFO observed by law enforcement officials in the Western U.S. in June.

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Song of the week

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EXCLUSIVE

STRATTON BOOK FOLLOW-UP

A new book by a former senior defense intelligence official accuses one of the military’s most prominent UFO investigators of covering up a top-secret program that has allegedly tried to reverse-engineer alien craft.

In a message to PARADIGM, the investigator, Sean Kirkpatrick, has responded by accusing the book’s author of violating an unspecified “national security law.”

The exchange of accusations between former high-ranking military intelligence officials adds to the spectacle created in recent weeks as veterans of government UFO queries have made a series of shocking claims about aliens.

On Tuesday, Jay Stratton, who served as the first director of the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force, published his UFO-hunting memoir, Out of the Shadows. The book makes a slew of extraordinary new claims, including that strange beings and lights haunted Stratton’s family at their home for years.

Many of the book’s most consequential claims relate to a purported “Legacy Program” that allegedly spanned decades of government and private-sector efforts to retrieve and reverse-engineer alien craft.

PARADIGM tracked down context and comment from relevant sources to make sense of some of Stratton’s key claims about the alleged program.

In the book, Stratton claims that he learned of “Legacy Program” activity from at least three different sources.

1. Late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who allegedly confided in Stratton that he had once mistakenly received a briefing about the program.

CONTEXT: Before his death, Reid championed UFO investigations and said he’d been told that Lockheed possessed alien material, but never said he was formally briefed on a program.

In an email, Susan McCue, who served as Reid’s chief of staff from 1999 to 2006 and now works as an advisor to the UAP-focused advocacy group Americans for Safe Aerospace, wrote of the briefing claim: “I’ve heard that a few times but am not able to confirm as [Reid] didn’t relay it to me and I don’t recall him discussing.”

2. An unnamed “very senior member of the special operations community,” who allegedly told Stratton he was part of a team that was scrambled to retrieve radioactive alien technology.

CONTEXT: Two people who dealt with Stratton as they investigated UFOs for the Senate said they did not recall Stratton providing them with any information about alleged retrievals or reverse-engineering of alien tech.

One of them, retired Senate staffer Kirk McConnell, who now advocates for UFO transparency, wrote in an email: “I do not recall Jay ever sharing this information with staff from the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees. As the lead for the Navy-led UAP task force, I expect Jay was not in a position to reveal such information at that time, given the likely repercussions. The environment and his situation are different now. I welcome his statements.”

3. Jim Ryder, a former Lockheed Martin executive who led the company’s Advanced Technology Center. He allegedly told Stratton that the aerospace giant, in cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency, possessed a dozen downed alien craft and offered to arrange delivery of one of them to the Department of Defense.

CONTEXT: Ryder died in 2018. In a podcast interview released in August, Eric Davis, a scientist who collaborated with Stratton on UFO inquiries, said that a person matching Ryder’s description also confided in him about such a program.

Towards the end of his life, Ryder gave public presentations that dealt with unusual subjects such as consciousness, UFOs and plasma physics. Writing last year, journalist Nick Cook speculated that Ryder’s late-in-life musings about the nature of reality may have been prompted by encounters with mind-bending classified technologies.

Despite the lack of public proof, Stratton makes clear that he believes the program exists and exerts considerable power. Throughout the book, he repeatedly attributes setbacks in his investigation to the “hidden hand” of the “Legacy Program.”

The author singles out Kirkpatrick, who served as the founding director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which succeeded Stratton’s task force as a military clearinghouse for studying UAP.

AARO, which has proposed mundane explanations for several UFO incidents and produced a 2024 report finding “no empirical evidence” for claims about a program to reverse-engineer alien craft, has long drawn the ire of UFO believers who suspect it of perpetrating a cover-up.

Stratton, in his book, goes further, alleging that Kirkpatrick “was compromised and controlled by the Legacy Program” and that lawmakers had access to classified intelligence that proved it.

In a message to PARADIGM, Kirkpatrick, who led AARO from its 2022 founding until late 2023, responded:

“That’s the most absurd thing I’ve heard today. I’m sure Jay offers no evidence of this allegation, although he clearly has a lot to gain by making it because it makes people buy his book. The only classified information Congress has on this fictitious program is the information I and others presented them on what violations of national security law Jay and his band of pseudo-scientists have committed. However, since they also managed to ghost write the whistleblower protection legislation for themselves, no one can prosecute them. There is no legacy program, and apparently the lack of critical thinking skills is culturally pervasive now.”

CONTEXT: Kirkpatrick did not immediately respond to follow-up questions. Anwesha Basu, the publicity contact for Stratton’s publisher William Morrow, did not respond to a request for comment sent Thursday morning.

One of the people who investigated the subject in the Senate and dealt with both men said he was not aware of evidence being presented for either of their claims. “They all hate each other,” this person said. “There was deep distrust of Kirkpatrick all around and suspicion he was there to cover for the program. I have not seen any evidence.”

This is a developing story. PARADIGM has additional queries out about Stratton’s claims.

FOR YOUR RADAR

Sen. Mark Warner said that a 17-day UAP incursion over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia “mostly ended up being Chinese drones.” (Ask a Pol UAP)

Rep. Eric Burlison said he was exploring whether intelligence officials who witnessed a 2025 UFO incident involving luminous orbs could testify to Congress. (NY Post)

The Liberation Times tracked down a 2025 podcast interview involving a fantastical, second-hand tale about Area 51. The story could shed light on the basis for David Grusch’s claims about a deadly confrontation between U.S. personnel and “reptilian” aliens. (Liberation Times)

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Song of the week

Welcome back to Signs of Life, PARADIGM’s weekly briefing tracking all things UAP and NHI (UFOs and aliens).

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THE RESULTS ARE IN

… and they indicate birds.

The newly formed UAP Science Advisory Council published its first conclusions this week in the form of a preprint of a new paper analyzing a UFO video of six objects picked up by a military aircraft’s infrared camera last year in the Middle East.

The authors, who include council lead Avi Loeb of Harvard, conclude that the objects in the video — which was released In September by the War Department —are most likely a flock of birds.

That’s based in part on a comparison of the rate at which the objects dim and brighten in the video to the rate at which birds flap their wings. The paper finds that the objects’ apparent high rate of speed could be an illusion caused by parallax.

The paper highlights the finding as an example of what scientists can achieve with creative analysis when forced to evaluate videos where much of the relevant instrument data has been withheld.

“Releasing the redacted sensor and platform data would provide information that could refute these hypotheses,” the paper adds.

That comes off as a pointed comment if you’ve been following the ongoing tensions between officials who say they are providing UFO transparency and the activists and scientists who say it is not enough.

Disclosure activists have been privately pressing the administration and lawmakers for many months to release more of the sensor data that accompanies UFO videos — and to release full-resolution versions of the videos themselves. One factor preventing fuller disclosure is a concern that it could reveal the capabilities of military sensor systems to adversaries.

But, based on what I’m seeing on X and Reddit, the large and fervent community of Disclosure supporters has grown increasingly frustrated with the pace of Disclosure in recent weeks. Their discontent has been exacerbated by a disconnect between the escalation of claims from whistleblowers like David Grusch, for example on last week’s Joe Rogan podcast, and the far more mundane results of the Trump administration’s formal Disclosure process to date.

PARADIGM recently caught up with the new paper’s lead author, the astrobiologist and advisory council member Jacob Haqq-Misra. If you’re unhappy with the level of Disclosure so far, Haqq-Misra feels your pain.

Our conversation had a recurring theme.

“We just need more data.” … “It’s frustrating,” ... “Show us the data.”

… “I understand that they don’t want to reveal classified secrets. But if there is data that can be declassified and shared, then let’s work on it together.” … “We need data. It’s a very frustrating problem.”

I expect this will be an enduring point of tension between the Trump administration and its UAP science advisory council, compounded by pressure from the online grassroots.

Subscribe to get the full Q&A with Haqq-Misra — including his visit to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — when it comes out tomorrow.

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HERRINGTON’S STORY EVOLVES

John Herrington, who served as Ronald Reagan’s energy secretary, now says that he did once pay a teenage Brent Friedman to drive his car across the country.

The cross-country drive is central to the premise of a famous story Friedman, now a Hollywood writer, tells about Herrington confiding over dinner that he had received secret government briefings revealing the existence of aliens.

When I asked Herrington about this last year, he said the alien story was “total BS,” as PARADIGM previously reported. He told me that he had paid his son-in-law to drive his car cross-country, but that “Brent Friedman had nothing to do with it.”

On a new episode of American Alchemy, Herrington now tells host Jesse Michels, “we hired him to drive our car to Washington.”

Crucially, Herrington, who is now 87 years old, still maintains the crux of Friedman’s story — that Herrington admitted to receiving a secret government briefing about aliens — is “BS.”

Later in the episode, Michels and Friedman speculated at length about the lag between my interview with Herrington and PARADIGM’s publication of an item based on the interview.

FOR THE RECORD: I spoke to Herrington at the beginning of my UFO research last fall and published an item based on our interview a few weeks after PARADIGM’s launch this August. I did not realize just how big this story has become in UFO circles, and I was surprised by the tremendous interest in Herrington’s denial.

Full interview

AN XPRIZE FOR ALIENS

ICYMI: PARADIGM reported that XPRIZE Foundation chairman Peter Diamandis is actively exploring the creation of an XPRIZE for anyone providing proof of an alien presence near Earth in the form of technology that was demonstrably not created by humans.

The creation of a prestigious XPRIZE for alien visitation would cement the subject’s move from the fringe to the mainstream.

READ THE FULL STORY

ICYMI, Part II: The piece also included the news that former Navy fighter pilot Ryan Graves, founder of Americans for Safe Aerospace, is joining the Trump administration’s UAP Science Advisory Council.

OUT THERE

Astronomers have detected radio waves coming from a planet 63 light-years from Earth. It may be the first direct evidence of a magnetic field — which can help make a planet hospitable to life — on a planet outside our solar system. (NYT)

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said his agency “should have a seat at the table” if aliens are shown to be behind UFOs (Space.com)

FOR YOUR RADAR

House Oversight chairman James Comer said he wants to schedule another UAP hearing for the lame-duck session after the November election (Ask a Pol UAP)

The Liberation Times obtained 67 reports from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission about aerial incursions over nuclear facilities since 2024. (Liberation Times)

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Need more context? Read “Reality Shock: A beginner’s guide to UFOs, Aliens and Disclosure.”

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Song of the week

XPRIZE Chairman Peter Diamandis (left) at a weekend event with UFO researchers and activists (source: Diamandis’ X Account)

The chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation is exploring the creation of a new prize for providing proof of alien technology, according to four people involved in the process.

The creation of an “XPRIZE for aliens” would mark a major milestone in the transformation of a once-fringe topic into a prestigious subject of scientific inquiry.

Early discussion of the prize has focused on evidence of alien visitation, as opposed to detecting life in far-off star systems, according to the people.

“The basic point is to identify technologies that are of non-human origin in the form of objects near Earth,” said Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who is advising XPRIZE executive chairman and founder Peter Diamandis on the initiative.

Loeb, who also leads the UAP Science Advisory Council that is advising the Trump administration on UFO issues, said that the biggest obstacle to launching the prize is securing funding. Loeb said he had identified a potential funder but declined to name the person “until it’s finalized.”

Since its founding in 1994, the XPRIZE Foundation has become a top scientific agenda-setter by creating prizes for specific breakthroughs. It offers bounties ranging from roughly $5 million to $100 million, depending on the prize.

Loeb said the foundation’s board would need to approve an alien-themed prize. Neither Diamandis nor the foundation responded to requests for comment.

Diamandis, a serial entrepreneur, published an essay in September titled “The Evidence Around UAPs Is Getting Harder to Ignore.” UAP stands for unidentified anomalous phenomena, the official term for UFO.

“I am not asking you to believe,” Diamandis wrote. “I am asking you to look. The evidence is there. The people coming forward are credible. The correlations are statistically significant. The government is preparing.”

This past weekend, Diamandis and filmmaker Lyn Lear co-hosted Los Angeles-area events to discuss the evidence for possible alien visitation and the details of a potential XPRIZE.

About 100 people gathered at Diamandis’ Santa Monica home on Saturday to hear from several luminaries of the Disclosure movement, which advocates for government transparency on UFO matters. Speakers included Loeb, Stanford medical school professor Garry Nolan, former Navy fighter pilot Ryan Graves, founder of Americans for Safe Aerospace, and Peter Skafish, executive director of the Sol Foundation, a Disclosure-focused think tank.

Graves, who testified to Congress about military encounters with UAP in 2023, called the prize-planning “a tremendous indicator of how this conversation has matured and advanced.”

According to Graves, Diamandis said that a potential funder for the prize has been identified but that no firm commitment had been made.

Graves added that Diamandis has come to view the possible presence of nonhuman intelligence as more consequential than the rise of artificial intelligence. “He sees this as a central issue,” Graves said. “Not just something he’s exploring on the fringes.”

PARADIGM has separately learned that Graves has joined the Trump administration’s outside UAP Science Advisory Council as its latest member.

Other attendees at Saturday’s event included actress Jane Fonda, Communion author Whitley Strieber, and Susan McCue, who served as chief of staff to the late Senate majority leader Harry Reid.

Musician George Clinton RSVP’d to attend but did not make it. (Clinton has long maintained that he and bandmate Bootsy Collins encountered a real UFO in Canada after embarking on Parliament-Funkadelic’s mid-’70s P-Funk Earth Tour, which featured the collective’s famous “mothership” UFO prop.)

Lear, the widow of television producer Norman Lear, said the event came about after she ran into Diamandis earlier this year and the pair discussed their mutual interest in aliens.

She said their discussions then turned to a potential alien XPRIZE. She said that Diamandis and his foundation are currently “looking into it.”

“I think everybody on the cutting edge,” she said, “knows we’re not alone in the universe.”

Awarding such a prize would require the foundation to establish what constitutes bona fide evidence of alien technology. In recent decades, people have produced material purportedly sourced from alien technology, such as the “Art’s Parts” hunk of metal, only to have scientists dispute or debunk claims of an exotic origin.

“Of course there could be all sorts of crackpots who come forward,” Loeb said, but he argued that well-qualified judges could differentiate between genuine and bogus evidence.

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EXCLUSIVE

PODESTA RESPONDS

Joe Rogan released a new interview with David Grusch on Wednesday in which the former military intelligence officer made a series of extraordinary new claims.

More on that below, but first, an on-record response from John Podesta to one claim in particular about the Democratic Party elder’s role in Disclosure efforts.

By way of background: Podesta, whose interest in UFOs dates at least as far back as his stint as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff in the 1990s, has long been an advocate of greater federal transparency on the subject. During the 2016 election cycle, when Podesta served as chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the former secretary of state pledged to seek the release of UFO records if elected.

Hacked emails published by WikiLeaks, meanwhile, showed Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge emailing Podesta in 2015 and 2016 about UFOs, Roswell, and DeLonge’s interactions with retired Air Force Gen. Neil McCasland. The emails also included references to an apparent January 2016 call to discuss UFOs.

At the time, DeLonge was working on a multimedia UFO project called Sekret Machines. He went on to launch a company related to UFO media and potential breakthrough technologies.

In Grusch’s new interview, the former military intelligence officer cast those interactions as part of a concerted effort by Podesta to prepare society for the truth about UFOs.

“Podesta greenlit a— I’ll call it acclimatization activity, a popularization activity,” Grusch told the podcaster. “And, you know, that’s why Tom DeLonge got his advisors. That’s why General McCasland talked to him. It wasn’t because General McCasland, Robert Weiss [then-head of the Skunk Works] at Lockheed, other people— that’s all in WikiLeaks— just wanted to talk to Tom because he was a rock star and was infatuated by his celebrity and wanted to help on a sci-fi movie.”

“It was because they were given top cover to see Tom as a public figure who had the touch of the youth, rightly or wrongly,” Grusch said, “I mean, once again, there was an attempt and I’m not going to judge them bad or good, but they were trying to prep the battlespace prior to 2016.”

In an email to PARADIGM, Podesta publicly acknowledged for the first time discussing UFOs with DeLonge, McCasland and Weiss. But he disputed Grusch’s description of the context for those discussions.

“That is probably not how I would characterize our interaction,” Podesta wrote.

“My recollection is that Tom arranged a conference call with the individuals you mentioned and we discussed amongst other things, declassifying DOD files and reducing the stigma of professionals taking UAP’s seriously,” he wrote. “I have always maintained that the American people could handle the truth about UAP’s and didn’t really need to be ‘acclimated.’”

DeLonge’s company, To The Stars, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. DeLonge’s co-founder, Hal Puthoff, said in a text message that he believes the musician encountered McCasland and Weiss before encountering Podesta.

Weiss, who retired from Lockheed Martin in 2018, did not immediately respond to a request for comment left with Ultra Maritime, a company on whose board he serves. McCasland was reported missing from his New Mexico home in February. His disappearance is reportedly under investigation, and his whereabouts remain unknown.

BIG, IF TRUE

Grusch’s claim about Podesta was just one of several fresh allegations he made yesterday, several of them extraordinary. Here’s a rundown of his other claims:

• During the course of his internal UAP investigation, he viewed clear video of a crash retrieval that included footage of “beautiful” humanoid aliens with long hair and pale, bluish skin.

• He was informed of an incident in which personnel fought with and killed a “reptilian” alien

• He reviewed evidence indicating violent conflict between “reptilian” and “gray” aliens

• He was told by members of the intelligence community of a deep-sea base “multiple city blocks” in size that objects come in and out of

• He found evidence that officers of a government agency were engaged in the trafficking of children and worked with the Justice Department on the matter

• He was summoned to a meeting with senior staff from the Senate intelligence committee where he was informed that two people in the government had considered killing him until the idea was “kiboshed” (PARADIGM has queries out about this claim.)

• Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are both determined to make substantive disclosures about UFOs and aliens. (Rogan chimed in that Miller told him at a UFC fight that more UFO information is going to come out)

• He left his employment as a congressional staffer on Rep. Eric Burlison’s staff around Labor Day. (A spokesman for Burlison, Nate Lucas, confirmed this to PARADIGM but was not able to provide a specific date.)

• Corporate counsel for the MITRE Corporation, a nonprofit that conducts R&D for the federal government, is working on a response to a May letter from Burlison demanding the production of UAP-related records.

You can watch the full interview here.

OF NOTE

Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House oversight committee, said the future of the committee’s UFO investigation would be decided after the election. (Ask a Pol UAP)

An unnamed “UAP expert who has had discussions with people with direct knowledge of Trump’s concerns” told Politico Magazine that the president seems to believe the government possesses evidence of non-human technology and is “disturbed about what to do.”

Two members of the UAP Science Advisory Council told the magazine they believed the CIA was obstructing disclosure of relevant records, which the White House denied. (Politico Magazine)

The Black Vault obtained new records about the Navy’s efforts to understand UAP via FOIA. (The Black Vault)

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Song of the week

Welcome back to Signs of Life, PARADIGM’s weekly briefing tracking all things UAP and NHI (UFOs and aliens).

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EXCLUSIVE

Michael Spicer’s “Secret Sauce”

A lump of the material Michael Spicer claims to have reverse-engineered after an encounter with a super-advanced aircraft. (Courtesy of Michael Spicer)

Wichita businessman Michael Spicer has revealed new details to PARADIGM about his alleged reverse-engineering of a super-advanced aircraft, identifying a critical mineral that he says is one key to the craft’s performance.

Spicer also revealed plans to disclose more information about the craft’s alleged power source at a presentation in Colorado next month.

If substantiated, Spicer’s claims would have far-reaching implications for aviation and energy generation.

Spicer maintains he has spent decades reverse-engineering technology from an advanced aircraft after a chance encounter with one over public land in Kansas in the early 2000s. Spicer has said the craft he encountered hovered quietly. He also says he believes the craft is U.S.-made and capable of extraordinary speeds.

PARADIGM reported this month that members and staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence met with Spicer in 2023 and took custody of a piece of raw material that he maintains is a manufacturing input for the craft.

In a podcast interview last year, Tim Phillips, the former acting director of the Pentagon’s UFO office, AARO, indicated that a congressional committee chairman had referred Spicer to his office. But Phillips cast doubt on Spicer’s claims and suggested Spicer might have extorted the government with the threat of selling a piece of the craft to a foreign buyer.

Spicer has cited the extortion accusation and his frustration with his failure to secure a government contract as motivations for revealing additional details of his findings.

“We have been left with no choice,” he said. “It’s time to confront this broken, corrupt system of the military-industrial complex head-on.”

Spicer provided PARADIGM with an image of material he says represents a successful effort to reverse-engineer the exterior of the craft.

“That is the final pour, with everything mixed together,” Spicer wrote in an email.

Spicer maintains that the material does not just contribute to the craft’s stealth capabilities but that it is also essential to its power source and means of steering.

Spicer also told PARADIGM that the element tellurium is a crucial ingredient in the material that composes the craft’s exterior.

Tellurium is a rare metalloid used in solar cells and specialized alloys, among other applications. Tellurium rarely occurs in the ground in sufficient concentrations to mine it directly. As a result, most tellurium used in industrial processes is obtained as a byproduct of copper refining.

“The secret sauce contains a large amount of Tellurium mixed into a combination that is then subjected to condensed matter physics to amplify as well as change physical properties,” Spicer said.

Spicer said that his finished material includes both tellurium and the raw material he handed over to the Senate intelligence committee, which he declined to name.

Raw material Michael Spicer says he mined in the course of his reverse-engineering efforts (Obtained by PARADIGM)

“You have to add a few things to the Tellurium,” Spicer said. “Those few adds are the secret sauce.” He did not elaborate further on the process.

Spicer said he is intentionally withholding details about the process that would allow others to replicate it, and PARADIGM has not verified that Spicer has in fact reverse-engineered a revolutionary means of aircraft propulsion.

Spicer said he will discuss his findings about the materials and the alleged power source at a presentation in Brush, Colorado, on October 10.

He also expressed confidence that he will ultimately be vindicated.

“I come from a long bloodline of accused pirates who all died as heroes and very rich men,” Spicer said. “I’ll side with history.”

DISCLOSURE WATCH

On Friday, the War Department released its sixth tranche of UFO files. The release included details and a video of a 2025 incident in the Middle East involving a reported Air Force encounter with six “small spherical objects grouped together.”

No major revelations have yet emerged from this release.

ICYMI: Scientists tell PARADIGM these Norwegian “lights” could hold clues to Trump UFO files mystery

FOR YOUR RADAR

A new book analyzing UAP activity over the U.S. from 1945 to 1975, “UFO Intentions: Decoding the Patterns,” comes out next Tuesday.

The analysis assumes that some UFO sightings represent an intelligent presence and makes inferences about the nature of that presence based on patterns in the sightings.

Co-author Ian Porritt, a New Zealand-based UAP researcher, offered a sneak peek of some key findings.

“The long-term behavioral patterns point toward a surprisingly small, selective, and risk-averse operational presence,” Porritt, an affiliate of Harvard’s Galileo Project, said. “That conclusion emerged from the data and runs counter to many popular assumptions about the phenomenon. Yes they do have advanced technology but they still appear constrained.”

The book finds that daytime sightings occurred more frequently in the 1940s before shifting to occur predominantly at night. It infers that this change signaled a shift in intention from attempting to make contact with humans to preferring to remain inconspicuous.

Porritt contends that initial human responses to UFOs caused that shift.

“Our often lack of responses combined with aggressive interceptor approaches is not the right approach to encourage engagement,” he argued.

OF NOTE

Wired analyzed gaps in the Trump administration’s waiver of UAP-related NDAs.

Rep. Eric Burlison claimed credit for securing the release of audio and an official transcript of a 1952 presentation by Air Force officer Edward Ruppelt on UFOs.

The Justice Department filed for summary judgment against David Grusch in his FOIA lawsuit against the War Department. Researcher Douglas Dean Johnson analyzed the latest developments in the suit.

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Song of the week

A September 2007 spectral photo of the Hessdalen lights. Scientists say the lights could help explain recent UFO incidents disclosed by the War Department. (Project Hessdalen)

Scientists who have studied a rare aerial phenomenon in Norway tell PARADIGM it could shed light on two of the most notable cases revealed by the Trump administration’s ongoing UFO disclosures.

Both UFO cases involve recent eyewitness reports by U.S. officials of luminous orbs behaving in ways that have defied explanation.

Experts on the Hessdalen lights, a luminous phenomenon observed for decades over a Norwegian valley, said that similarities with the UFO cases could point to a shared underlying mechanism. Some further suggested that the local geology at the sites of these incidents could play a role in the formation of the orbs.

FIRST UFO INCIDENT

The first incident occurred over the course of two days in October 2023 in the Western U.S. and was initially disclosed in the first tranche of UFO files, released in May. In the course of that incident, six federal law enforcement agents observed luminous orbs around dusk near a sensitive national security site, according to documents released by the War Department, which describe the setting as a mountain valley.

A memo about the incident prepared by the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) reports that the most distinctive feature of that incident was a “luminous orange ‘mother orb’ [that] appeared to produce smaller red ‘orbs,’ one after another, multiple times over a period of several hours.”

SECOND UFO INCIDENT

The second incident occurred late last year and was disclosed in the second tranche of UFO files. During the incident, an unnamed senior U.S. intelligence official reported observing luminous orbs from a helicopter. Ground teams reportedly tracked a hot, low, fast-moving object that “split into two and changed direction.”

HESSDALEN LIGHTS

Since at least the 1930s, mysterious lights of various shapes, colors and movement patterns have been periodically observed in the sky above the Hessdalen valley in rural Norway. The nature of the lights remains a subject of debate, but scientists have proposed they could be composed of plasma. Others have proposed that unusual local geology could be responsible for creating a charged electric field over the valley that fosters the formation of the lights.

Notably, a 2004 study of the lights by Massimo Teodorani, an Italian astrophysicist, documents “ejection of mini light balls” from a larger ball of light — behavior similar to that of the “mother orb” observed in the October 2023 UFO incident.

Figure from Massimo Teodorani’s “A Long-Term Scientific Survey of the Hessdalen Phenomenon” (published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2004)

After noticing similarities between the UFO incident reports and descriptions of the Hessdalen lights, PARADIGM emailed nine scientists who have published research on the lights to share details of the UFO cases and ask about a potential connection.

Seven responded, sharing their opinions on a possible overlap or providing information about observations at Hessdalen that could shed light on the UFO cases.

Jader Monari, an Italian engineer who has studied Hessdalen since the 1990s, said the mechanisms behind the lights could also explain the unusual observations from the UFO incidents:

“According to our studies, the unique geology of the Hessdalen valley acts as a massive natural ‘macro-battery,’ capable of generating charged, luminous plasmoids. In light of this model:

The emission of smaller spheres (orbs): In plasma physics, this phenomenon can be understood as a form of thermal self-regulation. A high-energy plasmoid expels clusters of secondary plasma to dissipate excess energy.

Splitting and sudden changes in direction: Being composed of plasma rather than structured solid matter, these objects are not bound by the normal limits of aerodynamics. They respond instantly to fluctuations in electromagnetic fields. A plasma sphere can split (similar to mitosis) if its internal magnetic containment field destabilizes, and it can accelerate or change direction without the inertia typical of conventional aircraft.”

Monari added, “Many maneuvers that might appear ‘intelligent’ or tactical to military personnel actually correspond to the geometric self-organization of complex plasmas.”

Brazilian physicist Gerson Paiva, who has proposed a “dusty plasma” model to explain the formation of the lights, said the 2023 and 2025 UFO incidents were consistent with that framework:

“Both can be explained by the dusty plasma model and its interaction with very low frequency (VLF) electromagnetic waves. Both reports provide an excellent description of how these UAPs appear and move through the air. They also present characteristics of these orbs—such as the color of the emitted light and their lifespan—that align with the characteristics of the model.”

Teodorani, author of the 2004 study, wrote, “there are many similarities with the manifestations of the Hessdalen phenomenon.”

Noting a reference to a cave near the site of orb activity in the 2025 UFO incident, Teodorani shared that Hessdalen is “full of” caves. He said he saw other overlaps — luminous phenomena emerging from the ground, floating just above it, and transforming into geometric objects — between the UFO reports and his observations at Hessdalen.

Teodorani suggested that “piezoelectricity,” a phenomenon in which certain materials, such as minerals in the ground, generate an electrical voltage in response to physical stress, could explain these luminous orbs.

Anna-Lena Kjøniksen, co-author of a 2024 study of Hessdalen, suggested that more information about the UFO incidents would help in evaluating a possible connection. “It is difficult to say from just the reports, but it is possible that the phenomena in the reports are similar to the Hessdalen lights,” she wrote.

Bjørn Gitle Hauge, a Norwegian electrical engineer who has studied Hessdalen for more than 30 years, said he documented an event at Hessdalen in which one luminous object appeared to split into two red lights — an observation reminiscent of the 2023 UFO incident.

Norwegian electrical engineer Erling Strand, chairman of Project Hessdalen, also said that his team observed aerial lights splitting into two at Hessdalen. “We saw it on the radar screen,” wrote Strand, who has been studying Hessdalen for more than 40 years.

Greek geophysicist George Vargemezis, lead author of the 2024 study, argued that the presence of conductive ores in the ground around Hessdalen was a crucial factor in the appearance of the lights. “It would not surprise me,” he added, “if comparable conditions were found in other regions where similar phenomena have been reported.”

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THE BRAZILIAN CONNECTION

There is also speculation that the UFO incidents could be the result of human technology.

AARO’s memo about the October 2023 incident finds that natural phenomena, such as ball lightning, are “unlikely” to explain the event, citing factors like weather conditions.

The memo finds the possibility that the UFOs were the products of American military systems to be “plausible” but “inconclusive.” It cites unusual military flares as a candidate explanation for some of the observations, and finds that 60 percent of the reported behavior could be “plausibly attributable to military aircraft”:

“The characteristics described in the agents’ narrative account align with those of certain U.S. military technologies. However, the historical records are inconclusive regarding whether those technologies were present at the time and place of the reported incident.”

The report adds that no single U.S. technology could account for the entire UFO report on its own.

One of the Hessdalen researchers suggested that the UFOs could be related to the Norwegian lights and also be the product of secret U.S. military systems, based on an encounter he had in Brazil 20 years ago.

Paiva told PARADIGM that after he published a 2007 paper in which he reported the creation of luminous orbs resembling ball lightning in a lab, a U.S. Air Force official approached him to propose a research collaboration.

Paiva said he met with James Fillerup, then serving as point man in Latin America for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

The Air Force Research Laboratory did not respond to requests for comment.

Paiva declined to collaborate with the military, but the encounter has stuck with him. He said he has interpreted the approach as being motivated by a desire on the part of the Air Force to be able to create luminous plasmas that resemble many UFO reports.

Fillerup, now retired, confirmed the meeting, though participants differ on the extent to which UFOs figured into the encounter.

Welcome back to Signs of Life, PARADIGM’s weekly briefing tracking all things UAP and NHI (UFOs and aliens).

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EXCLUSIVE

UFO GOLD RUSH WATCH

Source: Alabama Secretary of State’s Office

Claims that humans are reverse-engineering alien technology remain unproven, but one of the most prominent sources of those claims is already positioning to capitalize on breakthroughs in aerospace science.

Public records obtained by PARADIGM list whistleblower David Grusch as the chief operating officer of StarDustX Materials, Inc., an advanced materials startup whose other executives have backgrounds in UFO activism and aerospace technology.

The records offer the latest glimpse into the commercial jockeying behind the scenes as the Disclosure movement pushes for release of more classified information about UFOs and the alleged existence of aliens.

Publicly available details about StarDustX remain sparse.

It was incorporated in 2024, according to public records. Stanford medical school professor Garry Nolan, a member of the Trump administration’s UAP Science Advisory Council, and Karl Nell, a retired Army colonel and Disclosure advocate, have both identified themselves as co-founders.

Nell — whose LinkedIn profile lists past engineering roles at defense contractors and indicates his tenure at StarDustX ended last year — has described it as “a multimillion-dollar VC-backed startup focused on metamaterial analysis and design.” He has also written that the company is “positioned to be the disruptive global leader in iterative meta-materials generation – imaging, analytics, engineering, and synthesis – spearheading a transformation of human material culture at an equivalent resolution and intricacy inherent to that of the natural world.”

Nolan has analyzed metallic debris allegedly associated with UFO sightings and holds patents related to materials analysis.

Grusch, Nolan, and Nell did not respond to queries. Nate Lucas, a spokesman for Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri, whose office employs Grusch part-time, declined to comment.

The involvement of Grusch, a former military intelligence official, is notable because he is arguably the central figure of the modern Disclosure era: He delivered congressional testimony in 2023 alleging that the government secretly retrieves crashed alien craft; became a congressional staffer last year to aid the House UFO investigation; and has become an increasingly visible Disclosure activist in recent months.

His involvement in a for-profit aerospace venture, though, presents potential ethical pitfalls.

Ethics restrictions for lower-paid House staffers like Grusch, are laxer than they are for other legislative-branch employees. But rules bar all staffers from using their positions to benefit outside employers or representing them before federal agencies.

Burlison, one of Congress’s top Disclosure advocates, succeeded in July in getting the House to adopt his UAP Disclosure Act as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. The Disclosure Act would compel private contractors with information about UAP materials to provide that information to the federal government for eventual public disclosure.

A potential business rival is already crying foul.

PARADIGM reported last week that security consultant Gene Sticco is working with Michael Spicer, a Kansas businessman who claims to have reverse-engineered materials from a super-advanced U.S. aircraft.

On Tuesday, Sticco tweeted a screenshot he says he took earlier this year from a government database of federal contractors at SAM.gov, showing Grusch listed as a point of contact for StarDustX.

Currently, the StarDustX listing on SAM.gov shows only Joseph DiNoto, a former senior Army official, as the company’s point of contact. DiNoto did not respond to a query sent to Obsidian, a company where he is listed as an executive. StarDustX registered to receive federal contracts in May, according to the listing, which does not show any awards granted.

Public records from Alabama that show Grusch listed as the registered agent for the company’s Alabama branch (Huntsville is an aerospace hub). The company’s application to register an Alabama branch, obtained by PARADIGM, was filed in January and lists Grusch as the company’s chief operating officer.

In a text exchange, Sticco alleged that Grusch’s perch in Congress provided an unfair advantage in the jockeying over the disclosure of purported UFO tech secrets.

“If you have inside knowledge and you know the rules need to change so you can play in that game,” he said. “You work to change the rules.”

Also this week…

DISCLOSURE WATCH

The Department of War announced the issuance of a waiver for all current and former service members, civilian personnel and contractors bound by nondisclosure agreements related to UAP information. The waiver allows them to disclose information to authorized recipients under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP (PURSUE).

Disclosure advocates have called for releasing the text of the waiver itself and pointed out that a waiver covering intelligence community personnel has not yet been announced.

BIG, IF TRUE

Speaking onstage at a company event in Miami, Palantir CEO Alex Karp said the company does not take on technology projects its engineers do not believe in. He then claimed that a general once told the company, “Build me this bullshit alien anti-gravity machine that also tells me I am brilliant.”

Palantir’s press office did not respond to requests for more information.

FOR THE RECORD

For years, Hollywood writer-producer Brent Friedman has told a personal story that purports to provide evidence for longstanding UFO lore about a sprawling government cover-up.

In 1981, attorney John Herrington took a post in the Reagan administration and moved from northern California to the D.C. area. According to the tale, Herrington hired Friedman, his erstwhile California neighbor, then a recent high school graduate, to drive his car across the country to his new home.

Friedman claims that when he delivered the car to Herrington, the new political appointee hosted his old neighbor for dinner and began to drink. Herrington then allegedly revealed that he had received a series of destabilizing briefings to the effect that aliens are real and the government was involved in an elaborate cover-up of that fact.

Late last year, before PARADIGM’s public launch, I tracked down Herrington, who ultimately served as Reagan’s assistant Navy secretary and energy secretary, to put the story to him.

In a brief phone interview, Herrington, now 87, called Friedman’s tale “total BS.”

Herrington initially said he had never met Friedman, but after listening to a summary of Friedman’s story, Herrington said some aspects of it were real. “You just rung a bell with me,” he said. “I think he used to be a neighbor of mine.”

Herrington also said that he really did pay to have his car driven across the country.

“That’s a true story, but Brent Friedman had nothing to do with it,” he said. Instead, Herrington said he had hired his son-in-law to drive his car.

While Herrington maintains he never had an alien-induced meltdown after being read in on government secrets, he said he was intrigued by recent reports of Navy fighters encountering UAP.

Friedman told PARADIGM he stands by his story, pointing to a recent retelling of it on his podcast, “Sound, Light & Frequency.”

OF NOTE

• A White House spokesperson told Wired that there are no plans for Donald Trump to deliver an alien disclosure speech.

• In a post this morning on X, Aaron Lukas, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, publicly acknowledged ODNI’s recent meeting with the UAP Science Advisory Council. He said representatives from the Disclosure Foundation and To the Stars also attended.

• Burlison joined Japan’s former defense minister in calling for greater international cooperation in understanding UAP. (op-ed in The Debrief)

• Former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence Chris Mellon, chairman of the Disclosure Foundation, called on the National Press Club to rescind an award given to the Wall Street Journal for articles about alleged UFO disinformation and misinformation inside the military. (Letter)

• Helen McCaw, a former economist for the Bank of England, called on the UK to use its upcoming turn as the leader of the G20 to push for UAP Disclosure. (Global Policy Journal)

What do you think of Signs of Life? Respond to this email with your thoughts.

Need more context? Read “Reality Shock: A beginner’s guide to UFOs, Aliens and Disclosure.”

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Song of the week

This rock, allegedly made of material used in a super-advanced aircraft, sat for months in a safe controlled by the Senate intelligence committee, according to three people familiar with the matter. (photo obtained by PARADIGM)

SIGNS OF LIFE

Welcome aboard the maiden voyage of Signs of Life, a weekly briefing from PARADIGM tracking all things UAP and NHI (UFOs and aliens).

For those just getting back from holidays, today’s edition will catch you up on developments from late summer on.

But first…

EXCLUSIVE

TALES FROM THE SCIF

A few months after several members of the Senate intelligence committee proposed the UAP Disclosure Act in 2023, the committee came into possession of a dark, dense, porous rock, according to three people familiar with the episode, who said the committee stored the object in a safe inside the Hart Senate Office Building.

If the owner of the rock, a man known in UFO circles by the pseudonym “Whistling Mike,” is to be believed, the object has the potential to help explain a large number of UFO sightings and to rewrite the history of aviation. Now Mike is revealing his identity exclusively to PARADIGM as Wichita-area businessman Michael Spicer and laying out his plans to present his findings next month in Colorado.

According to Spicer, he encountered a quiet, dark, roughly triangular, fighter jet-sized craft hovering low to the ground over public land in Kansas one night in the early 2000s. Spicer says he retrieved a piece that came off the craft and spent the intervening decades reverse engineering the craft’s technology and creating a system to detect it.

He tells PARADIGM that he has concluded the craft is U.S.-made and relies on a revolutionary method of propulsion. He declined to detail his conclusions about that method, but he described it as roughly analogous to magnetism. He said the material in the rock was integral not only to the craft’s stealth capabilities but to its power source and means of steering.

Asked about the rock, Spicer said it was a piece of raw material he mined after determining it was one of the inputs of the advanced craft he encountered. He declined to name the material but confirmed that he presented it to committee members and staff during a 2023 meeting in which he briefed them on his findings inside the committee’s secure facility in Hart.

Spicer confirmed that he asked for the rock back in early 2025. A former Marco Rubio aide on the committee, Jon Estridge, who had by then left the Senate, retrieved the rock. He then passed it on to Dillon Guthrie, a former Senate aide to John Kerry, who then returned it to Spicer.

Guthrie, a co-founder of the Disclosure Foundation, did not respond to a request for comment. Estridge confirmed basic facts about the rock and its chain of custody, but declined to comment on Spicer’s claims about an advanced craft.

Hannah McCarthy, a spokeswoman for committee chairman Tom Cotton of Arkansas, did not respond to questions about the episode. Susan Gough, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which investigates UFO reports, acknowledged receipt of questions but did not provide answers.

Asked about “Whistling Mike” during an appearance on the Total Disclosure podcast last November, Tim Phillips, the former acting director of AARO, said a committee chairman referred Spicer to AARO and that the office met with him inside a security facility. But Phillips, without naming Spicer directly, cast doubt on his claims. He suggested that an alleged image of the craft Spicer gave to Congress could have been photoshopped from an aircraft manufacturer’s promotional video. Phillips also suggested that Spicer might have extorted the government with the threat of selling a piece of the craft to a foreign buyer, and said he referred the matter to the FBI.

Spicer, who is seeking a contract from the U.S. government for his UAP detection system, says he takes exception to Phillips’ comments. He said he has faced threats and inducements from Russia and China over his findings. Spicer also said he has been working cooperatively with the FBI, which did not respond to a request for comment.

Spicer also tells PARADIGM that he plans to present some of his findings in a series of presentations for law enforcement officials, investors and policymakers on October 10 in Brush, Colorado.

Spicer, who has been publicly associated with a civilian UAP group in Kansas, is collaborating on the event with security consultant Gene Sticco.

Sticco told PARADIGM he believes that Spicer’s UAP detection system can be sold to private operators of critical infrastructure, such as nuclear power plants and electrical substations, who are concerned about airspace incursions.

The title of the presentation is “Uncontrolled Skies: The Unattributed, Under-Reported, Unresolved Gap Over American Airspace.” Spicer said he will present findings about a series of UAP episodes, including swarms of craft sighted over Colorado and Nebraska in 2019 and 2020, sightings over Langley Air Force Base in December 2023, and the late 2024 incursions over New Jersey. Spicer said he will also present materials from his reverse-engineering efforts.

BIG, IF TRUE

Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri posted additional details on X about an alleged government “luring operation” to attract unidentified aerial phenomena that he previously said he’s been briefed on:

“Our own agencies went back through every past sighting, asked what draws these things in, then recreated those conditions on purpose at a site with prior activity.

ODNI, CIA, FBI and military intelligence were all on site.

Something showed up.”

The FBI declined to comment. The other agencies named did not respond to requests for comment. PARADIGM has additional queries out about these allegations. Stay tuned.

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DISCLOSURE WATCH

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence informed members of the White House UAP Science Advisory Council on August 31 that the government has a plan in place should the existence of alien intelligence be confirmed, according to a post by psychologist and advisory council member Jennice Vilhauer.

ICYMI

PARADIGM’s launch piece, “Reality Shock,” a deep dive on the available evidence on UAPs and the issue’s high stakes, published last month to rave reviews.

Author Rod Dreher called it “one of the best things I’ve ever read.” Nick Cook, former aerospace editor for Jane’s Defence Weekly, devoted much of his new essay, “The Age of Anomalies,” to grappling with it.

CLAPPER UNEASY: “Reality Shock” included an exchange with an attorney for ex-director of national intelligence James Clapper seeking clarification of Clapper’s past public comments on Air Force efforts to track UAP. Two weeks after publication, the UAP-focused Liberation Times, citing an unnamed source, reported that Clapper “has grown uncomfortable with the recent surge of attention” around his UAP comments.

PENTAGON PONIES UP FOR UFO RECORDS: After “Reality Shock” broke the news that the Pentagon has consulted David Marler, an expert on triangular UFOs, about unresolved sightings, DefenseScoop reported that AARO has moved to grant Marler’s National Unidentified Flying Object Historic Records Center a contract for a subscription to the center’s archives of UFO sightings.

HUMAN RESOURCES

Andrew Bates, a former White House deputy press secretary and campaign spokesman for Joe Biden, has been dispensing pro bono PR advice behind the scenes to the Sol Foundation, which describes its mission as “preparing humanity” to cope with UAP and “the nonhuman intelligences that likely make and operate them.”

Bates was introduced to the foundation by Democratic Party elder John Podesta, a longtime disclosure advocate. Bates’ involvement is the latest signpost of the Disclosure movement’s growing mainstream cachet.

[Cc: Hunter, Jen Psaki]

AROUND THE WORLD

Following a UAP incident over a nuclear power plant, Japanese lawmakers presented Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara this spring with a request for the establishment of a UFO “command center function” within the Cabinet Secretariat (Source: translation of Japan’s Kyodo News).

Euronews reviewed a document from the European Commission’s defense department stating that the EU’s ability to track UAP is improving.

[Cc: Tim Mak, Tim Röhn]

REALITY SHOCK WATCH

During an appearance on the Dr. Phil Podcast, former Pentagon intelligence official David Grusch again escalated his UFO claims. Grusch said he personally saw video and photos of recovered craft and alien bodies and has been told of aliens communicating telepathically with humans. He also suggested the late Dick Cheney worked on the issue.

The interview was part of a broader effort by Dr. Phil to mentally prepare the nation for the “ontological shock” of alien-related disclosures (Read “Reality Shock” for background on this phenomenon).

[Cc: Oprah, Gayle]

OF NOTE

• ODNI issued a memo providing guidance on waiving nondisclosure agreements for government employees and contractors bringing UAP information to AARO or the White House’s PURSUE initiative.

• The Department of War released its fifth tranche of UFO files on August 7.

• A Gallup poll found that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe the government is withholding information about UFOs, but only a minority believe that some of them are alien spacecraft.

• The Sol Foundation said it is launching a study to assist the White House and Congress on safely disclosing UAP secrets.

• The Disclosure Foundation released a national preparedness framework for disclosure.

• Farmingdale State College on Long Island announced a fall 2026 course on UAP.

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Song of the week

“Something’s happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.” — Buffalo Springfield



To anyone paying attention, it is clear that something big is afoot when it comes to UFOs and aliens.1

In less than a decade, the subject has migrated from the fringe into congressional hearings, prestigious scientific journals and even discussions of monetary policy.

This tectonic shift began in 2017 with the revelation of a secret Pentagon program to study anomalous aerial phenomena. It was a subject the military had not publicly admitted any interest in for decades. At the same time, details and infrared video leaked from a 2004 incident in which Navy personnel concluded they had encountered an object that moved in ways that defied the limits of human technology.

Then in 2023, things took a turn for the truly weird when a bipartisan group of six senators proposed a bill that would allow the federal government to assert eminent domain over “technologies of unknown origin” and “biological evidence of non-human intelligence.”

Days later, a former Pentagon intelligence official, David Grusch, testified to Congress that the U.S. government has engaged in a highly secretive, decades-long program to retrieve and reverse-engineer downed alien craft.

The following year, the Pentagon issued a report concluding that claims about reverse-engineering of “extraterrestrial technology” were unsupported.

That finding did not put the matter to rest.

Instead, since then, the strangeness has only intensified, as a growing roster of military veterans, former officials and government consultants have come forward to make statements that range from the cryptic to the fantastical.

The odder end of this spectrum includes claims made in the media early last year by an Air Force veteran that the government employs people with psychic abilities to summon alien craft. Then there was the spectacle last May of a consultant to past Pentagon UFO studies informing a congressman, at a briefing on Capitol Hill, that the alien species who pilot downed craft include “grays…Nordics … reptilians and insectoids.”

This February, when asked on a podcast about aliens, Barack Obama said, “They’re real. But I haven’t seen them. And they’re not being kept at Area 51.” Obama quickly walked back the comment,2 but the episode provoked a response from President Trump, who complained that his predecessor “took it out of classified information” and vowed to begin the rolling government release of UFO files that commenced this spring.

If you find all of this disorienting, you are not alone. The world has taken notice of the astonishing signals emanating from Washington.

Last fall, a journal in the portfolio of Nature published a paper purporting to provide statistical support for UFOlogists’ longstanding claims about a link between aerial anomalies and nuclear weapons. In January, an alumna of the Bank of England wrote to the central bank’s governor to warn him of the need to prepare for the potential of a financial crisis brought on by an official acknowledgement of alien life. In March, the consulting firm Deloitte included government revelation of non-human intelligence as one of two case studies of the kinds of “black swan” events that organizations worldwide should prepare for.

The official interest in UFOs and aliens has also made a cultural impact, helping to usher in a general mood of uncertainty about the border between the real and the fantastical.

Grainy UFO photos and videos — many of them obvious fakes — increasingly clog up social media feeds. An emerging ecosystem of podcasts and documentaries feeds millions of viewers a constant stream of content that treats the reality of aliens and reverse-engineering programs as established facts. Meanwhile, a growing subculture of “experiencers” who believe they can psychically summon and commune with aliens is gaining traction online.

There’s now a professionalized “Disclosure” movement — stacked with former officials and business elites — making the case that the government has no right to withhold fundamental truths about aliens and their technologies from humanity.

Gone, as a result, are the days when a UFO gathering implied a small group of misfits at a seedy Las Vegas hotel.

In one striking scene last fall, Ivy League academics and private equity investors were among those gathered on the shores of Italy’s Lake Maggiore for the annual conference of an alien-focused think tank. There, attendees took in a presentation from a group purporting to use the power of the human mind and a proprietary “electro-mechanical dog whistle” to attract and study UFOs.

So, what on Earth — or in the universe — is going on here?

The extent to which the ultimate explanations turn out to be alien intelligence, atmospheric phenomena, man-made drones, or a tangled mass of delusion, confusion, and disinformation remains to be seen.

Thus far, the Trump administration’s disclosure of UFO files has mostly just spurred more debate between skeptics and believers. And the announcement in June of a White House UAP Science Advisory Council suggests that these files will not put the matter to rest on their own.

But at least one thing is already clear: Whether or not it ends with aliens, the story of how we got to this strange juncture promises to be an extraordinary one.

I spent the last 15 years as a journalist, mostly in Washington, covering big, messy stories like the Trump-Russia saga, the Hunter Biden laptop SNAFU and the rise of crypto. I saw how existing institutions struggled to respond to those subjects and to controversial mysteries like Havana Syndrome and COVID’s origins.

These topics tended to share a few defining characteristics. They were politically fraught, technically complicated, and difficult to slot into existing categories — because they spanned worlds like politics, law, science, spycraft and corporate intrigue.

I also saw how the right mix of dogged reporting, thoughtful writing and open-minded perspective could overcome those challenges and get us closer to the truth.

The present UFO flap is more vexing and more intriguing than any story I’ve seen yet. So I’ve decided to launch a dedicated investigation of it. I’m optimistic that, at this particular moment, the right kind of inquiry can bring us closer to solving the mystery than we’ve been at any time in the 80 years since it first taunted humanity.

To kick it off, I’ve spent several months diving into decades of civilian UFO research, scouring declassified documents from governments around the world, surveying alternative media and interviewing two dozen people close to the subject — current and former officials, activists and researchers.

Those efforts permit a few preliminary findings:

The study of UFOs, and concern about them, have long been more serious than you’d think:

The subject was relegated to the fringe after a Pentagon-commissioned report dismissed its importance in 1969. But both before and since, scientists, intelligence analysts and senior military figures in the U.S. and allied nations have repeatedly concluded that the highest-quality UFO reports stem from real objects whose behavior defies apparent explanation.

While UFO research is just beginning to enter peer-reviewed scientific literature in any quantity, serious government and private efforts at scientific study of UFO sightings have existed continuously since the modern UFO phenomenon began in 1947.

The known body of physical evidence related to UFO sightings remains small relative to the high quantity of reports. But patterns exist in those eyewitness reports that are suggestive of a real, extraordinary physical phenomenon — as opposed to hallucinations or misidentification of banal objects. For example, a review of one historic dataset of about 900 eyewitness sightings shows a greater-than-7 percent incidence of apparent electromagnetic effects, like cars losing power, associated with UFO sightings.

And there are more recent cases that have stumped government investigators beyond the handful of famous incidents acknowledged in recent years. David Marler, an expert on triangular UFOs, told me that since 2024 investigators from the Justice and Defense departments have consulted him about sightings of triangular UFOs by “high-caliber witnesses” that could not be explained.

While a case can be made for presuming that some UFOs really do represent one or more exotic phenomena, the available evidence that humans are retrieving and reverse-engineering alien craft is much weaker:

Grusch has cited interviews with over 40 insiders in reaching his conclusion that the government really has retrieved and reverse-engineered alien craft. But public claims about reverse-engineering can largely be traced to a smaller group of about a dozen interconnected scientists and former officials, who have collaborated on research and advocacy efforts. (The Pentagon’s 2024 report denying reverse-engineering claims, which drew on non-public information, also traced the claims back to this group).

And there are plausible alternative explanations for famous crash-retrieval stories like Roswell.

This raises the possibility that the claims about U.S. possession of alien craft stem from misunderstandings and disinformation about real military programs, including those that retrieve and reverse-engineer human-made craft.

At the same time, the serious concerns demonstrated by people with access to classified information about these claims signal a need for additional transparency.

The UFO issue has broader implications for institutional legitimacy:

For existing institutions, the risks are twofold: One is the excessive mobilization of government, scientific, and philanthropic resources to explore claims that turn out to be nonsense.

The other is that alternative institutions discover, publicize and exploit the existence of non-human intelligence or other breakthroughs related to UFO anomalies while incumbents miss the boat.

In the 17th century, the failure of the Catholic Church to account for and integrate new scientific findings about the solar system undermined its legitimacy. Today, the UFO issue presents similar risks to existing institutions at a time when public trust in many of them has eroded.

The topic has also become a magnet for allegations of government malfeasance and New Age beliefs about consciousness. In fact, UFO lore has become so elaborate, and so divorced from mainstream understanding of reality, that it could form the foundations of an entire alternative belief system.

The current UFO flap need not lead to proof of alien life to produce a major technological shock – or even a shock in our understanding of reality:

It is possible that the anomalies detected by advanced military sensors in the 21st century will precipitate one or more scientific paradigm shifts.

It is also possible, as some observers speculate, that militaries have already exploited secret scientific breakthroughs to develop extraordinary technologies – and that some of the claims about aliens now surfacing publicly could stem from disinformation used to cloak these secrets.

A survey of journalistic inquiries and scientific claims in and around the UFO subject suggests several candidate breakthroughs. They include new understandings of time, gravity or the relationship between consciousness and the physical world; or new aircraft propulsion systems far outside of known human capabilities.

What follows is a beginner’s guide for anyone seeking to wrap their head around current UFO controversies and their sprawling ramifications.

Its purpose is to orient readers and provide a jumping off point for further investigation.

The guide traces the federal government’s evolving posture towards aerial anomalies; the rise of abduction reports; the subject’s migration into popular culture; the development of an elaborate reverse-engineering lore; the advent of the modern Disclosure movement; current scientific controversies and the consequences of this flap for our shared understanding of reality.

But first, it’s worth reviewing the genesis of the UFO phenomenon.

ONE SPOOKY SUMMER

“The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious.” — Air Force Gen. Nathan Twining

In future histories of American civilization, the middle months of 1947 are likely to cast a long shadow.

That summer, with the nuclear age and the Cold War still dawning, the federal government established the bureaucratic architecture that would cement the United States as a globe-spanning hegemon. At the same time, seemingly out of nowhere, the country found itself under siege from what witnesses described as a mysterious wave of saucer-shaped and totally alien craft.

Ever since, clandestine American power and the UFO mythos have both grown immensely and become inextricably intertwined.

On July 26, President Harry Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947. The law effected a reorganization of the national security state and established, among other things, the Air Force, the Central Intelligence Agency, and what would become the Department of Defense.

In the decades to come, the government that had unleashed the atom bomb would maintain an omnipotent mystique in the eyes of the world, and its own citizens. That was thanks in no small part to the secret military technology, covert operations, and air supremacy enabled by these new institutions.

But even these mighty organs of the American empire would be stymied by a new mystery in the skies.

Just a month before the law’s passage, Kenneth Arnold, a private aviator, reported a strange sight in the air over Washington State: nine objects, flying in formation, at approximately twice the speed of sound — far faster than any crewed aircraft that existed at that time — for about three minutes.

What did they look like? It’s worth noting that — thanks to some apparent confusion in early press reports — Arnold’s initial descriptions did not quite match the familiar shape that would soon become globally recognizable.

An article that appeared in the East Oregonian newspaper the next day, based on an interview with Arnold, described “saucer-like aircraft.” But in a radio interview two days after the sighting, Arnold recounted, “They looked something like a pie plate that was cut in half, with a sort of a convex triangle in the rear.”

In a statement to military investigators, Arnold described “saucer like objects” that “appeared to be completely round” when reflecting sun, though an illustration he provided alongside his statement made clear that they were irregularly shaped.

Arnold later said that he had used the term saucer not to describe the objects’ shape, but their undulating flight pattern: “like a saucer if you skip it across the water.”

An account and notes provided by Arnold to military investigators (Wikimedia Commons)

But the term “flying saucer” made headlines, and the familiar image of a saucer-shaped spacecraft was stamped indelibly into the collective consciousness.3

Arnold’s report kicked off a wave of UFO sightings, numbering close to a thousand, over North America in the weeks that followed.

The most consequential report, though, was of something found on the ground in New Mexico early the next month. There, a rancher came across unusual debris, including metallic foil, strewn on a property outside the city of Roswell. Believing it could be wreckage from one of the flying disks that had been all over the news, the rancher contacted local authorities, who turned him over to officials at the Roswell Army Air Field. On July 8, the base’s public information officer issued a press release announcing the recovery of a flying disc.

The announcement set off shockwaves, but almost immediately the military, in the person of Brigadier General Roger Ramey, said the flying disc identification was a mistake, and offered a more mundane explanation: the debris amounted to a pile of foil, rubber and wooden sticks from a downed weather balloon.

Public curiosity was satisfied. Ramey, it seemed, had closed the case.

It wouldn’t last. Interest in both Roswell and flying discs was here to stay.

The Age of the UFO had dawned.

THE MEN IN BLACK

“What you think you saw, you did not see” — Will Smith, “Men in Black” (1997)

The flying saucer wave presented American officials with two problems: their own consternation and the need to manage public perception.

In September of 1947, Air Force Lieutenant General Nathan Twining sent a memo on the UFO wave to top brass concluding that “The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious.”

Despite Arnold’s initial report of an irregular craft, the sightings analyzed by Twining were of objects that were very much saucer-shaped: “Circular or elliptical … flat on bottom and domed on top.”

The memo noted the lack of physical evidence for the objects’ existence, while hypothesizing that they might employ top-secret American or foreign technology, perhaps nuclear propulsion, that accounted for their extraordinary speed and maneuverability.

Twining concluded by recommending a detailed study of the matter.

What followed was 20 years of on-again-off-again Pentagon initiatives — under the names Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book — to study UFO sightings.

The Air Force concluded that most sightings it investigated were caused by misidentification of natural phenomena – like ball lightning, birds and the planet Venus – or man-made objects, like satellites. Air Force investigators also wrote off some reports as hoaxes.

A small minority of cases eluded official explanation, while witnesses and civilian UFO researchers sometimes rejected the ordinary explanations proffered by the Air Force. But the federal government had reason to downplay any lingering mystery.

After a spike in UFO reports in 1952, which included a summer wave in Washington, D.C., the CIA became concerned that the high volume of civilian UFO reports flooding the federal government could overwhelm air defense systems and that the Soviet Union could exploit UFO hysteria for psychological warfare purposes.

In 1953, it convened the Robertson Panel, chaired by physicist Howard Robertson, to address public concerns. The panel’s report found no basis for concluding that UFO reports were caused by extraterrestrial craft or foreign weapons systems, and recommended more proactive debunking of UFO cases in order to deter public interest in the subject.

Even as the CIA signalled a desire to deemphasize UFOs, the Air Force investigation open at that time, Project Blue Book, continued well into the next decade. Then, in 1966, the Air Force commissioned a study of its findings from University of Colorado physicist Edward Condon. He came back two years later with the conclusion that further government study was not likely to bear scientific fruit. In December 1969, on the strength of the Condon Report, the Air Force shuttered Blue Book.

This outcome failed to satisfy the sizable community of UFO researchers that had sprouted up in the years since Arnold’s sighting.

Notably, official government dismissals also failed to satisfy some well-placed government officials.

“Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about the UFOs,” retired vice admiral R.H. Hillenkoetter told United Press International in February 1960. “But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.”

Hillenkoetter, who had served as the CIA’s first director upon its establishment in 1947, was so unimpressed by official debunkings that after leaving government service, he joined the board of the then-leading civil society group for UFOlogists, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena.

Even more remarkable, perhaps, was the case of astronomer Allen Hynek, who served as a scientific adviser to the Pentagon’s early UFO investigations. Hynek was the source of many of the debunking explanations the military offered for unusual aerial sightings, such as airplanes, weather balloons, and in one iconic episode in Dexter, Michigan, “swamp gas.”4

But far from being satisfied that the issue was settled, Hynek grew increasingly frustrated with an Air Force bureaucracy he perceived as determined to wave away all anomalous reports at the expense of scientific rigor.

After the expiration of his military advisory role in 1969, Hynek devoted the remainder of his career to further UFO investigation, an endeavor that alienated him from many of his scientific colleagues.

Of course, by the end of the sixties, alienation was going around. In the age of Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War, the United States entered a period of cynicism, marked by distrust of government.

Since the spooky summer of 1947, the post-war security apparatus had spawned a growing number of “black programs.” These military and intelligence projects, modeled on the Manhattan Project, were subject to strict classification, compartmentalization and even misdirection designed to obscure their true purpose.5

By the ’70s, denizens of this shadowy region of government had started referring to it as the “Black World,” a dark place where powerful new technologies and covert operations dwelled under a veil of deception.

In this milieu, the established reality of government agents like Hynek, who did show up at the sites of odd sightings, gave way to visions of more menacing figures. The Men in Black, agents sent by the powers that be to cover up the truth about aliens, entered the zeitgeist.

Through them, the UFO story crystallized in the popular imagination into a parable of the government’s determination to conceal the true nature of reality from its own citizens.

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THE LORE

“I’ve often felt that dreams are answers to questions we haven’t yet figured out how to ask.” — Agent Fox Mulder, The X-Files

The end of Blue Book banished UFOs from respectable discourse. But by 1969, it was too late to dislodge the subject from its place in the popular imagination and among a thriving subculture of true believers.

In the final decades of the 20th century, a mishmash of documented sightings, rumors and theories gelled into a unified account of the UFO phenomenon. Referred to in UFO circles as “the Lore,” it has become something of an unofficial founding mythology for the Black World.

While there is no single, canonical version of the Lore, the best versions of it weave the disparate elements of the UFO subject into a surprisingly coherent and elaborate story of a massive government effort to conceal the existence of aliens and study their technology.

To do that, the Lore also had to account for a new aspect of the UFO phenomenon that was arguably more baffling than aerial sightings or tales of downed craft: abduction experiences.

An early template for these experiences was set by a New Hampshire couple, Barney and Betty Hill, who reported a bizarre encounter with not-quite-human entities while driving home from Niagara Falls one September night in 1961. As they later recounted it, the Hills saw an otherworldly craft in the sky. It then, they said, approached them and hovered, revealing short, gray-skinned humanoid occupants, who communicated telepathically and took the couple onto their craft for medical examinations.

In the years since, experiences similar to the Hills’ have been reported with remarkable frequency.6

Early abduction reports caught the attention of Jacques Vallee, a dashing French astronomer. As a young scientist, he had collaborated with Hynek on UFO research after the latter left Air Force employment. Vallee went on to serve as the inspiration for the French scientist Claude Lacombe in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

In his 1969 book Passport to Magonia, Vallee, now 86, wrote that modern abduction reports shared important characteristics with more ancient stories, such as traditional folklore about fairyland. One commonality was a tendency for people to report being taken to surreal environments for what felt like a relatively short period, only to return to their normal lives and find that much more time had elapsed in the real world than they could account for.

(In the face of such vexing accounts, it became increasingly common to hypothesize that alien beings came from the future, other dimensions, or even more obscure realms, rather than a far-off star system.)

The most influential abduction story may come from the horror writer Whitley Strieber’s 1987 book “Communion: A True Story.” In it, the author recounts how the onset of a vague sense of unease led him to undergo hypnosis and unearth memories of an alien abduction experience. Strieber argued that the presence of physiological after-effects, including a lesion near his ear, ruled out mundane explanations, like a hallucination or other purely mental cause.

The book’s cover — featuring an illustration of a humanoid figure with gray skin, large black eyes and thin lips — has become one of the most iconic depictions of an alien.

One of the 20th century’s most influential book covers depicts the familiar alien type now called a “gray.”

Strieber’s book helped usher canonical abduction experiences into the mainstream of American culture. And as tales of such experiences proliferated, a Harvard psychiatrist, John Mack, decided in the early 1990s to investigate.

At the outset of his inquiry, as Mack later recounted, he visited an old family friend, the historian of science Thomas Kuhn.

Kuhn had written “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” a landmark 1962 book in which he argued that scientific theory moves forward through a recognizable, recurring pattern: Within a scientific subfield, when scientists encounter anomalous observations that are not well explained by current theories, they attempt to reconcile them within the subfield’s prevailing framework, called a paradigm.

Eventually, the anomalies accumulate to a point that cannot be reconciled with prevailing frameworks, precipitating a crisis in the scientific subfield. The crisis is resolved when a scientist, often someone young or marginal to the subfield, posits a new theory that better accounts for the anomalies. For political and practical reasons, many existing practitioners reject the new theory, but it eventually wins out as incumbent scientists die out and are replaced by a new generation.

The book used the term “paradigm shift” to describe this process.

Kuhn, Mack recalled, encouraged him to approach abduction experiences with an open mind and to ignore objections to the project made in the name of institutional science, which Kuhn believed had grown too dogmatic and unwilling to explore phenomena that lay outside the material world.7

Mack went on to find several recurring patterns in abductees’ reports, including experiences of passing through walls, immobilization, invasive medical procedures, and gaps in conscious memory.

He found that “experiencers” did not, in general, appear to be mentally ill, and concluded that the abduction phenomenon was not well explained by existing psychiatric theory. He suggested it might even present dilemmas for the materialist understanding of reality assumed by Western science.

Mack’s suggestion that abduction experiences may be caused by some external, exotic phenomenon scandalized many of his colleagues at Harvard, who also expressed concerns about elements of his methodology, including the use of hypnosis. In 1994, the university’s medical school opened an investigation into his work, though the process ultimately reaffirmed his academic freedom.

****

As American culture digested alien abductions, it also undertook a reconsideration of the original UFO crash tale following the publication of a sensational book about Roswell.

For 30 years, the episode had barely been mentioned in UFO lore. But in the 1980 book The Roswell Incident (and other interviews around the time of the book’s publication), Jesse Marcel, the Army Air Force intelligence officer who originally responded to the crash report, shared new details. He described the foil material he recovered as “nothing made on this Earth” and said the debris bore strange hieroglyphic markings.

The book also contained claims by William Brazel Jr., the son of the rancher who initially found the debris, that his late father had been detained by the military and sworn to secrecy, fueling suspicions that Roswell had been a coverup.

In the years that followed, some people close to the Roswell incident and their surviving relatives began to make public claims about alien bodies. In one case, local mortician Glenn Dennis said in 1989 that he received a call from the air base at the time of the crash inquiring about child-sized caskets.

The clamor caught the attention of Steven Schiff, a Republican congressman from New Mexico, whose inquiries prompted the Air Force to re-investigate the episode. It published a report in 1994 concluding that those who smelled a coverup at Roswell were… correct. But what was being covered up, the Air Force said, was that the wreckage near Roswell came from a top-secret effort, called Project Mogul, to spy on the Soviets using high-altitude balloons.8

This explanation was not enough to banish aliens from the zeitgeist. Even as the Pentagon batted down rumors about Roswell, the deserts of the Southwest had given the Lore a new landmark to mythologize.

In 1989, a local television reporter in Las Vegas, George Knapp, landed one of the strangest exclusives in the history of American journalism: An anonymous source, later revealed to be technician Bob Lazar, claimed to be involved in the reverse-engineering of alien craft at Area 51, a secret Air Force facility north of Las Vegas.9

Since then, no hard evidence has emerged of alien craft at Area 51. But the previously obscure facility joined Roswell as an icon of government-on-alien skullduggery in countless movies and shows, such as The X-Files.

It also took its place in the Lore.

In the twilight zone between established fact and acknowledged fiction, UFOlogy was, by the ’90s, formulating its complex alternative history of the post-war world. The Lore was informed by purported insider information10 and purported leaks of secret documents,11 as well as the public accounts of countless alleged witnesses and abductees. And it offered a grand unifying theory of the relationship between anomalous phenomena and Black World secrecy.

Versions of the Lore, as it exists today, often include the following: UFOs came to public attention in the aftermath of World War II because the use of atomic weapons attracted interest from an alien intelligence. The alien craft achieved incredible feats of speed and maneuverability by manipulating gravity. They were steered telepathically, which is also how the aliens communicate with humans.

Roswell and other crash stories long considered debunked by the mainstream were true. And the brightest minds American civilization could muster, like Vannevar Bush and Edward Teller, inventor of the hydrogen bomb, had secretly worked to reverse-engineer alien tech, at Area 51 and elsewhere, in a top-secret effort called “The Program.”

These efforts met with some success: Alien technology inspired important 20th-century breakthroughs, including the transistor and fiber optics (The “memory metal” found at Roswell inspired the invention, years later, of nitinol, a nickel-titanium alloy with shape memory).

To maintain a veil of secrecy, the alien technology was treated as “restricted data” under the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, a move that was legally justified by the radiation it emits. Special secrecy provisions in the law complicate the power of the president to declassify alien tech, while giving the Department of Energy jurisdiction over much of the program. The CIA, of course, was involved, as was the Air Force.

Somewhere along the way, the best material fell into the hands of one or more defense contractors, further stymying oversight by elected officials.12

This version of 20th century history remained marginal until the summer of 2023, when Grusch testified to Congress that the broad outlines of the Lore, and many of its particulars, were not only true, but constituted a pressing matter of national security.

Grusch also offered support for more recent elements of the Lore.

He testified that his visibility into a large number of compartmentalized programs allowed him to see what their participants couldn’t. In the interests of secrecy, the reverse-engineering effort had become “stove-piped” and ineffective. In stark contrast to the collaborative and effective Manhattan Project, teams worked in isolation from each other, hindering their ability to make progress.

This is especially alarming, Grusch testified, because China and Russia are engaged in their own alien reverse-engineering efforts that threaten to overtake our own.

At least as far as the Lore was concerned, the UFO arms race had officially gone global.

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WHAT IN THE WORLD?

“The existence of the phenomena is undisputed” — Former Brazilian defense secretary Aldo Rebelo, discussing Brazilian Air Force UFO encounters, June 2026

Alleged arms race aside, the UFO phenomenon is indeed a global one.

A common misconception among skeptics holds that UFO sightings are isolated to the U.S., the result, perhaps, of a military with a lot of secret programs to hide combined with a populace that is both more naive and more paranoid than others.

In fact, UFO sightings, the belief that they are caused by aliens, and even the belief that the U.S. is reverse-engineering alien craft have long existed among both the governments and the people of the world.

As early as 1950, Wilbert Smith, an official with Canada’s Department of Transport, authored a since-declassified memo about American UFO efforts based on “discreet inquiries” made through staff at the Canadian embassy in Washington. He concluded, “Flying saucers exist”; “The matter is the most highly classified subject in the United States Government, rating higher even than the H-bomb”; and “Their modus operandi is unknown but concentrated effort is being made by a small group headed by Doctor Vannevar Bush.”

“I was further informed that the United States authorities are investigating along quite a number of lines which might possibly be related to the saucers such as mental phenomena,” he wrote, “and I gather that they are not doing too well since they indicated that if Canada is doing anything at all in geo-magnetics they would welcome a discussion with suitably accredited Canadians.”

Decades later, after the memo became public, the physicist Robert Sarbacher, a Pentagon consultant during the early Cold War, outed himself as one of the sources for it.

In a 1983 letter to UFO researcher William Steinman, Sarbacher elaborated on his recollections. “Certain materials reported to have come from flying saucer crashes were extremely light and very tough,” he wrote. “I am sure our laboratories analyzed them very carefully. There were reports that instruments or people operating these machines were also of very light weight, sufficient to withstand the tremendous deceleration and acceleration associated with their machinery. I remember in talking with some of the people at the office that I got the impression these ‘aliens’ were constructed like certain insects we have observed on earth, wherein because of the low mass the inertial forces involved in operation of these instruments would be quite low. I still do not know why the high order of classification has been given and why the denial of the existence of these devices.”

Sarbacher told Steinman he had no firsthand knowledge of any UFO activity, and was only relaying what he had heard and seen in internal reports.

It is possible that Sarbacher had been exposed to disinformation designed to conceal the existence of Project Mogul or other secret U.S. programs. But he would not be the last person in a sensitive government position to conclude that reverse-engineering rumors were true.

In 1971, Harry Turner, an intelligence analyst for the Australian government, authored a since-declassified assessment, in which he concluded that the Robertson Panel was a CIA feint. “By erecting a facade of ridicule, the U.S. hoped to allay public alarm,” he wrote, “and act as a cover for the real U.S. programme of developing vehicles that emulate UFO performances.”13

Turner argued that efforts to accelerate gravity research, undertaken by the U.S. government starting in the 1950s, made little sense in the context of existing theories of physics. They should instead, he wrote, be understood as an effort to reverse-engineer UFOs, which were thought to operate by means of gravity manipulation.

****

Foreign officials did not just have to worry about what Americans had seen and what the CIA knew. They had their own airspace to worry about: UFOs have been sighted in the skies over every inhabited continent, vexing governments around the world.

The Belgian Wave, for example, shook that corner of Western Europe for months from late 1989 into early 1990. Thousands of citizens reported aerial sightings that clustered around a peculiar pattern: large, black triangular craft that appeared to have lights on their undersides, hover silently at low altitudes and accelerate faster than known human craft.

The wave was never explained, though skeptical scholars have proposed that some sort of mass delusion played a role.

Among the points in favor of the skeptics is that the most famous image to emerge from the wave was exposed as a crude hoax.

The creator of this image initially claimed to have captured a shot of a Belgian Wave craft. He later said it was a slab of polystyrene and some light bulbs.

Despite the prevalence of hoaxes, Belgians’ neighbors in France have long taken the UFO mystery seriously.

In 1977, at a time when U.S. inquiries were officially dormant, the French government established its own UFO investigation office, now called GEIPAN.

By placing the office inside the national space agency, rather than the military, the French positioned UFOs more as a scientific question than as a potential threat.

The office has documented a handful of episodes of particular interest to UFOlogy. In one case from January of 1981, a man in southeastern France reported seeing a round, gray craft, about 8 feet in diameter, with no visible means of propulsion, land briefly on his property before rising vertically and speeding out of sight. According to its report, GEIPAN took samples of soil and alfalfa plants from the site of the alleged landing, which appeared to contain skid marks. The report found that alfalfa plants near the site of the alleged landing showed unexplained damage to their leaves — including a reduction in chlorophyll – and hypothesized that exposure to an “intense electric field” could be responsible.

“A significant and unusual phenomenon occurred that day,” GEIPAN concluded, “and the investigation failed to determine its origin.”

An extraordinary report published in 1999 by COMETA, a French UFO group led by scientists and retired military leaders, was more conclusive. It asserted “the almost certain physical reality of completely unknown flying objects with remarkable flight performances and noiselessness, apparently operated by intelligent [beings].” The report concluded that, based on available information, the most likely explanation for the UFO phenomenon was “extraterrestrial visitors.”14

In an appendix on Roswell, the report’s conclusions go even further. “The disappearances of files and the Air Force’s clumsy attempts at explaining [the incident] show that U.S. military personnel are hiding something important that occurred at Roswell in July 1947,” the report states. It opines that the Air Force report attributing the debris at Roswell to Project Mogul smacks of disinformation intended to conceal an even more sensitive truth. “The hypothesis of an extraterrestrial vessel that is supported by quality testimonies cannot be dismissed,” it concludes.

While some veterans of the French defense establishment suspected the Americans of using disinformation to conceal the reality of downed spacecraft, the reverse is certainly true: American officials at times have concocted UFO stories to conceal more earthly secrets.

In one notorious case from the 1980s, when a civilian engineer started to investigate unusual activity around Kirtland Air Force Base, an Air Force official encouraged the man’s belief that he was monitoring the activities of aliens, rather than the NSA.

More recently, the Wall Street Journal reported last year on a practice, allegedly widespread for decades within the Air Force, in which commanders overseeing secret research programs were shown an image of a flying saucer and falsely told their project was part of an effort, codenamed “Yankee Blue,” to reverse-engineer the craft. The Journal characterized the alleged practice as a hazing ritual.

Believers in an actual alien reverse-engineering program greeted the Journal article with skepticism, and Grusch has said his findings were not based on a misunderstanding of hazing rituals. The Journal cited a Pentagon spokeswoman who said the Defense Department expected to release a report detailing the practice by the end of 2025. But no such report has materialized, and the Pentagon did not respond to a question about when and whether to expect it.

Just how much UFO lore ultimately originates from government disinformation is a question that may never be answered satisfactorily.

PANDORA’S BOX

“We ended up coming progressively to the conclusion that there’s not just smoke here, there’s fire.” — Kirk McConnell, career staffer on the Senate intelligence and armed services committees

Inside the United States, UFOs remained safely quarantined to film, television and a marginal subculture of UFOlogists until December 2017, when the New York Times and POLITICO ran stories revealing the existence of a secret Pentagon program to investigate them.

The Times story featured footage from a 2004 encounter between Navy fighter jets based on an American aircraft carrier, the Nimitz, and what appeared to be a tic-tac-shaped object that — without any visible means of propulsion — accelerated and maneuvered in ways that far exceeded the capacity of any known human technology.

After an initial flurry of interest, the subject receded, in mainstream public discourse, to the status of an intriguing, lingering mystery.

Progress towards a solution was desultory. Details of a couple of similar incidents trickled out. Senior officials made some surprisingly frank statements, including former CIA director John Brennan. (“Some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continue to be unexplained,” he said, during a 2020 podcast appearance, “and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”)

And the Pentagon convened a UAP Task Force, then opened the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, AARO, to examine odd incidents and issue public reports.

Then in 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a preliminary assessment. “Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors,” it found. “In a limited number of incidents, UAP reportedly appeared to exhibit unusual flight characteristics. These observations could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception and require additional rigorous analysis.”

While acknowledging continued uncertainty, the government had, it seemed, successfully contained the issue within a bureaucratic framework.

But behind the scenes, a loose-knit group of officials and scientists in and close to the government had opened a Pandora’s box. Secrets, rumors and accusations from the Black World continue to spill out of it to this day.

Several of this group’s members were involved in the Pentagon UFO program revealed in 2017, and they maintain that elements within the Black World are covering up the existence of advanced, non-human intelligence.

Two of them, former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon and Pentagon official Luis Elizondo, had reportedly helped set in motion the 2017 Times story by tipping off a journalist to the existence of the tic-tac video.

Other members of the group include engineer Hal Puthoff and his longtime collaborator, astrophysicist Eric Davis.

The driving force behind much of the pair’s work has been Robert Bigelow, an aerospace magnate. Bigelow has sponsored much private UAP research, and he convinced Harry Reid to appropriate the funding for the Pentagon UFO program whose existence was revealed by the Times and POLITICO.

Skeptics note the association of several members of this group with fringe activities and beliefs.

Bigelow for years owned Skinwalker Ranch, a property in Utah where visitors, some of them involved in UAP research, have claimed to witness a variety of bizarre sights, including mutilated cattle and oversized wolves.

Before his turn as a UFO guru, Puthoff led Cold War era “psychic spies” research for the military and the CIA, shaping programs that purported to rely on the extrasensory abilities of “remote viewers” to gather intelligence on the Soviet Union.

Tim Gallaudet, a retired Navy rear admiral who endorses the non-human intelligence explanation for UAP, has publicly stated that his daughter “can see spirits,” likening her to a medium who can “tap into…the other side.”

(There’s also the issue of false positives: In 2024, after presenting a blurry photo of what he described as a “mothership” at a gathering in Philadelphia, Elizondo was forced to back off the claim when a group of online researchers traced the photo to a Facebook group and suggested it actually depicted a chandelier.)

The group’s role in the elevation of UFO controversies did not end with 2017’s press revelations.

Grusch has testified that, in 2019, while working on a Pentagon UAP investigation, he was tasked with compiling a comprehensive list of secret military programs. It was that assignment, he testified, that eventually led to his startling conclusions about alien technology.

Over lunch in Austin last fall, Davis told me that he and Puthoff briefed Grusch early on in his investigation inside a secure facility in Colorado Springs in March 2020 about the alleged existence of a government program to reverse-engineer UFOs.

Davis said that he provided Grusch with a roadmap for investigating the claim, including a list of people to talk to.

(A second person familiar with the investigation, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Puthoff and Davis provided Grusch with a mix of “interesting leads” and information that Grusch later determined to be false. The person said that Grusch did not rely on them as core witnesses.)

Three years later, Grusch burst into public view with his spectacular findings.

At the same time, six senators — Chuck Schumer, Mike Rounds, Marco Rubio, Kirsten Gillibrand, Todd Young, and Martin Heinrich — proposed the UAP Disclosure Act, an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that included the following provision: “The Federal Government shall exercise eminent domain over any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence that may be controlled by private persons or entities in the interests of the public good.”15

Two weeks after that, the public got a taste of the thinking behind this mystifying proposal when Grusch delivered whistleblower testimony to Congress.16

At a House Oversight Committee hearing, he offered an astounding account: He testified that his efforts to compile a comprehensive list of secret military programs caused him to stumble upon claims that the government has been retrieving and attempting to reverse-engineer downed alien craft for decades. Grusch said he concluded those claims were true after he spent four years interviewing dozens of witnesses about them. Grusch also testified that the government had recovered non-human “biologics” and that people had been harmed in order to protect the secrecy of these activities.

Kirk McConnell, a career Senate staffer who investigated the matter, later said in a podcast appearance17 that, behind the scenes, the inquiry into Grusch’s claims “led to other people coming to Congress and telling their stories, which were riveting and credible.”

McConnell specified that these new witnesses were not from the well-known group of figures associated with prior Pentagon UFO programs (such as Elizondo, Davis and Puthoff).

“These are people with high-level clearances, positions of authority in the intelligence community and the Defense Department,” he said of the additional witnesses, “and no reason to be fabricating things.”

“We ended up coming progressively to the conclusion,” McConnell said, “that there’s not just smoke here, there’s fire.”

But in officially shooting down the crux of Grusch’s testimony the following February, the Pentagon’s UFO office, AARO, largely attributed claims of an alien reverse-engineering program to “circular reporting from a group of individuals who believe this to be the case, despite the lack of any evidence.”

AARO’s report said that many of the military personnel it interviewed to get to the bottom of Grusch’s claims described real Pentagon programs that they mistakenly believed involved alien technology. The report also found that in 2021 a program run by an unnamed intelligence agency really did expand its mission to include reverse-engineering of alien craft, but the report said the program never found any alien technology and was closed.

The report attributed the expansion of the program’s mission to six unnamed members of the interconnected group of actors it blamed for ginning up the reverse-engineering narrative.18

Grusch did not back off his claims in the wake of the Pentagon’s findings (or a report that he had been committed to a mental health facility in 2018 after expressing suicidal thoughts). Instead, in an unprecedented move for a congressional whistleblower, he joined the House investigation as a staffer for Rep. Eric Burlison, a Missouri Republican, in April of 2025.

A few months later, the House Oversight Committee held a hearing at which Air Force veteran Dylan Borland testified that he had direct knowledge of UAP programs. Borland also testified that he personally observed a silent, 100-foot-long triangular UFO that got within 100 feet of him, interfered with his cellphone and rapidly accelerated skyward at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia in the summer of 2012.

Borland’s description of a silent triangular UFO that exhibits extraordinary acceleration is similar to many sightings from the Belgian Wave. The description also matches several of the defining characteristics of a much broader set of triangular UFO sightings, dating back to the 1950s, as set out in “Triangle UFOs: An Estimate of the Situation,” a 2013 book by New Mexico researcher David Marler. Marler’s list of 10 primary characteristics includes silent flight, low-altitude flight, and rapid acceleration.

Marler told me that in the last two years, investigators with both the Defense Department and the Justice Department have consulted him and his book. “They have triangle cases that they simply can’t resolve,” he said.

Marler said federal investigators did not divulge the details of the cases and asked him not to name the specific agencies examining them. But he said investigators took the matters seriously. “They kept saying, ‘These are high-caliber witnesses that we’re interviewing,’” Marler recalled, saying that he took that to likely mean trained military personnel.

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment. A Pentagon spokeswoman, citing department policy, wrote in an email, “We do not comment on the details of conversations between AARO and external partners.”

DISCLOSURE

“It’s time to find out what the truth really is that’s out there. The American people—and people around the world—want to know, and they can handle the truth.” — Former White House chief of staff John Podesta, 2010 (from “UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record” by Leslie Kean)

The dramatic escalation of government interest in UFOs and the more incredible elements of the Lore has unleashed a full-fledged movement for government disclosure of UFO secrets, complete with activists working Capitol Hill, and as of this summer, a Steven Spielberg movie, “Disclosure Day.”

The roots of this movement can be traced to the ’90s, when the term “Disclosure” gained currency as a byword for the government coming clean about secret UFO knowledge. Notably, in 1993, physician-turned-UFOlogist Steven Greer founded the Disclosure Project to facilitate UFO whistleblowing by government insiders, helping to cement the concept in UFOlogy even as it remained fringe.

In the wake of Grusch’s 2023 testimony, Disclosure has taken on a life of its own, as a slew of insiders have taken advantage of a wide-open media landscape to go public with their own claims about UFOs and aliens.

Not long after Grusch’s testimony, another former Pentagon official involved with the military’s UFO research, Jim Lacatski, claimed in a podcast appearance that the government not only possessed a UFO, but had accessed its interior. Then Elizondo, the former Pentagon official who facilitated the New York Times’ blockbuster 2017 scoop, affirmed Grusch’s claims about crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering in his own congressional testimony.

Shortly before his death last year, Harald Malmgren, a former high-ranking U.S. trade official, said that CIA officer Richard Bissell briefed him on “otherworld technology” in the 1960s and that he personally handled debris from a UFO inadvertently downed by a 1962 U.S. nuclear test, Bluegill Triple Prime.19

In January 2025, Air Force veteran Jake Barber began claiming in media appearances that he personally participated in the crash retrieval program, and that the military employed people with psychic abilities as part of its efforts to understand UFOs.

Speaking to Joe Rogan last May, Puthoff estimated that the U.S. possesses “more than 10” downed alien craft. That same day, his longtime collaborator, astrophysicist Eric Davis, appeared at a briefing on Capitol Hill. There, Davis explained to Burlison that the pilots of these craft “are typically the multiple species people are familiar with: the grays, the Nordics. People have talked about reptilians and insectoids. It’s not that they’re reptilian or insectoid. It’s that they resemble… a reptile or an insect-type humanoid.”20

Meanwhile, a constellation of polished groups has formed to lobby for Disclosure and prepare the world for its presumed consequences. They include the Disclosure Foundation, a nonprofit headed by a veteran of McKinsey that pushes for government transparency and boasts professors from Harvard and Yale on its advisory board.

Danny Sheehan, an attorney who represented John Mack in his clash with Harvard’s faculty, has launched Citizens for Disclosure to organize grassroots activity.

Ryan Graves, a former Navy fighter pilot who has testified to Congress about UFO encounters, has founded Americans for Safe Aerospace to encourage military pilots to share their own encounters. It counts former Harry Reid chief of staff Susan McCue among its advisers.

There’s also the Sol Foundation, a think tank whose board is headed by Stanford medical professor Gary Nolan. It describes its goal as “to prepare all areas of society—government, academia, the private sector, and religious and other civil institutions (to name a few)—for the changes that increased public awareness of UAP will bring.”

UFO-themed media is also taking off.

“Age of Disclosure,” a documentary released last fall that features interviews with Rubio, Gillibrand and other senior officials, purports to shine a light on the government’s alien reverse-engineering efforts. In it, Elizondo, Puthoff and Davis lay out their theory of alien anti-gravity technology based on patterns in UFO sightings.21 It debuted as the most-purchased movie on Amazon.

On the podcast Weaponized, George Knapp, the Peabody Award-winning journalist who first interviewed Bob Lazar about Area 51, and his co-host Jeremy Corbell, feature a heavy dose of military veterans along with leaked videos of purported military UFO encounters.

There’s also American Alchemy, hosted by Jesse Michels, a former venture investor with Peter Thiel’s family office and aficionado of speculative science. Michels regularly draws millions of viewers with episodes that delve into UFO Lore and the speculative science around it.

In one sign of this ecosystem’s influence, Burlison invited Sam Gerb — a UFO investigator who publishes his speculative research on YouTube — onto his official congressional podcast in March. On the podcast, Gerb outlines his theory of how Black World operators are funding and hiding reverse-engineering efforts.

Purported Area 51 whistleblower Bob Lazar sits for an interview on the set of American Alchemy (screenshot)

But in this ecosystem, the line between whistleblowing, tall tale and fantasy can be difficult to discern. On Weaponized, the conversation sometimes veers into spookier fare, like aliens “extracting our souls” and Sasquatch. In addition to Kirk McConnell and Grusch, American Alchemy has hosted an explorer who discussed the alleged capture of a 12-foot-tall giant in Afghanistan and a man who claims his job was to communicate with aliens for the NSA.

Even when sober-minded senior officials do appear in this new media, it is not guaranteed to provide greater clarity about the reality of the UFO situation.

The most notable get in “Age of Disclosure” is an interview with former director of national intelligence James Clapper. Having also led Air Force intelligence, the DIA and the NSA during his 50 years in service, Clapper, now in his 80s, is among the most seasoned intel officials in American history. He is also exceptionally well-positioned to assess just what the U.S. government knows about UFOs. So his mere appearance in a UFO documentary is noteworthy on its own.

Clapper appears only briefly onscreen, but he seems to drop a bombshell: “When I served in the Air Force there was an active program to track anomalous activities that we couldn’t otherwise explain,” says Clapper, who served in that branch from the mid-’60s until the early ’90s, “many of them connected with ranges out West, notably Area 51.”

The statement seems to reveal the existence of a previously unknown UFO program, as well as raise questions about the security of airspace over sensitive facilities, during the long period when the Air Force had publicly disclaimed interest in UFOs.

Filmmaker Dan Farah has certainly cast the statement as a major revelation. He said in a podcast interview that Clapper paused after making it as the gravity of his words set in, and that other intelligence officials in the room during the interview recognized their import. “Their jaws were on the floor,” Farah said, “because it’s such a big statement from a guy like that.”

Clapper’s statement also caused a stir among UFO activists, some of whom have lobbied Congress to demand more transparency from the Air Force about the program he refers to.

The Pentagon referred my questions about the statement to Clapper.

In an email, Clapper’s lawyer, Robert Litt, told me, “Director Clapper was not referring to Project Blue Book or any other specific program focused on UAPs. Rather, he was referring to the fact that in the 1980s, when new aircraft such as the F-117 stealth fighter were being tested in the West, there were a lot of reports of sightings of UAPs that the Air Force tracked down.”

Asked to square this explanation with Farah’s commentary, Litt declined to comment further.

For his part, Farah declined a request to share additional video or transcripts from the interview that might shed light on the context for the original comments.

To add to the confusion, Grusch, appearing on Megyn Kelly’s podcast in January, said that Clapper in fact managed the retrieval of alien craft during his time in government. Litt declined to comment.

****

The rise of the Disclosure movement has come at a time of declining public trust in institutions, and amid a continued fracturing of the media landscape, both driven by the rise of the internet.

These trends have helped Disclosure, as a cultural force, become a vehicle for a general suspicion of government, especially its darker corners, and for a broader questioning of what is real.

This open-minded mood is exemplified by the curiosity about psychic powers that is gaining currency in the culture. At the beginning of last year, the Telepathy Tapes, a documentary-style look at the alleged telepathic abilities of nonverbal autistic children, was the most popular podcast on both Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

In fact, claims about psychics and UFOs are more closely connected than you might think.

In addition to the Disclosure Project, Greer has popularized a movement he calls CE5 — short for Close Encounters of the 5th Kind — in which believers attempt to summon alien entities by channeling psychic powers. Thousands of practitioners now congregate on the internet to discuss their experiences in online groups.

And in the new UFO media ecosystem, accounts circulate from people who say they were subjected to, or are aware of, MK-Ultra-esque efforts by the deep state to recruit children with psychic abilities, often for purposes of communication with aliens.22

These claims have further stoked demands that the government come clean about UFOs.

In May, the Disclosure movement achieved a historic milestone when the Trump administration began a rolling release of UFO-related files on the Defense Department’s website.

But so far, the releases have consisted of previously known documents and ambiguous photos and videos. Rather than offer definitive answers, the releases have mostly provided more fodder for endless online debate about what purported UAP videos actually show.23

The controversy is also kept alive by the often cryptic and confusing statements of senior officials, who alternately give off the impression of harboring a great secret and of not being quite sure what they themselves believe.

Trump alone has expressed skepticism about UFOs, praised military pilots who say they’ve encountered them, suggested he possesses secret knowledge about Roswell, and generally reveled in the ambiguity of his administration’s UFO file dumps.

But even officials who have long embraced the cause of Disclosure can be difficult to read. At the outset of my research last fall, I contacted John Podesta, who, as Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff, undertook an investigation of government UFO records and rumors of alien bodies at Area 51.

Since then, Podesta, who went on to serve as an Obama White House adviser and as the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, has become an outspoken advocate of Disclosure. He has repeatedly stated that the American people “can handle the truth.”

What that truth is, he’s not prepared to say.

In an email, I asked him about UFO-world rumors that, during Obama’s presidency, he had worked with the National Security Council to develop plans to disclose the existence of alien reverse-engineering efforts during Hillary Clinton’s expected presidency.

Podesta responded, “To whet your appetite if you haven’t seen” along with a link to a 2016 Guardian article about the obstacles to Hillary Clinton’s campaign trail vow to look into UFOs.

He did not respond to several follow-up attempts to arrange an interview.

THE NEW SCIENCE OF UFOS

“Either we are dealing with a serious breach of national security or with the biggest scientific discovery in history.” — Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, June 2026

Rather than wait for government disclosure, a growing number of scientists are taking the initiative to try to crack the UFO enigma themselves.

In doing so, they’re building on a body of knowledge built in the 20th century, largely outside of the scientific mainstream. Volunteer groups like MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), NUFORC (National UFO Reporting Center), and CUFOS (Center for UFO Studies) collected and analyzed information about countless sightings. CUFOS alone boasts a database of close to 200,000 of them.

There were also pioneering analyses produced by Vallee,24 the French astronomer, and Allen Hynek.

By the mid-’70s, Hynek was giving presentations in which he floated the far-out hypothesis that UFOs’ source might be extra-dimensional rather than extraterrestrial. He also noted patterns in the sightings, including silent hovering; rapid acceleration; psychic effects and electromagnetic effects.

Indeed, a review of one dataset compiled by Vallee of 923 UFO sightings from 1868-1968 confirms the recurrence of electromagnetic effects. Sixty-eight of the reports, more than 7 percent, include claims of lights or car engines failing; TV or radio interference; or compasses or watches malfunctioning in conjunction with aerial sightings.

In the early 1980s, European UFOlogists working with MUFON compiled a data set of over 1,300 UFO sightings that were accompanied by apparent electromagnetic effects.

Around this time, UFOlogists like James McCampbell, an aerospace and nuclear engineer by trade, inferred from such patterns that UFOs may produce microwave radiation as a byproduct of their advanced propulsion systems, which might also manipulate gravity.

Until the dawn of the modern UFO era in 2017, such work was conducted mostly on the margins.

Since then, UFOlogy, often under the more technical “UAP” heading, has not only become an acceptable subject of scientific study, it is now emerging as a hot topic among an avant-garde of researchers.

In 2021, the Galileo Project, led by astronomer Avi Loeb, launched at Harvard. It has since published several papers on methods for monitoring aerial anomalies in the Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation.

An even more ambitious effort came last year, with the publication of a 200-page paper on “the New Science of Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena” in Progress in Aerospace Sciences. In it, researchers from two dozen institutions — including Wellesley, the State University of New York and UChicago — published a lengthy overview of the subject that reviewed government investigations, links with nuclear weapons, and putative physical evidence for such phenomena.

The paper outlines a transition underway from the collection of eyewitness reports by civil society groups like MUFON and NUFORC to the collection and analysis of data using advanced instruments inside scientific institutions.

Among the paper’s authors is Nolan, the Stanford professor who sits on the Sol Foundation’s board and acts as an important bridge between UFOlogy and institutional credibility.

Nolan has said that his professional interests took a turn in 2013, when he was approached by figures from the aerospace industry about an unusual set of medical cases. As a result, Nolan began examining MRIs of government and aerospace industry personnel who exhibited a cluster of mysterious symptoms, including buzzing noises in their heads. Nolan has said that many of the cohort turned out to have Havana Syndrome, the ailment plaguing U.S. diplomatic personnel that some believe to be caused by Russian microwave weapons. But he has also said that a handful of cases that do not match Havana Syndrome came from patients who reported seeing UAPs and who have scar tissue damage in their brains. He has said the damage might be caused by exposure to a strong electromagnetic field.25

Nolan has also studied metallic debris associated with purported UFO sightings. He has said two of 12 samples he’s analyzed have unusual isotope ratios, and speculated that the material could play a role in the propulsion of UFOs, which might then eject it as exhaust.

A chart listing dozens of potential UAP explanations, ranging from the mundane to the fantastical. (Via X)

The most arresting findings to pass peer review thus far are probably from a pair of studies led by Beatriz Villarroel, an astronomer at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stockholm. The papers found statistical patterns that Villarroel believes could offer the first evidence for a key pillar of the Lore: the relationship between UFOs and nuclear weapons.

To find support for the relationship, Villarroel and her collaborators examined “fast transients,” specks of light that pop up in some time series photos taken from observatories of the night sky — but do not appear in photos taken seconds later.

One prosaic explanation for these transient specks of light is that they are random noise caused by minor instrument issues, such as bits of dust on an observatory’s photographic plates.

Villarroel suggests a dramatically different explanation for the specks: that they are glints of sunlight reflecting off of fast-moving alien spacecraft that showed up to monitor humanity’s early experiments with nuclear weaponry.

In a paper published last fall in Scientific Reports, a journal in the prestigious Nature portfolio, Villarroel et al. found that transients in a set of photographs from a San Diego observatory appeared 45 percent more frequently in the 24 hours before and after the dates of nuclear tests. (To preclude the possibility that the specks of light were caused by man-made satellites, the authors restricted their study to photos taken before the 1957 launch of Sputnik, the first man-made object to orbit the Earth.)

The mere appearance of the paper in a Nature journal was a signal event for the mainstreaming of UAP studies.

A second paper, published in an astronomy journal, found that these transients were more likely to appear in places where an object in space would reflect light from the sun, suggesting, the authors argue, that the transients could be caused by fast-moving physical objects.

Images such as these, taken from the Palomar Observatory in California, are at the center of an unlikely scientific debate: Are the disappearing white specks bits of dust or UFOs? (Scientific Reports 11, 12794 (2021))

Of course, the papers have provoked deep skepticism, even among researchers who take UAPs seriously, that their statistical inferences really point to the presence of non-human craft. In the months since their publication, a lively debate has begun playing out, largely on arXiv (pronounced “archive”), an online repository for preprints of scientific papers that have not yet been published in peer-reviewed journals.

One preprint that appeared in January — authored by researchers from Wellesley, SUNY and elsewhere — finds fault with the papers’ methods on several grounds, and argues that their findings amount to statistical illusions.26

Another preprint, posted in March by an independent researcher from Texas, attested to the validity of the original papers’ statistical analyses. A third preprint, also in March, by a retired software engineer for NASA, examined fast transients in photographic plates taken at the Hamburg Observatory in the mid-1950s. It found that an analysis of their shape “provides further support for their interpretation as sub-second optical flashes, consistent with reflections from flat, rotating objects in orbit around Earth.”

The debate remains far from settled, and there are signs that this new era of institutionally sanctioned scientific studies of UAPs is only just beginning.

After a wave of UAP sightings rocked New Jersey last year (now partially attributed to drone activity), the state has appropriated funding for a UAP research center.

And in November, SUNY Albany announced that a donor had made a “major gift” of unspecified size to support ongoing UAP research led by physicist Kevin Knuth, lead author of a 2019 paper in the journal Entropy analyzing UFOs’ apparent flight patterns.

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THE UFO GOLD RUSH

“Looking for the black world was like looking for evidence of black holes” — Nick Cook, The Hunt for Zero Point

Despite the lack of scientific consensus that UFOs are alien technology, or represent any kind of exotic phenomenon at all, entrepreneurs and investors are already jockeying to profit from potential breakthroughs.

This speculative gold rush was on display last October at the luxe Grand Hotel Dino on the banks of Lake Maggiore in northern Italy. There, interested parties ponied up $500 a head to attend the annual conference of the Sol Foundation, the UAP-focused think tank led by Nolan and anthropologist Peter Skafish.

The swanky atmosphere led one attendee, Dario Garcia Giner, to voice a surprising critique: UFOlogy had gone corporate. “I was expecting a polished affair,” he wrote in the Blind Spot, a publication for sophisticated investors. “But I never imagined it would be this refined.”

Noting the contingent of besuited venture capitalists, private equity investors, and military contractors on hand, Giner concluded that “UFOs have entered their Davos era.”

The proceedings included a presentation by Skywatcher, a venture launched last year on the premise that it could summon UAPs on command using two methods.

Slide from a Skywatcher presentation laying out 11 classes of UAPs that can allegedly be attracted with a high-tech “dog whistle.” (Courtesy of James Fowler)

The first claimed method is a high-tech “electro-mechanical dog whistle.” The second method is called “psionics” or “Neuromeditative Interaction.” Basically, psychic powers.

Despite launching last year with great fanfare – including coverage by cable’s NewsNation — Skywatcher has not released proof that it is in fact summoning UFOs.

In an interview late last year, Skywatcher co-founder James Fowler told me that he stumbled upon the dog whistle technique in 2021 while providing support for war games as a military contractor. He said he detects the UFOs using radios, radar and other sensor systems. Fowler, who is no longer working with Skywatcher, told me he initially believed the objects he was detecting were a secret American system, but that he has since ruled that out, and that he keeps the U.S. military apprised of his activities.

He said other members of Skywatcher are responsible for the psychic summoning, and that he could not vouch for its efficacy. He also said he has collected terabytes of UFO data, but declined to share it, saying it would give away his proprietary summoning method.

Fowler is just one of the entrepreneurs promoting the promise of unproven UFO technologies.

To The Stars, a company founded by Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge, along with Puthoff and others, launched in 2017 with plans to exploit alleged UFO technologies like electromagnetic propulsion. In 2019, it entered into an agreement with the Army to cooperate on the research and development of technologies including “beamed energy propulsion” and “active camouflage,” according to a filing it made with the SEC. Under the agreement, the company provided fragments of possible UFO material to the Army for analysis.

But in a 2024 report, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory concluded the material was “terrestrial in origin.” The company’s speculative technologies do not appear to be nearing commercial viability: In recent SEC filings, the company describes its primary business focus as its media production subsidiary.

The lack of results from Skywatcher and To The Stars has not deterred other entrepreneurs from getting in on the game.

In February, venture capital firm American DeepTech, led by Anna Brady Estevez, an alumna of Boston Consulting Group, announced that it was launching an initiative to capitalize on the Trump administration’s disclosure initiative by commercializing technologies derived from and inspired by UFOs.

That same month, a disclosure-themed ETF created by Tuttle Capital Management started trading. It currently boasts just $3 million under management, spread among the stocks of companies like Palantir and Lockheed Martin that could hypothetically benefit from the disclosure of alien technology.

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At the nexus of rumored alien technologies and real-world business applications sits the world of private military contractors. This is where Harry Reid, David Grusch and others have suspected that many secrets of “the Program” are hidden, and where Disclosure advocates are directing much of their scrutiny.

Even if alien technology is nowhere to be found, investors have other reasons to pay attention to a movement determined to shine a light into the darkest corners of these contractors’ Black World projects. In his Sol conference dispatch, Giner points out that the Disclosure movement gives tech entrepreneurs and foreign powers an avenue to pump the U.S. government for insight into its secret military programs, and speculates that the UFO furor may offer a “Trojan Horse” for those seeking to shake up the military-industrial complex.

UAP transparency efforts could, for example, yield valuable intelligence about advanced drones or next-generation decoys.

In fact, a small subset of Black World watchers have long speculated that the military has secretly achieved revolutionary breakthroughs in physics. Such breakthroughs, they argue in turn, could lead to applications like gravity manipulation or the harnessing of “zero-point energy” associated with the “quantum vacuum.” Some UFOlogists argue that these technologies could explain the extraordinary flight patterns ascribed to UFOs.

This speculation is fleshed out most thoroughly in “The Hunt for Zero Point,” a 2001 book by the British journalist Nick Cook.

Cook, while serving as the aerospace editor for the staid trade publication Jane’s Defence Weekly, received an unexpected tip about decades-old American military research. The tip led him to probe American post-war efforts to appropriate secret Nazi science projects, a subsequent American push into gravity research, and occasional claims since then that scientists have figured out how to harness anti-gravity.

As Cook investigated the case that the U.S. has secretly achieved mind-bending aerospace breakthroughs, he examined the possibility that the flying discs seen in the skies after World War II were actually experimental man-made craft.

But Cook found no simple answers. Instead, his journey down a Black World rabbit hole, through the Lore and to the frontiers of secret military tech has shaken the foundations of his worldview.

Decades later, he, too, is now calling for radical reorientation.

In April, he and Pippa Malmgren — a former White House economic adviser under George W. Bush and the daughter of Harald Malmgren — founded the Exo Institute. It describes itself as a forum that “integrates consciousness and anomalous phenomena in developing a more complete understanding of the true nature of reality.”

REALITY SHOCK

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” — Hamlet

In philosophy, ontology is the study of what is real. The term “ontological shock” refers to a state of profound disorientation a person experiences when they are forced to revise their basic assumptions about reality. In UFO circles, it has gained currency as a way of describing the process people go through when confronted with evidence for the existence of alien intelligence.

One Senate aide exposed in recent years to classified briefings about UFOs and alleged reverse-engineering efforts was sent into a state of ontological shock that lasted several weeks, according to a person briefed on the episode. The aide declined an interview request, but some lawmakers have made clear the unsettling effects of the information they are receiving behind closed doors.

“If they were to release the things that I’ve seen, you’d be up at night, worrying,” said Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett, who sits on the Oversight subcommittee investigating UFOs, in an April television appearance. “This country would have come unglued,” he said, “if they would have heard all that I heard.”

Clearly, something destabilizing is bubbling up from the Black World, and the UFO mystery cannot be solved without a better sense of exactly what.

One perspective could start with the initial 1947 misunderstanding about the “saucer” shape, then move to the apparent role of confusion and military disinformation in seeding the Roswell myth, then on to the long list of intentional hoaxes and mistaken eyewitnesses. It would focus on the unusual beliefs held by many of the national-security insiders who brought about the current UFO era and the lack, after decades of controversy, of decisive photographic evidence.

With these aspects of UFO history in the foreground, it looks like a tale of human error and the suggestibility of the collective consciousness.

It would make the present commotion, with government and scientific resources being spent to investigate the more extraordinary claims of the Lore, one of the great delusions of all time — something comparable to the quests for El Dorado or the Fountain of Youth.

From this perspective, it would appear that the only thing emerging from the Black World is the rotten fruit of its own secrecy and deception, poisoning the minds of many of its denizens, overseers, and now members of the public, to the point that they have lost their grip on reality.

Another perspective might emphasize accounts supported by multiple trained witnesses and infrared video, as well as the persistence of government interest. There’s the growing number of statements of concern from officialdom. And the fact that, over the decades, the trend has been from vague and suggestive comments, to, in recent years, increasingly explicit claims about a link between UFOs and non-human intelligence (as well as reverse-engineering).

There’s also the recurring association of UFOs with apparent electromagnetic effects, and other patterns in sightings that arguably constitute the signature of a real, anomalous phenomenon. (Some UFOlogists cite instantaneous acceleration, lack of apparent means of propulsion, and supersonic flight without a sonic boom among these signature characteristics).

From this perspective, it would appear that long-suppressed truths about UFOs, and perhaps aliens, are finally emerging from the Black World.

****

Whichever way you look at it, Deep State leaks and congressional hearings make for odd prisms through which to view mysteries about the nature of reality.

UFO anomalies do not fit easily into existing bureaucratic categories, and attempts to account for them regularly threaten to expose state secrets. It is no wonder that governments have repeatedly abandoned their inquiries without arriving at definitive conclusions.

But Pandora’s Box is now firmly open. And by focusing attention on things that governmental institutions are unable or unwilling to satisfactorily account for, these mysteries are testing the limits of those institutions.

Scientific and media institutions have been similarly hard-pressed. As a result, supernatural theories have seeped into the explanatory void: One school of thought endorsed by Vice President J.D. Vance, a convert to Catholicism, holds that UFOs are demons.

It’s a prospect that is difficult to entertain within an institutional context that has long been defined by Enlightenment rationalism, scientific materialism and the separation of church and state.

But the present UFO flap is demonstrating its potential to destabilize that context.

In part, that’s because the mere investigation of the UFO mystery can induce a sort of ontological shock simply by forcing a person to reckon with the limits of their own perception and understanding.

Humans can directly detect only a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum as visible light. We have access to a few dimensions of space and time, even as scientists theorize the existence of many more. We naturally perceive a certain scale within those dimensions, even as we have become progressively aware of phenomena that exist on much larger and smaller scales. Math and literacy are recent inventions in the context of human existence. Abstract theories of physics are newer still, and have been subject to regular upheaval.

Facing these facts, it is hard to feel confident that our understanding of reality is remotely complete or especially stable.

If advanced, multidimensional beings were interacting with humanity, it is reasonable to suppose this could generate a body of reports as bewildering as the ones associated with UFOs. It is also reasonable to suppose that we might eventually figure out what’s going on, and adjust our understanding of the world accordingly.

As optics advanced in the early modern period, the realization that the Earth orbited the sun and the discovery of microscopic organisms were both met with initial disbelief, before being universally accepted.

The present flap comes at a time when new tools for collecting and making sense of information about the world are rapidly improving. Momentous discoveries could plausibly follow.

But, as Thomas Kuhn demonstrated, scientific consensus is not merely a question of technical advance. Its evolution has social and political dimensions. Meteors offer one (potentially apt) illustration. For centuries, reports of rocks falling from the sky were dismissed as the ravings of ignorant peasants. That changed when a meteor shower sufficiently close to Paris swayed elite opinion.

UFO anomalies, likewise, are not the province of science alone. The subject has long taken on political and even spiritual dimensions.

The current UFO era, coming at a time when populist movements and online media have undermined old authorities, is no exception.

Perhaps it should not come as such a shock, then, that the reemergence of the UFO mystery has become the occasion for a broader reevaluation of reality.

It’s a process that promises to have plenty of terrestrial consequences. Whether or not the discovery of alien intelligence is one of them remains a matter for further investigation.

IF YOU FOUND THIS GUIDE USEFUL, PLEASE FORWARD IT FAR AND WIDE. STAY TUNED FOR MORE.

APPENDIX A: Possible Precedents

The annals of human history fail to offer anything quite like today’s sprawling, bewildering UFO phenomenon. But several historical episodes offer useful touchstones for anyone striving to make sense of it.

Meteors: For centuries, the learned elites of European capitals consistently rejected reports of rocks falling from the sky as folklore fed by the delusions of ignorant, superstitious peasants.

In 1803, the French Academy of Sciences sent scientist Jean-Baptiste Biot to investigate reports of a meteor shower in Normandy. His detailed findings finally swayed learned opinion.

The Salem Witch Trials: A mass hysteria exacerbated by social incentives and official government sanction. Just as belief in UFO lore has lasted for decades despite a lack of proof, belief in witchcraft has recurred in human societies for eons despite the lack of evidence for supernatural powers.

The Heliocentric Solar System: History’s most famous example of a scientific discovery that was repressed because it undermined the authority of an existing power. Galileo showed that the Earth moved around the sun, but the Church forced him to recant.

Microbes: Early modern improvements in optics did not just allow humans to peer deeper into the sky. In the 1670s, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a shopkeeper and minor Dutch official, built a more powerful microscope.

He found a whole hidden world, teeming with life, at a microscopic scale. But his letters detailing his discoveries were met with skepticism for years by the scientific establishment, until the findings were independently replicated.

It was not until the 19th century that one implication of the discovery, germ theory, became widely accepted and revolutionized public health.

The Resurrection: The resurrection was initially an article of faith among a small group of believers who relied on the testimony of a tiny group of witnesses. Eventually, it was accepted as a core tenet of the world’s largest religion.

Historians tend to accept the historical truth of some basic facts surrounding the event, such as the crucifixion of Jesus, though secular scholarship generally does not accept the notion of a literal resurrection.

From a historiographical perspective, the Roswell event, especially, shares many defining characteristics with the resurrection, suggesting its potential to form the basis for a future religious belief system.

APPENDIX B: Further reading

UFOs:

“UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There” by Garrett Graff (2023). A straightforward history of the UFO phenomenon through about 2020 that balances open-mindedness with scholarly skepticism. Graff, a chronicler of the U.S. national security state, interweaves this account with the lesser-known history of mainstream scientific efforts to find life in the distant cosmos.

“The Hunt for Zero Point,” by Nick Cook (2001). A British editor at Jane’s Defence Weekly, a trade publication for the military-industrial complex, gets a tip that sends him on an odyssey through the “Black World” of secret military tech and the dark history of Nazi science. Cook suspects, but never quite proves, that the U.S. has secretly pursued gravity manipulation technology similar to the gravity propulsion systems that have been speculatively attributed to UFOs.

“UFOs and Nukes,” by Robert Hastings (Second Edition: 2017). Hastings, an Air Force brat, glimpsed the prelude to a notorious UFO incident as a teenager at a base in Montana in 1967. He went on to spend much of his adult life cataloging eyewitness accounts of similar episodes at other nuclear facilities. The book has become something of a bible in contemporary UFOlogy, which conjectures a close link between UFOs and nuclear activity.

“Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers” by Jacques Vallee (1969). A classic early work by the French eminence grise of UFOlogy. The book finds continuities between modern accounts of close encounters and millennia’s worth of folktales and religious stories about mystical encounters with otherworldly beings.

[Click here for PDF]

“Triangle UFOs: An Estimate of the Situation” by David Marler (2013). Marler, executive director of New Mexico’s National UFO Historical Records Center, models his study of triangular UFO reports on a military threat assessment. His conclusion: “We appear to be confronted with something other than human technology, therefore the implications are profound.”

History of science:

“The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn (1962). A classic of science history and the theory of knowledge, the book introduced the term “paradigm shift” into the modern lexicon. It documents a recurring pattern in scientific upheavals that offers a framework for understanding current controversies over empirical anomalies.

“Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time” by Peter Galison (2003). Galison, a historian of science, documents the context that gave rise to the great paradigm shift of the 20th century: relativity. The book convincingly demonstrates the extent to which technological change, driven by political and economic imperatives, created the conditions for a breakthrough that is often treated as pure theory.

Could a secret military arms race be on the cusp of forcing a 21st-century revolution in physics, just as imperial expansion and the telegraph did at the turn of the 20th?

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