Three years after a bipartisan group of senators moved to assert eminent domain over “evidence of nonhuman intelligence,” the public is renegotiating its relationship with reality itself.
Thank you so much for jumping into the scrum, Ben. This is a really great piece, and a solid map of the terrain for people new to the topic (the most solid I've encountered from an actual journalist), that is, with one exception I'd like to respectfully call out.
You list Puthoff's remote viewing work among the "fringe activities and beliefs" that skeptics cite against the reverse-engineering crowd... though please note the government already adjudicated that question, and the answer goes the opposite way.
In 1995, the CIA commissioned the American Institutes for Research to evaluate the Stargate program, right before "shuttering it." The review's statistician, Jessica Utts of UC Davis, concluded that the statistical evidence for the anomalous effect was established. Her words were that it "far exceeds what is expected by chance," and that further experiments aimed at proving mere existence would be a waste of resources.
Also - her skeptic counterpart, Ray Hyman, agreed the effect sizes were statistically significant and conceded he could not identify the methodological flaw producing them; he simply declined to accept the parapsychological interpretation.
So while most people still look at RV as fringe, that's clearly a government-commissioned finding that the phenomenon under study produced replicable, significant results across SRI and SAIC... which is presumably why CIA and DIA funded it for two decades. (Also note: Whether it stayed shuttered is a separate question - Kona Blue's proposed scope suggests the institutional appetite never closed.)
Notice, too, that psi isn't incidental to your subject, rather Id say it's structural. Your Lore section notes the craft were reportedly "steered telepathically." And the 1950 Wilbert Smith memo you cite reports that U.S. authorities were already investigating "mental phenomena" in connection with the saucers, in the same breath as Vannevar Bush and above-H-bomb classification. So, as you can see, the consciousness thread runs through the earliest documented government inquiry, not just the modern personalities.
Therefore, I'd argue that Puthoff's career shouldn't be angled as a believer dragging his eccentricities into the subject; when in fact the security state that hired him is investigating along the same exact axis the reports had pointed to since at least 1947.
Most recently, this also connects to your Skywatcher reporting. The "psionics" method communicates like the absurd half of their pitch, only if the underlying phenomenon was never substantiated...but again. that question was settled in 1995, by the government's own reviewers. The current critique of Skywatcher therefore isn't whether psychic functioning exists; it's whether their application of it produces the summoning results they claim, which is exactly the data Fowler declined to release. Which we should simply ask, why?
And even more interestingly the story has moved since your interview (which might be a place for follow up): the skywatcher group has gone dark, and Ross Coulthart is now reporting - via NewsNation, tied to February's abrupt FAA closure of El Paso airspace - the allegation that a classified government operation absorbed Skywatcher's dog-whistle and psionic techniques for its own detection-and-intercept purposes.
Granted that's a single-source claim and should be weighted as one. But we should all note its shape, and discern: the alleged government response to a psionic summoning outfit wasn't public ridicule, it was...acquisition?
You can certainly argue about what remote viewing is, though treating Puthoff's involvement in it as a credibility deduction actually inverts the record, which is: he ran a program whose core empirical claim survived hostile review by the government that paid for it.
If anything, it's a data point that the national security state takes consciousness-adjacent anomalies more seriously than its public posture admits, which is rather the theme of your piece.
Following up on my earlier comment, because a few documents connect in a way that's not just a theory.
Start with a question nobody in this space has asked cleanly: why did the UAP file keep trying to move to DHS? Kona Blue: the declassified 2011 proposal, AARO's own release - wasn't pitched to DoD. It was pitched to DHS S&T, and read what's actually in it: a "Consciousness Center" for acquiring and training remote viewers and "communicators," humans deployed as "biosensors," medical and experimental centers, tracking whether effects follow people home from monitored sites, and a purpose AARO's interviewees described as protecting the retrieval and exploitation of "non-human biologics." Almost none of it is about aircraft. It's a persons file. And DHS is the persons department - its entire statutory machinery is about who is present in the homeland, their origin and status. DoD's authorities run over objects; DHS's run over who walks among us. If the subject's core is people - which is exactly what your Skywatcher reporting and the Puthoff/Stargate lineage keep pointing at, then DHS isn't a weird venue. It's the exact correct filing.
Now look at 2026. Stephen Miller is Homeland Security Advisor by title, and per Liberation Times' reporting he's also leading the administration's UAP work, consistent with him personally announcing PURSUE tranches from his own X account and being the guy reporters grab at the Capitol for disclosure questions. Same desk, both meanings of the word "alien."
His lane also launched aliens.gov in May: an ICE dashboard wrapped in disclosure language ("they walk among us") the same month the War Department dropped the first real tranches. In 2011 the persons file tried to move to DHS and got killed by the Deputy Secretary in six months. In 2026 the persons file went to DHS's advisor instead. That's twice, on paper, that this subject has been routed toward persons jurisdiction.
Which reframes the El Paso closure from my last comment. A border city's airspace shuts in February; the ambient explanation is enforcement; Coulthart's reporting (single source, weight it as one) says a classified operation absorbing Skywatcher-style psionic techniques sits behind it. Under the jurisdiction lens those aren't competing stories. Enforcement authority is the legal wrapper that persons-related operations naturally wear, and the word "alien" covers both readings without anyone having to lie. Similar to what Geoff Cruickshanks is uncovering with two verified "Blue Books" over the exact same era...
The reportable questions this generates are concrete: Who staffs the new ODNI UAP Governance Board and what's DHS's seat? What was DHS's formal justification memo for establishing Kona Blue as a PSAP - the release shows the Under Secretary cited "claims that relevant information and material existed," so whose claims, in what document? And is there any paper connecting the Homeland Security Advisor's UAP role to DHS components (CBP air, I&A) rather than to DoD? Those are FOIA-able and askable. The pattern's already public; what's missing is someone with your access asking why the persons department keeps ending up holding the file.
I have found this space so difficult to navigate. You have done a great service by putting all this research together in one place thank you.
Thanks for reading, Tom. I’m glad you found it useful. Please share it with anyone who might be interested
Thank you so much for jumping into the scrum, Ben. This is a really great piece, and a solid map of the terrain for people new to the topic (the most solid I've encountered from an actual journalist), that is, with one exception I'd like to respectfully call out.
You list Puthoff's remote viewing work among the "fringe activities and beliefs" that skeptics cite against the reverse-engineering crowd... though please note the government already adjudicated that question, and the answer goes the opposite way.
In 1995, the CIA commissioned the American Institutes for Research to evaluate the Stargate program, right before "shuttering it." The review's statistician, Jessica Utts of UC Davis, concluded that the statistical evidence for the anomalous effect was established. Her words were that it "far exceeds what is expected by chance," and that further experiments aimed at proving mere existence would be a waste of resources.
Also - her skeptic counterpart, Ray Hyman, agreed the effect sizes were statistically significant and conceded he could not identify the methodological flaw producing them; he simply declined to accept the parapsychological interpretation.
So while most people still look at RV as fringe, that's clearly a government-commissioned finding that the phenomenon under study produced replicable, significant results across SRI and SAIC... which is presumably why CIA and DIA funded it for two decades. (Also note: Whether it stayed shuttered is a separate question - Kona Blue's proposed scope suggests the institutional appetite never closed.)
Notice, too, that psi isn't incidental to your subject, rather Id say it's structural. Your Lore section notes the craft were reportedly "steered telepathically." And the 1950 Wilbert Smith memo you cite reports that U.S. authorities were already investigating "mental phenomena" in connection with the saucers, in the same breath as Vannevar Bush and above-H-bomb classification. So, as you can see, the consciousness thread runs through the earliest documented government inquiry, not just the modern personalities.
Therefore, I'd argue that Puthoff's career shouldn't be angled as a believer dragging his eccentricities into the subject; when in fact the security state that hired him is investigating along the same exact axis the reports had pointed to since at least 1947.
Most recently, this also connects to your Skywatcher reporting. The "psionics" method communicates like the absurd half of their pitch, only if the underlying phenomenon was never substantiated...but again. that question was settled in 1995, by the government's own reviewers. The current critique of Skywatcher therefore isn't whether psychic functioning exists; it's whether their application of it produces the summoning results they claim, which is exactly the data Fowler declined to release. Which we should simply ask, why?
And even more interestingly the story has moved since your interview (which might be a place for follow up): the skywatcher group has gone dark, and Ross Coulthart is now reporting - via NewsNation, tied to February's abrupt FAA closure of El Paso airspace - the allegation that a classified government operation absorbed Skywatcher's dog-whistle and psionic techniques for its own detection-and-intercept purposes.
Granted that's a single-source claim and should be weighted as one. But we should all note its shape, and discern: the alleged government response to a psionic summoning outfit wasn't public ridicule, it was...acquisition?
You can certainly argue about what remote viewing is, though treating Puthoff's involvement in it as a credibility deduction actually inverts the record, which is: he ran a program whose core empirical claim survived hostile review by the government that paid for it.
If anything, it's a data point that the national security state takes consciousness-adjacent anomalies more seriously than its public posture admits, which is rather the theme of your piece.
Following up on my earlier comment, because a few documents connect in a way that's not just a theory.
Start with a question nobody in this space has asked cleanly: why did the UAP file keep trying to move to DHS? Kona Blue: the declassified 2011 proposal, AARO's own release - wasn't pitched to DoD. It was pitched to DHS S&T, and read what's actually in it: a "Consciousness Center" for acquiring and training remote viewers and "communicators," humans deployed as "biosensors," medical and experimental centers, tracking whether effects follow people home from monitored sites, and a purpose AARO's interviewees described as protecting the retrieval and exploitation of "non-human biologics." Almost none of it is about aircraft. It's a persons file. And DHS is the persons department - its entire statutory machinery is about who is present in the homeland, their origin and status. DoD's authorities run over objects; DHS's run over who walks among us. If the subject's core is people - which is exactly what your Skywatcher reporting and the Puthoff/Stargate lineage keep pointing at, then DHS isn't a weird venue. It's the exact correct filing.
Now look at 2026. Stephen Miller is Homeland Security Advisor by title, and per Liberation Times' reporting he's also leading the administration's UAP work, consistent with him personally announcing PURSUE tranches from his own X account and being the guy reporters grab at the Capitol for disclosure questions. Same desk, both meanings of the word "alien."
His lane also launched aliens.gov in May: an ICE dashboard wrapped in disclosure language ("they walk among us") the same month the War Department dropped the first real tranches. In 2011 the persons file tried to move to DHS and got killed by the Deputy Secretary in six months. In 2026 the persons file went to DHS's advisor instead. That's twice, on paper, that this subject has been routed toward persons jurisdiction.
Which reframes the El Paso closure from my last comment. A border city's airspace shuts in February; the ambient explanation is enforcement; Coulthart's reporting (single source, weight it as one) says a classified operation absorbing Skywatcher-style psionic techniques sits behind it. Under the jurisdiction lens those aren't competing stories. Enforcement authority is the legal wrapper that persons-related operations naturally wear, and the word "alien" covers both readings without anyone having to lie. Similar to what Geoff Cruickshanks is uncovering with two verified "Blue Books" over the exact same era...
The reportable questions this generates are concrete: Who staffs the new ODNI UAP Governance Board and what's DHS's seat? What was DHS's formal justification memo for establishing Kona Blue as a PSAP - the release shows the Under Secretary cited "claims that relevant information and material existed," so whose claims, in what document? And is there any paper connecting the Homeland Security Advisor's UAP role to DHS components (CBP air, I&A) rather than to DoD? Those are FOIA-able and askable. The pattern's already public; what's missing is someone with your access asking why the persons department keeps ending up holding the file.
Hope that's a thread you're willing to pull!!!
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Thank you!
GREAT WORK & Comprehensive History which provides the perfect required Reading & Listening List. !! Thanks!