For anyone who has been following the UFO/UAP topic for any length of time, there are few surprises.

One surprise is that we can now legally and accurately call it a government cover-up, because that part of the disclosure is now out there: the memo that created the cover-up, the signatures of the people who signed the memo, and the fact that the newly-created CIA would be running the cover-up as a major psychological operation (PSYOP) on the American public to discredit claims of UFO sightings and encounters.

We’re talking about the discrediting of every person who reported a UFO and lost their flight license, or security clearance; every person who was censured or fired from a job; every person who was mocked and shamed by their neighbors; every person whose marriage collapsed; every academic who took an interest in UFO’s, and lost standing, funding, or even employment at their college or university.

We’re also potentially talking about every UAP encounter and abduction that was misdiagnosed as mental illness, that resulted in trauma and medical malpractice.

The harm from this 80-year cover-up is has been incalculable.

One up-side of this disclosure is that the stigma of UAP sightings and encounters should start to diminish.

I just listened to Meredith Spearman’s interview with the Hidden Experience podcast. As Meredith makes so clear, every hidden story, when shared, helps others who have hidden stories.

I would like to tell a story about my mother.

The last two times I saw my mother were, first, about a month after her death, and then again about a year after that. Both incidents were in vivid dreams as I slept.

In the first dream, I was standing in a doorway that opened onto a long, darkened corridor with a smooth, tiled floor, and square-tiled, institutional walls. Only a few fluorescent overhead lights were on: there was a pool of light directly under each, but long gaps of darkness between lights. Closed doors with glass window panels ran along the length of the hallway at intervals. The entire hallway was empty except for a wheeled metal cart, moving down the corridor by itself. A woman sat on the cart, legs curled under her, dressed in a ragged hospital gown stained in dark blood, combing dried blood out of her long, tangled gray hair. I realized it was my mother, and I ran and caught up with the cart, jumped onto it, and rode with her. My heart broke for her condition. Not knowing what else to do, I helped her comb her hair where she could not reach. She recognized me. She told me she would be okay. I felt she was in the right place. I jumped off the cart, and let her continue her journey.

In the second dream, a year later, I heard a knock on my apartment door, and when I answered, it was my mother. She was dressed sharply in a pale business-blue jacket with matching below-the-knee skirt, very 1940’s-professional, carrying a slender folder of documents against her chest with one hand. She was young and beautiful, her hair shiny and carefully styled, very much like her high school graduation photo. Her smile was radiant. I don’t remember the words we exchanged, but I could see that she was okay. She was moving on.

Mom was born in the early 1920’s, in the Oklahoma panhandle. She and her family were members of a Fundamentalist cult called The Followers of Christ, founded by General Marion Reese in the late 1800’s.1 Mom was a Reese, on her mother’s side.

The cult’s stand-out peculiarity was faith-healing. The church later sent missions to Oregon and Idaho, where they “prospered and multiplied,”2 But they also found themselves embroiled in repeated legal prosecutions over the unusually large number of childhood deaths within the cult, associated with by-then-preventable diseases.

For Followers, going to a doctor was the worst sin possible, a direct spit-in-the-eye of God Himself, and grounds for excommunication from the cult and the fires of Hell in the afterlife.3

My mother married a local boy, and they left Oklahoma for Wyoming, to homestead. She eventually sought, and obtained, a divorce, and this speaks loudly to how bad the situation must have been: in the 1940’s in Wyoming, women did not divorce husbands, and if they attempted it, their case was often dismissed without consideration. She met my father several years after her divorce, and I was born in the mid-1950’s.

Shortly after my birth my mother had — as I would call it now — an experience. When she talked about it, she was hospitalized and given electroshock therapy.4 It took legal threats from her sister (who had married into money) to get her released from the hospital.

I reconstructed most of this after both parents’ deaths, from my father’s diaries, stored legal documents, and a few memories from some of the surviving “apostate” members of her family.

And, of course, I have my own now-distant memories.

This was never discussed in the family.

Toward the end of her life, after I was a middle-aged adult, my mother told me of a vision that had puzzled her.

She told me that God had shown her a color in the sky. She couldn’t say what color it was, because it was a color she’d never seen before, nor after. She tried to describe it several times, but would drift off, unable to find the right words. There was a kind of wistfulness in her voice as she spoke of it. She’d said she’d seen it only the once, but had never forgotten it, because it was so beautiful.

The fact that she said it had puzzled her was what caught my attention.

She had many (far too many) visions she saw in the sky, but she normally never talked about her visions until she had worked them out through the wood-chipper of a peculiar kind of bibliomancy that I’ve never heard described elsewhere, and may have been her own invention. Once settled in her mind, she let people know. Her interpretations ranged from weird to spiteful to apocalyptic.

When she was not in the grip of one of these fits, she was one of the sweetest women you’d ever hope to meet.

The wistfulness in her telling of this vision of an impossible color made me wonder if it had perhaps been her first sky-vision. She didn’t say.

But she remembered it. It stood out in her mind as unique.

This is a fractured story. It has always been fractured, and I know of no glue to put it back together.

It started in the 1950’s, one of the more arrogant, misogynistic, intellectually rigid decades in American history, squashed flat by post-war trauma, political hubris, the beginnings of the machine-supported consumer economy, painted in black-and-white by the rapidly expanding television monoculture, and explicitly spelled out in George Orwell’s well-known 1949 novel, 1984.

Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky. The pithy 1962 response to the 1950’s.

During my years at home, there was no language for our family story. Not within the house, not outside the house. There was no space for it in American society.

There was only painful silence, endured.

I want to tie this back into the emotional core of Meredith’s posts, which is that there are many experiences that cannot be talked about in our culture, not because they are inexpressible, but because the only common language for it is abusive language, like “crazy” or “heretical” or “un-American.” Language that results in alienation, rather than empathy and insight.

I started this story with dreams that entered my mind in the world of sleep. Taken together, I found them to be profoundly healing. They were simple and direct.

My mother was desperately ill and in pain.
My mother was healed, and moving into a bright future.

These dreams weren’t about her. They were about my experience of her. Though I can hope they were true dreams that spoke to her experience as well.

I’ve struggled with writing this post, because there is still no language for any of this, though I believe that is changing, slowly.

I think I would now say that my mother had real visions, but her only training in such things was through a simple-minded fundamentalist cult that has no problem with losing children to measles — just drop a couple more babies to make up the deficit, problem solved — and that saw everything other than the King James Bible and simple-minded preaching as the work of the devil. My mother had no language for that color she saw, and only a desperately flawed, inarticulate language for all the rest of her visions.

I’d like to think this is changing, right now, through writing like Meredith’s, and Nicole VanDen Eng’s, and many others.

I am outside, at night, in a clearing in a pine forest. The sky is clear, black, and filled with diamond-bright stars. A short distance away is a large silver spacecraft, standing on its tail, its sharp prow pointed into the sky. Along one side, the hull is transparent, like glass, lit from within, and I see seats, like airplane seats, with the seat-backs horizontally oriented: an airplane with a glass roof standing on its tail. People are in some of the seats, and others walk between the seats, sitting and standing horizontally as though gravity has been turned sideways inside the craft. More people are entering near the base of the craft.

I catch only a glimpse of this, because my full attention is on the woman in front of me. Looking back now, I would call her a girl; she is a little older than me in the dream, but much more mature. Taller — she stands on something, I think: a stone, or a platform. I remember blonde hair, short. She wears a uniform: blue jacket, pants, cap. She is very beautiful.

We are parting. My young heart is breaking. I want to go with her, but I am too young. It is not permitted.

She assures me I will be allowed to go, when I am old enough. I recall no promise that I will see her again, only that I will someday board a ship such as this, and travel between the stars.

I wake in my bed, and my face is wet with tears.

I am ten years old.

On my seventieth turn around our sun, this dream is still with me. The emotional edge is dulled a bit, and I can no longer attest to all of the details, but I still feel the echo: the intensity, the longing. I don’t know if I was ten — that feels about right, but I could have been twelve, or eight, or even a little younger.

I am currently re-evaluating my status as an “experiencer.”

It does seem a bit odd to me to hold this dream with such clarity for sixty years. I’ve had no other dreams with that kind of longevity and clarity.

I’m certainly not the “classic” experiencer. I have not seen UFOs, nor spoken with the Mothman, nor experienced “downloads” of information, nor been abducted. The only “missing time” I can recall is going under anesthesia during medical procedures, which always has the unnerving quality of total unawareness: I’m fully conscious, and then suddenly, I’m regaining consciousness with nothing in between except lost time. There is never any sense of losing consciousness, only of regaining it.

I do know that I suffered for many years as a child with “night terrors,” waking in the night with the sense of terror of something unknown in the room with me; I would lie there, frozen like a vole that hears the hoot of a nearby owl. I would eventually work up the nerve to call for my mother, and she would come, and I would go back to sleep.

Night terrors are common, according to the internet, and are thought to be related to the “reducing function” that begins to optimize neural pathways and reduces sensory input as a normal part of maturing.

One of the comments that Meredith Spearman has made is that during certain ritual practices, psychotropic drugs are used to create specific altered states of awareness, and at least some of these drugs reopen neural pathways that were closed during brain maturation. They re-expand the reducing function, and suddenly, the world is alive with entities.

Perhaps there were entities in the room when I was a child. Perhaps there are always entities in every room. Perhaps the reducing function is mostly so we can get some sleep as mortals.

Photo by m wrona on Unsplash

The so-called “Standard Model” of the universe that I grew up with (and later studied in college) looks something like this:

• big bang

• physics

• chemistry

• biology

• consciousness

The most “fundamental” science is physics, which deals with “fundamental forces,” and “fundamental particles,” and “fundamental laws of mass and energy.” It attempts to work backward toward the Fundament, the ultimate foundation, called the TOE (Theory Of Everything) that has long been the Holy Grail of modern physics.1

Chemistry requires physics, and cannot violate the laws of physics.

Biology requires chemistry, and cannot violate the laws of chemistry or physics.

Consciousness requires a sufficiently complex biological system.2 It cannot transcend the structure of a given biology, nor the laws of chemistry or physics.

This hierarchy is why “ghosts” or “discarnate spirits” are dismissed as impossible. Where is the functioning biology that supports the ghost’s consciousness? The body is dead, the biology has become disordered, the chemistry is breaking down. There can be no continuing consciousness beyond physical death.

The Platonic Model

If we go back to the ancient Greek civilization, specifically Platonic thought, the model was instead something like this:

• demiurge

• consciousness

• daimones and other spiritual entities

• living organisms (including humans)

• non-living substance

I want to call attention to the fact that the Greek model is an almost perfect inversion of the Standard Model, notably in placing consciousness at the top of the hierarchy, rather than the bottom, and physical reality at the bottom, rather than the top. I’ll return to this.

In The Beginning

The “big bang” and the “demiurge” are technically not categories, but rather events that serve as “epistemic thresholds,” that is, a kind of curtain behind which nothing is knowable. Think of the first tick of the clock of the universe, the instant that time began. To ask “What happened before time started?” is a meaningless question: there is no such thing as “before” until time starts.

The Standard Model calls this threshold the “Big Bang” because when it was named, the universe we could see with our telescopes seemed to be expanding, with everything moving away from everything else. Therefore, if you run that movie backwards, everything moves back together toward everything else, and eventually it all gets very small and crowded and maybe even comes together at a single point. That point — the Singularity — contained all the energy of the universe that came afterward: a very big bang indeed.

Similarly, the Platonic demiurge is the “uncreated consciousness,” that serves as the starting point of existence. Plato is said to have thought the demiurge was probably good, in the moral sense. The later Gnostics believed the demiurge was evil, because it “trapped” human souls within the heaviness of material existence. But there is no meaning to the question, “What existed before the demiurge?”

The Question of Meaning

In the Standard Model, a lot of common and important human experiences are implicitly dismissed as illusory or impossible.

In the Standard Model, there is no God. There are no gods. There are no discarnate spirits. There are no ghosts of the dead. There is no Heaven, and no Hell, and no afterlife. Apart from recurring patterns in sociological models of observed primate behavior, there is no morality, nor kindness, nor compassion, nor justice, nor good, nor evil. There is only observable primate behavior, in all its variations, and it is evaluated exclusively on a basis of utility in the survive-and-reproduce game.

In the Platonic model, nothing is removed from modern physics, or chemistry, or biology, but it adds back both consciousness and discarnate conscious entities as real things. This is where it gets interesting.

Consciousness in the Greek model is the precursor to everything. It doesn’t need energy, matter, chemistry, or biology. Instead, consciousness creates energy, matter, chemistry, and biology. The Fundament is consciousness.

In between this universal consciousness and humans is an entire class of non-human entities, such as the Daimones of the Greeks, the Djinn of the Arabic world, the Fae of the Irish, the mak’akh of the Hebrews, the Angels of the Catholics, and so forth.

Humans (and other material creatures) are “a little lower than the Angels.”

Carl Sagan referred to this model as a “demon-haunted world,” and argued that it was entirely an illusion constructed by the human brain and culture, and that we are better off without it.

I’ve never agreed with Sagan on this for multiple reasons. But the overt problem with Sagan’s answer right now is UAP. The current definition of UAP involves observing them break the established laws of physics.3

The observations are no longer a matter of testimony. There are high-resolution camera images, stereo camera images, infrared, radar, and lidar images, and state-of-the-art military tracking images.

UAP break the laws of physics like a teenager breaks curfew on Saturday night. Subsequent attempts to make “sense” of their behavior often ends in “high strangeness” and usually an intellectual pratfall. As Travis Taylor is constantly saying in an aggrieved tone on The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, “What the Heck?”

It’s almost like the UAP are deliberately playing tricks on us.

And that seems to be the key insight. In the Platonic tradition, the whole list of conscious “entities” above humans have been known as both “teaching” spirits, and as “trickster” spirits. The trickster aspect seems to be part of their preferred pedagogical method. They pull the rug out from under you, and then bend down and say, “So, grasshopper, what have you learned?”

Some of them aren’t even that nice.

Cultures that deal regularly with tutelary spirits have procedures and protocols. Rituals. How to treat the Fae with courtesy. How to approach the Manitou. Proper caution in asking assistance of the Djinn. Rituals to initiate and frame and mediate contact. Rituals to tell them to go away.

Perhaps most important, these protocols buffer the psychological shock of coming into mind-to-mind contact with truly alien intelligences.

Our modern societies have pretty much nothing along these lines. In fact, if you have any kind of disturbing spiritual or supernatural encounter, your only acceptable conclusions are:

1. It never happened. Bad dream.

2. I’m insane. I need a psychiatrist.

3. God has spoken to me. I need to start a cult to share the prophecies.

None of these conclusions is very helpful.

Where From Here?

What inspired this post is a new Substack by Meredith Spearman, Maze to Metanoia, which I’m following and highly recommend. She is a nurse and an academic, and is addressing this matter directly, with style, eloquence, and intelligence. I find it fascinating.

The human species needs a different approach. What we are doing now is not working. We are overpopulating, poisoning the life-carrying capacity of the Earth, grinding forward toward a nuclear World War III with unholy glee while citing the stupidest, most unsupportable, most pathetically childish rationalizations of simple spite and avarice.

Frankly, the world of humans needs an intervention. I don’t think we’ll get one, unless we do it ourselves.

But maybe, just maybe, we could ask for a little help. Especially if we re-learn how to discern the helpful spirits, and how to ask politely.

I don’t doubt that there is such a project.

I don’t even doubt that they may have done some crash retrievals — Jake Barber insists that he has done some of these, though he was just the delivery person — but even if what they retrieved hasn’t already evaporated into Faerie Dust, or been destroyed at the command of Christian Fundamentalists (version CF1950) in the program leadership who think this is all the work of Satan, I doubt very seriously there has been any successful “reverse engineering.”

Let me clarify that term. “Successful reverse engineering” is that either you have figured out an engineering artifact well enough to use it, or you have figured it out well enough to reproduce it. Two different levels.

Given that a monkey can learn to use a gun — or a rocket-launcher — at least once, I’ll give this the benefit of a doubt about turning on an intact UAP and even learning to fly it around a bit, assuming that UAP are physical things that don’t evaporate like faerie gold at dawn. But reproducing one? Engineering one? Nope.

Let me make the argument from several directions.

First, having a UAP flying machine even to send a team of three or four people places would have been used. Consider the capture and execution of Osama Bin Laden in 2011. The military used specially “quieted” Blackhawk helicopters. They clearly didn’t have UAP under control in 2011. Or the very recent abduction of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. They sent in a huge force of very conventional air support. They still don’t have UAP under usable control in 2026.1

Second, the nested security system inside the military is allegedly such that no one gets more than a little bit of information about anything, and it’s all broken up in such a way that you can’t easily put anything together from the pieces. I have to assume there is some process of putting the pieces together — otherwise, you’re just gathering lint — but it seems that it requires a huge gathering of people to unlock enough boxes to bring useful information together. This Chinese puzzle-box contains items over 80 years old, and the original people who knew what was where are long dead. Since the CF1950 group has top-level control, good luck getting any of that information, much less the good stuff.

Third — and this is the strongest objection — where do you find the engineers to do the reverse engineering? Three of the extremely valuable capabilities of UAP are “positive lift”, “instantaneous acceleration,” and “hypersonic velocity without sound.” They can allegedly float in one location indefinitely, take off in any direction (including up and down) at instantaneous “ludicrous speed” which should flatten the pilots into thin paste in their seats (but somehow, doesn’t), and they can run dead silent at hypersonic velocity (no air sound, no sonic boom).

Ask any trained engineer or physicist how that is accomplished. They will laugh in your face, and ask, “This is joke, right? What’s the punch-line?”

So where does Lockheed Martin, or Northrup Grumman get their UAP engineers? How do they replace them when they retire? A standard engineering degree takes about four years for a bright student, at a university with instructors, labs to work in, a full-time curriculum, and lots of support. It takes in thousands of students, qualifies the best, and tells the rest find some other career. If the military hires one of those students, they’ll have to spend time telling them, “Forget everything you think you know,” and then spend as much time or more teaching them the “new physics” they need to know. “Oh, and by the way, this will blow your mind, and you can’t talk about it to anyone who isn’t in your security box, not even your wife or your shrink, or you go to jail forever. If we don’t just shoot you.”

But even this this only works if the contractors have an actual, well-developed curriculum for UAP science. If they’re still fishing in the dark, this hypothetical “reverse engineering” enterprise is going nowhere.2

Maybe I’m wrong.

But I’m pretty sure none of the UAP up there in the sky belong to the US.

• CE1: A a sighting closer than 150 feet, allowing visible details of the UFO to be seen.

• CE2: A sighting that leaves physical evidence, such as burns, radiation exposure, or debris.

• CE3: A sighting that includes UFO occupants or extraterrestrials.

• CE4: An abduction experience (introduced 1990 by Jacques Vallée).

• CE5: An abduction experience with physical evidence of injury or healing (introduced in 1990 by Jacques Vallée).

• CE5: A human-initiated contact with extra-terrestrials (introduced in 1990 by Stephen Greer).

Note that there are two very different CE5 categories. From what I’ve read, Vallée’s CE5 isn’t widely used, and Greer’s CE5 is undergoing a phase of popularity, so for the purposes of this post, I will use CE5 to mean Greer’s.

While CE1 through CE4 can be viewed as “events” that people observe and report, Greer’s CE5 is generally called a “protocol” or “process,” since it can (allegedly) be used by humans to initiate contact events with UAP.

Here’s the core of the CE5 protocol, from one of the ubiquitous AI’s out there:

1. Preparation & Clearing: Meditate to clear your mind and reduce fear.

2. Intention Setting: Focus your mind with a clear goal for contact, often using heart-centered meditation.

3. Projection (Telepathy/Signals): Mentally project thoughts of peace and love, sometimes using visual aids like laser pointers or specific light patterns to signal the sky.

4. Observation: Watch for unusual phenomena (lights, orbs, sounds) while documenting everything.

5. Documentation: Keep detailed records (journaling) of experiences, times, and locations.

This five-fold structure shows up in most Western religious and spiritual practices, with minor variations. I would summarize these generically as follows:

1. Grounding

2. Intention

3. Call (sending)

4. Response (receiving)

5. Sharing

This isn’t physics. It’s a ritual practice.

One of the key difficulties in physics, or science in general, is the observer-effect. When you do any scientific experiment, you need to create some kind of experimental environment that isolates the thing you want to study in a way that the observation itself does not affect, or bias, the result.

For instance, suppose you want to measure the depth of a swimming pool full of water. One way to do it is to get a long measuring stick, put it in the water and let the end drop to the bottom of the pool, then read off the number at the water-line. It works well-enough. But suppose you use the same process to measure the depth of water in a test-tube. Pushing a measuring instrument into the test-tube is going to displace the liquid significantly, and you will get a terribly wrong measurement.

Technically, you are not getting a precise measurement in the swimming pool either, for exactly the same reason, but in that case, the amount of water you displace is tiny compared to the amount present, and you frankly don’t care. It falls into the category of “negligible experimental error.”

Observer-effect is always present in science, and one of the key disciplines of experimental science is minimizing, or off-setting, the observer effect. It’s one of the reasons quantum theory is so scandalous: you cannot offset the observer effect. If you observe a quantum event, the outcome is different than if you don’t observe the event. Thank goodness it doesn’t involve anything larger than elementary particles….

In the CE5 case, we have a much more serious observer-effect problem. The fact that a group of people are thinking about the UAP in a ritual setting is what apparently causes them to appear. Or perhaps the right expression is invites them to appear. Either way, we would say that the conscious observer-effect is very significant.

As I described in my recent post on Dragonfest, I have participated in ritual conjuring, passively and actively, and it can, indeed, leave perceptible traces, which are anchored to geological locations that are spinning around the axis of the Earth, which orbits a star, which follows a moving path within a swirling galaxy.

A human thought-form anchors itself to a patch of land, and others can find it.1

So what are these UAP that can apparently be invoked by a group ritual? Are they interstellar travelers with centuries-advanced theories of physics and telepathic powers? Are they earthbound entities of some sort? Are they part of a parallel reality, like the Fae or the Djinn? Are they Daimones, tutelary spirits?

What we do know is that they perform aerial (and underwater) maneuvers that flagrantly violate what we call laws of physics.

And as the political stability of the world teeters under the weight of spiraling lies, growing economic disenfranchisement, and escalating ecological damage, we continue to see more of these unexplained objects in the skies.

Maybe they are trying to tell us something.

What that means is that we are living in a period of time in which there are few certainties, many urgent questions, and a lot of anxiety about the future.

The term “ontological shock” is trending.

Definitions of “ontology” vary, but all definitions all have to do with forming mental categories that attempt to organize everything that is, and everything that happens. It’s part of the way our brains work. We categorize things. This is like that. This is not like that-other.

When those categories change, it is often caused by an “ontological crisis,” a situation where you are straddling a river, one foot on well-established “truths,” the other on something new that contradicts those “truths.” You are trapped there until you either step back and vow never to go that way again, thus becoming a hide-bound dogmatist with a blind spot, or step forward and create a new understanding of the world. Moving forward requires changing your truths.

An “ontological crisis” is stressful, but it is a normal part of life. Every child experiences ontological crisis on their first day of Kindergarten.1 Every high-school graduate faces an ontological crisis during their first month of college. Every world traveller faces an ontological crisis when visiting their first foreign country. We feel lost, get embarrassed, take a step back, adapt, and eventually move forward with a new and more expansive mindset.

Sometimes, however, the river is too wide and deep to step across, and you step into it instead, then find yourself swept away in a fast-moving torrent that threatens to drown you.

This last is “ontological shock.” It’s when everything changes all at once, at such a deep level that it rewrites everything you thought was real and true.

War often causes ontological shock, which was called “shell shock” during WWI in the early 1900’s. Categories like “home” and “family” and “prosperity” vanish into the experienced realities of violence, cruelty, starvation, and death. The customs of civilization make no sense, and you no longer recognize your neighbors and family. You feel completely isolated. You lose faith in God, in humanity, in goodness itself.

When ontological shock happens on a large scale, it can bring down civilizations. Even people who were nowhere near the torrent find they are roped to other people who have fallen in, and they all get pulled in and dragged under.

Ontological shock is a Big Deal.

So there is a term floating around right now, “Disclosure.” As I’ve commented previously, “Disclosure” has two very distinct meanings these days.

The first is the lesser of the two: Disclosure of an 80-year US military/industrial cover-up regarding what used to be called UFOs.2 That one now seems on track toward full (or nearly-full) Disclosure to the public: UFO’s are real, they aren’t “ours,” we don’t know who (or what) they belong to, or what they want (if anything), and for 80 years US citizens have been losing jobs, spouses, families, and good community standing for admitting to having seen UFOs. There’s a massive class-action lawsuit against the government, slumbering right behind this issue of Disclosure.

But there is a much larger and stranger Disclosure taking place, despite apparent attempts to keep it quiet. This is Disclosure of the nature of these UFOs. It also has two parts.

The first part consists of (alleged) crashed-and-recovered UFOs, consisting of complete vehicles, hunks of metal and other solid objects, and what are generically called “biologics,” meaning non-human bodies, both alive and dead. There is an alleged “reverse engineering” program built around these artifacts. This all remains hearsay, coming from deep within classified sources, and as such, cannot really be trusted. But this disclosure, if true, provokes only an ontological crisis, not ontological shock.

The idea of “space aliens,” or “NHI” (Non-Human Intelligence), is hardly new. I grew up on tales of space aliens, and they were no more shocking than the idea of Russians, or Eskimos, or talking animals.

In the late 1940’s, we saw Marvin the Martian appear on television, who was endlessly scheming to “destroy planet Earth,” but was humiliated in every attempt by Bugs Bunny, who represented the ideal American citizen of the time: grounded, clever, common-sense, resourceful, infinitely optimistic, and more than a little smart-ass.

Then came Lost in Space, My Favorite Martian, Star Trek, and a boom in the popularity of science fiction in print.

The idea of space aliens has now moved from Mars to distant stars, and people have been led to believe the NHI are here to monitor us and to keep us from destroying our own world with nuclear weapons. In other words, they are here to help, but under something like a Star Trek non-intervention constraint.

But this doesn’t really fit the data. UFO sightings are increasing in frequency, becoming a regular nuisance in some areas. They stubbornly resist (or confound) analysis, cannot be caught, captured, or shot down, and make a habit of hazing nuclear technology sites, like flies at a barbecue.

I want to shift momentarily to the Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, the History Channel television series. I got hooked on the show when it first came out, and I’ve joined the backstage discussions through their website — I’ve been fascinated — and these guys are frustrated. That’s my sense, anyway.

There’s a thing the team calls “high strangeness.” The term is attributed to astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek in 1972, and referred to UFO testimonies that featured bizarre, illogical, even supernatural aspects. High strangeness is a common feature accompanying UFO sightings, and seems designed to create ontological crisis, if not shock. The SWR team has been facing high strangeness from the first episode they filmed, as did the previous military/industry investigation of the site under Robert Bigelow under government contract. Often, this high strangeness seems perverse and even childish.

High strangeness is so commonly associated with UFOs that it suggests it is an essential feature of the UFO phenomena.

Then I encountered my very own little ontological crisis.

No, I didn’t get abducted. I read a Substack post, and the ground shifted under me.

The post is here:

The Maze to Metanoia

The Pentagon Calls Them Demons. The Ancient Greeks Called Them Daimons. Both Might Be Right

Ingo Swann, Cosmic Egg, 1994; Oil on canvas…

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5 months ago · 368 likes · 85 comments · Meredith

Click. Maybe a muttered, “aHA!”

That is the sound of an ontological shift.

I did not know that the Greek Daimones were akin to the Roman Genii, or the Islamic Djinn, or the Irish Fae, and that the Roman Demon was a later Christian era invention: an early theological categorization and rejection of all spirits as purely evil, other than (of course) the Holy Spirit.

The Greek Daimones were considered by the Greeks to be tutelary (teaching) spirits. The Roman Emperor was more or less expected and assumed to have a Genius that offered advice and guidance. These spirits needed to be dealt with carefully, because they were known to be tricksters, which seems to be their typical way of precipitating ontological shifts and subsequent enlightenment. They seem to generate high strangeness, perhaps as a teaching tool.

Trickster spirits are found in every culture in history, and they all precipitate high strangeness, and display the same fundamental ambiguity: are they good, or are they evil? Benign or malevolent? It seems to be part of the pedagogical method.

My ontological shift was simply this: good or evil or neither, this isn’t physics.

The crisis occurred due to my considering physics foundational to reality. This was implicit throughout my seven years of college, studying physics, and the deepest goal of physics is to become a foundation for a “Theory Of Everything,” or “TOE.” This is not something even considered by any other branch of science. It is implicit in physics. Though sometimes they get into it with the mathematicians, and that brings in the philosophers, and then they all reconvene at a pub and nothing useful happens until the next morning.

This isn’t physics.

How simple and elegant.

I’m not at all surprised about either of these observations. But to discuss this, I need to clarify a bit about what Evangelical Christianity is all about.

In the early 1800’s in (primarily) the United States, particularly as the Appalachian boundary was erased after the war with England ended, the mostly-English settlers started to move West. The new communities they founded were small and very, very far from traditional Christian churches: they had to create their own churches, and along with that, their own ministries and (ultimately) theology. What constituted “Christian” belief became very diverse. Mormonism spread from upstate New York, and ended up concentrating in Utah. Adventism adopted the “dispensational” arguments of John Nelson Darby, which predicted the End Times that most Americans are familiar with in films like The Omen. Faith Healers took up a battle against doctors and medicines. The idea of a “Christian Revival” became a kind of traveling circus, led by itinerant preachers like Billy Sunday. The Fundamentalist movement formed in the early 1900’s, and took up a stance against the theory of Evolution espoused by Charles Darwin, Communism, and a number of other then-current issues.

Evangelical Christianity, as we know it today, started in the early-to-mid 1900’s, and became intensely politicized in the mid-1900’s. Old farts like me will still remember Billy Graham, “pastor to presidents,” as one of the most visible figures of this movement, specifically between 1945 (Truman) through 2001 (George W. Bush). At one point, “Evangelical Christianity” comprised nearly 50% of the US population according to the Pew Research Center, dwarfing all the other denominations.

So it is no surprise that a large number, or even a majority, of people serving in the US Armed Forces between 1945 and the present would be Evangelical Christians.

Let’s talk a bit about the tenets of Evangelical Christianity.

It is based on a specific dualism: saved, or not-saved. Humans are born in sin, and must be “saved,” typically through the conversion experience of “accepting Jesus into their heart.” It is possible (and common) for the “saved” to “fall away from the faith,” but they can “return to grace” by again “committing themselves to Jesus.”1

It’s a lot like the addiction cycle of the alcoholic, but applies equally to gambling, abusiveness, sex, vulgar language, bathing more than once a week, or any other act or practice that a person or community decides is “sinful.”

The cosmology of Evangelicalism is the Heaven/Hell divide that has been popular since Dante Alighieri and his Divine Comedy. The Angels are largely aloof, while the Devils are always snapping at human heels with temptations to sin. There is no real “middle ground,” such as the “virtuous pagans” that exist in Dante’s vision, or “nature spirits” that are neither good nor evil. Humans are “saved,” or “damned.” Spiritual agents are angels, or demons.

The sociology centers around the faith-community, the local church, which is what originally caught the eye of the political class in the mid 20th century. If you can control the specifics of what constitutes good and evil within the community, the group will regulate itself. Dissenters will be ejected from the community, while those who are unsteady in their faith will be reinforced. “Outreach” is an important part of this dynamic, to share the Good News of Salvation, so it builds on itself automatically.

People in 2025 should immediately recognize that MAGA is a direct outgrowth of this.

So let’s project this into the UAP situation within the deeply compartmentalized and secretive groups within the Legacy Program. The apparent technology of the UAP is so far outside nuts-and-bolts technology that it is — as Arthur C. Clark put it — indistinguishable from magic. The entities that show up cannot be Angels: they don’t specifically praise Jesus as Lord, which is the litmus test for an Angel. If they are not Angels, they must be Demons.

Consider also how isolated the members of the Legacy Program are. The community is about as insular as it is possible to be: a secret organization that cannot even reveal that the organization exists, much less that they are part of it, dealing with what looks like raw magic that none of them really understands, and intelligent entities that are not human.

In addition, they are within a military structure where threat assessment takes precedence over trust when dealing with the “other,” whether it is non-human beings or unvetted civilians who could be foreign spies. It is an inherently paranoid environment.

So when I hear that non-human beings are “demons,” I simply can’t take it seriously. As beings go, they could be bad-to-the-bone: indications are that this isn’t the case, but it’s certainly possible.

But calling them “demons” is not a metaphor if it’s coming from an Evangelical Christian: it is naming a specific category in a very limited and simplistic taxonomy of existence.

There are two distinct parts to “disclosure,” and it’s important to keep them straight.

The larger disclosure is, of course, contact with non-human, intelligent beings, which offers the definitive resolution to the Fermi Paradox. We are not alone in the universe, and it appears they want to talk.

The smaller and far more messy disclosure is the fact that the US Government — more specifically, the modern US expansion of what used to be called the Allied forces during World War II — has been suppressing the larger disclosure for 80 years through set of secret black-site/black-budget organizations within the US government that are apparently trying to reverse-engineer UAP technology to use as a weapon of war. This is an entirely different disclosure movement gaining momentum to pull the sheets off this cover-up, and it’s also called Disclosure.

It might be appropriate to distinguish them as

• NHI Disclosure (the We Are Not Alone disclosure), and

• UAP Disclosure (the US military coverup disclosure).

I grew up on Science Fiction. My father and uncles were all fans of SF, and I was reading about spacecraft and aliens and time travel and telepathy almost as soon as I could read. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t simply assume that there were alien beings out in space. It was as common as the idea that there are neighbors in those houses down the street, including the grandmother who always has cookies baking, and the mean old guy who would yell at you if you stepped on his lawn. And even the guy Mom said to stay far away from, for reasons she wouldn’t explain.

It’s called a “neighborhood.” The Earth has a neighborhood, and it appears that there are other intelligent beings living “nearby.”

It’s likely they’ve known about us for a long time, but what apparently captured their attention was when we started setting off nuclear bombs in our back-yard. It seems they don’t like that. It’s hard to blame them. It’s certainly not good for us, and it probably isn’t especially good for them. I don’t doubt it violates a zoning law for the neighborhood. There are persistent reports that some of the UAP fly into human nuclear sites and mess with the launch devices. They zip in, start a nuclear launch, then shut it down, then zip out. I can see them waggling an alien finger at us.

“Nope,” they say. “This is not an acceptable hobby. Not in this neighborhood.”

It seems like the human species just might be the guy everyone else’s Mom said to stay away from.

It was much better than I thought it would be, and I had pretty high expectations. I highly recommend it.

For those of you who have not been following this topic, let’s start with this:

• UFOs are real. They’ve always been real.

• UFOs have crashed, and have been recovered by the US military.

• UFOs have contained non-human intelligent beings (NHI) — “aliens.”

This isn’t my opinion. This is the official word from US government and high-ranking military officials who appear in this documentary.

They aren’t calling them UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) any more, they call them UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena), because it isn’t clear they are “flying” in any normal sense of the word, and it isn’t even clear that they are objects in an ordinary sense. They are extremely high-tech, and apparently not well-understood — they ignore laws of physics. But UAP do include the classic UFO reports going back to the 1950’s, and the “Foo Fighters” during WWII.

The documentary is available on Amazon, though it’s pricey ($20+ to rent), and is available in a small number of theaters in certain larger cities. After the theater release is over, I’m guessing it will (eventually) become available as part of the normal Amazon subscription plan.

Since I’ve been following this topic for quite a while, there weren’t any big surprises in the documentary for me, but I was impressed with it as a documentary. It had good pacing, kept explanations tight, did not wander off into sci-fi speculations, stayed on track, and packed a significant punch.

The narrative is not so much about the UAP, as about the eight-decade cover-up by the US government, and where it stands today.

This was (and is) a real conspiracy, not a theory. They call it “The Legacy Program.” Its original intent was to find out what these UAP were after WWII ended, and to capture and reverse-engineer the technology. It originated under the Air Force and the newly-created CIA in 1947. Much of the reverse-engineering work has been parceled out to private military contractors with black budgets. The Non-Disclosure Agreements for employees (military and contract) have steel legal teeth and penalties that include imprisonment. Like Fight Club, the first rule of the Legacy Program is that no one talks about the Legacy Program.

Eighty years is four generations. A twenty-year-old cadet in 1947 would be nearly 100 years old today. None of the senior people who started the Legacy Program are still alive.

Secrets held that long, like wines, tend to go bad.

At this point, it appears that the Legacy Program is an autonomous organization. It is not even visible to Congressional oversight, and appears to keep the US President, the cabinet, and the rest of the US administration in the dark. It, or parts of it, may be subject to Air Force, CIA, NASA, or Department of Energy oversight. Or it may not. Its trick with Congress is to refuse to tell Congress members anything because they don’t have clearance, and then blocks them from obtaining clearance. It may well be the same with all other oversight.

Nonetheless, the Legacy Program is a leaking ship. “Whistleblowers” have been taking substantial personal risks by talking confidentially to journalists and congress members, expressing serious concerns about the program.

At the same time, UAP sightings have been increasing substantially, in the US and around the world. Are they Non-Human? Are they Chinese or Soviet UAP? Are they Legacy Program UAP?

It’s an untenable situation, and the most dangerous part of it is the secrecy itself.

This all needs to be disclosed. Secrecy has spoiled the wine, and it is stinking up the whole house.

My one objection to The Age of Disclosure was the wrap-up at the end, where everyone seemed to get confused about this last point: that the biggest problem is the secrecy.

The people in the documentary are all career US politicians (including ranking military) and they continue to make the argument that we must keep everything secret from the Soviets, and the Chinese, and whatever other national “enemies” they imagine they may need to deal with. They demand that we keep our spoiled wine in our bottle, my prrrrecious.

That part deeply disappointed me.

There has been an academic breakthrough in UAP studies.

Two peer-reviewed papers have been published, one in Scientific Reports, and the other in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, both of them well-respected scientific journals. The clip above is an interview with Dr. Beatriz Villaroel, principal author of both papers.

She and her colleagues went back to old astronomical photographic plates,1 specifically from the Palomar Observatory in California, USA, from before 1957, the year the Russians put Sputnik 1 into orbit as the first human-made artificial satellite.

What they found in the images were “specular reflections,” reflections of sunlight that were very sharp and bright, with a spectral signature as if the sunlight was reflecting off a polished metal surface, or a mirror. This is unlike the images caused by meteorites or other natural objects in Earth-orbit. They also occurred in multiples, forming straight lines, and when they went into the Earth’s shadow, they vanished, indicating that it really was reflected sunlight.

There were hundreds of thousands of these “specular events” recorded, and in addition, the count of the events seemed to fluctuate over time. When they did statistical analysis of this fluctuation, they found a strong correlation with dates of known nuclear tests around the world.

Pre-Sputnik reflective objects in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth, hanging out above nuclear tests.

Wow.

One of the things Beatriz seems most excited about is that the Palomar photographic plates are far from the only astronomical plates from that pre-Sputnik period. That means their techniques can be used by other astronomers around the world to check for this using photographic plates from other observatories. It makes for very exciting science to be the first in an avalanche of new experiments.

We could guess that these specular objects are still be up there, but with all the shiny metal “space junk” in orbit now, it is virtually impossible to pick these reflections out using telescopes on earth. It should be possible to see them with orbiting telescopes, but that gets into politics and money. Combing through old photographic plates mouldering in observatory storage is one thing: commandeering an orbital telescope where astronomers have been waiting years for their turn, is something else entirely. We’ll see if priority gets yielded, or bumped.

First, let’s talk about a “scalar field.” We need some definitions.

The first part, “scalar,” is a mathematical term for any single-valued quantity. Temperature. Pressure. Mass.

Something like velocity is not a scalar, because it consists of two quantities: speed and direction.

A “field” represents a conceptual space to which values are applied, and the field is imposed upon a “manifold,” which describes the dimensionality and curvature and other geometric properties of the field.

So: if you assign a scalar value to every point within the field, the result can be called a “scalar field.”

A simple example is the temperature in a room. The temperature is a single-valued quantity: degrees (Fahrenheit or Celsius). It’s a number. The field is the room, which has a temperature value at every point, and the manifold is the three-dimensional space in which the room exists. This is a scalar field.

The Higgs field has a single-valued quantity at every point in 4-dimensional space-time, which interacts with particles and gives them mass. The Higgs field is a scalar field.

A gravitational field is not a scalar field, because gravity has both magnitude and direction. In general relativity, it’s an even more complex “tensor field,” which we don’t need to go into.

The term “scalar field” is very general, but the one real requirement is that it contains only single-value quantities over the field.

This brings us to the term “scalar waves.” Waves consist of both a magnitude and a direction, so there is nothing “scalar” about them. This appears to be a complete misuse of the term. If anyone can explain why this is not the case, I’d be delighted to hear.

What the term is used to mean in UAP contexts seems to be based on the idea of a “compression” wave that applies to electromagnetic energy.

Compression waves are quite common. When you talk, you are emitting compression waves. The vibrations produced in your throat cause air molecules to jostle air molecules in front of you, which jostle the air molecules in front of those, until the jostling reaches someone’s eardrum and they hear you.

The proper term for this kind of electromagnetic wave would be a “non-Hertzian longitudinal electromagnetic wave.” Which is a double-mouthful.

Electromagnetic waves have not been observed to behave this way. Instead, they are “transverse” waves, meaning they jiggle back and forth between electric and magnetic properties at right angles to the direction they are moving, but in the direction they are moving, they move smoothly along at the speed of light, and can’t catch up to the next wave in the chain to jiggle it. That’s a crude physical analogy, but so far, there has been no compelling evidence for the existence of longitudinal electromagnetic waves.

But people keep looking, and (of course) absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. If they can ever detect longitudinal waves and get it through peer review, it will make a lot of noise in the scientific community, and probably result in a Nobel Prize.

The original impetus for looking for longitudinal waves seems to go back to Nicola Tesla, who was looking for a way to efficiently broadcast power wirelessly. You can, of course, just make a very (very!) powerful radio-wave transmitter, but it has two downsides: most of the energy you broadcast ends up going places you don’t need or want it, which is incredibly wasteful, and it ends up cooking or setting fire to everything nearby, which is highly undesirable.

There seems to be a mythology, or a belief, that somehow, longitudinal waves will not spread out with distance, which is what wastes power and cooks unwanted things. In practice, a MASER (a microwave variant of a LASER) can create a fairly tight microwave beam. But either way, if a duck flies through the beam, you get a momentary power interruption and duck flambé.

Hope this is helpful.

Addendum

The main use of the term “scalar wave” that shows up on the internet is in alternative health environments, where some kind of device is purported to produce “scalar waves” that improve health in various ways. These typically seem to be devices you can purchase and are the size of a small radio. I have no opinion on this.

There’s also what is called a “scalar wave detector” used in astrophysics to look for very small fluctuations in fundamental constants. I have no idea how these work.

Addendum2

It could also be that “Scalar Wave” is a a code name for a technology that has nothing whatsoever to do with scalar fields or waves. Like “Black Swan” or “Green Monkey.”

This is just a short comment: perihelion for 3I / Atlas is October 29. This year. A smidge over a month from now. Perihelion is the closest approach to the sun on its current trajectory.

Its closest approach to Earth is in December.

So by Christmas, we’ll know whether it’s going to stop in our solar system for a burger and a coke, as some continue to insist it will do.

I’m content to wait and see.

The idea of “parsimony” in science can be loosely stated as, “Don’t invent complex explanations if a simple explanation will do.”

Or, “Be stingy with your hypotheses.”

I’d like to apply this to the “five observables” of UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena). For reference, these are:

1. Positive lift

2. Instantaneous acceleration

3. Hypersonic velocities without signature

4. Low observability (cloaking)

5. Trans-medium travel

I found myself having difficulty sleeping after watching Ross Coulthart’s interview of a US Marine named Michael Herrera, worrying at a knot of almost-there insight I was having trouble articulating.

Brief overview of the interview: in 2009, Michael Herrera was deployed with a small team on a relief mission to Sumatra, Indonesia after a natural disaster in the area, as one part of a much larger military relief effort. Hererra and his team saw a UAP hovering near the ground, octagonal in shape and about 300 feet in diameter. They went to investigate, and surprised and were disarmed by what seemed to be a private military force (human, black uniforms, US American accents). They watched HVAC cargo containers loaded into the UAP, and then saw the UAP depart silently with extreme acceleration. The private military then released them, telling them to keep their mouths shut about what they saw.

UAP themselves are like magic carpets — they can do whatever they need to do, right? Antigravity? Sure. Faster-than-light? Why not? I’m sure they could make a perfect soufflé during an earthquake.

What kept me up that night was something more prosaic: the displacement of air.

Ambient air doesn’t belong to the UAP. It surrounds the UAP. It’s normal: we know a lot about how air behaves.

If the UAP occupies physical space, in the sense that you could walk up to it and rap your knuckles on it, then it is displacing air in the space it occupies. When it moves, the air flows around it, filling the space the UAP just vacated, and getting pushed out of the space the UAP just moved into. If the UAP moves rapidly, the air swirls violently and makes audible noise. If the UAP moves “instantaneously,” its departure from where it was leaves a hole — a vacuum — a lot like when the Road Runner takes off in an old Loony Tunes cartoon. Ambient air will rush into the hole, which will produce a loud thunderclap. As the object races away, it shoves air out of the way and leaves a hole in its wake, into which air collapses and makes a lot of noise. This is because of the physical properties of the air the UAP is racing through.

It doesn’t matter what is pushing the UAP through the air, whether it is gravity or psychic energy or Aladdin’s flying carpet. The air is plain old Earth air. Shoving an octagonal object at high velocity through the air should create one hell of a racket.

Yet it is silent. There is no thunderclap that knocks everyone off their feet, trying to suck them into the 300-foot diameter vacuum suddenly created by the object’s rapid departure. There’s no reported trail of dirt and vegetation lifted from the ground. There is no trailing sound of disturbed air. There is no reported sound at all.1

The only hypothesis that works is to say that the UAP was not interacting with the ambient air. It isn’t displacing air as it hovers, and it isn’t pushing it around as it moves. The UAP is not tangible. It is an image. An illusion. A ghost.

Yet trucks delivered payloads, which were loaded into the UAP. Was the payload also an illusion? Were the trucks? Were the black-clad soldiers?

And why? What might have been the purpose of this David Copperfield level of illusion performed for an apparently unexpected group of marines in a disaster zone?

The multiplication of hypotheses going down that road is bewildering. It certainly is not parsimonious.

The thing that makes most sense to me — since we have to invent something to account for this at all — is that the UAP managed to become completely intangible: it somehow relinquished or suppressed its occupation of normal space. It was in a state where it co-existed with the air that filled the space it seemed to occupy. In principle, someone could have thrown a rock at the UAP, and it would have passed right through it and landed on the ground.2

The UAP did remain visible, and I’ll return to that in a moment.

Here’s what I find attractive about this hypothesis: it immediately explains four of the five observables in a general way.

Hypothesis: The UAP is intangible. It is not interacting with matter.

It is therefore not subject to Earth’s gravity. That’s observable #1.

It is in its own self-referential inertial frame, which is not moving at all, so it would experience no inertial forces at any time. That’s observable #2.

It is not interacting with air, so it would never generate hypersonic signatures, regardless of its apparent velocity in our world. That’s observable #3.

Transmedium travel is an obvious corollary. Air, water, stone, metal are alike. It passes through them all. That’s observable #5.

Observable #4 offers another insight: interaction with light, or more broadly, electromagnetic radiation.

UAP seen in daylight tend to reflect light, showing highlights consistent with solid objects made of shiny metal. They also show up on radar, and presumably reflect other frequencies of E-M radiation. At the same time, they exhibit the other four observables.

So it seems that UAP can become physically immaterial and still reflect light.

Because of the mass-energy equivalence of E-M radiation, the energy of this reflected light represents a reaction force on the object in the form of radiation pressure, and will resist motion of the UAP. It could preclude transluminal velocities, even if the UAP remains immaterial.3

Observable #4 renders the UAP invisible, which could be merely a side-effect of rendering the UAP partially or fully intangible to light, or more generally, to electromagnetic radiation, which could simply be a useful side-effect of permitting transluminal travel.

The second is Mitch Randall’s address at the 2024 Sol Foundation conference.

I’ve also added a link to an earlier post of my own.

The general UFO/UAP topic is gaining attention very rapidly, but despite the talk about “the five observables” that help distinguish real UAP from other more ordinary visual events, observation of these “observables” remains mostly inconclusive, and is (rightfully) considered poor scientific evidence.

What gets me excited about Mitch Randall’s “Operation Skywatch” is two things. First, it directly addresses the poor evidence-value of UAP observations, and second, it involves the public — the general public, people like you or me — in obtaining high-quality data.

Let’s start with the “five observables” that distinguish UAP from other stuff in the sky.

1. Positive lift

2. Instantaneous acceleration

3. Hypersonic velocities without signature

4. Low observability (cloaking)

5. Trans-medium travel

Postive Lift

The only known ways of keeping a heavier-than-air object in the air, all involve reaction mass in some form, meaning you throw mass (typically flaming fuel) out of the object to keep it aloft. A rocket or missile throws the burning fuel out the bottom, and the reaction of the rocket is to go up. A jet aircraft throws it horizontally out the back, forcing the aircraft to move forward, and uses a specially-shaped airfoil (the wings) to convert its forward motion into lift — and if it stops moving forward, it falls. A helicopter (or typical drone) uses fuel to drive a rotor, which creates a strong downward wind, and the reaction to the downward wind is to drive the rotor upward, dragging the payload with it. These are all “reaction lift” methods, where keeping device up in the air requires constantly throwing away reaction mass.

The only other way to keep something aloft is to make it lighter than air, such filling a lightweight balloon with hot air or a lightweight gas like helium. These balloons can float for long periods of time, but the ability to maneuver and change altitude is quite limited. In particular, they can’t stay stationary in a wind.

“Positive lift” is essentially equivalent to neutralizing the gravitational pull that causes objects in the sky to fall in the first place. You could think of it as “antigravity,” though it might be something else. But it acts like antigravity.

Instantaneous Acceleration

No one knows if it’s actually instantaneous, meaning it takes zero time to change velocity. What this really means is that acceleration is so rapid that it can’t be measured or even estimated. There is no visible “speeding up.”

The problem with this is that, to the nearest it can be estimated, acceleration is so high that it would turn any passengers inside the device into goo, and would tear the vehicle apart even if it were made of the strongest materials we know of.

As insult to injury, UAP are often observed to do “dog-leg” maneuvers, where they travel at extreme speeds in a straight line, then make an apparently right-angle turn without slowing, which features a double-acceleration: one to kill the current velocity, and the other to accelerate instantly in the new direction.

We have no technology, or materials, that can demonstrate this behavior.

Hypersonic velocities without signature

This if a fancy way of saying UAP often move at multiples of the speed of sound, sometimes ridiculously high multiples, yet are completely silent. We used to watch the Blue Angels air show over the F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming around the Fourth of July, and a sonic boom is not a sound easily mistaken for anything else. Creating a sonic boom is pretty much synonymous with moving faster than sound. UAP do without.

Low Observability

UAP are visible to the naked eye, show up on cameras, reflect radar and LIDAR pulses, often emit bright light (especially at night) — and then they don’t. Sometimes, they fade out. Sometimes they just vanish. Then they may reappear.

It’s the kind of “stealth” behavior you see in a Marvel movie, or a stage-magician’s illusion. There are all kinds of speculations of how this might be accomplished, but — like suppressing sonic booms — these speculations aren’t something that lend themselves to working well at hypersonic speeds in the air.

Trans-medium Travel

This is one of the most baffling behaviors. It refers to the behavior of UAP that doesn’t seem to respect what it is flying through — the vacuum of space, air, water, or even solid rock. We all know what happens when you try to run a race car through a stationary brick wall. You get … well, pieces. But you get pretty much the same thing if you fly a jet plane into the ocean. Or fly a space capsule into the Earth’s atmosphere at too steep an angle.

UAP don’t — or don’t always — seem to care what they are flying through. It’s like they are immaterial ghosts. Or can becomes ghosts at will, while remaining visible.

The problem

The basic problem with making quality observations of these behaviors is that humans have binocular vision, and cameras do not.

Camera evidence of a UAP zipping by at hypersonic speeds a mile away cannot be positively distinguished from a moth flitting by a few inches from the camera lens. Single focus cameras can produce a lot of illusions: I like to refer to the film, Lord of the Rings, where Gandalf was so much taller than all of the hobbits. This was all done with something called “forced perspective,” and creates the illusion in real time with an ordinary camera, with live actors.

The human taking the photo, or video, has a much better sense that the object is far away, because the human has two eyes (typically) and can estimate the distance fairly well using binocular triangulation, which is basically wired into our predatory brain. Eyes aren’t going to mistake a moth for a UAP.

But you can’t prove it with a photograph. All people can do is share is a story, and maybe snap a photo of something in the sky that could be just about anything.

You can create a binocular camera, but they tend to be quite expensive, bulky, and have to be kept in good repair. You can’t carry one around in your pocket.

So the question is, how do we get peer-reviewable data on phenomena that occur when least-looked-for?

Operation Skywatch

There are two parts to this operation.

The first involves something called “passive radar.”

Since the early 1900’s, we’ve been living in a thickening soup of radio waves with controlled frequencies: AM radio, FM radio, GPS signals.

All of these signals tend to bounce off things they hit. Walls. Aircraft. UAP. These signals can be used to locate the things the signals are bouncing off. It takes a “magic box” radio that picks up the right frequencies and determines the direction they came from, but with some software, just a few “magic boxes” can triangulate the signals they receive and determine the 3D location of the objects it is picking up.

It’s like binocular vision, but much more accurate, and covers an entire volume of airspace simultaneously, using radio signals that are already in the air.

As Mitch indicates in both of the videos below, he’s prototyped this, and was able to record passive radar images of planes taking off and landing from a nearby airport.

Part 1 of Operation Skywatch involves mass-producing these “magic boxes” and putting them across the United States, which would provide (essentially) a full-coverage “dome” that could show everything (that isn’t cloaked) up in the sky that reflects radio signals that are already bouncing around. Commercial aircraft broadcast ADS signals that identify each plane, its location, altitude, and direction, and can be filtered out, leaving only “anomalies.”1

As nationwide projects go, it’s cheap. Mitch’s estimate is that it would require about 10,000 of the magic boxes to cover the airspace above the US, and would cost around $50M. He’s looking for investors.

Part 2 is the fun part.

If you look at Mitch’s images as generated by his prototype, the resolution is very coarse, and that is built-in due to the radio frequencies being used. For high resolution, you need light. Visible images. This is where the public comes in.

The idea is to have an Internet site you can sign up for, and an application you can install on your mobile phone. When Skywatch sees something it thinks is anomalous, it will know where it is and where it is headed — at least at the moment — and can send an alert to all of the subscribers in the path of the anomaly. If they are free to do so, they can run outside, start the phone app, and start recording in the direction the anomaly is supposedly coming from. Hopefully, some of them will get videos as the anomalies fly by.

It’s a flying saucer early-alert system, for the public, and with public participation.

Now, if multiple subscribers in the same area get the alert and all start recording, the phone image will provide a timestamp, orientation data, and the image itself as the anomaly shoots past. The images of all these cameras together will provide triangulation data for the anomaly, but instead of a human binocular sighting separated by two inches (the average distance between human eyes), they’ll be separated by meters or even kilometers, providing a huge baseline for very accurate trajectory determinations. There could be dozens of images of the same anomaly, all taken from different angles and distances, which will refine the data further.2

All of this data is uploaded to the Skywatch servers, which does all the math to provide a robust measurement of the altitude, location, direction, and velocity of the anomaly, as well as (of course) visual images, though these are almost always just dots in the sky.

I think it could become the basis for a very popular hobby for lots of people.

I’d be one of them.

Links:

Reality Check with Ross Coulthart

Operation Skywatch

Correlations don’t always reveal a causal link. Sometimes, it’s just a coincidence, or as in the case above, an arranged coincidence.

One of the rough-and-ready means scientists use to sort this out is called The Null Hypothesis, which is a fancy way of quantifying the test of “What happens if I just sit here and do nothing?”

There are quantitative ways of constructing a formal Null Hypothesis as a statistical measure, and it takes you into some slightly complex math, and a whole lot of arguments among statisticians about “significance.”

But here’s the bottom line: at least some Null Hypothesis testing is a whole lot better than none at all.

I’m going to turn to a specific example where just a little bit of Null Hypothesis testing (and data) would yield big dividends.

Out in the Arizona desert is a group of researchers that believe they can “call” UAP using “psionic operators.” These operators are human individuals alleged to have what used to be called a “high PSI” talent in the science fiction of the 1960’s and 70’s. The term psi, or psionic, refers to a category of mental talents like telepathy, remote viewing, seeing the future, levitation, mediumship, and other “psychic talents.”

Like UAP, most people have been conditioned to scoff at this, and a number of science popularizers, like the late Carl Sagan, and Neill deGrasse Tyson, pooh-pooh it entirely.

I don’t. Pooh-poohing any claim without investigation is called “debunking,” and it’s an intellectually dishonest practice.1

The information I’ve heard is that the operators call, and the UAP show up. They turn the steering wheel on the post, and the geyser erupts. Cause and effect.

Maybe.

The Null hypothesis is that the psychics have no effect at all. The UAP show up when and where they will, and the psychics aren’t involved.

To determine whether this is the case, you need to get some information on what happens if you sit there and do nothing. That is, what happens when the psychics stay home?

This starts with a quantitative observation. How many spontaneous UAP appearances are detected per week in this area? How are they distributed — in clumps, or randomly spread out? Do they cluster around certain times of day? This is the Null Hypothesis baseline data. It’s a picture of the world without any psychics involved.

Then you introduce the psychics, and continue to collect data. Does the sighting count change? Is there any indication that they are more clumped around the psychic callings, perhaps with a consistent time-lag?

In strong causal cases, there really won’t be much question.

The implication in the reports I’ve heard is that there are zero UAP sightings until the psychics show up and do their thing. That would be a Null Hypothesis test result — zero UAP in the desert — and I’d like to hear about the data. Is it really zero? Is it only one a month? One a week? One a day, but only between midnight and dawn?

I’m curious.

The UFO abduction phenomenon is not as common as sightings, but — as one of my readers pointed out — the single most common side-effect is that it seems to ruin the abductee’s life.

Any kind of abduction tends to do that: it is a profound trauma to have all of your autonomy ripped away and become the involuntary and helpless subject of someone else’s designs. The UFO abduction has the added issue of sometimes unfolding like a nightmare, filled with strange, inhuman creatures, medical probes and tissue sampling, having objects inserted under the skin, and other indignities.

What is worse, however, is the subsequent experience of having everyone in the world insist that the abduction never happened. It was a drug trip, or a psychotic break, or a lie told to get attention, or a fantasy born of reading too many comic books.

A lot of women experience this same kind of dismissal-trauma after they are raped, especially if the rapist is rich and famous. “No,” they are told, “it never happened. He would never do that. You aren’t even his ‘type’.” Harvey Weinstein. Bill Cosby. Donald you-know-who.

The UFO abduction experiencer is treated the same way, but also often seems to suffer the deeper trauma of having their sense of reality shattered.

When you read or hear Irish tales, or early-American folklore, or any mythology from times past, there is invariably a concept of an Otherworld, populated by creatures of magic who are not human. In the tales, people who wander into their realm, or are captured and taken there, may return to find that decades have passed in the mortal realm, as in the story of Rip Van Winkle. Most cultures in history have some kind of mythic framework for this experience of abduction from and return to the ordinary world. In many cultures, to have such an experience is a mark of distinction and honor.

Not here and now.

I don’t, of course, know what the true nature of a UFO abduction experience is, or how many of the abduction stories are based on spoiled barley in the soup, or mental illness. But it is a rare but widespread experience, and in the past, there was at least a language for it.

We don’t have any language for this experience in our modern mythology. There is no Otherworld, there is no alternative reality, everything is cut-and-dried and served up on the unwavering tick of the atomic clock. If you slip out of the real world, you need to be “treated” with chemicals for mental illness, and the cure is complete only when you can agree that the experience never happened.

I certainly do believe that abduction experiences happen. That much is obvious. The question is not whether the experience happened. The question is how to best come to terms with it, both personally (for the experiencer) and culturally.

Let’s talk about both the phenomena themselves and the various players in this game of UAP hunting.

The public phenomena consist (primarily) of lights and visilble objects in the sky1. This has been reported going back into the 1800’s (before powered aircraft), and given various petroglyphs around the world showing what might be saucer-shaped objects in the heavens, it may go back a very long way in history and pre-history.

It is only since humans have started playing in the sky themselves that this has become a real issue.

There’s a growing consensus regarding categorizing UAP as something that possesses one or more of the Five Observables, which I’ll list here:

1. Instantaneous acceleration

2. Hypersonic velocities without signature

3. Low observability (cloaking)

4. Trans-medium travel

5. Positive lift

Taken together, anything that exhibits all of these observables basically “isn’t there at all.” And yet, there it is: visible to the human eye, detectable by infrared and radar, recordable by cameras. It isn’t an hallucination, unless cameras have hallucinations.

I’ve spent a lot of time pondering this from a physics perspective, and it’s largely a dead-end: anything that is physically real and behaves like this, exhibits properties or technology more than two steps ahead of current art, meaning there’s a learning gap to get through.2

I’ve started thinking about it more, now, from the perspectives of the players, or actors, in this drama — particularly the human actors, and perhaps even the (possible) non-human actors.

It’s the question of “why?” rather than “how?”.

This immediately breaks out into a number of groups of UAP players.

1. Fabulists.

2. Debunkers.

3. Primary (unprepared) observers.

4. Enthusiasts.

5. Academic scientists.

6. Private military/industrial contractors.

7. Enlisted military UAP observers.

8. Military officers in charge during a UAP event.

9. Covert government agencies.

10. Hostile military agencies.

11. UAP agents.

The fabulists and debunkers make a business out of their narrative, and largely need to be ignored. It’s a harsh accusation, and difficult or impossible to prove, but I generally try to stay away from people who seem too sure of their own narrative.

Primary unprepared observers are generally gobsmacked and looking for answers. They are natural prey of the fabulists and debunkers.

I’m an enthusiast, so I’m not going to be quite so harsh. But most enthusiasts have a pet theory, and I haven’t seen any solid theories to date, domesticated or wild. I think this group is most useful as a prepared observer. Should they ever observe anything. I have not.

Most academic scientists don’t have time or interest for UAP research. I studied for an academic career, and have a fair number of academic friends. They are all specialists: it’s the nature of the job. As an undergraduate, I helped unpack a vacuum-ultraviolet spectrometer, a tool used by vacuum-ultraviolet spectroscopists. It’s an expensive piece of equipment — though nothing like a particle accelerator — and they have to justify the purchase, with publishable results in their field. Of vacuum-ultraviolet spectroscopy. Even Gary Nolan, founder of the SOL Foundation, has only done so after deciding he’s had enough of academic biology and wants a change. There are very few academic UAP specialists, like Jacques Vallee, in the world: fewer even than vacuum-ultraviolet spectroscopists.

The private military contractors just want to make money. Period. One way of doing that is to invent stuff, get a patent, and use the patent to lock up the technology so they can win contracts and beat out competitors. Beyond that, I don’t see them working independently from the government. Corporations are very short-sighted and focused on money, typically in the form of government contracts. If they invent an anti-gravity machine, how are they going to make money? By trying to create the anti-gravity plane and compete directly with Lockheed for commercial flights? Or by making anti-gravity stuff for the government under contract?

I’m going to lump all of the military groups together, including the “hostiles” and the covert agencies. This is a huge spy versus spy game that has been going on for at least 80 years, and every narrative that comes out needs to be considered potential disinformation, regardless of the source. It also seems very ingrown and more interested in keeping secrets than using them.

Finally, the most interesting group, the UAP agents.

One hypothesis is that the UAP sightings are all run by covert military agencies.

There was a story — I think in one of Jacques Vallee’s books — about an interview with an unnamed senior military intelligence agent (British, as I recall) who admitted that they had staged an “alien abduction” on some poor soul in a village, complete with alien costumes, psychotropic drugs, and psychological manipulation, then turned him loose to “see what would happen.” After the Tuskeegee Syphillis Experiment in the US was exposed, such a story of staged alien abduction should hardly seem implausible.

There are a couple of problems with this general hypothesis, however. There were UAP in the 1940’s, and the “UFO invasion” of Washington DC in 1952. We would have to push the covert technology back to th 1940’s, if not earlier. That seems very unlikely to me.

Another possibility is NHI — Non-Human Intelligence. I think there are two main branches of this, one being a hidden species co-existing with us on Earth, and the other being “space aliens3” of some form.

The main difference, I would think, is detachment.

Any NHI co-existing with us on this planet is going to be concerned about our behavior. While they might live underwater or underground and be less affected by the climate change we are inducing, a full-scale nuclear war would probably ruin their day. There has been the long-standing apparent concern/curiosity the UAP have had for our human nuclear capabilities. Perhaps they are near neighbors. Perhaps they were once known as the Fae, or the forest spirits.

Any NHI “space aliens” of whatever form would likely have a more … detached, though possibly altruistic concern for what we do to our world. I find that a little harder to grasp. There are supernovae all over the galaxy, and if it happens to wipe out an entire cluster of high civilizations, do these NHI show them the same concern?

But here’s another, even wilder thought.

Maybe there is no non-human intelligence, and perhaps the UAP themselves are not physically real (which could explain all of their apparently non-physical capabilities).

Maybe they are a manifestation of our own global human conscience.

They came to our awareness in numbers during WWII. They’ve critiqued our nuclear weapons. As our entire world deteriorates under our “economic progress,” and wars of aggression, they are coming out in greater numbers.

Perhaps they are us, speaking to ourselves.

Perhaps we should listen to them.

But they both reflect an awareness of the reality of Dr. Beacham’s critique of current (public) UAP data, in that the quality of the data is generally very poor. I’d like to talk about what this means, and the kinds of things that would help improve the data substantially, some of which can be achieved fairly easily.

The first problem is that UAP occur where they occur, when they occur, and if no one is looking at it or recording it, then there is no evidence at all. UAP don’t generally take out an ad in the local paper giving a time and date for the show.

As a result, people aren’t generally prepared to make good observations when a UAP shows up, much less take good measurements and readings. They are caught empty-handed and are limited to what their senses report.

The first caveat with visual sightings is that stereoscopic vision in human eyes becomes useless more than a certain distance away: there are arguments that set this as low as 200 meters, and as large as 1000 meters (about half a mile). Beyond 1000 meters, you have to know how big something is to guess its distance (or vice versa). A honking big UAP twenty miles away looks about the same as an itty-bitty UAP a half-mile away, except for other more subtle cues, like “bluing” (the tendency of distant objects in daylight to become more bluish in color because of light scattering in the air), or by distant objects that obscure or are obscured by the UAP. Apparent velocity is likewise affected by distance.

Perceived passage of time is a psychological measurement, and it changes quite dramatically with emotional state. How long did that prom kiss actually last? Who can tell?

One big change in the last few years is that virtually everyone now carries a digital camera around with them in the form of a cell phone, and most people — younger people in particular — are adept at whipping out their phone and recording a video.

Phone cameras are actually quite amazing. They not only have phenomenal resolution, they also have built-in sensors that provide the GPS location of the camera, and have built-in magnetometers and accelerometers that can determine the orientation of the camera: they know which direction is North, and which is “down.” This information appears in the “metadata” of every photo you capture.

The one thing these cameras don’t do is to determine distance: they are like a one-eyed person, and cannot determine distances at all. A small object up close looks much the same as a large version of the object far away.

A classic example of this is the “giant glowing UAP” flying by at enormous velocity, that turns out to be a tiny bug buzzing along a foot from the lens, illuminated by a streetlight behind the camera.

This problem can be easily corrected if you have multiple cameras recording the same object, from different locations. With two cameras, you get binocular vision. With many cameras, you get even better resolution: like “surround sound,” but with light.

The one missing piece is the ability to run all of these multiple camera images through software to generate a 3D image of the UAP.

There are a number of companies working on different ways to do this, including (apparently) Enigma Labs. The SOL Foundation has a discussion as part of their Operation Skywatch, providing an app for your phone that manages the uploading of the images along with the metadata for processing, as well as the images from every other camera recording the same event.

Depending on exactly how they set things up, there are a few fundamental suggestions for how to manage your video recording to create the best data.

First, disperse your group (even if it’s just two of you) to record the UAP. Try to get some distance between you so you are all capturing the show from different locations and angles. The further apart you are from each other, the better the data will be. Remember that your two eyeballs with their separation of two inches are good out to at least 200 meters. A ten-foot separation between two cameras are good for a lot further.

Second, if you can get anything into the camera field of view that is visible and in a fixed location, keep that point steady in your camera, and let the UAP go wherever it wants, including out of the field of view. Examples might be (at night) a bright star, or the moon, or a tall building with an aircraft warning light at the top. In daytime, maybe there’s a tree branch, or a rock outcropping, or a cloud. Think “I’m taking a nice, steady video of the moon just sitting up there, and this crazy UAP thingy is probably just an annoying firefly anyway.”

If the UAP goes completely out of the camera field, you can try to find it again, of course, but always try to also find a new reference point and hold that steady in the view.

Third, don’t zoom in for a close-up. Keep the field of view as big and wide as you can and still clearly see the UAP.

I’d like to explain a bit about why these suggestions will provide more useful data.

Dispersing your group improves the multi-view stereoscopic image of the UAP. It effectively allows the UAP to be located in three dimensions, and that can be used to determine its position, velocity, and acceleration in three dimensions.

This information applies directly to three of the “five observables” that UAP exhibit, namely:

• positive lift (ability to hover without apparent support from propellers or jets)

• extreme (hypersonic) velocities without sonic booms

• instantaneous acceleration, including sharp turns at high velocity

One huge weakness in existing data is the absence of three-dimensional data for the UAP. A single camera provides only a two-dimensional view, and depending on the distance of objects from the camera, can result in all kinds of illusions. Consider the “forced perspective” used so effectively in the film Lord of the Rings, to make Gandalf look so large and Frodo so small.

Even a two-camera stereo view can eliminate these illusions, and a multi-point stereo view provides not only better measurements, but also statistical error bounds on the measurements.

Keeping a stationary object in the same location in your field of view does a few things.

It keeps you from “chasing” the UAP. If you attempt to chase a UAP with your camera, you are going to overshoot and lose the image of the object anyway, especially if it changes direction, and then you’ll thrash around trying to find it again. Then you’ll overshoot again. I saw lots of this in the New Jersey drone videos: they ended up with more searching-for-it footage than actual object footage in many cases.

More importantly, this provides a reference point in the field of view that is known to be stationary. It will always appear to move in the field of view unless you have your camera mounted on a steady tripod, because your hands aren’t that steady. Knowing that there’s a fixed object that isn’t actually moving even if your hands are trembling allows each frame of the video to accurately locate the visual position of the UAP. This enormously improves the data.

There are a several reasons you don’t want to zoom in too tightly.

Most of the genuine UAP are essentially featureless: a tic-tac, a round object in a transparent cube, a saucer, a ring of lights. The shapes aren’t actually very interesting. What is interesting is the behavior — the five observables.

When you zoom in, you end up with a low-resolution image of an uninteresting shape, and you simultaneously reduce the field-of-view, meaning that you can no longer observe the behavior of the UAP. Is it hovering, motionless? You can’t tell, because you’ve zoomed your fixed reference object right out of the image, and every tremor in your hands makes the UAP jump and jitter. Then it decides to move, and (blink) it’s gone. Now you have to zoom out and try to find it again.

Zoom in just as much as is necessary to see the object clearly as an object, and try to keep the field of view as wide as possible.

Dr. Beacham is a particle physicist who works at CERN, which (to date) features the largest particle accelerator in the world.

He says that he found it odd to be speaking at a UAP conference, and was a little nervous about the fact that he is a UAP skeptic. His skepticism is based on the poor quality of data for UAP.

I have to agree with him on that point. The hard data is, frankly, shit.

Where I part ways with him is regarding the relevance of this fact, and I think I can make a reasonable case that it isn’t particularly relevant at present.

Dr. Beacham studies (among other things) quantum black holes, which I’ll take as an illustrative example. Without being any kind of an expert in this field, I think I can say with confidence that one does not accidentally discover hard evidence for quantum black holes.

The way you do this kind of work is to first study both General Relativity Theory and Quantum Theory — both of which are essentially branches of pure mathematics that model the phenomena of gravitational and quantum effects1 — and then drive the mathematics toward the extreme limits where quantum black holes (if they exist) should theoretically appear, then study that math until you get an intuition of how you might set up an experiment that would create the right conditions to detect a quantum black hole .

Then you consult with every expert you can find, to go over your calculations, your models, your proposed experiment, and see if they can pick it apart.

Then you ask for money to set up the experiment.

You hope, of course, that your experiment works the way it is supposed to, and keep refining and trying again if you don’t (until the money runs out). If you do detect a quantum black hole, or what you think is one, you can then start tweaking the experiment to try to figure out if all its properties consistently match what theory predict. If they do match with theory, you get a Nobel prize. If they don’t match with theory, you have that once-in-a-century-or-three opportunity to collect enough data to rewrite the whole field of physics.

In other words: to write a paper about the observation of quantum black holes requires almost impossibly accurate, reproducible, and theoretically predicted observations2.

At no point in this process does a quantum black hole EVER jump out and pop you on the nose, screaming “Hi! I’m a quantum black hole! Look at me!”

UAP are at the opposite end of research. They are things that no one was looking for, and theoretically, do not and cannot exist.

The only reason people bother with them at all is that they DO jump out and pop you on the nose3.

It’s more like the discovery of the neutrino. Certain particle experiments were not behaving the way physicists thought they should, and no one knew why. They studied them, and eventually hypothesized a massless particle with no charge4, the neutrino, imbued it with various other magical properties, and used this imagined particle to make the math work. It worked well enough that it became broadly accepted despite its ridiculous properties, and then the search for it began in earnest. Only much later were scientists able to conclusively detect the neutrino and confirm that it isn’t quite massless, and does, in fact, really exist.

The one thing that made the discovery of the neutrino relatively easy was the fact that neutrinos aren’t capricious. They don’t behave impulsively5. Once you get used to the idea of this “ghost in the machine,” you can make it appear at will, and it always behaves consistently. It follows rules.

UAP are almost entirely capricious. They appear to be guided by intelligence, or at least goal-seeking behavior, and it is very difficult to get them to show up on demand.

In this regard, they are like “ball lightning,” a rare phenomenon that has, at various times, been dismissed by scientists as a figment of hysterical imagination. The Wiki page on “ball lightning” lists no fewer than twelve proposed (and very different) scientific explanations for this phenomenon.

I could add a thirteenth (poetic) explanation: perhaps ball lightning is a dying UAP.

The point here is that when you are first observing a new phenomenon, you are stuck with the phenomenon as it presents itself. For transient, capricious phenomena, it’s impossible to get the kind of high-quality data that a particle physicist is accustomed to requiring. But every phenomenon is new at some point in time, and even if the observations are rare and the overt behavior seems capricious, you can still do science.

So while I agree with Dr. Beacham that there is little high-quality public evidence for either ball lightning or UAP, that isn’t especially relevant. Not at this point in the inquiry.

There is more than sufficient evidence to indicate that there is an interesting phenomenon worth paying attention to. Once we start paying attention, we can collect better data.