UFO Ubiquity and Chesterton's Fence

You may be surprised to discover how common UFO "experiences" are

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A couple weeks ago, I was at a Christmas event where there were a number of senior citizens, along with their care workers.

Two of the older gentlemen, let's call them M and S, were sitting at a table comparing notes about their military careers. I listened for a while, and then, when the moment seemed right, I asked: "Did you ever see any UFOs?"

Neither of them looked surprised at the question. M, the more talkative one, said that lots of guys in the service had seen them. S mostly listened and nodded but said nothing. I didn’t get much in the way of specifics, as this was the sort of general, meandering conversation one has with those in their twilight years, and at the moment I was having it I was short on time before needing to pack the kids up and get them home.

N, one of the care workers, said that when he was in the Army and deployed in Afghanistan, he was once sent with a group of soldiers to secure a particular mountain where something had crashed. They weren't given any info about the crash, but they were told not to go investigate, only to secure the perimeter. After a while, a new group of soldiers showed up in black uniforms, with no identifying markers. They relieved N and the other men of duty, and told them that this had never happened and they were never there. Later, if I recall correctly, N said that he was debriefed by a high ranking officer he had never seen before.

As he told his story, I was immediately reminded of the claims made by Marine veteran Michael Herrera, who said that he and his fellow marines had seen a huge UFO under US military control when he was deployed on a humanitarian mission in Sumatra after the earthquake and tsunami that hit that region in 2009. They were sent to secure supplies that were airdropped in, when they came across a clearing containing what they claimed was a giant, hovering craft. And then they were discovered:

Herrera claimed that when he and his five comrades got within 150 feet of the craft, they were ambushed by eight men wearing all-black camouflage, bullet-proof vests, wielding M4 rifles with high-end night vision attachments given to elite US troops.

'They had their weapons drawn on us,' he said. 'We could audibly hear their weapon safety levers flipping off safe.'

'Who the f*** are you guys? What are you doing here?' two of them yelled with American accents, he said.

'They said we weren't supposed to be there, and that they could kill us.'

As the men continued to threaten them, took the marines' weapons, dumped their ammunition and scanned their military IDs, Herrera said he saw others loading 'large weapon cases' and other containers from modified Ford F350 trucks onto a platform beneath the craft.

'When the last two trucks finished unloading and drove off, the lower part of the platform rose off the ground to about 10 feet and the craft lowered to meet it and it came together into one piece,' he said.

'On the corners of the craft, it had lights that were changing between blue, red, yellow and green.

'It rose off the ground and a little past the trees, then shot off to our left towards the ocean at around 4,000mph.

'We can't believe this is f***ing happening. From a dead stop, it didn't make any sound like a sonic boom, it didn't disturb the trees like rotor wash would. We could see coconuts on the trees and none of them were disturbed.'

Herrera said the eight unmarked soldiers gave them back their unloaded guns and marched them back over the hill, 'still telling us how they could kill us.'

'Once we got over the hill they told us to get the f*** away from here and don't look back.'

True or not, the situations struck me as eerily similar, down to the black uniforms and the veiled threats and the debriefing by unknown personnel. N told me that he had not heard Herrera’s story. I had to look it up to show him.

N also told me later that S, the older gentleman who hadn’t said much during the UFO conversation, “knows things, but won’t talk about them.” He told me that S was a spy plane pilot when he was in the service, and still takes the duty of protecting national secrets very seriously even in his 80s. He told me they’d had some conversations about the topic, but that S was only willing to disclose what he felt N would have been cleared to know during his own time in the service — which wasn’t much.

N then told me he’d also seen UFOs locally, more than once, and even had photos. He sent me this, telling me he’d taken the photo just a few miles away from where we were standing:

Obviously, none of what I’m saying here is dispositive of anything. That’s the frustrating thing about this topic. As Eric Weinstein says, there’s a mountain of indirect evidence that can’t be ignored, but little to no direct evidence. That said, it’s extremely interesting to me that I can start a conversation at random with three men from two different generational cohorts, all of whom had military service, all of whom had seen or experienced or directly knew people who saw or experienced some aspect of the phenomenon.

It makes me wonder just how many people you and I know have seen things. Experienced things. Since I started writing more about this topic, I’ve heard from a number of people who’ve seen things they can’t explain. People who read this Substack. People I talk to all the time.

One of the reasons that the push for disclosure is gaining ground is because there are just so many experiencers. As tech improves, and more and more unidentifiable objects show up on sensors, cameras, night vision, and so on, it’s going to be harder and harder to keep a lid on whatever is going on behind this. The fact that it’s possible for people to carry around pretty decent cameras in their pockets everywhere they go means there is a growing repository of public sighting data, even if much of it is of lower quality than we’d like.

The higher quality images and videos, if whistleblowers are to be believed, do exist, but they are being kept secret by forces within the government who do not want them revealed.

Which is also pretty interesting.

All these attempts to stop disclosure legislation, headed up by politicians whose pockets are lined by the very same aerospace defense contractors who are alleged to have crashed UFO tech in their possession, certainly seems to indicate that investigating smoke will, eventually, lead you to fire. If they allow you to get that far.

I’ve been thinking about the secrecy issue, too, in the context of a Chesterton meme that’s been going around:

My friend Kale Zelden explains it in more detail:

"Chesterton's Fence"

It's an idea G.K. lays out in an essay called "The Thing".

It’s more important than almost anything else he wrote.

He writes: "There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.'..."

"To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: 'If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'"

Be careful of unintended consequences.

All too often our solutions only appear as such, and hide downstream consequences we fail to anticipate.

Kale was looking to make a different point; one about modern innovations and their impending consequences.

But I immediately thought about UFO secrecy and disclosure.

The obvious reason for secrecy would be national security, or even the kind of money that would come developing cutting-edge products by reverse engineering advanced technology.

But what if it’s something more? Something deeper? Something darker?

Tucker Carlson, who has been talking this topic quite a lot lately, seems to think there’s something to that. In one of several interviews on the topic he’s done recently, he alludes to “disturbing” things he’s heard but has not been able to verify:

This is just what I believe based on talking to an awful lot of people about this, some of whom I trust a lot, some of whom I trust sort of. I mean, you're trying to piece it together from lots of different places. But no, these are my views that can't be proven.

But there are, I think, informed views that the phenomenon is real. It's been recorded for thousands of years. We know that there's something buzzing around us in the skies, but also under the oceans. We now know, and probably underground as well. So it's real. The government's lied about it a million different ways, probably for a million different reasons, for at least 80 years.

That's also confirmed. They're lying about it now. Who knows what their motives are. And they're also trying to keep a lot of the stuff from being disclosed. That's true. Yes. So do those people think it's a psyop? Well, yeah. Everything's a psyop. But I know for a dead certain fact — and it’s provable — that, say, Mitch McConnell and Speaker Johnson, and people who should — a couple of committee chairmen — who should all know better are trying to prevent the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 from taking effect in a meaningful way.

So they are trying to hide it still. That's a fact. My own view is that these are not aliens. There's no evidence that they come from somewhere else. We would probably know. We've got a lot of technology that's watching what comes in and out of the atmosphere, and there's no evidence of that. I think they've been here forever.

This is my view. Again, it can't be proven. But I'm just telling you, after a lot of conversations, I think it's likely that the US government has had contact with these, direct contact, over a period of years. I find that really disturbing because I, you know, and a bunch of other things that I, that are highly distressing that I can't prove, and so I'm not going throw them out there.

But I can, I’ll tell you this: I've talked to a lot of people about this now because I've never been interested in UFOs until like five years ago. And I'm like, 'Wait, this is real. What is this? Why aren't we talking about this?' I'm just like, coming at it from a totally idiotic, I don't know anything, curious position, which is my normal posture on everything.

And so I've talked to a lot of people, and my view is that they're, you know — this is my opinion — that there are things about this that are really disturbing. And while I hate any kind of government secrecy, and if I could prove any of this, I would say it immediately, consequences be damned. I do sort of understand why they don't want to let this stuff out.

It's not about, “Oh, we've got fragments of one of these crafts at a Lockheed facility in California, and we have biologics from there.” You know, everyone knows that that's likely true. Well, it's certainly true that they have the, you know, pieces of the stuff. But I think it's likely that it's darker than that and that the US government is — I said “the US government,” people in the US government, not the US government — but, you know, there are parts of, it’s vast, it's the largest human organization in history.

Parts of it have knowledge that is very, very disturbing. And I personally think, strongly think, that there's a spiritual component to this that I don't understand and will not pretend to understand. But I think it's very clear that there's a spiritual component to this. That's one of the reasons the Vatican, and again, I'm not Catholic, but has been involved in this for over 100 years, has an observatory, etc., etc.

I mean, it's pretty obvious that these are not men from Mars. That, I think, that was a psyop, because I think the truth is a little bit wilder and has deeper implications just then than that.

So what if, to borrow the idea from Chesterton’s Fence, there’s a bigger reason why the barricade of secrecy was erected around this topic in the 1940s? Whistleblower Dave Grusch has said that the secrecy around this topic came directly from the protocols for the Manhattan Project, and even that some of the same men were involved in both. Which would make sense, since the first significant US sighting, known as the Trinity UFO, happened just after the Trinity test of the first atomic detonation at White Sands New Mexico.

Those of us who think the time for secrecy on this has passed are eager for disclosure. We want to know what’s going on. We are clamoring at the fence. For me, it’s a matter of intellectual curiosity and boyish wonder. But for countless experiencers, who have had their lives turned upside down by encounters they do not know how to explain and who are stigmatized as lunatics for telling their stories, there is a real urgency for exoneration. Having known some people who have supernatural religious experiences, I am well aware of just how precarious it can be to talk about things that will cause people to brand you as crazy. But at least religious experiences are somewhat widely accepted within religious circles. Abduction events by nonhuman beings? Hell, I can feel the skepticism crawling up my spine just writing the words.

And yet, so many otherwise normal people have claimed precisely this.

So do we tear down this fence, or don’t we? Could we at least be given the courtesy of knowing why it was erected in the first place? Is it protecting profit and power, or something much more disturbing? As we push it and pull it, it would be helpful to have some idea on what we might be about to unleash.

In 2024, I suspect we’re going to get more of these answers. I genuinely hope that’s for the best.