UFOlogy, Religion, Tribalism, and That One Time I Saw a UAP
skojecfile.steveskojec.com
I sometimes wonder if people who know me from my previous work find my fascination with the UFO/UAP topic odd. In fact, when I was still working as a religious publisher, I got a lot of pushback when I would share even the most well-substantiated stories in serious publications about things like government and military disclosure of UAP encounters. There was a core contingent of folks who followed me who honestly believed that the phenomenon had to be demonic in origin, because they couldn’t find a way to make it fit with their
Thanks for this very good post. I guess my early exposure to CS Lewis inoculated me to the kind of metaphysical prejudice you describe. Faith that stiff and rigid will likely break and shatter in coming years. My own suspicion is that we have been told very little about reality, only what we need in order to know, love and serve Christ. The "everything" God tells the prophets is related to the specific situations they are called to address. That's my opinion at any rate. It is not only the life to come that surpasses all we can imagine or dream.
It's very exciting. I hope we do find out more soon about what these UAPs are.
I don't know how or if it relates to UAPs per se, but I saw an orb once, a ball of blue light traveling close to the ground, not more than a few feet away from me. When people photograph these things, they're explained away as bits of dust or water on the camera lens. And perhaps many purported orbs in photos are indeed nothing but such. But I, and at least one other, saw this particular orb directly, so that explanation doesn't fit here. I don't know what it actually was.
I totally missed this article when it came out, I don’t know why! (I suspect it was the work of the devil 😱)
But I really enjoyed it. I have run into the same old things from people, who are about as open minded as a fossilized clamshell and as clear sighted as reading glasses made of road tar.
I am different from you, in that I find it a lot of fun to talk about this stuff in front of them and watch their brains melt from the existential crisis. I have always believed that we don’t learn by forgetting and we don’t grow by staying in the darkness. It’s fun to watch people pretending to be medieval Catholic peasants lose their cool and drop the poser act. I consider it an act of charity to point out the deficiencies in their faith, which seems to have been placed more in rules, rubrics and canon laws than is good for them. How do I do that? Well, I usually start by laughing loudly and pointing fingers at them. Then I tell a war story...
Since we’re swapping tales, I have one:
My visits to Iraq while I was an active soldier were mercifully rare and brief in duration. But one time we had to go out to that big damn on the Euphrates river, to pick up some pieces of equipment for return to the US for repairs.
We got there and found that none of it was ready to load. In fact, after sitting there for what seemed like hours, somebody finally came out and told us it was still sitting in this lower floor area, and could we help them go get it?
So we were pissed off about this, but there was no way of gett around it. We follow the guys down all these corridors and head down inside the damn.
This whole place had a creeper vibe of ten times ten to it. For one, it stank of river mud. For another, there were cracks everywhere on the concrete walls and the deeper we went, the more water was coming in from them and puddling on the floor. There were constant wierd noises and groans, like the sounds you hear from the overburden in deep mines.
We finally got to the equipment and started loading it on carts to haul back out. One the guys with us is telling us all kinds of stories about wierd stuff that happens to people all the time down there.
We got the clear impression that the reason we had to go get this stuff was because nobody wanted to ever come down there.
The lights failed twice while we were down there, and the elevator stopped on the way back up, so we were not in the mood to disagree by the time we got back to the trucks and started loading.
It was full on dark by the time we were on the road.
Our convoy had armoured escort, but no air cover. We were less than two miles from the damn when started catching sight of lights up in sky. I had heard of this from the same places and sources you mentioned.
I have always wondered about them, but this was the first time that I had ever seen with my own eyes. They didn’t move like aircraft or drones.
There were three of them, two were white, and one was more bluish.
They came up from behind the damn, and whizzed out in front of us, and moved up and alongside us. We all saw them, there was no mistaking them. They stayed with us for about an hour then just wandered away back in the direction we came from.
The consensus among us was that it had something to do with dam and all the spooky things happening there we had been told about, but over the years I have been thinking that what we saw that night is a lot closer to the UFO phenomenon.
There’s a relationship between the two phenomena, and it should be looked into. I have seen some articles that have seriously looked into supernatural phenomena and demonstrated credibly that they could be UFOs misunderstood by the observers at the time.
I don't know what to make of these mysterious objects buzzing around the skies, but they have my attention. Even though I have never seen anything myself, the Cosmos seems too big for us to be alone. The Bob Lazar episode on Rogan was fascinating, I've watched it twice, Lazar seems very sincere and I can't see what he would gain from lying. Elizondo is also interesting to listen to. One thing he said that stood out to me was a visit he made to the Vatican. Apparently they had in their possession a communique of a Roman General from almost 2000 yrs ago talking about flying discs over a battlefield. This is so crazy if true, even the Vatican is looking into this stuff? Well who knows, I just hope they find more answers in our lifetime.
P.S. Great win against the Titans in the opening week, you have to be stoked. That's the stuff of magical seasons right there my friend. I know it's early, but hey everybody is a contender in September (Except the Lions, apologies to Fr. Joe).
Guess I always just figured "those in other flocks who belong to me" pretty much covered it. I wonder about the experience of looking into the night sky. Still looks like the sphere of the fixed stars as we watch the procession of the constellations, Hubble and Webb notwithstanding. We think we know better than Ptolemy. We're asked to trust science, and even if we master string theory, have we really integrated it into our experience? We act like we know what we're talking about when we speak in terms of dark matter, bosons, quarks. We claim to know. The appeal to authority behind every popular communication of scientific results was laid bare in how the pandemic played out. Science ran up against public policy and we made rules on the basis of what experts said was the best available information. But experimental results really need to be stated in terms of confidence intervals, which don't fit well in sound bytes. And if it's a scientific judgment, it holds the seeds of its own demise as it must be falsifiable.
So whom do we trust? Anthony Fauci was embraced as a secular prophet. He and Francis Collins gave us some interesting insights on "the way science really works" when strategizing in emails about squelching dissent from the narrative they were cultivating. Is this how all the experts are playing the rest of us? Is it that much of a leap to posit that someone knows more about UAPs but I is managing that information for their own benefit? Maybe I'm a cynical old fart, but now that everyone is familiar with the idea of DOD black budgets, it wouldn't surprise me in the least bit if before the black budgets became common knowledge, the experts arranged for a transfer from the public sector to the various Skunk Works mutations need inside defense contractors of all the files and stuff and personnel who know what really happened in Roswell.
Whom do we trust? How do we trust? I think we close the door, sit and wait, desire to listen for the still, small voice to put everything in context. The cross puts everything in context. Steve, my prayer for you today is that the spark you once experienced, evident in your prior work, gets fanned back into flame. If it's not in the Church of Rome, so be it. The Church of Rome is not coextensive with the people of God. You can look it up in the early part of canon law. Take a look at Brian Zahnd, whom I know as a brother in Christ. Take care.
In regard to the intro of your article, I simply never trust people who have it all figured out.
I never trust anyones spirituality that isn’t open to wonder.
As for the rest of the article, I enjoyed it very much, and as usual, I am grateful for how generously you share your gift with the world.
Thanks for this very good post. I guess my early exposure to CS Lewis inoculated me to the kind of metaphysical prejudice you describe. Faith that stiff and rigid will likely break and shatter in coming years. My own suspicion is that we have been told very little about reality, only what we need in order to know, love and serve Christ. The "everything" God tells the prophets is related to the specific situations they are called to address. That's my opinion at any rate. It is not only the life to come that surpasses all we can imagine or dream.
It's very exciting. I hope we do find out more soon about what these UAPs are.
I don't know how or if it relates to UAPs per se, but I saw an orb once, a ball of blue light traveling close to the ground, not more than a few feet away from me. When people photograph these things, they're explained away as bits of dust or water on the camera lens. And perhaps many purported orbs in photos are indeed nothing but such. But I, and at least one other, saw this particular orb directly, so that explanation doesn't fit here. I don't know what it actually was.
I totally missed this article when it came out, I don’t know why! (I suspect it was the work of the devil 😱)
But I really enjoyed it. I have run into the same old things from people, who are about as open minded as a fossilized clamshell and as clear sighted as reading glasses made of road tar.
I am different from you, in that I find it a lot of fun to talk about this stuff in front of them and watch their brains melt from the existential crisis. I have always believed that we don’t learn by forgetting and we don’t grow by staying in the darkness. It’s fun to watch people pretending to be medieval Catholic peasants lose their cool and drop the poser act. I consider it an act of charity to point out the deficiencies in their faith, which seems to have been placed more in rules, rubrics and canon laws than is good for them. How do I do that? Well, I usually start by laughing loudly and pointing fingers at them. Then I tell a war story...
Since we’re swapping tales, I have one:
My visits to Iraq while I was an active soldier were mercifully rare and brief in duration. But one time we had to go out to that big damn on the Euphrates river, to pick up some pieces of equipment for return to the US for repairs.
We got there and found that none of it was ready to load. In fact, after sitting there for what seemed like hours, somebody finally came out and told us it was still sitting in this lower floor area, and could we help them go get it?
So we were pissed off about this, but there was no way of gett around it. We follow the guys down all these corridors and head down inside the damn.
This whole place had a creeper vibe of ten times ten to it. For one, it stank of river mud. For another, there were cracks everywhere on the concrete walls and the deeper we went, the more water was coming in from them and puddling on the floor. There were constant wierd noises and groans, like the sounds you hear from the overburden in deep mines.
We finally got to the equipment and started loading it on carts to haul back out. One the guys with us is telling us all kinds of stories about wierd stuff that happens to people all the time down there.
We got the clear impression that the reason we had to go get this stuff was because nobody wanted to ever come down there.
The lights failed twice while we were down there, and the elevator stopped on the way back up, so we were not in the mood to disagree by the time we got back to the trucks and started loading.
It was full on dark by the time we were on the road.
Our convoy had armoured escort, but no air cover. We were less than two miles from the damn when started catching sight of lights up in sky. I had heard of this from the same places and sources you mentioned.
I have always wondered about them, but this was the first time that I had ever seen with my own eyes. They didn’t move like aircraft or drones.
There were three of them, two were white, and one was more bluish.
They came up from behind the damn, and whizzed out in front of us, and moved up and alongside us. We all saw them, there was no mistaking them. They stayed with us for about an hour then just wandered away back in the direction we came from.
The consensus among us was that it had something to do with dam and all the spooky things happening there we had been told about, but over the years I have been thinking that what we saw that night is a lot closer to the UFO phenomenon.
There’s a relationship between the two phenomena, and it should be looked into. I have seen some articles that have seriously looked into supernatural phenomena and demonstrated credibly that they could be UFOs misunderstood by the observers at the time.
I don't know what to make of these mysterious objects buzzing around the skies, but they have my attention. Even though I have never seen anything myself, the Cosmos seems too big for us to be alone. The Bob Lazar episode on Rogan was fascinating, I've watched it twice, Lazar seems very sincere and I can't see what he would gain from lying. Elizondo is also interesting to listen to. One thing he said that stood out to me was a visit he made to the Vatican. Apparently they had in their possession a communique of a Roman General from almost 2000 yrs ago talking about flying discs over a battlefield. This is so crazy if true, even the Vatican is looking into this stuff? Well who knows, I just hope they find more answers in our lifetime.
P.S. Great win against the Titans in the opening week, you have to be stoked. That's the stuff of magical seasons right there my friend. I know it's early, but hey everybody is a contender in September (Except the Lions, apologies to Fr. Joe).
I’m excited for you to read Universal Harvester by John Darnielle, it’s a Novel that deals with these themes, I think you will love it
Guess I always just figured "those in other flocks who belong to me" pretty much covered it. I wonder about the experience of looking into the night sky. Still looks like the sphere of the fixed stars as we watch the procession of the constellations, Hubble and Webb notwithstanding. We think we know better than Ptolemy. We're asked to trust science, and even if we master string theory, have we really integrated it into our experience? We act like we know what we're talking about when we speak in terms of dark matter, bosons, quarks. We claim to know. The appeal to authority behind every popular communication of scientific results was laid bare in how the pandemic played out. Science ran up against public policy and we made rules on the basis of what experts said was the best available information. But experimental results really need to be stated in terms of confidence intervals, which don't fit well in sound bytes. And if it's a scientific judgment, it holds the seeds of its own demise as it must be falsifiable.
So whom do we trust? Anthony Fauci was embraced as a secular prophet. He and Francis Collins gave us some interesting insights on "the way science really works" when strategizing in emails about squelching dissent from the narrative they were cultivating. Is this how all the experts are playing the rest of us? Is it that much of a leap to posit that someone knows more about UAPs but I is managing that information for their own benefit? Maybe I'm a cynical old fart, but now that everyone is familiar with the idea of DOD black budgets, it wouldn't surprise me in the least bit if before the black budgets became common knowledge, the experts arranged for a transfer from the public sector to the various Skunk Works mutations need inside defense contractors of all the files and stuff and personnel who know what really happened in Roswell.
Whom do we trust? How do we trust? I think we close the door, sit and wait, desire to listen for the still, small voice to put everything in context. The cross puts everything in context. Steve, my prayer for you today is that the spark you once experienced, evident in your prior work, gets fanned back into flame. If it's not in the Church of Rome, so be it. The Church of Rome is not coextensive with the people of God. You can look it up in the early part of canon law. Take a look at Brian Zahnd, whom I know as a brother in Christ. Take care.