"Why Do You Care About UFOs?"

Answering a question that keeps coming back up

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I was going to take a little break from the chaos of my current life circumstances to tell you about the latest UAP hearing in Congress yesterday.

But then a thought occurred to me: most of the people who read you probably don’t understand why you care about this issue at all.

Admittedly, while this a topic of personal fascination for me, it doesn’t feel like it fits here with the other things I write about.

I beg to differ. But let me explain.

I am primarily focused here on the search for meaning in a chaotic universe.

Sometimes, that comes in the form of personal or religious deconstruction: “Why am I the way that I am, and how did I get that way?” and “Why do we believe the things we say we believe, and how can we know whether they’re true?” and so on.

Sometimes, it’s cultural commentary and analysis, on things like the battle of the sexes, the falling birthrate, the decay of cultural mores, the clash between immigrant and native populations, the deglobalizing world, and so on. All of this stuff matters very much insofar as it forms the fabric of the world we live in and the quality of our lives both individually and collectively.

But other times, it’s more esoteric stuff. Emergent phenomena. The rise of AI and the surveillance state and the way technology is irreversibly changing the course of human history. What social media is doing to our brains and our relationships and our attention spans and our ability to think and read and innovate with depth and consideration.

And the UAP issue — UFOs if you prefer, but they’re not all flying objects — relates very much to the core existential understanding I’m trying to chisel out of the rock in this darkened cave.

If we are not alone, that changes everything we understand about how the universe works.

It changes our religious understanding.

It changes the way we look at topics like evolution.

It raises questions about our place in the cosmic dominance hierarchy.

It forces us to reflect on the question of whether our foundational assumptions across a broad spectrum of topics are actually true.

I can’t tell you what got me into the topic. I’ve been fascinated since I was a little boy. Maybe it was the fact that my dad was a big sci-fi fan. Maybe it was growing up with Star Wars as the sort of foundational mythology of my time and place. Maybe it was just looking up at the stars at night and wondering how all of that could be out there and yet it could just be us here on this one lonely planet, all by ourselves.

Long before I studied theology, long before I had any sense that man’s salvation story was specific and unique, I wondered what else was out there, looking back at us.

I’m guessing I was one of the only 6th graders in 1989 checking out library books about Project Blue Book and trying (and failing, due to sheer terror) to get through Witley Streiber’s Communion.

But as I grew older, my need for affirmation and acceptance and purpose was best embodied through a religious lens, and I became increasingly zealous. By 15, I had been to World Youth Day, was having religious arguments on local BBS systems (and later online), and was wearing Christian-themed t-shirts to my public school. By 18 I was living with the Legionaries of Christ, going to one of their schools, doing missionary evangelization work in several countries, and ultimately volunteering full time in a house of apostolate. I lived with priests for nearly 2 years. By my sophomore year of college, I added Theology as a second major after my Communications degree.

The deeper into religious discourse I got, the less I thought about any of this UFO stuff. I still loved science fiction, but I treated it as entertainment. I tried writing sci-fi stories, but I couldn’t find a way to make it fit with my Christian epistemology, and always felt stuck. After all, Christ became man and died to redeem mankind, and that was not likely to be a repeatable theme across star-strewn cultures. As our technology grew, as we launched the Hubble Telescope and got continued data from the Voyager probes and monitored every signal from the skies, the Fermi Paradox loomed larger.

Where was all the other life in the universe?

I was more or less content not to care. I was interested in girls and theological debates and travel and hanging out with friends and playing video games and watching the New York Giants mostly suck and occasionally be very good at football, and that was enough.

Early in my marriage, I think C.S. Lewis opened a door.

On a whim, I got audiobooks of his Space Trilogy, and we started listening to them. They presented an alternative theological view of how aliens might exist, and it was fascinating. If Out of the Silent Planet was mind-bending, the richly imagined world and deep philosophical and theological underpinnings of Perelandra quickly became my favorite book I’d ever read, and I actually became afraid to go back and re-read it later because I was afraid it would lose its mystical quality.

Admittedly, I choked a bit on That Hideous Strength, but perhaps in my 20s I just wasn’t ready for it yet. It felt out of character from the other two books, and was more a kind of cosmic horror than the wonder and beauty of the first two volumes.

I also saw an inexplicable object in the sky with my now-wife about a year before we got married. It was an overcast day in Binghamton, New York, and as we drove we saw a shape shifting ribbon of dark material in the sky that never went up and never came down. We tracked it for as long as we could before losing it in the trees.

I also dealt with plenty of paranormal phenomena after working with an unofficial exorcist for a time, a story I’ve written about before here. I started to see the world as a lot less empirical and clear cut than I would liked to have believed. I loved the neat little bows Catholic theology tended to tie around everything. Everything neatly explained, categorized, and labeled. All of it sanitized for your protection.

My experience of the world of demons and ghosts and real and false visions and interior voices and bizarre synchronicities left me on unstable footing. As I continued my work in Catholic media, I had more such experiences, and I never knew quite what to make of them.

Then, in 2017, everything came back into focus with a single story from the New York Times:

The article confirmed so many things I had long wondered about. It brought me back to my childhood interest. It told me that some of the bizarre things I had long found so fascinating were actually real.

And so, for the past eight years, I’ve been keeping abreast of the topic with great enthusiasm. When I would try to present evidentiary information on my social media accounts, my Catholic audience would often buck and bristle and object. They had the same theological and soteriological problem I had often dealt with as a wannabe writer of science fiction: if this is real, it throws our narrative into chaos.

People would often dismissively respond that anything that seemed to be a UFO or alien abduction was probably demons.

I would ask, incredulously, why demons needed technical craft that would engage with our advanced fighter jets and warships, how it was possible that these craft could crash and leave wreckage, why they showed up on radar and infrared, and so on.

Superstition was far stronger than any impulse to simply follow the evidence and find out where it led.

But it mattered. Whether it destroyed religion or simply changed it, this was clearly a real phenomenon, and I wanted to study it like a scientist: show me the evidence, tell me what the data says, and let’s go from there. Being open minded about all of it didn’t feel like it was optional for truth seekers.

It was essential.

When I finally lost my faith, my interest in UAPs had nothing to do with it. To a small degree, the willful ignorance and a priori assumptions of my fellow Catholics, however, did. I simply could not accept an epistemology that rewarded burying your head in the sand. And inasmuch as I was already rejecting the spiritual counsel I was getting in the confessional when it came to looking at the crisis in the Church — “if it challenges your faith, look away from it” — I was not willing to entertain it in any other arena either.

I had an interior conviction I couldn’t shake: your beliefs don’t particularly matter in the face of facts that contradict them. You either find a way to accommodate those facts within the structures of your beliefs, or you reject your beliefs in favor of ones that do accommodate those facts.

So again, I didn’t lose my faith because of my interest in “little green men,” as a number of my detractors have glibly proposed. I lost my faith because my epistemology is far more concerned with truth than with the de facto acceptance of unfalsifiable beliefs. I lost my faith because God couldn’t find any way to show me that he was real, or that he cared, and I was tired of being abused by those who purported to speak in his name.

But because my interest in UAPs was empirical, not spiritual, it remained. Not as a religious substitute at all; rather, it was an exotic and paradigm-breaking reality that could be studied, to some extent, through objective and rational means.

Real World Cases, Real World Interest

I spent years hearing about and intentionally ignoring what was going on at Skinwalker Ranch, precisely because it felt like it crossed over too much into the spiritual realm. I didn’t want to have to be forced to disentangle the “demonic” category from the “nonhuman intelligence that is not demonic” category, particularly when the Venn diagram of each seemed to overlap each other so broadly.

But I just finished watching the 6th season of the History Channel show about the ranch, and have two books on the topic (which I have not yet read), and I am now utterly convinced that the most consistent, scientifically-grounded study of the phenomenon is going on right there in that weird little section of the Uinta Basin in Northern Utah. I’ve listened to talks by the guys doing the investigation, and they deal with so much weird shit in their lives. Poltergeist-type activity. Weird technological interference that often causes data errors or corruption, or the malfunction of scientific devices used to record that data. “Hitchhikers” are even said to follow them home when they’re not on the ranch grounds.

But nevertheless, they are doggedly persistent. They measure, they record, they study, they provoke, they repeat. And they are, after all these years, getting closer to an answer. They are so dedicated to the cause that they actually just launched a satellite to study the phenomena going on at the ranch from space.

Of course, they’re not alone in experiencing bizarre technological failures when encountering the phenomenon.

In yesterday’s Congressional testimony, former US Air Force Geospatial Intelligence Specialist Dylan Borland described a UFO he personally witnessed at Langley AFB in 2012, and the way it shut down his phone while causing him to feel “static electricity” all over his body.

Borland says he faced professional reprisals for reporting what he witnessed. In his written testimony provided to Congress, he states that this included:

[D]enial of work I performed while enlisted in the U.S. Air Force; forged and manipulated employment documents; workplace harassment, including colleagues being directed not to speak with me; and the manipulation of my security clearance records by certain agencies to block or delay my access to classified employment.

[…]

After David Grusch testified under oath in the summer of 2023 and provided historic disclosure, I was then asked to go to the ICIG, and I did so in August 2023. It was very clear early on during my intake interview, which was video recorded under oath, that their objective was solely to assess just how much I know, not to move forward with an investigation based on new information. The aftermath of that IG complaint still troubles me to this day.

Since my ICIG complaint, I have been prevented from resuming my prior employment and can confirm I am still blacklisted from certain agencies within the Intelligence Community. In addition, multiple agencies attempted phishing attacks to assess what I had divulged to the Inspector General, including being asked to disclose details of my ICIG complaint during a CI polygraph for a position entirely unrelated to UFO/UAP matters in November 2024. As I sit before you today, I and many other whistleblowers have no job prospects and no foreseeable professional future in a nation all of us came forward to defend.

We all hear about the so-called “Deep State,” but rarely does it come into such clear focus as within the context of this issue. A number of the men and women who have come forward from within our military and intelligence apparatus to report that there is a great deal more going on here than factions within the US Government are willing to disclose — many claiming illegal use of taxpayer dollars without Congressional oversight to study and retrieve materials from these craft in an attempt to reverse-engineer them — have been threatened, blacklisted, or had their careers ruined.

Some have even allegedly been killed.

Former counterintelligence agent and former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Detection Program (AATIP) Lue Elizondo echoed Grusch’s concerns last November in his own Congressional testimony:

I could bury you in video clips and testimonies and book references. There is so much happening in this arena.

And there are big disinformation campaigns going on that obfuscate facts and muddy the waters and attempt to destroy the reputations of those coming forward.

What was a childhood interest out of pure fascination and wonder has become a pillar of my existential questioning.

The UAP topic not only calls into question our uniqueness in the universe as the only known planet with not just life, but sapient life. It also raises the question of just what else is sharing this space with us, what its capabilities and intentions are, and how much our governments know about its existence here.

A new video released yesterday by Missouri Congressman Eric Burlison purports to show military footage of a Hellfire Missile shot at an orb-like UAP by a US MQ-9 Reaper drone, only for the missile to bounce off, and a small debris field to remain travelling with the otherwise seemingly undamaged orb at speed. This defies conventional understanding, and all of the military witnesses being questioned said the technology on display here scares them:

All the circumstantial evidence points to the fact that there is a non-human intelligence with technological capabilities beyond our own operating covertly here on earth, doing things that surpass our abilities to such a degree that at times it crosses over into what appears to be a quasi-spiritual realm.

It is apt to recall the oft-quoted line from Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

We are encountering a great many things that appear indistinguishable from magic. Our most highly-trained and esteemed military and intelligence personnel are telling us that they are encountering things with capabilities that far exceed our science. A number of our top scientists agree, and a number of others have become cautiously interested in just what exactly is going on.

If something is happening on our planet of this magnitude, it affects all of us, whether we realize it or not. If you had someone secretly living in the walls and the attic of your home, would you ignore the creaking noises, the bumps in the night, the strangely missing personal items, all because you’ve got other things going on?

Or would you feel that it’s important that you know?

Ross Coulthart, the award-winning Australian investigative journalist who began an inquiry into the UAP topic as a skeptic and who has become a believer based on the information provided by his many sources says that he has been given the signal that it is deeply important that the public know what has not yet been revealed, because something is coming. Something imminent. “We are living on borrowed time” he says:

Matthew Brown, the intelligence analyst-turned-whistleblower who brought the “Immaculate Constellation” program to light in last year’s Congressional hearings offered an unnerving insight about what he has discovered is going on:

Brown’s final words are both cryptic and sobering, and I’ll leave you with them:

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