UAP disclosure: prepare for mass ontological shock?

Come on Trump and RFK, spill the beans already

A 1971 photo from the Costa Rican government showing a flying saucer hovering over La Fortuna.

The equivalent of the Apocalypse in UFO culture is ‘Disclosure’. This is the moment when the US government will finally come clean about what it knows, the veil will be sundered from the holy of holies, light will break out and all will be uncovered - the bodies at Roswell, the secret alien breeding programmes, the lizards in the Royal Family, the whole shebang. But, like the Apocalypse, devotees keep waiting and waiting for it and it never quite happens.

Except maybe it is happening. Some say we’re in the ‘age of disclosure’ and, if you pay attention, the US government (or at least several senior figures within it) have completely shifted their stance towards UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) or indeed Unidentified Underwater Phenomena, and seem to be preparing the public for a series of minor revelations. Joe Rogan, who to his credit has devoted 20 episodes to the topic, describes it as ‘the big shift of our time’.

In the 1990s, when I was a teenager, UFOs were a fun deviant belief associated with weed culture - only about 20% of Americans believed in them. But we’re rapidly approaching a tipping point where more than half do. According to a Gallup poll from 2021, the percentage of Americans who think UFOs are ‘alien spacecraft’ rose 8% in three years, from 33% in 2019 to 41% in 2021 - and that was before the Schumer Amendment of 2023 (which I will describe shortly).

UAP phenomena has routinely occurred and been monitored by governments since at least World War 2, when many pilots reported strange lights flying their craft - they were nicknamed foo fighters. There was a spate of UFOs in the 1950s, when they got the name ‘flying saucers’ for the distinctive shape of many of them, and the US Military began programmes to investigate and try and classify reports. J. Allan Hynek, an astronomer and advisor to Project Sign (1947-1949), Project Grudge (1949-1951) and Project Bluebook (1952-1969), introduced a taxonomy still used, of Close Encounters of the First, Second and Third Kind (the latter, which inspired Spielberg’s movie, relates to events where not just a UFO but ‘animated entities’ appears to humans and interacts with them).

If you read J. Allen Hynek’s books - The Hynek UFO Report, or The UFO Experience - you read of countless encounters involving multiple credible witnesses, often from the military, with vessels that do things beyond the capacity of human technology. Sometimes these objects or beings within these objects interact with humans, either individuals or even large groups of humans.

However, until recently, these tens of thousands of reports were actively dismissed by the US government as misinterpreted natural phenomena. It was the official government policy, as set by the CIA through the Robertson Panel of 1953, to try and dissuade the public from interest in UFOs. This was partly out of concern that, if the government admitted to these reports and their inability to explain them, it could create societal panic, which could in turn be manipulated by the Soviets to undermine US national security. Still, it was the US Air Force’s job to investigate UFO sightings, which it did through Project Bluebook and later initiatives. These initiatives were entrusted to mid-ranking officials, whose job implicitly understood to be: ‘explain away superhuman phenomena as natural phenomena’. That’s what J. Allan Hynek did for several years - he described the predominant attitude of Bluebook as ‘it can’t exist, therefore it doesn’t exist’. Finally, he became disgusted with himself and came clean about all the credible reports the US military had gathered, and how little it had done to actually investigate them.

This was gaslighting on a national scale, and it’s been going on for decades. Tens of thousands of people had UFO encounters and then were dismissed or ignored by their government when they reported their accounts. Over time this has contributed to a growing distrust of and anger with the US government. Most Americans believe it knows more than it’s telling us.

Because of the Establishment’s gaslighting, UFO culture went underground and became the preserve of cranks, grifters, gurus and cults. Jacques Vallee, computer scientist, entrepreneur and an advisor to various governments on UFOs going back decades, investigated the social and cultural impact of UF) encounters and the rise of UFO cults in his 1979 book Messengers of Deception. He became extremely pessimistic and somewhat paranoid. Were UFO cults being encouraged by intelligence agencies as a psyop to discredit UFOs? Or was the entire UFO phenomenon an elaborate psyop by human or superhuman agents to control human consciousness, keep us passive, make us distrust science, or some other hidden agenda? Either way, Vallee feared the entire ‘UFO phenomenon’ had now become so infected with cranks it might be impossible to ever ascertain the truth.

Away from the cranks, there have always been serious people, from the military, scientific establishment or private sector, who were convinced that something real and worthy of investigation was going on, and who wanted to find out what it was. Valle called it ‘the invisible college’. He was one of the few experts prepared to talk and write publicly about the phenomenon (he inspired one of the characters in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind) but most preferred to remain private to avoid ridicule or endless close encounters of the crank kind.

If you read Diana Walsh Pasulka’s American Cosmic (2019), you get taken into this esoteric inner sanctum of UFO investigators. Walsh is a religious studies scholar, who previously studied the lives of Catholic saints. She was contacted by a mysterious figure called Tyler (not his real name), who she describes as a wealthy entrepreneur who works for NASA and has high-level security clearance. Tyler takes her and a high-level scientist called James to an alien crash site in the New Mexico desert, where they stumble across alien artefacts (apparently they’re just lying around). James (since revealed to be Professor Garry Nolan, head of the Nolan Lab at Stanford University) studies some of these artefacts and says they’re not made with any known human technology. Tyler claims that proximity to these objects has led to him ‘downloading’ information for new tech inventions - he has over 40 patents for advanced technologies. Tyler chooses to remain anonymous but he’s been identified by UFOlogists online and he does indeed have several patents to his name (I’m not going to dox him but you can find out who he is easily enough).

All of which is weird and fascinating, but unfortunately few of us are in this ‘invisible college’, we don’t have access to these mysterious artefacts, so we’re left on the outside with the cranks and grifters in the UFO underground. This was the frustrating state of play in UFOIogy until recently. But there’s been a big shift in the last decade, largely thanks to the journalism of Leslie Kean.

Leslie Kean

Kean is from an establishment family (her grandfather was a Congressman, her uncle was New Jersey governor, she has worked for the New York Times) but she’s also quite New Age (she’s a Zen Buddhist and her two main topics are UFOs and NDEs). So she is well-placed to bridge the underground and the establishment, much as Michael Pollan has done with psychedelics. She has done an extraordinary job of shifting public and establishment opinion on UFOs and arguably deserves a Pulitzer - revealing a decades-long US government cover-up of Non-Human Intelligences, that’s a juicy story.

Her work on UFOs goes back many years but it was two articles in particular that really shifted attitudes in Washington and in the wider public. The first was in 2017, called ‘Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program’, which was co-written with the New York Times’ Pentagon correspondents. It revealed a secret Pentagon programme to track UAPs, funded with $22 million a year, set up by Senate majority leader Harry Reid and Senator Ted Stevens (who had personal experience of ‘foo fighters’ when a pilot in WW2). The programme was reported to be working with a billionaire called Robert Bigelow, who is developing spacecraft for NASA. It was headed up by an intelligence official called Luis Elizondo, but he resigned in 2017 in protest at continued government secrecy and opposition to the programme - so he and others went to the NYT to try and encourage more openness.

Then in 2023, Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal published an article in The Debrief, interviewing another whistleblower from US intelligence, David Grusch, who is a veteran of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) who served as the reconnaissance office’s representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force from 2019-2021. He claimed the US government has a secret programme which is reverse-engineering technology from alien artefacts, as do other countries.

The article lined up many figures from the US establishment to support Grusch’s statements - former deputy-assistant secretary of defence Christopher Mellon; Colonel Karl Nell; Professor Garry Nolan of Stanford; Charles McCullough, the first Inspector General of the United States Intelligence Community. This was the ‘invisible college’ making itself visible in order to try and (1) push the US government to speed up disclosure (2) encourage other whistleblowers to come forward and (3) prepare the US public for the revelations to come. ‘I hope this revelation serves as an ontological shock sociologically and provides a generally uniting issue for nations of the world to re-assess their priorities’, Grusch told Kean and Blumenthal.

A few days later, Grusch told Congress the same story, under oath, with Charles McCullough watching in the audience (on the right behind him). Grusch also briefed both of Congress’ intelligence committees.

The following day, Chuck Schumer - then the Senate Majority Leader - introduced an amendment on UAP disclosure, backed by various other serious people, including Senator Marco Rubio from the Intelligence Committee and Senator Mike Rounds from the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity for the Armed Services Committee. The Schumer Amendment called for all US government secret UAP programmes to disclose their information to oversight from the US Senate and Congress, creating an archive of reports for the public to access, and a UAP Review Board (made up of representatives from the government, military and academia) to create a Controlled Disclosure Plan - sort of like a guided psychedelic trip to help the US public integrate the ontological shock of disclosure. It also gave the US Government ‘eminent domain’ over any technologies developed by private companies from non-human artefacts.

Senator Schumer said:

The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena. We are not only working to declassify what the government has previously learned about these phenomena but to create a pipeline for future research to be made public.

This is a great talk by Colonel Karl Nell of the UAP Task Force on the Schumer Amendment and why it’s basically an acknowledgement by the US government that there is clear evidence of UAPs and Non-Human Intelligences, and there needs to be a Plan to disclose this information in the next few years.

The Schumer Amendment was ultimately watered down in various respects - most notably, the US government did not get ‘eminent domain’ over reverse-engineered technologies. This suggests the technologies could already be in wide use and worth a lot of money. There was also no UAP board created, and no ‘UAP Campaign Plan’, and the Amendment left a great deal of discretion in the US government over what gets disclosed to Senate, Congress and the Public.

Why the secrecy? Christopher Mellon, former deputy secretary of defence and member of the Mellon family, is one of the whistleblowers who leaked to Leslie Kean. He says that one concern is ‘catastrophic disclosure’ leading to widespread panic and even societal collapse. He points out how indigenous societies became demoralized when they came in contact with much more technologically advanced civilizations. There’s also a concern about ‘ontological shock’ - a phrase first introduced by theologian Paul Tillich and then popularized by Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, who studied UFO abduction experiences. It refers to a state of bewilderment after an encounter with a Non-Human Intelligence or inexplicable phenomenon. It happens quite often in psychedelic experiences as well, by the way - CPEP did a whole paper on it.

How much should we worry about mass ontological shock? Most Americans already believe in Non-Human Intelligences and don’t see it as a major security threat, according to Pew Research.

We’re so over-stimulated, so bombarded by spectacle and stimulation and WTF-ness, that a UFO could land next to the White House and little green men could stick a probe up Elon Musk’s backside, and it would just be another weird day in Trumpland. Or perhaps I’m underestimating the impact, what do you think?

Another concern could be national security. Former Deputy Secretary of Defence Christopher Mellon said in a recent Sol Foundation talk:

Our military is encountering intelligently controlled solid objects invading restricted military airspace, sometimes flying in formation. In many cases they’re emitting radiation. Multiple credible reports indicate these objects have rendered segments of our nuclear deterrent inoperable. In other recent cases they’re jamming radar on fighter aircraft. Other cases involve serious injuries to military and civilian personnel.

Other countries may also have artefacts, so there may be a space race to control advanced technologies like zero gravity or free energy, or perhaps even a race to contact Non-Human Intelligence and win it over to your side…Nonetheless, non-disclosure is also a threat to national security, if it significantly undermines trust in democratic government and hinders the ability of the Senate, Congress and perhaps even the White House to know what the US government is doing and how to respond to the UFO phenomenon.

The climate in Washington is clearly shifting, and Senator Schumer recently urged President Trump to speed up disclosure (perhaps State Secretary Rubio can urge him as well, along with RFK, who campaigned on a promise of full UAP disclosure).

Professor Garry Nolan, who co-authored the first peer-reviewed journal article on ‘exotic materials’, says we should prepare ourselves for ‘an avalanche of information’. I hope we don’t suffocate on it…

I suppose the knock-on effect of ‘ontological shock’ could be a general destabilization of our ideas of truth and reality - that’s already taking place, isn’t it - and this general destabilization could potentially create fertile ground for irrationalist religious or political movements…not just freaky little UFO cults like Heaven’s Gate but something bigger and weirder and potentially more dangerous. I’m already hearing about figures in the MAHA movement thinking they can channel aliens while on drugs…

Like any mass ecstatic experience, we need discrimination, we need some sort of guides in the far-out-lands, lest we lose our way and become completely credulous and gullible. What’s encouraging is that senior figures in the sciences, humanities and the military are increasingly coming forward and discussing UAPs in public fora, including in conferences, journals, documentaries, podcasts and YouTube channels, so what was once a private conversation is increasingly a public one - which we can join and try to contribute to constructively. I find the Sol Foundation particularly good - check out its YouTube channel, which has talks by many figures from the ‘invisible college’.

There is a clear role for academia in the disclosure process - particularly for scientists to try and understand and reverse engineer any non-human technologies they encounter; but also for humanities scholars. As Jacques Vallee often points out, ‘the UFO phenomenon’ is not simply a material phenomenon and should not be too quickly interpreted as ‘aliens from outer space’. It is also a psychic phenomenon - an interaction with human consciousness - and a social phenomenon - an interaction with human culture. Colonel Karl Nell suggests we need philosophers to help us think about civilizations which are apparently far advanced to our own. What should be our attitude to them - are they Gods, or fellow creations of God? Should we defer to them and follow their commands?

One humanities scholar who has been writing about these matters for over a decade is Professor Jeffrey Kripal, whose work has influenced me and many other writers on ecstatic experiences (I interviewed him a decade ago here and have kept in touch ever since). He has suggested that UFO experiences, like other ecstatic experiences, involve a dance between humans’ cultural expectations and some form of Superhuman intelligence which interacts with us, reveals itself and then hides, toying with our cultural expectations and, well…fucking with us.

Who are They? Extra-Terrestrials from outer space is just one possible hypothesis. They could also be Intra-Terrestrials - they exist on Earth but hidden, deep underwater or somewhere else. Or they could be interdimensional beings which exist here but on a higher dimension, hence their crafts’ ability to appear then disappear suddenly. Or they could be ‘angels’ or ‘demons’ (yes, Rod Dreher goes for the latter theory) or some aspect of Cosmic Mind playing with us.

Or - and this is a distinct possibility we should stay alive to - they could be figments of our imagination, projections of our spiritual yearnings. It’s noticeable how many of the Invisible College turn out to be not just into UAPs but also into NDEs, meditation, psychedelics, the occult and other New Age beliefs. Like Agent Mulder, they want to believe.

If genuine Non-Human Intelligences exist and interact with us, what do They want? They seem to be especially interested in our military and nuclear capabilities (it’s notable the first rush of UFO encounters were during World War 2 and then following the development of nuclear weapons). When there have been ‘close encounters of the third kind’, according to Jacques Vallee, there is often a message warning us about the risks of scientific power and encouraging some form of global government. UFO abductees - I am sceptical about this data set - say the beings they encountered often seem concerned with ‘breeding programmes’. I met a scholar at one of Kripal’s seminars who thinks aliens are humans from the future who have somehow lost the ability to breed so come back to harvest our eggs and sperm. Yes, eugenics in space!

Thankfully, there is now a growing list of serious books and organisations dedicated to researching the phenomenon. After the paywall, a reading and viewing list for UFOlogy 101. And a question for the comments - reading all this, does it blow your mind or, like me, are you kind of OK with it and more mildly curious rather than quivering with ontological shock?

After the paywall, a reading and watching list for UFOlogy 101…