I Infiltrated the UFO Community (So You Don't Have To)
Lessons learned in my three-year search for truth
Today is a landmark in UFO history, as whistleblower David Grusch is scheduled to testify in front of the House Oversight Committee. Despite his impeccable résumé, Grusch has gone on record with grandiose claims of a coverup that until recently would have made even many UFO diehards blush. After 60+ years of denials, then 5 or so years of schizophrenic plausible deniability, the US government may now be poised to enter the ‘craft and bodies’ phase of disclosure. Meanwhile, 99% of humanity will treat today as just another day.
In 2020, I was among those 99%. But I noticed the dissonance between the prevailing wisdom that UFOs aren’t real, and the increasing lip service senior government officials were paying the subject (e.g. DNI Ratcliffe, former CIA Director Brennan). With a background in the finance industry, I sensed a market ‘mispricing’. Revelation of alien visitation (or more) would be a ‘black swan’ event with a profound effect on society. So with that justification in hand, I took a deep dive down the rabbit hole, placing myself in the mindset of both wide-eyed believer and later, cynical skeptic to better understand the perspectives of each.
The following are my biggest takeaways on the fraught ufology landscape.
Serious people take it seriously
The strongest evidence for UFOs is the serious way disclosure/transparency is now being championed in Congress. Tectonic shifts are occurring with little fanfare or publicity.
UFOs carry a lot of stigma, and politicians run away from stigma. Yet since about 2020, both Democrats (Gillibrand, Schumer) and Republicans (Rubio, Burchett) have overtly leaned into the issue. Each year brings more legislation that raises the stakes.
The DoD and intel community hate talking about UFOs, but they study it. AAWSAP was a DIA program and was probably just the tip of the iceberg.
There is serious talk of ‘legacy programs’, engaged in reverse engineering of alien material. The so-called ‘Wilson-Davis memo’ holds up to scrutiny, and a handful of other credible, tightly-held stories have circulated among insiders for years.
Among insiders, interest is proportional to the degree of access to classified data.
Since Lue Elizondo went public in 2017, skeptics have been flailing trying to explain what is behind the upsurge in UFO interest. First they thought it was a ‘technoscam’, then it was to increase defense spending, then it was a psyop to fool China, then it was incompetence and a string of unfortunate misidentifications, then it was a small cadre of true believers who through sheer persuasive force, sent Congress on a multi-year wild goose chase.
Don’t dismiss psychic phenomena
Virtually all UFO insiders also believe in psychic phenomena. In fact, it probably has more evidence than do UFOs.
The government funded classified operational Remote Viewing programs, from the 1970s through the 1990s. A 1995 evaluation (the AIR report) deemed RV to be insufficiently reliable for use in intelligence operations and on that basis, the program was cancelled. Nevertheless, the study found the data showed a statistically significant effect.
As an experiment, I hired an RVer to try to RV me. He described my physical location via text message, to a degree of accuracy that could not be just chance.
If RV is real, then why aren’t the best RVers all fabulously rich and successful? Why aren’t hedge funds hiring RVers? Perhaps RV skill is too rare or unreliable, which essentially is Kit Green’s take.
Promising research from Garry Nolan correlates those who claim radiation injury from a UFO with having an enlarged Caudate-Putamen region of the brain. This region is known to be where ‘intuition’ originates. RVers within the study had especially large CP’s.
There is an absurd amount of misinformation
Most UFO buffs don’t have the patience or inclination to sift out the good from the bad, and default to whatever their initial biases were.
In the absence of verifiable data, lore has built up over the decades in an evolutionary process.
Most cases don’t hold up on close scrutiny. The stuff I gave credence to early on would now make me laugh, as I’ve become better calibrated.
The government has intentionally seeded disinformation (e.g. Doty).
Groups of credentialed witnesses can still make misidentifications (see the recent Twenty-Nine Palms debacle).
People lie. Never wonder, “But what motive could so-and-so have to lie?” People lie for all sorts of pathological reasons.
Mental illness and delusion are overrepresented in the UFO community. 'Experiencers’ enable each other because they all want to believe and don’t want a critical eye turned on them. This doesn’t mean all experiencers are inauthentic or deluded. But many (majority?) probably are. This is a touchy subject.
Even authentic experiencers probably have a lower barrier for accepting others’ claims as true, since they are already convinced a real phenomenon exists. This explains why otherwise-reputable people might entertain dubious claims.
You will never find ground truth
The UFO topic is hopelessly complex. That’s why journalists suck at it and for the most part don’t even try. Keeping up with the factions and efforts to study the phenomenon are hard enough. Actually uncovering the truth behind UFOs is impossible.
Every UFO video/photo is worthless. If any smoking-gun evidence exists, it’s classified and out of reach. Thus, the strength of a case must be assessed by the credibility of the witnesses, and the credibility of the people (insiders) who believe those witnesses.
The biggest struggle is filtering out the misinformation. Good luck finding the 5% of real cases that a priori are just as credible as the other 95%.
The strongest cases don’t add up to a coherent whole. You’ll end up with a smorgasbord of UFO types and alien types, psychic phenomena, near-death experiences, etc. The range of scenarios doesn’t converge; it only expands, requiring ever more degrees of freedom.
Even the insiders can’t form a consensus. This realization convinced me that cracking the UFO mystery is probably a lost cause. That could change if/when more information becomes available, but now I think that while the government knows more than me, it still doesn’t know very much.
Best guess?
UFOs are real, but I have no idea what they are.
The US government has covered it up, possibly illegally.
The Disclosure pressure will continue to build, culminating in an official confirmation. (Either that, or we’re on the verge of exposing a UFO mind virus infecting otherwise-serious DoD, intel, and political leadership.)
Reality is weirder than we can appreciate. Consciousness and psychic phenomena tie in. Solve the mystery of consciousness and maybe you solve it all.
To be continued…