Something's Happening and We Don't Know What It Is

“In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibration of beauty.” Christopher Morley

“The truth is out there but so are the lies,” Dana Scully, The X-Files

This isn’t about UFOs, except it is. And it isn’t about America or Nazis or Christian fundamentalism. Except it is. This isn’t about conspiracy, ignorance, or secret esoteric knowledge. It’s not “psionics.” Except it is. It’s not about making contact with the dead or summoning orbs in the night. It’s not about religion and it’s not about science. Except it is.

More than anything, this is about humanity. All of us. In our various shapes and configurations, in all of our differing belief systems. This is about who we are. I don’t mean who we are today. I mean who we are in the deepest sense of being. It’s about our shared history, yes, but our history is only important insomuch as it informs our present, and our future. Our shared future. The battle for that future is playing out right now. The battle, like all battles, is about power.

In 1561, residents of Nuremburg looked up and saw this. According to Wikipedia: “According to the broadsheet, around dawn on 14 April 1561, "many men and women" of Nuremberg saw what the broadsheet describes as an aerial battle "out of the sun", followed by the appearance of a large black triangular object and exhausted combattant spheres falling to earth in clouds of smoke.”

Ultimately, this is a complicated story whose plot remains unknown. It involves secret or semi-secret groups known as “The Invisible College, “The Collins Elite,” “MAJIC-12” (also known as “Majestic-12”) and many others, many of whom may not even exist. It’s a story of legends, half-truths, buried secrets, self-delusion, and wonderment. It’s the story of people across millennia opening their eyes only to discover that they’re blind. It’s Plato’s cave. It’s the story of people feeling their way in the dark, hoping to discover… something.

What is that Something? It’s the impulse that brings worshippers to their knees. It’s what lifts our eyes to the stars. It’s the universal sense that the world in which we find ourselves is obscured by a kind of veil through which we can’t quite see. That Something is humanity’s unscratchable itch. It’s like the feeling all of us experience now and again when we enter a room in search of something but cannot remember what.

What is it? What did we forget?

Let me back up a little. I saw a UFO. You can read about it here. I was sixteen, I’d just graduated from high school. I was with two other people. As far as UFO sightings go, it was mundane. Less typical, or so I thought, is the fact that we never talked about what we saw.

What I learned later is that this sort of response is familiar among people who witness the inexplicable. Lt. Colonel John Blitch calls the sensation “irrational ambivalence.” It should be noted that Col. Blitch described his own irrational ambivalence occurring when a larger-than-human-sized insectoid creature tore chunks from his face during an encounter in 1995. The attack left no wounds. Make of that what you will. You can watch the full interview he just recorded with Jesse Michels (about whom I have many reservations) here.

My own UFO encounter puzzled me but didn’t compel me to rethink my worldview. At sixteen, I didn’t have a worldview. I had been interested in UFOs long before I had my own, and after, but I remained aloof from the topic until December, 2017 when the New York Times reported that the Pentagon was aware of, and studying, what they called “Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon,” now known as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon (UAP), to better capture the reality that these things -whatever they are - are not just “aerial.” They’re also in the oceans and in space.

Since then, the topic has gone mainstream, with the Pentagon establishing AARO (the All-Domain Anomalous Resolution Office) to investigate sightings. In 2023, one of the government employees tasked with interfacing with AARO through his work at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency made the startling claim, under oath, that the US is in possession of a number – unclear what that number actually is – of “retrieved” non-human craft, some of which contained “biologics.” I wrote about David Grusch here.

Since then, other witnesses including, crucially, first-hand witnesses, have come forward. Many of these witnesses are former military, including Jake Barber, the “special operator” who claims to have been part of a secret crash retrieval project. Barber recently gave a long interview to the journalist Ross Coulthart, which you can watch here. Members of his team have also spoken on the record. As have others.

Here are some clips from the Jake Barber interview if you don’t want to watch the whole thing. I’m including these highlights because I think it’s hard to watch his comments and not sense his sincerity.

All of this is well-known and I relay it here as table setting for the larger meal to follow. I’ll be honest. I don’t know if I’m capable of delivering the information in a cogent way. There’s too much, and so much of it is so weird that it will likely turn off readers who might be interested in the topic but not “telepathic giant grasshopper eating dude’s face” interested.

Here's what I’m going to try to do, though. I’m going to try to tie together a lot of disparate threads. UFOs are only one string, albeit a fascinating one. But there are other, equally compelling stories that all tie back to each other. The recent “Telepathy Tapes” podcast is one such story. So is the study of Near Death Experiences. So is religion, in particular the religion of shiny South African billionaire Peter Thiel. So is quantum mechanics. So is – believe it or not - the history of the Third Reich. And so is the current war being fought in the American capital.

Lest you think I’m just another conspiracy nut, don’t worry: I’m also concerned that I’m a conspiracy nut. As we move through this series (with the caveat if I move through this series – let me know if you want me to keep going or abandon this before I really get started), I will give you my sources for you to judge for yourself whether what I’m saying is, at all, credible.

I’ve already started writing about this a little bit here, here, and here but I haven’t gotten particularly granular for the simple reason that I’m not at all convinced that what I’m going to tell you is capital “T” True. Because, as I said at the outset, this is a complicated story whose plot remains unknown, even to those attempting to author that story.

Even so, I’m convinced the story is an important one because some of the players within that story have now taken up residence in the halls of power. They’re congresspeople and senators and advisors and, as I said, at least one South African billionaire not named Musk. Their esoteric beliefs are now informing policy. Those beliefs fall somewhere between religion and science. The story they’re telling has potentially monumental consequences for all of us.

It's the story of Something. What that Something is remains a mystery. But I leave you with a warning. It’s a warning you probably don’t need to hear but I will issue it anyway because certain Truths bear repeating: when it comes to the subject of that ineffable Something, anybody who claims to have the answers does not. At least nobody of this world.