UFOs, UAPs, and WTF.
It’s difficult to transcribe the fading of the age of Gen X without mentioning this, I guess. I could’ve skipped it. I don’t think many of my X brethren would bother inserting this longstanding boogeyman of human history within standard dystopian phenomenology, but the truth is, it does finally seem to be gaining more steam among accredited folk these days, in this early 21st century of ours.
I admit I’ve always had a fascination with cryptozoology, exotic archaeology, and the study of ancient anthropology. It goes without saying our vast universe of strange space-time is quite an enthralling subject for me. When I was a kid, I’d devour those now vintage Weird Fantasy ED comic books, and Marvel’s Strange Tales, and those ‘weird world’ Britannica style volumes filled with all manner of myths and folklore, from Bigfoot and the Yeti to the Loch Ness monster and the kraken.
What happened to the Mayans? The Inca? Who really built the pyramids? Lemuria, Pangea, Atlantis. The colony at Roanoke. The Bermuda Triangle. The inner earth portal in Antarctica. Covert moon bases. The face on Mars. The above photo is supposedly the most famous UFO picture ever taken, the Calvine photograph taken in the Scottish highlands. I ate that stuff up. I’m a sci-fi nerd in that fashion, always wanting to know the secret knowledge that the masses don’t know…yet. That’s mostly because I like to live outside of man made constructs that are illusory, which unfortunately comprises a great deal of human history and archived academia. We hoi-polloi don’t know jack shit about the real history of the earth or the universe at large.
Let me redefine that. Very few of us hoi-polloi know much, but there are, unquestionably, some few who do, be they members of a clandestine government agency, supposedly abducted randos, certain explorers, and so on, these elite or lucky folks who do know some of these things. Is it possible some yokel hunter in the Sequoia national forest has actually been face to face with a Sasquatch? Have Greek divers truly founds the remains of Atlantis beneath the waves? Of course all things are possible. That doesn’t mean our governments are willing to let things fly. The public are very sensitive to their worldviews being challenged.
But in the purview of ufology, it’s more than possible, it’s probable, perhaps as much as definite. That’s what I’ve come to believe, after all my decades on this planet, and these days, it’s more than a passing kiddo fantasy or a cultured hypothetical taken from our fictions, our movies, our literature. There’s just too much evidence.
World governments have had to concoct so much spin at this point, it’s starting to sound ridiculous rather than rational. It’s a hot topic this week, thanks to the drop of Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, Luis Elizondo’s best selling book. The author is a former director of AATIP, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program at the Pentagon. He’s got some pretty incisive takes, which alternately fascinate and terrify, depending on who you are and what you believe.
So, let’s talk about those suckers in the skies for a quick moment, though my puny voice surely is among thousands of Substacking voices this week, concerning this ongoing UFO UAP brouhaha.
Do you know what the most common explanation is given, in some milquetoast form or another, by reluctant whistle blowers, concerning the revelation of UFOs and alien contact being made public?
It’s this: We are an extremely religious species.
To think that we’re being denied hard reality truths, and potential world-saving technologies or philosophies, to glad-hand millions of Christian, Judao, and Islamic folks for fear of riots and mass suicides…it’s fuckery of the highest order. Ridiculous, yet completely understandable.
Unless it’s bad news. As in, we’re just an alien experiment, little more than rats in a maze, or germs in a petri dish, existing without rhyme or reason, simply for higher intelligences to observe and ‘see what happens’ with our collective evolution, or lack thereof. There are plenty of theories supporting that admittedly dismal prospect.
But it’s more likely it’s good news, or at least, news that would force us to widen our perspectives about the meanings of our lives, and where we might fit into the grand scheme of things. At this point in life, I’m all about whatever works, for us to step the fuck up the ladder of sapience, even if it means we have to drag some people up it by the collars of their shirts whether they like it or not. Gotta go with the numbers. That greater good. Whatever gets us out of this doomer cycle of eventual, inevitable extinction.
The good news being, a lot of folk purportedly taken by beings in UFOs commonly report an across-the-board sentiment expressed by those beings, in that we are part of their collective, somehow, that we have sisters and brothers and ancestors and what-have-you among the advanced species, that we may be, as many a Native tribe’s beliefs have held, descendants or children of the Star People.
Ringing my crypto-archaeology bell is a good way to get me thinking more deeply about stuff, and I’m a dead-to-rights sucker for those hieroglyphs found in Egyptian tombs, Mayan temple ruins, Indigenous petroglyphs, or Celtic rune sites from ancient antiquity…the same ones that, despite having been crafted some thousands of years prior, clearly depict renderings of saucer-shaped craft, helicopters, flying machines, astronauts in suited gear, and of course, the short little guys with big, black, almond eyes and bulbous heads, our infamous greys, the dudes who seem the most taken with us. They’re the ones so often rendered in our cinema, with Spielberg’s Close Encounters, or any number of alien horror flicks, or ‘based on a true story’ abduction films.
Most say they communicate telepathically, that they’re very interested in our emotional states and our reproductive capabilities. Quite often, visited humans relay a common message from those semi-benevolent alien tourists…that we’re fucking up our planet and we need to correct course, or that our use of nuclear power and nuclear weapons will eventually destroy us if we don’t get our shit together.
Indeed, one striking assertion many a ex-military official tends to claim is how so many UFOs appear over nuclear sites, be they power plants or missile silos or breached nuclear submarines, and the like. There’s footage of several UFOs hovering over Fukushima after the incident there, and there’s one infamous, grainy clip of a supposed saucer flying impossible speeds and angles around a launched ICBM and emitting some kind of ray, supposedly rendering the warhead inert. A few anonymous NORAD personnel have claimed nuclear exchanges have been averted a number of times in history, due to UFO interference.
Point being, a common phenomenon seems to be their interest in our nuclear endeavors, and if the visitations are remotely based in truth, they appear to not want us to blow ourselves to kingdom come.
Now, whether that’s compassion and concern for a lower sapient species, or whether it’s because they don’t want their experiment ending prematurely, is anybody’s guess. There are too many rabid paranoid theories on the ‘net, many of them touting the idea that our nuclear use concerns them because it affects the space-time continuum itself, that our nuclear endeavors might even affect their abilities to travel, or that the earth is a way point for a number of species and they’d rather it not go to seed.
Of course, that begs a few questions, not the least of which is, hey, if they don’t like it, why not give the puny little humans a smack down and take our nuke-toys away from us, if we can’t play proper in the sandbox? Also, if all that’s true, that’s great news in some regards, because it sounds like if a full nuclear exchange is launched, alien overlords might intervene and avert Armageddon for the poor, little, hairless apes. At the same time, why did they allow the eradication of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
There’s a lot to consider, if, and only if, there are really alien beings overseeing or observing our world.
I’m pretty sure there are. Now, to what degree, and what their ultimate motive is, that’s the food for thought. There are some who insist, after being taken into a craft and questioned, that those Greys are from the future, evolved humans having come back in time or through alternate dimension, to warn us of a pending fate. Why they wouldn’t land on the White House lawn and have a press conference, is a twenty thousand dollar question.
Whatever or whoever they are, there seems to be a secret agenda of sorts, wherein they have agreed, or they don’t prefer, alerting the masses across the globe, choosing to only corroborate their existence and plans with a small, select amount of government type humans.
Naturally, I like to lean into the spiritual side of things, if I can, if the context at hand fits the glove, so to speak, and given the fact I believe all the universe’s creatures are connected to one another through stardust and energy and whatever the fuck you want to call that junk inside you, that essence separate from your bone and water and meat, I’d like to think they have a vested interest because they want us to ascend to a higher existence, since that does seem to be the idea in this corporeal universe, what with the processes of evolution and the nature of sentience and sapience. Becoming more than what we are, and again, and again. Expansion of the universe, expansion of the multiverse, expansion of consciousness, expansion of love, all of it follows a certain logic, in becoming more.
Or, ya know. There’s that darker side. We’re soulless, muckity-muck test tube babies, mammalian primate dummies being given a test run, and we’re falling short of expectations to those Martian mad scientists. There’s an urban myth that claims that’s more or less what President Carter was told by covert men in black components of our clandestine, Area 51 type of government folk, and they asked why he was crying after being told as such, and he said “Because I have daughters.”
Yikes.
Now. Have I seen any UFOs?
Not as many as loyal readers might think, given my frequent outlander travels in the far reaches of Californian and Nevadan wastelands, late night in plenty of wide open wildernesses and spaces. I was a prime target for abduction on any number of occasions. Perhaps even a willing one, if those overlords are in fact benevolent, though I’ll pass on the invasive medical intrusions. For all I know, I may have been scooped up all the same, and received your standard memory wipe afterward. How many of us are walking around with undetectable, otherworldly implants? At least a few, right?
I think I’ve seen at least three. I’ve even got a few photos of one sighting. Or it’s a cloud. It’s probably a cloud. It’s almost certainly a cloud. It’s not a horrible idea for UFOs to camouflage themselves by projecting a cloud type mirage about them, especially if they’re executing broad daylight surveillance. Yet it’s such a cartoon trope at the same time.
I’ll relay them in reverse chronological order.
The third time, I was out in Joshua Tree National Park a few years back, with my gal one late night, stargazing late because there was a blood moon that night, and it was utterly magnificent that night in J.T., the park being a certified Dark Sky locale, and the moon was a startling, deep shade of red. My girl fell asleep, and I kicked back in the pickup bed looking up at the Milky Way. At one point, a plane heading to what I assumed was Ontario Airport in San Bernardino began cruising by in the distance, and behind it, was a dark, seemingly triangular object of a kind, following the plane, executing physic-defying angles and greater speeds. Given my surroundings, it made me a bit nervous. Prime time abduction locale, where we were, alone, late night, middle of the desert. The plane banked toward Coachella Valley, and then I lost sight of both craft as they passed out of view beyond a hillside range.
The second time was also at night, less captivating, probably more likely to be a passing something on a major American freeway, but I’ll note it anyway. I was coming back from Chico, up in northern California, headed southeast back to a cabin in Lake Tahoe, taking Highway 20 from Marysville through Grass Valley. I don’t like that road very much. It always feels claustrophobic. Evergreen tree canopies there grow over the roadway, so it often makes me feel boxed in, and I’m all about wide open skies. It was about 10:30 pm or so, and I was only a few miles from the I-80 interchange that would take me to the Truckee exit for Incline Village. Ahead and above, through the trees, I spied an odd object, seemingly hovering above the I-80. It was moving way too slow for normal freeway traffic. It was cylindrical, oblong, fairly large, not quite the frequently reported ‘Tic Tac’ shaped UFO, but similar, more squared and oblong at its ends, and its carriage appeared sectional. It was pulsing orange, in strobes. It definitely gave me the heebie-jeebies. Then I lost sight of it in the foliage, and by the time I came to the 80 interchange, it was long gone. Could it have been some weird carnival ride being transported to a state fair? Sure. But at the same time, Lake Tahoe and Donner Summit are notorious for UFO sightings. It’s another Dark Sky kind of place. Some Washoe tribesmen claim there’s a UFO base in the deep lake itself.
The last, and most dramatic, was spied smack dab in the middle of an afternoon. I was en route to San Diego, maybe about 2 pm, on a bright sunny day with some minor marine layer cloud cover, and I was rounding the I-5 at Dana Point in Orange County, near Doheny Beach. And I saw this, pictured below, hanging high over a stretch of OC suburbs, as did, I presume, many fellow Interstate Five travelers heading south. I grabbed a Canon digital point n’ shoot in my glove box and quickly snapped a few photos outside my passenger window.
Now, what’s interesting about this probable cloud is the rainbow contrails it’s emanating from its bottom center…supposedly one of the more common ports in seeing UFOs expel any sort of exhaust or wake, which itself is exceedingly rare. Most sightings of UFOs tend to exhibit no evidence of propulsion systems at all. What I found more compelling than the exhaust trail was the circumference edge of the apparition, seemingly tapered and rounded just as one would expect your classic flying saucer to look like, ala George Jetson. See it? Sure, you bet, that’s your brain anthropomorphizing that plain old cloud, just like mine did, ‘cause we’ve been cultured to expect saucer type vehicles in the skies from our movies and tv and comic books.
Or is it the real deal?
Do I really think it’s a UFO?
I dunno. Maybe not. Maybe so. Our monkey brains love slotting cloud formations into meaningfulness. It’s called illusory pattern perception. Was it moving? As I was speeding by in excess of 70 mph, I couldn’t really say. It was an odd place to manifest, if its pilots were remotely interested in keeping themselves on the DL, cloud cover or not.
The bottom line for me concerning aliens is, if they’re so invested in our progress, or lack thereof, why not lend a helping hand? That’s when the whole Star Trek prime directive dealio comes thundering in, with its fair logic, that perhaps higher intelligence wants planetary societies to succeed on their own merits, for fear of tainting their special, developmental cultures. Or, conversely, they’re cold, calculating entities, who want the control group for their experiment untainted by interference from the architects. Either options makes sense, but there’s the flip side of that coin. How many planets across the universe are charred chunks of charcoal, because their endemic residents killed themselves off, due to never overcoming their primal roots? I’m thinking more often than not. But that’s the human in me. Maybe we’re the aberrations, and the violence of lower sapience is unique to us.
What I do think about, is how those Sky People might help our less fortunate, and alleviate a whole saucer-load of suffering. Since they’re definitely not doing that, it might imply we’re not worth the effort. I often seek out the lore of Indigenous peoples when it comes to stuff like this. Their elder myths and legends are full of visitations and interactions from the Star People. In North America, the Pleiades constellation is often cited as the main source of human ancestry, especially among elders of the Hopi tribe, who tend to ascribe to the common theory of aliens being our ancestral kin, and that the Sky People may have seeded the earth to perpetuate our species. That’s been suggested by science as well as fiction.
The UFO community has been rallying around a projected, worldwide announcement coming in 2027, that the governments of the world have been told to prepare for that media blitz, come hell or high water. I’m not sure why a specific date would be important to a higher species to announce their existence to unwashed masses, but a lot of people who claim to be in the know, including ex-military, ex-Area 51 employees, and plenty of supposed abductees, many of them say 2027 will be a game-changing year for the human race. Hey, if they’re not gonna wipe us out, or take our planet for themselves, I’m eager to embrace the Age of Aquarius. At this point, I’d understand if they take the planet away from us, what with our shitty stewarding job.
Me, if I was a member of a higher intelligence, I’d be an advocate for us barrel-bottom humans, that we deserve a chance to climb the ladder of eternity.
Do you know why?
Despite all our genocides, our rape and murder and child abuse and lowlife primal tendencies, our hoarding of resources, our wars and environmental collapse, our racism and misogyny and sexism and class-based systems?
Because of this.
Some few of us make wheelchairs and mobility aids for disabled doggies.
That’s it.
That’s what makes humans worth saving, worth more than a brief passing note across the endless universe, worth more than our lowly status as some higher intelligence’s experimental lower life forms.
That one little thing.
Which, spiritually speaking, is not little at all, Sky People or not.
I’m happy to stand in front of a galactic federation council, as they debate whether to wipe the earth clean of its mammalian, viral infestation, to offer testament for the right of humans to carry on. And they’ll show me our eons of wars and butchering each other for little more than coveting resources, they’ll point at our greed, our fears, our inequities, our failures to recognize each other as one, and I’ll have to kowtow and bow my head in shame, and I’ll agree that we’re a poorer species, given all the evidence.
But then, I’ll counterpoint by showing them the rare folks among us who bother to help supposed lower life forms.
I’ll remind them that we do have potential.
Doggie wheelchairs. It’s what keeps me going.
Honest.
Otherwise, I’d probably write us off too. :)