By Will Clarke in Oxford American on May 27, 2025.
Quote:Friday and Saturday didn’t let up. Astronomer Dr. Wes Watters, physicist Dr. Kevin Knuth, and anthropologist Dr. Peter Skafish attacked the topic from their respective disciplines. There were panels on ethics, ontology, owls, remote viewers, and experiencer narratives moderated by scholars like Kimberly Engels and Karin Austin, the latter of whom is overseeing AI-driven analysis of the John Mack and Whitley Strieber archives. If you weren’t rethinking your place in the universe by the end of these talks, you either weren’t paying attention—or you had fallen asleep like I had.
Because, you know, PowerPoint.
Ironically enough, the most revealing moment of the conference for me didn’t come from a dramatic keynote or an abductee testimony. It came from two of the driest PowerPoint slides ever projected—courtesy of Retired Colonel Karl Nell, a career Army intelligence officer and Pentagon UAP advisor who has, by all accounts, been in the room where it happens when it comes to UFOs (and probably still is).
Quote:The Colonel’s slides were methodical and profoundly bureaucratic. The Pentagon and their agencies and contractors didn’t know what this UAP phenomena was any more than I did—otherwise, they wouldn’t have needed ninety-three guesses.
So for me, the more urgent question isn’t what is flying around out there. It’s: Which of those “93 Hypotheses” wants to screw with our nuclear missile silos?
Quote:In satanic ritual abuse cases, courts ultimately had to be definitive about the truth of allegations. When it came to alien abduction, however, the Harvard committee, academic researchers, therapists and the court of public opinion were under no such obligation. As such, the phenomenon could be treated as many things at once: a mental aberration, a sleep disorder, a mystical experience, a concocted fiction, an expression of cultural anxieties, an actual encounter with extraterrestrials. Law demands clear-cut resolutions. The psychological sciences, however, are far more accommodating to ambiguity.
In a paradoxical way, alien abduction was afforded a certain measure of legitimacy since it avoided legal authority and fell to the psychologists. The experience of abductees was real in that it was real enough to the person who believed it. So the phenomenon was effectively relegated to the status of a devoutly held belief, not unlike a spiritual conviction or idea. Viewed as a deeply felt personal belief, many people saw no problem in at least respecting reports of alien abduction as yet another perspective on reality. In this way, the alien abduction phenomenon was made relatively harmless. Now, at a time when talk of unidentified anomalous phenomena and retrievals of crashed spaceships and ‘non-human biologics’ has made its way into the world of congressional hearings, it remains to be seen whether alien abduction will stay in its place.
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By Tom Rogan for The Washington Examiner on July 9, 2025.
Quote:The third possibility, and in my view by far the most likely, is that while the vast majority of UFOs have prosaic explanations, a very small percentage of UFOs represent intelligently controlled machines not operated by a nation or corporation. This supposition is supported by the absence of later identified classified military aircraft with extraordinary capabilities, and by the many thousands of credible military witnesses and witness-contemporaneous sensor recordings. This very small proportion of UFOs is likely to be “alien” in the broadest sense of some kind of extraterrestrial, extra/inter-dimensional/extra-temporal/”other” intelligence. Again, however, this constitutes a very small percentage of UFOs. The majority of UFOs have prosaic explanations, even where video and sensor data often suggest something out of this world.
In turn, we should hope for more journalistic coverage of this probable possibility alongside skepticism of sensationalism.
Quote:Some seven years later, astronomer Beatriz Villarroel came up with a similar methodology in the search of what she and her colleagues call ‘non-terrestrial artifacts’ (NTA) close to or orbiting our planet: analyzing the digitized photographic plates taken by the Mount Palomar astronomical observatory’s Sky Survey (POSS I) in the 1950s—before the start of spaceflight and Sputnik (1957)— and compare them with plates of the same portions of the night sky taken by the same observatory thirty years later (POSS II). If the plates showed bright star-like spots in the 50s survey which were absent in the 80s survey, and after you eliminated all emulsion errors and scanning artifacts, whatever was left would be indicative of an NTA which could not be explained by any known astronomical phenomena (stars don’t tend to ‘disappear’).
Spoiler: she found several NTAs across several studies.
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