Inside Rice University’s 2025 UFO Conference
By Will Clarke in Oxford American on May 27, 2025.
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?