For most of the twentieth century, the UFO topic was confined to fringe culture — dismissed as misperception, hoax, or psychological projection. That has shifted. In 2017, The New York Times reported the existence of an official Pentagon program studying anomalous aerial phenomena. In 2023, a former U.S. intelligence officer testified to Congress about a long-running, classified program to recover and reverse-engineer non-human craft. Independent governments — French, Brazilian, Chilean — have released their own files. The conversation is no longer fringe; it is institutional.

This page is where I keep notes on what is known, what is contested, and what remains genuinely open.

My approach

I take the phenomenon seriously while remaining sceptical of any specific interpretation. The evidence base is real: thousands of credible witness reports across decades, military radar tracks, cockpit-camera footage, and now official acknowledgments. What that evidence means — extraterrestrial visitation, a natural phenomenon we don’t yet understand, advanced human technology, an interdimensional reality, or some combination — is the genuinely open question.

I’m wary of two opposite errors: the dismissive scepticism that refuses to examine the evidence, and the credulous certainty that has already named the visitors and explained their motives. The honest position, given current data, is that something is happening that does not fit comfortably into our current physical models, and that further investigation is warranted.

Recommended starting points

• Leslie Kean, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (2010) — the journalistic work that helped lay the foundation for serious institutional reconsideration.
• Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia (1969) — Vallée’s foundational argument that the modern UFO phenomenon may be a contemporary face of something humans have been encountering for centuries. Disorienting and indispensable.
• Garry P. Nolan, public lectures and interviews — the Stanford immunologist’s analyses of physiological effects in encounter cases, and his insistence on rigorous methodology.

Branches

The disclosure era

From the 2017 New York Times revelation to the 2023 Grusch testimony — a chronology of the institutional shift.

Working list of references

This section will grow into something more structured. For now, a few resources worth bookmarking:

• (placeholder for an annotated list — books, papers, congressional testimony, podcasts, archives)

Cross-references

• For the consciousness-related questions raised by encounter experiences, see States of consciousness.
• For the survival/transcendence dimension some abductee testimonies touch on, see Survival research.

---

Last updated: May 2026.