According to David Grusch, the tragic overdose death of Matthew James Sullivan, a 39-year-old US Air Force veteran, is a national security mystery. “He passed away mysteriously”, Grusch told The Big Weekend Show on Fox News 13 June.

In reality, the New York Post reports, Sullivan “died at his home in Falls Church, Va., on May 12, 2024 from a lethal mix of alcohol, alprazolam, cyclobenzaprine and imipramine, according to the Northern District Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.” Accidental prescription drug overdoses are not mysterious. They happen tens of thousands of times every year in America.

Grusch made a sensation with hearsay evidence to Congress in 2023. Grusch testified about special access programs in the United States government that had retrieved spacecraft and “non-human biologics”. He said that “photos” of UFO crash retrievals exist, that he has seen them. Reader, long before the AI revolution I saw photos proving that Batboy exists. “Photos” are not scientific evidence.

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In April or May of 2025, Grusch became a “Senior Adviser” to Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri, working “to promote transparency regarding UAP and other matters on the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets”, according to an office press release.

It appears that Grusch prevailed on Rep. Burlison to express his “grave concern” to the FBI that Sullivan’s death had “implications for national security.” Multiple media outlets dutifully reported that the FBI is investigating the entirely un-mysterious death of Matthew James Sullivan.

‘Disclosure’ has not produced evidence of extraterrestrials in the last three years. Repeated disappointments have instead produced apathy. Yet “Sullivan had personally seen UFOs in the federal government’s possession and would have exposed the legacy program at the congressional hearing in November 2024, according to sources”, the Post reports.

Those “sources” are the UAP disclosure cult, of course. Grusch is their charismatic leader. Such figures are normal in Harmonialism, a religious movement that seeks to ‘harmonize’ science with faith using occult means. My book draft, A Spiritual Biography of the Flying Saucer: Revealing An Old Time Religion in America tells the story of this faith movement and its present incarnation as the ‘UAP disclosure’ community.

This community is currently constructing a new story to explain the failures of disclosure. As I recently explained for premium subscribers, this is a case of apophenia, a false pattern of apparent coincidences. Sullivan brings the putative list of dead or disappeared ‘UAP witnesses’ to fifteen.

Carl Jung, who recognized the flying saucer as the icon of a new religious awakening in 1954, would call this synchronicity, a coming together of inner and outer events that are not causally linked, but are meaningful to the person who experiences them. Grusch lost his friend, which affected his inner state, and he connects this event with outer events.

The body of Melissa Casias was found in New Mexico a few weeks ago. If Casias’s death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound as it reportedly appears, then 10 of the 15 “mysterious” cases are completely solved as suicides, murders, accidents, or natural causes, and not a bit mysterious at all.

The remaining five cases are either unexplained because someone has disappeared and not been found yet, or because the family has withheld the cause of death from an obituary. That is also not unusual, in fact it is is completely normal, especially when substance abuse is involved or the deceased is very old.

In a recent press conference, Grusch emphasized a sense of threat, calling UAPs a “national security issue”. He accused “high-ego, politically appointed actors” of stifling disclosure efforts. Grusch also mentioned that he is still fighting for his medical military retirement. He is disabled by what he knows, a traumatized whistleblower.

Asked by a reporter just how many different kinds of aliens have visited earth, Grusch would not comment on ‘grays’ or ‘Nordics’. “I certainly don’t have the compendium”, he said. “It’s a continuum from corporeal bipedal type life to what I would consider as like sentient plasmoid life, but there are several that the US government is aware of.” Watch:

“Plasmoid” is a coherent structure of plasma and magnetic fields found in physics. It is also a popular playable race of amorphous, gelatinous beings in the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game. I suspect that Grusch associate Jim Semivan came up with plasmoids. He has described alien beings like these appearing in his living room.

Semivan is a good example of the deep state careerists behind David Grusch and the UAP disclosure ‘movement’. Semivan retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency, which Grusch now accuses of stonewalling disclosure. He complains at great length about government secrecy, then retreats behind secrecy whenever he is challenged for details.

In his public statements, Grusch is creating a new myth that explains the disappointments of disclosure as a mystery: the witnesses are all dead, the evidence has been buried. Meanwhile, the creative recycling of the extraterrestrial experience narrative continues with a fun new alien typology.

In A Spiritual Biography of the Flying Saucer, I identify Grusch as a bricoleur, a person who refashions old stories using new material. He keeps proving me right. While I am disgusted at the way he uses his friend’s death, I am happy to have this validation of my work.

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I am not really spoiling anything by telling you that there is ‘found video’ of alien autopsies in this new film by Steven Spielberg. I am not the only viewer to be struck by how dated the black and white ‘archival clips’ ‘disclosed’ in the film are.

The Roswell ‘footage’ too is unconvincing. Crop circles are no longer dramatic or convincing. The aliens are also unconvincing ‘in the flesh’, and for the same reason: age.

This film consists of too much tired, old stuff. We have seen it all, already. We know the story too well, so that there are not any real surprises.

Spielberg cemented the image of the ‘gray’ extraterrestrial with his 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Chris Carter wore it out with The X-Files. Extraterrestrial visitors are a tired franchise. Entertainment consumers are fatigued, now.

David Koepp, the screenwriter working with Spielberg, has too much old, stale, and pale stuff going on, here. Spielberg too is borrowing from his own previous work. Extra credit for cineastes who can spot the callbacks to Jaws, Duel, and Close Encounters.

As I explained last week, Koepp and Spielberg are bricoleurs, while Disclosure Day is a mash-up (bricolage) of the Harmonialist gospel. Spielberg raised the hackles of some religious people by saying the film was supposed to challenge their faith. It was one more misstep from a director at the end of his career.

Harmonialism is an eclectic religious current in American life that seeks to harmonize science and faith through occult means. Emily Blunt using a magic alien universal remote to do magic tricks and telekinesis, or Colin Firth using it for remote viewing and mind control in this movie: this is the Harmonialist story in a nutshell.

The Harmonialist story has inspired science fiction, and taken inspiration in return, since the 19th century. Since 1946, it has taken on the form of a flying object in the sky containing a higher, more evolved intelligence that exists in cosmic harmony with the universe. These objects take on various shapes, the saucer being most familiar and iconic.

But these icons have faded. Disclosure Day aliens have heads the size of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, presumably because of their huge brains that give them psychic powers. They are too much of what I have learned to expect, and also not enough of what I hoped to see.

The ‘grays’ are just one trope used in this film that has become passé. Uncanny artifacts that are too old to be in fashion, and not old enough to be back in style, beggar the suspension of disbelief.

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I’m tired. Are you tired?

Firth’s character wears all black just to make it stupidly obvious that he is the Man In Black. Spielberg begins with Josh O’Connor in the middle of an encounter with the sinister para-governmental conspiracy to conceal the paranormal truth from us. We have all seen this movie before, this time Spielberg has made it.

As I explained last week, Harmonialism is very good at creating empty ‘magic boxes’. All too often in modern storytelling, writers pile layer after layer of enigmatic questions, secrets, and plot hooks onto the viewer to keep us engaged and theorizing, but then they fail to deliver satisfying, coherent, emotionally resonant, or logical resolutions that satisfy expectations.

Harmonialism does the same thing. The ‘disclosure movement’ is a mystery box plot. Spielberg is using a too-familiar mystery box, and we don’t get to find out what is inside. Expectations go unsatisfied. Spielberg has tried to shake us into awareness. Instead, he may have inadvertently buried the Harmonialist gospel.

The central conceit of the whole Roswell story, the idea that interstellar or interdimensional beings with magic powers and preternatural abilities … crashed their spaceship in the desert … is absurd. The whole story is absurd. In this movie, it even looks absurd.

If the government has kept aliens alive in captivity for decades, what kind of food did they eat? Extraterrestrial biomes are likely not the same as ours. How have they survived this long?

Being from a different planet, produced by a different evolution, has consequences for interplanetary imprisonment. Like the characters in this film, Harmonialists debate among themselves just how much ‘disclosure’ is healthy for humanity. Some technologies are too dangerous for mankind to have.

Then there is the human rights question, because the aliens don’t seem to respect human values. If the government, or some secret shadowy parallel organization, has experimented on these aliens, is it not payback for … whatever it is the aliens are doing to the kids in this movie?

I am left with more questions than answers. This is the essential creative problem in Harmonialist religion. Disclosures never fully satisfy, while stories age quickly rather than becoming timeless.

The mystery box is always empty

The recent disclosed video files of unexplained aerial phenomena, or UAP, are an example of Harmonialist magic boxes containing only disappointments. Spielberg attempts to recreate the ‘found footage’ effect but it all ends up looking like a video game.

Here is Mick West, probably the world’s greatest debunker of UAP imagery, explaining in brief how a balloon can appear to be making impossible movements when it is being observed by a gimbal camera operator. This video was one of the recent files disclosed by Trump’s executive order. It is thoroughly debunked, but it still looks much more convincing than anything in Spielberg’s movie.

Taking in reactions from a number of sources, it is my impression that movie reviewers with the strongest desire for the Harmonialist story about extraterrestrials to be true are the most disappointed in the film. Reviewers with no investment in the tale of Roswell, aliens, and Area 51 are generally more positive, even if they criticize the film.

In other words, Spielberg has made a Harmonialist gospel film that satisfied no one and made everyone mad at him, including the Harmonialists.

Christians are mad about Spielberg’s fumbling challenge to their faith in his marketing interviews. Harmonialists are mad that the altar call in the movie is just one nun reassuring us that everything will be okay because God’s got this. Spielberg’s message is both too specific and too generic.

Spielberg has made an uncanny film. Rather than add mystery, the uncanny valley makes Disclosure Day tired. Diversity casting is supposed to make the story look universal, but instead marks Disclosure Day as a product of its very weird time. Then there is not enough diversity in the fleeting challenge to human religions. Spielberg delivers the worst of both worlds.

John Williams has produced the weakest score of his career, but the movie would still be ten times worse without it. Lens flare does not improve the dark, colorless visuals. Everything about this film feels a little bit wrong in some way. Neither of the two couples in the film have any romantic chemistry.

Some people enjoyed it. They were the ticket-buyers who were least invested in the story.

We got used to disappointment

Meanwhile, running in the background of the entire film, the world is on the precipice of nuclear Armageddon. The ‘stakes’ are not really explained and we do not see what is going on in the world that has everyone on edge.

Of course, the message from the stars is what saves the world from itself. It is a magic box containing the solution for world peace.

This has been the Harmonialist story since December 1952, when George Adamski met a man from Venus in the desert near Mount Palomar observatory. Only a few weeks had passed since the Ivy Mike test of the world’s first H-bomb. The ‘messages’ that Adamski then relayed from his friends on Venus are boring, dime store Theosophy that is supposed to save the world.

Harmonialism is consistently undermined by its own revelatory language. The gravitas of beings with anti-gravity technology is utterly dispelled by a script from a fortune cookie. Spielberg and Koepp have stopped just short of revealing the contents of this mystery box because it would bore the shit out of us.

The film ends with an extraterrestrial message that is passed to Emily Blunt, who then stands before the newsroom camera that is linked to the entire world: we, the human race, are all paused at the threshold of nuclear apocalypse, watching her deliver a message of peace from outer space on our smart phones.

“Listen”, she says, and then the movie ends.

We never receive the message that was hidden in the mystery box, the words that bring heaven to earth and change us forever as a species. Koepp and Spielberg have stopped just short of imagining heaven, descending.

A creator can only present us with a limited slice of heaven in any story because conflict drives plot. The same problem bedevils apocalyptic films like the Left Behind series. As anyone who has read the full Divine Comedy knows, Dante’s hell is entertaining, but his heaven is boring.

If Blunt kept talking, the message would inevitably sound like George Adamski’s “space brothers”. Harmonialist heaven is always boring, and always quaint. Every Harmonialist text I have read has amazing passages that beggar credulity because they are clearly products of a different time than ours. Old attitudes become embarrassing to liberal-minded people of the future.

Every update to the Harmonialist story thus fades with age, so that some new creator must reboot the story from its beginning. Spielberg has tried, and failed, to refresh the familiar story of hidden extraterrestrials and the world-altering promise of disclosure.

Perhaps Steven Spielberg could not hope to make it work because the old story no longer works. ‘Disclosure’ in the real world has also failed to produce the promised evidence. The audience has been trained to expect disappointment. Disclosure Day delivers it.

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Spielberg believes ‘they’ are here, and he believes he can “hurry” the day of disclosure along with this movie. Our screen magician is attempting to work a spell on us that will deliver “ontological shock” to make us question the foundations of our faith. The result, he says, will be a harmonious humanity. This idea is turning out to be a little bit controversial.

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Spielberg’s comments have some Christians bracing for a perceived offense to their beliefs. The script apparently only touches on Christianity without examining the effect of extraterrestrials on other religions. This tension over what I call ‘Space Jesus’ crystallizes the fraught relationship of Harmonialism (‘New Age’ religion) and Christianity. It makes up a theme of my book draft, A Spiritual Biography of the Flying Saucer.

UFOs are a ‘way of knowing’ among moderns, so Jesus can ride with aliens, or be an alien himself. Christians do in fact object to Jesus being placed in equality with Ascended Masters, Saint Germain, and the rest of the undifferentiated heavenly beings of the Harmonialist imagination.

Spielberg was raised in Judaism. However, his film career is filled with Harmonialist themes. Close Encounters of the Third Kind borrowed heavily from the latter-day Theosophy of Spielberg’s youth through the use of color and sound to communicate with aliens.

Now he is bookending Close Encounters. There is a line in this trailer which mentions a “79-year cover up”. Born in December 1946, Steven Spielberg is 79 years old. It is a useful coincidence that he was born at the cusp of the very first UFO ‘flap’. Obvious self-reference is obvious.

I suggest the dating matters, and not simply because Spielberg has reached the median age of mortality for his demographic. During Spielberg’s first year on earth, Kenneth Arnold reported seeing chevron-shaped metallic objects emitting or reflecting light as they flew. Arnold later experienced a series of paranormal events. This is a pattern to Harmonialism that is reflected in the film trailer.

Emily Blunt seems to experience a paranormal event in a television studio, apparently ‘channeling’ an alien language. This would be a spiritual practice of Harmonialist religion. UFO cults are replete with examples of mediumistic transmission like this. ‘Remote viewing’ is another popular psychic power among Harmonialists. The attempt to combine scientific and psychic is a key trait of Harmonialism.

Wait. Who are these Harmonialists?

As religious historian Sydney Ahlstrom wrote in his encyclopedic description, Harmonialism characteristically seeks to harmonize science with the occult. The result is always a pastiche of incomplete evidence glued together by faith. Paranormal becomes normal. Absence becomes evidence.

Harmonialism must include Christianity, and explain Christianity, in order to encompass the universe of possibility. This is where Harmonialist texts can cross boundaries with Christians.

Harmonialism also departs from reality at the beginning of its story about itself. The month after Arnold’s sensational story in 1947, a US Army balloon crashed to earth at Roswell. This incident has become a falsified narrative origin-point for the flying saucers of Harmonialism.

Ufologist Christopher Lambright is the only researcher who ever asked the famous Roswell eyewitness, Jesse Marcel, “if there was anything in what he saw or found that made him think it was part of a flying saucer or crashed disc”. Marcel’s answer was “an unambiguous ‘No’.”

In The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don’t Want You To Know, Kal Korff conclusively shows that the material recovered at Roswell perfectly matches a US Army balloon radar target made by a toy company in New York.

Spielberg prefers to believe a different story. Disclosure Day starts at Roswell. My book shows that Harmonialism is two centuries older than Roswell. Believers were contacting aliens through astral projection, automatic writing, and other psychic means throughout the 19th century.

Flying saucers are icons of faith that descended from Harmonialist heavens. Roswell is an article of faith, not history, so Spielberg’s film is a religious epic. Harmonialists have no Ben Hur, no Ten Commandments, no Passion of the Christ. Disclosure Day seems meant to be that kind of a film for Harmonialism.

Spielberg says that he is “much more inclined now” towards belief in extraterrestrials than he was when he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I believe him. At his age, that kind of reflection is pretty universal.

Spielberg and Harmonialism

In my drafted book, A Spiritual Biography of the Flying Saucer, Spielberg is mentioned five times. His work has formed a mimetic feedback loop in American culture for decades, profoundly shaping the public imaginarium of the extraterrestrial.

This is normal in Harmonialism, which borrows freely from science fiction, while science fiction frequently takes inspiration from Harmonialism.

Close Encounters cemented the archetype of the alien-visitor-abductor in the public mind: small, gray humanoids with black eyes and nostril slits instead of noses. The now-familiar ‘grays’ were based on the final form that extraterrestrials took in the evolving descriptions of Betty Hill.

At first, Hill described the aliens as having prominent noses. Under the influence of hypnotic regression and Harmonialist religion, however, the aliens progressively lost their noses in further retellings.

Spielberg has been associated with major Harmonialists for his entire career. Two advisers on the 1977 film, J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée, are venerated figures in ufology. In fact, Vallée inspired the scientist character Claude Lacombe played by renowned French actor François Truffaut.

Lacombe is the scientist who remains open-minded while listening to Richard Dreyfuss describe his spiritual experience with the cinematic aliens in Close Encounters.

Whereas Hynek and Vallée are legitimate scientists, they stop being scientific when they delve into metaphysical questions. That is where Harmonialism happens. Vallée is a year older than Spielberg, but he remains a prominent figure in the UAP ‘disclosure community’.

He also has a government background, as do most of the Harmonialists in the UAP disclosure movement. In fact, the ‘deep state’ seems to be a natural habitat for Harmonialism. Harmonizing science and faith requires secret knowledge, so it is reasonable that classified government jobs attract a fair number of Harmonialists.

More problematic and revealing however is the role of Richard C Doty, a consultant on Steven Spielberg’s 2002 alien abduction mini-series, Taken. Doty is the living embodiment of the unreliable narrator, a red flag of falsehood.

During his time with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations in the 1980s, Doty conducted multiple disinformation campaigns within the ufology community that left it divided by controversy.

On at least one occasion, Doty’s pretextual story of extraterrestrial contacts with the federal government clearly borrowed from Close Encounters. One year after Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Doty approached a victim of his psywar with a story about an extraterrestrial abiding on earth before returning home.

Like the character played by Colin Firth in Disclosure Day, Doty is a recognizable Man In Black, a sinister figure from UFO folklore who violates truth boundaries. Doty says that he did it all to protect the human race. Humans “cannot accept what we know”, Firth’s character says in the trailer.

Rather than a cover-up by the government, my research reveals that Harmonialists in the government, including Doty, have used secrecy as a veil of illusion to imbue their prophecies of imminent disclosure with gravitas and drama. The ‘hidden’ flying saucers and autopsied aliens are another mystery box.

The “mystery box” problem is a modern storytelling approach popularized by J.J. Abrams, the co-creator of Lost, a show that infamously exemplifies the trend. Writers pile layer upon layer of enigmatic questions, secrets, and plot hooks to keep audiences engaged and theorizing.

Too often, show writers fail to deliver satisfying, coherent, emotionally resonant, or logical resolutions that satisfy expectations — like the latter seasons of Lost. Harmonialism does the same thing. The ‘disclosure movement’ is a mystery box plot.

Spielberg is using a mystery box. According to Chris Gore at Film Threat, about 80 percent of the film is chase scenes to get to the mystery box. As a moviegoer, this is what really frightens me.

Disclosure is the plot device

Great secrets have been kept from us. Humanity is not ready to know, but humanity deserves to know. This conflict drives the plot of Disclosure Day. Spielberg wants us to believe this moment of disclosure is immanent, a transcendence unfolding in the real world. It is supposed to be spooky, frightening, Judgment Day stuff.

We are meant to fear for our beliefs. Christian belief is apparently questioned, but only with nuns. Anti-Catholicism is common in early Harmonialism. While Harmonialists have tried to incorporate kabbalistic Judaism, anti-Semitism was also a common comorbid symptom of Theosophy, which suffered disasters by trying to incorporate Hinduism. Harmonialists have attempted to incorporate Islam in the past, but there is little of that activity these days.

Perhaps the reader has already noted which dog does not bark, here. From its beginnings as a spiritual movement, Harmonialism was largely a Protestant movement drawing upon Protestant roots. Disclosure Day is a substitute for the Protestant Day of Judgment: souls ascending, angels descending, cosmic justice.

Repent, ye sinners!

Being a Spielberg film, however, the ending will encourage belief. Ideally, we are meant to leave the theater believing even more strongly than we did before. This is the Spielberg form, and it will be in form with Harmonialism.

In his stories that depict extraterrestrials in a positive or neutral light, Spielberg shows us that rapport with the cosmos — being in tune with universal vibes — can do magic. Spiritual power derived from this relationship to the cosmos can work miracles, such as E.T. healing a bloodied fingertip. Spielberg is Harmonialist in his optimism.

In his darker takes, such as War of the Worlds and Taken, Spielberg admits that cosmic forces can be disruptive, invasive, insidious, a poison hidden inside a promise of pure, harmonious benevolence. The motives of our ‘space brothers’ become muddied, their behavior inhumane. Comet-riding ‘Luciferians’ of the Black Lodge are an original trope of Harmonialist religion. Even War of the Worlds managed to have a positive continuity, a faith in the family.

The word for this sort of story, where the aliens arrive and that is good or bad or even both at the same time, is ‘apocalypse’. Disclosure Day is meant to be an apocalypse.

Harmonialists love doomsday: earthquakes, lost continents, interplanetary conflict, Younger Dryas impact scenarios, and ancient nuclear wars abound in their texts. Positive Harmonialism is a narrative of faith in continuity, though it is disrupted by upheaval and change. Darker Harmonialism disrupts the pacifistic promises and good intentions.

It is all very protean, like the Book of Genesis, or the myth of Prometheus.

The “ontological shock” of the shared experience of seeing this movie is supposed to unite humanity in a new understanding of ourselves as connected beings. Talk about marketing to the global box office.

Spielberg wants to “remind us of our capacity for empathy and remind us there is something bigger than us”, he says. Something. It could be God, or gods, or a galactic high council. Notably, he does not say what that something is. But it was aliens.

The call to Harmonialism is presented as a revised version of Pascal’s wager, the proposition that it is safer to believe in God and be wrong than reject God and be wrong. The universe is so big, the argument goes, that we cannot possibly be all alone in it. It is safer to believe in the aliens and be wrong than to disbelieve in the aliens and be wrong.

We should therefore have faith that we are not alone, the movie preview suggests. It is the Harmonialist gospel. I have found iterations of this argument in every Harmonialist text I have examined. The obvious problem with Pascal’s wager is that it also applies to the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Odin, Baal, or Baphomet. At some point, empirical probabilities demand respect.

Harmonialists always try to strike a perfect balance of belief and evidence, and always fail, eventually. Every Harmonialist text is dated, aged, in need of updating. They all suffer from the relentless progress of real scientific understanding.

Spielberg disclosed

Harmonialism is an eclectic faith movement that anyone can join. Jews can be Harmonialists. Catholics and Muslims can become Harmonialists. Spielberg does not have to make a public confession of Harmonialism to be in harmony with the universe.

That is a very attractive feature of the faith movement for a great many liberal-minded people. I am certainly not ascribing a narrow religious perspective to Steven Spielberg. On the contrary, he is fundamentally a humanist. His Harmonialism is not grounded in sectarian allegiance. It is a product of his liberal artistic values.

Spielberg told SXSW in March that the 2017 New York Times coverage of alleged UFO sightings “reinvigorated” his belief in extraterrestrials. This is an important topic covered in my book because the ‘news’ story was a sensational propaganda project.

Two of the three authors of that headline story are Harmonialists. They write Harmonialist books. The most prominent of the three is a practicing spiritual medium.

Imagine Helena Blavatsky writing headlines for the newspaper of record, reporting pronouncements from the Lords of the Flame on Venus, because that is more or less what the ‘disclosure movement’ did in 2017. A new UFO flap was at hand. Belief in extraterrestrials was at an all-time high.

My book identifies Steven Spielberg as a bricoleur. He makes new stories out of older material, forming a collage of beliefs. Disclosure Day is a bricolage, or mash-up, of Harmonialist beliefs, and some of these are much older than Spielberg, or the first flying saucer flap. The 2017 NYT story was also a bricolage by bricoleurs.

Death is not a new religious question. It is the original religious question, and Harmonialism has offered answers in every new creative collage that it presents us. Spielberg is near the end of his life, pondering the ascent, and calling on us to watch the sky. Mortality has made this movie.

Reader, see the movie if you want to. Enjoy the popcorn. But do not hold your breath waiting for the day of actual disclosure in the film title. Like Roswell, the day of disclosure is an article of faith. Spielberg may be disclosing his religious values to the world, but the mystery box is all we can ever expect to witness.

Which is not to say I don’t have faith in Spielberg. Buzz about the film is generally good. I hope that Disclosure Day is good. I plan to see it, so I am not judging Spielberg’s film in advance. If there is a sinister conspiracy behind this movie, then that sinister conspiracy is going to get my ticket and popcorn and soda money.

And then I’m sure I’ll have much more to say.

Post script, here are two reviews, one good, one bad.

Jeremy Jahns is a respected and honest YouTuber with a positive review. He doesn’t know, or care, about Harmonialism. He just cares about being entertained. Jahns says he had a good time with Disclosure Day. The real test of a gospel film is whether it annoys us with the altar call. Apparently this film did not do that.

Here is Chris Gore of Film Threat. He also does not know or care about Harmonialism. He is a film critic who demands to be entertained. He says he did not have a good time watching Disclosure Day. The real test of a mystery box is whether the payoff was worthwhile. Apparently this film does not do that, which would also be very consistent with Harmonialism.

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Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter were Chicago psychologists who learned about a flying saucer cult in Oak Park, Michigan and set out to study what happened when their doomsday prophecy failed. They presented their findings in a 1956 book, When Prophecy Fails, that stood for decades as a landmark study.

My reading of that text is at the core of three chapters in my drafted book, A Spiritual Biography of the Flying Saucer: Revealing An Old Time Religion In America. However, the text has always been problematic, and the story of the book suspect.

Thomas Kelly, an independent researcher, published a debunking of the book by Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences during 2025. Kelly reveals that Festinger et al participated in the whole affair far more than they revealed.

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Dorothy Martin, the spirit-medium at the center of the group, regarded Riecken as “the favorite son of the Most God”. In response to her entreaties for a message from beyond, “Riecken claimed to belong to both the Brotherhood of Sara and the Brotherhood of the Light — an admission that deeply impressed her.”

Kelly notes that Bertha Blatsky, a pseudonymous member of the group, told Riecken that “you will have a very important role, you will be a guide to many people”. Kelly does not note that this was during Bertha’s challenge to Dorothy Martin’s spiritual authority as the group channeler. He may not consider this relevant, but the two women were fighting for the favor of one of the study authors, and that is notable.

Then, after the disconfirmation, Riecken pressed the group to explain the failure of the prophecy. Charles Laughead, a leader of the small Harmonialist community, responded with a speech about keeping the faith. Riecken thanked Laughead: “Thank you, Chuck, you’ve given me just what I was looking for.” He then urged the group to release their ‘Christmas message’ explaining the failed prophecy.

Rather than simply observing the rationalization of cognitive dissonance, the researchers had participated in it, shaping the outcome. Kelly further undermines the core thesis of the book by showing that the Seekers cult in Oak Park proselytized far more before their doomsday prophecy failed than after. As he notes, most of the group dissolved, while a few — the Laugheads and Martin — carried on with their Harmonialist revelations

This is consistent with my research into postwar Harmonialism. Psychology very much regarded itself as a “science of the soul”, while Harmonialism always attempts to harmonize the occult with the scientific. The same reinforcing biases play out in “recovered memories” of alien abduction.

Put another way, the entire UFO phenomenon was inflated by Carl Jung, hypnotherapists, and pseudoscience of the mind. L. Ron Hubbard was a competitor in this spiritual market. He understood that Harmonialists wanted a “spiritual technology”. I should have guessed there was more to the story of the research team. It makes perfect sense that they were creating as much as they were studying.

“According to the archival material, Riecken fabricated psychic messages from extraterrestrials to shape group behavior including the pivotal events that unfolded on the night of the failed prophecy”, Kelly reveals.

One of the team observers, Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Williams, further participated in the group’s belief formation by performing automatic writing — a form of spirit-communication — for one of the members that she found gullible. Martin formed a similar attachment to Liz as a result.

The Seekers are a fascinating example of the bricolage effect. As my own book draft explains, humans form pastiches of belief out of the cultural materials around them, which appeal to them. I think this explains just what Festinger, Reichen, and Schacter actually “observed”.

Like the Satanic Verses, the prophecy went down a memory hole while Dorothy Martin used automatic writing to write her way through the disconfirmation. She was a bricoleur, remaking the Harmonialist gospel rather than reciting.

Harmonialists always do this. They have to, because the popular science and pseudoscience they use to buttress their beliefs is continually challenged by new scientific findings. In this sense, the tragedy of Harmonialism is that its scientific prophecies always fail, requiring them to refresh the bricolage-pastiche of belief once again, usually with new literature.

To borrow a joke about communism, the real Harmonialism has not been tried yet.

Some number of believers, usually most, always step back from a disconfirmation. Many of these former seekers continue to seek out Harmonialist ideas and groups. “Many of Martin’s followers had already explored or embraced these teachings before joining her, and some would remain in this New Age and UFO‐believing milieu after leaving her group”, Kelly notes.

One group member “remained interested in Martin’s teaching, but it does not prove enduring, sincere belief.” This person evidently continued to believe in Martin, though.

Then there are always a few who refresh the bricolage, so that the belief behind the failed prophecy carries on. This pattern of pastiche-making makes it very hard for Harmonialism to adhere as a church, but there always some who try.

This does suggest some very interesting historical patterns of what we might call ‘the spiritual mind’. But as Thomas Kelly has revealed in his paper, the alleged scientists behind a core text of modern psychology were actually performing as shamans, and only ‘proved’ a theory they played out themselves, through the group.

That is not an exception to the rhyming patterns of the history in my book. It is the rule. This is very exciting new information, to me.

Three professional psychologists “misrepresented how the group responded to disconfirmation and that the group did not maintain their beliefs after disconfirmation nor dramatically increase efforts at proselytization.”

The group had “planned a book, published articles in multiple magazines, sent letters to editors and spiritual seekers, and welcomed curious visitors with open arms”, Thomas writes.

“Whatever else When Prophecy Fails may have captured about the psychology of belief, it mischaracterizes the group’s efforts to spread its message before the prophecy failed.”

Kelly somewhat confuses the prophecy, a text, for the underlying belief, which expresses as text. William Miller, whose prediction of Judgment Day failed in 1844, disavowed his prophecy without losing his faith in Jesus or heaven. Disconfirmation is indeed a driver of religious creativity, especially with esoteric religion. Festinger et al were not wrong about this.

While the 1954 group never reunited, they had not shared a formalized scripture in the first place. Their beliefs were malleable. Kelly admits “these general beliefs were endemic in those circles and did not depend upon Martin herself.” Indeed, this is why Martin had a second act as Sister Thedra, revealing messages from heavenly beings, until her death. Harmonialist seekers were everywhere.

After her death, her followers compiled some of her teachings in the sixteen volume Great Awakening series and the eight volume Transfiguration series. None of these twenty‐four books defend or describe the prediction that is the center of When Prophecy Fails nor do they defend or promote the “Christmas message.” Even though Martin would gain new followers who believed in her psychic powers and alien contact, and who probably would have accepted her teachings on the failed prediction and Christmas message, she did nothing to spread these teachings or reassemble the followers who had experienced its failure.

Nor did Sister Thedra have much to say about Bertha Blatsky, her challenger for the affections of research Harry Reicken, who seemed to spiritual to her. Indeed, Martin never allowed a competing medium in the same room again. She had learned her lesson about monopolizing spiritual authority.

Harmonialism does this a lot. Seventh Day Adventists are still embarrassed that their sect, which began after the Great Disappointment of 1844, was essentially a cult led by the automatic writing of Ellen G. White. After her writing was revealed as plagiarism, one group of schismatics from her church set out to create a Harmonialist gospel, The Urantia Book.

Thomas Kelly has contributed to a theme that emerges in my drafted book, A Spiritual Biography of the Flying Saucer. From past lives to alien abductions to other recovered memory ‘syndromes’, psychotherapeutic professions always participated in the postwar construction of Harmonialist beliefs.

They conceived themselves as scientists of the soul. In fact their experiments were often unethical and frequently harmful. This is still the case. Up to one in five psychotherapies has iatrogenic effects, almost always through improper therapeutic relationships or methods. Kelly is damning: Festinger et al committed research misconduct.

Carl Jung popularized the term ‘New Age’, but in fact psychology was dabbling in a much older religious current. This is the story I tell in my book. I have a small chapter addition to add, now.

You can read the paper at this link.

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A hiker found Melissa Casias in the McGaffey Ridge area of the Carson National Forest in New Mexico last week. Casias had been missing for almost a year. She was last seen walking alone along Highway 518 in June 2025. A gun was reportedly found at the scene of her remains.

Casias reportedly wiped her devices before leaving her New Mexico residence and left her keys behind. Only 53, her family was divided over what happened to her. Even clear evidence often fails to satisfy the hopes of survivors after a tragedy. Their turmoil helped feed rumors and speculation that Casias had been ‘disappeared’ by someone because she knew too much about flying saucers.

In fact, Casias worked at the nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory, but she was an administrative employee with a security clearance, not a scientist. If confirmed, a suicide by handgun would not be unusual or hard to believe. It happens every 19 seconds in America.

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The disappearance of Casias coincided with the disappearance of Anthony Chavez, a US nuclear weapons scientist. He was last seen in May 2025 when he left his Los Alamos-area home on foot without his wallet or keys.

Chavez was 78 years old and retired. His last work was with the Scorpius Project, which uses nuclear accelerators to make x-ray pictures of plutonium components in order to find flaws. Chavez never worked in space propulsion or any area with an obvious connection to space travel.

Chavez and Casias are two of the 14 people supposedly connected to extraterrestrial research who have died or disappeared under somewhat mysterious circumstances since 2021. As I recently explained for premium subscribers, this ‘list’ is absolute bollocks.

If Casias’s death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound, then 9 of the 14 cases are completely solved as suicides, murders, accidents, or natural causes, and not a bit mysterious at all.

The remaining five cases are either unexplained because someone has disappeared and not been found yet, or because the family has withheld the cause of death from an obituary. That is also not unusual, in fact it is is completely normal, especially when substance abuse is involved or the deceased is very old.

This whole story is apophenia, a false pattern that people are seeing, sometimes on purpose. Melissa Casias and Anthony Chavez were not involved in research related to UAPs, UFOs, or antigravity propulsion. Just three of the 14 ostensible victims of this supposed conspiracy even have any obvious connections to the science of space flight.

Death is not unusual. Death is universal and mortality is not a mystery. With 248,000 federal research and development personnel, however, there will always be enough missing or dead people tangentially connected to breakthrough technology research that this putative pattern can fool people forever.

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Have you heard about all the scientists involved in flying saucer research who keep disappearing? It’s true, according to the internet, which is completely wrong. A cursory examination of the facts reveals that this is a nonsense narrative. Humans are simply adept at seeing false patterns, a tendency called apophenia. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — and the evidence here is just ordinary human messiness.

Consider the example of Dr. Ning Li, who died in 2021 at the age of 79. Li was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease after suffering brain damage from being struck by a vehicle seven years earlier. She has been described as an “anti-gravity researcher”, and in fact she did work with high temperature superconductors during her career.

However, Dr. Li was not a “fusion energy and advanced space propulsion” scientist as aerospace contractor Dr. John Brandenburg has claimed. Indeed, Brandenburg maintains that her death is suspicious because Dr. John Mack of Harvard University, who found alleged victims of alien abduction credible, also died of a vehicular collision in 2004.

Raymond Czechowski, the driver who struck Dr. Mack, was convicted of driving under the influence. But never mind the public record, or the prevalence of DUI deaths. Two pedestrian accidents ten years apart are supposed to be evidence of a nefarious, sinister global conspiracy to hide the truth.

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The ‘list’ just gets more ridiculous from here. Dr. Li’s son would like everyone to stop making up stories about his mother. No doubt these families would all prefer the conspiracy theories surrounding their losses stopped circulating. Unfortunately, that is not going to happen for reasons explained below the paywall.

1. Amy Eskridge was president and co-founder of the Institute for Exotic Science. She worked on anti-gravity propulsion and electrostatic propulsion systems until her death in 2022. Eskridge died of suicide using a gun, a tragedy which happens every 19 seconds in America. “Scientists die also, just like other people”, her father Richard told Newsweek. Like Dr. Li, Eskridge lived in Huntsville, Alabama, one of the most highly-educated cities in America.

2. Michael David Hicks, an astrophysicist with NASA’s famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory, died in July 2023 — of arteriosclerosis, according to the LA County Coroner. Approximately 900,000 Americans will die of the same cause this year. Nevertheless, this death has been deemed suspicious by the internet, for some reason. The noise is so loud that even President Trump wonders what is going on, but no one can ever quite explain why a heart attack is unusual.

3. Frank Maiwald, another NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory research engineer, died in Los Angeles in 2024 at the age of 61. No cause of death has been released, which is hardly unusual — in fact, most obituaries do not, especially when age or substance use is involved. Nevertheless, the lack of an explanation for his death has been perfect fodder for conspiracy theories.

4. Anthony Chavez, a US nuclear weapons scientist, was last seen in May 2025 when he left his Los Alamos-area home on foot without his wallet or keys. He was 78 years old and retired. His last work was with the Scorpius Project, which uses nuclear accelerators to make x-ray pictures of plutonium components in order to find flaws.

5. Monica Jacinto Reza was a materials scientist working in aerospace engineering. She made rocket propulsion alloys for Aerojet Rocketdyne until she disappeared in June of 2025 during a hike in Angeles National Forest, California. Because she vanished just a few yards away from her friends, Reza’s disappearance has been easy to frame as mysterious. However, anyone familiar with coastal trails in California will appreciate how steep the hillsides can be. “I have done a fair amount of hiking and mountain biking in those mountains”, Michael Shermer writes at Skeptic, “and well know that there are countless precipitous cliffs off which one could easily fall off and disappear into thick brush below (which is how I broke my collarbone on a mountain bike ride in 1991).”

6. Melissa Casias, who worked at the same lab as Chavez, was last seen walking alone along Highway 518 in June 2025. She was an administrative employee with a security clearance, however, and not a scientist. Casias reportedly wiped her devices before leaving her New Mexico residence and left her keys behind. Only 53, her family is divided over what happened to her. Only about one percent of those reported missing are never found. However, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) database says that tens of thousands of Americans are currently missing.

7. Joshua LeBlanc was a 29-year-old aerospace engineer who died when his Tesla vehicle left the road, striking a guardrail and trees. His body was burned beyond recognition in the ensuing fire. Because he worked in Huntsville, his death has been added to the list of supposedly mysterious deaths, even though there is nothing mysterious about fatal car accidents. More than 40,000 deaths occur in vehicular accidents during an average year.

8. Steven Garcia was a Los Alamos contractor who worked on nuclear weapon components. He left his Albuquerque, New Mexico home in August 2025 with a handgun and a bottle of water, leaving his phone and wallet behind. Garcia has been described by anonymous sources as a “very stable person”, but police considered him to be a possible danger to himself. As noted above, suicide by handgun is sadly normal in the United States, with rates among men being even higher than women like Amy Eskridge.

9. Nuno Loureiro was a 47-year-old MIT physicist and the head of their Plasma Science and Fusion Center doing nuclear fusion research. His death is not a mystery at all. He was shot and killed at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts in December 15, 2025. The killer, Claudio Neves Valente, was arrested and reportedly confessed to planning the murder for years out of jealousy at Loureiro’s career success.

10. William ‘Neil’ McCasland was a retired Major General in the US Air Force. He walked away from his Albuquerque home in February of 2026 without his phone, eyeglasses, or hearing aids. A helicopter search for him was frustrated by unseasonable weather that made the ground too warm to spot him against a colder background. Aged 68, he had recently reported “mental fog” and stepped down from all the advanced research groups he had worked with. During his long career, McCasland was a base commander at a facility that has been subject to rumors about crashed spaceship storage for decades. He had briefly worked for Tom DeLonge, UAP enthusiast and co-founder of To The Stars Academy, as a scientific advisor on DeLonge’s fiction. Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri has claimed that McCasland was privy to “a lot of information” about UFOs. However, his wife insists that McCasland had no special knowledge about extraterrestrials.

11. Carl Grillmair, 67, was an astrophysicist involved in exoplanet research at the California Institute of Technology. He was shot and killed while sitting on his front porch in Antelope Valley, California in February 2026. His alleged killer, 29-year-old Freddy Snyder, was arraigned this week. Snyder’s criminal record is extensive and includes violent carjacking. Grillmair had called the police on Snyder before, so there is zero mystery about this death at all.

12. Jason Thomas, a biochemistry researcher at Novartis, went missing in December 2025 and his body was recovered from a nearby lake on 17 March. Aged 45, he was reportedly depressed from the deaths of his parents an hour apart. Thomas left his phone and wallet in the house and put his Apple watch in the mailbox before disappearing. It is unclear why this death is even being included in conspiracy theories about missing scientists, as he never worked on anything related to outer space.

13. David Wilcock took his own life on the morning of 20 April 2026. Wilcock “was an American paranormal writer and YouTube influencer (over 500,000 followers) deeply involved in the UFO ‘disclosure movement’, who suggested that he might be the reincarnation of the famed early 20th century psychic Edgar Cayce, that he is in telepathic contact with space aliens, and that reptilian aliens inhabit parts of Antarctica where they are preparing for an invasion to take over the world’s governments and banks”, Michael Shermer observes. According to the Boulder County, Colorado Sheriff’s Department, Wilcock called 911 in an evident mental health crisis, having been seen outside his home with a handgun. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida has tried to cast suspicion on this death, claiming that “something is up” without presenting any evidence at all.

Of the fourteen cases we have listed here, eight are completely solved as suicides, murders, accidents, or natural causes, and not a bit mysterious at all. The rest are either unexplained because someone has disappeared and not been found yet, or because the family has withheld the cause of death from the obituary, which is completely normal. Without the purported links to UFOs, most of which seem quite specious and tendentious, none of these names would be a national discussion. So what is really going on here?

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In photographs taken just before the June 2023 hearing, he sits at the witness table with a crescent moon smile, fing…

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Nick Pope worked for the Ministry of Defence over decades, running the ‘UFO desk’ from 1991 to 1994. While the MoD closed the office in 2006 and announced it was no longer studying UFOs at all in 2009, Pope became a fixture of Ancient Aliens on the History Channel, and more recently, a commentator on S…

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1 - Turns out Barack Obama is a Harmonialist.

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In the previous essay, I explored the Harmonialist religious discourse of the UAP Disclosure cult and showed how an “invisible college” of UFO believers within the ‘deep state’ has sown confusion for decades, using misinformation and disinformation, in order to monopolize spiritual authority. Richard Doty emerges as a key figure in this history. Anticipating a future revelation of extraterrestrial technology, the Disclosure community wraps itself in science, and includes a great number of very high-level scientists, but it is not science. It is Harmonialism, an old time American religion that wears science like a skin, shedding its form in every generation to replace the old science-skin with a new one, because real science marches on.

“I was born on February 15, 1950 in New York State and retired from the United States Air Force in November 1988 as a Master Sergeant”, Doty writes. He says that his father Charles and uncle Ed Doty had worked on Project Blue Book, the public UFO investigation which was just shutting down right as Rick joined the Air Force in 1968. Recognized for his family connection, Doty says that his very first assignment was guarding a gigantic hangar that held a secret spaceship, which he was allowed to observe exactly once during an experiment. He was being groomed for the world’s most secret program.

His logical next stop was Saigon. “About two months before departing for Vietnam, my uncle (who had just been promoted) came to the base to visit me”, Doty writes. During a meal at the Officers’ club, “my uncle asked me about my temporary assignment to Indian Springs. I told him I saw something I wasn’t sure about.” Importantly, Rick Doty’s memory of this meeting diverges from his uncle Ed’s memory. “He told me that indeed the object was a captured flying saucer and I was very surprised at the nonchalant way my uncle brought up the subject. I wondered whether it was safe to bring up this type of subject in the club, but my uncle told me not to worry”, he writes. Robert Collins, the main author of the Black World of UFOs, scrupulously includes a note from Uncle Ed confirming they had lunch. “To the best of my knowledge, he did not discuss anything classified”, however.

Rick Doty’s first decade in uniform was unremarkable. Then in 1978, “I was recruited by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) to become an agent”, graduating and arriving “to District 17 OSI, Kirtland AFB New Mexico in May 1979.” He was assigned to work as “a special investigator for UFO reports”, and in that role, he was to “investigate sightings, landings, or contacts with UFOs or extraterrestrials” through means that “would not draw public attention. We were disguised or under the cover of military or other federal agencies while investigating UFO sightings.”

We would run the whole covert UFO collection operation just like any other intelligence operation. We would solicit either wittingly or unwittingly of associates or of “cooperating people” as we would call them. We would recruit these people just as an intelligence officer would recruit people in a foreign country to provide us with information on UFO sightings. When they would give us information about a sighting or a landing, we would use ourselves in a cover capacity, identifying ourselves as some other person. We have even used newspaper personnel, wittingly and unwittingly, and scientists or, we would pose as a scientist.

Assigned to AFOSI in 1980, Doty was involved in “perception management” of Paul Bennewitz with false information. A local contractor and successful businessman, Bennewitz had become interested in UFOs and cattle mutilations during the 1970s. Project Beta: Summary and Report of Status (With Suggested Guidelines), a document that Bennewitz authored and circulated in the UFO world in 1981, is a “labyrinthine fantasy” and “as much a result of disinformation being fed to Bennewitz via AFOSI, as of his own imagining,” Pilkington writes. It is filled with material supplied by Doty.

Bennewitz called Col. Ernest Edwards, who was in charge of base security at Kirtland, and invoked his friendship with the base commander. Edwards assigned the case to Doty, according to Bishop, whose source is of course Doty. Bennewitz was convinced he had been taking pictures of extraterrestrial spacecraft in the night sky and he had received strange radio signals on his home equipment. Doty found the latter issue problematic, and recommended a meeting with the base command, security, and science staff. The NSA and AFOSI-PJ “asked Doty to make another trip before the meeting, this time to the Bennewitz home to see his operation firsthand.” Or so the story goes.

A discrepancy emerges here. In Bishop’s book, Doty took yet another Project Blue Book veteran, Lew Miles, and “a small, easily concealed camera” to take pictures of everything in the Bennewitz home “at the express request of the NSA”. In Collins’s book, Doty drops a different name nine years later. “Headquarters, specifically the PJ branch, suggested I take along UFO expert Jerry Miller”, who was also “a former Project Blue Book investigator”. It is not to be the last time a detail seems to differ in multiple versions of a story, a pattern which Collins calls “vintage Doty”.

Because signals are the domain of the NSA, Doty cites this agency — not his own — as the source of continued interest in Bennewitz after the meeting, in which Bennewitz told a room filled with amazed Air Force officers about the looming alien invasion and the need to defend America. Despite his crazy story, they were interested in just how he had managed to intercept secret Air Force signals, Doty says. When Bennewitz escalated to contacting New Mexico’s Senators in Washington, “the AFOSI decided that it was time to start drawing his attention away from the base.” Doty was now assigned to manipulate a man in declining mental health, a job he would do all too well, according to his own legend.

Nor was Paul Bennewitz to be the last victim of Doty’s influence. By the time he retired from the Air Force in 1988, Rick Doty had already developed relationships with key figures in the present-day UAP Disclosure cult. The following year, he would emerge as the most divisive character in ufology, splitting the larger community as the veracity of everything they had come to believe was called into question. Disconfirmation did not persuade anyone to leave the community, of course. Instead, the destabilized ufologists have treated Doty as an authority, and late in life, a prophet.

The story he tells about the extraterrestrials is classic Harmonialism, another gospel from the stars in the old time American spiritual tradition. Like William Sadler, who concealed the identity of ‘the Sleeper’, the trance medium behind The Urantia Book, Richard Doty presents a story that is unfalsifiable, for the truth hides behind a convenient veil of national security. He says he did it all for his country, but I think he did it for himself, to impress his beliefs upon the community of believers. Richard Doty is the Man In Black who would lead them.

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If all that cinematic laboratory equipment looks familiar, that’s because it was also used in Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and The Invisible Ray. An electrical engineer named Kenneth Strickfaden built all the tall, sparking, buzzing, clacking, discharging, flashing things as well as the Jacob’s ladders, those vertical glass tubes with continuous rising electrical arcs that climb upward in a steady, flickering spark trail. One of them is at the center of this scene, with Ming poised strategically behind it.

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You can watch the full series on YouTube here. At his point in the story, Ming is forcing Zarkov to build “radioactive rays” and “solarite” for interplanetary conquest. It is an abstract pop fiction action thriller, with plenty of voluptuous feminine presence but zero actual nudity or even a sexual reference. In fact, the Hayes Office, which acted as Hollywood’s regulatory censor in the 1930s, did object to the revealing costumes worn by Dale Arden and Princess Aura, so Universal switched to more modest costuming.

But there was no one at the studio actually watching out for the odd visual sex joke in those days. Putting Ming behind a rising electrical spark just so, creating a cheeky visual moment, was possible when nudity was not. Ironically, the costumes in the 1980 Flash Gordon film showed more skin, but studio and TV network managers would have caught this and likely cut it. If it is a sex joke, then it is one that probably only could have happened in its own time.

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This is a follow-up to the previous installment in my series on the history of the belief in extraterrestrials. I have identified flying saucers as a ‘way of knowing’ among moderns, a gnostic icon of Harmonialist religion, an old time American spiritual tradition. I anticipate two more premium subscriber essays this year before the book project is completed. The previous essay is unlocked for one week:

In the previous installment, I explained how the “Invisible College” behind the most recent UFO ‘flap’ on Capitol Hill consists of the same people who sold the US government on paranormal investigations decades ago. Having refreshed the spiritual menu of Harmonialist belief in extraterrestrial aliens like all similar movements before them, the Invisible College are now developing a new orthodoxy of rational ‘scientific’ UFO belief for the 21st century. They are following a distinct and consistent pattern observed throughout this essay series.

The rock star

Tom DeLonge endorsed John Kerry in 2004, touring with the Democratic presidential candidate, finding the sense of mission that lay behind his second band, Angels & Airwaves. In September 2005, after months of silence following the breakup of his first band, Blink-182, DeLonge “released a rather grandiose, cryptic and curiously punctuated statement on his whereabouts” that called his new band’s forthcoming album “the greatest rock and roll revolution for this generation”, as reported by James Montgomery for MTV. In a 2007 interview with Montgomery, DeLonge explained that he had “literally stayed awake for three weeks straight” after Blink-182 split up “trying to reorganize the next chapter of my life”.

“I didn’t want to come out and just be like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play some more music,’ because I’m not just creating another band, I’m trying to create the world’s greatest rock band”, DeLonge said. “Everyone I talk to says stuff like ‘Music sucks today,’ and I’m going to try and change all that.” Angels & Airwaves produced three albums. All of them were outperformed by every metric when DeLonge reunited with Blink-182 to produce the 2011 album Neighborhoods. Still seeking a wider outlet for his ideas, DeLonge’s involvement with the Church of the UAP began with his 27 March 2016 appearance on Coast to Coast AM with weekend host George Knapp, media grandfather of the Skinwalker Ranch group.

DeLonge was there to discuss his novel, Sekret Machines: Chasing Shadows, which he co-authored with A.J. Hartley and self-published under the business name “To The Stars…” the following month. It is currently ranked #140,400 in the Amazon Kindle store at the time of this writing. A sequel, Sekret Machines: Chasing Shadows, was published in 2018. Together, they are longer than the Urantia Book. The plot is a fictionalized version of the “core story”, or genesis myth, of the UAP believers. “I knew, and know, there has to be an answer”, DeLonge writes in his forward. “And it will be a simple answer once we hear it. But right now, that answer evades our understanding. It is like trying to understand the description of a color we have never seen.” DeLonge writes that he sent then-CIA official Jim Semivan the prologue to a nonfiction book series, “a thesis on certain elements within this project”, which “seemed to have made quite an impression” on the recipient.

During the interview with Knapp, DeLonge mentioned that in formulating the novel, he had spoken to “advisors” from within the intelligence community that he did not name. He was alluding to the Skinwalker Ranch group at the Pentagon, of course. In a 2021 podcast appearance on Into the Impossible, hosted by cosmologist Brian Keating, Semivan has also recounted how the Skinwalker Ranch group — which he likewise not name — urged him to read DeLonge’s book and listen to his interview with Knapp, insisting that national security leaks were potentially involved. No such leaks emerged, of course, because the book is fiction, but Semivan, a career spook, exhibited the intended fear response.

After meeting DeLonge in person later that August, Semivan began the collaboration that led to his co-founding To The Stars Academy with DeLonge and Hal Puthoff, a psychic remote viewing expert with decades of experience selling his services to the deep state that we met in the previous essay. In Washington, DC, DeLonge says he “pitched a massive entertainment franchise that involved novels, feature films, nonfiction books, documentaries, and everything else that goes along with a story that’s been told over decades and teaches people the truth about something that is almost too big to handle.”

I knew more than most that this phenomenon was scary, and everything that we did over the past sixty years was based on the enormity of the unbelievable task at hand. We had to rethink religion, history, national security, secrecy, physics, defense, space exploration, cosmology, humanity. But the generations of civilians who followed this matter felt left out, lied to, and disrespected.

The government has failed to explain the inexplicable and DeLonge would have us treat this as a hate crime against the believers in the unexplained. A sense of elite entitlement becomes evident throughout the discourse of the Disclosure community. Decades of frustrated expectationalism pervade their conversations. Everyone is top notch, an expert in their field displaying expertise outside their field, and all of them want their expectations fulfilled. Almost everyone involved is a former agent of the ‘deep state’, or else a dilettante with money to burn. They are united in their demand for disclosure, but only by the demand for disclosure. Among the believers, the key debate is what degree of immanent disclosure humanity is prepared to receive.

The primary mode of discourse in the Disclosure community is the podcast format. Both TTSA and the Sol Foundation, as well as independent YouTubers, have provided electronic pulpits for testimony. Within this discourse, there is an argument for limited disclosure, or what we might call managerial disclosure. Even the existence of the articles of faith, the relic spaceships in hidden hangars, becomes questionable when the respected voices with lifelong intelligence community careers argue for being very, very careful with the mysterious technologies in the spaceships. The new church of the UAP will have orthodoxy, it seems, but only after a rigorous, years-long scientific analysis at taxpayer expense, when this new class of experts have finally decided what they can reveal without breaking society.

In the meantime, we have the pseudoscriptures of Tom DeLonge to inspire our imaginations and lead us towards harmony with the cosmos. Claude Lévi-Strauss would recognize the bricolage of Harmonialism being refreshed once again by a new bricoleur. As with all the bricoleurs of Harmonialism going back to Emanuel Swedenborg in the 19th century, Tom DeLonge presents the latest, and he would hope greatest, version of an old story. He would like it to be the greatest Harmonialist story every told.

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This essay series on the history of belief in extraterrestrials will conclude in 2026 as I compile and edit a book draft. The Latter Day Saints are just one legacy of a forgotten 19th century American spiritual landscape in which the belief in aliens was common. Telling this ‘long durée’ history resolutely requires over 100,000 words. There is simply too much evidence for a shorter book.

This essay consists of new material that brings the history up to date on what may yet prove to be the last great UFO ‘flap’ on Capitol Hill. Occasional essays on this topic will follow as I look to write about other areas of esoteric history and draft another book about a very different faith movement. The Skeptic Spirit vertical will continue to examine other arcane and esoteric mysteries.

Introduction

Grieving for the death of his 24-year-old son, Rod Lee, by suicide, leaving behind a baby son and unborn daughter in 1992, Robert Bigelow and his wife took appointments with George Anderson, a psychic medium. Anderson was unable to contact Rod, but did console Mr. Bigelow that his son was alive in spirit, according to his 2021 interview in The New York Times. Bigelow then funded a $3.7 million Chair of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, employing two parapsychologists in the role, but shut the project down years later because “we just couldn’t make enough progress in research aspects”. Bigelow told reporter Ralph Blumenthal about his new initiative offering $1 million for scientific evidence supporting “the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death”. Life after death is not a new religious idea. It is the original religious idea.

Bigelow made his fortune in real estate, but he had always wanted to make that substantial fortune so that he could learn the truth about extraterrestrials. In an interview with CBS in 2017, Bigelow described seeing nuclear tests over Nevada as a child and a close encounter his grandparents had with a UFO. “It really sped up and came right into their face and filled up the entire windshield of the car. And it took off at a right angle and shot off into the distance”, he told Lara Logan. “I’m absolutely convinced” extraterrestrial beings exist. “That’s all there is to it.” Asked whether he thinks aliens visit earth, Bigelow was certain of it. “There has been and is an existing presence, an ET presence. And I spent millions and millions and millions — I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.” Let us take him at his word.

“When I was 12 or 13, I made a commitment to myself to really get involved in something to do with space, and something to do with U.F.O.s if I ever had the money to do it”, he told the NYT in 2021. “So I made a premeditated contract to myself to get into some kind of field where I could make a lot of money.” Paranormal activities were another keen interest. In 1996, Bigelow bought a large ranch from Terry Sherman for $200,000. Although the previous property owner, Garth Myers, says that he never saw anything unusual, Sherman told Bigelow that he was spooked by a series of supernatural events. Local news coverage had carried sensational stories from Sherman and his wife, Gwen, about werewolves, will-o-the-wisps, and bloodless cattle mutilations. Bigelow named the property Skinwalker Ranch after the shape-shifting witches from Navajo mythology and made it the research reserve for his National Institute of Discovery Science, or NIDS. Let us appreciate that Bigelow made his paranormal ghost hunting preserve sound official.

In 2005, the investigative team published their findings. Hunt for the Skinwalker, a volume produced by Bigelow’s scientist Colm Kelleher and his journalist George Knapp, purports to document paranormal events at Skinwalker Ranch and in the surrounding area going back “fifteen generations”, citing the Ute Indians who have lived on the reservation adjacent to the ranch for seven generations.1 Location is everything in real estate and the book is a brochure for the ghost hunting reserve. “If the Uinta Basin has any claim to fame today, it’s as a heavyweight contender for UFO capital of the world”, the authors write. “Since the 1950s, thousands of UFO sightings have been reported in the area, and it easily ranks among the most active UFO areas anywhere. By some estimates, more than half of the residents of the basin have seen anomalous objects in the sky.”

Of course, the implication here is that the reader will have a 50-50 chance of seeing anomalous objects in the sky if they visit the ranch themselves, or better yet, buy the property for millions of dollars. “Admittedly, 90 to 95 percent of so-called UFO reports are misidentifications of known phenomena. But even by that rigid standard, a very large number of sightings in the Uinta Basin can be categorized as unexplained.” You, too, can see whatever you want to see, at Skinwalker Ranch, and explain it to yourself any way you please. Another Mecca of American Harmonialist religion has been created.

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I had this promotional post scheduled months ago when a comet showed up and history rhymed with my topic. I cannot claim any foresight, it is just a complete accident that 3I/Atlas gave us another wave of revivalism for the cult of the extraterrestrial right as I was ready to unlock the audio…

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Nuremberg was the first city to convert to Protestant religion and along with Geneva, became a wellspring of the Reformation in the 16th century. All of Protestant Europe was therefore in regular communication with Nuremberg. The printing press had also been in use for more than a century when Hans Wolff Glaser created the above illustration, which has variously been described as an atmospheric event or a space battle, according to the level of sensationalism in the interpreter.

The possibility of a weather phenomenon is interesting, but ultimately unconvincing. ‘Sun dogs’ are indeed amazing and people saw them in the 1500s. However, no example ever recorded has even approached this vista of crosses and circles and strange “rod” objects. Ufologists are right to reject that ‘scientific’ explanation, but then they are also wrong to infer this illustration depicts an extraterrestrial war that people witnessed in the sky over Nuremberg. Nothing in the text supports that.

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Here is the translated text of the pamphlet. Full analysis is below the paywall. Emphases are added throughout, for example when highlighting the description of what sounds like cannon or musket balls and associated gun tubes (the “rods”) seen in the illustration.

In the morning of April 14, 1561, at daybreak, between 4 and 5 a.m., a dreadful apparition occurred on the sun, and then this was seen in Nuremberg in the city, before the gates and in the country — by many men and women. At first there appeared in the middle of the sun two blood-red semi-circular arcs, just like the moon in its last quarter. And in the sun, above and below and on both sides, the color was blood, there stood a round ball of partly dull, partly black ferrous color. Likewise there stood on both sides and as a torus about the sun such blood-red ones and other balls in large number, about three in a line and four in a square, also some alone. In between these globes there were visible a few blood-red crosses, between which there were blood-red strips, becoming thicker to the rear and in the front malleable like the rods of reed-grass, which were intermingled, among them two big rods, one on the right, the other to the left, and within the small and big rods there were three, also four and more globes.

The next section is the description of the ‘battle’, which reads very much as symbolism. Objects crash to earth in flames and then disappear, leaving no wreckage. While I have heard of UFO cover-ups in which the government supposedly hides evidence of crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft, I have never heard of flying saucers that crash and then hide themselves. That is quite a conspiracy. This section ends with a sign in the sky pointing directly west from Nuremberg, towards France.

These all started to fight among themselves, so that the globes, which were first in the sun, flew out to the ones standing on both sides, thereafter, the globes standing outside the sun, in the small and large rods, flew into the sun. Besides the globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour. And when the conflict in and again out of the sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the sun down upon the earth ‘as if they all burned’ and they then wasted away on the earth with immense smoke. After all this there was something like a black spear, very long and thick, sighted; the shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west.

The passage seems predictive and symbolic of leaders, either in the city or on the throne or on the battlefield, crashing to earth in a proverbial burst of flames. For his part, Glaser professed total ignorance of the real story. In the final part of the translated text, he is merely a humble and pious man passing on the news of a strange sighting. Who is he to suggest that great and terrible events may be unfolding a few hundred miles away, in the real world? Why, nobody. It is important to note that Glaser was no one important, and in the 16th century, being nobody meant having no protection from consequences. Speech was hardly free, even in Nuremberg.

Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows. Although we have seen, shortly one after another, many kinds of signs on the heaven, which are sent to us by the almighty God, to bring us to repentance, we still are, unfortunately, so ungrateful that we despise such high signs and miracles of God. Or we speak of them with ridicule and discard them to the wind, in order that God may send us a frightening punishment on account of our ungratefulness. After all, the God-fearing will by no means discard these signs, but will take it to heart as a warning of their merciful Father in heaven, will mend their lives and faithfully beg God, that He may avert His wrath, including the well-deserved punishment, on us, so that we may temporarily here and perpetually there, live as his children. For it, may God grant us his help, Amen.

The only supernaturalism present in the text is Christian prayer: God, not aliens, is the master of the mystery, here. Rather than a space battle, the pamphlet is Glaser’s warning about the imminent civil conflict in France, the first of eight episodes collectively known as the Wars of Religion. The outcome, he knew, was up to God. There was nothing to do for it but pray.

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I was not attempting to debate Roswell or Area 51 in these essays. Instead, I started out trying to understand where and how the belief in aliens arose, tracing its roots back through history. I found an American religious tradition that has believed in extraterrestrial beings, and even communed with aliens through spiritual means, from the earliest days of the Republic. Almost all of these new religious movements contain some admixture of Christianity.

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This information is never addressed by any book on UFOs. No single volume has ever been published that puts all of these pieces together. Flying saucers are a spiritual phenomenon that always lack some measure of verifiable or replicable evidence, a problem that splits the ufology community to the present day. The problem has only gotten worse in the age of advanced optical systems whose operators seldom understand them, or else abuse them.

Ignore the controversial ‘evidence’, look to the literary historical evidence instead, and the real story is hidden in plain sight. I have published further essays this year that I intend to read for publication in 2026. Please bookmark this page and give these a listen. The evidence has always been out there.

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Three weeks ago, I published my essay on The Urantia Book, perhaps the most famous example of a genre of occult literature that was popular in America for almost two centuries before the first flying saucer sightings. As I explained in that essay, the ‘Space Jesus’ religion presented in the UB has roots in the extensive writings of 17th century ‘prophet…

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During the 18th century, Emanuel Swedenborg published a series of volumes about the progress of the human soul in the afterlife through a universe filled with worlds covered in people. Swedenborg claimed that, by means of spirit-communication and astral travel, he had visited with extraterrestrial beings, living and dead. He described Mercury, Venus, the moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and extrasolar worlds as well as their humanoid inhabitants.

In this essay series, we have retraced the forgotten story of Swedenborg’s impact on the American religious frontier. From the moment of Independence, sincere belief that humanity existed on other worlds was common. Americans have claimed regular spiritual contact with extraterrestrial beings from the beginning of the nation until the present day. Though we call it the ‘New Age’, this is in fact an Old Time religion, and rather than a foreign import, it is American as apple pie.

Previously in this series:

The Urantia Book is a case in point. Formulated by a disappointed Seventh-day Adventist from the sleeping pronouncements and ‘automatic writings’ of a spirit-medium, the UB is meant to be a whole new revelation for humanity, a gospel from the stars. It was supposed to inspire “a religion the like of which this world has never seen,” according to the son of its creator, who wanted “an international religion … a mankind religion” to replace the strife-ridden spiritual confusion of the present world.1 While there is still a cult of the Urantia Book today, the text has failed to start a mass movement. Rather than a new global religion, the foundation left by the authors of the UB has lost control of the book as well as the believers.

Timing mattered. Conception of what became the UB started before the First World War using the same 19th century methods as a spiritualist medium. Composition of the UB began during the 1930s, when Christian Theosophy cults were at their peak in American life and culture. When the UB was finally published for the world in 1955, those same Christian Theosophists were rebranding, hailing their Ascended Masters from Venus in newly-sighted flying saucers. The UB had missed its moment, becoming a cultural artifact of a forgotten American zeitgeist.

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Over 2,000 pages long, UB has seen its most exhaustive study in print by skeptic and debunker Martin Gardner. Urantia: The Great Cult Mystery makes a convincing case that Dr. William Samuel Sadler, an apostate of the Kellogg Sanitarium at Battle Creek, Michigan, used the revelations of a sleeping medium, Wilfred Kellogg, delivered in the style of 19th century Adventist medium and prophetess Ellen G. White. Sadler added copious plagiarism from popular science books, including his own.

Emanuel Swedenborg’s name appears once in Gardner’s book about the UB. when he remarks that it is “crazier than the works of Swedenborg and Davis.” It is reasonable to assume that Gardner did not know much about Swedenborg, had not read his cosmology, and did not understand the plainly-Swedenborgian roots of the spiritual cosmology in the UB. Sadler likely did not know about the long reach of Swedenborg either, for he was too busy updating the modern heaven for his readers to bother working backwards towards primary sources.

By the time the UB was ready for print, the influence of Swedenborg was so intrinsic to the ‘modern heaven’ as conceived in American religion that there was no need to read or reference the ‘Swedish prophet’ at all, anymore. His ideas were everywhere, and belonged to anyone who believed in them, even if most Americans did not even know his name.

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It was never aliens. According to the Wall Street Journal, at least some of the most outspoken advocates for ‘disclosure’ of alleged alien technologies and “biologics” are in fact “victims of a bizarre hazing ritual.”

“For decades, certain new commanders of the Air Force’s most classified programs, as part of their induction briefings, would be handed a…

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