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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Just before midnight on the evening of 4 October 1994, a barn in Ferme des Rochettes near Cheiry, Switzerland began to burn with eighteen people inside it (see photo). They were all dead, arranged like spokes on a wheel, wearing capes. Three more bodies were found inside an octagonal room w…

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Recently, the online conspiracy world produced dubious ‘science’ purporting to show ancient megastructures under the pyramids of Giza. These claims by Italian researchers were a viral sensation thanks to the use of striking AI imagery. However, the scientific validity of their claims has come into question, mainly because synthetic apterture radar tomography does not penetrate limestone rock that far.

Other skeptics have pointed out that the alleged megastructures would be under a water table that has existed for millions of years. Geologists question whether the scan has found structures or natural cavities, as the scan is too indistinct. Everyone questioning the study would like the team behind it to try their technology on lots of known underground structures in order to prove that it really works, because no one understands quite how the fuzzy data results they produced were ever translated into AI images of incredible structures.

I shall not go over these arguments in detail. My point is that the debunkers treat this as a scientific hoax, and try to debunk it with science. I propose that the history of the idea of chambers under the pyramids is sufficient and final proof that they ultimately exist in the minds of believers in alternative religion, who then create the dubious ‘science’ that ‘proves’ their beliefs are true.

Since the viral ‘pyramid megastructures’ hoax appeared, more information about the creators has confirmed that evidencing a religious belief, and not scientific validity, was the real objective of ‘discovering’ these supposed structures. Translations of their public statements have emerged which corroborate the interpretation of the ‘pyramid megastructures’ as yet another typical New Age religious hoax wearing science as a magician’s hat.

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“Atlantis as the origin of New World culture is a theory dating back almost to the discovery of the New World itself,” Robert Wauchope wrote in 1962.1 It became a popular idea about the Americas even before they were colonized. We can blame the Spanish and the Italians. Columbus, a Genoan, sailed west looking for the legendary island of “Antilia” on behalf of the Spanish king and queen. Then people got creative. First, Italian poet Giralamo Frocastoro in 1530, and then historian Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdés in 1535, suggested that the New World was populated by the descendants of the fabled Atlantis.

Over the centuries, various parties have credited ancient Egypt, Phoenicians, and the ‘lost tribes’ of Israel with founding the societies of North and South America. Yet “of all the American Indian origin theorists, advocates of the Lost Continent are by far the most devoted to their cause,” Wauchope says. He names two modern esoteric religions in particular. Emphasis added:

Lost Atlantis devotees have been, for the most part, congenital romanticists and mystics. Nowadays they are to be found among adventure readers and members of mystic organizations like the Rosicrucians and the Theosophists, but as late as the nineteenth century they counted among their number a great many old-time scholars who flocked to the local meetings and international congresses of learned societies here and abroad to expound on an advanced civilization that flourished many thousands of years ago on a giant island in the Atlantic Ocean and that colonized the ancient American continent before being destroyed by cataclysmic volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tidal waves, to sink beneath the sea forever.

The 19th century was a particularly febrile period for lost continents. Ernst Haeckel, a keen Darwinian taxonomist, wanted to explain the distribution of lemurs and other common species between Madagascar and Australia. In his Natural History of Creation, published in 1868, and then his Origin and Geneology of the Human Race of 1870, Haeckel proposed a hypothetical landmass, which he called Lemuria, that had slid beneath the waves of the Indian Ocean many eons ago.

At the time, his thought experiment was even more reasonable and scientific than the Atlantean controversy. Theosophy reestablished Lemuria as an explicitly spiritual project. In An Outline of the Principles of Modern Theosophy, published in 1894, Irish Theosophist Claude Falls Wright asserted that the residents of Lemuria were the “Third Race” of mankind.2 They were also “of enormous stature — from twenty-seven to even thirty feet in height” and “possessed such powers over nature as we cannot now conceive of.”

The progressive Lemurians, the ones who evolved spiritually, “are the true ancestors of present-day humanity, for it was during the period of their existence that man first received the gift of mind,” Wright explains. The fallen Lemurians on the other hand settled Atlantis, the scene of Plato’s ancient parable of collapsing civilizations.

It all sounds like Swiss UFO prophet Eduard ‘Billy’ Meier because he draws from all the same material, including lost worlds that exist both under the sea and in outer space. The lost worlds of the fantasy past are in fact the promised worlds of the heavenly future; they are the same worlds. Shangri-La, or its interstellar equivalent, is always waiting for us just beyond the horizon. ‘Atlantis in the Americas’ is a legacy of esoteric religion in the early age of science, when people already believed in extraterrestrials and even communed with them in spirit.

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“We have not been left alone to evolve on our own as most planets have, but instead we are a mixture of many different races that have come here over the millennia,” J. Randolph Winters writes in his exegesis of the Swiss flying saucer prophet Eduard ‘Billy’ Meier. “It is this mixture of races who are at different spiritual levels of evolution that has led to the difficult times we are now experiencing” in 1994, when The Pleiadian Mission: A Time of Awareness was published. “Most planets have only one race and therefore fewer problems. Many war-like races have come here and contributed to our family tree and our bloody history.”

Winters, who died in 2018, wrote the book as an English-language exegesis of Meiers, who has written more than forty volumes in German. During his six months at the Semjase Silver Star Center in Switzerland preparing for the book, Winters did his best to improve on a poor English translation of the voluminous Contact Notes through discussions with Meier. His text is explicitly New Age and riddled with elements of Theosophy. The universe of Billy Meier, according to J. Randolph Winters, is structured just like the cosmology of Theosophy, including the core elements borrowed from Emanuel Swedenborg. Suffused throughout with pacifism, the book is also a racial narrative of human history borrowed from the Theosophists.

The Pleiadians come in peace. They are humans, like us, because we came from the stars. Every one of us is a reincarnated alien spirit. It sounds like Scientology because L. Ron Hubbard’s spiritual roots lie in the same source material as Meier’s. The explicitly spiritual message of universal peace that the Pleiadians transmit to humanity through Meier resembles the galactic order of George Adamski because Adamski was a Theosophist. At the end of the book, Winters proposes a “Constitution of the People of Earth” that bears all the hallmarks of modern esoteric religion bound up in Theosophy and the New Age. It is a message of world peace through universal evolution to a higher state of consciousness, led by our white saviors from the stars.

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Canton Zurich, the western, German-speaking part of Switzerland, is gorgeous. A photo viewer is so distracted by the surreal scenery that the spaceship hovering weightless above the landscape seems almost a natural phenomenon. William Eduard “Billy” Meier entirely owes his success as a flying saucer photographer to the land he inhabits, for when he has pointed his camera into picturesque scenes like this, his spaceships have been the most compelling. The successful Meier compositions — the photos that Sotheby’s likes to sell at auction — capture the “Pleiadian beamships” right on this happy boundary, in a liminal relationship to earth.

Whenever Meier’s lens has focused too closely on supposed beamships next to trees, or buildings or vehicles that are in frame, however, his photographic fakery has been too obvious. Even his best photographs have been utterly rubbished by real photographic experts; now 88 years old, Meier is undoubtedly the most well-documented and thoroughly-debunked fraud in the history of ufology. Still, the best of his pictures are admittedly amazing.

Like so many prophets of New Age religion before him and since, Meier’s artistic theosophy has not aged well, though. It dates him, over time; dispels his illusions. We still recognize the original, iconic X-Files poster-image flying saucer because of that magical-seeming balance between earth and sky, but the magic has faded. Per the poster in Agent Fox Mulder’s FBI basement office, many people still want to believe in Meier’s photography. His photos have won him worldwide fame, but his message has earned occult acclaim.

Wendelle Stephens, the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who imported the cult of Billy Meier into the United States in 1980, was already a great collector of UFO photography and thought Meier’s were the clearest pictures ever taken. Photos with natural settings abound in the two-volume coffee table book UFO... Contact from the Pleiades produced by Stevens’s investigative team, Genesis III. An uncle gifted me a copy for Christmas in 1983, and although it stirred my imagination, it left me with doubts about Meier. Reading that book, and moreover rereading it over the next few years, helped shape the younger me into the skeptic that I am today.

In 2025, with ‘AI deepfakes’ being a household term, we are perhaps less trusting of images than we were in the 1980s. Moreover, with the internet at our fingertips, it is easier than ever for someone to research Rolls Royce Camargues and make a YouTube video (see above) proving that Meier used forced perspective with a toy model car for a photo series featuring one of his ridiculous trashcan-lid “wedding cake” spaceships.

Digital cameras have replaced film. Photo analysis tools are now available to millions more people who know how to use them, so fake images can be unmasked in a matter of minutes on social media. But in 1982, when no household on the planet had a computer or a digital camera, it was much easier to convince television viewers that computer technology was magic, capable of anything. Genesis III set out to convince the public that a computer could tell the ‘real’ flying saucer photo from a fake one when humans could not.

Working with Meier, Stevens and the Genesis III team duplicated his technique for faking landscape photos in their 1980 television ‘documentary’ Contact From The Pleiadians. Disturbed when their pictures had the same quality as Meier’s, the filmmakers faced a dilemma. Science was no help, so they used pseudoscience. Genesis III wrote a script about “pixels,” which were a wholly new concept to almost all Americans, and presented a fancy-seeming digital image analysis that was nothing of the sort. We are more used to this sort of flimflam presentation nowadays. Here is that clip from the longer ‘documentary,’ which is available at Bitchute. The man presenting the pixels is Jim Dilettoso. He is of course not an actual scientist, let alone a computer scientist.

As Kal Korff emphasizes in his landmark debunking of Meier, Spaceships of the Pleiades: The Billy Meier Story, Meier had never provided any film negatives or source materials for his photography to anyone. “Without an original negative to study, any photograph of a ‘UFO’ (regardless of what it purports to show) is worthless and cannot be accepted by science as evidence,” Korff writes. “Indeed, according to Meier proponents, the original negatives and other photographic source material have all either been ‘lost’ in the mail or ‘stolen’ by everyone from souvenir hunters to nebulous and nefarious intelligence operatives. Still others have been ‘recalled’ by the Pleiadians, meaning that Meier was ordered to turn them over to the aliens.”1 Indeed, the authors of Contact from the Pleiades seem all too gullible on this point, suspending their disbelief to the breaking point as CIA, KGB, and other shadow organizations all reputedly converged on Meier in the late 1970s to steal his negatives.

Despite Korff’s exhaustive work, Meier still has believers, emphasis on belief. Seekers from around the world come to Meier for the photos, but they stay for his teachings. In fact, Meier’s cult organization, the Freie Interessengeneinschaft für Grenz-und Geisteswissenschaften und Ufologie-Studien (Free Community of Interests in the Border and Spiritual Sciences and UFO Studies, referred to hereafter as FIGU) remains active worldwide today. “It was to this study group in 1975 that Meier began to reveal his lifetime of contacts with space beings and to whom he had showed the photographs of flying saucers he had taken,” explains the Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology.2 Spiritual seekers learn German in order to read Meier’s books, most of which have not been translated. Much of this essay relies on his exegesis by English-speaking North Americans.

“The combination of pictures and spiritual message has had a marked influence on the continuing New Age movement with its emphasis on spiritual emergence,” the Encyclopedia notes. “As early as 1989, channelers in North America also began to claim contact with the Pleiadians,” with many embracing FIGU teachings. As we have learned in this essay series, the so-called ‘New Age’ is in fact a very old body of alternative religious beliefs, and extraterrestrial visitation has always been one of those beliefs.

The teachings of the Pleiadians transmitted to earth by Eduard ‘Billy’ Meier are virtually indistinguishable from any other UFO cult ‘bricolage’ because they are formed from the same material, acknowledge it, and comment upon it. Meier is a flying saucer prophet of an Old Time religion and ‘Genesis III’ was his media vanguard in the United States. Meier has “a distinctly religious message,” the Encyclopedia notes. The beamship photos are mere icons of Meier’s faith.

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