1 - Turns out Barack Obama is a Harmonialist.
Put the old conspiracy theories away, because the former president revealed his true religion to us last weekend when he told a podcaster that aliens are “real, but I haven’t seen them”. Americans shrugged, since a majority now already believes this to be true. “Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there”, Obama clarified on Instagram. “But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”
It is a variation on Pascal’s wager, the proposition that it is better to fear God and be wrong than to anger God and find out he exists. The aliens are divine beings from the literal heavens. This same argument has been made by other people who, by remarkable coincidence, just happened to be part of Obama’s deep state, such as Christopher Mellon at DIA, Jim Semivan at CIA, and Luis Elizondo at the Pentagon. Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Ted Stevens, and Sen. Daniel Inouye — two Democrats, one Republican — secured taxpayer funding for ‘UAP research’ that was largely spent on ghost hunts at Skinwalker Ranch.
The end result of this story, which I tell in my completed book draft, A Spiritual Biography of the Flying Saucer, was David Grusch giving hearsay testimony to Congress based on what he had learned from the Harmonialist cult of the UAP that thrives inside the secretive compartments of federal government. Months after his congressional appearance in 2023, Grusch emerged as an explicitly spiritual figure through the Sol Foundation. In 2024, he described his spiritual outlook to Joe Rogan, making a full confession of Harmonialism.
In his monumental Religious History of the American People, historian Sydney Ahlstrom identifies Harmonialism as “forms of piety and belief in which spiritual composure, physical health, and even economic well-being are understood to flow from a person’s rapport with the cosmos.” These religions rely on “allegedly rational argument, empirical demonstration, and (when applicable) a knowledge of the ‘secret’ meanings of authoritative scriptures.” The UAP disclosure cult meets this definition.
As I have established in the series of research essays that make up the book draft, flying saucers also meet Ahlstrom’s definition of Harmonial religion as a “vast and highly diffuse religious impulse that cuts across all the normal lines of religious division” and “shapes the inner meaning of the church life to which people formally commit themselves.” The reason so many Americans share this Harmonialist view is that it has no official church, being anti-clerical and opposed to orthodoxy by nature, so that anyone can adopt the belief in aliens unto their existing spiritual beliefs. Muslim or Jew, Catholic or Protestant: the prior confession of faith matters not.
Harmonialism is the family tree of religions that gave us Spiritualists holding séances, Theosophy and its weird variations, the word ‘vibes’ as a meaningful idea: the eclectic New Age. Harmonialists have given credence to mesmerists, spirit-mediums, astral travelers, channelers, automatic writers, sleeping prophets, and most recently, ‘remote viewers’. The so-called ‘science’ of UAPs, according to their strongest believers, consists of subjective psychic impressions and personal experiences that have been charged with meaning. It is a revelatory religion, so the idea of hidden spacecraft and ‘biologics’ waiting to be revealed has obvious appeal to the Harmonialist spiritual seeker.
As I explain in the book, Harmonialism took root in the United States before independence, and appeared on the frontier with startling speed. So put your old fears to rest at last, everyone. Barack Obama’s true religion is as home-grown as it could possibly be. So too is the inevitable disappointment that is coming when the fabled saucers and aliens do not materialize, after all. My book will need a long time to get a publisher and get to print, but it will still appear on shelves when the first genuinely scientific evidence of extraterrestrial visitation has yet to materialize. Rumors of immanent disclosure this weekend will be disappointed because they are always disappointed.
2 - There is never any ‘there’ there with UFOs.
In X Descending, Chris Lambright writes that he telephoned the key witness to the so-called Roswell crash, Jesse Marcel, at his home in Houma, Louisiana to see if there was anything to the story. “During our brief conversation I eventually asked him very matter-of-factly if there was anything in what he saw or found that made him think it was part of a flying saucer or crashed disc, etc. (I offered several terms just to be safe).” A startling denial followed:
His answer was an unambiguous “No”. He did make a point of saying that there was a truckload and a half of the material, something obviously very significant to him, but with that it was clear to me that what he had seen and said was being presented in ways that made it appear as support for a ‘crashed disc’ story.
“Whatever Marcel had found out there, from what he told me I had to conclude that he did not see anything that should have qualified as part of the UFO phenomenon.” I intend to do a fuller piece on the Roswell myth in the coming months, but the short version is that no eyewitness ever actually described a flying saucer. In fact, the only consistent thing they all agree on are details of wreckage that perfectly match a US Army balloon radar target made by a toy company in New York.
The reason none of these stories ever pan out is that they are made of belief, not evidence. In the case of Roswell, Lambright had good reason to be suspicious. Bill Moore, who popularized the Roswell story in 1980, met Richard Doty at almost the same moment Moore’s book was published. Doty was working for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) at the time, and seems to have been charged with learning what the ufology community was up to. However, if this is true, Doty went far beyond his remit and left the reservation. As I explain in this essay that unlocks next week, Doty was a Harmonialist believer when he joined the Air Force. With hindsight, it seems everything he did as a ‘Man In Black’ was intended to advance himself as a spiritual figure.
Doty has been responsible for Project Beta, Majestic Twelve, and the Serpo files, three infamous hoaxes that fractured the ufology community, and probably more than we know. Upon retirement from the Air Force in 1988, Doty joined a group of Harmonialists from within the deep state, people associated with Project Stargate. This was a US Army program that explored potential applications of the human potential movement, i.e. Harmonialist religion, from the early 1970s. Doty’s new peer group are the same people who met with Harry Reid and Robert Bigelow in 1996 to give us the modern ‘UAP disclosure movement’.
By that point, Richard Doty had ensured that ufology was disunited, acrimonious, and utterly confused about what to believe. In that environment, other prominent figures in the UAP disclosure movement, such as Jacques Vallée, are able to tell us what to believe with greater spiritual authority than before. Yet even as their grasp of the public imagination grows, their pronouncements become less material all the time: the aliens are interdimensional, they may not even be aliens, the flying saucers may not be material objects at all.
The more you actually listen to what Harmonialists say about them, the less real flying saucers become. Because they were spiritual phenomena in the first place, the UFOs/UAPs are always unfalsifiable. Whenever someone asks a sensible question, these deep state veterans invoke government secrecy to protect themselves from factual examination. Their citations are circular because the mystery is the whole point of the cult. Falsifiability has to be avoided at all costs because this is not science, it is religion. Myth-making by magicians.
3 - Get ready for another Great Disappointment
Donald Trump told reporters on Air Force One that Obama had disclosed classified information. A serious, but non-literal interpretation of this remark is that Trump meant Obama would have been guilty of disclosing classified information if it was true. But it is not true, because the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has already exhaustively searched every classified government program for any secret schemes being hidden from Congress, and found nothing. Indeed, the UAP disclosure cult has switched to claiming that private defense contractors must have the missing alien spacecraft hidden, somewhere.
Thus an exhaustive file search at the orders of President Trump is still not going to find evidence of nonexistent programs studying imaginary alien spacecraft that never actually crashed at Roswell in the first place. This will absolutely not stop the Harmonialists from declaring that a cover-up has removed the truth from view, or complaining Trump’s people did not look in the right places. Disconfirmation of prophecy always results in isolated individuals losing their faith while groups of believers intensify their devotion. This is a curious dynamic that has played out in American religious history before. Now watch history rhyme.
In 1844, William Miller had told America the second coming of Christ was nigh, that he had mathematically and rationally analyzed the Book of Daniel and calculated the exact year of Judgment Day. Miller considered himself scientific, and his arguments were so well-grounded in what was called ‘science’ at the time that it fooled even prominent skeptics. When the prophecy failed, Miller admitted his error, though he still believed in the End Times. Meanwhile, the Seventh Day Adventist church rose from the wreck of the ‘Great Disappointment’, as it is known to historians, and today that church has 21 million members.
One breakaway group of Seventh Day Adventists heavily influenced by Harmonialism even produced an alternative bible called The Urantia Book. It is a blend of revealed scripture — messages from the stars to Earth — with hundreds of pages of plagiarized popular science writing that has of course faded with time and the relentless progress of scientific understanding.
Like all Harmonialist texts, the Urantia Book also departs from the unique station of Jesus Christ and the unity of God, because Harmonialism wants to account for every religion in the universe. They must all come from the same holy spirit of the cosmos, right? So there must be many gods, since there are so many worlds, and all the planets must have received waves of spiritual teachers over the eons. Harmonialists often imagine grand hierarchies and structures of being in an afterlife with many levels, making it the perfect religion for the bureaucratic and managerial classes. Mark Twain satirized this Harmonialist afterlife in one of his most controversial short stories, “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven”.
Disappointment is the universal outcome of every reveal. Every Harmonialist text has also faded over time as the outer layer of scientific rationalism breaks down. Harmonialists believe that extraterrestrial life is everywhere in the universe. They communed with the residents of other planets in the solar system, describing their worlds and cultures, and then science determined that the rest of the planets are devoid of life. Less than a decade passed between George Adamski announcing he had visited with people on Venus and the Mariner 10 mission that determined the atmosphere of Venus makes any form of life we understand impossible.
Disappointment is bound to happen again this time because it always does. After it happens, watch how the UAP disclosure community doubles-down while the story changes again. This remixing of narratives and elements is called a ‘bricolage’. My book shows how bricoleurs have done this remixing in every generation, with each new iteration of Harmonialism, and how interplanetary spirituality was built-in to the Harmonialist project from the beginning.
4 - Nobody likes to be disappointed
I would need an entire essay to make the comparison in full, but consider how the release of the ‘Epstein files’ has gone down. On Threads, hyperpartisan liberals believe they are proof that Trump did terrible things to children because Epstein mentioned his former friend so many times in frustration at his lack of access. Surely this proves … something! Meanwhile, everyone from Whoopi Goldberg to the former prince known as Andrew to the Clintons to Bill Gates is ducking questions: David Copperfield, Deepak Chopra, Noam Chomsky, Sergey Brin, Al Gore, Kevin Spacey, and Alec Baldwin are all mentioned in the ‘Epstein files’. There are also thousands of crank reports from the same sort of people who told the FBI that Jimmy Hoffa was mixed into the concrete for the New York Giants’ new stadium.
We all know the story of a rich and powerful QAnon conspiracy involving Jeffrey Epstein’s island and a private jet, but Richard Branson has an entire fleet of jets, while Elon Musk has rockets (and, I think, an interest in tropical launch pad sites). Lex Wexner and Larry Summers clearly regret being friends with Epstein, but these men did not need transportation. Similarly, the ‘proof’ that Epstein was a Mossad agent did not materialize. Instead, Epstein seems to have enjoyed closer contact with Russian intelligence than Israeli or American in these ‘files’. As the puzzle pieces fit together, we see Epstein as a self-starter making friends everywhere, getting to know everyone, while giving almost 90 percent of his political contributions to Democrats.
The ‘Epstein files’ are exactly as disappointing as Pam Bondi and Kash Patel told us they were. The disappointment of one devoted tranche of believers has redoubled in its intensity, while the consequences take the form of unwanted scrutiny: the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor for disclosing national security information to Epstein, Goldberg frantically denying any connection to Epstein, Chomsky in disgrace in his nineties, the shocking, but hardly surprising, level of interest Epstein had in chemical castration of boys (‘transgender girls’). At the end of the evidence trail, however, we have (1) Ghislaine Maxwell procuring underage girls for her boyfriend Jeffrey, and (2) former sex workers using the expansive definition of ‘trafficking victim’ in federal law as a second career.
One tranche of deeply dedicated believers will of course abuse me for this analysis, calling me terrible names because I base this opinion on facts instead of feelings. The same is true of the UFO/UAP ‘phenomenon’. Believers will believe it no matter how many times I show them the words of their own spiritual leaders. I have no crystal ball and I am not receiving spiritual transmissions from the Pleiades, but I can outline certain dynamics with confidence.
As explained above, some seekers — people searching for authentic spiritual experience — will be disillusioned when Trump’s announcement leads to nothing. Some number of UAP enthusiasts will probably express disillusionment with Trump, and since one in ten Americans believes they have seen a UFO, some discernible fraction of ‘experiencers’ will perhaps get mad that they voted for him. Harmonialism — ufology — will have a new controversy to split itself over. We know this dynamic will happen because AARO already has an historical volume of reporting that is overdue.
5 - We already know some of what is in the AARO report and all of it has earthbound human origin stories.
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.” This disclosure in 2025 was just one of many examples of pranks that AARO has reportedly found in its upcoming report. “For decades, certain new commanders of the Air Force’s most classified programs, as part of their induction briefings, would be handed a piece of paper with a photo of what looked like a flying saucer,” Joel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha wrote. “ The craft was described as an antigravity maneuvering vehicle.”
Some of these commanders were never filled in on the joke. For while hazing is usually understood as physical violence — frat boys with paddles — it is in fact mostly about controlling someone in some way. The subject of the hazing ritual does not learn about the joke unless they are chosen to take part in making someone else the butt of the joke. Anyone old enough to remember the “Humor in Uniform” feature of Reader’s Digest will have read such stories before.
WSJ reporters are therefore not making any extraordinary claims when they describe “Yankee Blue,” a hoax presented to hazing victims in which alien technology was supposedly being reverse-engineered. As part of the joke, they “were told never to mention it again. Many never learned it was fake.” This happened to “hundreds of people,” many of whom say they were threatened if they did not stay silent. Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the scientist who stood up AARO in a whole-of-government effort to disclose as much as possible about UAPs, “found the practice had begun decades before, and appeared to continue still. The defense secretary’s office sent a memo out across the service in the spring of 2023 ordering the practice to stop immediately, but the damage was done.”
The second volume of AARO historical reporting should be ready soon, and it stands to reason that Trump has been briefed on the matter. No procedure is so tortured as bureaucratic self-reporting from inside the classified world, and the report remains secret until publication, so this may even be what Trump was talking about when he responded to the reporter’s question about Obama’s statement.
It is odd, however, for a president synonymous with bombast and hyperbole to find such weighty matters “important” and “interesting” and of “tremendous interest”, but not a breakthrough, or the greatest disclosure of all time, or the most important event in human history, the way Harmonialism does. Let us all consider the possibility that he actually knows more than we do, this time.
Trump is, ironically, a Harmonialist by ideology. The only book he is known to have read and internalized to any degree is The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, a giant of the New Thought movement in American religion. The founder of New Thought, Phineas Parker Quimby, was a Harmonialist. Harmonialism is all around us, for it has always been part of the American spiritual landscape.
This is our homegrown religion. In its attempt to embrace the entire world, other worlds, and lost worlds, Harmonialism always tries to combine science and religion. It is an impossible project, as unlikely as the philosopher’s stone that alchemists pursued for centuries. That is why it must always fail, re-brand, and attempt another revival. My book draft reveals this creative cycle of belief and disappointment, assembling the complete story of flying saucers as a faith movement into one volume for the very first time.
