A solo essay in which Pinchbeck argues that the official opening around UAPs has produced disclosure without proof, and that the phenomenon resists the subject-object framework used to judge it. He tracks the sequence from the 2017 New York Times report on the Pentagon's AATIP program, through the 2021 intelligence assessment of 144 incidents, to the AARO review that found no credible evidence of recovered non-human craft, setting that against David Grusch's congressional testimony about a concealed crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering program, and against earlier claims by Paul Hellyer and Haim Eshed. He notes the Pentagon's document portal and the documentary The Age of Disclosure, and contrasts today's mainstream attention with the ridicule he met when writing 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl and a 2001 Wired piece on crop circles. He ends with Patrick Harpur's view of crop circles as de-literalizing.
In brief
- Pinchbeck argues that the recent wave of official UAP disclosure, including the Pentagon's public document portal and The Age of Disclosure, has produced enormous attention but nothing conclusive.
- He sets the AARO review's finding of no credible crash-retrieval evidence directly against David Grusch's sworn claim of a multi-decade recovery and reverse-engineering program hidden from congressional oversight.
- He notes that current science offers no reliable model for the phenomenon, which he treats as the real obstacle rather than the absence of documents.
- He points to the debate over whether the interstellar object designated ATLAS could be technological, with Avi Loeb speculating and NASA maintaining it looks like a natural comet, as evidence that the boundary between respectable science and the alien question has become porous.
- He recounts being banned from Wired by its editor-in-chief after his 2001 crop circle article, and describes summers spent investigating formations around Avebury and Glastonbury.
- Following Patrick Harpur, Pinchbeck concludes that certain crop formations will never collapse into a single objective explanation and function instead to loosen the assumption that the world can only be imagined one way.
Full text
The meeting we are expecting in front of us in linear time has already occurred, is now occurring, and will continue to occur. Gods and advanced aliens do not talk to us. They play with us through our history. Our subjective objective distinctions about reality are incorrect. As in the world view of the Hopi Indians, matter, energy, and consciousness form a continuum. When it comes to the UFO phenomenon, something massive has shifted just in the last few months. On May 8th, the Pentagon began releasing previously classified UAP material through a new public portal, Pursue, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. With an initial drop of roughly 120 documents, 28 videos, and 14 images pulled from Defense, NASA, FBI, and State Department archives, and more promised on a rolling basis.
The portal took 340 million hits in its first 12 hours. The release lands the middle of a wider cultural moment around UFOs and disclosure. Dan Farrah's documentary, The Age of Disclosure, with its lineup of sitting senators, former intelligence officials, and credentialed witnesses, has dragged the question of UAPs out of the conspiracy aisle and into the mainstream discourse. Farrah himself recently appeared on Diary of a CEO, where Steven Bartlett walked an audience of millions through the claim that craft of unknown origin have been operating in our skies for decades, and that elements of the US government have been actively concealing the evidence. It's a striking inversion of the world I was working on in when I wrote my second book.
Back in the early 2000s, UFOs, ETs, and anything connected to them belonged squarely to the lunatic fringe. If you wrote about fast-moving craft in the sky, floating orbs, abduction accounts, or the geometric designs that appeared in English wheat fields each summer, people would totally dismiss you and make fun of you. If you tried to pitch the story to mainstream media like I did, you were assumed to be bonkers, out of your mind. If you enjoy this video, please remember to like it and subscribe to this channel. The establishment, the press, the academies, the government treated all of it as trash, beneath contempt. So, yeah, recently that's all changed, at least on the surface.
I think that a lot of us find this whole subject extremely frustrating. We really can like sense, we can feel we're not getting the whole truth, we're not getting inside into what's going on. We can't trust the government to give it to us, even with, you know, this new effort and so on. And we have no reliable model for understanding the phenomenon within our current scientific, rational paradigm. And then you have even highly touted documentaries like Age of Disclosure in the end offering nothing conclusive. There's no solid proof. So, in what follows, I want to propose an approach that attempts to make sense of this phenomenon as a whole.
Let's go back to December 2017, when The New York Times published an article revealing that the Pentagon had quietly run a program called AA TIP, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, to investigate military encounters with unidentified craft. The article, which was like right on the front page, included declassified videos on the website objects accelerating, maneuvering in ways that appear to outstrip known aerospace technology. And these were tracked by Navy pilots with advanced sensor systems. Then in 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a preliminary assessment of what they rebranded as UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena. And that report reviewed 144 recent military incidents. Only one of which could be firmly explained.
The The rest of them were grouped as unexplained with a list of possible causes, airborne clutter, natural phenomena, secret US programs, ball lightning, foreign adversaries, and a final catch-all category just for other. The report noted that some objects seem to show, quote, "unusual flight characteristics" that they also lacked obvious forms of propulsion. So, this led the government to create the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office or AARO, which back in 2024 produced a historical review of alleged crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs. In the end, that report concluded there was no credible evidence that the US government has ever recovered non-human craft, technology, or alien bodies. So, while there remains a big mystery about all these sightings, we have not found the smoking gun of extraterrestrial hardware as long as we know.
At least that remains the official line. Meanwhile, you have whistleblowers like David Grusch, a former United States Air Force and intelligence officer, who has gone before Congress claiming the exact opposite. My name is David Charles Grusch. I was an intelligence officer for 14 years in the both in the US Air Force, uh both active duty, Air National Guard, and Reserve. I was my agency's co-lead in unidentified anomalous phenomena and transmedium object analysis. I became a whistleblower uh following concerning reports from multiple esteemed and credentialed current and former military and intelligence community individuals that the US government is operating with secrecy above congressional oversight with regards to UAPs.
I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program. Rush claims there are crash retrieval programs that we've recovered exotic materials and there's a whole secret labyrinth of hidden material. Similarly, Paul Hellyer, the former Canadian Minister of National Defense, said UFOs are as real as the airplanes flying overhead in 2005. His next question was, "Well, how many species do you think that there are?" And I said, "Well, I don't know. I suppose somewhere between two and 12." And he said, "Yes, that's what I think, too." But this was in the days when we didn't have any idea of how many there really were.
So, um all of this stuff and was loaded aboard the mothership. And away they went, finally. And, of course, uh the first little while when they're going through the time uh space the time warp, uh they were all sick. Yes. After they got through that and in the wormhole, they uh they were okay. And 10 months later, they had gone 38 million light-years distance in 10 months, which is absolutely incredible. And the Israeli General Haim Eshed, who ran Israel's space defense program for three decades, said in 2020 that the United States and Israel had been in contact with, quote and quote, a galactic federation of extraterrestrials.
Although he also claimed humanity was not ready for disclosure. But, of course, all those claims remain unproven and officially denied by the governments. But any case, UAP UAPs or UFOs are now considered serious enough to track, study, and report on, but we're just not told whether this means we need to rethink our fundamental model of reality, or do we have to prepare for some kind of imminent alien invasion? At the same time, astronomy has evolved to the point where we have cataloged thousands of exoplanets, a number of them in potential habitable zones. The James Webb Space Telescope analyzes at atmospheres looking for biosignatures. It is no longer controversial at all to think life may be quite common spread across the universe.
So, the question has started to shift from are we alone to what forms might life and mind evolve into on different worlds and different environments? Would we even recognize them? Now, you even have Harvard astrophysicists like Avi Loeb getting into the UFO sweepstakes, so the UFO game. Uh Loeb wrote a book on 'Oumuamua, a cigar-shaped object that whipped through our solar system on a hyperbolic trajectory. More recently, we had 3I Atlas, another interstellar comet named after the survey that discovered it. What is it about 'Oumuamua that was so shocking for you that said, "You know what? I have to invest my energies in it." What What is it really?
Is it an alien craft? Did you notice something different? Can you discuss with our listeners about the those findings that you you saw? Why did you receive so much pushback on the the Still, I I thought, "Okay, well, it's probably a rock." But the people who discovered it already pointed out in the discovery uh notes that they wrote that uh in fact, the brightness of this object is changing by a factor of 10 as it's tumbling every 8 hours. And that's that implies since we're talking about reflection of sunlight which is simply that the amount the brightness is proportional to the area that of the object in the sky that is intercepting sunlight and reflecting it in our direction.
So, if the object is tumbling and the brightness changes by a factor of 10, it means that the area of the object is changing by a factor of 10. Loeb and other scientists speculate that such such objects could actually be technological. They could be probes or maybe debris left over from other civilizations. Though once again, this remains totally speculative. NASA's position is that Atlas seems like a natural comet so far. But I admit I find it wild to watch all these debates taking place inside these institutions that once worked so hard to keep the subject of ETs and UFOs confined to the margins of mockery or of science fiction.
The border between respectable science and the forbidden otherness of alien worlds and alien minds was impenetrable. Now it seems to have become porous and permeable. While all of this unfolds in official channels, another similarly related phenomenon still flickers at the margins of our awareness. And that's the largely forgotten and often ridiculed phenomenon of the crop circles. Now, I wrote about crop circles in one of my books in 2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl, and I spent a few summers in the UK around Avebury and Glastonbury tracking down crop circles, visiting them as soon as they appeared, interviewing people about them. I first wrote a piece about the crop circles for Wired magazine back in 2001.
And though I made no final determination in that piece, I guess I took the the a bit too seriously for Wired. The editor-in-chief banned me from the magazine after the article appeared. But, this only fueled my curiosity. Actually, after quite a lot of research, I came to agree with the amazing writer Patrick Harper, who saw the crop circles as a metaphor for deliteralizing and a tool for deconstructing our conscious viewpoints, so that we come to understand that the world we imagine we are in is only one among many ways the world can be imagined. Harper stubbornly asserted that certain formations will never be satisfactorily collapsed into a single objective truth.
I came to the same conclusion after deep investigation of a subject that most people find trivial or nonsensical.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.