Home / Aliens Take Two (February 2026)

The first time I tried to write this blog post, my computer crashed and autosave failed, erasing the entire thing. They must be watching me. Just kidding! I’ve been obsessed with aliens for a little while now. After enough late-night research to annoy my wife, I’m finally starting to get bored. But before moving on, I wanted to write down how my opinions have changed, because they’ve changed a lot.

I don’t think anyone can say for sure whether aliens are visiting us or not, outside of having firsthand experiences or access to classified information, which is why it’s more helpful to think probabilistically. Before I started looking into aliens, I assumed it was unlikely we were the only intelligent life in the universe, but I figured the stories of little green men in flying saucers were made up or could be explained by things like waking dreams, weather balloons, satellites, ball lightning, and so on.

Now that I've done a little research, if I had to put my chips on the table, I’d say there’s a 99% chance something “real” is happening, a 80% chance it can’t be explained by conventional science, and a wild guess that it’s stranger than aliens physically visiting from another planet.

‍99% chance something “real” is happening
‍The first thing that surprised me when I started digging into this topic was how ubiquitous UFO encounters are. I naively assumed they were a modern American phenomenon, when in fact people have been independently reporting them for most of recorded history. This isn’t always obvious because people use culturally specific language. Witnesses might use angel, fairy, or alien to describe what could be the same thing. Even today, most of us think of angels and aliens as different things, when they are often used to describe a similar idea: unexplainable beings, coming from the sky, surrounded by light, appearing and disappearing quickly, and behaving in prophetic or magical ways.

If you want to dig into historical reporting, Jacques Vallée is a great place to start. Given people have been independently reporting UFO sightings for so long, it’s extremely unlikely that it’s all a coordinated hoax or mass dillusion. Something “real” is happening here, even if that “real” thing turns out to be a quirk of human psychology that causes people to independently invent similar stories.

I believe the truth is stranger. But if psychology is the explanation, it’s still fascinating and deserves more study than it’s receiving, likely due to the stigma around anything UFOs. As an aside, stigmatized topics are usually stigmatized for a reason. There’s a stigma around believing the Earth is flat because it’s certainly not flat. UFOs, however, are one of the few topics I’ve found that carry far more stigma than the evidence warrants.

‍80% chance it can’t be explained by conventional science
‍The second thing that surprised me was learning about incidents involving multiple credible witnesses, like high ranking military officers and nuclear weapons operators, who reported seeing unexplainable craft defying known laws of physics, and their testimonies were corroborated by multiple reliable sensors, including various U.S. military video and radar systems all capturing the same images.

If you want to dig deeper, the Tic Tac incident is a good place to start, as is the book UFOs and Nukes by Robert Hastings, who interviewed 150+ military veterans about their experiences with UFOs while working in and around U.S. nuclear weapon sites. The fact that these objects show up on video and radar systems that we trust to defend our country and secure our nuclear weapons suggests that whatever is happening is physical in nature, not purely psychological. I believe it's 80% likely that there really are physical craft behaving in ways we don’t understand, but there's still a material chance these corroborated accounts can be conventionally explained.

Multiple people and military sensors could somehow hallucinate the same data, but that seems very unlikely to happen simultaneously on numerous occasions. Alternatively, someone could possess technology that defies known physics, but if we or another country had that capability, it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t have been used to dramatically reorder global power dynamics. Finally, it’s possible that governments have coerced people into lying and fabricated evidence. While that has likely happened in isolated cases, it seems unlikely that so many incidents can be explained by a disinformation campaign sustained across decades, involving so many people, agencies, countries, and systems.

At this point it seems clear that the U.S. government, in partnership with some private defense contractors, have been studying this phenomenon, know more than they're sharing, and spread disinformation. However, one area where I break with standard UFO lore is that I don't believe the government knows exactly what is happening, either. My hunch is that while they are surely ahead of the public, part of what has prevented full disclosure is the fact that it's difficult for any government to admit they can't fully explain something that could pose a potential threat to the citizens they're responsible for protecting.

If China and Russia are also studying this phenomenon, which it appears they are, as a democracy we could be at a disadvantage. Autocracies have fewer transparency laws and red tape and are more adept at forcing their brightest minds to work in secret. If any major government was going to disclose first, it makes sense it would be the U.S., given our dynamic private sector. This could be behind the recent drip of "soft" disclosure, which started with the 2017 New York Times story The Pentagon's Mysterious UFO Program and continues today with an increasing number of government officials, including Obama, Marco Rubio, and Chuck Schumer publicly stating that we are observing craft we can't explain. For more information on the government angle, check out the recent documentary, Age of Disclosure.

I came across a surprising number of eccentric, smart, highly credentialed private sector scientists, industrialists, and venture capitalists who are convinced this phenomenon is worth studying. People like Gary Nolan (tenured professor at Stanford), Peter Thiel (venture capitalist and Palantir cofounder), Avi Loeb (theoretical physicist at Harvard) and startup founders like Palmer Lucky (Anduril founder). And yet, most of us normal people don't know much, if anything, has changed on the UFO front. If the government was going to gradually disclose for strategic reasons, this is what they'd want - more money and research without more mainstream chatter.

‍Stranger than aliens from another planet
‍So what’s actually going on? I don't know, but what I do know is that it’s not just one thing. The UFO phenomenon is so widespread that it almost certainly includes examples of hoaxes, government psyops, hallucinations, experimental technologies, and misattributed sightings. Even if something really weird is happening, too, like aliens, time travel, parallel universes or a breakaway civilization, then the chances are that multiple variations of that thing are happening. For example, that we're being visited by more than one race of aliens or group of time travelers.

The fact that so many different things are being grouped together as one unexplainable phenomenon makes the topic tricky, because if you want to attribute everything to misattributed satellites, I’m sure you can find examples where that’s the case. But that doesn’t prove there isn’t a subset of sightings that can’t be explained. So how about some wild speculation about what's going on with those?

One thing I've found interesting is that, unlike in the movies where aliens come try to colonize Earth (which says more about us than aliens), many encounters with aliens are reported as being neutral or positive once people get over their initial fears. The messages people receive are surprisingly consistent: protect the planet, stop fighting (especially with nuclear weapons), and grow spiritually. I can't say I disagree with the sentiment.

I find it interesting that many credible encounters have a dreamlike, ephemeral, metaphorical quality to them, and it seems like whatever is happening involves manipulating consciousness or spacetime. I’d bet against whatever this is simply being explained by physical crafts using propulsion to travel from another planet. That idea extrapolates our current technological progress too linearly, when innovation often happens in unexpected ways.

My best guess is that whatever is happening is too strange for us to fully grasp, but that doesn’t mean it’s magic or unexplainable. It's likely just science we don’t understand yet. Imagine being an ancient human discovering that, on rare occasions, two special rocks attract each other. You’d call that an unexplainable rock phenomenon until you understood electromagnetism. It’s possible UFOs are artifacts of deeper scientific realities we can’t yet grasp, but which are as real as anything else.

There's a meme called the midwit that shows a beginner and an expert reaching the same conclusion, while the person in the middle overthinks things. That could apply here, too. Maybe these things are what religions have been saying they are all along: angels, demons and/or gods that pop in and out of our reality to nudge us one way or the other. Their ambiguity could be intentional, perhaps it makes their messages more compelling, less disruptive, and/or helps us preserve some free will. For some reason, the image that keeps popping into my head is that humanity is like a baby in the womb, still in the dark about the unverse's larger truths, and this phenomenon is like doctors checking in to make sure the baby is developing normally, which involves some prodding and reorienting from time to time.

Ok, all that said, I clearly have no clue what is going on. It was fun to try and structure my thoughts a bit, but I guess I'll have to check back in a few more years to see if the aliens have decided to go on any podcasts yet.