It's real. It's happening. Now what?
On walking my loved ones through ontological shock
First, let me kick this blog entry off with an apology. I’ve been radio-silent for weeks now, both here and on my podcast. Life has just been super busy, between getting two manuscripts ready for my agent to take out on sub next month, a total revision on another manuscript, marketing for my next Olivia Hawker book (which comes out in April and is, a propos, about UFOs… among other things), crossing an international border to get some warrantied work done on my car, getting my house in the States ready for renters to move in, and fretting over my closest friend, who was in the hospital for 10 days but is now back home recovering (yay!) This fall and winter have been A LOT for me, and as usual when things get overwhelming, I drop all my extraneous activities like my Substack and my podcast and I just focus on my work.
But I couldn’t not write about what’s going on in our skies right now. Because it’s a lot, too.
Maybe you’re beginning to notice your local news reporting on some unusual goings-on in New Jersey and elsewhere. There are large drones, the reporters say, flying by night over several urban and suburban locations in NJ. The drones are the size of small SUVs. No one has yet been able to determine whose they are, where they’re coming from, or what in the hell they’re doing as they hover over one of the most densely populated areas in North America.
If this is the first you’ve heard of the drone incursion, your reaction to this news was probably “Huh,” or maybe you experienced a moment of mild worry. It’s pretty odd that there are unidentified drones flying around civilian airspace, but somebody will figure out whose they are and bring them down. We have the most advanced military in the world. We’ve got anti-drone technology. This will be a piece of cake.
In fact, this isn’t a new development. And it didn’t begin in New Jersey; nor is it confined to that location. It has been going on for nearly a month now—twenty days, to be exact, as I sit writing this entry into my very sporadically updated blog.
On November 20, 2024, the first unknown aerial objects began appearing over Lakenheath, the joint RAF/USAF base in the UK. No one had any luck in disabling the drones, nor could their origin or control point be determined. And they kept coming, day after day and night after night, hovering over Lakenheath while the service members below could do nothing to down or deter them. The same activity quickly spread to other bases in the UK—Mildenhall and Feltwell, to be exact.
Okay, everyone said (even everyone in the ufology community.) It’s weird, but the whole planet is on the verge of boiling over into war. The most likely explanation is spy drones from Russia or China.
Only a few days after the initial drone activity at the UK bases, similar drones began appearing over northern New Jersey, soaring around ordinary neighborhoods every night, and the “foreign adversaries are spying on our military capabilities” explanation began to seem little less probable.
That was when all of us in the ufology community sat up and really took notice. New Jersey got the lion’s share of the attention, just due to the sheer number of drones, but it wasn’t the only location where sightings of unknown objects in the sky suddenly boomed. Activity was increasing—dramatically, in fact—and spreading beyond military locations, into the spaces where ordinary people could look up and see something unusual in the sky. Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida, Nebraska, Sacramento and Los Angeles, the Hawaiian Islands, the urban centers of Texas, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Missouri have all seen a sharp increase in general UFO sightings. Actual drones have been reported—either on their own or chasing luminous orbs—in Oregon, too.
This was no longer a mere curiosity. It was beginning to look like a bona fide “flap”—a statistically significant increase in sightings of anomalous aerial phenomena. UFO flaps have occurred now and then. We have historical records of flaps dating all the way back into the 1880s. But the most recent flap was in 1973—well before most contemporary ufology nerds were born—so this winter’s event caused (and is still causing) some real excitement within the community.
The truth settled into me. I accepted the weight of paradox on my heart. I turned to face a new reality: something was up there in the skies
(N.B.: the infamous “Phoenix lights” event of March 13, 1997, doesn’t count as a flap. Technically, it was a “mass sighting event,” in which thousands of people in the Phoenix area witnessed the same single anomaly in the sky.)
Despite all the busy work I’ve had to do lately, I’ve been glued to the story. Most people go all their lives without observing a UFO flap, and this is a special interest of mine. I’ve tracked every new development as it has unfolded. First, the statements from the FBI and other government and local law enforcement agencies (which have all amounted to “Yeah, we don’t know what’s going on here, sorry.”) Then the media finally beginning to take notice of this event, weeks after it began. Three days ago, on December 7th, New Jersey state senator Doug Steinhardt sent a strongly worded letter to Governor Murphy demanding an investigation into the incursion. Just today, on December 10th, State Senator Jon Bramnick called for a “limited state of emergency” to try to get the drone situation under control and properly investigated. Also today, Senator Cory Booker sent a letter to Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; to Christopher Wray, director of the FBI; and to Pete Buttigieg, head of the Department of Transportation, demanding full transparency and a comprehensive briefing on the drones that have been menacing New Jersey for weeks now.
A mere half hour before I began writing this blog post, a spokesman for the FBI (Mr. Wheeler) testified to the House Committee on Homeland Security that “the Bureau is actively investigating the situation [in New Jersey]… the unexplained sighting of drone activity over that part of New Jersey, including proximity to sensitive sites and areas of concern.” At this point in his testimony, Wheeler seemed to struggle to find words or to marshal his feelings. He swallowed hard, sighed, and a certain Mr. Weigmann seated next to him looked at him sharply, alarmed by his unsettled state. Wheeler went on: “We do not attribute that to an individual or a group yet. We’re investigating, but I don’t have an answer of who’s responsible for… those drone flights.”
As I’ve watched this drama unfold and spill over from the ufology community into the public awareness, I’ve asked myself countless times how I should approach it with my friends and family. Because once I saw that the media was (finally) reporting on the story, I understood that it was only a matter of time before my loved ones began ask me what the hell was going on. I decided my smartest move was to maintain silence about the drones until each individual raised the subject on their own. If I were to text “IT’S FINALLY HAPPENING, DISCLOSURE IS HERE, I TOLD YOU THIS SHIT WAS REAL,” nobody would take me seriously. But if I allowed my loved ones to approach me with the subject when and how they felt most comfortable doing so, I could take each one gently by their hand and guide them through the rabbit hole… and out the other side, back into the same old reality we’ve always lived in, but freshly perceived, more honestly seen.
My mom was the first to do it. She texted me Sunday night:
Local news talking about some things the size of small automobiles flying around. Congress demanding to know what’s going on and what are they. Calling them possible aliens.
I answered:
I haven’t said anything about it because you would have thought I was crazy until you noticed the story for yourself. But get ready because I think in the weeks ahead we’re going to have a shift in the way we think about the universe and our place in it.
And then I told her everything I’ve told you so far in this post. The timeline of events. The dramatic increase in sightings, not just in New Jersey but everywhere. The baffled and ineffectual response from law enforcement, the military, and our government.
I told her this is real. It’s happening. And whatever is behind the objects in the sky (and we truly don’t know what’s behind them yet—advanced foreign technology, extraterrestrial visitors, time traveling future humans, a more advanced Earth civilization that has managed to keep itself hidden from us all these thousands of years), our view of ourselves, our planet, our institutions, and our spiritual beliefs are all about to undergo a seismic shift.
I’m lucky, because I got my ontological shock out of the way early. More than half my lifetime ago, in fact, in 2001, when I was 21 years old.
It was a summer night. I was sitting in a hot tub with two friends in a backyard in Edmonds, Washington, a suburb north of Seattle. We were talking and looking up at the stars, when all of us fell silent mid-conversation. I don’t remember now why we stopped talking. I know for sure that we didn’t hear anything unusual—I feel I would have remembered that—but if a particular feeling came over us and stole all our words, I can’t tell you now what that feeling was. It was a long time ago.
A V of five lights came cruising into view. Each light in the V looked about the same size as the stars that surrounded the formation, so these aircraft were obviously flying very high. This was nothing unusual. There are three major military bases in the region, all with airfields, and aircraft flying in formation is a common sight around Puget Sound.
What happened next, however, certainly was unusual.
Each of the five lights whipped around one another in a maneuver so rapid and tight it rendered me helpless with astonishment. I’ve never seen anything move so fast, especially not any aircraft. The motion was so swift that I’ve occasionally described it as “visual garbling,” the collapse of an ordinary sight into a patch of utter chaos, complete disorder. The movement went on for perhaps a second or two. Then the lights snapped back into their V formation and sped away.
The experience was so bizarre, I would have convinced myself that my eyes had played a trick on me, if not for my friends.
I said, “Did you guys see that?”
They had. Both confirmed it. One friend insisted that we get out of the hot tub that very minute and go inside. He didn’t want to be outdoors anymore, under the stars.
“Disclosure” is practically a religion for some people in this community. They await its coming the same way Evangelicals await the Rapture
The experience stayed with me for days, then for weeks. Eventually, I had to admit that I was rather haunted. I had seen something that couldn’t possibly be real—not given what we as a civilization knew about aircraft, technology, physics, reality itself. And yet, I had seen it. Other witnesses had corroborated my own experience. It wasn’t supposed to be real—couldn’t be real—and yet, it was.
The truth settled into me. I accepted the weight of paradox on my heart. I turned to face a new reality: something was up there in the skies, something more advanced than any human technology, something that seemed to defy all that was known in this world.
A chorus of if-thens began to sing all around me. If there is something more advance than human tech flying around this planet, then we are not the most powerful species on Earth. If I really saw what I saw—and I did—then the United States doesn’t have the most powerful military in the world, which meant our nation was more vulnerable than we allowed ourselves to believe. (Three months later, the 9/11 terror attacks would prove I’d been right about that.) If something more powerful than us is zipping around the globe, and it wasn’t mentioned in any religious text, then all our human religions are bullshit.
That last one was an especially big deal to me. I had only recently been baptized into my Mormon faith. The notion that religion was not divinely inspired, but merely created by fallible humans to try to make sense of a senseless world, undid everything I had previously known and believed about the purpose and potential of humanity, the mind, the soul, and our place in the universe.
“Ontological shock” is the fancy term for this moment—the moment when something so astonishing occurs that you are forced to re-evaluate your previous worldview. I feel fortunate that my experience with ontological shock was relatively gentle. I moved quickly and easily from a position of denial and disbelief to a position of calm acceptance of the new, indisputable facts. I can’t tell you why it was easy for me, to confront the fact that humans are not the most powerful critters on Earth, and that unknown objects are sailing about our airspace with impunity, exhibiting behaviors that should be impossible, given what we currently know about physics. Possibly, that’s just the way I’m wired. (I have worked at a few very high-stress jobs in the past, and did those jobs with a calm detachment that surprised and impressed me, so maybe I’m more chill than your average human.)
But I know not everyone is like me. Now that we are experiencing a widespread, protracted incursion of unknown, unidentified, apparently unstoppable aircraft over our military installations and even over civilian neighborhoods, many more people are going to bump up against their own first experiences with ontological shock. It’s going to go hard for some of them, and that’s why I’ve been so thoughtful, these past 20 days, about how I must approach the subject if and when my loved ones want to talk about it. I’ve been an enthusiastic explorer of the UFO phenomenon for more than half my life now, ever since my own sighting. Not everyone will think it’s such a blast to witness a UFO flap… and what could potentially come after.
Many people in the ufology community are convinced that “This is it!” The moment we’ve all been waiting for, for decades now, has finally arrived. Disclosure. The mythic event when the governments of the world will be forced to admit that yes, something is up there in our skies, something we know next to nothing about, something that far outclasses all known human technology. “Disclosure” is practically a religion for some people in this community. They await its coming the same way Evangelicals await the Rapture, and they are dead certain that Disclosure will entail the dramatic reveal to end all dramatic revelations: an admission that the US government has been trading abductees for advanced technology, perhaps, or the display of an alien body in front of Congress.
I have a much more nuanced and sensible view of disclosure, one that has made me distinctly unpopular on certain ufology forums. I think it already happened. Back on May 17, 2022, when Congress held its first public hearing addressing the UFO phenomenon and admitting that yes, they’ve known since at least the 1940s that UFOs are something real (though still unexplained.) That was it, folks. That was disclosure. They admitted it was real, and they admitted that nobody has the least idea what the hell these things are, or how they move in frankly impossible ways, or who controls them. It isn’t the high-drama moment people have longed for, but it is the truth.
In my opinion, these present drone incursions are not the big moment of capital-D Disclosure so many have longed for and still await. Rather, they are an expansion of the disclosure that already began two years ago. The FBI has now admitted before Congress that they don’t know who controls these drones or where they’re coming from. And to be very clear, I have been avidly viewing every new video I can find of these objects. Most of them are certainly, obviously, undeniably drones. There are drones zipping around all over the damn place, and the FBI hasn’t yet been able to learn whose drones they are.
That’s a huge security problem, obviously, but it doesn’t indicate extraterrestrials or anything else more unusual than human technology.
However.
There is quite a bit of good evidence to support the idea that the human-made drones are there because something else is going on.
Not all the videos of these recent sightings depict drones. A good many depict objects that I can’t really describe, except to call them “orbs.” The not-drones move in unusual ways, maneuvering around one another in such close proximity that even advanced drones shouldn’t be able to manage without crashing. Many people assume (and I’m one of them) that the actual drones belong to and are controlled by the US military. They are being deployed in areas where real UFOs have been sighted in an attempt to either drive away the UFOs or to gather intelligence on these other, unknown objects (or both.) In the absence of more information, we’re speculating that the FBI is telling the truth when they say they don’t know who’s controlling the drones, because the US military deems this activity too sensitive to disclose anything about it, even to the FBI. That makes sense. If the military is trying to use their most advanced drones to determine whether these weird little orbs are some kind of Chinese or Russian spy tech, they wouldn’t want to tip their hand to China or Russia that we’re on to them. Not until they’ve gathered all the information they need to assess the incursion and respond accordingly.
Some people have suggested that the drones might be tracking nuclear radiation, perhaps from a dirty bomb. There are drones that are equipped with radiation-sensing tech, so this isn’t a wild speculation. However, I don’t think this is a very likely explanation, for one simple reason. The drones have only seen by night, from their first appearance over Lakenheath until now. Why would drones deployed for such a serious emergency only be used by night? That just isn’t logical. Ditto to the speculation that the drones are being used to track the movements of known or suspected terrorists. Why would work so urgent be restricted to nighttime only?
The drones are just drones, but they’re being used in such bizarre numbers and have been deployed for so long that they seem to indicate a bigger event, a bigger secret our military is currently protecting.
And alongside all those videos of real, actual, ordinary drones, the videos of orbs and other anomalous phenomena continue to pile up on ufology forums and on social media at a rate we have frankly never seen before.
I believe we’ve reached the stage of “Disclosure” where our governments can no longer chase away the harsh reality—though they’re certainly trying to chase it away with their drones. In the days and weeks ahead, it may very well become clearer to more and more of us that something is up there, something that will change the way we see humanity, its strength, and its potential. I think the odds are good that many of us will begin to see past the drones to notice what the drones are chasing.
And when we catch sight of that other reality, how will it change the way we look at ourselves—our systems of government, the utility of our religions, the ways we organize our societies, our reasons for making war?
Ontological shock is jarring, but it isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes, it allows us to see beyond the small, the useless, and the familiar. It allows us to envision a broader reality—one that we can make together, if we only find the will to do so.
That’s all I have to say on the subject for now, though I’m sure I’ll have more to add as these events continue to develop.
If you’re wondering exactly how I’ve been easing my non-UFO-nerd friends and family into this subject without freaking them out too much, I have a very simple answer for you. The UFO Rabbit Hole is a great podcast hosted by Kelly Chase. I recommend to everyone who’s new to the concept of UFOs that they start with episode 1 and go from there. Kelly does an excellent job of presenting the facts in a clear, rational, facts-supported manner that will satisfy the most skeptical person you know.
Once you’re over the initial shock of realizing that this is actually happening, I hope you’ll be able to enjoy the mystery and wonder of it. There is very good historical evidence that these objects in the sky have been with us for a very long time—for thousands of years—and thus, there is little reason to fear them. If they wanted to do anything bad to us, they would have done it long ago. This is not an invasion, friends; it’s our long-time neighbors finally turning up to introduce themselves and say hello.
Well you just flipped my world upside down