Why the Cassiopaean synthesis rattles materialists, religionists, and New Agers alike — and why it looks more rational than the "UFOs are demons, return to church" narrative

In my last article, I announced that it was the finale in my "Fun With AI" series. I think I spoke too soon.

There's probably no end to the fun a person can have with AI even if the topics discussed in that little series were rather serious and possibly depression inducing. Today, I'm going to make it worse. If you think those subjects were depressing, hold my beer!

There's a little backstory to the fun we are going to have with AI today. A month or more ago I noticed that there was a significant uptick in the number of people searching my name and work on google. I know this because I have an academia.edu account and they notify me when someone is searching my name on google and lands on their site. The uptick wasn't like overwhelming, just significant enough to get my attention. Instead of a few searches every week, there were tens and dozens per day. And, this is still ongoing. I thought about it for a while and I suspect it is just because of the heightened interest in UFO/UAP disclosure as well as some of the things coming out from gov whistleblowers on the topic.

Anyway, I then started to get a few requests from academia.edu for any text from my book High Strangeness.
Well, cool, I thought. And then I thought some more. I finally decided that, with all the confusion about the topic due to the many crazies coming out of the woodwork, maybe I should just upload the whole darn book to academia.edu. I do plan to talk about the issue in some depth in an upcoming podcast, but can't say definitely when that will be just yet. Stay tuned.

I had to ask my crew/publisher for a PDF since it's been so long I have no idea where the file is. I received a copy almost instantly! I uploaded it to academia.edu and then, I was scanning through it a bit and wondering what else I could do with this handy text and the lightbulb went on!

Yup! You guessed it! I can use this text to play with Grok!

Not with a bang but a whimper.
Friday was a big day for aliens. The night before, the US Department of War (I think I liked it as Defense better) released a highly anticipated trove of documents related to UFOs and extraterrestrials. The "disclosure" came in the wake of President Trump reacting to former President Obama making waves with a misinterpreted comment about "aliens being real"

So the documents get released and I get up early and starting pouring through them. I click. I read. I watch videos. I click again. And then I realize...

There's nothing here.

This highly touted disclosure amounts to just an endless parade of fuzzy images (or videos) and unverifiable personal testimony. Some of the documents go back 70 years but it's all basically the same. Taken as a whole, it's the kind of thing we've seen for decades: fuzzy images; unverifiable personal testimony; no hard evidence. There's even a laughable image of flashing "orb' in a wheat field made by photoshopping a bad cartoon onto to a photo. It was an FBI technician's attempt to illustrate someone's account of a sighting.

Given the explosive congressional hearings we seen where witness claim the government has lots in crashed alien spaceships and dead alien bodies, I was kinda hoping for a whole lot more. It was all just so... boring.

If you want to see my arguments about why, if people are going to keep making these incredible claims, we should be expecting much more you can read this piece I did for The Atlantic (it's paywalled but you can usually get a couple of free articles).

A look at newly surfaced lunar surface images and the declassified transcripts that go with them.
The word "UFO" tends to trigger one of two responses: credulous excitement or immediate eye-rolling. But when the source material is NASA mission photography and declassified crew debriefing documents — some originally stamped Confidential — it becomes harder to dismiss out of hand.

A set of recently surfaced images from the Apollo 12 (1969) and Apollo 17 (1972) lunar surface missions has been circulating alongside newly released government UAP files. The photographs show the grey lunar terrain, astronaut shadows stretching across the regolith, and — annotated with yellow zoom boxes — small, anomalous luminous objects in the black sky above the lunar horizon. The objects vary across the frames: a vertical blue streak in one, a tight cluster of white-blue points in another, a solitary bright orb in a third, and in one striking image, what appears to be a larger rectangular luminous form.

The truth has always been out there. Americans are now closer than ever before to grasping it.

On Friday, the Department of War, acting under President Donald Trump's direction, released more than 150 government files - many previously classified and some dating back 80 years - revealing information about unidentified flying objects and other unexplained phenomena.

One NASA image from the Apollo 17 moon mission in 1972 appears to show three lights arranged in a triangular formation above the lunar terrain. A transcript of the astronauts' communications reveals one crew member describing the light as 'very bright particles or fragments,' another compared the scene to 'the Fourth of July'.

It's only the beginning.

Newly released FBI files have revealed shocking details of mysterious four-foot-tall crewmen exiting a UFO in the 1960s.

The documents, released Friday as part of the Trump administration's UFO disclosure, detailed how investigators reviewed reports that 1965 marked 'the year of the greatest number of UFO sightings' observed by multiple witnesses across the world.

The FBI summarized reports of metallic craft capable of hovering silently, reaching 'fantastic speeds' and interfering with electromagnetic equipment.

The files also referenced that wreckage from crashed saucers had been recovered on multiple occasions, including materials described as unknown metals containing microscopic spheres.

But one of the most startling sections involved testimonies of encounters with apparent occupants of the craft.

'A few witnesses have reported seeing crewmen who had landed from the objects,' the document stated, describing the beings as 'three and a half to four feet tall, wearing what appear to be space suits and helmets.'

The FBI records were among hundreds of newly released files, photographs and videos published Friday under President Donald Trump's long-awaited UFO transparency initiative.

The new webpage, which is hosted under the name "war.gov/UFO", represents a notable return to a term that had been considered for replacement by UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) in recent years. It will serve as a portal to access newly released documents and videos, and bears the official title of "Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE)". As stated on the main page:

the Department of War (DOW), with support from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), is overseeing government wide efforts to expeditiously find, review, identify, declassify and publicly release unresolved UAP-related records and historical documents in the federal government's possession.

It is interesting to consider how this differs from the current initiative by the National Archives. They have already established a specific page under law to address the disclosure of documents related to UFOs.

This is an unprecedented, historic undertaking that requires coordination between dozens of agencies and the review of tens of millions of records, many existing only on paper, spanning many decades.

The Department of War's involvement in the release of documents from other agencies, notably the FBI, raises questions about the selection process for what was deemed not to be disclosed to the public.

The Pentagon has announced that they employ specialized energy weapons for defense, seemingly vindicating researchers who'd long warned about the tech.

The Department of War's Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael announced this development in an X post fittingly — or perhaps eerily — posted on May the 4th, more popularly known as National Star Wars Day.

"Directed energy weapons are a fine addition to our arsenal..." read the post, which included a pic of said weaponry firing a laser beam and a soldier holding his head in pain.

Dubbed directed energy weapons or DEWs, these advanced instruments of war use focused rays to disable electronic weapons such as drones and incapacitate — or even kill — enemy soldiers.

According to the X post, these beams are comprised of "concentrated electromagnetic energy or atomic or subatomic particles."

Bigfoot, go home!
Ohioans are battening down the hatches as locals fear a not-so-friendly neighborhood Sasquatch is making a comeback after a half-century of silence — with a new brood in tow.

Northeast Ohio, the gloomiest corner of the Buckeye State, has been ripe with Bigfoot sightings since March. Some residents suspect a whole family of Sasquatches is moving into the region after a particularly brutal winter, Fox 8 reported.

Many anonymous witnesses shared pictures of hulking footprints scattered primarily between Akron and Youngstown (about 50 miles apart) in Portage County. Most of the prints are an estimated 17 inches long — which can only match a creature that is 7 feet tall or more.

Demons Out! When I was a young boy, my family often enjoyed watching and laughing at televangelists — especially Ernest Angley, who would regularly cast out demons for us on TV. Suffice to say, demons were considered a humorous component to my slight evangelical upbringing, not something to be considered seriously. Chevy Chase captured the zaniness perfectly in Fletch Lives-The Preacher

J.D. Vance-Aliens are Demons

Tucker, too

Turns out, lots of quite well-known people, and several commenters on The Unz Review believe these UFOs are demons. I would like to take a stab at seriously looking at this possibility.

There is a version of the UAP problem that is safe to discuss in polite company. It involves military pilots seeing objects that outperform known aerospace technology, radar systems confirming what the pilots saw, and a government that has spent decades lying about its level of interest in the subject. This version has congressional hearings, credentialed witnesses, and the imprimatur of the New York Times. It is, in the vocabulary of the national security establishment, a technology problem — something unknown is operating in controlled airspace, and the responsible question is what it is and who built it. Being alarming without being embarrassing is a considerable advantage. Senators can engage with it. Defense contractors can orient toward it. Journalists can cover it without their editors pulling them aside for a quiet word.

US President Donald Trump has said his administration will declassify and release government files on unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in the near future, describing some of the material as "very interesting."

The Pentagon has recently said it is reviewing and consolidating related records before any public release, citing security concerns. Trump signed an executive order in February instructing the Department of War to disclose "any and all information" related to UFOs and unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).

"I think we're going to be releasing as much as we can in the near future... some of it is going to be very interesting to people," Trump told reporters during a White House briefing late Wednesday, adding that public interest in the topic had built up "for a long time."

"I interviewed some pilots - very solid people. And they said they saw things that you wouldn't believe," he said.