Has anyone here watched Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing, Rory Kennedy’s new documentary about the continuing crisis inside the Seattle-based aerospace giant?

If you have, you’ll know it makes for deeply uncomfortable viewing.

Freefall follows Kennedy’s 2022 documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, which examined the two crashes of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft – Lion Air Flight 610 in October 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 five months later – in which 346 people died. At the heart of that story was MCAS, the flight-control software implicated in both accidents, and the disturbing picture that subsequently emerged of the commercial and organisational pressures surrounding the MAX programme.

The new film looks at what happened afterwards.

It takes the story through the January 2024 Alaska Airlines incident, when a door plug blew out of a virtually new 737 MAX 9 shortly after take-off from Portland (see header photo above), and into continuing allegations about manufacturing standards, quality control and the treatment of Boeing employees who tried to raise concerns. Looming over the film is the story of John Barnett, the former Boeing quality manager who became one of the company’s most prominent whistleblowers and who died by suicide in March 2024 while pursuing a legal case against his former employer.

Boeing has disputed aspects of the film, saying that some of the claims made against the company remain unfounded, while others concern issues it has addressed or continues to improve upon.

I watched Freefall last weekend and, for reasons that went considerably beyond the MAX, found it difficult to shake off – in large part because I watched the beginning of this story happen.

For almost twenty years I covered the aerospace and defence industry for Jane’s Defence Weekly, much of that time as the magazine’s Aerospace Editor. It was an extraordinary industry to write about because, in those days at least, it still carried something of the swagger of the great technological achievements of the twentieth century.

This was the world that had produced the jet engine, broken the sound barrier, built the SR-71 Blackbird and Concorde, put human beings on the Moon and developed machines capable of operating at the edge of what physics and materials science would allow.

Boeing occupied a special place in that world. Its aircraft had helped define successive ages of aviation: the B-17 and B-29, the 707 (above) that helped usher in the jet age, the 747 that transformed mass international travel, and later the 777. The company’s reputation rested ultimately on something quite simple: Boeing knew how to build aeroplanes.

The same was true, in different ways, of the other great names of the industry I found myself first reporting on in the early 1980s. Lockheed had its culture. Northrop had another. McDonnell Douglas another still. In the UK, companies such as Hawker Siddeley, de Havilland and BAC had already disappeared through earlier waves of consolidation, but their engineering DNA survived in the aircraft and people they left behind.

These companies certainly existed to make money – although not always that effectively. The old aerospace industry was no idyll. Programmes ran late and over budget. Companies fought viciously for contracts. Executives made bad decisions and engineers made mistakes, sometimes catastrophic ones. But the product had a status within those organisations that is difficult to convey now.

I spent much of my working life around the people who designed, built, tested and flew these machines. What struck me was how often their ambition could be expressed in essentially physical terms. Could it fly faster? Could it fly higher? Could it go further? Could it carry more? Could it be made safer, lighter, quieter or harder to detect?

Behind those questions were extraordinary concentrations of human expertise: aerodynamicists, propulsion specialists, metallurgists, test pilots, manufacturing engineers and designers, many of whom had learned their trades before computers became commonplace. Some of the machines that still define our idea of technological audacity were conceived by people equipped with little more than drawing boards, slide rules and an almost fanatical determination to make things work.

There was a romance to it, too, and those of us who loved aviation were susceptible to it. But there was something else as well: a culture in which engineering excellence was itself a measure of corporate success.

Somewhere around the turn of the millennium, I saw the Right Stuff gleam begin to disappear from the industry’s eye.

It didn’t happen overnight. Nor was Boeing alone. What I was watching was a much broader transformation across aerospace and defence as a new set of priorities and a new corporate language moved through the sector.

One of the ideas underpinning that change was ‘shareholder value’.

The doctrine had gathered enormous influence in American corporate life during the 1980s and 1990s. In its simplest form, it held that the primary responsibility of corporate management was to maximise returns to shareholders. There was nothing inherently unreasonable about that. Companies need investors; investors expect returns; and an aerospace programme that ignores financial reality will eventually discover that gravity acts on balance sheets too.

The problem was what happened when the financial performance of the company began to displace the performance of the product as the dominant measure of success.

Executive remuneration became increasingly connected to stock performance. Return on capital acquired greater importance. Outsourcing jobs long held in-house to low-cost economies could remove expensive capabilities from the balance sheet. Costs, inventories and workforces could be squeezed. The quarterly expectations of financial markets exerted pressures that were difficult to reconcile with an industry in which genuinely transformative programmes could take decades to mature.

At Boeing, the symbolic turning point was its 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas.

Boeing was technically the acquiring company, but something much more complicated happened culturally. Executives steeped in the McDonnell Douglas management philosophy acquired enormous influence within the combined organisation, and the traditional Boeing emphasis on engineering increasingly encountered a philosophy centred on financial performance and shareholder return.

Harry Stonecipher, who had led McDonnell Douglas and subsequently became Boeing’s CEO, later described the intention with remarkable candour: ‘When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it is run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.’

But being a great engineering firm was Boeing’s business.

What interested me at the time was that versions of the same transformation seemed to be occurring everywhere.

Products became ‘platforms’. Companies that had once defined themselves by what they designed and manufactured increasingly described themselves as ‘systems integrators’. Suppliers became elements of a ‘value chain’. Engineering capability that had once resided within the great primes migrated outwards through increasingly elaborate tiers of subcontractors and outsourcing relationships.

When I walked around the major aerospace exhibitions just after the turn of the century another change became apparent. The great primes were beginning to look remarkably similar.

Once, aerospace companies had possessed personalities shaped by their engineers and their products. By the early 2000s their corporate identities increasingly seemed to have been passed through the same sanitising machine. Their stands looked alike. Their mission statements sounded alike. Their executives spoke the same language. It was as though they had all attended the same business schools, employed the same management consultants and read the same half-dozen books about corporate excellence.

Much of this made good sense in a bank, an insurance company or a consumer-goods business. Some of it made sense in aerospace too. The industry had a formidable history of wasting money, protecting inefficient manufacturing practices and allowing engineers to pursue technological perfection at almost any cost.

But an aerospace company is not quite like other companies.

Its products carry hundreds of people through the air at nearly the speed of sound. Its military systems may be expected to work in circumstances where failure means people die. Its spacecraft operate in environments where a component costing a few dollars can compromise a mission costing billions. And, historically, its greatest advances had often resulted from doing things that appeared financially reckless, technologically improbable or both.

The industry I had entered as a young journalist had been obsessed with performance. Increasingly, the industry I was now covering seemed obsessed with managing risk.

By the beginning of 2005, these thoughts had been bubbling around in my head for some time. I wondered occasionally whether I was simply becoming nostalgic for the aerospace world I had first encountered. But then, on 19 January that year, I went to the Royal Aeronautical Society in London to hear one of Boeing’s most senior executives give the annual Frank Whittle Lecture. His name was Jim Albaugh.

Albaugh (above) was then President and CEO of Boeing Integrated Defense Systems, responsible for a business spanning combat aircraft, weapons, missiles, space and some of the most advanced technology programmes in the world. He was also an engineer by background.

The title of his lecture was Embracing Risk: A Vision for Aerospace in the 21st Century.

What followed was one of the most candid assessments of the industry I had heard from anyone at his level.

Albaugh’s argument was that aerospace needed to rediscover its appetite for technological risk. Boeing’s own account of the lecture records him calling on the industry to move away from ‘the way things have been done for the past 40 years’ and to ‘foster the innovation that comes from a risk culture’.

‘I am not talking about taking risk with human lives,’ he said. ‘I speak of the risk of new approaches.’

Here, from inside Boeing itself, was a senior executive articulating many of the concerns I had watched gathering across the sector. The industry that had produced the great technological leaps of the twentieth century was becoming increasingly incremental and risk-averse.

And then came his challenge: ‘If we want to transform the aerospace industry, we cannot be content with an evolutionary approach. We have to choose between being incrementalists, content to simply upgrade airplanes or becoming innovators creating the next quantum leap that will mark the dawn of a whole new era.’

Aerospace had spent the twentieth century making the improbable routine. Powered flight. Supersonic flight. Intercontinental air travel. Spaceflight. Human beings walking on another world. Yet here was the head of Boeing’s defence business warning that the industry responsible for those achievements was losing its appetite for technological risk.

At the time, I heard this principally as a warning about innovation. Looking back now, after watching Freefall, I think Albaugh was describing something more significant.

More than twenty years after that evening at the Royal Aeronautical Society, Rory Kennedy’s film introduced me to some of the people who had inherited the engineering culture Albaugh feared aerospace was losing. They were not senior executives – they were engineers, mechanics, manufacturing specialists and quality-control people: the men and women whose working lives revolve around whether something has been built properly, whether procedures have been followed and whether an aircraft is fit to leave the factory.

Aerospace has always depended on people like this. They can be awkward. They worry about things that others consider minor. They stop work, question assumptions, insist that a defect is investigated and refuse to sign something off simply because a production schedule says it is time to move on.

In the aerospace industry I first knew, these were valuable characteristics. Indeed, they were among the qualities that made the industry work.

Which is why one aspect of Freefall felt especially resonant. Many of the people appearing in the film as Boeing ‘whistleblowers’ looked remarkably like the people an earlier Boeing – any aerospace prime of that era – would simply have regarded as good engineers.

Engineering is, among other things, a discipline of resistance. It requires somebody to stand between an elegant plan and an inconvenient physical reality and say that the two do not match.

Sometimes that person will be wrong and sometimes the concern will prove unfounded. But in an industry whose products carry hundreds of people through the air, organisations need people prepared, at times, to make themselves unpopular.

The two 737 MAX crashes had already exposed serious failures in the development and certification of the aircraft, alongside intense commercial pressures surrounding a programme Boeing needed urgently in order to answer Airbus’s A320neo. The new documentary carries the story forward into Boeing’s manufacturing system and the testimony of people who say they tried to raise concerns from within it.

Among the most troubling of those stories is that of John Barnett.

Barnett spent more than three decades at Boeing, latterly as a quality manager at the company’s 787 plant in Charleston, South Carolina. He alleged that pressure to produce aircraft quickly was compromising quality and raised concerns about manufacturing procedures, defective parts and emergency oxygen systems. Boeing disputed a number of his claims.

The dispute eventually consumed much of his later life. Barnett retired in 2017 and pursued a whistleblower retaliation case against Boeing, alleging that the company had damaged his career because he had raised safety concerns. Boeing denied retaliating against him.

On 9 March 2024, while in Charleston giving evidence connected with that case, Barnett was found dead in his vehicle. His death was subsequently ruled a suicide.

Given everything that has happened around Boeing, Barnett’s tragic death has attracted a lot of speculation and I have no interest in adding to it. What interests me is the experience Freefall exposes before his death: what it means for an individual to find themselves in sustained conflict with an institution of Boeing’s scale and power.

A corporation such as Boeing has lawyers, communications departments, government relations teams, established relationships with regulators and customers and an institutional reputation built over generations. The individual challenging it has whatever evidence they possess and, ultimately, their credibility.

When a sufficiently powerful organisation disputes your account of events, the experience can be profoundly disorientating. However certain you may have been at the outset, you check the evidence again, you wonder what the organisation is telling other people about you; you begin to question whether you have missed something, misunderstood something, perhaps even whether your own judgement has somehow failed you.

Watching Freefall, I recognised that feeling, because I once experienced it myself. I should stress immediately that my own encounter was insignificant beside anything Barnett underwent. There were no safety implications, no career-ending disputes and no comparable personal stakes. But in 2002 I discovered, briefly, what it felt like to have one of the largest aerospace companies in the world push back against something I had reported and knew, from the documentary evidence in my possession, to be true.

The story began when a set of internal Boeing briefing slides were sent to me anonymously at Jane’s Defence Weekly.

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Something in a Reuters story yesterday caught my attention.

It concerned a new AI venture called Accelerated Understanding, founded by husband-and-wife team Anima Anandkumar and Benedikt Jenik. Anandkumar is Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech and a former Senior Director of AI Research at Nvidia; Jenik has a background in building large-scale machine-learning systems. The company has raised more than $30 million to pursue an approach to artificial intelligence that is rather different from the one most of us have become familiar with.

Large language models such as ChatGPT learn, in essence, by consuming the accumulated output of human beings: books, papers, websites, code, conversations and all the rest of the archival sediment our species has deposited online. Accelerated Understanding is attempting something different. Its models are designed to ingest enormous physical datasets and learn to predict how phenomena behave across space and time.

Anandkumar describes the distinction rather beautifully. Language models, she told Reuters, are built around ‘putting humans at the centre’’. What she and Jenik are attempting is ‘a nature-centric view’.

For all the extraordinary capabilities of today’s AI, we have principally been teaching machines to read what we have said about the universe. What happens when they start reading the universe itself?

The obvious answer: they may become extremely useful scientific tools. Accelerated Understanding is already applying its technology to weather and geological data, robotics and chip design. Its models use what are known as ‘neural operators’, designed to learn mappings between physical fields rather than simply predicting the next piece of language. According to Reuters, one of its systems has processed five trillion data points in a single prompt.

But there is a deeper possibility here.

Science is not nature. It is the extraordinarily successful model of nature that human beings have constructed from observation, experiment and mathematics. Inevitably, we have built that model using the perceptual and cognitive equipment evolution has given us.

We think in terms of matter and energy, space and time, particles and fields, observer and observed. Those categories have taken us from Newton to quantum mechanics, relativity, nuclear energy and machines exploring the outer Solar System. To date, they have worked extraordinarily well, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that they represent the only way of making sense of what is actually there.

An artificial intelligence has no evolutionary mind-map of this kind. It has not evolved to navigate three-dimensional space as we have, nor acquired its understanding of time, objects, distance, solidity or causation through embodied experience.

Feed such a system enough direct information about physical reality and an interesting question arises. Might it begin finding relationships in nature that human beings have missed, not because they are too small or too distant to detect, but because we have been looking at them through the wrong conceptual lens?

This becomes particularly interesting when we consider what readers of this column will recognise as one of my favourite subjects: scientific anomalies.

An anomaly, after all, is only anomalous relative to a model. When something refuses to behave as expected, our instinct is to ask which existing category it belongs to. In the UAP/UFO field the categories are familiar enough: aircraft, drone, balloon (like the Chinese ‘spy balloon’ photographed over the Central United States by a USAF U-2 below), plasma, sensor artefact, perhaps something genuinely unknown.

A machine interrogating the underlying data need not begin there. Given sufficiently good observations, it might instead ask what set of physical relationships would be required to produce them.

That possibility brought me back to something I wrote about recently.

In my last Substack piece, The Invisible Tree, I explored an idea that has increasingly interested me as I’ve dug into the history of US defence science. During and after the Cold War, enormous sums were invested in classified research involving plasma physics, pulsed power, directed energy, electromagnetic propagation and related fields. Some of that work is well documented. Much of it migrated into the open literature. Inevitably, some did not.

What if buried within that enormous forest of research, I asked in the piece, there is a particular branch of physics whose capabilities advanced considerably further behind the classified wall than most of us realise?

The UAP phenomenon then presents an unusual problem. If some anomalous observations intersect, even occasionally, with physical effects that have also been studied or exploited by classified programmes – some going back decades, perhaps – people trying to understand UAP may start asking inconvenient questions. Observations become breadcrumbs. So do old scientific papers, declassified reports, forgotten research programmes and technologies developed for apparently unrelated purposes.

The determined researcher then begins to see the outline of the tree – and, in doing so, potentially exposes something its custodians would rather remain hidden.

Reading about Anandkumar and Jenik made me realise I had overlooked another route into the forest.

AI.

For the best part of eighty years, the protection of advanced military technology has depended heavily on controlling information. If a physical effect offers a significant military or intelligence advantage, you classify the research, restrict access to the experimental results, compartmentalise the programme and protect its applications.

It is an imperfect system, as every intelligence service knows, but the logic is straightforward. If the other side cannot discover what you know, it cannot easily reproduce what you have built.

That logic becomes less secure if the other side no longer needs your information.

Imagine a future physics AI with access only to material legitimately available in the open world: decades of plasma experiments, atmospheric observations, radar measurements, high-energy-density physics, materials science, astronomical data, electromagnetic research, satellite observations, declassified documents and perhaps increasingly rich collections of UAP sensor data.

There need be no espionage involved, no stolen document and no whistleblower revealing the existence of a secret programme.

The machine simply starts connecting things.

A plasma experiment conducted in the 1970s turns out to have an unexpected relationship with an atmospheric-propagation result from the 1980s. Add an unusual radar observation from a decade later, a modern high-energy-density simulation and a sensor anomaly that nobody has satisfactorily explained – and maybe a pattern appears.

Perhaps the machine identifies a physical effect that nobody had previously noticed.

Or perhaps somebody had.

That second possibility is the one that intrigues me.

Imagine the excitement when an AI system identifies a previously unknown physical relationship with potentially revolutionary consequences. Papers are written, experiments are proposed and physicists begin trying to reproduce the effect.

But somewhere inside a classified programme, the reaction is rather different.

They have known about it for thirty or forty years.

The secret hasn’t leaked. The classified archive remains intact. Nobody has broken an NDA or carried documents out of a secure facility. The underlying physics has simply been rediscovered from the traces it leaves elsewhere in nature.

There is a precedent for the underlying problem.

The Manhattan Project that gave America the atomic bomb could classify bomb designs, enrichment techniques, calculations and experimental results. It could surround Los Alamos (below) with guards and fences. What it could not do was classify uranium, nuclear fission or the physical laws that made a bomb possible.

The Soviet Union benefited enormously from espionage in building its first atomic weapon, but the essential point remains. Nature contained the same information on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

AI may dramatically accelerate the process by which scattered clues become usable knowledge.

If so, the national-security implications go well beyond the current debate about autonomous weapons, cyber warfare and AI-assisted intelligence analysis.

Some military advantages depend upon engineering. Others depend upon knowing something about the physical world that your opponent does not.

As I touched on last time, a striking example lies in the origins of stealth. In the 1970s, Denys Overholser, a mathematician at Lockheed’s Skunk Works, came across an English translation of a 1962 paper by the Soviet physicist Pyotr Ufimtsev. Ufimtsev had developed a mathematical method for calculating how electromagnetic waves scattered from the edges of geometric shapes. The work had been published openly in the Soviet Union, where its potential implications for aircraft stealth appear to have attracted little interest.

Overholser saw those implications. By incorporating Ufimtsev’s mathematics into a computer program known as Echo 1, he and his colleagues could calculate the radar returns of complex faceted shapes and begin designing an aircraft accordingly. The work fed directly into Have Blue and, ultimately, the F-117 (below).

The irony was inescapable: one of America’s most closely guarded technological advantages had grown partly from physics the Soviet Union had itself placed in the public domain.

AI potentially changes the scale and speed of that process. Overholser knew enough to recognise the significance of one obscure paper and connect it to a problem Lockheed was trying to solve. Now imagine a machine able to make comparable connections across millions of papers, experimental results and datasets simultaneously. The crucial insight might already be sitting in the open literature, unnoticed because nobody has yet understood what happens when it is connected to something published twenty years later in an entirely different field.

And that is before we consider areas in which the underlying physical insight is not already available in a single paper, waiting for the right person to recognise its importance. It may instead have taken decades of specialist research, expensive experimental failures and generations of scientists gradually working their way towards an exploitable effect.

That is precisely the kind of advantage a state would have good reason to protect.

A sufficiently capable AI may not need to repeat that intellectual journey in the same way. Given enough data, it might find a shorter route: reconstructing the underlying principle from results scattered across the open scientific record, or identifying connections that took human researchers years to make.

Nor does it necessarily have to design the finished weapon. Simply identifying that a particular physical effect exists, can be reproduced and might be exploitable could collapse years of uncertainty. Once you know a hidden tree exists, finding your way towards it becomes considerably easier.

This gives the international race to develop advanced AI another dimension. The decisive advantage may not belong solely to the country whose machines can write the best code, penetrate networks or operate autonomous systems. It may belong to the one whose machines become best at understanding nature.

There is, of course, a larger possibility.

Everything I have described assumes that the machine eventually rediscovers something human beings have already found and hidden.

But what if it finds something nobody knows?

That takes us beyond UAP, the Pentagon and the hidden forests of Cold War science. It raises the prospect that another form of intelligence may begin constructing models of physical reality from quantities of information no human being could absorb, finding relationships we have never thought to look for.

Some of those discoveries may be wonderfully prosaic. Some may transform medicine, materials science, energy or our understanding of the climate.

Others may force us to reconsider parts of the model itself.

For eighty years, governments have operated on the assumption that dangerous knowledge can be contained by controlling who is allowed to see it. That assumption may be approaching its expiry date.

You can classify an experiment. You can classify a programme. You can classify what your scientists discovered about nature.

But you cannot classify nature itself.

(Photo by Jacek Smoter on Unsplash)

For the better part of a decade, the argument over UAP disclosure has revolved around a surprisingly simple assumption: that whatever the US government is protecting, the secret must lie principally in the things themselves.

Depending on where you stand in the debate, those things might be experimental aircraft, advanced foreign weapon systems, recovered vehicles of unknown origin or evidence of a non-human intelligence operating somewhere in our environment. The extraordinary secrecy surrounding the subject is generally taken to mean that somewhere behind the classified wall lies an answer to the question people have been asking since the beginning of the modern UFO era: what are they?

It is a reasonable assumption. But there may be another way of looking at the problem.

While researching the history of some of the institutions sitting at the intersection of advanced physics and US national security, I have found myself increasingly interested in a different question. What if, for at least one category of UAP, the sensitivity lies partly in the explanation itself? What if telling us what these phenomena are would require the Pentagon to disclose what it has learned about the physics that produces them – knowledge accumulated across decades of classified research and now embedded in technologies of considerable military importance?

That possibility does not require every UAP to have the same explanation. Almost certainly they do not. My interest here is narrower: recurring reports of luminous, sometimes roughly spherical or orb-like phenomena displaying unusual optical, radar or electromagnetic characteristics.

There are many possible explanations for such observations, and I am not proposing to settle that question here. Instead, I want to follow one particular strand of physics that turns up with surprising regularity in the history of US defence research: plasma.

The question is whether some of the classified material surrounding UAP might intersect with a much older body of defence science whose sensitivity extends far beyond UFOs. If certain anomalous phenomena involve physical effects that the United States has spent generations learning to generate, manipulate or exploit, opening the UAP files could potentially expose relationships between technologies whose military value remains very real.

Which leaves us with a rather different disclosure question:

What classified physics might be exposed if the US government told us what some UAP actually are?

The Fourth State Hiding in Plain Sight

Plasma is one of those things most of us vaguely remember from school physics. Heat a gas sufficiently and its atoms begin to lose electrons, producing an electrically charged mixture of ions and electrons: the fourth state of matter. Stars are made of it. Lightning produces it. Most of the visible universe consists of it.

The US defence establishment thinks about it rather more.

Plasma affects the propagation of radar and radio signals through the atmosphere and ionosphere, making it important to communications, navigation and sensing. It is integral to nuclear fusion and high-energy-density physics, generated by nuclear explosions and therefore central to understanding nuclear-weapons effects and EMP^[1]. It runs through intense particle beams, high-power microwaves, pulsed-power systems (see the time-lapsed image of the Z pulsed power accelerator at Sandia below) and directed-energy weapons. At hypersonic velocities, ionised gases form around vehicles; higher in the atmosphere, plasma becomes part of the operating environment for satellites, missile warning, radar and military operations in space.

Seen separately, these appear to be different branches of defence science. Underneath them lies a considerable amount of common physics.

The US Naval Research Laboratory provides a striking illustration. Its Plasma Physics Division works across space and laboratory plasmas, intense electron and ion beams, pulsed power, nuclear-weapons effects, inertial-confinement fusion and advanced radiation sources. NRL has also spoken openly about modifying space plasmas^[2] for ‘strategic effects’ relevant to communications, satellite navigation and radar.

There is nothing clandestine about this. What is striking is the breadth of capability gathered beneath a word that, outside specialist circles, carries little strategic resonance.

A physicist investigating how an intense beam propagates through an ionised medium may appear to inhabit a different world from an engineer studying communications disruption in the ionosphere, or a weapons scientist generating extreme electromagnetic conditions through pulsed power. Their programmes and immediate objectives differ, but at a deeper level they can be exploring different manifestations of the same physical landscape.

Looking for a single ‘plasma programme’ therefore makes little sense. The more interesting question concerns what generations of defence researchers have learned plasma can be made to do.

The Secret isn’t Plasma

Plasma physics is an established scientific discipline, pursued openly around the world. If there is something hidden here, we need to be precise about what it might be.

There is a useful historical precedent. During the early Cold War, the United States conducted its controlled thermonuclear fusion research under the classified Project Sherwood. Scientists at Los Alamos, Princeton, Livermore and elsewhere were trying to understand how extraordinarily hot plasma might be confined long enough to sustain fusion. Much of the work was eventually declassified, helping to seed the open field of plasma physics that followed.

The underlying science becoming public did not remove its military consequences.

I encountered a similar distinction years later in a very different field. Ben Rich (below), the legendary former head of Lockheed’s Skunk Works, once told me that during the early development of stealth there had been discussion about whether the underlying physics should effectively be buried before they even knew whether they could apply it to a workable aircraft. Stealth depended heavily on controlling how electromagnetic energy interacted with an aircraft, using shaping and materials to reduce the radar energy returned towards a hostile receiver.

Rich’s point stayed with me because it revealed something about disruptive defence science. A weapon can be protected by classifying the weapon. A physical principle, or an unexpected application of an existing one, presents a harder problem. Once people understand the principle, they can begin imagining applications of their own.

Suppose, over decades, defence scientists discovered that particular plasma states and their interaction with electromagnetic fields had useful consequences across radar, nuclear effects, high-power microwave systems, particle beams, communications, directed energy and the ionosphere. Each application could develop within its own programme, institution, technical vocabulary and security classification.

No grand decision to ‘hide plasma’ would be necessary. The strategically important knowledge could simply become distributed among the applications to which it gave rise.

We might, I suppose, call this ‘strategic fragmentation’.

Over time, related science starts to look like unrelated specialist disciplines. Plasma becomes fusion in one laboratory, space weather in another, nuclear effects elsewhere, pulsed power in another programme, radar propagation in another, directed energy in another.

In other words, the branches remain visible; what becomes harder to see is the tree.

The question that interested me – especially in the context of the UFO disclosure era – was this: how do you ensure this particular tree stays hidden within the forest, indistinguishable from other trees?

When Plasma Went to War

By the late 1950s, the nuclear age had begun extending upwards into the atmosphere and space, bringing the realisation that a high-altitude nuclear explosion could create vast artificial plasma disturbances. These could interfere with radio communications and radar, alter the ionosphere and threaten spacecraft. Plasma had become a large-scale electromagnetic environment with direct military consequences.

For NRL, this fell onto fertile ground. The laboratory had spent decades working on radio propagation, radar and the ionosphere and was already deeply involved in the emerging science of space. In 1966, it created a dedicated Plasma Physics Division, bringing together magnetic fusion, nuclear effects, space plasma physics and the propagation of intense light and particle beams through the atmosphere.

The grouping is revealing. Problems that could be described as separate military disciplines were being placed together because their underlying physics was closely related.

The consequences spread. Reproducing the extreme radiation environments created by nuclear weapons required machines capable of releasing enormous amounts of electrical energy in extremely short bursts. In 1968 NRL built Gamble I, a high-power pulsed-power generator developed to simulate nuclear-weapons effects. Pulsed power subsequently opened routes into intense electron and ion beams, X-ray generation, plasma radiation sources, Z-pinch research^[3] and high-energy-density physics.

This is how defence science grows. A solution to one military problem creates an experimental capability; that capability reveals another physical effect; somebody recognises a different application.

By the end of the 1960s, plasma had entered the defence establishment as a medium through which nuclear effects, electromagnetic propagation, intense energy, space and weapons research could increasingly intersect.

One scientific root system was producing an extraordinary number of military branches.

The Possibility Engine

Another institution had entered the story in 1958, created in response to Sputnik. The Advanced Research Projects Agency – ARPA, later DARPA^[4] – was intended to prevent the United States being surprised again by a technological breakthrough.

One of its earliest projects takes us directly into this story. In 1959, Cornell University signed a contract with ARPA to study an enormous ionospheric radar instrument in Puerto Rico. Four years later it opened as the Arecibo Ionospheric Observatory. Although it became famous for radio astronomy, its development had initially been funded through Project DEFENDER, ARPA’s ballistic-missile-defence programme, and included studying the upper ionosphere and its interaction with electromagnetic signals.

The military logic was clear. A ballistic missile travelled through an ionised environment, while systems intended to detect and intercept it depended upon radar propagating through that environment. ARPA was simultaneously pioneering electronically steered phased-array radar for missile defence and space surveillance.

The missile-defence problem was therefore drawing together radar, space surveillance, electromagnetic propagation and the ionosphere while plasma and high-energy physics developed elsewhere across the defence establishment.

ARPA occupied a distinctive position in this landscape. Laboratories could accumulate deep expertise in particular physical regimes; ARPA’s purpose was to ask what strategically useful capability might emerge if promising science were pushed further and faster. Successful technologies could then migrate elsewhere.

By the early 1980s, the United States possessed a mature defence-science ecosystem exploring advanced radar, missile defence, space, electromagnetic propagation and increasingly powerful directed-energy technologies.

Then Ronald Reagan gave many of those strands an extraordinary reason to converge.

Star Wars – the Great Convergence

On 23 March 1983, Reagan called on American scientists to develop the means to render nuclear ballistic missiles ‘impotent and obsolete’. The Strategic Defense Initiative that emerged from that challenge quickly acquired another name: Star Wars.

The vision involved detecting Soviet missiles and destroying them during different phases of flight using a layered defensive system (above) extending into space. Among the technologies considered were high-energy lasers, nuclear-pumped X-ray lasers, free-electron lasers, neutral particle beams and other forms of directed energy, supported by sophisticated sensors, radar and battle-management systems.

The scale was extraordinary. By the end of fiscal year 1991, SDIO^[5] had received $20.9 billion for research and development, including $6.3 billion for sensors and $4.9 billion for directed-energy weapons.

But look at what those billions bought.

Beneath the individual weapons concepts lay overlapping technologies: intense electron and ion beams, high-power microwave systems, pulsed-power generators and switches, free-electron lasers, fusion-derived technologies and the extreme-energy conditions required to generate and control them. By 1991, SDIO’s pulsed-power research alone was supporting neutral particle beams, space-based free-electron lasers, ground-based lasers, electromagnetic launchers, laser radar and high-power microwaves. Plasma opening switches were being investigated on enormous machines at Sandia^[6] and NRL to compress and multiply electrical power.

Many of these technologies predated Reagan. What SDI supplied was an organising mission powerful enough to draw them into the same strategic enterprise, together with the money and urgency to see how far they could be pushed.

Scientists concerned with plasma behaviour, beam propagation, extreme electromagnetic fields, laser interaction, nuclear effects, radar and space physics were contributing to different parts of an architecture intended to solve the same almost impossibly difficult problem. Their technologies did not all work as hoped, but the effort generated experiments, measurements, models and practical knowledge about physical regimes being driven towards military capability.

Judging SDI solely by whether it produced Reagan’s promised missile shield therefore misses an important part of its legacy.

SDI was also a knowledge-convergence machine.

For a decade, a remarkable concentration of American scientific talent and resources was directed towards understanding how frontier technologies might operate together. Plasma and extreme electromagnetic physics ran through a striking proportion of that work, sometimes explicitly and sometimes as enabling science beneath technologies carrying different names.

Weapons could fail and programmes could be cancelled.

The knowledge accumulated in pursuing them was harder to make disappear.

The Great Disappearance

Then the strategic world that had created SDI disappeared.

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union dissolved two years later. In 1991 President George H.W. Bush redirected SDI towards more limited ballistic-missile threats; in 1993 the Clinton administration renamed the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.

The age of Star Wars was formally over.

The transition coincided with a sharp contraction in some of SDI’s more exotic technologies. By 1993 its directed-energy portfolio was being reassessed programme by programme. The free-electron laser transferred to the Army; funding fell dramatically. Yet contemporary reviews show the Pentagon deciding which technologies BMDO should retain, which should transfer elsewhere and what knowledge should be preserved for possible future development.

A neutral particle beam weapon (SDI concept below) could prove impractical as an orbiting missile killer while leaving valuable knowledge about accelerators, beam propagation and plasma interactions. A laser weapon could fail SDI’s requirements while advancing optics, tracking, atmospheric compensation and high-energy laser physics. Pulsed-power machines built for one mission could serve another.

The apparent disappearance of Star Wars is therefore deceptive. When the strategic problem changed, the knowledge did not need to remain inside an organisation carrying the SDI name. It could migrate into the services, national laboratories, successor missile-defence programmes and elsewhere.

For anyone reconstructing the history later, this creates an archival illusion. A programme ends, a budget line vanishes or a technology transfers, and the trail appears to stop. The scientists, facilities, experimental results and accumulated understanding may simply have moved.

From outside: dead programme.

From within the research ecosystem: accumulated knowledge.

So, rather than looking for a secret successor to SDI, perhaps we should ask what sort of architecture could retain what it had learned.

An Ecosystem Built to Remember

The US defence research establishment is an ecosystem of government laboratories, national laboratories, research agencies, military services, contractors and federally funded research and development centers – FFRDCs. Technologies and people move between them while different institutions preserve different kinds of expertise.

NRL provides perhaps the clearest example of scientific continuity. Its history runs from radio and radar through the ionosphere and space into nuclear effects, plasma physics, intense beams, pulsed power and directed energy. A weapons programme may last five or ten years; a laboratory can retain scientists, facilities, models and accumulated knowledge across generations. The national laboratories at Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia perform similar long-term functions in nuclear effects, fusion, high-energy-density physics, pulsed power and related fields.

Certain FFRDCs add another form of continuity. Institutions such as the Aerospace Corporation, RAND and the Institute for Defense Analyses provide technical, analytical or systems-level support across long-running national-security problems. A laboratory may understand in extraordinary depth how a physical effect works; an FFRDC supporting a defence sponsor may be positioned to ask how mature the technology is, how it fits into a wider architecture, what other capabilities it enables and what happens when it is combined with something else.

JASON^[7] adds cross-cutting scientific scrutiny, drawing leading scientists into difficult national-security problems across the boundaries of individual programmes.

Seen this way, searching for a single custodian of the knowledge accumulated under SDI looks misplaced. Laboratories could preserve physical understanding; DARPA explores applications; FFRDCs provide analytical and systems-level continuity; JASON scientific scrutiny; services and contractors turn selected effects into capabilities.

SDI temporarily forced many of those functions towards the same strategic objective. When that objective fragmented, the institutions remained.

There need never have been a hidden ‘plasma programme’ preserving a unified body of secret science. The national-security system already possessed an architecture capable of retaining knowledge while distributing it among organisations, missions and security compartments.

The memory did not have to reside in one place. It could reside in the ecosystem itself.

Strategic Fragmentation

Across this longer history, plasma became increasingly difficult to perceive as a single strategic field because its applications had spread so widely: nuclear effects, radar propagation, electronic warfare, space systems, fusion, high-energy-density physics, pulsed power, directed energy, missile defence and ionospheric research.

There is an intriguing parallel with the way the US classification system treats information. Defence doctrine allows for ‘classification by compilation’: individually unclassified pieces of information can become classified when their combination reveals a sensitive association or relationship. In the language of current DoD guidance, ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’.

This does not establish that plasma science has been deliberately protected this way. It illustrates a more general point: strategically sensitive information can reside in the relationship between facts.

The physics of an ionised gas can be public. So can a paper on radar propagation, a pulsed-power experiment or ionospheric research. Greater strategic value may reside in knowing which plasma state, produced under which conditions and interacting with which electromagnetic field, creates an effect useful for sensing, disruption, deception or directed energy.

The consequential secret may therefore look less like:

A is classified.

and more like:

A + B + C = capability D.

This helps explain why the history is difficult to reconstruct from outside. Researchers follow programme names and institutional boundaries; physics is indifferent to either. An effect discovered during nuclear-weapons research may later matter to directed energy. A technique developed for missile defence may acquire another application entirely.

Over seventy years, an extraordinary amount can become publicly known while strategically important synthesis remains obscure. Classification, compartmentalisation, institutional boundaries and simple specialisation are enough to produce that result.

The branches remain in view.

What becomes difficult to reconstruct is the tree.

And this is where our history finally reconnects with the question that started the investigation.

UAP.

The Object That May Not be an Object

The idea that plasma might account for at least some UFO sightings is hardly new. More interesting here is that the possibility has surfaced inside the defence establishment itself.

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(Photo by Michael Herren on Unsplash)

This week, two conversations – one in Washington, D.C., the other in Charlotte, North Carolina – arrived, independently, at remarkably similar destinations.

The first came in the form of a superb new Substack essay by American journalist and author Ben Schreckinger. The second emerged from a gathering of several hundred scientists, consciousness researchers, AI thinkers, experiencers and explorers of the unknown at the Psi Games conference in North Carolina, where I found myself giving an address.

Ostensibly, the two events had nothing to do with one another. Yet by the time I’d finished speaking at one and reading the other, I found myself wondering whether they were, in fact, describing different aspects of the same story.

A journalist enters the mystery

The article that prompted these reflections is titled Reality Shock. Schreckinger (below) is not a UFO researcher; he’s an experienced Washington journalist whose reporting has ranged across some of the defining stories of the past decade: Trump and Russia, the Hunter Biden laptop, the rise of crypto, Havana Syndrome and the origins of COVID.

That background is what makes his decision to tackle the UFO subject so interesting.

Schreckinger approaches it neither as a believer nor as a debunker, but as a reporter asking a simple question: is there a story here that serious journalism has misunderstood?

His answer is measured, thoughtful and refreshingly free of hyperbole. He doesn’t claim to know what UFOs are, nor does he dismiss decades of testimony because some of it is plainly unreliable. Instead, he patiently surveys the landscape: the history of the subject, the emergence of credible military evidence, the gradual shift in scientific attitudes, and the increasingly public struggle of institutions to deal with a phenomenon that sits awkwardly between defence, intelligence, physics, psychology and consciousness.

Towards the end of his introduction, he writes: ‘It is possible that the anomalies detected by advanced military sensors in the 21st century will precipitate one or more scientific paradigm shifts.’

Which was the part that got my attention, because, at almost exactly the same moment he was publishing his piece (or, at the very least, putting the finishing touches to it), I found myself standing on a stage in Charlotte wrestling with precisely the same possibility.

Charlotte

The Psi Games is unlike most conferences. It certainly isn’t exclusively about UFOs, nor is it solely concerned with consciousness, psi or artificial intelligence. Instead, it occupies the increasingly interesting territory where those subjects begin to overlap.

For three days, physicists, neuroscientists, AI researchers, remote viewers, psychologists, philosophers and experiencers shared ideas alongside participants (above) competing in the Psi Games’ psi challenges. They came from very different backgrounds and held very different views, but each, in one way or another, was exploring the same frontier.

Some speakers approached the mystery through quantum physics. Others through neuroscience, machine learning, near-death experiences or consciousness research. Tom Campbell described a consciousness-based informational universe evolving towards greater coherence; Simon Duan explored artificial intelligence and computational models of reality; and Riz Virk argued that the physical world itself may best be understood as a sophisticated virtual reality. Others examined psi, remote viewing and the growing body of evidence that consciousness may not be confined to the brain.

My own contribution came towards the end of the conference.

It marked the first time I had publicly presented a framework I have been quietly developing over the past several years: the Adaptive Interface Model, or AIM.

AIM grew directly out of the thirty-five-year investigation that found expression in The Light Beyond the Mountains, The Outlier Series and The Participation Dialogues. On the surface, that investigation began as an attempt to understand UFOs. It ended somewhere rather different: with the possibility that anomalies of every kind – UAP, psi, near-death experiences, synchronicities and trippier forms of what have loosely been called ‘high strangeness’ – may be telling us something profound about the nature of reality itself.

What do anomalies actually do?

What interested me most, reading Schreckinger’s essay, was how his investigation had led him to a simple but striking observation that sits at the heart of AIM: anomalies may be the precursors of scientific paradigm shifts.

To take us there, AIM asks a fundamental question about anomalies - not what they are, but what they do.

Across neuroscience, artificial intelligence and complexity science, adaptive systems tend to learn in much the same way. They build working models of the world, and those models remain remarkably stable until something happens that they cannot explain. The resulting mismatch between expectation and experience – what neuroscientists and AI researchers call prediction error – forces the system to pay attention, incorporate new information and, ultimately, revise its understanding.

Viewed through that lens, anomalies aren’t merely puzzles waiting to be solved, they may also function as catalysts for learning: events that expose the limits of an existing model and create the conditions from which a broader one can emerge.

Whether that ultimately proves to be the right explanation remains an open question. What particularly appeals to me about the framework, however, is that it doesn’t require UAP to have a single origin. They may be extraterrestrial, interdimensional, ultraterrestrial – or something else entirely. AIM leaves that question open. Instead, it shifts the emphasis to their effect. If they consistently draw attention to moments when existing models begin to fail, perhaps what matters most is that they are creating the conditions in which a larger understanding of reality can emerge.

What struck me was that Schreckinger’s article takes the reader to that same threshold.

He does not attempt to explain the phenomenon in its entirety. Instead, he argues that the anomalies now confronting us may herald one or more scientific paradigm shifts, which, in turn, points towards the same possibility AIM explores: that anomalies matter not simply because they are strange, but because they may be signalling that our present model of reality is beginning to reach its limits.

The paradigm may already be shifting

We need now to take this possibility seriously. Not because we suddenly understand what UAP are – plainly, we don’t – but because they have crossed an important threshold. They are no longer simply the preserve of eyewitnesses, enthusiasts or fringe researchers. They have become official anomalies: acknowledged by governments, debated in legislatures, investigated by scientists and discussed openly within institutions that, until recently, preferred not to acknowledge the subject at all.

Whatever one thinks of the current US administration, the PURSUE initiative – the Trump administration’s move to accelerate official investigation and public disclosure of UAP – has catalysed that process. By placing UAP firmly within the machinery of government, it has done something historically important. It has transformed the phenomenon from an object of speculation into a legitimate subject of enquiry.

That is how paradigm shifts often begin – not with answers, but with anomalies that become too persistent and too well evidenced to ignore.

Thomas Kuhn, whom Schreckinger references more than once, understood this better than anyone. Existing models rarely collapse because somebody invents a better theory. They begin to give way because reality itself refuses to conform to the old one.

Whether or not the shift is actually underway is debatable. At the very least, however, we are at the beginning of a very different conversation about what we believe reality to be.

Where the journey leads

If you’re new to this subject, I can think of few better places to begin than Ben Schreckinger’s Reality Shock.

Full disclosure: he very generously references both The Hunt for Zero Point and the work of the EXO Institute (above - you can read about EXO’s launch here)). I’m grateful for both mentions, but they’re not the reason I’m recommending his essay. I’m recommending it because it is measured, deeply reported and refreshingly free of certainty. More than anything, it demonstrates what careful journalism can still do when confronted by a subject that most people have either sensationalised or dismissed.

I also suspect he is standing at the beginning of a rather interesting journey. I know because, more than three decades ago, I thought I was investigating a mystery about advanced aerospace technology. I had no idea, of course, where following the evidence would eventually lead.

Last weekend, however, it led me to North Carolina, where I found myself discussing many of the ideas Schreckinger begins to surface with an extraordinary mix of scientists, technologists, consciousness researchers and people whose lives have been shaped by experiences that still sit awkwardly beyond the boundaries of accepted science.

Somewhere along the way, the question has quietly changed. It is no longer simply, ‘What are UFOs?’ It has become something broader – and, to my mind, far more interesting.

What are anomalies telling us about the world – and about ourselves?

I’m not sure any of us yet knows the answer.

Nor, I think, should we pretend that we do.

But if there is one thing I have learned over the years, it is that the most rewarding investigations are rarely the ones that confirm what we already believe. They are the ones that quietly compel us to enlarge our map of what we think we know.

Schreckinger’s essay does exactly that and then some.

(Photo by Eutah Mizushima on Unsplash)

This story begins, as another recently did, on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza.

Readers may remember the Tyringham Initiative gathering hosted last month by entrepreneur Anton Bilton, where scientists, physicians, indigenous practitioners and consciousness researchers came together to explore a provocative question: the nature of non-human intelligences and their possible relationship to psychedelics, spirituality and consciousness.

Among those attending was Benjamin De Loenen, founder and Executive Director of ICEERS (the International Centre for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service), an organisation that has spent many years working alongside Indigenous peoples in South America, helping to protect their traditional knowledge while building relationships with Western science, medicine and public policy.

Our conversation in Ibiza was all too brief, so we agreed to continue it when we returned to our respective homes. Last week, we picked up where we left off – and curiously, we spoke very little about psychedelics or consciousness. Instead, Ben started to tell me about something no less remarkable.

Over the past decade, an alliance of Indigenous spiritual leaders from across South America has quietly been taking shape. Representing more than thirty Indigenous nations across South America, they have reached an extraordinary conclusion.

Humanity, they believe, has entered a period of profound imbalance.

And after centuries of protecting some of the world’s oldest knowledge traditions, the time has come to begin sharing them in order to help the modern world navigate the future.

For generations, that knowledge had been closely guarded. Colonisation, religious persecution and the destruction of Indigenous cultures had taught its custodians the dangers of exposing what they knew. But the spiritual leaders with whom Ben works now believe that this position is no longer tenable. The crisis facing the planet is no longer confined to any one culture, country or continent. It is systemic. As Ben put it starkly: “Humanity is now in the emergency room.”

The patient is humanity itself.

And that, he said, is why these spiritual leaders have begun to speak of a ‘New Time of Alliance’: a moment when the knowledge they have preserved must enter into partnership with the best of modern science, technology, policy and capital.

Because neither, they believe, is sufficient on its own to meet the scale of the challenges now confronting humanity.

Not religion. Not folklore. Science.

Ben did not describe these traditions primarily as religions, belief systems or collections of myths.

He called them sciences.

That word, I know, will trouble some readers. It troubled me at first – not because I dismissed what he was describing, but because in the modern West, science has acquired a very precise meaning. It implies testable hypotheses, controlled experiments, reproducible results and evidence that can be independently verified.

Ben was describing bodies of knowledge developed through sustained observation and practice across centuries, and in some cases millennia: systems for understanding the relationships between human beings, plants, animals, landscapes, consciousness and what their practitioners regard as the deeper intelligence of the living world.

From the outside, he said, these traditions can appear simple, even primitive. Their knowledge is often expressed through stories, rituals, sacred places and forms of language that have no direct equivalent in Western thought.

But beneath those outward forms, he believes, lie highly sophisticated maps of reality. “They have names for it,” he told me. “They have studied this for millennia.”

Perhaps the clearest example comes from the Kogi, Arhuaco, Wiwa and Kankuamo peoples of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.

At the heart of their worldview is what is commonly translated as the Law of Origin.

This is not law in the Western sense: a set of rules drafted by human beings and enforced by institutions. It is understood instead as the underlying order through which life came into being and continues to sustain itself.

The mountains, rivers, forests, animals and human communities of the Sierra are not separate elements occupying the same territory. They are participants in a living system, each with a role, a relationship and a responsibility to the whole. Human wellbeing cannot therefore be separated from the health of the land. Mental disorder cannot be considered entirely apart from social or ecological disorder. Damage to a river, a forest or a sacred place is not merely environmental harm; it is a disturbance within the larger network of relationships that supports life.

This is a radically different starting point from our own.

Contemporary society tends to understand reality by dividing it into parts. Human and non-human. Mind and matter. Nature and culture. Observer and observed.

The Law of Origin begins from relationship.

Everything is connected as the fundamental condition of existence. And balance, within that system, is not something that can be imposed from above. It has to be continually maintained.

Partnership, not conversion

The proposal emerging from the New Time of Alliance is surprisingly simple.

It is not asking the modern world to abandon science – or science itself to validate Indigenous traditions.

It is asking something much more ambitious: whether different ways of knowing might work together.

Science. Technology. Public policy. Finance. Indigenous knowledge.

Each bringing what it knows best.

The premise is that none of these, acting alone, is sufficient to address the intertwined crises of the twenty-first century.

The obstacle, however, is not willingness.

It is a problem of translation.

As Ben observed during our conversation, imagine asking Einstein to explain relativity to someone with no mathematics. The problem would not be the quality of the knowledge but finding a common language.

The same challenge exists here.

Many Indigenous traditions express sophisticated understandings of consciousness, ecology and relationship through stories, ceremonies and practices that have no obvious equivalent in Western scientific discourse. Conversely, modern science has developed extraordinarily powerful analytical tools but often lacks the conceptual framework within which those traditions understand the living world.

The result is that two sophisticated systems of knowledge frequently fail to recognise one another.

The Alliance therefore begins from an unusually practical proposition.

Don’t simply exchange ideas.

Work together.

Whether restoring degraded ecosystems, improving mental health, exploring consciousness or addressing other complex global challenges, shared problems create the shared language that conversation alone often cannot.

It is an approach that shifts the emphasis from debate to collaboration – and perhaps, in doing so, offers a different model for how humanity might learn.

A Living Intelligence

Running through all of these traditions is another assumption that differs fundamentally from the modern Western worldview.

Nature is not regarded as an inert collection of objects.

It is understood as a living, intelligent system.

Ben refers to this as a form of ‘Ancestral Intelligence’ – an intelligence embedded within the living world itself. The Kogi refer to this deeper reality as Aluna: a world of thought and consciousness from which, they believe, the physical world arises. Their spiritual leaders are trained, over decades, to cultivate a relationship with this deeper order, with the aim of maintaining balance between human communities and the wider living system.

Whether one accepts this ontology is almost beside the point.

The more interesting observation is that it begins from a radically different premise. Rather than asking how intelligence emerged from matter, it asks how matter emerged from intelligence.

From that perspective, the role of humanity changes. We cease to be separate observers standing outside nature and become participants within it – within the field of consciousness itself – an idea, as readers of The Participation Dialogues will know, that is now of its time. Knowledge, accordingly, is not simply acquired through measurement and analysis. It also arises through relationship, attention and participation.

It is an idea that sits well outside conventional scientific thinking. Yet, as Ben observed more than once, these traditions are not presenting it as a new hypothesis. They regard it as an accumulated body of knowledge, refined over many generations and now, for the first time, being offered as the basis for a wider conversation.

Why now?

This initiative did not emerge overnight.

Its roots stretch back to 2016, when Indigenous leaders from across the Amazon began organising around the challenges posed by the globalisation of traditional medicines. Initial discussions focused on ethics, cultural appropriation, environmental protection and the safe stewardship of Indigenous knowledge.

Over time, however, the conversation evolved.

The question was no longer simply how to protect ancient traditions.

It became how those traditions might contribute to the future that lies ahead.

Today, the Alliance continues to bring together spiritual leaders from Indigenous nations across South America. This September, many of them will gather in Girona, Spain, for the World Ayahuasca Forum – not simply to discuss ancestral knowledge, but to begin exploring how it might enter into meaningful collaboration with scientists, technologists, policymakers, philanthropists and other institutions shaping the modern world.

Ben was keen to stress that the Forum should not be viewed as a conference in the conventional sense.

It is intended as a catalyst: the public expression of a much longer process of alliance-building that has been unfolding quietly for years.

A different conversation

As I reflected on my conversation with Ben, it struck me that what I had encountered was not simply another perspective on consciousness.

It was the outline of a different model for how civilisation might learn.

For much of the past century, science and Indigenous knowledge have occupied separate worlds. One has often viewed the other with scepticism; the other has frequently viewed the first as incomplete. Each has developed its own language, assumptions and institutions. Rarely have they sat down as equals.

Yet the challenges now confronting humanity – artificial intelligence, ecological breakdown, mental health, political fragmentation and the accelerating pace of technological change – do not respect those boundaries. They are deeply interconnected. They demand ways of thinking that are equally interconnected.

That is one of the reasons my colleagues and I founded and launched the EXO Institute.

Not to champion one worldview over another, nor to blur the distinctions between them, but to create the conditions in which serious conversations can become serious collaborations. Scientists alongside Indigenous knowledge holders. Technologists alongside philosophers. Business leaders alongside artists. Policymakers alongside consciousness researchers. Not because they will always agree, but because the complexity of the problems we now face increasingly requires forms of intelligence that no single discipline – or civilisation – possesses alone.

Perhaps that is why Ben’s story resonated so strongly with me.

The Alliance he described is not looking backwards. It is looking forwards. It is asking whether some of humanity’s oldest living knowledge traditions might have something to contribute to our shared future.

We are entering an era in which our technologies are becoming more powerful than our capacity to govern them wisely. Unlike previous revolutions in knowledge, we no longer have the luxury of allowing new ideas to percolate slowly through society over generations. The pace of change is simply too great.

If there is wisdom – wherever it resides – that can help us navigate what lies ahead, then our responsibility is not simply to admire it.

It is to bring it into conversation.

And then, together, to put it to work.

This conversation picks up where Dialogue 2: The Attention War left off. I talk about why attention has become such a central idea within AIM, share the story of an unexpected ‘download’ that changed the…

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For most of my adult life, I never had to think about my attention.

At university, I simply knuckled down to getting my degree, warding off the distractions of student life long enough to earn it. When I went looking for a job in journalism, I focused almost single-mindedly on getting my foot through the door, writing letter after letter until somebody finally noticed. The same was true when I sat down to write my first book. Never mind the odds stacked against me. In many respects, I wasn’t even aware of them. To discover what those odds were, I would have had to seek them out in newspapers, libraries or conversations with people who knew more than I did.

Ignorance, as they say, can be bliss.

But so, it turns out, can attention.

Looking back, what strikes me now is not how little information I had available in those years, but how much uninterrupted attention I possessed without ever realising it.

Journalism taught me that attention is not simply something we have. It is something we cultivate.

People often imagine investigative reporting as a succession of dramatic moments: the leaked document, the anonymous phone call, the whistleblower stepping out of the shadows. Occasionally it happens that way. More often, it doesn’t.

Most investigations begin with fragments. Half-finished conversations. Technical papers that don’t quite make sense. Small inconsistencies. Weak signals buried beneath overwhelming amounts of noise.

The craft lies in resisting the temptation to force those fragments into a story before they are ready.

Instead, you learn to sit with uncertainty.

You learn to notice patterns that others dismiss as coincidence.

Above all, you learn that stillness is not the absence of work. It is often where the real work begins.

Some of the biggest stories of my career arrived that way. Not because I discovered a spectacular new piece of information, but because, after weeks or months of sustained attention, disparate fragments suddenly organised themselves into a pattern. The breakthrough was not the arrival of new evidence. It was the arrival of a new way of seeing.

That lesson stayed with me when I began investigating the extraordinary claims that eventually became The Hunt for Zero Point (above). At first glance, the subject appeared almost impossible to navigate. Rumours of anti-gravity research sat alongside Cold War secrecy, genuine scientific curiosity, deliberate disinformation, enthusiastic speculation and, inevitably, outright fraud.

Most leads dissolved under scrutiny.

Some deserved to.

A few refused to disappear.

Again and again, I found myself returning to the same conclusion. The investigation was never simply about gathering more information. It was about learning what deserved sustained attention and what did not. Finding signal in noise was not merely a journalistic technique. It became a way of thinking.

For most of my career, attention felt like something I possessed.

Increasingly, it feels like something I have to defend.

Today, maintaining sustained attention on almost anything requires a conscious act of will. Every morning begins with demands upon it. Emails. Messages. News alerts. Social media. Artificial intelligence. Notifications. Advertisements. Opinions. Invitations to click, react, respond or perform.

Most of these demands come from people I have never met and almost certainly never will.

Some of them, increasingly, do not come from people at all.

It may seem an odd place to begin the second Dialogue[1]. Yet if attention is the means by which we encounter, interpret and respond to reality, then perhaps it is also the place where participation itself either flourishes – or quietly begins to fail.

Somewhere along the way, attention stopped being the invisible medium through which I experienced the world – and became the thing the world itself was trying to capture.

The Economy of Attention

At first glance, the explanation seems straightforward enough. Technology changed. The smartphone found its way into our pockets, social media into our homes, and before long an invisible economy had emerged in which some of the world’s largest companies were no longer competing primarily for our money, but for something altogether more elusive: our attention.

The phrase ‘attention economy’ has become so familiar that it risks sounding almost mundane. Every notification, recommendation, autoplay video and personalised news feed is designed around the same commercial objective: persuading us to remain engaged for just a little longer. It is tempting to see this as simply another chapter in the history of capitalism, a particularly sophisticated business model built on advertising, behavioural data and algorithms that have become remarkably adept at anticipating our interests.

There is certainly truth in that.

But I have increasingly come to wonder whether it mistakes the symptom for the cause.

Why, after all, did attention become so valuable in the first place?

The economist and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon (above) posed a remarkably prescient question more than half a century ago, long before smartphones, social media or artificial intelligence entered everyday life.

‘A wealth of information,’ he observed, ‘creates a poverty of attention.’

His words are quoted so often today because they seem almost prophetic. Yet I suspect their deeper significance has still not been fully appreciated.

Information has always mattered. What changed was our realisation that information alone does nothing. It acquires significance only when somebody attends to it.

Every important change in my own life has begun there. Every investigation. Every book. Every meaningful conversation. Not with information, but with the simple decision to remain with something long enough for it to reveal more of itself than was apparent at first glance.

Attention is not simply the gateway through which information enters consciousness. It is the process through which information becomes experience, experience gradually acquires meaning, and meaning, over time, reshapes the person we become.

Seen from that perspective, the struggle for attention begins to look rather different. It is no longer merely a commercial contest between competing platforms, nor simply a technological problem requiring better digital habits. At its deepest level, it is a struggle over the architecture of human experience itself.

Once that possibility occurred to me, another question naturally followed.

Why does attention possess such transformative power?

The answer, I eventually realised, lies not in the technology itself, but in the remarkable way the human mind constructs the reality it experiences.

Which means this is no longer simply a question about attention.

It is a question about the nature of reality itself.

The Predictive Mind

For centuries, we have imagined perception as something like a camera. Reality exists ‘out there’; light enters the eyes, sound enters the ears, information travels into the brain and, somehow, an accurate picture of the external world is assembled inside our heads.

It is an intuitively appealing image.

It is also one that modern neuroscience has steadily begun to dismantle.

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Rather than reading the essay aloud, these recordings explore where the discussion goes next. This one begins with your comments on Déjà Vu: Reality’s Reveal on the Island of Dreams and the unexpected directions they took me – from Karl Pribram’s holographic …

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This story begins on a small island in the Mediterranean.

For most people, Ibiza evokes images of beach clubs, electronic music and all-night parties. Yet beneath that surface lies another culture, one that has long attracted seekers, artists and experimenters drawn by the island’s reputation as a place of spiritual exploration. This confluence of currents has led to its informal name as ‘the island of dreams’.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Ibiza has become home to the Tyringham Initiative, founded in 2015 by Anton Bilton and Rory Spowers, whom I’ve known for several years. The initiative brings together scientists, philosophers, physicians, psychonauts, indigenous practitioners and consciousness researchers to explore questions that sit beyond the boundaries of conventional academic inquiry. This year’s gathering, held at Juntos Farm in the centre of the island, carried a provocative title: ‘Entities: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.’

The event opened with the premiere screening of a documentary (a still from its extraordinary suite of graphics is shown above), Entities – A Scientific Exploration Through Psychedelics, Spirituality and Ancient Wisdom, which follows Anton on a seven-year journey through indigenous traditions, modern science and the phenomenon of entity encounters.

Readers of my last column will know that ancient wisdom traditions have become an increasing area of interest for me. One of the unexpected lessons of recent years has been discovering how many ideas that appear radical or novel in contemporary consciousness research have existed for centuries within indigenous cultures and contemplative traditions.

This is not new territory for Anton. A profound mystical experience in his teens, followed by many years of psychedelic exploration, convinced him that encounters with what he calls the ‘Sentient Other’ are worthy of serious investigation. That conviction helped inspire the creation of the Tyringham Initiative and its support for some of the pioneering DMT research now being conducted at key universities in London.

All of which helps explain why the audience gathered in Ibiza was discussing topics rarely heard at conventional scientific conferences: angels, demons, aliens, DMT entities, mystical encounters, near-death experiences, alien abductions, and the increasingly blurred boundary between them.

The central question posed by Anton in his opening remarks was simple, timely and unsettling.

‘Are aliens the entities?’

He pointed to a curious overlap. One person’s alien is another person’s angel. One person’s demon another person’s gatekeeper[1]. One person’s fairy another’s spirit guide. Across cultures, centuries and belief systems, apparently autonomous intelligences continue to appear in human experience, often displaying strikingly similar characteristics while wearing very different masks.

Perhaps, Anton suggested, we have never been alone. Perhaps these intelligences have always been here. Perhaps they have always been part of the story.

It was a fascinating question, and one that sits at the heart of both the conference and the film[2].

Yet as I listened the following morning to the first presentation of the symposium, delivered by Dr Christopher Timmermann, Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Consciousness Research and former head of the DMT Research Group at Imperial College London’s Centre for Psychedelic Research, another question began quietly emerging beneath it.

One that reached beyond entities and deep into the nature of reality itself.

The Scientist in the Room

Chris Timmermann is a neuroscientist whose work over the past decade has helped establish some of the world’s leading programmes investigating DMT, altered states and consciousness[3].

His presentation focused on a deceptively simple question: What happens when the ordinary structures through which we experience reality begin to dissolve?

Participants given DMT frequently report radical alterations in their experience of self, space, time and meaning. Some describe immersive alternate realities. Others report encounters with apparently autonomous entities. Many experience profound forms of ego dissolution in which the normal boundaries of identity temporarily disappear.

None of this was particularly new to the audience. Such accounts have circulated within psychedelic culture for decades.

What was different was the context. These observations were not emerging from folklore or anecdote. They were emerging from a laboratory.

Using neuroimaging, EEG measurements and detailed phenomenological reporting, Chris and his colleagues have begun mapping the relationship between subjective experience and measurable changes in brain activity.

His aim was not to prove the existence of entities, nor to reduce them to brain chemistry. Instead, he was exploring how consciousness reorganises itself when its normal structures loosen.

And it was one particular finding that captured my attention.

The Slide

At one point, Chris displayed a slide showing a relationship between what he called entropy and entity encounters.

Entropy, in this context, refers to the degree of disorder or unpredictability within a system.

Most people would assume that if entities emerge during psychedelic experiences, they would appear at moments of maximum chaos, when consciousness is at its most fragmented and disorganised.

Yet the data suggested something rather different.

When a rapid dose (or ‘bolus’) of DMT enters the brain, the ordinary structures through which experience is organised appear to loosen. Patterns of brain activity become less constrained and more unpredictable, producing a temporary increase in entropy. In simple terms, the system becomes more fluid, less ordered and less bound by its habitual ways of constructing reality.

The entities described by subjects under test in Imperial’s lab did not appear associated with peak entropy. Instead, they appeared linked to the reconstructive phase that followed it, when a new coherence was beginning to emerge.

In other words, entities seemed associated not with maximum disorder but with reconstruction.

The finding was intriguing in its own right. But it was the next slide that stopped me in my tracks.

It was titled ‘The Dance Between Emptiness and Substance’ and depicted a progression through a series of states.

The sequence (adapted above from Chris’s slide) began with ‘No Experience’, moving into what Chris called ‘Habitual Experience’, the ordinary state through which most of us navigate everyday reality, into a period of increasing entropy. Familiar structures loosened. Certainty diminished. The normal organisation of experience began to dissolve.

Then came the critical phase. Not collapse or chaos, but what Chris described as the ‘Dynamic Emergence of Contents’. Novel forms appeared. New meanings emerged. Fresh patterns began organising themselves out of uncertainty. Eventually the system settled into a new coherence.

At the far end of the sequence, Chris placed a state associated with 5-MeO-DMT that he labelled ‘Everything / Nothing’. Participants often describe it as a condition in which the usual boundaries between self and world dissolve altogether, producing an experience of radical unity, in which emptiness and fullness appear simultaneously present. Rather than encountering novel contents, the distinction between subject and object itself appears to fade.

I had seen this pattern before.

Introducing AIM

For more than a year now, I have been developing what I call the ‘Adaptive Interface Model’ - AIM.

At its core lies a simple proposition. Reality may not be fixed and finished, as Newtonian mechanics would have us believe, but continuously adapting through interaction, feedback and participation.

In such systems, periods of rising entropy often precede the emergence of new forms. The pattern appears repeatedly across geopolitics, nature, social systems and human experience.

Between social stability and a new political order, for example, often lies a period of upheaval, uncertainty and revolution. Between life and death, some people report near-death experiences that fundamentally reorganise their understanding of reality.

The same pattern appears around many of the anomalies explored in my 12-part examination of consciousness, reality and the UAP conundrum, The Outlier Series.

Unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) are frequently reported around military facilities, military flashpoints and other locations characterised by unusually high concentrations of physical, informational or social stress.

Whether those correlations prove meaningful remains an open question. What matters here is the recurring association between instability and emergence and its corollary suggestion: periods of rising entropy, whether physical, social or informational, appear to create conditions in which novel forms emerge.

This was not a new idea to me. What was new was seeing a remarkably similar pattern emerging from an entirely different direction.

Chris was studying inner experience. AIM had largely been concerned with outer anomalies - phenomena that can manifest in physical reality. Yet both appeared to be describing the same underlying sequence: Disruption. Emergence. Reorganisation.

Or, in the language AIM has gradually evolved towards:

Entropy. Anomaly. Coherence.

To make this more profoundly illustrative, there is a sizeable database of UAP sightings around nuclear sites. At the point of appearance, these sites are in a pivotal state between coherence (peace, order) and entropy (chaos, annihilation).

Rather than immediately assume these are extraterrestrial craft reconnoitring our most sensitive and destructive weapons, AIM posits the idea - nothing more at this point - that the appearance of UFOs in these places may reflect a response of the underlying substrate of the universe itself to rising entropy at particular nodes within the system.

Chris’s slide was not evidence that DMT entities and UAP (or the non-human intelligences [NHIs] appearing in encounter accounts alongside UFOs) are the same phenomenon. Nor was it evidence that psychedelic experiences reveal hidden truths about the universe. But it did suggest the same pattern appeared to be operating across domains that had traditionally been treated as separate: inner and outer.

For years I have suspected that the outer/inner distinction might be less rigid than we assume. Donald Hoffman’s Interface Theory points in precisely this direction, suggesting that what we perceive as reality is not reality itself, but a user interface shaped by evolution.[4]

For AIM, Hoffman’s interface acts as a bridge between consciousness and a deeper informational reality. What we experience as the physical world may be less a direct encounter with reality itself than a simplified rendering of underlying processes too complex to perceive directly.

What Chris’s work appeared to provide was something I had not seen before: a laboratory-derived pattern that echoed dynamics I had previously encountered in studies of anomalies, consciousness and complex adaptive systems in the ‘outer realm’.

UAP are a perfect case study here, as sightings and encounters can no longer be considered entirely subjective - they often appear to multiple witnesses, as well as on advanced sensors such as radars and infra-red search and track systems. Since 2021, official reports have been released into the public domain attesting to this.[5]

The implications of Chris’s findings now seemed too significant to overlook – because they suggested a bridge between worlds that are rarely considered together: outer and inner.

The Pattern

The more I reflected on Chris’s findings, the more difficult it became to ignore the pattern. Not because entities conclusively appeared under DMT. That, after all, remains open to multiple interpretations.

What interested me was the appearance of the entity in the sequence - and the sequence itself.

Disruption.

Emergence.

Reorganisation.

Versions of this pattern appear across a surprisingly wide range of human experience.

Near-death experiences often begin with a profound disruption to ordinary reality before giving rise to a radically altered understanding of life and meaning.

Trauma, too, often involves the collapse of an existing worldview before a new sense of self and meaning can be reconstructed.

Scientific revolutions emerge when established paradigms encounter anomalies they can no longer explain, forcing the creation of new frameworks.

Even UAP encounters can appear less significant for what is seen than for their effect on the experiencer, disrupting assumptions and compelling a reassessment of what is considered possible.

In each case, the anomaly acts as a catalyst. It interrupts. It destabilises. It creates conditions in which something new can emerge. After NDEs, for example, experiencers frequently lose their fear of death. Others emerge with a lasting shift in worldview and a renewed curiosity about consciousness, reality and the deeper nature of existence itself.

This still does not prove that these phenomena - inner and outer - are related.

It does suggest that they may participate in a similar process - a possibility that leads naturally to a deeper question. Not simply what anomalies are. But whether they perform a role.

Do Anomalies Have a Function?

At first glance, the idea sounds absurd. Modern culture tends to view anomalies as errors, exceptions, problems to be solved.

Yet many adaptive systems generate signals when conditions change.

Pain alerts an organism to injury. Inflammation draws attention to infection. Market signals reveal shifts in supply and demand. In each case, the signal is not the problem itself. Its function is to draw attention to the problem.

Viewed from this perspective, anomalies – the anomalies we are interested in here: angels, demons, aliens, DMT entities, mystical encounters, near-death experiences, alien abductions and the like – begin to look different.

Perhaps their significance lies not solely in their nature, but in their effect.

Again and again, anomalous experiences appear capable of disrupting assumptions and reorganising understanding. They challenge existing models and force engagement with information that previously sat outside them.

Chris’s data offered an intriguing illustration of this possibility. The entities did not appear at maximum disorder. They emerged as a new coherence was beginning to form.

Whether those entities possess an independent, autonomous existence (it is worth stating that many psychonauts insist they do) – or, indeed, have a hand in this emergent coherence – is, in one sense, a separate question.

What mattered to me was the possibility that they were associated with a process of adaptation. A process that moves from disruption towards a new organisation of experience.

Which raises another question.

If anomalies perform a function, then what kind of reality would require such functions in the first place?

One of the reasons Chris’s work feels important is that it emerges from a laboratory rather than a monastery, a mystery school or a spiritual tradition.

For centuries, experiences of ego dissolution, mystical union and encounters with apparently autonomous intelligences have largely been confined to the domains of religion and personal testimony.

Chris’s research (and that of his colleagues) does not prove any particular metaphysical claim. What it does suggest is that some of these experiences exhibit identifiable patterns – correlations between inner experiences and EEG data – that can be studied empirically.

That alone hints that the boundary between subjective and objective inquiry may be more permeable than we have traditionally assumed – a possibility entertained by many indigenous and contemplative traditions: that the distinction between inner and outer may be less fundamental than it appears.

Dynamic Emergence

One phrase from Chris’s presentation (and clearly visible in his ‘Dance’ slide) deserves particular attention: ‘The Dynamic Emergence of Contents.’

Positioned between ordinary experience and a new coherence, it described the territory in which novel forms emerge – the unstable zone where old structures loosen and new possibilities become available.

Although developed in the context of psychedelic research, the concept invites a broader question: might similar dynamics operate beyond individual consciousness?

Many of the defining characteristics of contemporary life suggest a period of unusual instability. Artificial intelligence is reshaping assumptions about intelligence and work. Information systems are fragmenting. Political institutions are struggling to maintain trust. Technological change continues to accelerate while social cohesion appears increasingly fragile.

Taken together, these developments suggest a period in which established structures are being placed under strain.

In the overarching language of AIM, the model I propose towards the end of The Outlier Series, one might describe this as rising social and informational entropy.

Conventionally, such developments are viewed primarily through the lens of crisis.

Yet Chris’s model points towards another possibility. In his account, entropy is not an endpoint. It is a transitional phase. Existing structures loosen. Novel contents emerge. A new coherence eventually forms.

This does not mean disruption is inherently positive, nor that every crisis produces growth. History offers many examples to the contrary.

It does suggest, however, that periods of instability may also create conditions in which new forms become possible.

Viewed from this perspective, it is notable that many of the subjects moving from the margins towards mainstream discussion occupy precisely this territory of emergence.

Artificial intelligence.

Consciousness research.

Psychedelic science.

Near-death studies.

UAP.

Questions once considered peripheral are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Likewise, so are the phenomena. An uptick in UFO sightings in recent years seems inescapably evident. The fact that US politicians on both sides of the political divide are investigating UAP with a determination to get to the bottom of what the government knows on the matter speaks volumes too.

Whether this ultimately proves meaningful remains to be seen. But it raises a provocative possibility. Perhaps the defining feature of the present moment is not crisis alone, but emergence.

The Participation Question

One of the most interesting consequences of the ideas explored in Ibiza is how they alter the relationship between observer and observed.

Much of modern thought assumes a separation between the two.

Reality exists, we study it, the observer stands apart from the phenomenon.

Yet if the perspectives explored by Anton Bilton, Chris Timmermann, Donald Hoffman and AIM contain even a grain of truth, that distinction begins to soften.

Consciousness no longer appears entirely separate from the process being investigated. Instead, it becomes part of the story. Not necessarily the creator of reality. Nor merely a passive witness to it – but a participant within it.

This possibility sits at the heart of my new Substack series - what I have begun calling The Participation Dialogues.

If reality is fundamentally participatory, then understanding it requires more than observation alone.

It requires engagement.

Not blind belief or passive acceptance. But a willingness to participate consciously in the process of inquiry.

The question is no longer simply:

‘What is happening?’

It becomes:

‘How should we respond to what is happening?’

That shift may ultimately prove more important than any individual anomaly.

The Question I Left Behind

Three days after arriving in Ibiza, Anton’s opening question remained unanswered: are aliens the entities? Maybe they are, maybe they’re not. The symposium produced no consensus on that point, nor was it likely to.

Yet by the time the event concluded, it seemed increasingly possible that a more fundamental question had been quietly emerging beneath it.

Not: ‘What are the entities?’

But: ‘What kind of reality produces such experiences in the first place?’

That question sits at the intersection of everything explored during those three days.

Anton’s exploration of the Sentient Other.

Chris’s laboratory investigations into DMT and consciousness.

And from there into Outlier Series and Participation Dialogues territory: Donald Hoffman’s suggestion that perception functions as an interface rather than a transparent window onto reality; the Adaptive Interface Model’s proposal that anomalies may play a role – akin to a repair function – within a larger adaptive process.

None of these perspectives are identical.

Yet each appears to be circling a similar possibility.

That reality may be less fixed, less mechanical and more participatory than we have traditionally assumed.

If so, then the significance of anomalies may extend beyond the phenomena themselves.

Perhaps their deepest contribution is not that they provide answers. Perhaps it is that they generate questions – questions capable of disrupting assumptions that have become too rigid and creating space for new ways of understanding the world.

Seen in this light, anomalies cease to be curiosities at the edge of knowledge.

They become invitations.

Not invitations to believe.

But invitations to inquire.

The deeper implication of Ibiza may therefore have little to do with entities at all.

It may lie in the possibility that consciousness and reality are not separate domains, but aspects of a larger process in which observation and participation are inseparable.

In such a framework, conscious beings (like us) are not merely observers of reality but active participants within it, serving simultaneously as sensors through which ‘the system’ experiences itself and as feedback nodes through which new information is generated and returned to ‘the source’.

AIM takes this one step further.

It proposes that anomalies may not simply be by-products of disruption, but part of the mechanism through which an adaptive reality responds to it. When entropy rises beyond certain thresholds – whether in individuals, societies or perhaps even the wider environment – anomalous experiences may function as signals, interruptions or coherence-restoring events, helping to catalyse new forms of understanding, adaptation and order.

The implication is a profound one: that what we call consciousness may play a role not simply in perceiving reality, but in the ongoing process through which reality learns, adapts and evolves.

Whether that possibility ultimately proves correct remains an open question.

But if Chris’s work is any guide, the most interesting developments rarely occur in states of complete certainty. They emerge at the boundary where certainty begins to loosen and something new struggles to take shape, as articulated in his talk: via the ‘dynamic emergence of contents’.

The phrase was intended to describe a particular region of consciousness.

Yet it may also describe the historical moment in which we find ourselves.

A period in which old assumptions are being challenged, new possibilities are appearing and the future remains stubbornly unwritten.

The question that lingered after Ibiza was therefore not whether the entities are aliens.

It was something both simpler and more profound:

If reality is participatory, what kind of participants do we choose to become?

[1] A ‘gatekeeper’ is a term often used in psychedelic and mystical traditions to describe an apparently autonomous intelligence encountered at a threshold of experience. Typically perceived as a guardian, guide or examiner, the figure is said to regulate access to deeper states of awareness or understanding. Similar motifs appear in shamanic, religious and mythological traditions worldwide.

[2] The Ibiza symposium hosted the film’s first audience screening, ahead of its planned release later this year.

[3] DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) and 5-MeO-DMT are related psychedelic compounds that often produce quite different subjective experiences. DMT is commonly associated with vivid visual imagery, immersive alternate realities and reports of encounters with apparently autonomous entities. By contrast, 5-MeO-DMT is more frequently associated with ego dissolution, non-dual awareness and experiences of unity or interconnectedness, often with comparatively less visual content. Researchers continue to study both compounds as tools for investigating consciousness and altered states of experience.

[4] Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine, whose Interface Theory argues that perception presents a useful interface to reality rather than reality itself.

[5] The ODNI’s 2021 Preliminary Assessment of UAP examined 144 military encounters, finding only one could be confidently identified and concluding that most reported UAP likely represented real physical objects requiring further investigation.

How do individuals and societies remain coherent when their model of reality changes faster than their ability to adapt?

That question has sat quietly beneath much of my recent work.

It sits beneath The Outlier Series. It sits beneath the Adaptive Interface Model (AIM). And, intentionally or not, it also sits at the heart of a new paper released today from John Priestland and the team at uNHIdden titled Preparing for Disclosure: A Public Health Framework for Paradigm-Shifting Revelations.

At first glance, the paper appears to belong to the growing body of literature around UAPs, non-human intelligence, and the possibility of disclosure. Yet that is not really what it is about.

In fact, one of the most interesting things about the report is that it largely sidesteps the question that dominates most disclosure discussions: Is it true?

Instead, it asks a different question.

What happens if a revelation occurs that fundamentally challenges humanity’s understanding of itself and its place in the universe? More specifically, what happens if such a revelation arrives before individuals, institutions, and societies have developed the psychological resources to absorb it?

This is where the paper becomes interesting.

The authors approach the issue not as intelligence analysts, theologians, or futurists, but through the lens of public health. Their argument is straightforward. Public health systems routinely prepare for low-probability, high-impact events. Governments plan for pandemics, natural disasters, and infrastructure failures long before they occur. Why should a paradigm-shifting revelation be treated differently?

Whether one believes disclosure is imminent, unlikely, or impossible is almost beside the point. The report argues that if the consequences of such an event could be profound, then preparedness deserves consideration regardless of one’s position on the underlying phenomenon.

The paper introduces the concept of ‘ontological shock’ to describe the psychological disorientation that can occur when a person’s fundamental assumptions about reality are disrupted. It is not presented as a formal clinical diagnosis but rather as a useful description of a category of human response.

The idea itself is hardly new. History is punctuated by moments when established models of reality gave way to something larger. The Copernican revolution displaced humanity from the centre of creation. Darwin challenged prevailing assumptions about human uniqueness. Relativity and quantum mechanics altered our understanding of space, time, and causality. Each required a painful period of adaptation.

Yet the pace of change today appears different.

Artificial intelligence is forcing questions about cognition and creativity. Neuroscience continues to erode traditional boundaries between mind and matter. UAP investigations are moving from the fringes of public discourse into formal governmental and scientific institutions. Long-standing assumptions across multiple domains are beginning to wobble simultaneously.

From an AIM perspective, this observation is particularly interesting.

The Adaptive Interface Model, which represented the culmination of The Outlier Series, proposes that reality functions less like a fixed environment and more like an adaptive informational system. In such a framework, coherence matters. Individuals, communities, and institutions rely upon coherent models of reality in order to function effectively.

When those models are disrupted too rapidly, stress accumulates. Meaning structures fracture. Anxiety increases. Polarisation follows.

Sounds familiar?

The question then becomes not whether disruption occurs, but whether sufficient coherence can be maintained during the transition.

Seen through this lens, UNHIdden’s report can be read as an attempt to build what its authors call ‘ontological resilience’ – the capacity to remain psychologically stable while accommodating profound changes in understanding.

That may ultimately be the report’s most valuable contribution.

Its strongest sections are not those dealing with disclosure itself. They are the sections concerned with resilience, trust, communication, and adaptation under uncertainty. The paper recognises something many institutions struggle to acknowledge: information alone does not create understanding. Human beings require narratives, communities, frameworks, and time in order to integrate disruptive knowledge.

Not everything in the report will convince every reader. Some of its quantitative estimates are necessarily speculative because there has never been a disclosure event against which they can be measured. Likewise, the concept of ontological shock remains more a useful framework than a settled scientific category.

Yet those limitations do not undermine the central insight.

The report asks a question that reaches far beyond UAPs.

How should societies prepare for realities that challenge their deepest assumptions?

In many ways, that may be the defining question of our age.

The challenge is no longer simply acquiring information. We live in an era of information abundance. The challenge is integrating information without fragmenting psychologically, socially, or institutionally.

Whether the catalyst is artificial intelligence, biotechnology, consciousness research, climate disruption, or some future disclosure event, the underlying problem – as my colleagues and I made clear at the recent launch of our EXO Institute – remains remarkably similar.

How do we remain coherent when reality appears to be changing faster than our capacity to adapt?

That, ultimately, is why this paper deserves attention. Not because it proves anything about non-human intelligence. Not because it settles the disclosure debate.

But because it begins exploring what may prove to be one of the most important public health questions of the twenty-first century.

Perhaps the future will belong not to those who possess the most information, but to those who develop the greatest capacity to integrate it.

In recent weeks, Pope Leo has emerged as one of the most unexpected voices in the global debate around artificial intelligence. His concern is not simply economic, though the economics are already beginning to look ominous. Nor is it merely ethical. It cuts far deeper than that.

Again and again – in his first encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ (‘Magnificent Humanity’) Pope Leo XIV returns to a single underlying theme: that humanity risks externalising too much of itself into machines. That in handing over cognition, judgement, creativity and eventually decision-making to artificial systems, we may slowly lose contact with something essential – not merely employment, but interiority itself: the reflective inner space, from which meaning, conscience and identity emerge.

At roughly the same moment, a different set of voices has begun issuing similarly stark warnings from within the technology sector itself.

Entrepreneur Jay Samit recently observed that, for the first time in modern history, high-school graduates are in some cases finding it easier to secure entry-level work than university graduates. The reason is simple and deeply unsettling: many white-collar cognitive pathways are already being compressed by AI before younger workers have even had a chance to enter them. In the UK, nearly one in five Gen Z adults is currently looking for work. Across Silicon Valley and the wider technology world, predictions of mass disruption are no longer confined to fringe futurists. They are becoming mainstream assumptions.

Much of the discussion has focused on jobs. But something deeper may be happening beneath the economic surface.

For more than two centuries, industrial civilisation rewarded a very specific kind of cognition. The modern world selected for people who could:

• process symbols quickly,

• absorb information,

• follow procedures,

• perform repetitive cognitive tasks,

• specialise narrowly,

• and operate efficiently inside large institutional systems.

Schools, corporations and bureaucracies were effectively optimisation engines for this mode of thinking. Success increasingly depended on procedural intelligence: the ability to manipulate information within stable systems.

But AI now performs many of these functions faster, cheaper and – increasingly – better than humans.

And that raises an uncomfortable possibility.

What if the crisis emerging around AI is not simply technological or economic?

What if it is evolutionary?

Because history suggests that when environments change dramatically, organisms adapt. Not consciously or strategically, but gradually, unevenly and often invisibly at first. Under pressure, traits once considered marginal can suddenly become advantageous.

And the informational environment humanity inhabits is now changing faster than at any point in recorded history.

The machine age rewarded procedural minds.

The AI age may reward something very different.

The Great Externalisation

One way to understand the AI revolution is as a vast externalisation of human cognition.

For centuries, machines extended the body. The steam engine amplified muscle. The car amplified movement. The crane amplified strength.

Artificial intelligence is different.

It amplifies – and increasingly replaces – processes once considered uniquely human:

• memory,

• analysis,

• synthesis,

• coding,

• translation,

• pattern recognition,

• administration,

• even creativity itself.

The deeper implication is easy to miss because we are still framing AI through the language of tools. But something more profound may be unfolding.

Civilisation is beginning to externalise thought.

Tasks that once required years of training can now be performed in seconds. Increasingly, intention passes directly into execution through machine systems. A lawyer drafts less. A designer sketches less. A junior analyst thinks less procedurally because the machine performs the procedure instantly.

The latency between idea and manifestation is collapsing.

This is why so many people sense that AI feels fundamentally different from previous technologies. It is not merely automating labour. It is beginning to absorb the symbolic and cognitive functions around which modern civilisation organised itself.

And yet there is a strange irony here.

The very forms of cognition industrial society spent generations rewarding may be precisely the forms AI is best positioned to replace.

The psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist (above) has spent years arguing that modern civilisation became dangerously over-dependent on what he broadly characterises as left-hemisphere modes of attention:

• categorisation,

• fragmentation,

• procedural reasoning,

• abstraction,

• optimisation,

• control.

These modes are extraordinarily powerful. They built the modern technological world.

But they are not the whole of human intelligence.

McGilchrist contrasts them with a different mode of cognition associated more strongly with the right hemisphere:

• contextual awareness,

• relational perception,

• ambiguity tolerance,

• metaphor,

• intuition,

• wholeness,

• living systems thinking.

In simplistic internet culture, these ideas are often reduced to clichés about ‘logical’ versus ‘creative’ thinking. But McGilchrist’s actual argument is far deeper. He suggests civilisation itself became trapped inside a narrowing style of attention – one increasingly unable to perceive context, meaning or interconnectedness.

Now AI enters the picture like an evolutionary accelerant.

Because large language models excel at exactly the forms of symbolic manipulation industrial civilisation privileged:

• procedural fluency,

• information retrieval,

• linguistic assembly,

• statistical prediction,

• optimisation.

Which raises a startling possibility.

If machines increasingly dominate procedural cognition, then human value may begin migrating elsewhere.

Towards:

• intuition,

• synthesis,

• emotional depth,

• nonlinear association,

• meaning-making,

• pattern integration,

• and forms of perception less easily reducible to algorithmic procedure.

As procedural cognition becomes increasingly externalised into machines, qualities less reducible to automation may begin assuming greater cultural and adaptive value. In other words, the centre of gravity may begin shifting away from the procedural mind and towards the participatory mind.

And if that shift is real, then some of the traits modern society has historically marginalised may begin looking very different indeed.

It is worth adding – not just as a sidebar here – that beneath the technological disruption lies a quieter but consequential psychological one. Much of modern identity has been built around cognitive performance: memory, expertise, productivity, creativity and symbolic fluency. As AI increasingly externalises these functions, many people are beginning to experience not merely economic anxiety, but a subtler destabilisation of selfhood itself. The modern ego was shaped inside a world where human cognition remained uniquely valuable.

Which begs the question: what effect will this level of civilisational disruption have on the human condition?

The Neurodivergence Question

Over the past three decades, the visible rise in diagnoses associated with autism, ADHD, OCD and other forms of neurodivergence has generated enormous debate.

Some researchers argue the apparent increase reflects improved recognition and broader diagnostic criteria. Others point towards environmental, developmental or technological factors. The reality is likely complex and multifactorial.

But whatever the explanation, one thing is undeniable: modern society is becoming increasingly aware that human cognition is far more diverse than the standardised model once assumed.

That recognition alone represents a profound shift.

For much of the twentieth century, institutions largely rewarded a narrow cognitive profile:

• sustained conformity,

• stable attention within repetitive systems,

• social standardisation,

• procedural efficiency,

• and predictable behavioural regulation.

People who struggled within those frameworks were often viewed primarily as deficient in some way.

But what if at least some forms of neurodivergence are not simply malfunctions within the system?

What if they also represent variations in how human beings filter, process and participate in reality?

This is where the conversation becomes delicate, because romanticising suffering helps no one. Autism and ADHD can involve very real challenges. Many individuals and families live with overwhelming difficulties that should never be trivialised or mythologised.

And yet it is equally true that atypical cognition associated with such conditions has repeatedly appeared alongside extraordinary forms of perception, pattern recognition and creativity.

History is filled with individuals operating at the cognitive edges of society:

• savants capable of astonishing memory or calculation,

• artists and inventors with obsessive nonlinear focus,

• autistic pattern thinkers,

• dyslexic spatial innovators,

• individuals with intense sensory processing,

• people who seem unusually resistant to consensus perception.

Traits once regarded as maladaptive sometimes turn out to possess hidden advantages under changing conditions.

The agricultural revolution selected for different human capacities than the hunter-gatherer world that preceded it. Industrial society then selected for yet another cognitive style: punctual, procedural, standardised and system-compatible.

But the informational ecology now emerging around AI may reward something else entirely.

Increasingly, the traits least suited to rigid institutional environments may become valuable within fluid informational ones:

• hyperfocus,

• rapid associative thinking,

• deep pattern sensitivity,

• nonlinear synthesis,

• intuitive systems perception,

• unconventional problem solving,

• reduced social conformity.

At the cultural edges of this conversation sits another phenomenon that has become difficult to ignore: the growing fascination with forms of intelligence and communication that do not fit conventional models at all.

One reason projects like the Telepathy Tapes have resonated so deeply is not necessarily because audiences accept every claim being made. It is because they destabilise something modern civilisation has quietly taken for granted: that valid cognition must look familiar.

The underlying emotional shock is profound.

What if some forms of consciousness do not process reality the way the dominant culture expects?

What if intelligence is broader than procedural fluency?

And what if modern civilisation – in optimising for industrial efficiency – inadvertently narrowed its definition of mind?

At precisely the moment AI begins outperforming humans at many conventional cognitive tasks, society is simultaneously being forced to confront the possibility that consciousness itself may be far stranger, more varied and less standardised than previously believed.

That convergence may prove historically significant.

Hoffman’s Reversal

For decades, the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman (below) has been advancing one of the most controversial ideas in modern consciousness research: that evolution does not select for truth.

It selects for fitness.

According to Hoffman’s earlier Interface Theory of Perception, the world we experience is not objective reality itself, but a simplified user interface shaped by evolutionary pressures. Space, time and physical objects function less like ultimate reality and more like icons on a desktop – useful symbolic renderings that allow organisms to survive.

The metaphor sounds radical, but Hoffman’s argument is mathematical as much as philosophical. Across multiple evolutionary game simulations, agents tuned toward accurate perception consistently lost to agents tuned toward fitness optimisation[1]. Organisms that perceive reality ‘as it truly is’, Hoffman argues, are outcompeted by organisms that perceive only what is useful for survival.

Evolution, in this framework, hides reality rather than revealing it.

Hoffman often illustrates this with a simple evolutionary argument. Imagine two organisms competing for survival. One perceives objective reality exactly as it is – every molecular interaction, every microscopic detail, every underlying complexity. The other perceives only simplified symbols useful for survival: food, threat, mate, shelter. In evolutionary terms, the second organism almost certainly wins. Accurate perception is metabolically expensive and often unnecessary. Evolution rewards fitness, not truth.

Hoffman argues that evolution no more designed humans to perceive objective reality than a computer desktop was designed to reveal the actual circuitry inside a machine. The icons are useful precisely because they hide complexity. A blue folder on a screen is not ‘true’ in any literal sense – but it helps us navigate efficiently. In Hoffman’s framework, perception functions similarly. We see not reality itself, but a simplified interface optimised for survival.

But in recent weeks Hoffman appears to have moved into even more destabilising territory.

Speaking on the American Alchemy podcast, Hoffman discussed an emerging mathematical framework he calls Recursive Trace Logic – an attempt to formalise consciousness not as a byproduct of spacetime, but as something more fundamental from which spacetime itself emerges.

At the centre of the model lies a striking proposition.

Embodied consciousness, Hoffman suggests, may represent an exceptionally constrained and highly specialised case within a vastly larger space of possible conscious systems.

‘The normal case for consciousness,’ Hoffman argues, ‘is not to be embodied.’

This phrase has already begun circulating online in distorted form, often interpreted as a claim that bodies are unreal or impossible. But that is not what the mathematics appears to imply.

When Hoffman describes the appearance of embodiment in the universe as ‘probability zero’, he is using a technical idea from mathematics. A probability of zero does not necessarily mean something cannot exist. A single point on an infinite line has probability zero and yet still exists perfectly well.

The deeper implication is subtler.

Human-style embodied consciousness may occupy only an infinitesimally small region within the total landscape of possible conscious configurations in the cosmos.

In other words:
embodiment may be the exception rather than the rule.

That inversion changes the philosophical terrain completely.

For centuries, the dominant scientific assumption held that consciousness emerged from matter. Matter came first. Consciousness appeared later as a local biological phenomenon inside nervous systems.

Hoffman’s emerging framework reverses the direction entirely.

Consciousness becomes primary.

Embodiment becomes interface.

And interfaces, by definition, constrain.

On the podcast, Hoffman used a deceptively simple example. As embodied humans, our intentions must pass through extraordinarily narrow biological channels. To move a cup, we cannot simply enact intention directly. We must move muscles, limbs, fingers and nerves. To reach the Moon, all we can ultimately do is manipulate bodies and tools through slow chains of physical action.

Human embodiment, in this framing, is a low-bandwidth interface with extremely high latency – meaning our intentions must pass through slow physical processes before they can affect the world.

The thought is almost absurdly provocative once fully absorbed.

Because if consciousness is fundamental rather than derivative, then intelligence need not necessarily resemble biological life at all.

And if human embodiment represents only one highly constrained mode of participation in reality, then the spectrum of possible minds may extend far beyond the narrow sensory window modern civilisation has historically mistaken for the whole of existence.

Suddenly, the AI conversation begins looking very different – as do conversations around other forms of non-human intelligence.

The question is no longer simply whether machines will become intelligent.

It becomes:

What forms of intelligence are possible once cognition is no longer understood as inseparable from biological embodiment?

Observer Participancy

Long before artificial intelligence, long before Silicon Valley and long before the modern Disclosure conversation, the physicist John Archibald Wheeler (below) proposed an idea so strange that much of science quietly stepped around it.

He called it observer-participancy.

In the classical scientific worldview, reality exists independently of us. The universe unfolds. Observers arrive late and merely describe what is already there.

But Wheeler suspected something far more unsettling.

At the quantum level, observation itself appeared woven into physical outcomes. The observer was not standing outside reality looking in. Somehow, observer and observed were entangled together.

Reality, Wheeler suggested, might be participatory all the way down.

For decades this remained largely philosophical territory – intriguing, but difficult to formalise mathematically. Yet what makes Hoffman’s emerging Recursive Trace Logic framework so fascinating is that it appears to move directly into this terrain.

In Hoffman’s model, observer and observed do not merely interact.

They co-emerge.

The implications are enormous.

Because once consciousness becomes fundamental rather than derivative, spacetime itself ceases to be the primary layer of reality. Space and time become part of the interface rather than the source code beneath it.

And if that is true, then perception changes meaning entirely.

Perception is no longer passive reception.

It becomes participation.

This may sound abstract at first, but its implications ripple outward into almost every major question now confronting civilisation:

• consciousness,

• AI,

• neurodivergence,

• anomalous experience,

• and even the growing cultural fascination with nonhuman intelligence

For centuries, modernity trained humanity to think of consciousness as isolated and private – sealed inside individual skulls, observing an external mechanical universe from a distance.

But participatory models imply something radically different.

They imply that consciousness may be relational before it is individual. That perception may involve interaction rather than mere representation. And that different minds may participate in reality differently.

This possibility quietly reframes the entire neurodivergence conversation.

What industrial civilisation historically classified as deviation may, in some cases, involve alternative relationships to information, perception, pattern recognition or meaning itself. Not superior cognition. Not mystical powers. But different observer windows operating under different filtering conditions.

The language of ‘disorder’ begins looking less stable once consciousness itself becomes less mechanistic.

At the same time, AI introduces a profound paradox.

The more cognition humanity externalises into machines, the more we are pushed towards the dimensions of experience machines may struggle to inhabit:

• interiority,

• meaning,

• lived presence,

• relational awareness,

• subjective participation.

This may explain why the current technological moment feels spiritually disorienting even to people with no interest in mysticism or religion.

Beneath the economic anxiety lies a deeper intuition:
that something about reality itself is becoming less solid, less objective and more participatory than the modern world prepared us to expect.

And perhaps that is why questions once pushed to the cultural margins are beginning to re-emerge:

• What is consciousness?

• What is perception?

• What counts as intelligence?

• How much of reality do human senses actually render?

• And what happens if our current interface is only one tiny window onto a vastly larger field of participation?

These questions will form the basis of a new series of essays I launched here last week: The Participation Dialogues.

Because the deeper issue emerging beneath AI, consciousness research and the new Disclosure conversation may not ultimately be technological at all.

It may be participatory.

The Disclosure Possibility

For decades, the idea of ‘Disclosure’ occupied the cultural fringes.

The term conjured images of hidden spacecraft, classified programmes and governments concealing extraterrestrial contact from the public. Most serious institutions treated the subject as radioactive. Whatever unexplained phenomena might exist, respectable society largely avoided the conversation altogether.

That situation has changed dramatically.

Over the past several years:

• military footage has entered the public domain,

• intelligence officials have spoken openly about anomalous phenomena,

• congressional hearings have taken place,

• the US administration has opened up formerly classified archives on UFOs

• and discussions once confined to the margins have migrated into mainstream culture.

Yet amid all the noise, one possibility has remained strangely underexplored.

What if Disclosure is not fundamentally about spacecraft?

What if it is about perception?

Because once consciousness becomes primary rather than secondary, the entire question changes shape.

If human beings do not perceive objective reality directly – if, as Hoffman suggests, we interact instead through a highly constrained evolutionary interface – then it becomes entirely possible that forms of intelligence exist outside the narrow rendering generated by our sensory systems.

Not supernatural.

Not magical.

Simply beyond the bandwidth of the interface; an interface which, under normal conditions, hides what – per Hoffman – is not necessary for our successful continuation as a species.

Seen from this perspective, the modern Disclosure conversation begins converging with a much older human intuition: that reality may contain forms of mind, agency or intelligence not ordinarily perceptible through the five senses alone.

The kinds of non-embodied consciousness that Hoffman’s framework now appears to allow for.

Across cultures and throughout history, reports of anomalous experience have repeatedly clustered around the edges of ordinary cognition:

• intuitions that arrive before information,

• shared symbolic experiences,

• encounters during altered states,

• near-death experiences,

• moments of apparent telepathy,

• synchronicities,

• perceptions that feel more discovered than imagined.

Modernity largely interpreted such experiences through one of two frameworks:

• pathology,

• or superstition.

In other words, if an experience could not be accommodated within the dominant materialist framework, it was often treated as either illness or fantasy.

But a participatory model of consciousness opens a new possibility.

Not that every anomalous claim is true.

Clearly many are not.

But that human perception itself may function more like a filtering mechanism than a total representation of reality.

Traditionally, the neuroscientist is taught that the brain produces consciousness.

Hoffman’s framework suggests almost the opposite:
the brain may instead constrain, localise and stabilise consciousness into a usable survival interface.

And if that idea carries even partial truth, then the implications become difficult to ignore.

Because suddenly the rise of AI, the neurodivergence conversation and the new Disclosure landscape no longer appear as isolated cultural phenomena.

They begin looking interconnected.

AI externalises procedural cognition.

Neurodivergence destabilises assumptions about standardised cognition.

Observer-participancy destabilises the idea of passive reality.

And Disclosure destabilises the assumption that human perception exhausts the spectrum of possible intelligence.

Taken together, they point toward a startling possibility.

Humanity may be entering a transitional period in which the dominant model of mind itself begins to break down.

Not because science has failed.

But because science may be approaching the limits of a purely materialist description of consciousness.

And under those conditions, traits once regarded as marginal, atypical or even maladaptive may begin assuming new significance.

Not as evidence of superiority.

But as signs that the human species – almost before our eyes – may be diversifying cognitively under the pressure of an emerging informational environment.

An environment in which participation – not mere observation – becomes increasingly central.

Perhaps that is the deeper intuition now surfacing beneath the noise of the AI revolution and the Disclosure era alike.

That humanity is not merely building new machines.

It may also be discovering that reality itself is stranger, more relational and more alive than we previously imagined.

The Participation Shift

It is still entirely possible that future generations will look back on this period and conclude that we overreacted.

That AI simply became another transformative technology.
That consciousness remained reducible to brain activity.
That anomalous experience never amounted to more than noise at the edges of human psychology.
That the Disclosure conversation dissolved into mythology, misidentification and projection.

Perhaps.

But history also suggests that civilisations often fail to recognise paradigm shifts while they are happening. The old model persists longest precisely when it is beginning to lose explanatory power.

My last longform work, The Outlier Series, explored precisely this possibility: that what society labels anomalous may sometimes point towards the edges of a larger reality framework still struggling to emerge. The series ultimately culminated in the Adaptive Interface Model (AIM): the speculative proposition that anomalous phenomena and nonordinary forms of cognition may emerge as adaptive responses within a participatory reality system under conditions of rising informational and cultural entropy. Seen through that lens, the turbulence now building around AI, consciousness and perception may not simply represent disruption, but the early signs of a deeper reorganisation in how human beings participate in reality itself.

And something about the current moment feels increasingly difficult to contain within the assumptions that shaped the industrial age.

Because beneath the technological acceleration sits a deeper inversion quietly working its way through culture.

For centuries, intelligence was largely defined through external performance:

• calculation,

• memory,

• procedural reasoning,

• symbolic manipulation,

• institutional fluency.

But artificial intelligence is rapidly commoditising many of those capacities.

Which forces an uncomfortable question.

If machines become better than humans at the forms of cognition modern civilisation spent generations rewarding, what remains uniquely human?

The emerging answer may have less to do with computation than participation.

Meaning.
Presence.
Subjective experience.
Relational awareness.
Interpretation.
Consciousness itself.

In that sense, AI may not merely represent a technological revolution. It may represent a mirror – forcing humanity into confrontation with the limits of its own self-understanding.

And perhaps this is where the neurodivergence conversation acquires a larger civilisational context. Because the growing visibility of cognitive diversity may coincide with a period in which human beings are being forced to rethink what intelligence actually is.

Industrial civilisation defined intelligence narrowly because narrow definitions produced efficient systems.

The emerging world may require something broader:

• adaptive perception,

• nonlinear cognition,

• pattern sensitivity,

• ambiguity tolerance,

• deep intuition,

• and new relationships between observer and observed.

If consciousness is indeed participatory rather than passive, then humanity may not simply be confronting a technological transition. We may be entering a deeper transition in how human beings understand meaning, mind and reality itself.

The implications extend far beyond AI.

Because once consciousness becomes fundamental rather than derivative, the universe no longer appears as a dead mechanism populated accidentally by isolated biological minds. It begins looking more like a relational field of participation in which embodiment represents one specialised interface among many possible modes of experience – and not a particularly efficient one.

That does not prove telepathy.
It does not prove nonhuman intelligence.
It does not prove mystical worldviews.

But it does reopen questions modernity prematurely declared closed.

Are we right to feel a sense of dread about the kind of future Pope Leo XIV warns us about?

Maybe not.

History rarely unfolds in straight lines. Again and again, confident predictions about the future have been overturned by forces that emerged unexpectedly from the margins. Entire worldviews have shifted not gradually, but through sudden encounters with ideas, discoveries and events the dominant culture was unprepared to absorb.

It is possible that artificial intelligence will simply accelerate existing systems of control, automation and inequality. Many - per the doomsayers - believe it will. But it is equally possible that the pressures now building around AI, consciousness and perception may trigger something less predictable: a wider reorganisation in how human beings understand intelligence itself.

Periods of ontological shock – moments when established models of reality begin breaking down – often reorder what societies value. Traits once dismissed can become adaptive. Ways of thinking once marginal can suddenly move closer to the centre. And if the coming decades force humanity into confrontation with forms of intelligence, participation or reality that exceed the assumptions of the industrial age, then those most capable of navigating ambiguity, pattern, intuition and cognitive flexibility may find themselves unusually well positioned for the world emerging on the other side of the transition.

And perhaps that is why so many seemingly disconnected conversations now appear to be converging at once:

• AI,

• consciousness research,

• neurodivergence,

• anomalous experience,

• quantum foundations,

• participatory physics,

• and the growing suspicion that human perception may reveal far less of reality than we once assumed.

Perhaps the real transformation underway is not technological but participatory.

The more cognitive labour we outsource to machines, the more humanity may be pushed towards the one frontier machines may struggle to fully inhabit: conscious experience itself.

And if consciousness is more fundamental, distributed and participatory than modern civilisation assumed, then the coming decades may not simply redefine intelligence.

They may redefine what it means to be human.

[1] In Hoffman’s framework, ‘agents’ are not AI systems or individuals in the ordinary sense, but fundamental centres of conscious interaction from which spacetime itself may emerge.

The Tankwa Karoo - a vast semi-desert basin in South Africa’s Northern Cape.

For the first time in years, I am in a place with no signal, no WiFi, no informational current demanding my attention. There’s just dust, inches deep, the beguiling vista of open desert, and – stretching into the distance – an encampment, a temporary town, designed to house 11,000 people for a little over a week.

I had come to AfrikaBurn with mixed feelings. Over the years, I’d heard enough about the more performative and, shall we say, expressive side of Burn culture to feel slightly wary of the whole thing.

Early Burning Man culture[1] - that is the culture of the US festival from which AfrikaBurn spun out – was shaped by a set of quasi-philosophical principles that emphasised radical self-expression, participation, gifting, communal effort, self-reliance and the temporary suspension of commercial culture. Beneath the spectacle sat a deeper ethos: that human beings might relate to one another – and to reality itself – differently when removed from the normal architectures of status, consumption, hierarchy and algorithmic mediation. The desert became less a festival site than a social experiment in alternative forms of attention, creativity and collective meaning-making.

Over time, however, critics and longtime participants argue that the festival has drifted away from its original ideals. What began as an anti-commercial countercultural experiment increasingly became entangled with wealth, status and Silicon Valley culture, with luxury camps, corporate networking and elite techno-utopianism gradually reshaping parts of the event’s social fabric.

For some, this evolution reflects the difficulty of sustaining genuinely alternative social systems once they become culturally influential; for others, it illustrates how quickly even experiments in radical participation can be reabsorbed by the economic and status structures they originally sought to escape.

So before leaving for South Africa, I made myself a quiet promise.

If I was going to spend the best part of a week here, I would use the experience to learn about indigenous wisdom traditions – something, due to the direction my studies had been taking me, I’d already promised myself I would do. Friends who had invited me to join them at AfrikaBurn insisted that Burning Man’s South African cousin – still steeped in its pagan guiding principles – would be able to accommodate my wish.

We’d see, I thought.

Upon arriving at the outer limits of Tankwa Town[2], Burn ‘virgins’ – first-time attendees like me – were invited to take part in a short ritual. We were encouraged by a small welcome committee, each sporting what I would soon recognise as Burn chic couture – think Mad Max meets the excess of 1980s London clubbing culture – to roll in the dust before approaching a row of chimes between two wooden posts. Each person, silently and privately, was asked to declare an intention before ringing them.

Fine desert earth pressed into my skin and my clothes beneath an enormous blue sky. Then I got up and paused briefly – carrying the thought sincerely and very consciously - before striking the chimes:

Teach me something real here.

Nothing happened, of course. There was no blinding revelation, no mystical experience, no sudden transformation.

But looking back, I suspect that moment mattered more than I realised at the time.

Because participation had already begun.

That first evening, at our encampment, I met the twenty people with whom I’d be sharing the week. Among them: artists, technologists, musicians and researchers – but also a small group of San elders, including two sisters, one in her eighties, the other in her seventies, who spoke in traditional click language. Their son and nephew – a gifted musician and storyteller – translated for them. The San are among the oldest continuous indigenous cultures on Earth, with traditions rooted in the deserts, savannahs and semi-arid regions of Southern Africa stretching back tens of thousands of years.

One of the first things someone told me that night was this:

‘If you want to get the most out of AfrikaBurn, stop trying to control the experience. Follow synchronicity. Follow flow.’

A day earlier, I very likely would have dismissed that kind of language. But something about the environment was already beginning to alter the texture of my perception.

Without the usual informational overload of ordinary life, attention began behaving differently. Over the course of that first day, conversations slowed and deepened. Time itself felt subtly less compressed. People, it seemed, stopped performing. Connections started to form. And perhaps for that reason alone, I decided – at least temporarily – to suspend disbelief.

Not belief.

Just disbelief.

The Water

The following morning, an opportunity arose to accompany our San elders to a water blessing ceremony some distance from the ‘suburbs’ of Tankwa Town. We walked for half an hour across the hard-baked floor of the Tankwa Karoo: around forty of us moving slowly through dust, silence and heat towards one of the few natural springs in the area. Along the way, participants were encouraged to pick up small stones from the desert floor. These, we were told, would later be offered to the water.

The ceremony itself was simple. We gathered around the source of the water while two shamans, Jethro and Sarah, guided the ritual. One by one, each participant was invited to say something meaningful aloud – an intention, a hope, a thought, a grief – before throwing their stone into the water.

When my turn came, I spoke and threw the stone. Almost immediately Jethro grabbed me. “Look,” he said excitedly, spinning me around and pointing at the water. “Do you see?”

Some bubbles had begun rising slowly from beneath the surface.

“The water spirits heard you,” he said.

Under normal conditions, my instinctive reaction would have been scepticism. Bubbles rise from water all the time. Gases escape. Mud shifts.

And yet what struck me was not the bubbles themselves.

It was my reaction to them.

For the first time, I found myself not immediately needing to collapse the experience into either belief or dismissal. Instead, I made a different decision.

I let go.

Not into irrationality.
Not into credulity.
But into participation.

After all, I had come to the desert partly to confront the deeply ingrained habits through which I normally organised reality. The reflexive need to stand outside normal experience. To decode everything immediately. To maintain cognitive control at all times.

And so, I decided – at least temporarily – to stop resisting the possibility that meaning might sometimes emerge through participation itself.

What followed over the next few days would make that decision feel increasingly significant.

The Fire

Two mornings later, before dawn, the camp gathered again.

My new friends had constructed a traditional grass hut near the edge of the playa earlier in the week – their contribution to the temporary city that had emerged out of the desert dust.

It was on the playa that the effigy of the burning man and other pieces of sculpture and artwork were on display for Burners to enjoy during the week. Throughout the Burn, our hut became a place where people gravitated almost instinctively. Musicians gathered there at night. Stories were told there. Strangers sat together in long, unplanned conversations beneath its woven walls while drums and local instruments competed across the darkness with the thump of dance music emanating from multiple other gatherings nearby.

The plan had been to burn the hut as part of the week’s rituals. But strong winds arrived on the morning scheduled for the burn, making it too dangerous to light.

So instead, before sunrise, the camp gathered quietly around a smaller ceremonial fire nearby while the two elders – our ‘ohmas’ – danced in the half-light.

As sparks lifted into the cold desert air, their son and nephew, Petrus, began telling stories about animals, tricksters, spirits, landscape and transformation. Stories in which the boundary between psyche, nature and cosmos did not appear especially rigid.

In the contemporary world, reality is generally treated as something external: objective and measurable, fundamentally separate from us. Meaning is something human beings project onto an otherwise indifferent universe. But inside many older traditions, participation comes first. The world is not experienced as dead matter observed from outside.

It is experienced as relationship.

Landscape, symbol, story, ritual, emotion, dream and community all exist inside a continuous field of meaning rather than in separate categories artificially divided from one another. And sitting there beside the fire, watching sparks disappear into the pre-dawn sky, I began to understand something that will become central to this series:

modernity may have generated extraordinary technological power partly by separating ourselves from participation. By standing outside the system. By converting reality into object.

And yet something fundamental seems to have been lost in the process. Not because indigenous cultures possess magical answers modern science lacks. Romanticising them would be both naïve and patronising. But because they may have preserved forms of attentional relationship to reality that industrial civilisation systematically trained out of itself.

The more time I spent in the desert, the more I began noticing that participation was not simply a philosophical idea.

It altered perception itself.

As attention slowed and conversations deepened, coincidence became more noticeable and the environment felt strangely responsive.

Not supernatural or irrational. Just less psychologically filtered than it did in ordinary life.

And increasingly, I found myself wondering – not for the first time[3] – whether what we call ‘normal reality’ might actually be a highly managed attentional state – one optimised for productivity, control and social performance rather than presence.

The Lights

The sighting happened two nights later.

By then, something in my relationship to the environment had already changed. Not my critical faculties or my scepticism. Those remained intact. But the internal posture through which I normally encountered reality had become subtly less defended, less compulsively analytical.

Most of our camp was gathered together – we had just finished eating dinner – when the first light appeared low on the southern horizon.

At first, it looked unremarkable. Bright white, stationary for a moment against the darkness. Then it began moving – not in the smooth linear path of an aircraft or a satellite, but in short, strange manoeuvres that immediately caught our attention. Then it dimmed, disappeared and reappeared somewhere else.

A second light emerged nearby. Then another. At one point there may have been five visible simultaneously, interacting across the same section of sky for close to forty minutes while a group of us watched in near silence.

Importantly, I want to be extremely careful here.

I have seen unusual aerial phenomena before. Most memorably on the periphery of Area 51 more than thirty years ago – experiences I later wrote about in The Light Beyond the Mountains. But in every previous case I eventually arrived at a plausible rational explanation. I was trained professionally to understand what moves through our skies – both openly and secretly[4].

This felt different.

Not necessarily because it was different in any objective sense. But because, for the first time, I found myself unable to arrive at a stable explanatory frame that fully satisfied me.

And strangely, that no longer bothered me as much as it once would have.

Because what began interesting me was no longer simply the phenomenon itself. It was the context in which the phenomenon appeared.

The desert.
The disconnection from ordinary informational life.
The altered attentional state.
The rituals.
The social coherence.
The surrender to synchronicity and flow.
The gradual suspension of hyper-mediated cognition (in which our perception, attention and interpretation of reality are continuously filtered, shaped and pre-structured by technological, informational and social systems before we directly experience the world ourselves).

In other words: participation.

And this, I slowly realised afterward, may point towards one of the central mistakes modernity makes when confronting anomalous experience.

We isolate the anomaly from the field in which it emerges.

We focus obsessively on the object – the light, the craft, the event, the data point – while ignoring the surrounding human conditions under which perception itself changes.

But what if the conditions matter?

What if participation is not incidental to anomalous experience, but part of the mechanism through which such experiences become available in the first place?

I am not claiming the lights were extraterrestrial craft. Nor am I claiming they were supernatural. I am making a narrower – but perhaps more important – observation: that the experience forced me to confront the possibility that consciousness, attention, environment, expectation, symbolism, coherence and perception may interact more deeply than our current models comfortably allow.

And once that possibility enters the frame, the question changes completely.

The issue is no longer simply: ‘What did we see?’

It becomes: ‘What kind of reality produces experiences like this under conditions like these?’

The Realisation

I did not leave AfrikaBurn believing I had discovered hidden truths about the universe. What changed instead was something subtler: my relationship to certainty itself.

The culmination of my last Substack project - The Outlier Series – was AIM, the Adaptive Interface Model, a tentative framework for thinking about reality not as a fixed mechanical system, but as an adaptive informational process in which consciousness participates.

Drawing together ideas from quantum mechanics, systems theory, neuroscience and anomaly research, AIM proposes that certain phenomena – synchronicities, UAP encounters, psi experiences and states of heightened coherence – may function as feedback signals arising within a participatory universe under conditions of stress, transition or transformation.

Read more

(Photo by Bobby on Unsplash)

Something is changing.

Not just in the UFO conversation, but in the wider architecture of reality itself – or at least in our collective willingness to question the assumptions that have underpinned it for the past century.

Ten years ago, serious discussion of UFOs or non-human intelligence existed largely at the fringes. Today, former intelligence officials testify before Congress. Military pilots describe encounters on primetime television. News outlets discuss claims of ‘non-human biologics’ without irony. NASA holds public briefings on UAP. Silicon Valley technologists openly debate consciousness and the possibility that reality itself may behave more like an informational system than a fixed material substrate[1].

At the same time, artificial intelligence is beginning to destabilise one of humanity’s oldest certainties: that human cognition occupies a uniquely privileged position in the order of things.

With all of this happening simultaneously, we need to pay attention very carefully to what it is telling us.

Because when civilisations encounter periods of rapid ontological instability – moments when their deepest assumptions about reality begin to fracture – the danger is not merely confusion, but overcorrection – the human tendency to rush from anomaly to absolute explanation.

This, historically, is where things become dangerous.

We are now entering what many are beginning to call the ‘Age of Disclosure’. But the phrase itself may already contain a hidden assumption: that what is being disclosed is singular, stable, and ultimately understandable within our existing conceptual frameworks.

That may not be true at all.

The modern UAP archive is not simply a collection of unidentified flying objects. It is a sprawling, contradictory, psychologically charged body of material that appears to intersect with consciousness, perception, symbolism, trauma, physics, information theory, folklore, religion, and human expectation itself.

The phenomenon – whatever it ultimately turns out to be – does not behave cleanly.

And that should give us pause.

Because the temptation, particularly in periods of uncertainty, is to impose coherence too quickly. To move from:

• ‘something strange is happening’
  to:

• ‘therefore I now know what’s causing it.’

History is littered with examples of intelligent people making exactly this mistake.

The problem is not that they observed anomalies. Often, the anomalies were real, or at least sincerely experienced.

The problem is that observation became ontology – the question of what kind of thing something actually is – and ontology became metaphysics, with extraordinary speed.

In other words: certainty arrived before understanding.

This is why the coming months and years will require a level of disciplined thinking largely absent from both traditional ufology and much of modern internet culture.

Because the challenge ahead is no longer simply whether anomalous phenomena exist - the United States government has already publicly acknowledged that they do[2].

The challenge is whether we can look directly at anomaly without collapsing prematurely into belief.

That may turn out to be the real test of Disclosure.

The Historical Trap

One of the great difficulties in studying anomalous phenomena is that the phenomena themselves often arrive wrapped in emotional force.

People do not simply see strange lights.

They experience revelation.
Transformation.
Fear.
Meaning.
Sometimes even healing.

This is important, because emotionally charged experiences have a powerful tendency to generate total explanations. The mind does not like ambiguity for very long. Particularly when the experience feels personal, destabilising, or sacred.

And this is where many intelligent investigators – including some of the most compelling figures in the history of the field – began to drift beyond observation into metaphysics.

Wilhelm Reich is a good example.

Reich (below) was, in many ways, decades ahead of his time. A brilliant and deeply controversial psychoanalyst who broke from Freud in the 1920s and fled Nazi Germany in 1933, he became convinced that he had discovered a universal life energy permeating both biology and the atmosphere itself – what he called ‘orgone’.

Some of his observations remain genuinely intriguing even now. He documented strange microscopic pulsating structures in blood and organic tissue, unusual blue glowing phenomena in the atmosphere, and possible energetic links between emotion, illness, and environment.

The problem was not necessarily that Reich observed unusual things.

The problem was that he moved too quickly from:

• anomaly,
  to:

• explanation,
  to:

• cosmology.

Eventually, everything became evidence for the theory itself.

Biology.
Weather.
Psychology.
Politics.
Spirituality.
Human illness.
Civilisational collapse.

The framework expanded until it explained almost everything – which is often the moment a theory becomes least reliable.

And Reich was not alone.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the American journalist and researcher John Keel, one of the most perceptive chroniclers of high strangeness, began by investigating UFO reports as physical anomalies. But over time he came to suspect that the phenomenon behaved less like extraterrestrial visitation and more like an adaptive, deceptive intelligence capable of manipulating belief itself. His work became increasingly metaphysical, populated by ultra-terrestrials (non-human intelligences rooted in Earth rather than outer space), trickster forces, and reality-distorting entities that seemed to shape-shift through history.

And yet Keel (below) remains valuable precisely because he recognised something many investigators still resist: the phenomenon does not behave cleanly.

It mutates.
It mirrors expectation.
It absorbs symbolism.
It destabilises certainty.

Even today, many of the sharpest observers in the field eventually find themselves confronting the same problem: the data refuses to stay confined inside ordinary categories.

And here’s the point. More recently, parts of the Disclosure movement itself have begun showing similar tendencies. What starts as legitimate inquiry into military encounters, radar data, pilot testimony, or government secrecy can quickly harden into complete cosmological systems:

• humanity as a genetic experiment,

• ascension narratives,

• interdimensional hierarchies (from angels to demons),

• spiritually enlightened aliens,

• or apocalyptic prophetic frameworks.

Again, the issue is not necessarily that every anomalous experience is false.

The issue is the speed with which uncertainty becomes certainty.

This matters because anomalous phenomena appear uniquely capable of bypassing our normal intellectual caution. They trigger what might be called ‘ontological vertigo’: the destabilising sensation that reality itself may not be what we thought it was.

And when humans experience ontological vertigo, they tend to reach for total meaning systems with extraordinary speed.

This is why Jacques Vallée remains such an important figure in the history of the subject.

Not because he solved the mystery.

But because he refused to solve it too quickly.

For more than half a century, Vallée (below) has insisted on something deeply unfashionable in modern culture: that ambiguity itself may be part of the phenomenon. That premature certainty may actually obscure understanding rather than advance it.

His enduring value lies not in having closed the case, but in resisting the urge to collapse anomaly into ideology.

That distinction may become critically important in the months and years ahead.

A Discipline for the Age of Disclosure

So how do we move forward without falling into either cynicism or belief?

How do we study genuinely anomalous phenomena without either dismissing them outright or constructing entire cosmologies around them?

Increasingly, I think the answer may lie in a simple progression:

anomaly first,
ontology second,
metaphysics last.

Not because metaphysics is unimportant. Quite the opposite. Questions about consciousness, intelligence, reality, meaning, and the nature of existence may ultimately become unavoidable as this conversation evolves.

But the order matters.

And history suggests we repeatedly get the order wrong.

The first task is anomaly.

Observation.
Pattern recognition.
Data.
Testimony.
Correlation.
Behaviour.

What actually happens?

Not what we wish is happening.
Not what confirms our preferred worldview.
Not what fits our politics, spirituality, or fears.

Just the anomaly itself.

This sounds straightforward, but it is remarkably difficult once emotion enters the system. Particularly because many anomalous experiences feel profoundly meaningful to the people who undergo them.

A luminous orb appearing during a moment of psychological crisis.
A near-death experience that transforms someone’s understanding of consciousness.
A military encounter involving impossible flight characteristics.
A synchronistic event that arrives with uncanny timing.

These experiences often carry an emotional and symbolic charge far beyond ordinary perception. Which means the temptation is always to leap immediately into interpretation.

But interpretation is not the same thing as understanding – and this is where ontology enters the picture.

Ontology is simply the question:
What kind of thing might this phenomenon actually be?

Not in an absolute sense.
Not as doctrine.
But as provisional modelling.

Which is where frameworks become useful.

Perhaps some phenomena involve plasma-like behaviours.
Perhaps consciousness interacts with reality in ways we do not yet understand.
Perhaps perception itself functions more like an interface than a direct apprehension of objective reality.
Perhaps certain anomalous events emerge under conditions of environmental, psychological, or informational stress.

These are ontological propositions. Importantly, they are not yet metaphysical claims. They are not fixed in stone and do not require us to conclude:

• that the universe is spiritually guided,

• that aliens are visiting Earth,

• that reality is a simulation,

• or that ancient religious systems secretly understood everything all along.

This distinction matters enormously.

Because once metaphysics arrives too early, the investigative process often collapses into narrative reinforcement. Every new anomaly becomes proof of the pre-existing belief structure. Contradictions are absorbed rather than examined. Ambiguity disappears.

Inquiry quietly becomes ideology.

And this, increasingly, is the danger facing modern Disclosure culture – particularly online.

Because digital environments reward certainty, not uncertainty. They reward emotionally satisfying narratives, not disciplined ambiguity. The algorithm prefers revelation over restraint.

But reality – especially anomalous reality – may not cooperate with our need for closure.

In fact, one of the most consistent features of the UFO/UAP archive is precisely its resistance to stable interpretation. The phenomenon appears physical in some cases and dreamlike in others. It behaves technologically one moment, symbolically the next. It leaves traces yet also distorts perception. It appears objective, then deeply subjective.

This is not normal behaviour for a conventional object.

Which means we may need a framework capable of holding contradiction without prematurely resolving it.

That is why maintaining layered uncertainty matters.

Anomaly first.
Ontology second.
Metaphysics last.

The progression is not merely philosophical caution. It is a form of intellectual hygiene.

Particularly now.

Because if the Age of Disclosure is real – and I increasingly suspect it is – then humanity may be entering a period of profound ontological stress. A period in which old models of reality begin destabilising faster than new ones can responsibly replace them.

And under those conditions, clarity may become one of the most important disciplines we possess.

Why This Matters Now

All of this might once have remained a niche philosophical problem – the kind of thing debated quietly at the edges of physics, consciousness research, or ufology.

But not anymore.

Because the wider environment surrounding the UAP conversation is changing with extraordinary speed.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating.
Institutional trust is fragmenting.
Information systems are becoming increasingly unstable.
Synthetic media is blurring the distinction between authentic and artificial experience.
Geopolitical tensions are rising.
And simultaneously, discussion of anomalous phenomena is moving from the cultural fringe into the centre of public discourse.

These developments are not isolated from one another.

They are interacting.

And that interaction may prove historically consequential.

For most of modern history, reality itself functioned as a relatively stable social consensus. Whatever people privately believed, institutions broadly maintained a coherent model of the world:

• material reality was objective,

• consciousness was local[3],

• human perception was broadly reliable,

• and anomalous experiences existed at the margins.

Today, nearly every one of those assumptions is under pressure.

AI is challenging the uniqueness of human cognition.
Quantum information theory is reshaping parts of physics.
Neuroscience increasingly suggests perception is actively constructed rather than simply passively received.
Simulation theory has migrated from philosophy seminars into mainstream technological culture.
And the UAP discussion has opened the door – however cautiously – to the possibility that reality may contain intelligences, behaviours, or dynamics that do not fit conventional models.

This creates an unusual danger.

Not simply misinformation.

Ontological overload.

Because humans are meaning-making creatures. When multiple foundational assumptions destabilise simultaneously, the impulse is to force them into a single explanatory narrative.

And that is precisely the moment disciplined thinking becomes most important.

Already, parts of the modern Disclosure landscape are beginning to exhibit the characteristics of what might be called metaphysical contagion:

• escalating certainty,

• total explanatory systems,

• spiritual absolutism,

• apocalyptic thinking,

• and emotionally charged narratives that absorb every new anomaly into a pre-existing worldview.

In previous eras, such belief systems spread slowly.

Now they spread at algorithmic speed.

The architecture of the internet rewards emotional coherence over evidential coherence. A complete narrative – however speculative – will almost always travel further than ambiguity or restraint.

But anomalous phenomena may demand exactly the opposite posture.

Because the deeper problem emerging beneath the UAP conversation is not simply:
Are we alone?

It is:
What kind of reality produces phenomena that appear simultaneously physical, psychological, symbolic, and informational?

That is a far more destabilising question.

And one reason it matters now is because the pressure conditions themselves appear to be intensifying. The modern world increasingly resembles what complexity theorists describe as a system approaching criticality:

• rising instability,

• rising correlation,

• rising informational noise,

• rising emotional volatility,

• and increasingly nonlinear outcomes.

In such environments, small inputs can produce disproportionately large effects – as I outlined in The Outlier Series.

These include ideological ones.

Which means the informational immune system matters now more than ever.

Not scepticism in the reductive sense.
Not automatic belief.
But disciplined ambiguity.

The capacity to remain inside uncertainty long enough for better models to emerge.

Because if Disclosure is real in any meaningful sense, then the challenge ahead may not simply involve revealing hidden information.

It may involve learning how to think coherently while reality itself becomes less conceptually stable.

The Framework Problem

At this point, a reasonable question emerges:

If we are warning against premature ontology and metaphysical overreach, does that mean we should avoid frameworks altogether?

Not at all - in fact, the opposite may be true.

Because raw anomaly, on its own, eventually becomes overwhelming. A civilisation cannot absorb decades of contradictory UAP reports, consciousness anomalies, near-death experiences, psi data, plasma phenomena, symbolic encounters, military testimony, and perceptual instability without eventually attempting some kind of higher-order synthesis.

The problem isn’t frameworks – it’s rigidity.

A useful framework should behave less like a belief system and more like a scaffolding – provisional, adaptive, and capable of revision as new data arrives.

This, too, is partly where The Outlier Series eventually arrived.

Not at certainty.
Not at revelation.
But at the possibility that many anomalous phenomena may make more sense if approached as ‘interface behaviours’ rather than object intrusions.

That distinction is important, because for most of the modern UFO era, the dominant assumption has been technological visitation:
physical craft,
external intelligences,
structured vehicles entering our airspace from somewhere else.

And some portion of the data may indeed point in that direction.

But the deeper archive – particularly the high-strangeness material examined by researchers like Jacques Vallée – often behaves differently. The phenomenon appears:

• adaptive,

• symbolic,

• psychologically coupled,

• context sensitive,

• and strangely resistant to stable categorisation.

It behaves less like hardware alone and more like interaction.

This is where AIM – the Adaptive Interface Model at the culmination of The Outlier Series – begins to emerge, not as a cosmology, but as a working hypothesis.

Importantly, AIM is not an answer to the phenomenon.

It is an attempt to create a disciplined language for discussing recurring behavioural patterns inside the anomaly without prematurely collapsing into metaphysics.

At its most basic level, AIM proposes something surprisingly modest:

Reality may behave less like a fixed mechanical stage and more like an adaptive informational interface in which consciousness participates.

Under conditions of stress, instability, liminality, or threshold states, aspects of that interface may become unusually permeable, allowing anomalous phenomena such as UAP to manifest in ways that appear physical, symbolic, psychological, or informational simultaneously.

That is a model.

Not a belief system.

AIM does not require:

• extraterrestrials,

• spiritual hierarchies,

• simulation hypotheses,

• an overarching cosmology,

• or universal consciousness.

Nor does it deny them.

It simply brackets those questions for later.

That is the crucial point.

Because AIM is not trying to tell us what ultimate reality is. It is trying to provide a framework flexible enough to hold the anomaly without reducing it prematurely to either:

• materialist dismissal,
  or:

• metaphysical certainty.

In this sense, AIM attempts to occupy a difficult middle territory rarely tolerated in modern discourse.

Not:
‘nothing is happening’.

And not:
‘everything is explained’.

But rather:
something appears to be happening,
the existing categories may be insufficient,
and new models may be required –
provided we maintain enough careful thinking not to mythologise the data before understanding it.

That restraint is critical because the history of anomalous research repeatedly shows what happens when frameworks harden into doctrine.

The moment a model becomes emotionally non-negotiable, inquiry begins narrowing rather than expanding. The map becomes sacred. And once that happens, the phenomenon itself often disappears beneath the belief system constructed around it.

Which is why AIM, if it has value at all, should remain provisional.

Adaptive.

Open.

Because the goal is not to replace one orthodoxy with another.

The goal is to preserve inquiry under conditions of ontological stress.

Participation

None of this, however, should be mistaken for dismissal.

Particularly of the experiencer.

Because one of the enduring failures of both mainstream scepticism and parts of traditional ufology is that they often flatten the human dimension of the encounter itself.

Either:

• the experiencer is treated as delusional,
  or:

• the experience is immediately absorbed into a fixed cosmology.

Both responses miss something important.

Because whatever these phenomena ultimately are – psychological, physical, informational, symbolic, environmental, or something that cuts across those categories entirely – the felt experience of the encounter is often profoundly real.

Sometimes transformative.

Sometimes destabilising.

Sometimes healing.

Again and again, people emerge from anomalous experiences with the same underlying conviction:
that reality is somehow larger, stranger, and more interconnected than they previously believed.

Which means it deserves to be approached neither with ridicule nor automatic belief, but with seriousness and care.

This may ultimately prove to be one of the most important implications of the entire UAP conversation: not merely that strange things appear in the sky, but that the phenomenon seems repeatedly to draw human consciousness itself into the event.

This is also one of the reasons behind initiatives like the EXO Institute: not to promote a fixed belief system about the phenomenon, but to create a space where anomaly, consciousness, science, and human experience can be explored without prematurely collapsing into ideology.

The observer is not always standing outside the anomaly.

Often, the observer appears entangled with it.

This is partly why the most enduring encounters are rarely experienced as simple sightings. They are experienced as participatory events.

And perhaps this is where the conversation now begins to move beyond Disclosure itself.

Because after the anomaly comes a deeper question:
What is the relationship between consciousness and reality in a world where the boundary between observer and observed may be less stable than we assumed?

This is the territory the next phase of inquiry - the series I’ll announce shortly to follow The Outlier Series – will explore.

Not belief.
Not doctrine.
Not a new religion disguised as ontology.

But participation.

Careful participation.
Conscious participation.
Disciplined, grounded participation.

If The Outlier Series explored the possibility that what we experience as reality may itself function as an adaptive interface – a perceptual medium through which deeper layers of the world present themselves to consciousness – then the next question naturally follows:

What role do we play within it?

Not as passive spectators.
Not necessarily as creators.
But perhaps as participants within a system whose deeper architecture we are only beginning to perceive.

That possibility demands humility.

Because the temptation, as always, will be certainty.

But perhaps the healthiest posture – especially now – is something more balanced:
to remain grounded without becoming closed;
open without becoming credulous;
and capable of holding profound anomaly without surrendering the clarity required to investigate it properly.

That may ultimately be the real challenge of the Age of Disclosure.

Not simply learning that reality is stranger than we imagined.

But learning how to participate in that strangeness without losing ourselves inside it.

[1] aka simulation theory: the idea that reality may behave more like a computational or informational system than we normally assume.

[2] This shift began after the 2021 ODNI Preliminary Assessment confirmed that many military UAP incidents remained genuinely unexplained and was followed by the creation of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in 2022, NASA’s independent UAP study in 2023, and more recent public releases of archived UAP-related government files (in May 2026) under Trump administration transparency initiatives.

[3] The traditional assumption that awareness is confined to the brain and separate from the outside world.

Over the past few weeks, several seemingly unrelated things happened that have impacted the way I see the extraordinarily consequential times we find ourselves in.

In Washington, the Trump administration launched a new disclosure initiative around unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) – UFOs as it insisted on calling them (in a linguistic throwback to its better-known acronym) – releasing a cache of files and imagery related to the phenomenon into the public domain under a programme known as PURSUE.

At almost exactly the same time, I found myself in the Tankwa Karoo in South Africa at AfrikaBurn (see photo above) – temporarily disconnected from the internet, from news cycles, from algorithms, and the endless cognitive weather of modern life. For several days, immersed among artists, technologists, musicians, indigenous storytellers and consciousness researchers, I experienced something that felt strangely difficult to categorise in ordinary language: a temporary social reality organised less around consumption, status and self-display (although quite a lot of that was on display too) than participation, coherence and connection.

Then, shortly after returning home, another announcement surfaced – one that might have sounded fanciful but for the calibre of the individual involved, whose seriousness I can personally attest to. Harold ‘Sonny’ White, the former NASA EagleWorks physicist associated with advanced propulsion research, emerged from stealth mode claiming progress towards a prototype energy device designed to draw usable electrical power from the ‘quantum vacuum’ – empty space to you and me.

Individually, these events may have little to do with one another.

A government disclosure initiative.

A week in the desert.

A speculative energy technology.

Yet taken together, they left me with an increasingly difficult feeling to ignore: that something about the underlying model through which we interpret everyday reality is beginning to loosen.

Originally, I intended to slate this piece as the final ‘lock’ of The Outlier Series. But in the run-up to writing it, something became clear to me: the series had already reached its natural conclusion. The final argument had already emerged.

The deeper question was no longer whether anomalies – the theme underpinning the series – exist. It was what they imply about the kind of system we may actually inhabit.

Which means this piece is not really an ending, but the beginning of the next phase of the exploration.

And perhaps, in a small way, a reflection on where many of us now seem to find ourselves – culturally, scientifically, psychologically, and maybe even civilisationally – after a strangely momentous week.

Here’s why.

Signals

The first signal came from Washington.

On 8^th May, the Trump administration formally launched a new disclosure initiative centred on UFOs under a framework known as PURSUE: the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. The initiative involved the release of previously classified files, imagery, historical intelligence material and aerospace records through a newly established public archive. Predictably, much of the immediate reaction focused on the question that has followed this subject for decades: was there finally evidence of extraterrestrial life?

But that may ultimately prove to be the least interesting aspect of what happened – and may even be the wrong question.

Because the deeper significance of PURSUE is not that it resolves the UFO anomaly. It doesn’t. The material released is fragmentary, inconclusive and open to multiple interpretations. Even where unusual objects or observations are highlighted, the accompanying language remains cautious, careful and deliberately noncommittal – this, to be clear, is not ‘Disclosure’ with a capital ‘D’.

What has changed is something subtler, but potentially far more important.

Because, for the first time, anomaly itself has been formally moved from the margins of culture into the architecture of official reality.

For decades, the UAP/UFO issue existed in a strange liminal zone: publicly ridiculed, privately investigated; culturally visible, institutionally suppressed. Governments studied it while simultaneously denying its legitimacy. Scientists avoided it for fear of reputational damage. The subject became epistemically radioactive – not fully excluded from reality but denied stable permission to exist inside it.

PURSUE changes that dynamic.

Not because it proves the existence of non-human intelligence. Not because it suddenly validates every extraordinary claim ever made around the phenomenon. But because it represents the beginning of the slow cracking of institutional control over ontology itself – over what kinds of things are permitted to count as ‘real’.

That shift becomes particularly striking in the Apollo material included in the release.

For years, speculation has circulated around anomalous observations made during the lunar missions: unexplained lights, orbital objects, strange photographic artefacts. Much of it drifted into folklore. Yet among the newly foregrounded records are transcripts from Apollo-era communications involving observations of bright drifting particles and co-orbital objects during complex manoeuvres in space.

One Apollo 17 exchange is particularly striking. Astronauts described ‘very bright particles or fragments’ drifting past the spacecraft. One crew member compared the scene outside the window to ‘the Fourth of July’ – a dense field of luminous objects suspended against the blackness of space. A photo taken on the Moon during the Apollo 12 mission (see below) depicts unidentified lights above the lunar horizon, supporting claims that ‘bogeys’ – aerial anomalies – were seen during NASA missions at that time.

Importantly, however, none of this constitutes proof of anything extraordinary. Conventional explanations remain entirely plausible: ice crystals, vented material, reflected debris, optical effects. NASA has historically offered such interpretations, and the released material itself carefully avoids drawing definitive conclusions.

And yet the inclusion of these materials inside the beginnings of a formal UAP disclosure architecture remains symbolically profound.

Because the Apollo anomalies occupy a uniquely controlled observational environment. They do not prove the existence of non-human intelligence. But they do reinforce something else: that even at the height of the twentieth century’s greatest technological triumph, uncertainty remained embedded inside the system.

As a result, the old model – the assumption that reality is fundamentally known, stable and institutionally contained – begins to look a little less secure.

And perhaps that is the real significance of PURSUE: the visible weakening of an older epistemic structure: one in which institutions mediated reality downward to passive populations assumed incapable of participating in the deeper questions themselves.

The state may not have solved the anomaly, but it has quietly acknowledged that the anomaly belongs inside a broadening definition of ‘reality’.

And with that threshold crossed, it becomes difficult for officialdom to fully reverse course.

The Desert Experiment

The second signal arrived far from Washington, in the dust of the Tankwa Karoo.

Between late April and early May, I attended AfrikaBurn – the South African counterpart to Burning Man – a temporary city built on the edge of one of the most inhospitable desert regions on the planet. Like its American predecessor, AfrikaBurn (see below) operates less as a conventional festival than as an experiment in temporary culture: a participatory environment organised around art, ritual, gifting, self-expression and communal creation rather than commerce or passive consumption.

I arrived there with a group of remarkable individuals. Among them were musicians, storytellers, technologists, AI researchers, consciousness explorers and people working at the edges of what some now call ‘field consciousness’ – the possibility that awareness may not be entirely confined to the individual brain but connected in ways modern science is only beginning to seriously investigate.

There were aspects of AfrikaBurn that weren’t especially for me. The hedonistic side of Burn culture was never the central draw. What interested me – and what affected me far more deeply than I anticipated – was something else entirely.

For almost a week, I was disconnected from the technological interface through which modern life is now largely experienced. No phone signal. No social media. No email. No news cycle. No algorithmic feed continuously shaping attention from moment to moment.

At first, the absence feels uncomfortable. Then something stranger begins to happen.

The nervous system slows.

Attention reorganises itself.

And gradually, beneath the noise floor of ordinary life, another kind of order begins to emerge.

What struck me most about AfrikaBurn was not the spectacle, but the coherence. People fed one another. Built for one another. Played music for one another. Told stories to one another. Strangers helped strangers without obvious transactional motive. Art (like the monster designed to eat our fears, see below) emerged not as commodity, but as offering. Identity – at least temporarily – softened around the edges.

It would be easy to romanticise this – I don’t want to do that. Temporary societies are still human societies, with all the contradictions and imperfections that implies. But something undeniably shifts inside an environment intentionally organised around participation rather than extraction.

In the language developed towards the end of The Outlier Series, AfrikaBurn began to feel less like a festival than a low-entropy social field experiment.

Not because disorder disappeared, but because attention itself became differently structured.

Connection became easier. Synchronicity became more noticeable. Social barriers weakened. Reality felt subtly more alive, more informational, more responsive.

One experience in particular stayed with me. Towards the end of the week, before sunrise, I participated in a San storytelling and song ritual in the desert[1]. Sitting there in darkness as voices moved through the cold air, I found myself thinking about something indigenous cultures have understood for millennia – something Western civilisation, despite all its technological sophistication, is only now beginning to circle back toward through consciousness research, systems theory and quantum foundations.

Namely: that separation may not be the primary condition of existence.

Several indigenous participants put this far more simply than any scientific model could. Western science, they suggested, is not discovering something entirely new in its investigations into consciousness and interconnectedness. It is rediscovering – in fragmented analytical form – intuitions that older cultures preserved through lived participation with the world itself.

Deprived of the usual distractions and informational overload of contemporary life, bound more directly to environment and community, I began to glimpse something increasingly difficult to articulate within the default language of modern culture: that beneath the competitive, fragmented surface of civilisation, human beings may possess latent capacities for coherence that rarely get activated inside the systems we currently inhabit.

The veil, for a moment, felt thinner.

Not in some supernatural sense. Nothing particularly miraculous occurred. But the underlying assumptions through which ordinary reality is organised – isolation, competition, performance, disconnection – no longer felt quite as inevitable as they usually do.

And somewhere between the fires, the rituals, the conversations and the silence of the desert, another possibility slowly began to emerge.

What if participation is not incidental to reality?

What if it is part of how reality works?

The Learning System

That question sits at the centre of where The Outlier Series eventually arrived.

Looking back now, I can see that the series underwent a gradual but important shift over time. Early on, the anomalies explored across the locks – UFOs, psi phenomena, near-death experiences, plasma events, synchronicities, consciousness anomalies – largely appeared as exceptions to the accepted model of reality. Strange outliers at the edge of the map. Interesting precisely because they resisted conventional explanation.

But by the final stages of the series, another possibility began to emerge.

What if anomalies are not simply interruptions to the system?

What if they are part of how the system behaves?

That was the deeper implication of the final lock, which traced a conceptual arc running from Einstein and Schrödinger through Wheeler, Hoffman and ultimately into the Adaptive Interface Model – AIM.

Einstein gave us a lawful and objective universe existing independently of observation. Schrödinger showed that beneath that apparent stability lay probabilistic foundations that only resolved under measurement. Wheeler moved the observer inside the system itself, suggesting that acts of observation participate in the formation of physical reality. Donald Hoffman then went further still, proposing that spacetime may not be fundamental at all, but an interface through which deeper informational processes are rendered to conscious agents.

AIM extends this one step further.

It proposes that reality behaves not merely as a static informational structure, but as an adaptive one – a system (aka the universe) capable of learning, reorganising and generating feedback as it evolves through the participation of conscious agents – agents like us – within it.

Taken together, these ideas point toward a radically different picture of reality.

Not a dead mechanism unfolding impersonally through empty spacetime, but something closer to a participatory informational process – that word again – one in which consciousness is not external to the system, observing from nowhere, but embedded within it as part of how information is registered, interpreted and acted upon.

In this framing, the physical world begins to resemble what might be called a rendered layer – an interface through which deeper processes become accessible to observers. A computational learning model geared to self-exploration, evolution and growth. Not a literal simulation controlled by an external programmer, but a dynamically stabilised experiential environment emerging from informational relationships beneath ordinary perception.

And within such a system, anomalies take on a different meaning.

Under pressure, adaptive systems do not simply accumulate error. They generate feedback.

Biological systems produce pain signals. Cognitive systems generate confusion, surprise, dissonance, and even breakdown when models fail. Complex informational systems redistribute attention toward regions where adaptation is required. A fever tells the body something is wrong. A market crash exposes hidden fragility in an economy. A recurring dream, crisis or synchronicity can force the mind to confront material it has avoided.

From this perspective, as documented throughout The Outlier Series, certain categories of anomaly – particularly those that challenge deeply embedded assumptions about consciousness, matter and reality itself – may function less like meaningless noise and more like directional signals inside the system. In other words, they point toward the place where the model and the underlying reality no longer align.

Indicators that the current model is becoming insufficient.

This does not mean every anomaly is ‘real’ in the strictest sense, nor that every extraordinary claim reflects some deeper truth. Human beings are pattern-seeking creatures prone to projection, error and mythmaking. Scepticism remains essential.

But it does suggest that the persistence of certain anomaly clusters – UAP encounters, near-death experiences, psi reports, synchronicities, plasma-like orb phenomena and accounts of non-human intelligence – across cultures, decades and disciplines may not be entirely accidental either.

In the language of AIM, the system appears capable of generating pressure against overly rigid models of itself. When a culture’s model of reality becomes too narrow, the anomaly acts like pressure from outside the frame. It does not provide an answer, but it forces the frame to expand.

And suddenly, several things begin to look different.

The recurrence of UAP phenomena around moments of geopolitical instability. The repeated appearance of UAP around nuclear facilities, military installations and periods of Cold War tension is one obvious example.

The appearance of synchronicity and altered perception during periods of psychological transition is another. This is familiar from bereavement, breakdown, near-death experience and trauma recovery, when people often report heightened meaning, coincidence, dream intensity or altered perception.

The role of attention, observation and consciousness in shaping human reality at both individual and collective scales is a third. At the individual level, attention determines what becomes meaningful. At the collective level, shared attention can reorganise culture, markets, politics and even scientific possibility.

Even temporary environments like AfrikaBurn begin to acquire a new interpretive possibility: not escapes from reality but altered configurations of participation within it.

This, ultimately, was where The Outlier Series arrived – at the possibility that we inhabit something more dynamic, participatory and informational than the dominant scientific worldview of the last three centuries has generally allowed. A participatory universe akin to a simulation – but subtly different from one – in which we are both sensor-receptors and feedback nodes of the data the system craves in order to fulfil its purpose: to learn from itself, evolve and grow.

Which changes the question entirely.

The question is no longer simply:

What is reality made of?

It becomes:

What is reality doing?

And if reality is participatory – if consciousness genuinely plays some role in how trajectories stabilise and evolve – then the implications can no longer remain confined to theory alone.

At some point, thought has to become action.

EXO – Thought into Participation

That, ultimately, is where the EXO Institute enters the picture.

One of the conclusions I slowly arrived at while writing The Outlier Series is that identifying the incompleteness of our current models is only the beginning of the process. Recognition alone is not enough. If reality is more participatory, informational and adaptive than we have assumed, then the structures through which we explore reality may also need to evolve.

Not because science has failed. Quite the opposite. Science remains the most powerful tool humanity has ever developed for interrogating the unknown. But the frontier increasingly appears to lie precisely at the boundaries where disciplines begin to fragment – where consciousness, physics, information theory, ecology, technology, culture and human meaning all start bleeding into one another faster than our institutions can comfortably process.

That is the space EXO, which my colleagues James Hersov, Sian Sutherland, Dr Pippa Malmgren and I launched a month ago, is intended to explore.

Importantly, EXO was not conceived as a doctrine, belief system or a finished institution. Nor is it an attempt to prematurely resolve questions that remain deeply open. If anything, it begins from the opposite premise: that we are entering a period of growing ontological uncertainty, and that new forms of inquiry may be required to navigate it responsibly.

At its simplest, EXO is an experiment.

A prototype.

A container for serious cross-disciplinary exploration at precisely the point where many of the pressures examined throughout The Outlier Series appear to converge.

Part of the motivation emerged directly from the final lock itself. If consciousness participates in reality more deeply than we currently understand, then meaning, attention and values are not external to the system. They become part of the feedback architecture through which trajectories stabilise or destabilise over time.

And if that is true, then participation really matters.

That changes everything.

Because the dominant model of modern civilisation still largely treats human beings as spectators inside an inert universe: consumers of reality rather than participants within it. Institutions mediate truth downward. Expertise remains siloed. Culture fragments. Attention becomes increasingly commodified and extracted.

But the anomalies explored throughout the series consistently pointed somewhere else.

Towards interconnectedness.

Towards participation.

Towards the possibility that coherence itself may possess underestimated significance within complex adaptive systems - as AIM postulates the universe to be.

EXO is, in many ways, a response to that possibility – an attempt to create a space where scientists, technologists, experiencers, philosophers, artists, indigenous thinkers and ordinary people can think together at the edges of the current map without immediately collapsing into either dogma or ridicule.

Because one of the great failures of the current epistemic environment is that it increasingly forces complex questions into polarised binaries: believer versus sceptic; science versus spirituality; materialism versus mysticism; technology versus humanity.

Reality may not divide so neatly.

Indeed, one of the most striking things about the present moment is how rapidly formerly separate domains are beginning to converge. Artificial intelligence. Consciousness studies. Quantum foundations. Information theory. Systems collapse. Ecological instability. UAP disclosure. Neuroscience. Complexity theory. Indigenous knowledge systems. Advanced energy research.

For most of the twentieth century, these fields largely existed in isolation from one another.

Now they are beginning to overlap.

When previously separated systems begin interacting rapidly, periods of instability often follow – and few would argue that we are not in one of those periods now. But so do periods of emergence – an opportunity, in this case, to fix longstanding issues we have never properly been able to address: war, species extinction, environmental collapse - pick your global challenge of choice.

This is why I increasingly think the real significance of the current moment is not technological but civilisational. We may be approaching a transition in which our models of consciousness, matter, energy and participation begin changing simultaneously.

If so, then institutions built entirely upon older assumptions may struggle to adapt.

Which means new spaces for exploration become necessary.

Not to replace existing institutions.

But to help bridge what may be coming next. This, too, is what EXO has been conceived to do: to help leaders across government, policy, business and finance understand what may now be coming at us fast.

The revelations implicit in the PURSUE data are merely the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the waterline lies an issue far more profound than the issue of extraterrestrials and non-human intelligences even - the deeper shock that comes from its corollary: that reality is not what we think it is.

Ta-dah! A Breakthrough Energy System

And then, as if on cue, came another signal from the edge of the map.

Shortly after the launch of PURSUE and my return from AfrikaBurn, reports began circulating that Harold ‘Sonny’ White (see photo below) – a former NASA EagleWorks physicist associated with advanced propulsion research, whom I met at a gathering at MIT convened six years ago by Charles Chase, the former head of Revolutionary Technology Programs at the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works (the Skunk Works of the Skunk Works, if you will) had emerged from stealth mode with a company called Casimir Inc., announcing progress toward a prototype semiconductor device designed to generate continuous electrical power from engineered quantum vacuum effects.

The proposed device, known as MicroSPARC, is described as a tiny chip containing millions of microscale Casimir cavities – structures designed to exploit subtle quantum effects associated with vacuum fluctuations and electron tunnelling. According to the company, the architecture creates a directional flow of electrons capable of generating small but continuous amounts of usable electrical power without conventional batteries or moving parts.

At the time of writing, independent verification remains limited, and many physicists remain understandably cautious. History is littered with premature announcements around ‘free energy’ technologies that failed under serious examination. Scepticism here is not only healthy; it is necessary.

And yet, regardless of whether MicroSPARC ultimately fulfils its ambitions, the announcement still feels symbolically important.

Because it arrives at a moment when several previously stable assumptions are beginning to loosen simultaneously.

The significance of the story is not that ‘free energy has arrived’. It hasn’t – not yet, anyhow. Nor is it that classical physics has somehow been overturned. The underlying phenomena involved – Casimir effects, vacuum fluctuations, quantum tunnelling – have existed inside mainstream quantum theory for decades.

What matters is something subtler.

The boundary of the physically possible appears to be shifting.

Or perhaps more accurately: the willingness to seriously investigate domains once dismissed as fringe is increasing across multiple fronts at the same historical moment.

That convergence is important.

For centuries, industrial civilisation has been built upon a set of deeply embedded assumptions:
that matter is primary;
that consciousness is secondary;
that energy is fundamentally scarce;
that reality is mostly inert;
and that human beings stand outside the system as detached observers attempting to extract resources from it.

But developments like MicroSPARC – even in tentative form – begin exerting pressure on those assumptions.

Because if usable energy can eventually be drawn from properties intrinsic to spacetime itself, then the vacuum is no longer truly empty in the classical sense. It becomes active, structured, informational. Less like absence, more like substrate.

And once again, the broader pattern begins to echo themes explored throughout The Outlier Series.

Information.

Participation.

Underlying structure.

Emergence.

The possibility that what we experience as physical reality may sit atop deeper dynamical processes not yet fully understood.

I want to be very careful here. None of this means we are on the verge of some utopian technological revolution. Civilisational transitions are rarely clean or evenly distributed. Nor does it mean every claim emerging from frontier physics should be accepted uncritically. Most will likely fail. Some should fail.

But new paradigms begin precisely this way: as weak signals appearing at the edge of institutional confidence before gradually reorganising the centre.

Which is partly why the timing of all this feels so striking.

At the same moment anomaly is entering official political reality through initiatives like PURSUE; at the same moment consciousness and participation are increasingly re-entering serious scientific discourse; at the same moment social experiments like AfrikaBurn reveal alternative modes of human coherence – physics itself is beginning to probe whether the vacuum underpinning spacetime may contain untapped informational and energetic structure.

Individually, these developments may prove disconnected.

Together, they begin to resemble something else: a civilisation approaching a threshold in how it understands reality itself.

Full Circle

Which brings us, finally, to what this piece is really about.

Not UFO disclosure.

Not festivals in the desert.

Not quantum vacuum energy.

Not even consciousness, at least, not in isolation.

What connects all of these threads is something deeper: the possibility that the civilisation we inherited was built upon a fundamentally spectator-based model of reality – and that this model may now be entering a period of profound upheaval.

For centuries, the dominant assumptions of the modern world have remained remarkably stable.

Reality was understood as fundamentally inert: matter moving through empty spacetime according to impersonal laws. Consciousness appeared late in the process, accidentally and locally, inside isolated biological organisms. Human beings observed reality from the outside. Institutions mediated truth downward. Expertise fragmented into increasingly narrow domains. Energy was scarce. Meaning was subjective. Participation, beyond politics or economics, carried little ontological significance.

That worldview built the modern age.

It gave rise to extraordinary achievements: science, medicine, industry, computation, global communication. But it also produced a civilisation increasingly characterised by fragmentation, ecological destabilisation, psychological dislocation, the conversion of human attention into a resource to be captured and sold, and technologies powerful enough to destroy the civilisation that created them.

And now, across multiple domains at once, pressure is building against the assumptions underpinning that system.

PURSUE represents one form of that pressure: the inability of institutions to indefinitely contain anomalies that no longer comfortably fit the official map of reality.

AfrikaBurn represented another: the discovery that under altered social conditions, human beings can rapidly reorganise around participation, ritual, creativity and coherence rather than extraction and performance.

The Outlier Series pointed toward a third possibility: that anomalies themselves may not merely be exceptions to reality but features of how a participatory informational system generates feedback – via conscious nodes within it – under conditions of stress and transition.

EXO emerges as a response to that possibility – an attempt, however provisional, to create spaces where these questions can be explored seriously and collectively rather than disappearing back into the silos of institutional thinking.

And developments like MicroSPARC hint at something else again: that even the physical substrate we take for granted may contain deeper informational structure than twentieth-century materialism comfortably allowed.

None of this proves a new worldview – or a paradigm shift.

None of it resolves the enormous uncertainties involved.

And none of it should tempt us into abandoning scepticism, scientific rigour or intellectual caution. If anything, the opposite is true. Periods of transition are precisely when discernment matters most.

But something does appear to be changing.

Not cleanly.

Not completely.

And not yet in forms we fully understand.

The deeper shift may not ultimately be technological or political at all. It may be participatory.

Because if reality is more adaptive, informational and interconnected than we assumed – if consciousness genuinely participates in how trajectories stabilise within complex systems – then the old spectator position begins to break down.

We are no longer simply watching history unfold from outside the system.

We are inside it.

Contributing to it.

Feeding back into it through attention, interpretation, value and action.

Which means the question facing civilisation may no longer simply be whether our technologies advance quickly enough, or whether institutions adapt effectively enough. It may be whether human beings themselves can learn to participate more coherently within the systems we have created before those systems destabilise beyond recovery.

And perhaps that is the real thread connecting all the events of the past few weeks.

The possibility that reality is less like a machine we passively inhabit and more like a process through which consciousness, information and matter continually shape one another across time.

The Outlier Series was never really about anomalies alone.

It was about the gradual collapse of an older picture of reality.

And the uncertain emergence of whatever comes next.

This, then, is not the conclusion of the journey.

It is the crossing of a threshold.

The Outlier Series explored anomalies.

The next series, which I’ll be announcing shortly, explores participation.

[1] The San people – sometimes referred to as Bushmen, though many prefer the term San – are among the oldest continuous cultures on Earth, with ancestral roots in southern Africa stretching back tens of thousands of years. Traditionally hunter-gatherers, San communities developed highly sophisticated systems of ecological knowledge, oral storytelling, tracking, healing practices and social cooperation deeply attuned to the natural environment.

Last week marked the culmination of a project my co-founders[1] and I have been working on for more than two years: the launch of the EXO Institute.

On Tuesday 7 April, at Ladbroke Hall in London, more than 200 people gathered for the opening of something I have had in mind for a long time. In many ways, EXO is the action component of everything I have been exploring in this column through The Light Beyond the Mountains and, more recently, The Outlier Series.[2]

That timing was deliberate.

Just a week earlier, in the Twelfth Lock of The Outlier Series, I floated the idea that the investigations I have been pursuing through this column into consciousness, anomalous data, human potential and the deeper structure of reality could not remain purely intellectual. At some point, ideas have to become organised inquiry. They have to move from reflection to application. They have to enter the real world.

That is precisely what EXO is for.

At its heart, EXO brings together two long-held convictions of mine.

The first is that we are approaching a shift in science and thought every bit as consequential as the revolutions ushered in by relativity and quantum mechanics in the twentieth century. Across multiple disciplines, signals are accumulating that our current model of reality may be incomplete. Not wrong in every respect, but too small. Too narrow. Too mechanistic to account for the evidence now gathering at the edges.

The second conviction is that this matters not just intellectually, but practically. Because many of the global challenges now bearing down on us are not failing for lack of technical solutions. They are failing because of the way we think. Or rather, because of the limits of the model through which we think.

That was the spine of my opening talk at the launch, which I called ‘The Finch Moment’.

I used Darwin’s finches as a metaphor for the small anomalies that do not fit an accepted model.[3] Darwin did not set out to overturn the fixed view of life. He simply paid attention to what didn’t fit. Only later, reflecting on what he had observed, did the pattern become clear. And once he saw the pattern, the old model could not hold.

That idea has followed me for much of my own working life. First in the defence and intelligence world, where - as a senior editor for Jane’s Defence Weekly – I spent years tracking sensitive defence technologies that officially did not exist. Then in the frontier science questions that became The Hunt for Zero Point. Then later, through a much more personal doorway, via my wife Ali’s shared death experience, which I’ve discussed through this column and elsewhere, and the discovery that phenomena dismissed as marginal or taboo often sit much closer to the heart of reality than our culture is comfortable admitting.

Remote viewing. Telepathy. Psychedelic research. Unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) and non-human intelligence (NHI).[4] Non-ordinary human experience. Taken individually, they are easy to dismiss. Taken together, they begin to form a pattern.

Those, I told the audience on Tuesday night, were my finch moments.

And that, in essence, was what the evening explored: not a set of beliefs, or an ideology, but a set of anomalies that may be pointing to a new scientific picture. A new operating system. One with enormous implications not only for science, but for how we live, govern, build, invest, heal and plan for the future.

What struck me most, as the evening unfolded, was how clearly that theme was picked up from very different directions by a remarkable group of speakers, all of whom came from different disciplines with different vocabularies, looking at different kinds of evidence. And yet, again and again, the same deeper signal came through: something in the accepted model is no longer enough.

Professor Lee Berger brought that home with great force. His work on Homo naledi has already begun reshaping assumptions about human origins, but on the night he went further, framing the discovery as a kind of ‘first contact’ with a non-human species exhibiting forms of cultural and behavioural complexity we have long treated as exclusively our own. Deliberate burial. Symbolic engraving. Ritualistic behaviour. The controlled use of fire deep inside cave systems. The unsettling implication is that if such behaviours emerged in a small-brained hominin, then the neat story linking consciousness, symbolic intelligence and human exceptionalism begins to wobble. The question is no longer simply who we are, but how we came to define intelligence and consciousness so narrowly in the first place.

Dr David Erritzoe, coming from a very different direction, made a similarly important point through the lens of psychedelic neuroscience. His work at Imperial College London sits at the hard empirical end of a field that was once waved away as unserious. He showed how psychedelic-assisted therapy appears to loosen the rigid, overfitted network patterns associated with conditions such as depression, allowing the brain to form new routes and new forms of coherence. But perhaps most strikingly, he underscored that the subjective dimension of the experience – the felt sense of connectedness, transcendence and meaning – may not be incidental to the healing. It may be central to it. That matters enormously. Because it suggests that consciousness cannot be neatly reduced to brain mechanics alone, even when brain mechanics are part of the picture.

Dr Jude Currivan widened the frame further still. Her argument was that evidence from physics, cosmology, biology and systems science increasingly points towards a universe that is not dead, fragmented and accidental, but relational, evolving and fundamentally interconnected. In her view, the mechanistic worldview inherited from the nineteenth century has become one of the chief obstacles to addressing the crises of the twenty-first. That is a large claim, of course. But it landed because it sat so naturally alongside the themes raised by the other speakers. If the world is more alive and participatory than we have assumed, then many of our current institutions – from business to education to governance – may be running on an outdated operating system.

By that point the question naturally became: so what?

That is where my co-founder James Hersov took the evening in the second half, shifting the tone from anomaly to implication. He framed the panel around a question that lies at the heart of EXO itself: what happens when these signals, coming from multiple domains, begin to form a coherent pattern? What do they mean not just for science, but for life in the real world?

That phrase matters. The real world.

Because, as pointed out in her introduction by Sian Sutherland – the third of EXO’s four co-founders – EXO is not being built as a talking shop for interesting ideas. It is being built to help translate emerging evidence and frontier thinking into the sectors that can actually do something with it: business, finance, technology, and government and policy.

That was where the panel became especially revealing.

Dr Iya Whiteley spoke from her work in space medicine and extreme performance environments. Her focus was not on abstraction, but on what people actually do under conditions of pressure, risk and uncertainty. Again and again, she said, true experts outperform their training and official protocols yet are often unable – or unwilling – to explain how. In institutional settings, deviation from protocol is frequently punished, so the most valuable forms of tacit knowledge go underground. That insight is important far beyond aviation or medicine. It suggests that many systems suppress exactly the kinds of insight they most need, especially when those insights do not fit formal models.

Former US Army intelligence specialist, survival expert and founder of the Psi Games, Hakim Isler, approached the question through the frontier of psi[5] and human potential. His argument was simple but bracing: that after more than a century of research, the real question may no longer be whether such capacities exist, but how we develop, understand and govern them responsibly. He spoke not of superpowers, but of neglected human capacities – aspects of perception and cognition that may be part of what it means to be fully human, a claim that sits squarely within EXO’s wider concern: that experiencer data and anomalous human performance can no longer be dismissed simply because they are awkward for the prevailing worldview.

And then there were the contributions from two people operating much closer to the institutional sectors EXO most wants to reach.

Eric Hahn, speaking in a personal capacity from his position inside a major global investment bank, offered one of the most interesting bridges of the evening between frontier inquiry and institutional reality. He made three points that stayed with me and my colleagues. The first was that success in navigating the current transition may depend less on any single breakthrough technology than on creating the right settings for collaboration – spaces where different types of intelligence, evidence and experience can actually meet. In that sense, the EXO launch itself was part of the experiment.

The second was more personal – and, in its way, perhaps even more important. Eric argued that ontological experience – including one’s own anomalous or difficult-to-explain perceptions, and those of one’s children or family – should not be excluded from an honest conversation about consciousness and reality simply because it is inconvenient to professional norms. That was a significant intervention, because one of the recurring themes of the evening was that ‘experiencer’ data - from out of body and near-death experiences to UAP encounters and other anomalous reports – may turn out to be indispensable in understanding the shift now underway.

His third point went directly to AI. Eric described AI as both the most powerful anomaly detector humanity has ever built and, at the same time, a system bounded by the limits of the physics and assumptions embedded in its training data. In other words, if the tails of the knowledge distribution have been culturally or institutionally truncated – if the frontier data around consciousness, anomalous cognition or non-standard physics has been excluded or stigmatised – then AI will inherit that blindness. That is a profound observation, and one directly relevant to EXO’s mission. Because it suggests that the challenge is not merely one of gathering new knowledge, but of creating environments in which previously excluded knowledge can be taken seriously enough to enter the system.

Philipp Luettmann, from Deloitte, addressed the issue from the perspective of systemic risk and strategic foresight. His contribution was important precisely because it refused to treat questions like UAP disclosure, runaway AI or civilisational instability as isolated curiosities. Instead, he argued that these factors interact. They compound. They multiply one another. And when they do, the real danger is often not public panic but institutional disruption: a crisis of trust, a forced repricing of assumptions, and the destabilisation of decisions built on incomplete models.

That point deserves dwelling on. Because one of EXO’s central instincts is that the stakes here are not merely philosophical. If foundational assumptions about consciousness, intelligence, human potential or non-human presence begin to shift, then the effects will ripple outward into markets, governance, risk, strategy and public trust. Philipp’s warning was essentially that institutions are often poor at responding to weak signals, not because the signals are absent, but because incentives discourage action until the shock has already arrived.[6] We have seen that before, he said, and we will see it again.

Taken together, these contributions made the evening more than a salon on interesting anomalies. They gave it real-world weight.

They suggested that the issues EXO is concerned with are not fringe – it is more the case that our institutions have not yet built a robust language for handling them. That is different. And increasingly, it feels like a temporary condition – not because the ideas are marginal, but because our institutions have not yet built the language or confidence to engage with them.

Another strong theme of the evening was the role of convergence itself. No one speaker needed to ‘prove’ the whole case. That was never the point. The point was that independently – from palaeoanthropology, psychiatry, cosmology, space medicine, psi research, AI, and systemic risk – people are encountering signals that do not fit cleanly within our inherited model of reality. And when those signals begin to rhyme, one has to ask whether something larger is trying to come into view.

This is where experiencer data becomes so important.

If a paradigm shift is indeed approaching, it is unlikely to arrive first as a polished theory with institutional approval stamped neatly across the top. It will arrive messily, through edge cases, anomalies, subjective reports, unexplained correlations, taboo data and insights that do not yet know how to speak in the language of orthodoxy. That does not mean all such material is true. But it does mean that a culture trained to dismiss it out of hand may end up blinding itself at exactly the moment it most needs to see.

Part of EXO’s role, as my co-founders and I see it, is to help gather, assess, connect and communicate those signals responsibly. Not to sensationalise them. Not to collapse into ideology. But not to suppress or sideline them either.

And crucially, to do so for the sectors that can act.

Business. Finance. Tech. Government. Policy.

Because this is not a revolution in science that we can afford to sit back and wait for.

That was one of the deeper undercurrents of the evening - and of the EXO message as a whole. If a new Copernican revolution is coming, we cannot assume it will simply unfold on its own timetable and in its own safe institutional containers. The world is under too much strain for that. We need, collectively, to help birth it into existence.

That need for a more conscious, coordinated kind of midwifery was thrown into sharp relief by the wider backdrop to the launch. Hanging over the evening were two images of humanity that could hardly have been more starkly opposed: on the one hand, President Trump’s threat of ‘civilisational annihilation’ towards Iran; on the other, the Artemis II astronauts circling the Moon and seeing Earth as that fragile blue marble suspended in darkness.

Between those two images lies the whole problem.

The machinery of power, domination and old thinking on one side. Vulnerability, perspective and shared destiny on the other.

EXO exists in that gap as a platform for rigorous inquiry into the questions that may define the next era: what consciousness is, what reality is, what kind of beings we are, and what sort of civilisation becomes possible if our assumptions about all three begin to change.

And this is also a marker for the future of this column.

From here on, I will continue to explore the ideas that have shaped this journey – consciousness and its outliers, UAP and NHI, anomalous cognition, human potential, the emerging evidence for a wider reality. But I will also increasingly write about the action component of those ideas: how they may begin to translate into institutions, decisions, strategy, communication, preparedness and change in the real world.

That is now embodied, in part, by EXO.

And after last Tuesday evening, I feel more hopeful than ever that the appetite for this conversation is real.

Not because everyone agrees. They do not.

But because more and more people can sense that something does not add up. That the old map is no longer enough. And that if we are willing to look clearly at the anomalies – the finches in our midst – a larger pattern may begin to come into view.

That, at least, is the hope.

And for the first time, I feel we now have a vehicle to help carry it forward. A vehicle for people to engage with. Because this is everyone’s story. What we are doing – via the work of EXO directly and its adviser-network more indirectly, but importantly – is seeking to hone it into a narrative with the power to reach decision-makers in the real world sectors that can effect positive change.

WITH THANKS - The EXO founders gratefully acknowledge the support of: Ladbroke Hall and their entire hospitality team; Ben Parker and Tom Arden - FutureNowCollective; Sara Cooper and Team at Plastic Pictures; Patron Tequila and Sentia; and from me personally, to all the amazing subscribers to this column.

[1] For biographies on the EXO team, see: https://www.exoinstitute.io/team

[2] I dropped this as a hefty clue, in fact, into my introduction to The Light Beyond the Mountains in December 2023: https://nickcook.substack.com/p/introducing-the-light-beyond-the

[3] ‘Darwin’s finches’ refers to a group of closely related birds from the Galápagos Islands whose differing beak shapes – adapted to different environments – helped Darwin later recognise that species evolve rather than remain fixed. Darwin did not identify their significance at the time; this was clarified after his return to England with the help of ornithologist John Gould. The finches have since become a classic example of how small variations can point to a deeper underlying pattern.

[4] What used to be termed UFOs and aliens.

[5] ‘Psi’ refers to reported phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis – forms of perception or influence that appear to operate beyond currently understood sensory or physical mechanisms.

[6] For more on this, including an analysis on the impact of UAP/NHI disclosure on industry and markets, see Philipp Luettmann’s groundbreaking paper - ‘How to Foresee Black Swans: Navigating Uncertainty in an Era of Polycrises’: https://www.deloitte.com/ch/en/services/consulting/perspectives/how-to-foresee-black-swans.html

(Photo: Greg Rakozy/Unsplash)

Lock 12 – The Wrap Lock

Rewriting the Architecture of Reality

This series has been, at its core, an inquiry into anomalies. Not as curiosities to be explained away, but as data points that resist assimilation into our current models of reality. Across domains – from physics to neuroscience, from psychology to field reports of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) – we have encountered patterns that do not sit comfortably within a matter-first framework in which consciousness is secondary and localised.

Such anomalies are often treated as peripheral or dismissed altogether. But historically, it is precisely at the margins that scientific transformation begins.

What follows, therefore, is not a departure from the scientific story of the last century, but a reframing of it. Because when viewed through the lens of these persistent outliers, the arc of modern physics begins to look less like a completed structure, and more like a system under revision – one in which the role of the observer, the nature of reality, and the place of consciousness are all being quietly but fundamentally redefined.

Once Upon a Spacetime

For much of the twentieth century, physics appeared to have achieved something close to completion.

At its centre stood Albert Einstein, whose work on relativity had transformed our understanding of the universe. Space and time, once thought to be separate, were revealed as a single fabric – spacetime – curved by mass and energy, yet governed by precise and elegant mathematical laws. Gravity was no longer a mysterious force acting at a distance. It was geometry.

This achievement did not emerge in isolation. It brought to completion a programme that had begun in the seventeenth century with Galileo and Newton – the Enlightenment conviction that nature could be understood as a lawful, mathematical system. Over centuries, that idea had matured into the image of a mechanical universe: precise, predictable, and fully intelligible. With Einstein, that image was not overturned but perfected. For the first time, the universe could be described as a coherent whole: structured, lawful, and unified across every scale that could then be described.

And crucially, it appeared to be objective.

Reality, in this view, did not depend on us. It existed independently of observation. Stars burned, galaxies rotated, and planets traced their orbits whether or not anyone was there to witness them. The observer was incidental – a late arrival in a universe already fully formed.

Einstein himself was deeply committed to this idea. He resisted, throughout his life, any suggestion that reality might depend on acts of observation. In one of his more pointed remarks, he asked whether the Moon would cease to exist when no one was looking at it – a rhetorical question intended to highlight what he saw as the absurdity of such a proposition.

For Einstein, the answer was obvious.

Of course the Moon is there.

Of course reality exists independently of the observer.

This was not simply a philosophical preference. It was a conviction grounded in the extraordinary success of his equations. General relativity could predict the bending of light around massive objects, the expansion of the universe, and the behaviour of black holes – all without any reference to who might be observing these phenomena.

The universe, as Einstein saw it, was a complete system. It had structure. It had laws. It had continuity.

And it did not need us.

Yet even at the height of this achievement, there were tensions beneath the surface.

Relativity described the universe at large scales with astonishing accuracy. But it did not extend to what was happening at the smallest scales, where matter and energy behaved in ways that resisted classical description.

A new generation of physicists was beginning to explore that domain. Many of them were young, working in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War, grappling with experimental results that did not fit the existing framework.

Among them was Erwin Schrödinger.

And what they were beginning to uncover would not merely extend Einstein’s picture of reality.

It would rip it apart.

The Leap to Schrödinger

In the years following the First World War, a very different picture of reality began to emerge – not from the vast scales of cosmology, but from the smallest measurable structures of matter.

The work was scattered across a number of young physicists working in Europe: Werner Heisenberg in Germany, Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, and others trying to make sense of experimental results that no longer fit within classical physics. Electrons did not behave like tiny billiard balls. Light did not behave consistently as either a wave or a particle. The closer one looked, the less stable the underlying picture appeared.

Into this landscape stepped Schrödinger, an Austrian physicist working in relative isolation, who proposed a different approach.

Rather than describing particles as discrete objects, Schrödinger described them as waves of possibility. His equation – now one of the central formulations of quantum mechanics – did not tell you where a particle was. It told you the range of places it might be, and the probabilities associated with each.

This was not a temporary uncertainty, waiting to be resolved with better instruments. It was built into the structure of the theory itself.

Before measurement, the system did not occupy a single, definite state. It existed as a spread of possibilities. An electron was not here or there. It was, in a precise mathematical sense, both.

At first, this was taken as a calculational tool – a way of predicting outcomes. But it quickly became clear that the mathematics was pointing towards something deeper.

If the wavefunction represents all possible states, then what happens when we observe the system? Why do we not see a blur of possibilities? Why do we see one outcome?

This is the point at which quantum mechanics departs most sharply from the classical world that Einstein had helped to define. The equations describe how the wavefunction evolves over time. They do so with extraordinary precision. But they do not explain how, or why, the wavefunction collapses into a single observed reality when a measurement is made.

This is ‘the measurement problem’.

It is not a technical glitch - an inability of our instruments to assess what is going on. It is a conceptual gap at the heart of the theory. Because it implies that the act of observation is not incidental. It appears to play a role in determining what is real.

Schrödinger himself was deeply uneasy about this implication. He did not set out to overthrow the idea of an objective reality. On the contrary, he was attempting to restore a continuous, wave-like description of the world that would avoid the discontinuities of earlier quantum models.

His famous thought experiment, which he introduced in 1935 – the cat sealed in a box, simultaneously alive and dead until observed – was not intended as a celebration of quantum strangeness. It was a critique of it. A way of showing that, if taken literally, the theory leads to conclusions that strain common sense.

Yet the experiment had the opposite effect.

It made the strangeness unavoidable.

Around the same time, debates between Einstein and Bohr sharpened the issue further. Einstein resisted the idea that reality could be fundamentally indeterminate, insisting that the theory must be incomplete. Bohr, by contrast, argued that quantum mechanics was not describing an underlying objective reality at all, but the limits of what can be known through measurement.

In one of his most famous objections, Einstein remarked that he could not believe that God plays dice with the universe. Bohr’s reply was characteristically direct: stop telling God what to do.

Behind these exchanges lay a deeper shift. The problem was no longer simply how matter behaves. It was what we mean by reality. If the fundamental description of the world consists of probabilities that only resolve upon observation, then the observer can no longer be treated as an external witness. Something about observation itself is entering the physics.

By the middle of the twentieth century, this situation had stabilised in an uneasy way. Quantum mechanics worked. Its predictions were confirmed again and again. The technology built upon it – from semiconductors to lasers – had begun to shape the modern world. But a number of underlying questions remained unresolved. How do possibilities become actual events? What causes one outcome to appear rather than another? And what role, if any, does the observer play in that transition?

The classical picture of a fully objective universe had not been disproven. But it had been quietly undermined. Because at its foundation, reality no longer appeared to be simply there. It appeared to require something else.

It was this unresolved tension that John Archibald Wheeler would take seriously.

And in doing so, he would change the question.

Wheeler’s Loop

By the time John Archibald Wheeler began to engage seriously with the implications of quantum mechanics, the measurement problem had already been debated for decades. Most physicists had learned, in practice, to work around it. The equations functioned. The predictions held. The philosophical discomfort could be set aside.

Wheeler refused to set it aside. He was not an outsider to the field. Quite the opposite. Wheeler was one of the twentieth century’s most influential and imaginative theoretical physicists, known as much for the questions he asked as for the answers he helped shape. He had worked alongside some of the most important physicists of the twentieth century. He collaborated with Niels Bohr, contributed to early work on nuclear fission during the wartime Manhattan Project, and later helped develop key ideas in general relativity, including the concept of black holes – a term he himself introduced in a public lecture in 1967.

He stood, in other words, at the intersection of Einstein’s universe and the quantum world that had unsettled it. And he saw, more clearly than most, that the tension between them had not been resolved. Wheeler’s contribution was not to solve the measurement problem in a conventional sense, but to reframe it. Instead of asking how observation affects reality, Wheeler asked a more radical question: What if observation is not something that happens inside the universe…
but something the universe depends on?

This idea became known, in its most distilled form, as ‘It from Bit’ - a phrase that is deceptively simple.

What Wheeler meant by it was not merely that information is important. It was that physical reality – every ‘it’ – may ultimately arise from acts of information – ‘bits’ – that are brought into being through observation. In this view, the universe is not a fixed structure waiting to be discovered. It is, at least in part, brought into being through acts of measurement.

To illustrate this, Wheeler proposed a series of thought experiments that extended the logic of quantum mechanics to its limits. One of the most striking was the delayed-choice experiment. In simplified terms, the experiment suggests that the way a particle behaves – as a wave or as a particle – can be influenced by a measurement choice made after it has already passed through the apparatus.

In other words, present observation appears to influence past behaviour.

This was not a claim about time travel in the conventional sense. It was a demonstration that, at the quantum level, the distinction between past and present is not as fixed as classical intuition suggests. The act of observation does not simply reveal what already happened. It helps define what happened.

From here, Wheeler took a further step.

If observation plays a role in bringing specific outcomes into reality, and if observers themselves are part of the universe, then a loop begins to form, a self-referential structure, which he described like this:

1. Observers arise within the universe

2. Observers perform measurements, generating information

3. That information contributes to the structure of reality

4. Which in turn gives rise to observers

And so, the cycle continues.

This is the ‘observer-participator loop’. It is not a linear chain of cause and effect, but a closed circuit. A system in which the universe and the observers within it are mutually entangled in the process of becoming.

Wheeler himself was explicit about the implications. We are not passive spectators. We are participants.

At first glance, this may appear to be a philosophical overlay on top of physics. But Wheeler didn’t see it that way. He saw it as the logical extension of what quantum mechanics was already telling us. If the act of measurement cannot be removed from the theory, then the observer cannot be removed from the structure of reality.

And yet, even Wheeler stopped short of a full resolution. Because the loop he described contains an unresolved question at its core. If observers bring reality into being through acts of measurement … what brings the observers into being? The loop closes, but it does not explain itself. It describes a system that is self-referential, but not what that system is made of.

This is the point at which the story pauses again. Not because the problem has been solved, but because it has been pulled into sharp focus.

Einstein gave us a stable universe. Schrödinger showed that, at its foundations, that stability dissolves into probabilities. Wheeler then placed the observer inside the system, revealing a loop that connects observation, information, and reality itself. But the nature of the observer remains undefined.

This is the question that a scientist called Donald Hoffman set out to address - and it brings us to the present day.

Hoffman’s Interface

If John Archibald Wheeler closed the loop between observer and reality, he left one crucial element undefined.

What is the observer?

For most of the twentieth century, physics avoided that question.

The observer was treated as a black box – something that performs measurements but does not itself require explanation within the theory. Consciousness, in particular, was often considered outside the domain of physics altogether: a by-product of brain activity, real in experience but not fundamental to the structure of the universe.

Donald Hoffman takes a different view.

Hoffman’s work begins not in physics, but in cognitive science and evolutionary theory. Trained at MIT in artificial intelligence in the 1970s and later working on perception, he became interested in a deceptively simple question: do we see reality as it truly is?

The intuitive answer is yes. Evolution, after all, should favour organisms that perceive the world accurately. Those that misrepresent reality would be at a disadvantage.

But Hoffman, working with collaborators, tested this assumption using computational models of evolution – and the results were unexpected.[1] Agents that perceived reality accurately were consistently outcompeted by agents that perceived only what was useful for survival. In other words, evolution does not reward truth. It rewards fitness.

From this, Hoffman draws a striking conclusion. What we perceive is not a direct representation of objective reality. It is an interface – and to illustrate it, he uses a simple analogy.

Consider the desktop of a computer.

When you look at a file icon, you see a small blue rectangle. You can drag it, open it, delete it. The interface is intuitive and functional. But the icon does not resemble the underlying reality of the computer – the circuits, voltages, and machine code that actually store and process the information. In fact, the interface is designed specifically to hide that complexity. If you had to interact directly with the underlying hardware, the system would become unusable.

Hoffman suggests that perception works in much the same way. Space, time, objects – the entire structure of the world as we experience it – may be more like a user interface than a literal depiction of reality. They are the icons, not the underlying code.

This idea has profound implications, because it reframes the observer not as a passive witness of a pre-existing world, but as an active participant interacting with a structured interface.

To formalise this, Hoffman introduces the concept of ‘conscious agents’. A conscious agent, in his model, is not defined in terms of neurons or physical substrates. It is defined functionally, as a system that:

• experiences

• makes decisions

• and acts

Each agent interacts with others, exchanging information through the interface we perceive as the physical world. In this framework, spacetime itself is not fundamental. It is part of the interface. A convenient representation that allows conscious agents to interact, but not the underlying structure of reality.

This is a significant departure from Einstein’s picture. In relativity, spacetime is the fabric of reality. In Hoffman’s model, it is more like the screen on which reality is displayed.

At this point, the connection to Wheeler becomes clearer.

If observation plays a role in bringing reality into being, and if what we observe is an interface rather than the thing-in-itself, then the observer is not simply measuring reality. The observer is participating in a system that constructs the experienced world through interaction.

And yet, Hoffman goes further. He suggests that consciousness itself may be fundamental. Not emerging from matter but potentially giving rise to the structures we perceive as matter.

This does not mean that physical reality is an illusion in the trivial sense. The interface is real in its consequences. If you step in front of a moving car, the outcome is going to be pre-ordained. The car’s apparent solidity is not a contradiction of the interface model. It is a consequence of it. Interfaces are not designed to reveal underlying reality. They are designed to enforce reliable interactions. The icons on a desktop behave consistently because they compress vast layers of complexity into stable, actionable forms.

In the same way, the physical world presents itself as continuous and law-bound because that stability is what allows agents to navigate it. The ‘car’ is not a direct representation of ultimate reality, but within the interface it encodes a set of consistent relationships – mass, momentum, force – that cannot be ignored without consequence. They are the rulesets of the game. The pain of being hit by the car is real because the interface is binding. It is the ruleset through which this level of interaction occurs. But the structure of what you perceive – objects in space, moving through time – may not be the ultimate layer of reality. It may be the format through which deeper processes are made accessible.

At this point, the arc that began with Einstein has shifted significantly.

Einstein gave us a stable, observer-independent universe. Schrödinger showed that, at its foundations, reality exists as unresolved possibilities. Wheeler brought the observer into the system, forming a loop between observation and reality. Hoffman now reframes the observer itself, suggesting that what we perceive is not the world as it is, but the interface through which conscious agents interact.

But a question remains. If reality is an interface, if observers are participants, and if consciousness is part of the underlying structure, then how does the system behave?

Because an interface alone does not explain certain persistent outliers – the very phenomena that have sat at the centre of this series. Experiences and observations that resist easy assimilation into current models: telepathy and other forms of anomalous cognition; near-death and out-of-body experiences; altered states associated with profound shifts in perception; and the growing body of reports surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena - otherwise known as UFOs.

These are not uniform in character, nor are they all equally well understood. But taken together, they form a class of observations that cannot be dismissed outright. In recent years, elements of the military and intelligence communities have acknowledged the reality of unidentified aerial phenomena as legitimate objects of investigation, while legislators on Capitol Hill have begun to ask increasingly direct questions about their nature and implications. At the same time, large parts of the academic establishment continue to lack a framework within which such data can be coherently integrated.

Historically, this is not unusual. Anomalies have often been the precursors to shifts in understanding. When irregularities in Mercury’s orbit could not be fully explained within Newtonian mechanics they became one of the clues that led to Einstein’s reformulation of gravity. Variations among Darwin’s finches did not fit the prevailing model of fixed species; they revealed the mechanism of evolution. In both cases, what first appeared as deviation became, in retrospect, signal.

Thomas Kuhn, in his analysis of scientific revolutions, observed that paradigms do not change simply through the accumulation of confirming evidence, but through the persistent pressure of anomalies that existing frameworks cannot resolve. For long periods, such anomalies are set aside or marginalised. But as they accumulate, they begin to expose the limits of the prevailing model, eventually forcing a shift in the underlying assumptions.

Seen in this light, the outliers examined across this series are not necessarily peripheral. They may be indicative of a system approaching the limits of its current explanatory frame.

This brings us back to the arc we have been tracing. Because up to this point, the argument has moved in stages.

• Albert Einstein gave us a stable, objective universe.
• Erwin Schrödinger showed that, at its foundations, that stability dissolves into probabilities.
• John Archibald Wheeler placed the observer inside the system, creating a loop between observation and reality.
• Donald Hoffman reframed reality itself as an interface through which conscious agents interact.

But even taken together, these steps leave something unresolved. They describe what reality might be. They do not yet describe how it behaves over time – particularly under conditions where existing models begin to fail.

It is precisely at those points that anomalies tend to appear.

And it is here that the Adaptive Interface Model (AIM) enters the frame.

AIM: The Learning Architecture

AIM begins with a simple but powerful shift in emphasis. If reality behaves like an informational system, and if observers are embedded within it, then the system is not static. It is dynamic. More specifically, it behaves like a learning architecture.

In this framing, the ‘system’ is not a machine in the narrow sense, nor a passive backdrop against which events unfold. It is the broader environment in which all physical processes occur – what we might ordinarily call the universe – understood as an evolving, information-processing structure. Local interactions do not remain local. They feed back into the whole. Patterns form, stabilise, destabilise, and reorganise. Over time, the system explores its own possible states.

This immediately places AIM in continuity with Wheeler. The observer-participator loop becomes, in effect, a feedback loop. Observers generate information - data, and lots of it. That information contributes to the state of the system. The system evolves. And in doing so, it shapes the conditions under which future observations occur.

But AIM adds something further.

It introduces dynamics under stress.

In complex systems – whether biological, ecological, or computational – learning does not occur uniformly. It accelerates at thresholds – at points where existing structures can no longer fully contain the pressures acting upon them. These are the zones where:

• stability begins to break down

• uncertainty increases

• and new configurations become possible

Earlier in this series, we described this as the movement from entropy to coherence. As systems accumulate stress, their existing models loosen. They become more permeable to new information. If adaptation succeeds, a new, more stable configuration emerges – a higher level of coherence. If it fails, the structure collapses. This pattern is not abstract. It appears repeatedly across domains that are familiar to us.

• In evolution, where environmental pressure drives rapid adaptation or extinction

• In ecosystems, where accumulated stress triggers sudden reorganisation

• In neural systems, where learning often follows disruption, error, or even trauma

• In societies, where crises precede structural transformation (e.g. revolutions)

AIM proposes that this same logic may apply at the level of reality itself. And this is where anomalies enter the frame. If the system behaves like a learning architecture, then we would expect signals to appear at precisely those moments when:

• instability rises

• existing models begin to fail

• and the system approaches a threshold

Not as external interventions. But as internal features of the system’s behaviour.

Across The Outlier Series - and before it in The Light Beyond The Mountains - we have examined a range of such anomalies.

· UAP appearing near nuclear installations.

· Luminous, plasma-like orbs observed in regions of environmental or geological stress.

· Episodes of high strangeness that cluster around psychological or social thresholds, to wit the range of extraordinary phenomena reported - via military witnesses and programme architectures - across hotspots in the US Desert Southwest, such as Skinwalker Ranch[2]

These are events that do not behave like stable objects moving through space, but like ‘interface disruptions’ – moments where the underlying structure briefly becomes visible.

Consider a few well-documented ‘clusters’.

Read more

(Photo by Cash Macanaya on Unsplash)

Over the past decade, the public conversation around unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) has shifted in ways that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.

What was once confined to the margins – a mixture of anecdote, speculation, and occasional military leaks – has moved, gradually but unmistakably, into the open. Congressional hearings have been held. Intelligence reports have been published. Senior officials have acknowledged that some encounters recorded by advanced sensor systems remain unexplained within current analytical frameworks.

The terminology has evolved alongside the discussion. ‘UFOs’ have become ‘UAP’, a subtle but important shift that reflects a widening uncertainty about what, exactly, is being observed.

And yet for all this apparent progress, the central question has remained remarkably stable.

What are these objects?

Are they advanced aircraft, experimental secret technologies, sensor artefacts – or something more extraordinary? Are they, as popular imagination continues to suggest, evidence of extraterrestrial visitation?

It is a question that invites clear positions. Belief or scepticism. Confirmation or debunking. It is also, increasingly, the wrong question.

Because when the available data is examined more closely – not through isolated incidents, but through patterns – a different and less comfortable possibility begins to emerge.

Not what are these things.

But why do they appear where they do?

One of the more consistent features of the modern UAP record is geographical and situational clustering.

Encounters are not evenly distributed. They tend to occur in specific contexts, often associated with areas of strategic or environmental significance. Military training ranges. Naval operations. Nuclear weapons facilities. Regions of heightened geopolitical tension. Locations characterised by unusual atmospheric or electromagnetic conditions.

This pattern has been noted repeatedly, although rarely foregrounded in public discussion. Official reports acknowledge concentrations without necessarily interpreting them. Scientific commentary tends to treat each case as an isolated anomaly rather than part of a larger system.

But patterns, once recognised, have a way of exerting pressure.

If an event occurs once, it may be coincidence. If it occurs repeatedly under similar conditions, it begins to suggest structure.

And structure implies relationship.

If that relationship is real, then the UFO phenomenon may not be random at all, but contingent – tied to conditions we are only beginning to recognise.

That, I think, may be what we are seeing here.

The history of science offers numerous examples of this shift – from isolated observation to pattern recognition, and from pattern to theoretical reframe.

For centuries, the motion of planets appeared broadly predictable within the framework of Newtonian mechanics. Yet small discrepancies accumulated, most notably in the orbit of Mercury. These anomalies did not immediately invalidate existing theory, but they resisted explanation within it. Over time, the persistence of the discrepancy pointed toward something deeper – a limitation in the underlying model itself. The eventual resolution, through Einstein’s theory of relativity, did not simply explain Mercury’s orbit. It redefined gravity.

The important point is not the analogy itself, but the mechanism.

Progress often begins when the question changes.

So, let’s reframe the question.

The modern UAP discussion has not yet undergone that shift.

Instead, it remains anchored to a framework inherited from mid-twentieth-century speculation: the idea that unidentified objects in the sky are most plausibly explained as craft – vehicles – originating from elsewhere.

This assumption is rarely stated explicitly, yet it shapes both belief and scepticism. Those inclined to accept the phenomenon interpret it as evidence of interstellar visitation. Those inclined to reject it focus on the absence of definitive proof for such visitation. Both positions operate within the same conceptual boundary.

The result is a debate that appears polarised but is, in fact, constrained.

Because if the underlying assumption is incomplete, the argument built upon it will circle without resolution – as indeed it has for decades. And it is not unreasonable to suggest that this ambiguity serves certain institutional interests – particularly within the military and intelligence communities – where lack of clarity keeps the subject at the margins, contained within familiar narratives of ‘objects’, ‘threats’, or ‘foreign technologies’ (or even as a race by the great powers to acquire and decode them in what is presented in some circles as a new arms race) rather than opening it to more destabilising lines of inquiry.

A different approach begins not with origin, but with context.

Why are certain locations overrepresented in UAP reports? Why do some encounters cluster around nuclear infrastructure – both weapons systems and power generation sites? Why do others appear in regions experiencing environmental or geological stress? Why are some of the most credible observations associated with moments of heightened operational tension – training exercises, surveillance activities, or conflict zones?

None of these questions requires an answer in terms of extraterrestrial travel. They require only an acknowledgement that the phenomenon, whatever its nature, may not be randomly distributed.

And once randomness is set aside, a more unsettling possibility emerges.

That the appearances may be conditional – and that this conditionality may be the very clue that unlocks the mystery.

Complex systems – whether ecological, technological, or informational – often exhibit distinctive behaviour under conditions of stress.

Instability does not produce uniform outcomes. It produces fluctuations, anomalies, and occasionally the emergence of new patterns. Systems can reorganise, adapt, or generate responses that are not visible under normal conditions.

This is a well-established principle across disciplines, from physics to biology to network theory. It does not, in itself, explain UAP. But it provides a different lens through which to consider them.

Not as independent intrusions into an otherwise stable system.

But as events that may be linked, in some way, to the state of that system.

Here, the word ‘system’ requires careful definition. It is not being used in a narrow mechanical sense, but as shorthand for the broader environment in which all physical processes occur – what we might loosely call the universe itself. Increasingly, across physics and information theory, there is a growing willingness to consider that this ‘system’ may behave less like a static backdrop and more like a dynamic, informational structure – one that processes, responds, and evolves. In that framing, reality is not simply a stage on which events occur, but a participatory system, potentially computational in nature, in which local interactions feed back into the whole. This remains speculative but it provides a useful working model for thinking about how anomalies might arise not from outside the system, but from within it.

Over the past year, I have been exploring this idea in more depth through what I’ve called The Outlier Series – an attempt to step back from individual incidents and examine the broader structure within which anomalies appear.

The starting point is deliberately simple.

Outliers are rarely meaningless. In many domains, they are the first indicators that an underlying model is incomplete.

When anomalies cluster – around specific conditions, environments, or thresholds – they begin to suggest not noise, but signal.

From there, the question becomes less about the anomaly itself and more about the system in which it occurs.

What conditions produce deviation?

What happens at the boundary between stability and instability?

And how does a system behave when it approaches that boundary?

One way of describing this boundary is in terms of entropy and coherence.

Entropy, in its broadest sense, refers to disorder, uncertainty, or the breakdown of structure. Coherence refers to the emergence or maintenance of pattern, organisation, and relationship.

In many complex systems, the most interesting behaviour occurs not at the extremes, but at the interface between the two – where order and disorder interact.

This is sometimes described as the ‘edge of chaos’ – a region in which systems are neither fully stable nor fully random, but dynamically evolving.

It is also, not coincidentally, perhaps, where anomalies – including UFOs – are most likely to appear.

If UAP were distributed randomly across the globe, with no correlation to environment or activity, they would present one kind of problem.

If, however, they tend to appear disproportionately in regions characterised by stress or thresholds – technological, environmental, or geopolitical – they present another.

In the first case, we might reasonably assume that we are dealing with isolated objects or events whose origin lies elsewhere.

In the second, we are confronted with the possibility that the phenomenon is, in some way, linked to the conditions under which it appears.

Not necessarily caused by them in a simple, linear sense.

But associated with them in a way that suggests relationship rather than coincidence.

This is where the familiar question – what are they? – begins to lose its explanatory power.

Because it assumes that the phenomenon is best understood as an object, independent of context.

But not all phenomena behave like objects.

Some behave more like events. Others like interactions. Still others like boundary effects – manifestations that arise when different domains or states intersect.

In such cases, asking what something is may be less informative than asking what conditions give rise to it.

There are hints, within the available data, that at least some UAP do not behave like conventional vehicles.

Reports describe objects that appear and disappear without clear trajectories, that exhibit acceleration profiles inconsistent with known propulsion systems, or that lack persistent physical signatures. Some observations are transient, closer to events than to enduring structures.

For example, some military pilots have described luminous objects that appear briefly on sensors and visually, interact momentarily with aircraft or the surrounding environment, and then vanish without trace – not behaving like a vehicle travelling from A to B, but more like an event unfolding in place. Others report radar and visual correlations that suggest interaction between the phenomenon and the observing system itself (such as a radar or ourselves). Still others involve what might be described as boundary effects – transient manifestations that seem to occur at the interface between different environmental conditions, such as atmospheric layers or electromagnetic thresholds.

None of this constitutes proof of anything beyond current understanding. But it does suggest that the default assumption – that we are dealing with craft analogous to aircraft – may be too narrow.

What further complicates this picture is that these appearances are rarely isolated. If unidentified objects simply appeared and disappeared, that would be one thing. But as has been documented repeatedly over decades, they are often accompanied by what researchers have termed ‘high strangeness’ – secondary effects that extend beyond the visual sighting itself. These can include electromagnetic interference, alterations in perception, physiological effects, or deeply subjective mystical experiences reported by witnesses. In that sense, what we are dealing with may not be discrete objects at all, but encounters – events that appear to ripple outward, affecting both environment and observer, and which are difficult to contain within purely physical descriptions.

If the phenomenon does not conform to the behaviour of vehicles, it may be because it is not, in any straightforward sense, vehicular. This echoes earlier interpretations from thinkers such as Jung and Vallée, who suggested that the phenomenon may operate in a way that is both physical and psychological – interacting not only with the external world, but with perception itself.

This is not as abstract as it may sound. It challenges a basic assumption: that what we perceive as ‘physical objects’ are things as they truly are. A growing body of work in cognitive science, including that of Donald Hoffman, suggests otherwise — that perception functions less as a window onto reality and more as an interface. In that view, what we experience as solid objects are not the underlying structures of the world, but simplified representations – ‘icons’ that allow us to navigate an environment whose true nature may be far more complex and largely hidden from us.

An analogy can help. The icons on a computer desktop appear as stable, tangible objects, but they bear no resemblance to the circuits and code beneath them. They are useful fictions – interfaces designed for interaction, not truth. Similarly, what we call the ‘physical world’ may be a consistent, rule-bound appearance generated by deeper processes we do not directly perceive. In that sense, it may be closer – not literally, but functionally – to the experience of a vivid dream, where environments feel solid, coherent, and real, even though their underlying substrate is entirely different.

If that is even partially correct, then the distinction between ‘physical’ and ‘psychological’ may not be as clear-cut as it seems. Phenomena – including UFOs – that appear to move between the two may not be crossing a boundary at all, but exposing the limits of the interface through which we experience reality.

An alternative framing – still speculative but grounded in pattern rather than assumption – is that some UAP may represent responses.

Not responses in the intentional or communicative sense often implied in popular narratives, but responses in the way complex systems respond to changing conditions.

In this view, the phenomenon would not be something arriving from elsewhere, but something emerging – or becoming visible – under specific circumstances.

The circumstances, importantly, would not be arbitrary.

They would be tied to thresholds: points at which systems become unstable, where energy gradients shift, where informational or physical structures are under strain.

This is not a claim. It is a reframing.

And like all reframings, it carries implications.

If the phenomenon is linked to conditions rather than independent of them, then studying it requires a different approach. It becomes less a question of tracking objects – and even less about them being potential threats – and more a question of mapping environments: identifying where and when anomalies occur, and what those contexts have in common.

It also complicates the question of disclosure.

Because if UAP are not discrete objects with a single origin, but manifestations tied to systemic conditions, then the expectation of a definitive revelation – as so-called government ‘disclosure’ is so often framed – a file, a photograph, a recovered artefact that resolves the mystery – may be misplaced.

What would be disclosed in that case would not be an answer, but a pattern.

And patterns are harder to contain – which may, of course, be the thing that governments fear most of all.

They do not lend themselves to simple narratives or clear conclusions. They require interpretation, and interpretation inevitably extends beyond the boundaries of any single institution.

This may help explain why official language around the subject has remained cautious – and often deliberately obfuscating.

Terms such as ‘extraterrestrial’ define a specific hypothesis, one that can be addressed – and, if necessary, rejected – without resolving the broader question.

By contrast, more open-ended formulations, such as ‘non-human intelligence’ or ‘anomalous phenomena,’ acknowledge uncertainty but do not constrain it.

The distinction is subtle, but consequential.

It may also explain a consistent pattern in official responses: questions framed in terms of ‘extraterrestrial contact’ receive direct official answers – typically framed in the negative – while questions framed around ‘non-human intelligence’ tend to go unanswered. The latter is a broader, more inclusive category – one that does not presume origin, biology, or mechanism, and which could, in principle, include forms of intelligence arising from within the system itself.

When discussion does move in this direction, it is often framed using the language of ‘interdimensional contact’ – a term that suggests separation between domains. But it is possible that an even more fundamental interpretation is required. Rather than movement between dimensions, we may be observing moments in which the underlying informational substrate of reality – the deeper structure from which physical experience emerges – becomes partially visible. In that framing, what appears anomalous is not something entering our world from elsewhere, but something surfacing from within the architecture of the system itself.

If the current moment represents the early stages of a disclosure process – and there are reasons to think it might – it is unlikely to arrive as a single, definitive event.

More plausibly, it will emerge as a gradual shift in what can be discussed, studied, and taken seriously.

In that sense, disclosure may already be underway.

The normalisation of discussion around the subject of ‘contact’ is already apparent.

It has moved from the margins into the mainstream, from speculation into institutional acknowledgement. Recent political signals – including statements from President Trump indicating an intention to pursue further disclosure of UAP-related material – suggest that pressure for transparency may be increasing. Scientific and academic interest is growing. Observational systems are being deployed with increasing sophistication. The question is no longer dismissed outright.

What remains uncertain is how that question will be framed.

Because framing determines outcome.

If the discussion remains anchored to the search for extraterrestrial craft, it may continue to cycle between expectation and disappointment, belief and scepticism, without resolution.

Even if – and perhaps especially when – crash-retrieved craft are eventually acknowledged by government authorities, that may not constitute true disclosure. It may simply represent another layer of containment, one that confirms the existence of technology (and perhaps even the beings behind them) while deferring the far more consequential question: the nature of reality itself.

If, however, the frame shifts – from object to context, from origin to condition, from isolated event to systemic pattern – the nature of the inquiry changes.

The phenomenon, in that case, is no longer something to be located elsewhere.

It becomes something to be understood in relation to the system we already inhabit – our universe – and what it, rather than distant visitors, may have been signalling to us all along.

Within The Outlier Series, this line of inquiry develops into what I’ve tentatively called the Adaptive Interface Model (AIM). The idea, in simple terms, is that certain phenomena may represent interactions at the interface between human perception and a deeper informational layer of reality – not external incursions, but moments where the underlying system becomes partially visible.

One implication – still speculative, but increasingly difficult to ignore – is that consciousness itself may not be a closed, individual property. It may be better understood as a local expression of a broader system: a node within a distributed network of awareness.

If so, the phenomenon we are observing may not be separate from us at all, but part of the same underlying architecture.

And if that is even partially true, then the real disclosure may not be about what is out there.

But about what we are within it.

This is not a comfortable shift.

It moves the discussion away from distant explanations and towards more immediate ones. It raises the possibility that the anomaly is not separate from our environment but entangled with it in ways we do not yet understand.

It also expands the scope of the question beyond aerospace and defence – and beyond ‘threat’, a narrative that remains prevalent within defence and intelligence frameworks.

Into physics, certainly. Into environmental science. Possibly into the study of information and observation themselves.

And, inevitably, into questions about perception.

The Outlier Series has been, in part, an attempt to follow this line of inquiry without rushing to conclusions.

To treat anomalies not as proof of extraordinary claims, but as indicators that the current model may be incomplete.

To ask whether the persistence of unexplained phenomena reflects a failure of data – or a limitation of interpretation.

And to explore, cautiously, the possibility that intelligence, information, and environment may be more closely related than our existing frameworks allow.

If that possibility holds, even partially, then the implications of the current moment are even larger than they first appear.

The discovery of life elsewhere in the universe (or even cohabitating with us here on Earth) would be extraordinary. But it would not necessarily challenge the underlying structure of our understanding – however shocking that discovery or revelation might be. It would merely extend the map, not redraw it.

A phenomenon that suggests a deeper relationship between intelligence and reality itself would do something else.

It would require a different map – one that leads not only to a new understanding of the universe, but of ourselves.

For now, the evidence remains incomplete, the interpretations provisional, and the debate unresolved.

But one conclusion is becoming harder to avoid.

We may have been looking in the wrong place.

Not because the phenomenon does not exist.

But because the question we have been asking – persistent, familiar, and intuitively appealing – may not be the one that leads to an answer.

(Photo: Greg Rakozy/Unsplash)

LOCK 11 — The Axiology Lock:

The Question of Value in a Learning System

On the morning of September 26, 1983, a duty officer at a Soviet early-warning facility south of Moscow faced a decision that could have ended human civilisation.

His name was Stanislav Petrov. The computer system he was monitoring suddenly reported that the United States had launched a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. The alert appeared on the consoles in front of him as a series of escalating warnings: first one missile, then several more. According to the protocols of the time, Petrov’s responsibility was simple. He was required to report the attack immediately up the chain of command, which could trigger a retaliatory launch before American missiles reached their targets.

The system insisted the attack was real. The logic of nuclear deterrence demanded that it be treated as real. Waiting to confirm the signal could mean losing the ability to respond at all.

Petrov hesitated.

Something about the pattern seemed wrong to him. The computers were showing only a handful of incoming missiles when a genuine American first strike would almost certainly involve hundreds. Acting on instinct, he reported the alert as a false alarm. He was right. The system had mistaken sunlight reflecting off high clouds for missile launches.

The incident remained classified for years. When it finally surfaced, it became known as one of the closest moments humanity has come to nuclear war.

What makes the episode so revealing is not simply that a computer made an error. It is that the error emerged from a system whose internal logic was perfectly rational. Nuclear deterrence works by compressing decision time to almost nothing. In order to maintain the credibility of retaliation, the system demands that leaders respond within minutes to signals that may themselves be ambiguous or incomplete.

In other words, the architecture of deterrence places the survival of civilisation inside a feedback loop that operates faster than human judgement.

Petrov’s hesitation interrupted that loop. For a moment, human intuition overrode the machinery of the system. Had the same signal appeared on another console, in another bunker, with another officer following protocol more strictly, the outcome might have been different.

This episode reveals something uncomfortable about the systems we build. Intelligence can construct architectures whose internal logic becomes more powerful than the values of the people who created them. Once established, those architectures begin to shape behaviour, compress decision time, and amplify risk in ways that no single participant fully controls.

Nuclear deterrence is not the only example. Financial markets behave in similar ways when feedback loops accelerate beyond human oversight. Artificial intelligence systems now being deployed across the global economy operate at speeds and scales that challenge human governance. Ecological systems respond to accumulated stress through tipping points that unfold faster than political institutions can react.

Across these domains the same pattern emerges: complex systems begin to optimise for their own internal stability, even when that optimisation places the human beings inside them under increasing strain.

This brings us to the next step in the argument developed across the ten locks of The Outlier Series to date.

Lock 10, the last lock, proposed that anomalous phenomena – unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) in particular – may be feedback events generated by a learning/complex systems architecture under stress. It described how such feedback could appear at ‘thresholds’, cluster around high-consequence nodes (such as nuclear systems), and manifest through the perceptual interface we call reality.

But that explanation raises a deeper question that mechanism alone cannot answer.

If the system is learning, what exactly is it learning for?

And more importantly, whose values define success inside that system?

Those questions lead us into the problem that philosophers call axiology: the study of value itself.

The lesson of the Petrov incident is not simply that catastrophe was narrowly avoided. It is that the system itself was behaving exactly as designed. Nuclear deterrence compresses time, automates judgement, and forces decisions inside a narrow window where hesitation can be interpreted as weakness. From the perspective of the architecture, the logic is sound. From the perspective of human survival, it is terrifyingly fragile.

What the episode reveals is that complex systems can pursue internal coherence without regard for the values of the people inside them. The machinery of deterrence optimises credibility, escalation control, and strategic stability, yet those same properties place the fate of civilisation inside a feedback loop that can amplify error as easily as it contains it.

This is the uncomfortable territory we enter with Lock 11.

The Axiology Problem

Human systems instinctively assume that the universe shares our value structure (for ‘universe’ here, you can just as easily substitute the word ‘God’ - a God from whom we derive our morals and values). We tend to assume that reality, at some level, must favour the same outcomes we do. We imagine that the deeper architecture of the world should ultimately optimise for things like survival, happiness, justice, progress, or meaning.

But complex systems rarely optimise for moral ideals. They optimise for stability, persistence, and internal coherence. When those priorities collide with human values, the system’s logic often prevails.

Examples of this dynamic appear everywhere in nature and in the systems we build.

· Evolution does not optimise happiness.
Natural selection rewards traits that increase reproductive success, even if those traits produce suffering, competition, or short lives. The system selects for continuation, not for comfort.

· Ecosystems do not optimise fairness.
Predation, disease, and mass die-offs are not failures of the system but part of how ecological balance is maintained over time. Stability at the system level often depends on harsh outcomes at the level of individual organisms.

· Markets do not optimise morality.
Financial systems reward efficiency, growth, and competitive advantage. Left to themselves, they can generate extreme inequalities or systemic risk without violating their own internal logic.

· Natural selection optimises replication.
Genes that reproduce more effectively spread through populations regardless of whether the resulting organisms live longer, suffer less, or behave more ethically.

Once this pattern becomes visible, a deeper question emerges: if reality behaves like a learning architecture, as the ‘Adaptive Interface Model’ (AIM) proposed in the last lock suggests, then it too must be optimising something.

Which raises the central axiology question of this lock:

What does a planetary-scale learning system optimise for?

The Cold Possibility: The System May Not Care About Us

This is where the argument becomes unsettling.

If the universe behaves like a learning architecture, it may optimise for things that look very different from human moral priorities. The system’s implicit objectives may be structural rather than ethical.

Examples might include:

· Complexity
The tendency of systems to generate increasingly intricate structures over time: molecules forming cells, cells forming organisms, organisms forming ecosystems, intelligence forming technological civilisations. In this sense the system appears to favour arrangements that produce richer layers of interaction and organisation.

· Information density
The accumulation and processing of information within a system. Biological evolution stores information in DNA. Brains store it in neural networks. Civilisations encode it in language, science, and technology. From a systems perspective, entities that gather and process more information increase the system’s overall capacity to model itself.

· Adaptive resilience
The ability of a system to survive shocks and reorganise after disruption. Ecosystems recover after fires. species evolve after extinction events. civilisations adapt after collapse or transformation. What persists are structures capable of reorganising rather than those that remain static.

· System-wide coherence
The capacity of many components to function together without destabilising the whole. Coherence does not mean harmony at every level. It means that the system’s parts remain sufficiently coordinated that the larger structure continues to operate.

None of these optimisation targets necessarily prioritise human comfort, justice, or even survival at the level of individuals.

From that perspective, civilisations may not be the goal of the system. They may be experiments inside it.

Just as ecosystems generate species and evolution generates intelligence, complex systems continually explore possible configurations of matter, life, and mind. A technological civilisation like our own may represent one such configuration: a temporary trajectory through the system’s space of possibilities.

That trajectory is not necessarily being compared to other species on Earth alone. It may also be one instance among many forms of intelligence that could emerge wherever the conditions of the universe allow complexity to develop. The system may simply be exploring which forms of intelligence remain stable, which collapse, and which transform into something more durable.

Seen in this light, the anomalies we have been examining across this series may not be warnings or messages directed at humanity.

They may be something colder and more neutral.

They may be diagnostics.

Signals that appear when the system is probing its own state, sampling the stability of a region, or adjusting the trajectory of a process that has reached a critical threshold.

If that is the case, then the anomalies we have been examining throughout this series may not be signals addressed to humanity at all. They may be the system observing itself.

The Feedback Hypothesis

To see how this might work, we return to the mechanism first introduced in Lock 4 and formalised in Lock 10.

In a learning architecture, feedback appears when systems approach instability. The system does not necessarily intervene to protect its components. Instead, feedback introduces pressures that force adaptation.

This is not unusual. It is how complex systems behave across nature.

Consider a few familiar examples.

· Immune responses
When a virus enters the body, the immune system does not politely negotiate with it. It triggers inflammation, fever, and aggressive cellular responses that can damage the body as well as the pathogen. The discomfort is not a mistake; it is the feedback mechanism through which the organism restores stability.

· Ecological resets
Forest ecosystems periodically undergo fires, disease outbreaks, or predator population swings that wipe out large numbers of organisms. Yet these disturbances often clear accumulated stress in the system and allow new growth patterns to emerge.

· Evolutionary bottlenecks
Mass extinction events dramatically reduce the number of surviving species. But they also open ecological niches that allow new forms of life to evolve and diversify. Catastrophe becomes the mechanism through which evolution reorganises.

· Neural rewiring after trauma
After severe injury or psychological trauma, the brain often reorganises its neural networks. Old pathways weaken and new ones form. The resulting changes can produce entirely new behavioural or cognitive patterns.

In each case, the feedback mechanism is not a moral intervention. It does not exist to preserve comfort or fairness.

It exists to restore or reconfigure the stability of the system.

This is the key insight that AIM – the model that this series has been building to from its inception in Lock 1 – brings to the discussion of anomalous phenomena.

If reality behaves like a learning architecture, then similar feedback processes may occur at larger scales. When a region of the system approaches runaway instability, the architecture may generate ‘events’ that perturb trajectories, introduce uncertainty, and force participants to reconsider their assumptions.

In this sense, AIM builds on the breakthrough ideas of Jacques Vallée – that we live in a ‘control system’ – but AIM doesn’t require non-human intelligences - aliens - as the manipulators of our reality. Nor does it exclude them. It notes, simply, that anomalous events may be triggered at ‘thresholds’ within the system. Such events do not necessarily ‘solve’ the instability. Instead, they reopen the learning process.

Applied to civilisation, the implication is striking.

Human society has entered a period of escalating systemic stress: nuclear deterrence, accelerating artificial intelligence, climate disruption, ecological degradation, and geopolitical fragmentation. These pressures interact with one another, amplifying uncertainty across the global system.

If AIM is correct, conditions like these are precisely where feedback should appear.

And throughout The Outlier Series – as noted earlier – we have been examining one particular candidate for such feedback: the anomalous phenomena commonly described as UFOs or UAP.

Because if these phenomena function as feedback events inside the system, then their role may not be to communicate with us.

It may be to perturb us.

To disrupt our models of reality.

And to force the system into a new phase of learning.

The Human Variable

At this point the argument returns to one of the key insights developed across The Outlier Series.

Human beings are not outside the system observing it from a distance. We are nodes inside it.

By ‘nodes’ we mean something very specific. Earlier locks proposed that reality may behave less like a static physical stage and more like an informational architecture. In such a universe, matter, energy, and consciousness are not separate layers but different expressions of an underlying field of information. What we experience as the physical world may be the rendered surface of that deeper informational substrate.

Within this framework, conscious organisms are not merely inhabitants of the system. They are points through which the system processes and interprets information. Each conscious being becomes a localised centre of perception, decision, and meaning-making.

If this sounds abstract, consider the analogy of a distributed network. In a networked system, the intelligence of the whole is not located in a single central processor. It emerges from the interaction of many nodes, each receiving signals, interpreting them, and transmitting new information back into the network.

The Outlier Series has suggested that consciousness is better understood not as a by-product of matter but as part of the informational field underlying reality, which explores its own possibilities through the nodes that arise within it. Every organism capable of perception becomes a point where the universe observes, tests, and modifies itself.

Humans, in this sense, are not spectators in a finished world. We are participants in a system that is continually learning.

This brings us back to a key implication of Locks 9 and 10. If consciousness participates in rendering reality – if perception and meaning are part of how the interface becomes defined – then human beings cannot be passive observers.

We are active components of the system’s learning process.

In that role we function simultaneously as:

· Feedback nodes – points where the system receives information about its own state

· Interpretation engines – minds that convert raw experience into models of reality

· Meaning generators – sources of values, narratives, and decisions that influence how the system evolves

Which means that human value systems are not irrelevant to the architecture of the world.

They are one of the mechanisms through which the system’s future trajectory is shaped.

The Threshold Moment

The implications of this framework become clearer when we look at the present moment.

Lock 10, building on the learning-zone logic first introduced in Lock 4, ended by suggesting that anomalous phenomena may appear when systems approach instability – the transitional zones where rising entropy loosens the system’s existing structure, allowing new patterns of information to enter and reorganise the system toward a new state of coherence.

If that is correct, then the historical context in which we now find ourselves becomes difficult to ignore.

Human civilisation appears to be entering what systems theorists would recognise as a global threshold zone: a period in which multiple stresses converge and interact in ways that push the system toward instability.

Examples are not difficult to identify.

· Nuclear deterrence
For the first time in history, a single technological system holds the capacity to erase civilisation within hours. The global nuclear architecture depends on fragile deterrence logic, rapid decision cycles, and early-warning systems that compress judgement into minutes. Near misses such as the 1983 Petrov incident illustrate how small errors inside this structure can cascade toward catastrophe.

· AI acceleration
Artificial intelligence systems are now developing at a pace that challenges existing governance structures. Large-scale machine learning models already influence financial markets, security systems, and global information flows. The possibility that autonomous systems could operate faster than human oversight raises questions about control, alignment, and systemic risk.

· Biosphere destabilisation
Climate change, biodiversity loss, and large-scale ecosystem disruption are pushing planetary systems toward tipping points. Melting ice sheets, collapsing fisheries, and shifting weather patterns are not isolated environmental issues; they are indicators of stress within the Earth’s life-support systems.

· Geopolitical fragmentation
The international order that emerged after the Second World War is under visible strain. Regional conflicts, rising authoritarianism, and strategic rivalry between major powers are eroding the stability mechanisms that once moderated global competition.

· Informational overload
The digital information environment has transformed the way societies perceive reality. Algorithmic amplification, disinformation, and hyperconnected media ecosystems now shape political decision-making and collective belief systems in ways that can destabilise institutions.

Taken individually, each of these pressures is significant. Taken together, they represent something more consequential.

They are not independent crises. They are systemic stress indicators.

From the perspective of the Adaptive Interface Model, this is exactly the type of environment in which feedback events might begin to appear. Systems approaching threshold conditions often generate signals that force participants to re-evaluate their assumptions and adjust their behaviour.

This is where the argument developed across The Outlier Series intersects with one of the most curious patterns in modern history.

Because around the same moment that humanity entered the atomic age – the age defined by nuclear deterrence and existential technological risk – a new category of anomalies began to appear in the historical record.

Reports of structured aerial phenomena, luminous objects, and unexplained craft increased dramatically in the years following the first nuclear detonations of the 1940s.

Whether those events represent misinterpretations, technological artefacts, or something more complex remains an open question.

But the timing is striking.

It suggests that the appearance of these anomalies may not be random.

And that is where the next section of this lock takes us.

UAP as System Diagnostics

The possibility that these phenomena might represent a form of system feedback deserves careful consideration.

Throughout this series we have returned repeatedly to the anomalous phenomena commonly described as UFOs or UAP. At first glance they appear to belong to a completely different category of problem: unexplained aerial objects that may represent misidentified aircraft, experimental technology, or perhaps something more exotic.

But as the argument has developed across the previous locks, a different pattern has begun to emerge.

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(Photo by Brian McMahon` on Unsplash)

Ten days ago – in what seems like a world away from the present meltdown in the Middle East – President Donald Trump announced that he would direct U.S. government agencies to begin releasing classified material relating to UFOs, unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), and extraterrestrial life – a move that immediately reignited one of the most persistent and controversial questions of the modern era.

Posting on Truth Social, Trump wrote:

‘Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.’

The announcement followed renewed public discussion sparked by former President Barack Obama, who remarked during a podcast interview that aliens are ‘real’ in the statistical sense – meaning that life elsewhere in the vast universe is likely – while emphasising that he had seen no evidence during his presidency of extraterrestrial contact with Earth.

Obama later clarified his comments, reiterating that there was no hidden extraterrestrial presence at Area 51 and no classified confirmation of alien visitation. Yet the exchange achieved something familiar in the history of the UFO question: it pulled a subject long confined to the margins back into mainstream political conversation.

This is not the first time unidentified aerial phenomena have crossed that threshold. A 2021 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence documented more than a hundred encounters between U.S. military personnel and unexplained aerial objects, many recorded by advanced sensor systems. Congressional hearings followed in 2022, featuring declassified cockpit footage and testimony acknowledging that some incidents remain unresolved.

What Trump’s directive represents, however, is different. It signals not merely acknowledgment of unexplained events, but the possibility – at least rhetorically – of systematic disclosure.

And yet history suggests caution.

Government transparency rarely arrives as a sudden revelation. It emerges instead through controlled processes: review panels, classification assessments, redactions, and carefully bounded language. Files may be released, but meanings remain managed.

If past precedent holds, the coming disclosures – should they materialise – are unlikely to produce a cinematic moment of confirmation. More plausibly, they will arrive as a curated archive: fragments of data, technical reports stripped of sensitive context, and conclusions framed within narrowly defined categories.

In other words, the most important question may not be what is released, but how the phenomenon itself is defined.

Because buried inside Trump’s directive is a linguistic detail that reveals the deeper fault line running through the entire UAP debate: the repeated pairing of terms such as ‘extraterrestrial life,’ ‘UFOs,’ and ‘unidentified aerial phenomena.’

To most readers, these phrases appear interchangeable. Within government and scientific circles, they are anything but.

And that distinction – semantic at first glance – may ultimately determine whether disclosure changes anything at all.

If the United States government does begin releasing UFO-related material, expectations should be tempered by an uncomfortable historical reality: disclosure is rarely a single act. It is a process shaped as much by institutional incentives as by public curiosity.

There are, in effect, several built-in escape routes that allow authorities to appear transparent while revealing relatively little. Understanding these mechanisms is essential to understanding what Trump’s directive is – and what it is not.

National Security Comes First

The first constraint is the most obvious. Any review of classified material must pass through national security filters designed not to inform the public but to protect capabilities, sources, and methods.

Many UAP encounters involve advanced military sensor platforms – radar systems, infrared targeting pods, satellite tracking technologies, and electronic intelligence networks whose performance characteristics remain closely guarded secrets. Even when an object itself cannot be identified, the data used to observe it often cannot be released without exposing sensitive defence capabilities.

This creates a paradox. The more credible an incident may be from a defence perspective, the less likely it is to be disclosed in full.

What emerges instead tends to be partial information: summaries rather than raw datasets, conclusions rather than underlying evidence, carefully worded assessments that reveal uncertainty while withholding the material needed for independent verification.

Transparency, in such circumstances, becomes necessarily curated.

The Power of Definitions

Less obvious – but arguably more consequential – is the role of language itself.

Trump’s announcement refers repeatedly to ‘alien and extraterrestrial life.’ At first glance the terminology seems straightforward. Yet within official discussions of the phenomenon, definitions carry enormous weight.

For decades – but especially within the past five years – Pentagon officials have been willing to acknowledge encounters with unidentified objects while consistently declining to affirm anything related to their provenance or origins. The distinction is not accidental.

‘Extraterrestrial’ implies a very specific hypothesis: biological beings originating from another planet travelling across interstellar space to reach Earth. It is a narrow category – and one that can be rejected without resolving the broader mystery[1].

What has changed in recent years is not simply official terminology, but the questions being asked.

Reporters, congressional investigators, and independent researchers have increasingly pressed defence officials to address a broader formulation: not whether the United States has evidence of extraterrestrial visitation, but whether it possesses knowledge relating to the presence of ‘non-human intelligence’ – a category that does not presume origin, biology, or method of interaction.

Responses from the Department of Defense/War (DoD/W) have been notably cautious. When asked directly about non-human intelligence, Pentagon and AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office – a DoD/W clearing house for the UAP issue) spokesperson Susan Gough has repeatedly declined to engage the distinction, reverting instead to statements addressing extraterrestrial claims or unidentified objects more generally. The pattern is consistent: questions framed narrowly receive narrow answers; questions framed broadly tend to go unanswered.

This asymmetry is instructive.

‘Non-human intelligence’ is a more difficult category to dismiss because it describes capability rather than provenance. It does not require interstellar travel, physical craft, or even conventional technological assumptions. It simply acknowledges the possibility of intelligence whose nature or origin remains unknown.

The difference may sound semantic. In practice, it defines the boundaries of permissible inquiry.

If investigators conclude that no evidence supports extraterrestrial visitation, that statement can be entirely accurate while leaving open a far wider set of possibilities – technological, environmental, cognitive, or presently unknown.

And it is precisely this widening of the frame that makes the language consequential. Once the discussion shifts from where something comes from to what it may be, familiar explanatory categories begin to lose their stability – a tension that helps explain why some institutional responses appear carefully constrained.

Semantics, in other words, become a form of containment.

This linguistic narrowing is reflected clearly in mainstream scientific commentary. A recent overview in Scientific American summarised the prevailing institutional view: despite decades of investigation, no U.S. government study has produced evidence that extraterrestrials have visited Earth.

Pentagon reviews conducted through AARO, alongside a NASA-commissioned expert panel, have catalogued numerous unexplained sightings but found no indication that they represent alien technology or life.

“There is no evidence to suggest that any of these UAP sightings are extraterrestrial in nature,” former AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick stated, emphasising instead the likelihood of misidentified aircraft, atmospheric effects, or sensor artefacts.

Astrophysicist Federica Bianco, a member of NASA’s independent UAP study team, quoted in the same Scientific American article, similarly noted that even unusual observations can often be reconciled with known technologies once assumptions are adjusted. Other scientists argue that public fascination with UFOs reveals more about human psychology than about evidence of visitation – a reflection, perhaps, of humanity’s reluctance to believe itself alone in the universe.

Taken strictly on its own terms, this position is scientifically reasonable. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and science advances by eliminating explanations before embracing new ones.

But there is an important nuance often overlooked in public debate.

The Limits of the Scientific Question

The scientific consensus largely addresses a single question:

Are UAP evidence of extraterrestrial visitors?

It does not necessarily address a different – and potentially more profound – question:

What if the category itself is too small?

The modern UFO debate has been shaped for decades by a single, deceptively simple question:

Are aliens visiting Earth?

It is a question that lends itself to clear answers – yes or no, belief or scepticism, proof or debunking. It is also, increasingly, the wrong question.

The persistence of this definition has shaped the debate far beyond government language. Over time, the extraterrestrial hypothesis has become less a scientific category than a cultural default – a shared mental model through which unfamiliar observations are automatically interpreted. Popular imagery of spacecraft crossing interstellar distances and visitors arriving from distant star systems has provided a ready-made narrative framework, one that channels both belief and scepticism into the same narrow question. Whether accepted or rejected, discussion remains confined within those assumptions, even when the underlying phenomena may not fit them comfortably. Yet the persistence of a familiar explanation does not guarantee that it is the correct one.

But the data emerging from military encounters, scientific investigation, and decades of anomalous reports does not consistently behave like a conventional aerospace problem. Nor does it comfortably fit the expectations of planetary visitation.

Objects appear and disappear without clear propulsion signatures. Some exhibit performance characteristics that strain conventional aerodynamic models. Others seem less like vehicles than transient phenomena – events rather than machines.

Even the terminology has shifted. The U.S. government now prefers ‘unidentified anomalous phenomena’ rather than unidentified aerial phenomena, quietly acknowledging that many incidents involve domains beyond the atmosphere or effects not easily categorised as craft at all.

From Aerospace Mystery to Ontological Problem

Taken together, these shifts suggest something subtle but important: the mystery may not lie in where the phenomenon comes from, but in how reality itself is being interpreted.

If intelligence exists in forms not yet understood – non-biological, nonlocal[2], or embedded within physical processes we only partially grasp – then the extraterrestrial hypothesis becomes only one possibility among many, and not necessarily the most disruptive one.

The deeper challenge raised by UAP is therefore not technological but ontological.

Over the past year, this publication’s Outlier Series has explored precisely this transition – from treating UAP as isolated anomalies to understanding them as indicators of a deeper problem in our model of reality itself. The recurring pattern is not proof of extraterrestrial visitation, but the persistent appearance of phenomena that resist conventional categories of space, time, and intelligence. Seen in that context, current disclosure debates are less about confirming extraordinary claims than about confronting the possibility that our explanatory framework – rather than the data – may be incomplete.

The Outlier Series reframes the UAP question by asking instead:

What counts as intelligence?

Where does mind end and environment begin?

And how much of reality do human perceptual systems actually reveal?

These questions move the discussion out of astronomy and into the foundations of science itself – into physics, consciousness studies, and the limits of observation.

For much of modern history, anomalies have served as catalysts for scientific revolutions. The stubborn failure of Mercury’s orbit to conform with predictions more than a century ago hinted at relativity before Einstein formalised it. Quantum mechanics emerged from experimental results that refused to conform to classical expectations. Progress often begins not with answers, but with persistent inconsistencies.

UAP may represent a similar category: observations that resist current explanatory frameworks without yet providing a new one.

Seen in this light, the intense focus on extraterrestrials begins to look like a conceptual bottleneck – a familiar story imposed on unfamiliar data.

And this is where the implications of disclosure become far larger than the confirmation of life elsewhere in the universe.

Because if the phenomenon ultimately points towards forms of intelligence that coexist with, intersect, or operate through aspects of reality we do not yet understand, then the question shifts dramatically.

The issue is no longer whether something has travelled here from another star.

It becomes whether humanity has fully understood the nature of the reality it already inhabits.

Why Institutions Hesitate

This broader framing may also help explain why reports of internal hesitation within the defence establishment have begun to surface alongside calls for disclosure.

Recent media accounts describe resistance inside parts of the Pentagon to rapid declassification, citing concerns ranging from national security sensitivities to potential cultural or religious disruption. Some commentary has framed these anxieties in dramatic language, invoking fears that the phenomenon could be interpreted as ‘demonic.’

Such terminology, however, obscures more than it clarifies.

A calmer interpretation is that officials are grappling with explanatory uncertainty. When events resist established scientific, technological, or theological categories, institutions tend to fall back on the conceptual frameworks available to them – sometimes borrowing language from belief systems rather than empirical inquiry.

Replacing emotionally charged labels with more neutral terms helps lower the temperature of the discussion. Concepts such as ‘extradimensional’, ‘nonlocal’, or ‘non-human intelligence’ do not assert conclusions; they simply acknowledge that origin and mechanism remain unknown.

Again, the distinction matters. Words shape interpretation, and interpretation shapes public reaction.

If disclosure is framed through fear-laden narratives, the subject risks retreating once again into stigma and polarisation. If approached instead as an open scientific problem – complex, unresolved, and worthy of investigation – it becomes something else entirely: a legitimate frontier of inquiry.

And that may be precisely the challenge now confronting policymakers.

Because once official institutions acknowledge that unidentified phenomena exist and remain unexplained, the conversation inevitably expands beyond defence analysis into questions about consciousness, perception, and humanity’s place within a larger system.

In that sense, the risk is not panic.

The risk is paradigm change.

The Smaller Shock – and the Larger One

For decades, public debate around UFOs has revolved around a single imagined outcome: confirmation that humanity is not alone in the universe.

Yet paradoxically, that possibility may represent the least disruptive implication of the current moment.

The discovery of extraterrestrial life – microbial or even technological – would enlarge the map of the cosmos while leaving the underlying assumptions of reality largely intact. Life would simply exist elsewhere - a brief moment of shock, followed by a return to ordinary life.

The challenge posed by UAP appears different. It raises the possibility that intelligence may not be confined to distant planets, biological organisms, or even conventional physical systems. Instead, it hints – cautiously, incompletely, and potentially far more explosively – that intelligence could interact with reality in ways not yet captured by present models of physics or perception.

This is why terminology matters. ‘Extraterrestrial’ describes origin. ‘Non-human intelligence’ describes relationship.

The distinction widens the inquiry from astronomy to ontology – its impact on us at a deep level of meaning.

If even a fraction of reported encounters, sensor anomalies, or observational data ultimately point toward forms of intelligence that coexist with or intersect human experience in unfamiliar ways, then the implications extend far beyond defence disclosures or classified archives. They touch the oldest questions humanity has asked: What is consciousness? How do observers participate in reality? And are we discovering something external – or something about the structure of perception itself?

These questions carry huge weight. They challenge assumptions about separation between observer and environment, mind and matter, subject and object. They also explain why institutions built to manage certainty may approach the subject cautiously. The destabilising force is not necessarily the phenomenon itself, but the interpretive consequences that follow.

Reports suggesting internal resistance to rapid disclosure – whether motivated by national security concerns, cultural sensitivities, religious beliefs or simple uncertainty – should therefore be understood less as fear of the unknown and more as recognition of how far the conversation could travel once fully opened.

Because once official acknowledgement moves beyond ridicule and into legitimacy, inquiry accelerates. Scientists begin studying what was previously ignored. Academic institutions follow emerging data. Public discourse shifts from speculation to investigation.

In many respects, that transition is already underway.

Astronomers are deploying new sensor networks to study anomalous aerial events. Physicists are revisiting long-standing questions about observation and information in quantum systems. Consciousness research – once relegated to the margins – is re-entering serious interdisciplinary discussion. Even sceptical voices increasingly argue not that anomalies should be dismissed, but that they should be measured more rigorously.

Disclosure as Process, Not Event

Disclosure, in this sense, may not arrive as a dramatic revelation delivered through a government press conference. It may emerge gradually, through the normalisation of inquiry itself.

Which is why the language surrounding the subject matters so profoundly.

Framing unknown phenomena as supernatural, demonic, or existential threats risks replacing investigation with fear. History suggests that humanity advances not by retreating from anomalies but by studying them – patiently, sceptically, and with intellectual courage.

If Trump’s directive ultimately produces little new information, it will still have accomplished something significant: it will have moved the conversation further into the open. And once a question becomes publicly legitimate, it becomes scientifically unavoidable.

The real issue, then, is not whether classified files confirm extraterrestrial visitors.

It is whether humanity is prepared to examine – with the full tools of science, philosophy, and open inquiry – the possibility that intelligence in the universe may be more diverse, more subtle, and more deeply woven into reality than previously assumed.

Civilisation has never advanced by avoiding uncomfortable questions. Progress has always begun at the edge of the known, where anomalies accumulate faster than explanations.

Whatever emerges from the coming reviews and releases, one conclusion already seems clear: the era of dismissing the question outright is ending. Disclosure, in its most meaningful sense, may already be here.

The deeper question may be whether the phenomenon is waiting to be discovered – or whether it has been waiting for us to learn how to see it.

[1] Forty years ago, the DoD learned this lesson well. On my watch as a defence reporter, in trying to resolve the mystery surrounding reports of a deployed ‘stealth fighter’ (later revealed as the Lockheed F-117A), the DoD consistently denied it had such an aircraft. Within the strict definition of the term, this was true and accurate - the stealth fighter was actually a stealth attack aircraft.

[2] Non-local: not confined to a single location in space or time, allowing correlations or awareness across distance without direct physical interaction – as suggested, for example, in phenomena such as clairvoyance or remote viewing, where information appears to be accessed without sensory contact.