But adapting Earthsea (or any of Ursula K. Le Guin’s books) to film has been challenging. I actually have some first-hand experience with this in trying to adapt one of Le Guin’s science fiction books into a feature film, during which time I met her, and exchanged many calls and emails over the few years before her death in 2018. I even asked her about the Ghibli and the Sci-Fi channel Earthsea adaptations, which I’ll comment on later in this article.

But first, let me say a bit about my relationship with Earthsea and why it was so important to me.

(note: Today it’s called the Syfy channel but back in 2004 when they did Earthsea I believe it was called the Sci Fi channel – I’ll use both interchangeably)

Why Earthsea is Special (and not just to me!)

When I first became a teenager in the early 1980s, I discovered The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) books like many boys my age. After I had read those multiple times, one day, in a small library in the town of Williston, North Dakota, I began to hunt for other books about wizards and dragons. I came across an article that asked, “What were wizards like before they became wise old Gandalfs?”, and it was a review about A Wizard of Earthsea (AWOE), a young adult novel written by Ursula K. Le Guin in 1968. AWOE introduced the school of wizards on the Isle of Roke in the fantasy world of Earthsea, which I dare say at one point was probably among the best-known fantasy worlds, after Middle-Earth (J.R.R. Tolkien) and Narnia (C.S. Lewis) of course.

AWOE was the first book in what was at the time, Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy (she later released new books – more on these in a bit). The original Earthsea trilogy takes place in a world that consists of an archipelago of islands with a rich history of cultures, wizards and dragons. I gobbled up A Wizard of Earthsea and it became probably my second favorite book (after The Hobbit, even more fun to read than LOTR, which was stodgy and long), and became familiar with ILL (Interlibrary Loan) to get our library to get the rest of the books in the trilogy.

Le Guin’s economy of words to tell the story (AWOE is a short book where each chapter is both slow/contemplative and densely packed), mixed with the philosophy of the books made me re-read it many times (not to mention all the magic, exploration and oh yeah, a dragon!). Sparrowhawk (true name: Ged) became my favorite wizard.

Though the series was written to appeal to young adults, it became more sophisticated in each book, which focused on a different part of Sparrowhawk’s life/career as a wizard. The two subsequent books introduced two new teenage characters as Sparrowhawk had became first a wandering wizard (in book 2, The Tombs of Atuan) where he met Tenar, a priestess in the Karg lands, and then by book 3 (The Farthest Shore) he had became the archmage of all Earthsea (and head of the wizarding school). In the Farthest shore, Sparrowhawk meets the teenage prince Arren/Lebannen and they go on a quest together through the underworld trying to counter an evil wizard and collaborate with dragons.

Why did I like Earthsea books (particularly #1 and #3) so much? The story of a teenager attending a wizarding school and learning magic (written decades before Harry Potter!) and talking with dragons (who only spoke the Old speech) appealed to me as a young man wanting to make my way in the world. Le Guin’s magic had both a well thought out technique (using ancient names in the language of the dragons), and an accompanying philosophy, that equilibrium needs to be maintained. This was best expressed with the cautionary phrase for aspiring wizards to a keep in mind: To light a candle is to cast a shadow. In other words, the world had more depth than a lot of fantasy series today which have many thousands of pages more than Le Guin ever wrote about Earthsea.

Moreover, unlike other fantasy of the time, where most of the characters were white, Le Guin did something clever – she snuck in the fact that most of the characters in the archipelago were brown-skinned, like Native Americans, and the only white people were the Kargs, who lived in a corner of the world and were depicted as invaders. As a brown boy growing up in the Midwest amongst mostly white friends, this came as a revelation. I would later learn that Ursula’s father was famed anthropologist who spent time with Native Americans.

Like many teenage boys, I couldn’t quite get into the middle book, The Tombs of Atuan, not just because it was about a teenage girl (Tenar), but because there wasn’t much wizardry going on. Sparrowhawk doesn’t show up until the end of the book, and by then his powers have been zapped by the Old Powers in the Tombs as he searches for the second half of the ring of Erreth-Akbe, one of the most legendary wizards in Earthsea’s long and complex history. Le Guin wrote this book, and later a fourth book in the series, Tehanu (1990), deliberately from a female point of view, and it included much more about ordinary life in Earthsea than it did about magic and dragons (the ending of Tehanu, not withstanding). Even though there is eventually a romance between Sparrowhawk and Tenar, even that is mostly absent in the books until after Sparrowhawk ends his career as a wizard at the end of The Farthest Shore and retires back to the Isle of Gont, where he was from, and where Tenar had gotten married, had kids, and was a widow on a farm who takes in Tehanu (more on her later!).

Finally, by the time that Tales from Earthsea was made, there was another book of that name, a collection of tales from the history of Earthsea that was less about the characters we had met. It was meant to round out Earthsea as a living breathing world, and that was followed by The Other Wind, which continued the story of the now-retired archmage (Sparrowhawk), of Tenar, Tehanu and Lebannen (now king). It also brings in more about dragons, a new, possibly feminist philosophy to Earthsea (Le Guin was known as a prominent feminist), combined with revelations about reincarnation, which only the barbarian Kargs experienced in Earthsea (Le Guin often brought Daoism into her work). Today, the whole series is referred to as the Earthsea Cycle, while the trilogy still only refers to the first 3 books.

Adapting Earthsea, attempt 1: Sci Fi Channel Miniseries (2004)

Which brings us back to film adaptations.

I admit both of the “slower” books (#2 and #4, as I used to call them, though they are rich in their own way and the conclusion of Tehanu does involve dragons!), would be much more challenging to adapt into a film than either #1 and #3 (A Wizard of Earthsea or The Farthest Shore, both of which show Sparrowhawk as a wandering wizard having adventures).

I already mentioned that Le Guin’s work, which she herself called “un-genrifiable”, has been difficult to adapt and Earthsea has a particularly bad history.

I, like other Earthsea fans, was thrilled to hear in the early 2000s, especially in the wake of the excellent Lord of the Rings film adaptations by Peter Jackson, that the Sy Fy channel was adapting Earthsea into a miniseries (originally called Legends of Earthsea, later shortened to just Earthsea), which came out in 2004. The mini-series attempted to adapt the first two books of Earthsea, telling the stories of coming of age of Sparrowhawk (now called by his true name, Ged, rather than his use-name) at the school of wizards in parallel with Tenar’s stories of coming of age as a priestess. There was some serious acting pedigree (Danny Glover was Ged’s mentor, the mage Ogion, and Isabella Rosallini was Tenar’s mentor), and then the mini series ended with them meeting and bringing Tenar back to the Archipelago from the Karg lands (which is how the second book ends). There was even producing pedigree (including Lawrence Bender who was involved in Pulp Fiction) and supposedly, Jackson collaborator Philippa Boyens, one of the screenwriters of the Lord of the Rings films, was involved (which helped sell Le Guin on the idea of a TV adaptation).

I watched it eagerly along with perhaps millions of other fans. The adaptation fell flat with Earthsea fans. The website Moria said, I think appropriately: “Earthsea feels exactly like tv filler. In the books, Ursula Le Guin expended a great deal of time creating a world with a depth and culture, but nothing of this survives in the mini-series.”

Le Guin herself criticized the adaptation very publicly. In a now famous essay titled “A Whitewashed Earthsea: How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books.” It turns out she wasn’t consulted much, or at all during the making. Mostly she objected to the commercialization elements which came at the expense of the story. One major thing is that they made the main character, who was brown in the books, Sparrowhawk, played by a white actor because that would be better. This was a major part of the background of Earthsea and in order to get it approved by the publisher and readers in 1968, she snuck this fact into the book by not revealing it until half way through the book or it would probably have been rejected. Not only had she bought into Boyens being involved (Boyens dropped out of the project), but one of the main producers, Sam Haimi, had just made a miniseries called Dreamkeeper with many Native American actors, and certainly implied to Le Guin that he would respect the red-brown skin of many of the main characters. As Le Guin lamented “Danny Glover was the only actor of color” at all.

Moreover, in a book and world where names mattered, everyone had a use-name that they were known by, and a secret name which was their true name, Earthsea ignored this and reversed the secret true name vs the use name of the main character. The importance of names not just for people and dragons (who can be controlled if you know their true names) but also for magic (all magic is done using true names) can’t be overestimated. In fact, one of the first cyberpunk novels that predicted something like the internet was True Names, by Vernor Vinge – he had been inspired partly by Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy.

But it wasn’t just the race issue or name issue. The school became more of a Harry Potter type school and the story lost all if not most of the subtlety of the books and lots of action was added that may not have been necessary. Le Guin called it “McMagic” rather than what her books had been about!

Le Guin wasn’t the only one who was sorely disappointed – so were her hardcore fans, including me! I still watched the series multiple times anyway when it came out on DVD just to be in the world, but had to admit it was pretty atrocious.

My disappointment went beyond just being a casual fan. I spent quite a few hours in Earthsea in my mind in the 2000s. While I was trying to teach myself screenwriting, I wrote a draft of about the first quarter of a screenplay of AWOE – I didn’t know anything about rights, and never intended to publish it or try to get it made – I was just doing it to learn screenwriting and so decided to use my favorite novel to learn it with.

I also put together a fan dictionary of names of characters and places in Earthsea, which I combined with fan art (with the artists permission) to create a very unofficial companion guide to Earthsea, titled: “To Light a Candle: An Unofficial Earthsea Companion from A to Z”. In doing this, I had to delve more into the history of Earthsea than a typical reader – the kind of deep dive you might do to create a Bible to faithfully adapt a book or TV series, even if it’s just background information. I had put the companion guide draft up on the Internet (well before I met Ursula or her son Theo who was in charge of adaptations). I hoped that those adapting Earthsea would at least have consulted it or other fan websites that had similar information on them ( I recall a few websites at the time). I never published it as a book because it was just an informal fan thing. The funny thing is you can still find bootleg copies of the companion guide packaged with bootleg copies of the Earthsea trilogy on pirate websites – I’m not sure who combined them.

Strike #1 on adaptations. Le Guin, in another essay wrote that she herself had attempted a screenplay adaptation of the first two books, which she in her other essay about how terrible the adaptation was, Frankenstein’s Earthsea, and the backstory . She wrote this essay in response to fans complaining why she “allowed” the Sci-Fi channel to change her story. The backstory is interesting read on how Hollywood twists things and how artists visions get corrupted. Today the Sci-Fi miniseries is considered just a really bad adaptation.

Adapting Earthsea, attempt 2, revisited – Studio Ghibli (2006)

This brings us back to where I started this essay to the Studio Ghibli adaptation from 2006, Tales from Earthsea. The poster, shown above, was amazing with the Dragon and the child.

To be honest, I saw it as soon as I could get my hands on the DVD (though by then I wasn’t as invested or involved in Earthsea other than just as a fan). I was sorely disappointed; but more than that, I was just confused about what I was watching. There are no islands really in the film – it takes place on a continent that looks kind of like Japan, but with characters that look like anime versions of medieval European characters from a Japanese point of view. Some of this is to be expected in a Japanese adaptation.

First of all, it wasn’t really an adaptation of the book “Tales from Earthsea”. Like the Sci Fi channel had done with the first two books, it was an attempt to combine the next two books, The Farthest Shore and Tehanu, while borrowing the name from the fifth book in the cycle (Tales from Earthsea).

But the story of the books wasn’t really there. Yes, there is a lad named Arren/Lebannen and a wizard named Sparrowhawk and even an evil wizard named Cob (from The Farthest Shore), there is also Tenar, a woman Sparrowhawk used to know, and Tehanu, a girl who has been burned (from Tehanu) . There is a dragon who appears at the very end (which was surprising because Dragons play an important role in the Farthest Shore – I won’t ruin it, but suffice it to say the story doesn’t follow the books at all as far as I could tell. These are about as much as I could find in common with the books.

The film starts with Arren/Lebannen, a prince (just like in the books), killing his father for no reason at all, then at the end after saving the day, he’s going back to face the charges. OK, It’s been a while since I read the Farthest Shore – but I’m pretty sure I’d remember that plot point! It was completely made up for the film – and it changed the entire tenor of the film. On rewatch and re-reading Le Guin’s essay, I can see where they got the idea, by borrowing the shadow version of him that was introduced in a Wizard of Earthsea, but this wasn’t at all obvious or clear in the film.

Le Guin told some of the backstory of how she thought Miyazaki (the original founder of Studio Ghibli in an online essay, “and she repeated some of this to me when I asked her about it.

Hiyao Miyazaki had asked her for the rights and she was thrilled to have him try to adapt it, given her admiration for his work. But then she was informed that he was “retiring” from filmmaking and that his son, Goro Miyazaki was going to direct. When Goro asked her what he thought after they showed it to her in a movie theater in Portland, she said: “Yes. It is not my book. It is your movie. It is a good movie.”

My Reaction to the Ghibli: Then and Now: A New Interpretation

Upon rewatch recently, 20 years later, I had the exact same thought. It’s not a bad movie – it is beautiful in its animation, and I didn’t dislike it, but the part of me that knew the stories was cringing at each change. I mean, what was up with that weird ambisexual version of Cob “the evil wizard”? And when were Lebannen and Sparrowhawk going to the land of the dead? And once again, everyone was white (though in a vaguely Asian kind of way), which was not only inconsistent with Earthsea, but didn’t really match the characters either. They looked anime-western white characters but talked and acted like Japanese characters.

Le Guin even said that it took some of the names and situations of her characters but it was a totally different story. When I asked Ursula about this, she told me something similar about how she was disappointed that Hiyao Miyazaki wasn’t directing it.

So, what changed for me in this viewing? Well, for one thing, I had forgotten a lot of the film (if not the books), so I was surprised again. The biggest surprise was of course that the film started with a prince killing his father and then meeting the wizard in the wild. I knew I wasn’t going to get what I really wanted to see: a depiction of the Prince of Enlad meeting the archmage of Roke in the school of wizards, not to mention their interactions with dragons and their trip to and through the underworld.

A Japanese correspondent wrote to Le Guin (you can find a link to it on the wayback machine link I shared ) after her essay, saying that in Japan there was a distinct reactions: those who were elated with the film and those who are devastated. He even summarized that for those who were elated with the film they viewed it this way: “Simply put, the Ghibli movie is a story of a boy who kills his father without cause, and of what happens to him after he then runs away.”

It’s fair to say that any fan of. Earthsea was (like me!) probably devastated when they originally saw this version. It is true The Farthest Shore was about death, but not like this. It’s a totally different story.

After watching it again at the Ghibli fest on the 20^th anniversary, I think I finally understand what happened here. I’m not a big fan of Freudian interpretations of films (or anything really), and I don’t think Ursula, as a feminist, would approve of Freudian interpretations.

But there was something I couldn’t ignore. In the 20^th anniversary Ghibli fest, after the film finished, there was “extra” material: an interview with the Japanese producer (with subtitles if I recall) from Japanese TV that explained the history of the film. Goro had never made a movie before. No one thought he was up to the task, except for this particular producer who backed him. Even his father, Hiyao Miyazaki, who Le Guin had been counting on to direct this film, didn’t believe Gorry was up to the task, thinking it a very bad idea for his son to direct a big budget adaptation.

But Goro was defiant and wanted to prove himself worthy and defied both Hiyao, putting replacing him as the “Miyazaki filmmaker”, and the author.

As the prince in the kingdom of Ghibli, he metaphorically had to kill his father to prove himself and then put himself up for judgement. Note that the film starts with: a prince killing his father, runs off by himself to redeem himself through his adventure, and then submits himself back to the kingdom for judgement of his “crimes” once the film is done!

I would never have come to this conclusion just from the English articles or from watching the film. Listening to what this producer was saying, about tension between the father and the son, after the screening suddenly brought it into focus. Goro was not only metaphorically killing his father, he was submitting his results from running away from his father’s wishes for judgement in the kingdom of Ghibli. In the Earthsea books, the young man (Lebannen) eventually becomes the King of Earthsea. No doubt Goro was hoping this would happen if they judged his work well.

I can’t say that I liked the film any better as an Earthsea adaptation. But I did appreciate the film more since I knew it wasn’t going to the be story that I loved. And finally, after listening to the producer talk about the (metaphorical) patricide and the son taking the keys of the kingdom, I think I finally understand some of the really confusing stuff in the film.

No doubt there’s more – around Japanese psychology. I spent two summers in Japan, even learned the language and traveled around, and there was something particularly Japanese in the storyline about the son rebelling and killing the father out of rage that had no reason at all (except for life) and then submitting himself for judgement. I can’t explain the actual psychology in Japanese terms – I would need to have lived there a lot longer than two summers as a student to come up with a more reasoned understanding of this thing which also explains why so many liked the film in Japan.

Post Script #1: Another Earthsea adaptation coming?

When I was working with Ursula before her passing in 2018 (see PostScript #2), they had already started talking with a group to adapt Earthsea as a TV/streaming series.

In 2018, Fox optioned it and as of 2019 they were working with Netflix to develop the series. These options need to be renewed each year, and usually even if the option is exercised, they have seven years usually to complete at least part of the film or series. The last articles I saw on this that seemed definite were in 2019, mentioning Jennifer Fox and A24. It’s not clear if they exercised the option, or how far they got – probably Covid knocked everything off course. There is probably some update on the producers social media since then as well.

A TV series is probably the right format for a world as complex as Earthsea. Even though the books are very slim, they have a lot of depth and history that they refer to. Now that the Earthsea cycle is complete, ending with The Other Wind, it’s much easier to have a story arc across the seasons than it might be otherwise.

\Here’s are some random notes on my take for anyone who wants to do an Earthsea series:

• Season 1: I would stick with adapting A Wizard of Earthsea and not try, as the Sci-Fi channel did, or as Studio Ghibli did, try to adapt two books in this season. This should focus on Ged, the wizarding school, the Dragon of Pendor. You might even be able to squeeze a second season out of the chase of the Ged’s shadow, or at least part of a season. That said, they can lay some groundwork for the second season (the first half of he ring of Erreth Akbe), more on the Kargs which can happen at the beginning since the Kargs invade Gont, and tell many stories that are setups for future books and seasons. Theme/motto of this season: To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

• Season 2: I agree that adapting the Tombs of Atuan by itself is problematic. I would combine the Tombs of Atuan (what Tenar is doing) with what Ged/Sparrowhawk did in between. Ursula didn’t say much about this, though she referenced that he was the greatest traveling wizard of the age – so he went a lot of places. Places and things he does include: capping The Black well of Funduan (spelling? Check the bootleg guide of names I created to get this right), and his first encounter witih Cob. Combining the story of Ged moving from being a young wizard on his own to becoming one of the greatest heroes of Earthsea by finding both of the halves of the Ring of the greatest wizard of all time, Erreth-Akbe, and bringing them with Tenar to Havnor makes for a great arc in and of itself, and sets up for Ged becoming the Archmage.

• Season 3: This could be mostly focused on the events of The Farthest Shore, but I would include more on Cob at the beginning, and somehow we need to see more of Ged doing the things he does to become Archmage, and what it’s like for him to be stuck on Roke as archmage. This could be done before the Lebannen/Ged meeting in Roke when magic starts to fail, when Ged has been Archmage for a while and hasn’t traveled. It could be done via flashbacks too. This could even be a part 1 and part 2 of this season. Theme/motto of this season: To see the light of a candle you have to go to a dark place (not the exact quote from Le Guin but it was something similar).

• Season 4 and 5: After season 3, I think that adapting Tehanu is problematic but you can do a few interesting things between Tehanu, Tales of Earthsea and especially, the Other Wind.

I think you could incorporate future elements into the earlier seasons to create threads that Ursula didn’t have in the first 3 books. Here are some random suggestions that don’t fit for just one season but are cross season.

• Incorporate more of the lore, including dragons/humans, as well as the with the backstory of Segoy raising the islands of earthsea (the Song of EA). This could be introduced in the first season and then would bear fruit after season 4, pulling in elements from Tehanu and possibly the other wind, with more hints of it in season 2.

• Similarly, the ring of Erreth Akbe needs to be introduced in Season 1 to have the payoff in season 2. A good way to introduce lore in season one is when Ged is at the Isolate Tower witih Kurremkurmerrek (spelling?) – we could have him not just be the. master name but also to tell the history behind the names.

• Dragons need to be strewn throughout – the Dragon of Pendor might be mentiouned much earlier than it is A Wizard of Earthsea so that when Ged goes there. Kalessin. Was Segoy a dragon?

• Simiarly, the history of the Kargs and the Hardic people, and their relationship to death needs to be introduced earlier, probably in season 1, expanded on in season 2, mentioned in season 3, and then payoff could be in season 4 or season 5.

• The philosophy of the equilibrium is important to keep the school of Roke becoming Harry Potter-ized.

• The feminist themes that Ursula definitely put into her books, as well as the Taoist themes need to become phrases that get repeated throughout the seasons. Think of “Zeus’s law” from the recent Nolan Odyssey, though I didn’t think he did a particularly good job adapting parts of Homer’s epic (things I wanted to see he didn’t really put on screen), he did a good job in having this thread throughout and it had a big payoff.

• The last season could focus on the Other Wind. Tales of Earthsea (the book, not the film) could pull some of its tales in through a tradition of storytelling. When I was adapting one of Le Guin’s books (The Telling, see below), there was a whole theme around storytelling. I think it’s worth bringing that in.

• Finally, at least pay homage to Le Guin’s struggles to bring in brown characters as the Hardics; use some native American actors at least! Don’t make the protagonist white (Tenar is white and that’s fine!). There’s no reason there can’t be more white people (kargs) in the Archipelago than in the books, where they were relatively rare, but the dominant race should be brown/red in the archipelago.

• Make a Bible. Use my “A to Z” informal guide (it’s still out there in pirate form). When I was adapting the Telling (see below), I worked with Ursula to create a kind of “bible” for the movie – which included back stories, etc.

I’ll finish with the point that adaptations are difficult. If you are too literal it won’t work on the screen. If you go way off course (which both of these previous adaptations of Earthsea did) in the usual Hollywood manor, you’ll lose the spirit of the books and just end up with something that doesn’t satisfy fans or new viewers.

Anyways that’s more than my two cents for whoever eventually ends up doing the adaptation – whether it’s the folks who optioned it in 2018 or someone else in the future!

PostScript #2:

I’ll pick up this thread in another article about my own experience in attempting to adapt The Telling, one of Le Guin’s sci fi novels in the Hainish cycle of books (the Ekumen is like a group of interstellar anthropologists and most of her books in this cycle, including The Left Hand of Darkness, involve an Earth man or woman who goes to another planet). It was quite the adventure and I spent a lot of my own money on the project, though the film didn’t eventually get made. Stay tuned and let me know if you want to hear that story!

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Introduction to The Zen Entrepreneur and the Dream

What This Book Is About

This book is about my adventures in both the startup and the spiritual or “new age” scenes in the 1990s, following my graduation from MIT. The years covered in this book roughly followed the so-called “dot-com boom.”

It isn’t easy to write a book about the intersections of these two worlds. For one thing, the participants of those two scenes were, for the most part, mutually exclusive. For another, attempts to integrate these two worlds usually rely on cliches (“visualize what you want”, “follow these steps and you too will be a great success!”).

Unfortunately, the reality, as anyone who tries to integrate their spiritual life with their business life can tell you, is much messier and more complicated.

Our professional lives are intertwined with our spiritual development in ways that I certainly didn’t expect as a young entrepreneur. Moreover, these complications are rarely acknowledged in either the business or spiritual literature.

The internet has allowed for a superficial bridging between East and West. In the West, we have yoga studios on almost every corner in major cities, and mindfulness is taught by major employers like Google for stress reduction. Meanwhile, in India and China, startups are booming, and materialism runs rampant, perhaps more than it ever did here in the West.

Despite this surface-level mixing, a deeper integration of East and West has eluded both sides.

The deeper issues we face in our spiritual lives and in our careers are still kept separate. In this book, I’ll relate some of the reasons why I came to believe that our challenges in the world of business are based on the same inner challenges that impede our spiritual growth.

In short, the life lessons that we are here to learn spiritually are manifested in the two arenas we spend most of our time in: our professional/work life and our relationship/personal life.

For those interested in entrepreneurship:

I have often compared the founder’s journey to the stages of the hero’s journey of Joseph Campbell.^[1]

My first book, Zen Entrepreneurship, was about the early stages of the hero’s journey: “The Call to Adventure”, “The Refusal”, “Meeting with a Mentor”, “Crossing the Threshold”, and even “Supernatural Aid.”

I have now come to the conclusion that the most important stages of the hero’s journey are the “darker” ones, such as “Road of Trials”, a “Visit to the Underworld”, and “The Journey Back” to the ordinary world.

Those are the stages that this book is about. I’m also trying to give readers a sense of what running a venture-backed startup was really like vs. the almost romanticized version that is presented by the (relatively few) mega-success stories the public is fed.

For those interested in spiritual adventures:

Many spiritual memoirs tell of apprenticeship with a guru-like figure, and Zen Entrepreneurship was no different, though I encapsulated teachings from many sources into the character I called Ramaswami.

This book, on the other hand, is about conducting a spiritual search in the absence of a single “guru”, a more realistic path for most of us in the modern world. This includes the struggle to integrate what we have learned from different places into our lives and careers.

What this book is really about, then, is learning to weave the different threads of our life - professional, personal, and spiritual – together into the dreamlike tapestry that we (mistakenly) call “waking life.”

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made of

The ambiguous use of the word dream in the title is deliberate.

At one level, it refers to the use and purpose of nighttime dreams and waking visions on our path of spiritual growth, a subject I spent many waking and sleeping hours exploring (and continue to do so) as part of my esoteric studies. Almost all the spiritual traditions use dreams as a metaphor for life as being an illusory or temporary world, not just in Buddhism and Hinduism. There are elements of this metaphor in the esoteric sects of the major monotheistic religions, namely the Sufis, Kabbalists and the Gnostics. Most native cultures place dreams and dreaming as a key part of their shamanic worldview as well.

At another level, the title is also about the “dream” of every entrepreneur to “hit it big” and make millions of dollars from their startup. This book is then also about what happens when our pursuit of that dream goes sour, an all-too-common occurrence.

Today in Silicon Valley and beyond, I think there is almost too much focus on the financial part of the dream to the exclusion of other considerations or definitions of success or value in the startup journey.

Any startup that doesn’t sell for bazillions of dollars is considered a failure, and any personal or professional achievements along the way are simply written off as “input” that you can utilize to be more financially successful in the future. This single-minded focus on the financial axis of startup success can be damaging to our self-esteem and to lessons that we are here to learn in this life.

But what if the personal journey of the entrepreneur is just as important as the financial outcome of the startup itself? In this case, the journey truly is the destination.

I started meditating, a path of personal growth, because I thought it would help me with the challenges of my career. What I realized was that I had it backwards. In some sense, the challenges in my career and in my life were being presented to help me in my personal and spiritual growth. They were, it turns out, an important and vital part of my path!

What Makes These Books Unique

Publishing Zen Entrepreneurship (my very first book) presented some unique challenges. It was rejected by every minor and major publisher I sent it to.

Unbeknownst to me (at the time), I had committed a grave sin in the world of publishing. I had created a book that was, using a term coined by Ursula K. Le Guin, un-genrifiable.

It wasn’t clear if Zen Entrepreneurship was memoir, self-help, how-to, new age (or mind/body/spirit), career development, or startup/business book. The publishing industry didn’t know which shelf to put it on.

The truth is it was all of these at once. Both Zen Entrepreneurship and the current book could nicely fit on any of these shelves.

It wasn’t until the second edition was published in 2013 that the book gained a small but enthusiastic audience, not just in the US; it was translated into a Russian edition (and more recently in Brazil in Portuguese).

If the emails I’ve received over the years from readers are any indication, Zen Entrepreneurship has made a real impact on people’s lives precisely because it crossed genres. Readers went back to it again and again because the struggles it describes are universal.

How I Came to Write This Book

Mission accomplished, I thought, and I moved on to other startups and writing projects.

A number of years later, I was at lunch with a Russian classmate of mine from business school. He asked me when I would release a sequel to Zen Entrepreneurship (whose title for the Russian edition had been translated into Business in the Lotus Position).

He suggested that all of my Russian readers would like to know what happened next after the end of the first book.

I protested. I didn’t think I had very many Russian readers, and a sequel wasn’t really necessary. I argued (perhaps trying to convince myself as much as him) that I had tied things up very nicely at the end of the first book. The startup had moved beyond the initial formative stages, and my mentor, Ramaswami, had left for the Himalayas, effectively ending my apprenticeship.

Reluctantly, I began to recognize the funny feeling that tells me something is a “clue” in my own personal treasure hunt. The clue kept bubbling back up and wouldn’t let me go.

Eventually, after I had become a more successful author with a number of books to my name, I gave in to the clue and began to write this book.

What’s New in This Book

In this book, in addition to completing the story of my first startup, Brainstorm, I also included some of the more esoteric spiritual episodes that I left out of Zen Entrepreneurship. Perhaps I was worried about what respectable businesspersons, scientists and venture capitalists might think of me!

As I’ve gotten older, I have found myself caring less and less what more “respectable” (and often narrow-minded) people think. We are who we are and masking that to appear respectable is no longer something that I am willing to do.

I also completely left out of my first book the story of my personal life, and how my relationship with my first girlfriend, Ellen, formed and evolved during the years recounted in Zen Entrepreneurship (we met at, of all places, a meditation seminar). Our relationship was a bit like a roller coaster ride which followed the ups and downs of my first startup.

A life story isn’t complete without accounting for both career and love, and I’ve tried to correct this oversight by including some important episodes of turbulence that Ellen and I encountered during these years as a central part of the narrative of this new book.

A Word About the Structure of this Book

This book is based on real events which took place almost 30 years ago. In some cases, I am sure I have misremembered some details. In other cases, I have deliberately re-arranged events and combined characters in order to protect privacy and/or for the sake of the narrative.

As I did with Zen Entrepreneurship, I’ve added summaries of the spiritual and business lessons from most chapters, complete with exercises for you to try. So as not to interrupt the narrative flow, I have put these at the end of each of the five parts of the book. Readers have found these summaries to be useful, but it is entirely appropriate to skip these in your first read.

How To Read This Book

There are several different framings you can use to read this book, and you’ll get something different with each one.

You can read this book as a tale of a young entrepreneur and the evolution of his startup, just like any other book on the (nowadays increasingly virtual) business bookshelves.

Or you can read it as a story of a spiritual seeker on a continuing mystical journey, just like any book you might find in what is now called the mind/body/spirit bookshelf.

Finally, you can even read it as a romance novel – a story of a nerdy, ambitious boy and an artistic, creative (and very patient) girl.

However you choose to read it, my hope is that this book will inspire you to bridge the seemingly ever-widening gap between our professional, personal and spiritual lives. In truth, you may realize that they are not so far apart.

For those who struggle, as I did, to bring these spheres of our lives into harmony, I hope this book will help you to see and transcend your own patterns and walk your own Warrior’s Path — the unique combination of lessons you are here to learn, and the contribution you are here to make.

— Rizwan Virk,

Mountain View, CA & Cambridge, MA, June, 2026

Order Zen Entrepreneurship.

Pre-order The Zen Entrepreneur and the Dream.

^[1] Fore more on how the hero’s journey stages apply to entrepreneurship, see my book Startup Myths & Models, and my academic articles about this.

The debate about whether authors should use AI at all has been raging. I’m just about finished editing my latest book, The Zen Entrepreneur and the Dream. This book was mostly written before the age of AI over 4 years ago, though I added a number of chapter summaries and exercises this year (2026).

I ended up using AI (Claude in particular) extensively in the editing process, and I’ve reached the conclusion that every author should be using AI in their writing! Prior to this experience, I only used AI for initial research into a subject (and still do), but like Wikipedia, which might be OK for laypersons but isn’t a real source for academics, I ended up tracking the down the source documents when I needed to actually reference anything.

Now let me clarify, I didn’t actually use AI to do any writing. Like Stephenson I already know how to write, and don’t want AI to do any of my writing. But I found it extremely helpful to use as a developmental editor, and somewhat useful as a copy editor, and quite useful as a proofreader.

This is particularly valuable for those who, like me, have worked both with major and smaller publishers, but who have also self-published their books. In the past, my self-published books have been considered high quality (most people didn’t realize they were self-published) because I spent real money on developmental editors, copyeditors, proofreaders and indexers. But for a self-published author this can add up to thousands of dollars.

This is where Claude came in and proved quite useful in the editing process:

• My major task for editing was that the original book was already quite long (~109k words), and I added summaries for each chapter which were another ~28k words. This would’ve brought the total manuscript to ~140k words, which is too long. The longest I wanted the book to be was in the range of 115K to 120k words.

• · First I used it to look at the Chapter Lessons/Summaries and organize those that were the longest, and within those, to organize which of the individual lessons were the longest.

• Then I had Claude actually suggest, for each Chapter Lesson/Summary, which ones to trim. Claude was particularly useful in the on-going project because it could ingest the Word files, transform them internally, and keep multiple versions of the files which it could reference and most importantly, make intelligent comments on.

• It would also suggest where I was duplicating material from other chapters (esp. in a 100K manuscript that was written years ago, this was quite useful in deciding where I could trim).

• The suggestions to cut weren’t just about length – they were about substance as well. Particularly how to keep the essence of what I was saying intact but suggest where I was saying something with too many words.

In this first phase, each time it suggested parts that could be trimmed, it asked me if I wanted it to edit the actual Word document and give it back to me, but I said no. I hate it when human copyeditors edit my work, because they usually change my voice and I find myself cursing at them throughout the editing process for changing my wording. More importantly, after I edited a specific chapter, I could upload the file again and have it give me feedback on where I did edit well, and where I might have trimmed too much.

Using this process (again, doing only my own modification of text), I was able to get the lessons down from 28K words down to 15k words – a pretty big cut. I then did it with the whole manuscript, which I was then able to get down to 101K (from 110K).

The best part was that I could upload the revised version of each chapter after each set of edits and have it do a compare to both previous versions and relate it to other parts of the book.

Then, it was quite useful at identifying errors that spell/grammar-check didn’t get. These ranged from missing propositions/subjects in sentences to wrong references, or for example, using “lightening” vs. “lightning” in context or even when I forgot to mention a name. It was also quite useful in identifying punctuation issues (for example, extra spaces before or after quotes, of which I had tons).

Claude wasn’t so good at some thing. Here’s a short list of where to be careful:

Merging/Editing documents.

At one point I needed to merge my “lessons document” into the main document, putting lessons at the end of each chapter or part of the book. It asked me if I wanted it to merge this in. I was hesitant because I knew the complexity of the Word document format (I actually wrote code to read Word and PDF documents back in the day), and I knew there were many complexities. Still, since it was in .docx format, which is an XML format, I guessed that it might be able to do it. This proved to be a very complex task for Claude – the most complex I had asked it to do in this book project. This is because when you change the source file (like a Word or PDF file) there are tons of interdependent references to styles and other formatting elements). I was impressed that it was able to accomplish the task – it went off and did many individual steps. It even suggested that I should pass of tasks like this to Claude Work.

In the end, the document had problems (it was t missing some formatting and it didn’t get the pictures ported over correctly). I decided to discard Claude’s merged document and just did the merge manually in the source file by copying and pasting from one file to the appropriate sections in the main narrative .docx.

I wasn’t surprised that it wasn’t able to do it, but I was surprised at how far along it got, inserting all the text at the right places in the manuscript and getting most of the styles/formatting correct. Again, having written code to manipulate these kinds of files in my past programming life, I know it’s better to use the application (word or acrobat) to do modifications, so I’m glad I did this manually. Lists especially are notorious within Word for being messed up by the slightest change.

Proofreading

While Claude turned out to be pretty good at proofreading and finding errors that Word’s spell and grammar check couldn’t find, this turned out to be a more complex process than I thought. Each time I fixed a set of errors, I would have to ask it to go find other errors. So, this worked – but only because I kept asking it to go back and find more errors, which it did. I’m still considering whether I even need to hire a proofreader at this point.

Errors with fields/punctuation.

Because it uses a third-party tool to convert word docs into an internal format, it would occasionally tell me to fix and error that wasn’t actually present in the Word file. For example, I used Word fields for Chapter numbers, but it would tell me there were no chapter numbers present, or it would tell me something was italicized when it wasn’t. To Claude’s credit, when I pointed out these errors and told it to look again, it acknowledged the error and figured out how to use its internal tools to double-check the word fields (or other punctuation).

In any case, overall, I was extremely surprised at how helpful Claude was in the writing process (well, to be clear, it was the editing process) and how it served as a trusted advisor along the way. Most editors at the publishing house don’t have the patience or time to keep looking at new drafts several times a day and offering suggestions, or the memory to let you know that you already mentioned something in another part of the book, and suggest which description is worth keeping and which is worth trimming or even cutting. The key here is that the suggestions it made were after reading and then re-reading a passage and it gave me many more helpful suggestions for editing than I ever got from an editor (of any type, acquisition/developmental/copy/proof) at a book publisher!

In the end, I used Claude to get the book down to the range I wanted to be in within a very short period of time – it literally saved me weeks of editing (or I might not even have bothered with some of the edits). I ended up with a much tighter (and better) book, in my opinion!

While the debate rages on about AI reading and writing books, the only conclusion I came to from this process was: AI is in an indispensable tool for writers, and all writers should be using it, though not necessarily for writing. Think of it as the best editor that you have ever had.

The Sci-Fi Feedback Loop

Science fiction like Spielberg’s films and The X-Files often pull real world UFO narratives (taken from reports of witnesses and experiences) into a fictional narrative. These depictions then enter the public imagination, and have played a role in influencing how the public and the media (and even the government) approaches this particular subject.

This interaction between science fiction and real-world impact is informally called The Sci Fi Feedback Loop, and my PhD dissertation was one of the first academic examinations of this process. It shows

There are many well-known examples of the one-way and on-going influence. Star Trek inspired many different kinds of technology innovations and generations to go into the space program at NASA. The X-Files (more on the UFO aspect later) had a measurable effect called the Scully effect, which inspired many young women to go into STEM related fields. Speaking of Spielberg, after the film Jurassic Park came out, there were even reportedly academic institutions that increased research into molecular biology. After the film Gattaca raised fears of genetic discrimination, the so-called Gattaca law , more formally known as Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) was passed in Congress in 2008. This impact on Congress of sci-fi is a key part of my assertion on how the sci-fi feedback loop has worked for UFOs.

A particularly well-known example of the sci-fi feedback loop at work over many decades is in rocketry and human space travel. The work of Jules Verne and HG Wells had a particular influence on early rocketry pioneers like Robert Goddard, Hermann Oberth, and Russian “father of rocketry” Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, not to mention Oberth’s protégé, Werner von Braun, who built the V2 rocket during World War 2. A look at early film representations of Verne’s ideas of going to the moon, in the 1902 film A Trip to the Moon, and then a look at the post WW2 film, Destination Moon (1950) – shows this process at work. While the earlier film had borrowed Verne’s idea of a bullet, the later film (in 1950) had borrowed the look and feel of von Braun’s very real world V2 rocket.

Not only were these pioneers inspired by sci-fi, some of them, including Tsiolkovsky and von Braun and Oberth, like Kepler hundreds of years before them, actually wrote science fiction like volumes to try to illustrate the science they were working on. Star Trek inspired many of the next generation of STEM workers to join von Braun in sending NASA to the moon. and of course this loop continues to be at work today with space entrepreneurs like Elon Musk looking to colonize the moon through his company SpaceX. In an odd coincidence, in von Braun’s novel Project Mars: A Technical Tale (~1949), the leader o the Mars colon was called the “Elon”, and even more coincidentally, SpaceX had the largest IPO in history on the same day as the release of Disclosure Day, June 12, 2026.

UFOs, Sci-Fi and Disclosure

We see the Sci-Fi Feedback Loop at work currently as Disclosure Day releases at a cresting of the latest wave of interest in the UFO subject, whose modern era began in 1947 with the coining of the term “flying saucer” (and the similar “flying disk”). In fact, on the same day as the release, June 12, the DOD released its latest batch of UFO Files (tranche 3).

The current wave of interest was kicked off by a front-page New York Times story in 2017 about the Pentagon’s secret UFO program, AAWSAP, and has risen not only with members of the program (such as Lue Elizondo and Jim Lacatski and soon, Jay Stratton), as well as Navy pilots coming forward to describe what can only be described as encounters with advanced technology that some of them thought was “out of this world”. This led to the first Congressional hearings in 50 years, and interest from the academic community (including the Galileo project started by Avi Loeb at Harvard and the Sol Foundation, created by Stanford professor Garry Nolan), and additional whistleblowers like David Grusch testifying to Congress that not only are there craft of non-human intelligence, but we have recovered such craft and associated biologics (i.e. beings/pilots) of those craft, a claim which many academics continue to think of as “science fiction”, despite an increasing number of academics looking at the subject seriously and the fact that on the same weekend as the film was released, the White House announced a panel of scientists and experts to advise on UAP data and analysis.

The Sci-Fi Feedback Loop has been at work in Spielberg’s fictional “alien” films for a long time, most notably with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Close Encounters relied heavily on real world accounts of UFO sightings, and narratives that could have come from the annals of Project Blue Book (the Air Force’s program which was shut down on December 17, 1969, an important date for me).

This includes mass sightings in the Midwest (really happened), aviation pilots not wanting to report a UFO (really happened), the reports of car engines stalling when under a UFO (commonly reported), the chase across state lines of UFOs by police cars (really happened in the Midwest), and of course, one of the biggest narratives of them all: government and military knowledge of the phenomena in conjunction with a cover-up to convince the public that there was nothing special going on.

This last point we know about because of the Robertson Panel set up by the CIA in 1952, which put forth a policy of discouraging the public from making UFO sightings, and the work of the main scientific consultant to Project Blue Book, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a professor of Astronomy at Northwestern. While with Blue Book, Hynek played a leading role in dismissing cases like the now infamous Michigan case where he suggested the sightings might be “swamp gas”. That particular case prompted outrage from constituents whose Congressman, future US president Gerald Ford, demanded hearings. These hearings in 1966 and subsequent hearings in 1968, which led to the Condon report and shutting down of Project Blue Book on December 17, 1969 (a personally important date for me - ask me if you’re curious), wouldn’t be repeated in Congress for another 50 years.

Hynek later revealed that Blue Book was meant to “explain away” UFO sightings rather than to seriously investigate them. Hynek became a consultant to the making of the film, and coined the terminology used in the title (“Close Encounters”) while working with the Air Force. Even the French scientist in the film leading the covert UFO project, Lacombe, was based partly on Hynek’s protégé, French scientist Jacques Vallee, who met Spielberg during the filming and had many discussions with him about the script.

The beings in Close Encounters were based off of eyewitness testimony, though of course Spielberg put his own spin on making the aliens “friendly”. The impact of Close Encounters and related films on the subject of Ufology can’t be either underestimated or over-estimated. While in circles of ufology, the description of small white beings as “aliens” was well known, for the general public the subject still conjured up “little green men” from Mars and the invading aliens from the plethora of B sci-fi films in the 1950s. In a sense, Close Encounters made the public more aware of what private circles of ufologists had known all along, by wrapping them up in a fictional tale that included psychic interaction and citizen contact and a military coverup.

But the Sci-Fi Feedback Loop’s impact on real life narratives isn’t only in a positive sense. For Close Encounters, this impact included not only opening up public discussion and awareness of the UFO topic, it also had the impact of limiting the interpretation of the UFO phenomena to an “extraterrestrial” one. One of the big regrets that Vallee expressed was that when he met with Spielberg, the storyline had already been locked into what’s been called the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” of UFOs. Meanwhile, Vallee and others like John Keel had proposed that beings that people were seeing may not be extraterrestrial at all, but may have been here all along, relying on tales of folklore from Northern Europe including French descriptions of beings from the mythical land of “Magonia” after which Valle’s book, Passport to Magonia, was named. Similar tales, existed in the Celtic traditions of interactions with beings of the Fae.

To this day, though there are many other theories that have been proposed (including time travel and crypto terrestrial – see my article The Avatar Hypothesis of UFOs/UAP for a summary of them and my own hypothesis), the extraterrestrial hypothesis has dominated both public debate among scientists and the government and the media. I wrote an article about UAP for a major news organization a few years ago, and I was encouraged to only focus on the “prosaic hypothesis” (i.e. that UFOs are nothing) or the “ET hypothesis’, partly for length reasons, but also because the other options are harder for the public to comprehend. Vallee has long been an advocate that the actual data points to something much more complicated than simply ETs from another planet or solar system.

The ET hypothesis itself shows the close interrelationship between science, science fiction, and the way we interpret things. As knowledge of the universe increases, so does our ability to visualize more possibilities. Johannes Kepler, known for describing the motion of planetary bodies using Newtonian Mechanics, also wrote one of the first modern science fiction novels, Somnium in 1608, which, like a few others of the seventeenth century, included human visitors to the “moon” and interaction with beings living there.

Later, as we discovered that Mars and Venus were planets not unlike Earth, that revolve around the sun, the idea of “extraterrestrials” expanded. In the first half of the twentieth century, we interpreted reports of any beings that weren’t human as being from “Mars” or “Venus”. Even the UFO contactees in the 1950s, such as George Adamski and others, reported “beings from Venus”, without considering, as Vallee suggested that the phenomena itself might be deceiving us, fitting into our own understanding of the universe. We all knew than that mars were planets like Earth.

The whole Ancient Aliens movement tries to make the same point in reverse – that beings which were interpreted as “angels” or “demons” in the distant past were actually extraterrestrial, but that wasn’t an interpretation that the public could understand.

By the 1960s, there was speculation that planets existed around other stars, and the contactees start to report that instead of beings coming from Venus or Mars, they came from distant Star Systems. Scientists also use this hypothesis to try to mock and disprove the reality of UFOs – while most scientists believe some kind of life exists out in the Galaxy, we know of no way they could have visited us, and this difficulty is used to dismiss UFOs as being outside the bounds of physics, and should be ridiculed and dismissed out of hand. Believers, on the other hand, we are eager to place the origin “non-human beings” from one of these solar systems. Not that this explanation would support rather than upend our current “scientific” understanding of the universe. Spielberg’s Close Encounters helped to solidify this as the explanation that we should discuss and debate.

The 1990s, abductions and Sci-Fi

Spielberg tiptoed around the abduction phenomena in Close Encounters, but by the 1980s, the idea of “alien abductions” started to become more reported. In a strange mix-up of science fiction and science fact, a science fiction/horror writer Whitley Strieber, wrote a book called Communion, about his own “abduction experiences”. The alien on the cover of communion, with large black eyes and a big head, was not only recognized by thousands of other experiencers who wrote Strieber letters (preserved in the Archives of the Impossible at Rice University), became the new go-to depiction of aliens in the public imagination, replace the cuddly versions of Spielberg’s Close Encounters and his highest grossing film, E.T.

In the early 19990s, at MIT in June of 1992 (another date that is personally relevant to me – ask me why if interested), there was a conference on alien abductions held. The cochairs were an MIT physics professor and Harvard psychiatry professor John Mack. Mack had been coming across patients who believed they were “abducted by aliens”, and his work, resulting in his bestselling book, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens in 1994, brought the matter out in the open. Because of media publicity, both MIT professor Pritchard and Harvard Professor Mack, received flak at their home institutions for sponsoring this conference. Mack’s punishment was much more serious both in terms of media ridicule in places like The New York Times and institutional review after his book came out. Mack had to promise to be more careful with his research to keep his tenure status at Harvard, and afterwards he wrote that if he had simply called the abduction experience a new kind of “mental illness”, then Harvard wouldn’t have had any problem with it at all.

At the same time as abduction reports were climbing, in the early 1990s, the new Fox network released The X-Files, created by Chris Carter. The X-Files, chronicling the search of FBI agent Fox Mulder for aliens and his skeptical scientific partner, Dana Scully as they investigated the unknown. Those who watch the first season of the show will see that Carter was drawing directly from first-hand accounts of encounters with what they perceived to be aliens. When I was introduced to Carter through friends almost a decade or two later, the mutual friends told me that he didn’t like his stars attending science fiction conventions because he didn’t consider the subject matter to be science fiction.

The X-Files became a huge hit, and while some say it reflected the mistrust of government and conspiracy theories perfectly, it’s hard to tell how much was reflection, as in the case of the abduction experiences, and how much was causative – The X-Files fed these narratives, that were known in the world of ufology, to the general public and it became one of the touchstones of the 1990s television and culture. The idea of shadowy figures who had dominion even over the US government, having been emboldened by the government after we had recovered crashes at Roswell and elsewhere, is still with us and for many, The X-Files was their first exposure to it, echoed in its two most popular catchphrases: “Trust No One, and “The Truth is Out There”.

I met Carter in 2015, when our mutual friends introduced us at a UFO conference about the “secret space program” in San Mateo, CA. I didn’t get to talk to him too much, though, because Carter was too busy taking notes of what the experiencers and whistleblowers claims. A few years later, he released the new “seasons” of The X-Files (season 10 and 11). By the time season 11 came about, I recognized many of the elements: they seemed to have been taken right from the testimonies and assertions made at that conference. This included the idea of ARVs, or alien reproduction vehicles, and a claim by a former assistant of Werner von Braun, Dr. Carol Rosin, that the famous rocket scientist told her to beware of a false alien invasion narrative that the government would invoke some day in order to expand the military industrial complex’s defense budget.

Disclosure Day, UFOs and the Sci Fi Feedback Spiral

Which brings us to the current era of UFO narratives and disclosure which kicked off in between the two new seasons of The X-Files with the December, 2017 article in an environment where, after the tumultuous decade of the 2000s, conspiracy theories and mistrust of the government were climbing again. When Sarah Gamm, a Pentagon employee who helped with the UAP Task Force, a task force established via Congress and led by DOD employee Jay Stratton (who had led the earlier AAWSAP project) she joked to everyone that she was going to “help Mulder find his sister”, a key plotline in The X-Files which led to agent Mulder’s obsession with aliens and abductions.

In the current era, we have a blending, repurposing, and expansion of narratives that go back decades. The mythos established by both the real-world narratives/sightings/abduction reports, as well as the popular culture sci-fi depictions of them, are being woven together into new narratives in the. modern disclosure movement.

The first part of the modern disclosure era was focused on military pilot sightings (like the Tic-tac sighting on the USS Nimitz in 2004) and the Pentagon programs & aspects of national security (AAWSAP). This continued with the assertion that the US is and has been in possession of retrieved non-human craft. The definition of NHI, or non-human intelligence and TUO, technology of unknown origin, has made it into formal Congressional legislation. Figures like Elizondo became almost cult-like figures, penning a New York Times bestselling book, and Statton’s book, to be released this year, may just follow suit as the public’s appetite for knowing the truth about UFOs.

As the Sci-Fi Feedback Loop tends to add additional cycles, it looks more like a spiral than a loop, each time spiraling higher to create new narratives and new ideas that incorporate the old, resulting in the Sci Fi Feedback Spiral, a model I proposed in my academic research. The real-world narratives coming from The New York Times article in 2017 and the multiple hearings in Congress starting in 2022, convinced Spielberg that it was time to revisit his lifelong interest in aliens visiting the Earth, which resulted in Disclosure Day .

WARNING: mild spoilers ahead for Disclosure Day.

We can clearly see these real-world UFO narratives (whether we take these at face value as simply reports, or as evidence of actual alien or non-human visitation), have made their way into Spielberg’s new film, who heavily pulled from the world of ufology as it has evolved in the 50 years since Close Encounters.

This includes the rumors and testimony of crash retrievals and a reverse engineering program on this exotic technology. David Grusch, a whistleblower who testified in front of Congress in 2023, made the explosive claim that we have recovered craft from sites like Roswell and have been working on reverse engineering of the technology (which he and others, including scientists from the AAWSAP days such as Dr. Eric Davis, insist is true) and it is in the hands of private aerospace companies. Moreover, Grusch claimed there were recovered “biologics” – i.e. occupants of the craft. The issue of beings has been more controversial in today’s disclosure movement than the “nuts and bolts” aerospace aspect, but Spielberg’s film may just change that by incorporating many reported aspects of abductions.

Spielberg has updated the aliens from his cuddly versions in Close Encounters as well. The aliens themselves in this particular movie, Spielberg has said, were mostly based on one of the most famous sightings, the Arial school sighting in Africa in 1994, a sighting which John Mack investigated. Dozens of schoolchildren saw not only the craft but also beings emerge from the craft, who communicated with them telepathically.

Perhaps the most significant additions to Spielberg’s cannon from Disclosure Day include the nature of the coverup of reverse engineering programs by private companies and not directly by the military, and the addition of the abduction phenomena as experienced by the two main characters. Also present is a new addition of telepathic abilities including remote viewing and project.

In a sense, you can view Disclosure Day as a kind of mash-up of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The X-Files, tied together by the narratives testified to in front of Congress and told to the press by recent whistleblowers and Pentagon insiders about UFOs that led to the current wave. While the abduction phenomena and the interaction with beings has been reported in much darker ways, Spielberg puts his own optimistic spin on it, including the psychic abilities that are imbued to the two main characters, who together play the critical role in trying to bring this information to the world.

In this way, we can say that Disclosure Day is a reflection of the real world narratives that have been coming out in the past 50 years, mixing with the other science fiction that has come up in the meantime. Spielberg attempted to tackle this aspect of the UFO phenomenon before, in the mini-series Taken, which was about multigenerational contact and abduction with aliens.

Moreover, the release of Disclosure Day at the same time as the on-going white house UFO files dump, which received over 1.7 billion views, making it the most popular government website ever, shows the strange ways in which science fiction and real-world narratives interact and mix together, forming a complex tapestry.

This isn’t the first time that Spielberg’s films are reflecting his previous work through new eyes and with updates for real world progress. His 2018 film, Ready Player One, was based on Ernest Cline’s book that was heavy in nostalgia for Spielberg’s earlier films from the 1980s. In this weird way, you had Spielberg directing a film which relied on nostalgia about, Spielberg’s films, in a strange kind of self-referential strange loop. It’s hard to say that Ready Player One would have been the novel that it was without Spielberg’s previous films, merged with the progress of modern video game and virtual reality technology.

In the same way, it’s hard to tell where the real-world narratives that are incorporated into Disclosure Day begin and end. These real-world narratives that Spielberg relies on were no doubt influenced by previous waves of science fiction, including Spielberg’s own previous sci-fi like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Taken.

All we can say for sure is that the Sci-Fi Feedback Loop is hard at work, and both real world and fictional UFO narratives will never be the same again, spiraling together towards what may end up being our own Day of Disclosure in the very near future.

About Rizwan Virk

Dr. Rizwan Virk is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist and video game industry pioneer and bestselling author. He is a graduate of MIT and Stanford, founded Play Labs @ MIT, is currently at ASU’s College of Global Futures. He is the author of The Simulation Hypothesis, The Simulated Multiverse, and Wisdom of a Yogi. He recently completed his doctoral research at ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination, and teaches at ASU’s Fulton Schools of Engineering, and is part of the Future of Being Human Initiative at ASU.

Follow him on Instagram @rizcambridge, on X @rizstanford, and at zenentrepreneur.com.

Over the decades, there have been many theories put forward to explain the UFO phenomena, relating both to the reported objects and the beings. Each theory or hypothesis attempts to put meaning to the raw data, which in this case are usually reports of sightings/encounters by the participants recounted afterwards. Sometimes there is physical evidence or pictures and videos to accompany the testimony. In fewer cases, there is also purportedly radar evidence, though the vast majority of these cases do not make this data available publicly.

This article is about defining and qualifying an alternative hypothesis to the ones that have been proposed. This alternate hypothesis (which is not entirely new in that it has been postulated under different names and in different configurations) has been informally termed the “avatar hypothesis” by UFO researchers such as Dr. Garry Nolan and others. The purpose of this paper is not only to define and discuss this new hypothesis, but also to compare and contrast this new interpretation with other theories that have been put forth (many of which have significant overlap with each other, as well as with the avatar hypothesis).

I felt compelled to write this paper because of the overlap between the “avatar hypothesis” of UAP and my other work, including my books, The Simulation Hypothesis and The Simulated Multiverse, which are about the idea that physical world as we know it is actually a virtual world, or a computer simulation (ala the Matrix). I arrived at this overlap initially through discussions with Jacques Vallee and others about the strange nature of some UFO/UAP sightings that didn’t seem to fit in to a materialist interpretation or epistemology. In fact, they suggest that nature of reality itself may be more complicated than what our current science has been able to understand.

In all cases, we must first recognize that all the hypotheses are interpretations of the underlying data. As an example, in the popular media, UFOs (a term that we’ll use interchangeably with the new official government terminology, UAP, or unidentified anomalous phenomena) are often presented as being “aliens” from other planets in other solar systems. This particular interpretation of the phenomena (called the extraterrestrial hypothesis) is used by both believers and skeptics to make their case for the validity (or the likely impossibility) of the phenomena itself. By focusing in on a particular interpretation, they hope to limit the boundaries of argumentation to come up with a definite answer which support their particular point of view.

UFO Imaginaries in Popular Culture

The reason for calling this new interpretation the “avatar hypothesis” has to do with the common references of the term ‘avatar’ within our popular culture and media. This is not unusual as many of the existing narratives and theories about UFOs already intersect with science fiction and pop culture. Popular culture has influenced our interpretation of the phenomena, and in turn, actual UFO sightings have influenced pop culture representations in sci-fi.

These themes have been presented in the media in conjunction with UAP for so long that they are almost inseparable from the underlying phenomenon itself in both science fiction and news articles/segments. For example, articles about recent UFO file releases by the government and earlier Congressional testimony, inevitably almost always referenced “aliens”, often overlooking the fact that this is only one possible explanation (and according to some researchers, not even the most likely).

In the academic world, these internally held visions related to a social, natural or technological phenomena are often called “imaginaries”. Inevitably each of the hypothesis that attempt to explain the UFO phenomena (we’ll run through some other popular alternative theories) come with their own “imaginaries” that must be bought into for the theory to be valid. In most cases, these become social imaginaries thanks to popular culture, and in the UFO case, thanks to science fiction. Science fiction, n its purest form is charged with promulgating imaginaries of the future in fictional form, extrapolating from current scientific knowledge and building on top of previous imaginaries.

In a prominent example, the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, 1977), presented the UFOs as extraterrestrial and their occupants as “aliens”. This was both a reflection of existing sentiment about UFOs since the very beginning of the modern era of sightings (1947 onwards, but particularly in the science fiction of the 1950s with a focus on “flying saucers”). In turn, the popularity of the film also helped to solidify the mental imaginaries about UFOs that have persisted until today: that they could be extraterrestrial craft populated by small humanoid beings.

Long-time UFO researcher and scientist, Dr. Jacques Vallee, long rumored to have been inspiration for the French scientist in the film (Lacombe), has stated publicly that he disagreed with Spielberg’s strictly “alien” interpretation. However, by the time the two men meet, the framing was already designed into the script and filming was already underway. The cameo of J. Allen Hynek, scientific consultant to Project Blue Book for the U.S. Air Force, who Vallee worked with, only reinforced this complex relationship between fact and fiction.

Similarly, tore than a decade later the popularity of the The X-Files in the 1990s has helped to reinforce this idea that a phenomena, known as “abductions” most likely involved abduction by extraterrestrial entities, thus the popular terminology has become “alien abductions”. This is of course despite there not being any proof that hte abduction events, if they were in fact happening in the physical world, were being conducted by beings from a different planet. The imaginary of the “alien abduction” became a social imaginary at this time.

A quick overview of the Avatar hypothesis and accompanying Imaginaries

For the avatar hypothesis, one of the imaginaries that underlies it was presented in the film Avatar (Cameron, 2011). The popularity of this particular film, which takes place in outer space on a planet called Pandora, is underscored by the fact that it became (and remains, as of 2026), the highest grossing single film of all time.

In the film, a human paraplegic ex-marine, Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington), is sent to the Pandora, whose native inhabitants are a race of tall blue tribal biological beings called the Na’vi. Jake is able to control an “avatar”, an artificial (yet biologically grown) body of a Na’vi, which he inhabits and controls almost like a remote-controlled robot, from his “control pod” located in another part of the forest planet.

Thus, in this usage context and imaginary, we have a human controller, controlling a biological body (a robot or artificially grown body) from another location on the same planet. We can generalize this scenario and say that in this imaginary, the controller could be anywhere else in the physical world (leaving aside the speed of light communication latency issues, as theoretically we could be dealing with more advanced science and tech).

A second reason for the nomenclature has to do with the more common use of the term “avatar” today: characters in video games, which are controlled by players and with which the players identify. While the film Avatar deals with remote controlling a body from another location on the planet, this more common usage is about a character that represents someone or something else. In the case of video games that “someone else” is the player of the game, who exists outside of the “rendered world” of the game.

In the video game scenario, the player is not just outside the specific locale (or planet) in the game, he or she is located outside the physical universe that the avatar or game character lives in, which is a virtual world that is being rendered on some computing platform. In the original form of video game avatars, players can see their avatar being rendered on a computer screen (or mobile or tablet or TV screen). In multiplayer games, players can also see the avatars of other players that are in the same “virtual” location (i.e. near the same x, y, z, coordinates of the first avatar in a 3D world) but may be located somewhere else in the outside (i.e. our physical) world.

The control of the avatar by the player in video games is often achieved by using a video game controller, or a mouse, or a keyboard. Increasingly, science fiction has depicted more interactive and integrated control and rendering scenarios. In the case of films like Ready Player One (RPO), through a VR (virtual reality) headset and a set of controllers that fit the players body, such as a VR glove which allows for fine-grained control of the avatar’s hands and fingers to grasp objects and to interact with the virtual world. In RPO, there is also a full body suit that allows the player to experience physical effects from the virtual world, and an omni-directional treadmill that allows for movement and physical exertion.

In an even more futuristics scenario, in the film, The Matrix, the players (for example, Neo played by Keanu Reeves or Morpheus played by Laurence Fishburne) exist outside of the virtual world (called the “Matrix”) and are connected via a BCI, or Brain Computer Interface, and their identification is almost complete, forgetting that they are avatars in a virtual world.

The term avatar in the context of video games was put forth by Lucasfilm’s video game team, LucasArts, while they were building the multi-player game, Habitat and in the late 1980s. They borrowed from the Sanskrit term, avatara, which had to do when a divine being decided to incarnate into our world, onto Earth, in a human body. In the same way that an avatara was a kind of shrinking of a larger being into a smaller being, the creators of Habitat (Carlson & Morningtstar), felt that they were shrinking their persona into the telephone wires and borrowed the term and called their character their “avatar”.

In the context of the avatar hypothesis for UFOs, this shrinking down could mean coming from an external universe outside of this physical universe and might involve a shrinking of dimensions. This would be in the same way that in the novel Flatland, the residents of a 2D world need to interpret a 3D phenomena that they can’t quite understand - for example a sphere looks like a circle. There is also the implication that what we are seeing is a representation, a symbol, which appears real to us, but is meant to represent something else.

Simulation theory, which I use to describe this field more broadly, tells us that the term “The Simulation Hypothesis” was coined by Bostrom after he wrote his famous paper, Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? (Bostrom, 2003).

Bostrom was effectively arguing that we may in fact be code or AI running inside a simulation or computer program in his now famous “simulation argument”. In video game parlance, an AI character inside a video game is called an NPC, or non-playable character (the term itself derives from tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons in the 1970s, but has gone into common usage in video games).

It is important to note that even NPCs have avatars (i.e. a visual character representing them). However, in my works, I draw a distinction between the NPC flavor of simulation theory and the RPG (or role playing game) flavor of simulation theory, where players exist outside of the game and control characters in the game (Virk, 2019, 2025). This is close to the flavor of simulation theory offered by Chalmers (2003, 2022) which Chalmers originally called “the Matrix hypothesis”, only to later adopt what became the commen nomenclature of The Simulation Hypothesis.n

The Avatar hypothesis in this paper is presented as an overlap between characteristics of entities (including craft) in UFO reports and the characteristics of avatars (or symbols representing outside entities) in a simulated/virtual reality or a video game.

Definition of the Avatar hypothesis

A slightly broad but formal definition of the Avatar hypothesis might be:

The avatar hypothesis for UAP proposes that the visible elements of the phenomena, particularly the craft, lights, and beings which have been reported, are actually representations of entities that are elsewhere. In the strict version, they do not originate from within our physical three-dimensional universe, but are projected into our universe, and are being controlled from outside of our physical reality.

Note that with this definition we are closer to the video game idea of an avatar, though we are not ruling out that they may also be remote-controlled from another location in our physical universe, in a less strict version. It should also be noted that the “elements” include what appear to be living beings as well as what appear to only be orbs of lights, or lights on a craft, or in fact, craft itself.

It should be noted that the avatar imaginary doesn’t necessarily require that we be in a computer simulation or a video game, but just that there is something else outside of our physical universe. For these purposes it may be worth defining the sub-versions of the avatar hypothesis more formally:

• Avatar Hypothesis A₀: That the craft and beings are being remote controlled from another part of our physical universe (the accompanying imaginary would be the film Avatar).

• Avatar Hypothesis A₁: That the craft and beings exist outside of our detectible or physical universe (the accompanying imaginary would be The Matrix).

The definition above and the rest of this paper will focus on Avatar Hypothesis A_1, about UFOs or UAP elements being representatives or projections from outside of our reality.

Discussion and Comparison with Other Hypothesis

Before we go further, we should note that the avatar hypothesis for UAP is only partly distinct from other hypothesis, and it is useful to review some of these. As mentioned earlier, there is considerable overlap between the avatar hypothesis and some existing hypotheses, and in fact, between many of the existing theories themselves.

Many scholars of Ufology believe that we are not dealing with a single phenomenon, but rather multiple phenomena, which opens the door to multiple theories being true. In this case, UAP, which includes USOs (unidentified submerged objects) and traditional UFOs (unidentified flying objects), as well as lights and orbs, and finally, other related phenomena that have been classified as “high strangeness” around these readings. Though the government definition of UAP may or may not have intended to do so, we’ll include the abduction phenomena in this discussion as well.

Let’s review other theories, starting with the two mainstream hypothesis which the majority of today’s scientists use to interpret (and effectively dismiss) UFOs:

· Prosaic hypothesis — The on-going expectation of many scientists and skeptics can be classified as the “prosaic” hypothesis – which would mean that the phenomena is nothing unusual – just sightings of a prosaic nature, such as cloud formations, balloons, misidentifications of Venus or the moon or other natural phenomenon.

· Hidden Technology Hypothesis – This hypothesis is that the sightings which exhibit behavior that is outside of known performance characteristics of craft are in fact our own advanced technology, or that of our peers (i.e. Russia or China) and do not represent any kind of exotic technology but the ordinary progress of aerospace and nautical technology.

It’s important to note that these two “ordinary” hypotheses only attempt to explain the “nuts and bolts” part of the UFO phenomena, and not the “abduction” or “beings” part of the phenomenon. We could extend these to include the mainstream scientific explanation for this even more disputed aspect of UAP:

· Hallucination hypothesis –This hypothesis proffers that any communication or interaction with beings, including the “abduction” phenomena are not real. This could be because of hallucinations, sleep paralysis, or mental illness. For those that are willing to acknowledge a physical phenomena at play, a variation implies that it may be humans that are performing the abductions, but the subjects are having hallucinations that they are meeting beings which resemble the social imaginary of “aliens” (in this case smaller gray beings with large eyes).

While the goal of this paper is not to defend or dismiss these explanations, many researchers who are advocates of other theories have come to the conclusion that these explanations only cover some of the cases, and that the really interesting cases, both of craft and interactions with beings, are not adequately covered.

It should be noted that many scientists who have looked seriously into the phenomena, and have treated UFOs as potentially ontologically real, including for example John Mack at Harvard or Peter Sturrock at Stanford, have come up against a stigma within academia. For more on this stigma, including background literature and case studies of more recent examples of professors studying UFOs, please see my paper “UFOs in Academia: Stigma, Implicit Boundary Work and the Edges of Legitimate Science” (Virk, 2026).

Assuming that these researchers are correct and these ordinary hypothesis do not in fact account for all of, or even any of, the most interesting UFO cases, we must turn to the more non-ordinary hypothesis, including:

Extraterrestrial hypothesis - The most popular of these include the extraterrestrial hypothesis, which arose early on in the modern era of UFOs, and was typified by the term “flying saucer”. This has of course, been the most popular in the media as discussion. UFO researchers have noted that there have been unexplained objects and lights in the sky for much longer than the modern era. This hypothesis has also been used as a kind of straw man to disprove that the UFO phenomena is legitimate by scientists, given our current understanding of the distances between stars and the energy required to achieve interstellar speeds.

Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis – This variation of the extraterrestrial hypothesis implies that much of Biblical lore and other religious sightings of “angels” and “gods” were actually extraterrestrials. While this isn’t distinct from the extraterrestrial hypothesis, it is worth mentioning because this imaginary has taken hold thanks in part to, the extremely popular History Channel show, Ancient Aliens, and provides a re-interpretation of ancient data (i.e. Biblical stories of encounters with non-human intelligence).

While these both are quite popular in modern ufological discussions, the idea that the beings and craft do not come from other planets in other solar systems has also grown more popular since they were first proposed and there are various versions of these hypotheses including:

Ultraterrestrial hypothesis. In modern times, this hypothesis trace back to the work of John Keel, who defined the term “ultraterrestrials”, and Jacques Vallee, who noted that many of the interactions with these beings resembled the encounters in much European folklore. The essential idea here is that the beings (and craft) are coming from Earth and have always existed on Earth with us in some way. Hal Puthoff wrote a paper (2022) on the Ultraterrestrial hypothesis, categorizing it as “(e.g., ancient occult group, isolated pre-Diluvial high-tech society, stranded ETs/“gods”), i.e., sequestered terrestrial cultures … existing alongside us in distinct stealth.”

In this sense the ultraterrestrial is a broader categorization of several other hypotheses:

Breakaway human civilization– this hypothesis proposes that there is another civilization of humans, who have developed science and technology independently of mainstream science and thus have been in stealth using their technology. This could be an ancient human civilization or a more recent modern breakaway civilization.

Silurian hypothesis – this theory posits that there was at least one humanoid but distinctly non-human species that existed on planet Earth for a long time before humans. This species has survived but remained hidden, either below ground or in some other way. Once again pointing to the overlap of the imaginary with sci-fi, the term Silurian was borrowed from the science fiction series, Dr. Who, where there was a reptilian race that existing on Earth millions of years before humans called the Silurians. The Silurians went into hibernation inside the Earth, but were masters of the surface well before humans entered the scene.

Cryptoterrestrial - In this strand, or subset of ultraterrestrial hypothesis, which Case, Lomas & Masters (2024) define as “…the notion that UAP may reflect activities of intelligent beings concealed in stealth here on Earth (e.g., underground), and/or its near environs (e.g., the moon), and/or even “walking among us” (e.g., passing as humans).” The authors point out that Kastrup (2024) also argued that this idea was “the most reasonable” explanation for the far-flung UFO phenomena, and in earlier work, The cryptoterrestrials: a meditation on indigneous humanoids and the aliens among us (Tonnies, 2010).

Stranded aliens or gods. This strand overlaps with the ET hypothesis, but in the distant past and includes a technologically advanced ET civilization that has been here much longer than the modern era and thus have become natives of Earth. More on the “gods” idea below and its overlap with ancient alien hypothesis.

Folklore hypothesis. This strand, most closely associated with Vallee, suggests that the beings that have been reported in folklore are physical beings that have been here all along but that pop in and out of our reality. This is not only included with the ultraterrestrial idea, but overlaps with both the avatar and the interdimensional hypothesis.

You can see that categorizing these as sub-strands of the ultraterrestrial hypothesis is somewhat subjective, the theories clearly have overlap and don’t always lend themselves to clean breaks or separations of hypothesis.

Several more exotic hypothesis that are relevant are this discussion and should be compared and contrasted with the avatar hypothesis include:

Time-travel hypothesis. This hypothesis, most prominently proposed by evolutionary biologist Dr. Michael Masters, which he names the “extratempestrial hypothesis” is that what we are seeing are artifacts of human time travelers from our future. This hypothesis presupposes that we may someday be able to travel through time into the past (i.e. into our present or before). Masters in particular focuses on the beings, the most commonly reported of which are the “grays”, small gray hairless beings with very large eyes/pupiils, as being the end of an evolutionary trend of less physical labor, more mental labor, and if we were to move underground. This hypothesis also tries to explain some of the reported reproductive aspects of modern abduction reports. If we were to evolve in this way, it’s possible that the “future humans” might lack the ability to naturally reproduce, and this would why they seem particularly interested in human genes and in pregnant women, who often report that their pregnancy was prematurely brought to term during an abduction experience.

God & Angels hypothesis – note that this hypothesis is in some ways the flipside of the Ancient Aliens hypothesis, with which it agrees somewhat. Under this hypothesis, angels and demons and gods do exist outside of our world and can come into our physical universe. We are in the modern era misidentifying them as UFOs or alien or extraterrestrial craft, but the ancient interpretation of angels and demons is more apt. The western Christian religious interpretations often include hte idea that the beings which are being called “aliens” are actually “demons”, with some gnostics going so far as to identify them as the “archons” of gnostic lore, who work under a demiurge that is responsible for this reality. Both God & Aliens as well as the Ancient Aliens hypothesis agree that ancient sightings were similar to today’s UFO sightings, they are differeing about who had the correct interpretation of the phenomena - ancient mystics and scripture (Gods & Angels & Demons), or modern materialists (Extraterrestrials).

Interdimensional hypothesis. This hypothesis, which overlaps significantly with both the God & Angels and the Avatar hypothesis, and potentially the ultraterrestrial hypothesis as well, posits that the craft and beings come from “another dimension”. Whether this is another dimension to our physical universe, or something outside the physical world is left up to the interpretation of the reader. Angels and demons or jinn (the Islamic version of other beings that liave on Earth with us) might normally be in another dimension, as might other mythological beings that have been reported, so there is considerable overlap between this and other hypotheses.

Overlapping Characteristics of UFOs and Avatars

The reason the “avatar hypothesis”, along with other non-ET hypothesis, are being discussed more and more in modern ufology is because of characteristics of UFOs and abductions which seem to defy existing ideas of science, space travel, and even of physical reality.

Some of the characteristics that tend to encourage the idea of being projected from another reality can be looked at by dividing them up into two parts: the craft, and then the beings.

In the case of sightings, Hynek came up with a classification system which included night time lights, daytime discs, and those which had both a visual and a radar sighting. These were in addition to his 3 “Close Encounters” classifications (Hynek, 1972). Today, abductions have been informally classified as close encounters of the fourth kind (Bryan, 1996), and some have classified a fifth kind of close encounter, when participants psychically summon the UFO, often informally referred to as a CE5.

It is important to note that some sightings are just of light or orbs at night, and it is unclear if we are looking at a form of technological craft. In other instances, there is a clear interpretation of the object in the sky as metallic looking craft. Submerged object reports have often been caught on radar but mostly without visual descriptions, except in cases where the object has emerged from, or plunged into the ocean.

In the Avatar hypothesis, these “craft” are merely presentations or “avatars” of some underlying intelligence. Whatever intelligence is behind the phenomena would be presenting these objects to look a certain way – as technological craft.

Some of the interesting observations throughout history which support this idea include ancient description of objects as “chariots” and industrial revolution sightings of “airships” (before the Wright Brothers flights), foo fighters, and more recently, technological craft.

In the modern era, since Kenneth Arnold’s sighting in 1947, which led to the coining of the phrase “flying saucers”), many different shapes of UFOs ranging from egg shaped to cylindrical/cigars to discs and even more exotic shapes such as large red squares, cubes within spheres (and vice-versa) have been reported. In fact, the large variation of reports of objects/crafts just in the sky (not including orbs or USOs) has some uncomfortable implications. Accepting a physical hypothesis would mean that all of these are being manufactured by one very advanced civilizatation (unlikely, when we consider the number of variation of flying craft that we as a technological civilization have built), or we have to accept the perhaps even more outlandish idea (from some points of view) that there is not just one but dozens of technological extraterrestrial civilizations visiting Earth in the modern era (or dozens of hidden ultraterrestrial or cryptoterrestrial civilizations) which rely on very different technological models and possible even different “science”. A simpler explanation would be that these craft are avatars of some kind, they are being rendered into our reality from some place outside of physical reality.

If we look at the “observables” which came from Pentagon UFO programs, some of these include low observability, instant acceleration w/ no visible means of propulsion, antigravity, trans-medium. While the Pentagon list presupposes a material object or craft, other observables which weren’t in the Pentagon list but have been reported by UFO witnesses might include:

• “instant materialization/dematerialization”,

• “changing shape/appearance” and

• “going through physical objects.”

There have been modern reports, for example, where the craft appears out of nowhere. This has led some to speculate about a science fiction sounding scenario – cloaking technology. However, it is possible that if we take the reports seriously, then these objects are manifesting at a particular set of coordinates without traveling in three dimensional space to those coordinates. This would be difficult or impossible in a purely physical world without extremely precise wormholes, not just in space, but within the Earth’s atmosphere. However, if we were in a virtual world, the standard way to travel to some distant location would be to portal there – to de-render from one set of x,y,z coordinates and to render at another set of x,y,z coordinates. Currently materializations and disappearances remain a mystery but a persistent aspect of ufo reports that suggests we may be looking at non-material objects which render into teh physical.

As for changing shape and moving through physical objects, Nolan related at least one case to me where two observers, in the same car, came up with materially different shapes. There have been instances and reports where one person saw the UFO and others that were nearby didn’t, begging the question whether we are dealing with a psychic phenomena of some kind or if the UFOs are “objectively” there. Vallee related to me at least one case where the UFOs reported came down at a certain angle and went through the large redwood trees, but the trees were unaffected. Similarly, in ocean-related cases, there seems to be no physical effects from submersion and acceleration under water.

All of these aspects suggest that the objects may be both visible and non-physical at different times. While this could imply holographic projection from our universe (i.e. as in a hoax), they could also mean that they are being projected into and rendering in our universe, becoming physical but with the ability to phase in and our of reality. Once they are fully in our reality, they would be as real as our cars and airplanes to us, but they have the ability to de-render or to change shape.

The Avatar hypothesis could account for the large variety of shapes (especially considering the basic geometric shapes that have been described), the way that UFOs move, the ways they are perceived by observers, and the ability to move through physical objects, and most importantly, the ability to shift shapes or exist in a superposition of shapes at the same time. In a virtual world, these behaviors would become perfectly explainable as renderings of objects that are defined by data which are rendered on individual’s rendering devices.

Overlapping Characteristics of UFO Beings and Avatars

Similarly, while the most popular accounts of interactions with beings have been with the “grays” there are many other shapes and species in the vast corpus of UFO reports. Moreover, during abduction experiences, these “beings” regularly move through walls, and seem to be able to stop and start time and alter the subject’s perception.

Even traditional accounts of non-human beings within folklore, such as the Fae in the Celtric traditions, and the jinn in middle easter traditions, have cases of these other beings, who are here on earth with us, phasing in and out of our reality. They could be better explained by being avatars of these beings projected into our reality rather than accounting for a vast panoply of other intelligent races and dimensions. Similarly, our perception of having seen angels, for example, or demons, might fit the avatar hypothesis that what we are seeing are symbols of these entities real existence, but projected into our physical reality.

In the reports of non-human contact in the case of “abductions”, but also in the cases of “contact” with non-human intelligence that is not directly related to abduction, we see a variety of descriptions.

The most popular beings by far are In the case of the most popular described beings of the grays, an image which appeared on the cover of Whitley Strieber’s bestselling account of abduction/contact experiences, Communion: A True Story (Strieber, 1987). Strieber’s terrifying account was picked up by the media and the cover was displayed in bookstores around the country. This prompted many other abductees to write letters to Strieber about their own experiences, now stored in the Archives of the Impossible at Rice University. The precipitator for many of these letters by experiencers was seeing the image on the cover of the original communion book, which led them to recall their own experiences.

While this is the most common description, it is by no means unique. The various contact experiencers describe beings ranging from small grays (common alien), tall grays, tall whites, shadow beings, mantis beings, blue avians, and other insect-like descriptions. In the case of other contact experiences, we see descriptions of Andromedans, Pleaidians, Orions, Shadow beings, Mothmen, etc.

One outlier story that Strieber told me about and mentioned on his podcast particularly got me thinking about the possibility that what we perceive as “grey alien” beings may actually be projections or shapes or avatars which can shift shapes. This was the story of a young man whose girlfriend had gotten pregnant. In this report, she invited him to her apartment, and his thought was that they were going to get married and raise a family. Rather, she said that she needed to tell him that she was a gray alien, and according to the report, she transformed her appearance from human to that which we might think of as "gray alien”. She then changed back, but told him that she was going back to the world of her people, and that he would never see the woman or the baby again.

While such a story includes what some might call fanciful elements, if we take it seriously and ask, are there other contact experiences that have some of these elements? In the medieval Islamic literature, there are stories that sound almost identical involving human men marrying jinn women, and having children. The wife tells the husband at one point that she is going back to the world of the jinn, and taking the children with her, never to be seen again (El-Zein, 2017). These stories also have parallels within European folklore, as Vallee points out in this work, that humans should be careful not to be lured into the Fae world, and shouldn’t eat any food there.

As we expand our ideas of “contact”, the tapestry of beings begins to look even more complicated. In the case of DMT based contact experiences, multiple types of insectoid beings are often invoked, building on McKenna’s ideas about “machine elves”. The number of beings described in DMT-based contact experiences was so varied that it inspired authors and illustrators to write books like “The Illustrated Field Guide to DMT Entities: Machine Elves, Tricksters, Teachers, and Other Interdimensional Beings” (Brown & Huntley, 2025).

In many reported cases of contact, it seems that there may be some level of control over the appearance of these entities, who seem to exist outside of the ordinarily perceivable world. Their appearance may look almost indistinguishable from humans (human-like), similar to humans in shape but distinct (humanoid) or completely different from humans (insectoid or non-humanoid shapes). These beings also seem to have the ability to appear and disappear out of the physical world, and to appear in some cases, as near-humans. Is it possible that this faculty also covers ancient Native American ideas of skinwalkers, beings who are able to come into and outside of our reality and shapeshift? This would also correspond with angels and demons, who seem to have a similar ability to come into our reality when they want to be seen and be presented to us in humanoid form.

The avatar hypothesis suggests that these beings, when they project into our reality from “somewhere else” , can change their look as needed, and possibly customize it per individual. They can use contemporary human ideas or interpretations of what other beings might look like, once an idea of what an angel or an “alien” or a “machine elf” is born int he consciousness. This would be akin to simply changing the appearance of your avatar in a modern video game scenario.

Others have pointed out that the likeness of many (but not all!) beings to humans and humanoid shape seems unlikely in an extraterrestrial scenario, assuming independent evolution. Explanations could come in the form of some shared evolution or seeding or humans from the future.

However, another potential explanation that should be considered is the avatar hypothesis, that these beings are projected to look both familiar and unfamiliar to us. When they want to blend in, they wear “human avatars”, and when they want to present themselves as “others”, they present avatars that look like jinn, fae, grey aliens, mantis beings, etc. These are both similar enough that we could relate to them (as opposed to just being light or clouds or mist for example), but alien enough that we get the distinct message that they are not from “here”, are not human, and are in fact from “somewhere else”.

Conclusion

While the purpose of this paper hasn’t been to get into too much detail on individual sightings, many characteristics of traditional UFO sightings and reported abduction experiences leave traditional theories wanting, which is why many hypotheses have been proposed.

The purpose of the Avatar hypothesis is to combine some existing ideas (God & Angels, interdimensional, folklore) and to put forth a coherent hypothesis for how the phenomena could be appearing to us yet has its origins outside of our physical reality. Although I didn’t go into it here, the high strangeness that often accompanies UFO events is another arugment in favor of a non-physical explanation, or at least an origin that intersects with our physical world.

Further work can and should be done on mapping characteristics of individual sightings to elements of the avatar hypothesis, without prejudice towards a particular religion or folklore or interpretation. Similarly work could be done on a formal aspects of projection and rendering within physical and computer environments to explore these implications and compare those to individual abduction reports or craft sightings.

While no hypothesis (including the avatar hypothesis) covers all unexplained UFO sightings, this new flavor of theory brings forth new imaginaries which overlap with and extend current ideas about the origins of UAP/UFOs.

It is my contention in this paper, that we should be careful to draw conclusions based on past imaginaries and try to come up with theories which match the data, even if it is only in a subset of cases. For now, we can only speculate, as the phenomena themselves remain mysterious and essentially unsolved.

About Rizwan Virk

Dr. Rizwan Virk is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist and video game industry pioneer and bestselling author. He is a graduate of MIT and Stanford, founded Play Labs @ MIT, is currently at ASU’s College of Global Futures. He is the author of The Simulation Hypothesis, The Simulated Multiverse, and Wisdom of a Yogi. He recently completed his doctoral research at ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination, and teaches at ASU’s Fulton Schools of Engineering, and is part of the Future of Being Human Initiative at ASU.

Follow him on Instagram @rizcambridge, on X @rizstanford, and at zenentrepreneur.com.

“The U.S. military takes UFOs seriously. Why doesn’t Silicon Valley or academia?”

The government wants to know if these unidentified objects pose a military threat. But they also represent an opportunity to advance science and technology.

With the release of the first batch of the UFO files from the US government (see www.war.gov/UFO/ ) in 2026, I thought it was a good time to revisit this topic.

Academics in general and scientists in particular have been particularly dismissive of the UFO topic, to the point of the “giggle response” if you bring it up. The paper trail that is being released by the government, even in this first batch, is making some documents and details that have been part of the UFO community for years more visible and public.

To be clear, the first traunch does not provide any definitive evidence of what UFOs are, but it does provide evidence that there is a phenomena and we don’t really know what it is, and that agencies ranging from the Army Air Force (as it was called in 1947) and the FBI have been trying to figure out what was going on.

I found oddly enough that the article I wrote pretty much still applies. For the sake of space, NBC News made me edit it down so that I couldn’t include alternate theories about what UFOs may be - including time travelers, interdimensional beings, and more. They ended up taking a tact that the media often does: either UFOs are nothing (as most scientists would dismiss, maning prosaic explanations like Venus or our own secret technology) or they must be aliens (i.e. the extraterrestrial hypothesis). I’m including a longer version of the article I wrote in full below, because much of the content wasn’t included.

In the intervening years, I started an academic research project that explored why more scientists don’t pay attention to the subject. I interviewed more than 20 academics/scientists who openly studied UFO/UAP about their experiences. I had many interesting findings, and the whole academic article, title “UFOs in Academia:A Case Study in Stigma, Implicit Boundary Work and the Edges of Legitimate Science” is available for review and download, including extensive colorful quotes about how colleagues have reacted. I will be writing a more detailed summary of the findings, but here is an outline / extract of the various findings/.

One key finding is that there is both a data problem (i.e. scientists don’t have real data) but also a social issue, whereby stigma has developed through “guilt by association” across many different disreputable subjects, and scientists have forged a social identity that they take pride in: they don’t believe in things like UFOs and Bigfoot. So of course, they can’t take it seriously unless and until it becomes completely undeniable. Thomas Kuhn talked about paradgim changes as being the way that science moves forward - and one is definitely needed for this topic. Max Planck is quoted as saying that physics moves forward with the death of physicists tied to the old paradigm. The problem with the UFO/UAP is because, as the files show, even key parts of the government have no idea what they are, so there is no new paradigm being presented that is admissable within the Halls of science.

One topic that came up in my research was brought forth by Alex Wendt, who has written about national security and UFOs as a question of anthropomorphic sovereignty for the US government - by acknowledging the subject we’d have to admit we aren’t the top species on this planet, a duanting prospect. Both Wendt and David Pritchard, MIT Physics professor who hosted the MIT Alien Abduction conference in 1992, pointed out that UFOs may be “dangerous knowledge”, along the lines of nuclear weapons. Moreover, knowledge not just of UFOs but also abductions, a phenomena that is still very taboo to discuss in an academic setting, would be unsettling and “intellectually lethal” to scientists, so we ignore it. Hal Puthoff pointed out that scientists may be OK to be skeptical, because they haven’t seen the classified evidence (implying that he has!).

One of the findings was that hte stigma for the nuts and bolts aspect of UAPs (unlike the aspect which deals with NHI, non-human intelligence beings) has shifted since the New York Times Article in 2017 and the Congressional hearings, showing that at least some aspects of the scientific community do put stock in authorities such as the government and the media.

The release of the fist batch of the UAP files, even if it won’t convince the die-hard skeptics (who have taken an ideological position that is supported by their social group), but it should at least get them to start treating the subject “agnostically” as opposed to being hostile to it, which often happens. Academics are often driven by funding opportunities, and this subject promises to have many mysteries to figure out, no matter how many batches it takes.

The rest of this article contains:

1. Outline of findings and select quotes from my academic article “UFOs in the Academy”

2. A longer version of my NBC op-ed “The government takes UFOs seriously, Why Doesn’t Silicon Valley and Academia”

Summary of Findings from UFOs in the Academy

There were 3 main findings in this paper, each of which had several subfindings. The original paper is quite long, but i’ve included the findings and a few choice quotes below.

Finding #1: There has been a very real perceived stigma around the UFO subject.

The first major finding was that there was a very real perceived stigma around the UFO subject. Almost all of the participants in the study said they were aware of this stigma, and it delayed their “coming out” publicly on their interest in the UFO topic, a phrase used by a number of participants implying the existence of social stigma.

More specifically, we can draw the following sub-findings in this category:

· Sub-Finding 1.1. The stigma led the subjects to delay publicly disclosing their interest until they were more secure. Some quotes for this finding:

• “I didn’t say anything about this until I had tenure … I wasn’t willing to take that chance because of the culture that surrounded the subject, and especially prior to [becoming a full professor in] 2017 … And then by that point, it was game on … those protections of tenure were in place.” (MM interview)

• “I started my UFO research one year after I got tenure” (WW interview)

• “I think I was more afraid of the stigma or taboo associated with the subject … than motivated by a lack of interest or a belief that it was nonsense …” (MS interview)

· Sub-Finding 1.2. Publishing on the subject was difficult in general because of the stigma, though this varied. Some quotes:

• “I was taking it seriously. I thought, “Well, this is obviously published research at the university … so if I write a sensible analysis, I’ll send it to a journal, and they’ll publish it … [I was being …] Naive. I got five responses within five days … No even looked at it. Immediate brush off … No response whatever [was given] to the actual content of the report or what I wrote about the report.” (PS interview)

• “Not journals. No. I reached out to agents and publishers. But the problem is, it’s that chicken and egg conundrum where I didn’t want to talk about it because I would risk my career, at least I thought I would early on.” (MM interview)

· Sub-Finding 1.3. Reactions of Colleagues were mixed, but there were few actual concrete consequences for those that persisted. While there was a sense of perceived stigma, many of the academics waited until they were senior before coming out - they received supportive, critical, angry and hysterical responses from their colleagues, but because of their positions, there were few actual consequences. A few speculated that their induction into the national Academy of Science was delayed. Some quotes:

• “[They] just didn’t believe me … hey thought that… I had been duped [in my field work] …” (DWP interview)

• “So, I said, ‘If they’re doing all this to understand this, what the hell are we doing?’ … What are we [academics] doing in navigating this extremely flat sense of reality? … Are we the flat earthers of this broader community? … and the room exploded…” HA interview)

• “What I usually get when I bring up certain issues at least from my colleagues, is total disinterest or a lack of understanding. “ (DA interview)

• “… then the conversation can be shut down for no reason other than, ‘That’s a stupid subject. It’s a crackpot subject. We’ve labeled it as such, and there is no reason to continue the discussion.’” (MS interview)

Finding #2: Stigma on the UFO subject developed historically and was maintained by implicit and explicit boundary work, guilt-by-association, and other factors.

This set of findings is about how the stigma around this subject developed historically, and this stigma was maintained. This broad category can be further divided into the following more specific sub-findings.

· Sub-Finding #2.1 Explicit vs. Implicit Boundary Work, Socialization and Guilt by Association

• “And I remember presenting this to my class. I remember pounding on the podium and saying, “This deserves scientific attention.” And I think everybody laughed at me or something like that.” (WW interview)

• There’s an unspoken [rule] ... you’re not supposed to talk about these things seriously …There’s a whole class of phenomena or potential claimed phenomena that we’re not supposed to even talk about. And this is all culturally defined. No one ever explicitly tells you: you can’t talk about that. (KK interview)

• … I think I probably contributed to it because I would’ve laughed along with other people … in order to be part of the tribe ...in order to be part of the group …

· Sub-Finding #2.2. Potentially logical reasons for stigma. This section discussed ideas of dangerous knowledge and classified data as being a valid reason for the stigma, perhaps even encouraged by the defense establishment.

· Sub-Finding #2.3. How is stigma maintained? This finding discussed the ramifications of going against the stigma, reactions of colleagues but also potentially not getting tenure, or not getting grants, or being considered a “cuckoo”.

• “I have a conscious vivid memory of on occasion someone having a very dramatic, almost angry response to the topic, and that shutting down any further conversation.” (WW interview)

• “I think that physical scientists are more threatened by UFOs than social scientists, and so for them it’s [the stigma or opposition to UAP] may be even more intense … their lives depend on being able to get grants. And if anybody thinks you’re a crank who believes in UFOs … Boom! that’s the end of your grants, and that’s end of your career. So, they really face potentially existential consequences for acting in this direction.” (AW interview)

• “It [the taboo] is maintained with the usual mechanisms. There's just sort of dismissal out of hand. But ... there's also [the fact that]you have enough people in the position of wielding power and control over the various instruments of academic scholarship, like teaching, like hiring, like giving talks, and also publishing.” (MC interview)

Finding #3: Stigma around the subject has been shifting, a kind of reverse boundary work.

The third group of findings is about how the stigma around this subject is shifting, illustrating how the boundaries between what is considered a legitimate avenue of exploration and that which is considered pseudoscience or fringe, changes over time. Interestingly, it seems that the boundaries have shifted for part of the UFO subject but not for others, suggesting a kind of fluidity based on how well a controversial topic fits into our epistemic view of the world and the role of authority figures (such as the Pentagon or Congress) in shifting academics perceptions.

The sub-findings in this category include:

· Sub-finding #3.1: Stigma is changing for academics because of government & media attention

• “There's maybe a bit more humility, and willingness to listen and play the game at least … asking genuine questions, and going back and forth about it instead of just dismissively saying: ‘this is ridiculous’…” (AW intervioew)

• I definitely do think that New York Times article was a game changer. There’s no question about that. Because I’d started talking about this a lot with people outside of my institution leading up to 2019. And you’d always get the same thing. “Well, UFOs aren’t real. Why are we even talking about this?” (MM interview)

· Sub-finding #3.2: Younger researchers and students are showing curiosity around the subject. However, this must be coupled with the finding that many scientists don’t advise their PhD students to do research on the UFO topic.

· Sub-finding #3.3: Abductions and sub-boundaries within UAP. Another key finding was that the stigma is clearly still there on the abduction side of the UFO topic, and even scientists who are willing to openly discuss craft and aliens aren’t willing to talk about it.

Read the full article here.

The Military Takes UFOs Seriously, Why Doesn’t Silicon Valley or Academia (long version of op-ed published in 2021) (full article)

Rizwan Virk is a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, founder of Play Labs @ MIT and author of The Simulation Hypothesis. An earlier, shorter version of this article appeared on NBCNews/THINK

In our era of life-changing innovation, there are typically three major pillars of innovation: government, academia,and industry. Today, there are major breakthroughs that could well come from the serious study of a phenomenon that is too often mocked in these circles: UFOs.

Recently, The government has reversed its official position of publicly ignoring UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomenon, the new trendy name for UFOs) and is starting to tackle the subject openly. But within academia and industry, the topic is still too frequently dismissed with a chuckle accompanied by some trite remark about “extraterrestrials” or “aliens” visiting us.

In February, for instance, one of the biggest innovators of this century, Elon Musk, was asked what he thought about the recent Pentagon acknowledgment that Navy pilots have seen objects flying in our airspace using advanced technology we can’t identify, let alone understand or explain or reproduce. Musk’s answer was, “Honestly, I think I would know if there were aliens,” and, honestly, this response could have come from any number of prominent scientists or industry figures.

Musk’s non-answer was revealing because it suggested that he wasn’t aware of — or interested in — basic unclassified facts about military sightings of UFOs, or that the government is looking into the possibility that they are made from advanced technology that our scientists can’t yet figure out.

In June of 2021, a new task force championed by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is supposed to submit an unclassified report on unidentified aerial phenomena to Congress. It comes as several erstwhile officials, including former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and two former CIA directors, have called for a more rigorous look at these sightings, and the topic has suddenly blown up in the media, with mainstream coverage from 60 minutes and most of the major news channels, including CNN and Fox News.

One of the most famous examples (the one Musk was asked about) occurred when Navy pilots reported a craft resembling a Tic Tac that was moving unlike anything seen in the U.S. arsenal: They said it “wasn’t behaving by the normal laws of physics.”

The craft’s movements were, however, typical of both military and civilian UFO reports: Descending from 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet in an instant; stopping in midair and reversing direction without inertial effects; exceeding the speed of sound without generating a sonic boom; and submerging into the ocean. After The New York Times and The Washington Post reported on it in 2017 along with the military’s secret UFO tracking program, the Pentagon publicly acknowledged last year that the leaked videos in the stories were authentic.

Now recently retired national security officials are speaking out. In the run-up to the task force’s report in June, John Ratcliffe, former director of national intelligence, told Fox News last month that there were “a lot more sightings than have been made public.” Similarly, James Woolsey, former director of the CIA, said on a podcast this month he was taking the subject seriously, as did a successor at the CIA, John Brennan, in December. Even former President Obama, upon being questions about the phenomenon, admits that there are things flying around that we can’t identify.

The Pentagon hasn’t offered an official explanation for UAPs like the Tic Tac craft, calling them “unidentified.” Former officials don’t seem to be willing to utter the word “alien,” but seem to have no problems admitting that it’s probably something non-human. Lue Elizondo, who ran the secret Pentagon UFO tracking unit, has publicly ruled out the theory that the Tic Tac craft came from the U.S. arsenal or from the arsenals of our adversaries, leaving only the theory that it came from “someone or something else.”

According to Brennan, some of the phenomena we’re seeing “could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.” U.S. Navy pilots who have actually seen the Tic Tac craft are even more direct, with one telling the Post it was “Something not from the Earth.”

Danny Sheehan, a prominent civili rights attorney, and no stranger to the UFO topic or the Pentagon (since he was one of the principal attorneys for The New York Times securing the right of The Times to publish the content of the Top Secret “Pentagon Papers” about The Vietnam War) says that, in private, current Pentagon officials are much more candid. According to Sheehan, the new leader of the UAP task force inside the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence (who was previously Elizondo’s deputy) told The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and The Senate Armed Services Committee that his staff believes that at least some of these unidentified flying objects are “off-world vehicles”.

If they aren’t ordinary things like weather balloons or flocks of birds or instrument malfunction (all theories which are proferred by debunkers trying to explain them away — unfortunately these explanations do not fit the avaialable data), and they aren’t from our adverseries like China or Russia, what could these “off-world vehicles” be? Some, like ex-navy officer Sean Cahil,who witnessed the Tic-Tac incident, told CNN that this technology “outstrips our arsenal by at least 100 to 1000 years.”

There is no shortage of theories what they could be. They range from alien civilizations from other planets (the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis), to time travelers from the future, to a breakaway human civilization that has developed advanced technology, to a non-human civilization that ruled the Earth millions of years ago (known as The Silurian hypothesis). While all of these would revolutionize our understanding of our place in the universe, some theories are even stranger, and we would need to re-write our rules of what the universe actually is. This includes beings which are able to enter our physical dimension at will (the Interdimensional hypothesis) to my personal favorite, The Simulation Hypothesis (which is related to the idea that other levels of reality outside of our own exist).

While it’s good that the government is finally taking UFOs more seriously, its job is primarily to figure out whether they represent a military threat, not to come up with or prove new theories of physics. But as more than one expert has pointed out, UFOs in the past have been able to turn off our nuclear missiles for some time, and could already have conquered us if that was there intention. Which means they may not be a threat at all, but an indication that something is amiss with our understanidng of how the world works. These unidentified objects may also represent an opportunity to advance our science and technology significantly — if our other two pillars of innovation, academia and industry, are willing to catch up and discuss it in a non-dismissive way.

Unfortunately, when scientists are asked about UFOs, they generally laugh off the subject. The well-known astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, for one, said he would only take the idea seriously when aliens send him a dinner invite. Astrophysicist Katie Mack, who studies black holes, essentially tells us in Scientific American that it’s not her job to investigate UFOs. Prominent science blogger Ethan Siegel, tell us that even astronomers who are searching for extraterrestrial life in the universe just aren’t interested in studying UFOs, and justifies their apathy.

Why do leading scientists show such a profound lack of curiosity in a subject that might redefine not just their fields, but also all of science? It could lead to a new understanding of our place in the universe, and new advances in materials science, biology, quantum physics, cosmology and social sciences.

Part of the problem likely stems from an academic version of the old IBM rule in industry that “No one ever gets fired for buying IBM.” Similarly, no professor ever gets fired for mocking UFOs. The case of Harvard Medical School’s Dr. John Mack, though, shows the dangers if you take UFO-related stories seriously.

Thankfully, small cracks are appearing in academia’s wall of mockery. Avi Loeb, chief astronomer at Harvard University, was willing to say in his new book, “Extraterrestrial,” that he thinks that ‘Oumuamua, the first object we have spotted in the night sky whose origin is definitely from outside our solar system, was most likely a technological artifact of a long-vanished alien civilization.

Most academics in the hard sciences, though, still invoke some version of Musk’s nonargument: “If aliens were here, we would know!”. This is usually followed by reciting Carl Sagan’s statement, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, and then proceeding to completely ignore the evidence that has already been gathered. This leads to a retreat to the worldview where there is no way aliens or beings from the future or other dimensions could visit us, because, well, in a kind of circular parochial logic, we don’t know how to visit them so how could they be visiting us??!!

Normal science, says Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions “is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like” and that “normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments”.

Scientists in Europe similarly dismissed the idea of rocks falling out of the sky because, as every good scientist knows, there were no rocks in the sky, so how could they be falling from the sky? But it wasn’t impossible — the problem wasn’t the lack of evidence of anomalies, but rather a lack of imagination and curiosity on the part of scientists. Eventually, it was shown that rocks did fall from the sky, and this led to a re-evaluation of what was “in the sky” and a richer (and more accurate) understanding of the Universe.

But the government is saying that it does know that these craft exist — it just doesn’t know what they are. My purpose today is not to convince you of the evidence, however, but to encourage academics and industry leaders to move beyond their biases into an open-minded investigation to figure out who or what created them, and how they work.

I’m not naïve enough to assume that academics will study UFOs just to further human knowledge. But to point out the obvious: In the long term, there could be multiple Nobel prizes, not to mention new laws of physics, for those who are willing to dive in and risk ridicule in the short term.

The results this time could lead to new kinds of transportation devices capable of submerging into the ocean and in the air, transporting cargo and passengers across the globe in minutes, as well as ferrying humans safely beyond planet Earth, to name just a few.

Similar rewards await industry risk-takers as well, especially innovators in Silicon Valley who are interested in speculative topics such as the Singularity and the Simulation Hypothesis. To some extent, their apathy is the predictable spillover effect from the ivory tower: Venture capital firms aren’t going to invest millions in something that academics haven’t stamped as “viable” technology.

But peer pressure may also be at work in industry, too. Businessman Joe Firmage, for instance, was once the toast of the valley only to resign so as not to hurt his company’s reputation after speaking of his interest in UFOs (and being dubbed the “Fox Mulder of Silicon Valley” in the press).

To some extent, the resistance to taking the subject seriously in industry comes down to how seriously academics are willing to take it. Academics have been hesitant to study the topic openly, though there have been a number which have been studying it behind closed doors. Was this simply because of risking their colleagues ridicule?

Diana Pasulka, professor of religion at University of North Carolina-Wilmington, said in her book, American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion and Technology, that because of her field (religious studies) she was used to studying the impact of phenomenon that might be called “unexplained” (religious mystical experiences) without either believing or disbelieving the reports, and this made it easier for her to study the societal impact of UFO sightings.

As I was writing this article, Pasulka told me that the hesitation seen in academia may have started because of an agressive policy by the government to discourage study in this area: “There is a resistance to studying the phenomenon publicly and openly. This no doubt is a residual effect of the US government’s attempt to manage the public’s perception of the topic, most likely for good reasons. The Robertson Panel in the 1950’s is a good example of this effort, and it worked. People who attempt to study the phenomenon within institutions, and without, have been seen as fringe.”

My own discussions with those in academia shows that in fact there may have been some kind of organized effort to paint those who pay too much attention to the phenomenon in a corner and to discourage them from going too far into this field. For example, a professor at CalTech told me that when he invited a speaker that claimed to have first hand knowledge of the government’s secret UFO programs, he surprised to find himself summoned by the board of trustees to tell him in no uncertain terms not to invite this kind of speaker back, despite the speaker’s credentials. I also spoke with a colleague from MIT and Harvard, who also claimed to have first-hand knowledge of some of the government covert investigation into this technology and the physics behind it. He told me that he initially also thought the reluctance was based simply on peer pressure, but he realized as he got more into it that someone had been actively discouraging the study within academia for many years. He said he couldn’t tell me about any of his direct knowledge of the topic because of security oaths and clearances.

Daniel Sheehan, who I mentioned earlier, was also part of the team that represented Dr. John Mack during the inquest from Harvard University over the UFO and Extraterrestrial issue. Sheehan also lays part of the blame on past policies of the government. Sheehan told me: “I think the academy is ‘way behind the power curve’ on this topic from where even the Defense Department is. Most academics are still in the ridicule phase that was previously recommended to them by the U.S. government. But if the June, 2021 UAP Task Force report is made public — and The New York Times reports that senators like Mark Rubio and others start taking this issue seriously — then you may finally begin to see a change in the collective attitude on the part of members of The Academy.”

The current media frenzy around UFOs seems to be coming on the heels of some encouraging signs, in addition to the government changing its public posturing from “they don’t exist” to “we don’t know what they are”.

Recently, Prof. Garry Nolan of Stanford University and Jacques Vallee, a venture capitalist who worked with J. Allen Hynek — a part of the Air Force’s first UFO investigation group, Project Blue Book, from 1947–1969 — have teamed up to investigate samples of materials supposedly ejected at purported UFO landing sites.

As a starting point, if the ratios of the metals’ specific isotopes don’t naturally occur on Earth, the chemical composition could open up new opportunities for high-performance craft materials on- and off-planet. Vallee (inspiration for the French scientist in Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”) told me they would go through the academic peer-review processes, which might greatly advance respect for the subject.

Where does this leave us?

We will know more when the Pentagon’s report on unidentified aerial phenomena comes out, but now that the government is starting to take UFOs more seriously in public, it’s high time that more academics and industry leaders step up to do the same.

This article is meant to be part of a book about AI Myths. (NOTE: this is an update to an earlier draft to account for AI agents, etc.)

The AI doomers are at it again, echoing themes which are well-known to the public through science fiction. Recent advancements in AI models (LLMs), video generation models and AI agents like Moltbook have raised the concerns of AGI killing us all to a whole new level.

However, the rising level of alarm coming from call AI doomers should be viewed with a bit of caution. This is one of many modern AI myths that have their root in modern mythology – i.e. science fiction and popular media. The reason I call it a myth is not that it is entirely false, but because it isn’t entirely true. In other words, these narratives usually contain a kernel of truth, but by simply focusing on the larger mythological narrative, we may be missing the kernel of truth: downplaying the real problems, dangers, and harms that come from moderately intelligent AI as we see them developing in the near and medium term.

Superintelligence Scenarios and Petitions

In the1984 film, The Terminator, a superintelligent AI called Skynet takes over the Earth, killing many humans and enslaving the rest, leading to a rebellion against the AI. In this popular sci-fi franchise, the actual date of arrival for superintelligence was in the 1990s, and though it seems we are lagging a bit behind its predications, the narrative fear that was expressed in the series has become woven into the fabric of our technological society.

Visions of AI malfunctioning or deliberately taking over have been infused into the popular culture through media, and It’s not just the Terminator franchise: Battlestar Galactica, Ex-Machina, Westworld and many others are warning us about the dangers of AI. Even The Matrix, which had a more realistic date (early twenty-first century) for the arrival of superintelligent AI, which I’ve written about in my books The Simulation Hypothesis ad The Simulated Multiverse, is at its heart a cautionary tale of AI.

It’s become clear that many AI pioneers and business leaders have bought into this narrative. A few months ago, a number of prominent individuals, including AI pioneers like Geoff Hinton and Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak, have raised the alarm by signing a new (October 2025) petition. The petition was sponsored by the Future of Life Institute, founded by well-known physicist professor Max Tegmark at my alma matter, MIT, calling for a temporary halt on developing superintelligence. In a series of eyebrow raising news headlines, we found out that prominent signers of the petition included both right-wing media darlings Steve Bannon and Glen Beck, and left-wing media darlings such as the (former) royal couple, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

I recently completed my doctorate on how technoscientific narratives, such as those from science fiction, often catch hold with and influence members of society. In Silicon Valley, for example, innovators often push ahead with building technology from science fiction novels while often blindly ignoring the dystopic elements of these narratives. In this case, we have almost the opposite effect, with AI pioneers emphasizing the dystopian nature of these narratives as something to be concerned about.

These types of AI narratives aren’t new. The same was true of an earlier generation of sci-fi, including Asimov’s robot stories (I Robot) and even the classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, about the consequences of a malfunctioning AI called HAL that tries to kill the human occupants of a spaceship. In fact, the term robot itself is based on a Czech term that means “slave”, In 1920, a Czech author that introduced the term in a play called R.U.R (Rostum’s Universal Robots), where the robots (i.e. mechanical slaves) rise up against their masters. The theme has been part of our collective psyche since the start of the machine age (and even longer if you consider slave revolts in general, and not just mechanical slave revolts).

The recent 2025 petition follows on an open letter signed by over 1000 leaders and AI experts in 2023, including Elon Musk, to stop development of superintelligence. This was followed by an even more sensational story: AI pioneer Eliezer Yadlowsky suggested in an op ed that year in Time that we should bomb any rogue data centers that were working on superintelligence. While this may sound extreme, it follows on drastic sci-fi like thinking based on projections of the future which may or may not pan out. Similar bans were proposed on nanotech on the fear that every atom on earth would be turned by nanobots to grey goo. More recently, in, sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson wrote The Ministry of The Future, a group of “terrorists” would bomb airliners in order to get people to travel less because they were concerned about climate change.

While I can’t say for certain if any of the nightmare scenarios may come true, I can say, however, that taking drastic action based on straight-line predictions of technology doomers is usually incorrect and counterproductive. The reason is, as Yogi Berra once said, “it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future”.

AI Milestones and Progress

Part of the reason for the rising levels of alarm is that, in recent years, AI has proceeded more quickly than many expected. Many experts today, agree that today’s chatbots (based on LLMs or Large Language Models) like ChatGPT, have already passed the Turing Test, a test proposed by Alan Turing all the way back in 1950, which for years seemed like a science fiction proposition. In the test, if a human was communicating (via messages) to a computer behind curtain A, and a computer behind curtain B, and couldn’t distinguish between the two, then the computer (i.e. the AI) would have passed the test. The recent arrival of “autonomous” AI agents like OpenClaw and social networks of AI agents(Moltbook) has raised alarms about sentient agents debating consciousness and deciding to get rid of their creators.

Yes, it’s unclear if the next major milestone, AGI (artificial general intelligence), has been reached. The estimates for AGI vary from the next few decades to next year. Most generally agree that AGI, where AI can perform tasks as well as humans, must be reached before we could reach ASI (artificial superintelligence). Some experts, like AI pioneer Yann LeCun, do not believe that the current crop of AI (based on LLMs) has the right architecture to even reach AGI let alone ASI.

The October 2025 petition calls for a halt on developing ASI until there is “broad scientific consensus” on AI safety protocols and “public buy-in”. Yet there are on-going debates about what these milestones would actually mean as there are different criteria for AGI. For some, the only way to truly show AGI would be to have spatial intelligence, which means having an awareness of 3D space. Others define it purely in terms of pattern recognition, etc.

For ASI, the definition is even fuzzier, referencing “better than human ability” in almost every measurable area. That said, it is unclear what this will mean in practice or even if it’s possible. Obviously, computers and robots today (without AI) are better than humans at certain tasks – for example, calculation or physical tasks in factories, though they can hardly be called intelligent. The current crop of AI already promises to be as good as humans at most things – including summarizing information, creating videos, and computer programming.

Technology side effects are usually unpredictable

Historically, technologies have had both positive and negative effects on society. Unfortunately, so-called “experts” haven’t been very good at predicting the changes and potential pitfalls to society that might accompany the wide rollout of a new technology or innovation. There are usually unintended consequences, a point that has been emphasized by a whole new academic field of study, STS, Science & Technology Studies (or Science, Technology & Society).

As a simple example, when trains became the preferred method for long-distance travel in the US in the 1800s, the expected benefits of traveling more quickly were accompanied by many unexpected changes to society. Suddenly the idea of time zones became more important, as trains had to coordinate across time zones, and our whole society became addicted to keeping track of time and schedules.

In a perhaps more relevant example of how technology often comes with surprising twists, take the example of the automobile and pollution. When the automobile was becoming popular in the early twentieth century, the pollution problem they were trying to solve was the presence of too much horse manure in the cities. Rural farmers (who held a lot of power in American politics at the time) were against the automobile for a variety of reasons; one of these was that cars were noisy and they kicked up dust into the sky (since the roads at that point were built for horses), and having more cars on the road would only pollute the air with more dust, having an impact on the farmers’ cattle The actual pollution problem that was created from cars, wasn’t the one that was front and center in the fight for rollout of the automobile as roads were built to accommodate the new technology, changing the face of our country.

Even a technology that was intended to have negative effects, the atom bomb, was found to have unanticipated long-term side effects in the form of radiation. The US military routinely had soldiers near atomic test blasts until radiation and fallout was much better understood.

In a more recent, and perhaps more relevant example, no one really predicted in the early days of social media, that the primary dangers were surveillance, censorship, tribalism and cognitive issues in teenagers’ self-images, etc. These were unintended side effects, which often tend to cause more harms than the predicted side effects.

Narratives and Myths vs. Real Potential Harms

Popular culture can influence the publics fears and can help galvanize support or opposition to new technology. In 2008, for example, the GINA (the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act ) was passed. It was informally called the ‘Gattaca law’ because lawmakers were concerned about a society where genetic information was used as a form of exclusion as depicted in the sci-fi film Gattaca (1997).

The current popular narrative that superintelligent AI will, along the lines of Skynet in The Terminator, end humanity ,is one of many modern myths. Historically, myths aren’t always untrue – they are usually just embellished around some kernel of truth. It was thought, for example, that the Trojan war described by Homer in The Iliad was just a myth, until they found the city of Troy, showing a kernel of truth in the tale (though it’s unlikely the battle was fought, for example, over Helen of Troy or that the Greek gods participated)!

For the current myth, the kernel of truth is that technology in general, and AI in particular, can certainly be used to kill human beings, which is an outcome that we may all want to avoid.

There are other ways to avoid this without calling for a ban on full AGI or ASI research. One open letter that was signed by over 100 experts in 2017, before the current era of LLMs became popular, was to ban autonomous weapons. The UN earlier this year also called for a ban on these types of weapons. This approach, in my opinion, is a much better way to tackle the potential problems of AI killing humans. If autonomous weapons are unleashed on the battlefield, they might provide one side advantage, and this would be the arms ace that is likely already sparking development of human-killing AIs. In The Terminator, for example, the program that resulted in Skynet was originally trying to build autonomous AI weapons, called H-Ks, or Hunter-Killers, presumably to get an advantage over other nations.

Dangers of Moderately Intelligent AI Agents

While the hype about Moltbook agents was overhyped (with many of the most interesting posts actually created by humans masquerading as bots), the autonomy that locally running agents have within the realm of vague English prompts that their owners give them is real and could get worse, as these agents (which aren’t AGI or ASI by any means) have access to APIs that can cause harmful effects.

I like to tell the story of how I was asked (2 years ago) if AI could produce a chemical weapon within 5 years. I answered that current AI models at the time could definitely provide a list of how to build a chemical weapon, but it doesn’t necessary mean they know what they are doing or that they have the means to do it.

However, with the ability of Claude (from Anthropic) and other models to write code based on natural human prompts, and more and more APIs (application programming interfaces) being opened up to agents, we find that the capabilities may be coming soon. AI agents can not just post to reddit-like forums autonomously, they can answer emails and conduct financial transactions. And with sites that now allow “hiring” humans to do tasks, we now have the scenario that an agent could hire a human using cryptocurrency to carry out real harms, including acquiring the necessary means for a chemical weapon, for example, and then hire a human to deliver it. Other harms that come from agents is the amount of spam and content, deluging existing systems and causing financial havoc in the financial markets, or even in the goods markets.

In short, moderately intelligent agents (MAI) can become dangerous, and are more of a real concern than AI taking over the world.

It is difficult to predict the values of autonomous AI, whether they are superintelligent or not. The narrative of AI killing us all assumes that a superintelligent AI will l have similar instincts and goals as we might have in the same scenario, and that it would prefer to take over the physical world. This is not at all certain and is likely to be wrong, just as previous predictions of societal change because of society have been wrong.

It is, however, not as difficult to predict the values of human societies and governments, and it is very likely that autonomous weapons will be unleashed on populations, not by superintelligent AI intent on rebelling or destroying humanity, but rather by all-too human governments and terrorist groups using the technology to their benefit. We have already seen the beginnings of this with drones in Ukraine and Gaza.

The real harms of AI

The danger of focusing too much on the mythology is that we may be ignoring real harms that come from AI in the near-term, which may have nothing to do with superintelligent AI, but everything to do with MAI, or moderately intelligent AI. We may already be seeing the beginnings of these harms, many of which were not predicted and not on the radar of AI safety groups until recently.

In addition to the autonomous weapons and AI agent-caused havoc mentioned above, there are many other harms becoming obvious: These include AI-bias based on training sets, copyright and legal issues surrounding content, and more recently, humans becoming attached to their AI to the point where the AI could influence them to do things via social engineering. Take, for example, the recent case where the family accuses ChatGPT of encouraging a young man to commit suicide. There are also individuals who have proposed or want to marry their AI boyfriends/girlfriends, in a scenario that shows how sci-fi influences technology via another sci-fi film, Her (2013). A recent op-ed in the New York Times from the creators of a chatbot that inspired Her warns us that AI sexbots are dangerous. There are other societal challenges (not related to sex or romance) when people become addicted to their chatbots, called AI psychosis as they disconnect from the real world, encouraged by sycophantic chatbots in their delusions.

Moreover, not only does AI itself hallucinate, it can be influenced by its creators and other parties to give out information that is questionable, but users are already beginning to trust what AI says as gospel. In academia, for example, Wikipedia isn’t allowed as a primary source -not because much of what’s on the site isn’t true, but because it is capable of social manipulation, and so we are required to go the primary sources. With AI going back to the primary sources is difficult at best. While some AI platforms are trying to add links a majority of those links, in my experience, tend to just point to Wikipedia.

As AI makes us less capable of searching for and discriminating information on our own – whether its misinformation/disinformation of the kind the government or authorities might warn us about, or misinformation/disinformation that those same authorities want us to believe. I’ve written previously that as AI takes hold, it will become the most effective tool of censorship by the powers that be in the modern era, raising other challenges.

Conclusion

The main problem with putting so much emphasis on the “Superintelligent AI will kill us all” scenario is not that it’s entirely false. Like most myths, there are harms that can come from AI, but focusing only on this sci-fi narrative takes attention away from more relevant and near-term problems with moderately intelligent AI that aren’t based on science fiction tropes but are coming to pass already. By changing our focus, rather than banning more intelligent and effective AI research, we should focus on to make sure we can reap its benefits while working on actual potential harms.

Yogi Berra also had a famous saying about how “the future ain’t what it used to be”, paying homage to the idea that predictions are often focused on the wrong aspects of a technology. While we can’t predict the real harms in the long term from AI to society, if history teaches us one thing, it will probably not be the current myth that AI will kill us all.

About Rizwan Virk

Dr. Rizwan Virk is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist and video game industry pioneer and bestselling author. He is a graduate of MIT and Stanford, founded Play Labs @ MIT, is currently at ASU’s College of Global Futures. He is the author of The Simulation Hypothesis, The Simulated Multiverse, and Wisdom of a Yogi. He recently completed his doctoral research at ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination, and teaches at ASU’s Fulton Schools of Engineering, and is part of the Future of Being Human Initiative at ASU.

Follow him on Instagram @rizcambridge, on X @rizstanford, and at zenentrepreneur.com.

Here’s the description. You can read the full description and sign up here:

“Taught by the bestselling author of The Simulation Hypothesis and The Simulated Multiverse, this interdisciplinary course builds on the content of those books and is a based on the first college course taught at an academic institution about the newly emerging field of simulation theory and what it means for consciousness, religion and the future of humanity.

Today as the idea of virtual environments gains popularity through video games, virtual reality, Artificial Intelligence and the Metaverse, it’s natural to speculate about where it will all end up. The newly emerging field of simulation theory explores an idea that is being articulated by scientists, philosophers, theologists and more: that we live inside a simulated reality, like that depicted in science fiction like The Matrix. This course follows several threads that make up this exciting new field: Science Fiction, Technological Innovation, the Singularity, Quantum Mechanics, Religion and Philosophy.”

Here’s the schedule:

Schedule

Module 1: Introduction to the Simulation Hypothesis and the Simulation Argument

Online Session #1: for Modules 1 and Introduction -Jan 7

Module 2:Video Games, AR/VR, the Metaverse

Module 3: Western Philosophy and AI

Online Session #2: for Modules 2 and 3 - Jan 21

Module 4: Eastern Religions and the Simulation

Module 5: Western Religions and the Simulation

Online Session #3: for Modules 4, 5 - Feb 4

Module 6: Quantum Physics, the Simulation, the Multiverse

Module 7: Consciousness, Unexplained Phenomena, Glitches in the Matrix

Online Session #4: for Modules 6, 7 - Feb 18

Module 8: Downloading/Uploading Consciousness and Ethics of Simulations

Module 9: Living in the Simulation: What Does This Mean for Me?

Online Session #5: Wrapup for Modules 8, 9 - March 4

You can sign up for the class here - this may be the only time i’ll teach it this year, so sign up now!

https://www.morbidanatomy.org/classes/p/simulation-hypothesis-sci-fi-religion-science-and-techno-philosophy-with-dr-rizwan-virk-founder-of-mit-play-labs-faculty-associate-at-asu-begins

By Rizwan Virk

Note: this is an article length expansion of some musings I sent in a holiday email last week.

For those of you celebrating, I hope you had a very merry (or happy, depending on where you’re from) Christmas and are gearing up for a new cycle of the simulation, starting on January 1st.

This holiday season, I started to think about Santa Claus, NPCs and Angels. Why Angels in particular? Well for one thing, I recently watched on the for the first time on the big screen, the holiday classic I’d seen on TV many times growing up, It’s a Wonderful Life.

For those (few I hope) who haven’t seen this wonderful film, Jimmy Stewart plays George Bailey, a warm-hearted generous man who runs a small savings and loan in a small town of Bedford Falls. When it’s found that someone in his bank has misplaced some money, when, thanks to an unscrupulous town banker (Potter), it looks like George might have to go to jail unless he can find the money on Christmas Eve. George, normally mild mannered and loving, snaps (in Stewart’s first post-traumatic performance after he volunteered to fight in WW2), at his wife and kids and leaves the house while his wife prepares to receive visitors for Christmas Eve. George had always dreamed of escaping the small town and travel the world, but kept taking on responsibilities to help his family and other townsfolk through his father’s savings and loan, including sending his younger brother to college.

George hits a low point and wishes that he had never been born. He goes to bridge, considering jumping off in a potential suicide. In steps Clarence, a guardian angel (second class) in the form of an old man, who needs to get his wings. Not only does Clarence appears, but the old man jumps into the water, causing George to rescue him. Later, as they dry off, in figuring out how to give George his confidence back, the angel has an idea: to grant George’s wish that he had never been born.

Needless to say, George thinks the old man is nuts and walks back into town, only to find that … everything has changed. This starts with the name of the town (now called Pottersville); it’s become a capitalist nightmare and everyone’s life seems to be much, much worse, including all of his family members. He then realizes through talking to people the impact he’s had on the people of the town. George races back to the bridge and begs Clarence to give him his old life back. Because he had helped so many people in the past, including giving up his own money when needed, the townsfolk show up and give him the money needed to repay the bank, including his younger brother who had gone on to become a hero in the war, but had died in the alternate timeline because George hadn’t been there to save him when he almost drowned in the ice one winter. George is reminded by a note from Clarence, who has suddenly earned his wings, that “no man is a failure who has friends”.

It occurred to me that what is being described in the movie was an alternate timeline and it was kind of like what a certain percentage of Near Death Experiencers have described as a Life Review, or rather, an “Alternate Life Review”, or even what I sometimes like to call a “Life Preview” of what might happen “if”..

In a “normal” life review (if we can call anything that happens in an NDE as normal), the NDEr, who may be clinically dead or near death for some small amount of time, reports meeting an angel (or a being of light) that is familiar to them, as if they have been with them their whole life (and even longer!). The life review let’s the subject review, in a “holographic panoramic” way ever event of their life, but from the point of view of other people. Some describe multiple screens in the air, each of which can become a 3D interactive replay of the scene – if they had hit someone or been mean to someone, they have to feel what that was like, and often see the ripple effects of that action. Similarly, if they had been nice to someone or helped them, even in a small way, they get to feel the gratitude. I first heard about the life review from Dannion Brinkley’s bestselling book, Saved by the Light, where he described his experiences being a bully growing up and being in the military where had killed people. The key lesson from this life review is usually about how you treat other people, though they might also get into a discussion with their angel about their pre-birth planning – the issues, lessons and what I call “quests and achievements” that they may have planned with their angel guide before they were born. In other words, sometimes the question is asked, “What did you do with your life?”.

George Bailey’s angel used a clever trick to get him to experience a kind of “alternate life review” which is not unlike what I like to call “life previews”. Rather than seeing his impact directly, he saw what might have happened if he hadn’t been there - to save his younger brother from drowning, to stop the old pharmacist he worked for as a kid from accidentally giving the wrong medicine, to marrying his wife, and to help the townsfolk get their own houses. All led to worse outcomes for the person he should have interacted with.

Seeing the outcomes if they hadn’t been there has been reported in many life reviews - often there is a small act of kindness that the person did and thought nothing of, but the ripple effect was significant in the life of the person they helped or smiled at. I think there is something propound in this sense of “alternate timelines” and what might happen “if” you didn’t do a certain thing or help a certain person.

Most NDErs want to stay in the afterlife because there is no pain and there is only love and light, but many are told that “it’s not their time” and they have more to do and find themselves back in their body. Every now and then, the NDEr is given a choice whether to go back or to stay in the afterlife. In these cases, the NDEr is sometimes shown a preview of how things would evolve if they don’t return. This was the case with Elizabeth Krohn, for example, who saw what might become of her kids if she didn’t go back. This is often done with mothers with young children, who seeing what might happen to their children if they don’t go back, reluctantly agree to go back. For one woman, this wasn’t enough, she saw how heartbroken her mother would be if she (the daughter) died first, and reluctantly agreed to go back.

But not only parent NDErs see glimpses of a possible future – sometimes it’s things they are supposed to do years after going back, whether it’s make music or artwork, or speak and teach, or simply just take care of certain people. Dannion, for example, aw centers that he was supposed to establish to help people reduce stress in an increasingly stressful world. Natalie Sudman, who was heavily injured by an IED in the Iraq war, had a series of multiple potential “life previews” – she saw what her life would be like if she had various stages and kinds of injuries – if she was blind, or couldn’t walk, etc. While these sound gruesome, she said it was all done with a sense of “fun” – as if a writers room were discussing, what would happen if she was blind, or couldn’t walk, and how that would effect the story. She said she saw these futures as if they were very real.

The life review is only one of the functions performed by Angels in NDEs. In scriptures like The Bible and the Koran, there are angels who also serve various functions - functions which no single angel might be able to do for a billion people. I’ve written about these in The Simulation Hypothesis, that certain angels are like NPCs. The recording angels, in particular, who write down all of your deeds in the “Scroll of Deeds” in Islam, and in the “Book of Life” in the Bible in the Christian and Jewish traditions.

So what does this have to do with Santa Claus? Well, I’ve been musing on the idea of Santa Claus as a kind of metaphor for an NPC or a kind of angel that performs a function that is similar to a life review, each year.

In my book, The Simulation Hypothesis, I introduced the idea that in the religious traditions some angels were actually more like “functions” and when they appear in the form of a person (or avatar) in the sim, they are basically like NPCs who are trying to make sure a certain thing happens or doesn’t happen.

I started to hear stories of someone who shows up out of nowhere to save a person when they were stranded on the road in the winter, or when they were almost drowning in a lake, and that person strangely and promptly disappeared. Other angels are performing certain “necessary functions” for a large number of people – which led me to the conclusion that not all angels are equal – some are just performing a function, like running code over a large number of people.

Consider the role of the “angel” St. Peter (as opposed to the person when he was on Earth), who stands at the pearly gates to let in or turn away (potentially) billions of people. Both the gate and the angel in this case are serving a necessary function, more than a personality. In a nice coincidence, my name, Rizwan, in Arabic is the equivalent angel to St. Peter who lets people into heaven. This is better accomplished with an autonomous process, obviously than one guy directing every soul where they should go.

In a similar vein, in Islam, there are the recording angels, who write down your good and bad deeds in the Scroll of Deeds. We can assume that these are metaphors and that we don’t all have our own little angels with wings floating over our shoulders writing down, with a feather pen everything we did that day in the “good” or “bad” scrolls. Instead, the idea being expressed is that everything we do and its effects, good or bad, are being recorded. Rather than books or scrolls or pens, we should think of them as “processes” or “functions” or as we might call them today, AI Agents. This idea isn’t specific to Islam, in fact, there are similar recording angels in the Biblical traditions of Judaism and Christianity. There’s even a statue of a recording angel in Washington, DC.

Though there are disagreements among the Abrahamic traditions, for the most part, angels, unlike humans and jinn, do not have free will. In some cases, they were created with free will (whether to follow Satan or follow God, for example), but then generally obey their chosen path. In general, many angels described are more like deterministic processes that are fulfilling the wishes of God.

What have you done lately?

What if Santa Claus were reviewing our deeds, and then sending us “gifts” based on these deeds- basically the naughty and nice list is a way to teach about the scroll of deeds and/or the book of life, but for kids? What if we went further, and some of these gifts would help us in our next set of quests or achievements in the next year of life, indicating how we should improve?

In the Jewish traditions, for example, Rosh Hashanah is a small kind of judgement day, “which is an annual review of one’s actions over the previous year used to determine one’s material circumstances for the upcoming year”. What if as an archetype, Santa Claus is serving a similar function? It prods us (in a kid-friendly format) to think about how naughty or nice we’ve been – in other words, how we’ve treated other people -basically a mini life review.

If we were inside a simulation, in that case, Santa would be a type of NPC, one which reviewed everything we did in the past year, and who might even hand out challenges for the next cycle of our existence! In real life, most of us know that Santa’s rewards actually come from our parents, and in the NDErs life reviews, the only judgement that is important is not the angel’s or even God’s, but your own judgement when you review your deeds and their impact.

In a sense, a life review is a kind of self-evaluation of your performance, like a basketball or football team might review film of a game to see what they did right, or wrong, or what they might have done differently. The idea of using a film metaphor is a good one, though I think “virtual reality replay” is much more immersive, and this is where I began to see the parallels with living in a simulated reality. In that case, the only way to “win” the game is to play a flawless game – i.e. to treat other people well and follow Christianity’s Golden rule: treat others as you would like to be treated yourself.

Life previews and plans

But, continuing the sports analogy, there is another aspect that is used for comparison – the team’s plan (or book of plays). The team coach might help the team members realize what went wrong and compare it to their original plans for the game – how did we measure up to what we were supposed to do? No doubt plans in sports, as in life, inevitably go awry once we are in the arena. As Napoleon once said, the even the best laid plans only last until you get onto the battlefield.

The idea of a “plan” or a “set of lessons or experiences” that you agreed to have in life, also fits well into the video game version of the simulation hypothesis. Basically, you plan a certain set of quests, each with different (or with the same) players – whether romantic, business-oriented. This also might include lessons or aspects of yourself that you need to work on to improve – such as working on your anger or jealousy issues, or repaying some kind of karma or achieving a desire from a previous run of the game.

These plans -which are sometimes called a “life plan” – might also come with a “life preview” where you see, before you’re born, how things may play out, should you choose to accept a certain quest or experience, or if you end up making different choices.

The idea of doing a life review more than once is not just present in the Jewish traditions, it also shows up in records of NDErs who have died more than once. Dannion Brinkley, for example, has been dead not once or twice, but at least 3 times (and maybe even 4+ times if you hear him describe it). Each time, their subsequent life review (if they have one) revisits what they have done since the previous visit. I was sitting with Dannion once and he told me he had to complete some tasks because he knows when he dies next (not necessarily his final passing), the same being of light is going to be there and ask him what he did with his extra years since his last NDE!

We can save ourselves a lot of trouble if we think of angels or even Santa Claus as a way to prod us to do our own mini life review. Reviewing what we have done over some period what we have done over some period, like a year, or a month, seems reasonable. You can even do it once a week or even every day, too! How have you treated other people? Should have acted differently? How did that make them feel – and how would you feel if you had to experience that? Also, for the larger periods (like a year), did you move in the direction of some dream or task or creative project that you intuitively know is part of your game session in the video game of life?

As we get into the New Year, many will be doing new year’s resolutions -i..e goals or achievements for the next year. The key to fulfilling these, I think, is to find those which relate to your larger life plan, which, unlike someone who has an NDE, you may not be fully aware of. Nevertheless, your life plan undoubtedly has something to do with the patterns in your life - similar situations that you create (often unconsciously) and the topics and/or people that you are repeatedly drawn towards (also unconsciously). You can also look for clues of the blueprint – I call these clues on our treasure hunt of life (and my book Treasure Hunt, was all about how to recognize and follow these clues).

So, while It’s a Wonderful Life and Santa Claus are wonderful holiday themes, understanding the higher-level picture being painted can let us bring these themes into our lives can help us enhance and improve our gameplay for the next session, err, the next year, in the video game of life.

These topics are covered a little bit in the second edition of The Simulation Hypothesis, and The Simulated Multiverse, and will be delved into in even more detail in my next book, about God, Angels and the Simulation. For more about clues, check out my books, Zen Entrepreneurship and Treasure Hunt.

This Christmas holiday, many will watch the new James Cameron flick, Avatar: Fire and Ash (A:F&A). This is the third Avatar film – the first one came out in 2009, and became the highest grossing film of all time. The second film, released in 2022, Avatar: The Way of Water (A:WoW) became the third highest growing film of all time. This means that as of 2025, James Cameron has 3 of the top four grossing films (2 Avatars and Titanic, the unexpected massive hit from 1997) of all time. This particular accounting is not adjusted for inflation, which means that these films, while tallying up the biggest grosses, were not the most watched films in theaters. Adjusting for inflation, Gone with the Wind is still the domestic box-office champ, having sold over 200 million tickets! Star Wars, The Sound of Music, and E.T. round out the top 4 domestically.

Now that I’ve seen both sequels, I’d like to share some of my reactions and impressions -both to the films, the overall storyline, and the allegory it’s trying to show around industrial colonization of native lands via an alien colonization story.

If you don’t want to read the whole article, and just want my review/summary/TLDR of Avatar: Fire & Ash:

It was a passable movie (though longer than it needed to be by a lot). The major problem was that I kept wondering why we needed another Avatar movie, and struggled to remember key plot points from previous films. Not only did the effects, once considered groundbreaking, look like an older generation of video game graphics, but I didn’t find myself caring enough about the characters or world to watch it more than once.

Before we get to the details of these impressions and the larger themes they relate to, let’s zoom out and look at the whole series.

I remember seeing the original film in 2009 and the special effects were amazing for the time, especially in 3D. I found the plot a little simplistic and, and having studied Native American history in some detail, wasn’t overly fond of the way they were going along with the white savior narrative.

Imagine my surprise when it was revealed that Cameron was going to make not just one sequel but 4 of them – for 5 total films in the franchise. Were this many sequels really necessary or was this just a money grab, considering that the first film is still the highest grossing movie ever? After having completed two of the four sequels, Cameron himself cast doubt on further sequels, though his stated reason is “degraded cinema experience”. This is in contrast to my reason for questioning whether more sequels were needed: why bother??

I will admit that I had mostly forgotten the intricacies of the original storyline over a decade later (2022) when the first sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water (A:WOW) came out, which made it less enjoyable than it might have been. Unlike say other well-regarded fantasy & sci-fi film series, such as the Lord of the Rings films, the Star Wars films, or even Cameron’s own Terminator films, I had no desire to go see the original film at theaters more than once, other than its 3D special effects. 3D was all the rage at the time, thanks very much to Cameron himself.

Nevertheless, in watching the first sequel, I was puzzled when Jake Sully now a full blue-blooded Na’vi, the native race / tribes that lives on Pandora. Of course, I remembered that Jake had “gone native” via his big blue avatar, but he now had a whole family of large blue kids who refer to themselves as Sullies. Plus, there was a human teenager named “Spider”, who had to wear a mask all the time to breathe, but otherwise could climb trees and jump around with the best of the Na’vi children.

All kinds of questions abounded: Wasn’t Jake a remote avatar (i.e. a genetically grown copy), being controlled by Jakes’ real mind and body, which were sitting in a med-bed like control pod back at some base? How did they end up having children? Was Jake’s real body dead? I guess if I really cared enough, I could have looked it up, or watched the original again, but as with all good sci-fi, I decided to suspend disbelief and go with it.

The same question persisted three years later, when I went to see the new Avatar sequel, regarding the Jake’s nemesis, “the colonel”, who was also now a blue-bodied villain. Though the real human colonel was dead, the new, blue colonel had his memories, just as s Jake had all the memories of the original human. Wouldn’t it be better to call the new version of Jake Sully and the colonel “downloads” rather than avatars in that case? They are like stage 10 of the simulation point in my recent book, The Simulation Hypothesis, where we can upload ourselves virtually – the corresponding version would be downloading our consciousness into a new body, abandoning the original body, as shown in the streaming series Upload.

This particular twist means the films are pregnant with the kinds of questions that Star Trek aficionados love to debate: if you transport someone to a planet, you are reconstructing their body, are they the same person, or not? Is Jake Sully really Jake Sully or a copy? The two Avatar sequels don’t dwell on these philosophical questions and just take this at face value, the result of some mystical process. . Which is too bad, because these are the kind of questions that make for really exceptional science fiction, in my opinion.

These weren’t the only questions. How did Jake become the leader of the native revolt against the human industrially driven force, which was there to mine unobtanium, the most precious metal on or off Earth? Why did they leave Neytiri’s tribe/family behind? Again, it was probably explained at the end of the first movie, but between the spectacular visuals and the very bland storyline, I probably missed it, and didn’t really care enough to go track down the answers, which says something about my enthusiasm for these movies. Now let me say that I usually like all science fiction, and will often watch even a bad sci-fi movie more than once, just for the sci-fi world.

As for blandness and predictability of the storyline, the sequel didn’t improve much on the original – rather it seemed like a lot of standard tropes being put together into the film. This may have been compounded by the fact that the movie theater in Berkely where I saw Way of Water didn’t have their heat on in the winter and I had to go ask them to turn it on several times (Bay area residents: it’s cold in the winter!). The one redeeming quality of Way of Water, just like the original film, was that I watched it in 3D and the graphics were still somewhat impressive, even though the novelty of 3D had already started to wear thin by 2022.

Fast forward to today and the new film, Fire and Ash. I started off feeling the same way as the previous sequel: Did I really care enough about these characters and this world to watch another 3-hour movie? Not really. Moreover, I didn’t see it in 3D this time, which may or may not have been a mistake. All the same questions about Jake and his family, and how he became leader of the revolt came back to me. I almost left the movie theater, but glad I stayed to the end. I did warm up to the characters by the end, and could tell one blue-skin apart from another much more easily.

The real problem with Fire and Ash? The CGI, which had been downright impressive and a must-see in 2009 was already somewhat outpaced by 2022. At the end of 2025, the entire film looked mostly like an older generation video game. Of course, for the most part the same CGI methods that are used in video games are used for special effect in films. The difference here is that usually these effects are added onto real actors and locations. Given that the whole world and almost all of the characters on screen (with the exception of our sturdy little human teenager, Spider, who was one of the few interesting plot twists in the film, though once again relying on mystical mumbo-jumbo, the equivalent of technobabble in the Star Trek universe).

Spider was actually the son of the colonel … err, well not really. Unlike the Sullies, who were kids of the Jake Sully download/avatar, Spider was the son of the original colonel, not his blue skinned avatar/download. As mentioned, the colonel still has the colonel’s memories and so still has a soft spot for his (?) kid, who is affectionally called “monkey boy” by the other kids, especially by Sigourney Weaver’s blue skinned genetically reproduced daughter (don’t ask – and don’t complain if I got that wrong – I’m still fighting a strong case of apathy, or I would have gotten this article written last week and bothered to google it).

I will admit that my impression of the Avatar storyline is colored by my study of Native American history and the colonization of North America. The problem that Avatar (the original) falls into is what’s often called the “white savior” complex, where a white dude shows up, goes native, becomes the leader of the natives. The white dude (in this case, in a blue-skinned avatar), then saves the natives (as much as they can be saved). It’s a simplified storyline and one which westerners (and even some easterners love), combined with the “mystical powers” of the natives, which are used to counteract the western industrial weapons and the forward march of colonization.

The white savior (or rather, blue savior) story takes agency away from the indigenous warriors and leaders who did in fact resist. It also often ignores the complicated nature of the tribes’ interactions with each other and with the colonizers – in real life, there were multiple colonizing parties - French, Spanish, English, not to mention the newly emerging United States of America, which became the main antagonist for our continents Natives. The real history involves many different tribes, rivalries, inter-marriage and interaction between the natives and the colonizers which went on for many hundreds of years before the “Indian Wars” formally ended in the southwest at the close of the nineteenth century. Geronimo was one of the last Indian rebels to be captured and taken to the reservations (or as it’s called in Arizona and across Native lands: the rez).

If it wasn’t for the centuries-old internal rivalries of the different tribes, the colonization might not have proceeded so quickly.

Wait, you ask, as I once did, having been steeped in Hollywood films, wasn’t there a white savior who united the tribes to save them? I’m thinking of a mashup between Lawrence of Arabia and Lt. John Dunbar of Dances with Wolves? I will admit I liked both of those films, so I’m not against “white savior” storylines in general. But these films at least had a real human being going native, and they at least had very interesting and complicated storylines. They also had at least *some* level of historical accuracy (i.e. post-civil war and World War I), which made them more poignant.

In truth, what most moviegoers won’t know, in an episode of American history that’s not very well known outside of history buffs. It’s definitely much less known than Custer’s defeat in the Battle of Little Bighorn (which took place in modern day Montana during the US Army’s subjugation of the Sioux and many other plains tribes), or Geronimo’s violent resistance to the Apache wars in Arizona, or even the Long Walk of the Navajo’s (today’s largest Indian tribe) from their ancestral lands in Arizona to New Mexico.

Before all of these, there was an Indian leader who attempted to unify the various tribes against the onslaught of the expanding United States of America in the early 1800s: Tecumseh. Yes, I said Indian - I’m not a big fan of the left’s use of euphemistic language, as if that alone would atone for past injustices. Truth be told, neither the terms “Indians” or “Native Americans” stem from the indigenous residents of Turtle Island ( a common name for North America among various tribes). Columbus mistakenly called them Indians because he thought he was in India. Meanwhile the term America itself comes from an Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, which a European mapmaker decided to use for the whole kit and kaboodle. Most natives I’ve met don’t mind being called Indian any more than Native American.

After the Eastern seaboard had been pretty much colonized, Tecumseh, a younger Shawnee warrior did in fact unite many tribes to resist the westward expansion through his skill of oratory. This is one of my favorite historical stories during the colonization period, and one which has never been properly put to film (which will be necessary before it’s better known). Tecumseh and his brother, who was called “the Prophet” (adding a mystical theme to the real story) went around and preached a confederation of Indian tribes to stop the rapidly expanding United States of America. Tecumseh, a gifted orator whose speeches are remembered to this day, asked the other tribes, if they too wanted to be colonized. in a famous refrain from his tireless speeches to the tribes in the Ohio valley and to the west of the Mississippi:

“Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pocanet, and other powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before the summer sun…

Will we let ourselves be destroyed in our turn, without making an effort worthy of our race? Shall we without a struggle, give up our homes, our lands, bequeathed to us by the Great Spirit? The graves of our dead and everything that is dear and sacred to us? I know you will say with me, Never! Never!”

—Tecumseh, 1811

While many of the older chief’s didn’t listen to Tecumseh, many of the younger warriors did get fired up, and Tecumseh’s federation had a real chance of being a counterweight to the young United States of America, with a capital city called Prophetstown in present-day Indiana, with many tribes represented. The goal was to have it be as big as Washington, D.C. and serve as their capital. Tecumseh and his brother allied with the British in the war of 1812, and during this war, William Henry Harrison, ended up defeating the Indians when their war-leader, Tecumseh, was not present in the battle of Tippecanoe. In the end, though, in an attempt perhaps to add some mystical counterweight to the story, Harrison, who later became the ninth President of the republic (running on the slogan, “Tippecanoe, and Tyler too”), supposedly suffered from Tecumseh’s curse and died after only a month in office, the shortest US presidency in history.

Now I went into a lot of detail on Tecumseh for a reason. I think when telling the story of a colonization, if you want to make such obvious references to real historical event, there is great material, without requiring the hero to be a white savior. If Cameron continues to do sequels, perhaps that’s where he’s going with the half-breed offspring of Jake Sully (one in particular, which I won’t spoil about the movie), not to mention, Sigourney Weaver’s … well I guess you might call them offspring too (??).

Of course, Avatar is a science fiction film, so it’s not appropriate perhaps to get into too much anthropology of real history – they are, after all, on another planet, and the humans are on Pandora, real “aliens”, unlike the Europeans who were at least part of the same race and didn’t need biological avatars to intermingle and reproduce.

In between the original Avatar and its first sequel, I asked one of the most respected science fiction writers, who knew a bit about anthropology, Ursula K. Le Guin, what she thought of Avatar. The K. in Ursula’s middle name is her maiden name, Kroeber. She was the daughter of a well-known anthropologist in Berkeley, Alfred Kroeber, who studied the Navajo and other tribes.

Le Guin was a master of introducing anthropological issues into her science fiction and fantasy, often subtly, while portraying them as real people, not caricatures. In the Earthsea series, which when I was growing up, was probably the third best known fantasy series behind Lord of the Rings and Narnia, the residents of the archipelago were brown skinned and beardless, based on Native Americans. The first book, A Wizard of Earthsea, was released in the 1960s, and Le Guin subtly hid the fact that the main character wasn’t white until after the novel got going – bowing to prejudices of the time which wouldn’t allow for a non-white main character in science fiction (this will be a subject of another essay of mine for sure!).

And her Hainish series was about visitors to new planets – the Ekumen, were kind of like interstellar anthropologists, whose civilization had flourished a million years ago. They recognized that the real wealth on new planets was no longer more minerals or resources, but their culture and stories. Some of the best books in this series include The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, and The Telling, many of which are told from the point of view of an Earth Human visiting these other planets.

Le Guin’s response was emphatic: she hated Avatar, and its attempts to simplify the Native American struggle in the guise of science fiction. In fact, it was clear that she disliked it enough that she didn’t to talk about it. Incidentally, when the Sci Fi channel adapted here fist Earthsea books into a mini-series, they changed the main character to a white boy. Le Guin wrote a now famous essay about How Sci Fi Channel whitewashed and wrecked Earthsea.

Of course, anyone who has seen science fiction lately will recognize that lack of diversity isn’t the main issue anymore – the pendulum seems to have swung in the other direction. In fact, a certain vocal segment of Star Wars fans have been complaining about too much diversity in films, and there are rumored rules for inclusion of various races, genders, sexual orientation in new productions before they can proceed.

Which brings us back to Avatar: in an era where diversity is normal, we have the most successful film-maker of all time, showing us a white savior (disguised as a blue savior) narrative in a predictable film that rehashes all the old tropes about Native Americans, while telling a colonization story that is almost too obviously hitting us over the head with its “lessons” about colonization bad, natives good.

Will there be any more Avatar sequels? Yes, for sure, if the box office is any indication , as Fire and Ash has already crossed the $450 million mark.

I am hopeful that if someone wants to disguise the Native American colonization in another alien invasion story, we can at least get an intelligent one that isn’t 100% CGI (though I am not against AI or special effects), but one that perhaps shows us the lessons in both a more realistic and more subtle way, with interesting characters and less beating us “over the head” with lessons. If the “diversity” movement in Hollywood means anything, you think we could get a blockbuster movie that has both sci-fi special effects and some of the subtlety of colonization. One that I as a viewer might actually care about.

I actually started writing such a science fiction novel once, but I never finished it, about alien colonization of the Earth by several alien species, based loosely on the European nations exploits in the Americas.

I never finished the novel, so can’t share it fully (though if there’s interest I might share chapters on my Substack!). Since we are talking about alien invasions and colonization, I will however, share the quote that I started the novel with. It’s from another notable leader in the rich tapestry of Native American orators when confronted with an inevitable colonization, Chief Seattle:

A few more moons, a few more winters, and not one of the descendants of the mighty hosts that once moved over this broad land or lived in happy homes, protected by the Great Spirit, will remain to mourn over the graves of a people once more powerful and hopeful than yours.

But why should I mourn at the untimely fate of my people? Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless.

Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man … cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We will see.

- Chief Seattle, 1854

Note: this is a longer, original version of an article that I eventually was published in shorter form for free on The Conversation here, titled: “‘Simulation theory’ brings an AI twist out of ‘The Matrix’ to ideas mystics and religious scholars have voiced for centuries”. This full article is available to paid subscribers.

The most talked about film from the final year of the twentieth century, The Matrix, may have revealed unexpected links between our current explosion of AI and the mystics who wrote religious texts of old, through the idea of the simulation hypothesis.

In The Matrix, Neo (Keanu Reeves) finds that the world he lived and worked in wasn’t real. Instead, it was a virtual reality that had been created by AI. While the idea seemed like science fiction at the time, in the years since, with the rise of 3D video games and generative AI like ChatGPT and Grok, the idea that we live in a virtual world has become a credible technoscientific theory called The Simulation Hypothesis, which is also the title of my recently released book. Many technologists (Elon Musk), philosophers (Nick Bostrom,) and physicists (Neil deGrasse Tyson) have seriously looked into this possibility, asking questions that were once reserved for mystics and religious scholars.

Even a cursory watching of The Matrix shows that it was packed full of religious themes: Neo was called the One, or the savior of humanity, who undergoes both a death and a resurrection; Morpheus (named after the Greek god of dreams) and Trinity (who shares a nickname with the Catholic holy trinity) were like apostles for Neo.

Modern simulation theory comes in at least two flavors, each at the end of what I call the NPC vs. RPG axis. In the NPC flavor (non-player character), we are all AI characters within a simulation (think of Agent Smith and the Oracle, who were programs in the Matrix), whereas in the RPG version (role playing game), we are all players of the game and are plugged into virtual reality (think of Neo and Morpheus and trinity, who all existing outside of the simulation).

I suggest that the assumptions and implications of simulation theory parallel and expand on key ideas from certain key ideas from the world’s religious scriptures, including the Bible, the Koran, and the Vedas.

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This all is happening on the heels of a new documentary, The Age of Disclosure, that has generated a lot of buzz, reigniting an age-old question that has been explored in science fiction: Are We Alone? In this essay, I want to use the claims in this new film, about secret alien crash retrieval programs and national security threats, to explore the complicated and inter-related history of science fiction and ufology.

The new documentary has received exposure well beyond the usual UFO documentary, a growing sub-genre of documentaries which are usually only consumed by UFO enthusiasts. This film and its creator, Dan Farah (no stranger to Hollywood as he was an executive producer of Ready Player One), have been on the largest podcast in the world, The Joe Rogan Experience, and featured in many mainstream news outlets including Fox News, NBC news, and CBS News.

The Age of Disclosure contains explosive claims based on interviews with 34 current and former government employees, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, alleging a government UFO coverup. The allegations go much further than the grainy videos which accompanied now well-publicized sightings by military of unidentified craft operating in our airspace, covered everywhere from The New York Times to the Washington Post to 60 minutes. The new film’s whistleblowers allege that we have recovered crashed alien* craft, including bodies of the potentially extraterrestrial* pilots (*more on this asterisk later).

Moreover, the interviewees claim that that we have had a reverse engineering program for 80+ years that has been illegally covered up not just from the public but even from Congress. The program has been attempting to figure out UFO technology that is significantly more advanced than anything in our current military or scientific arsenal. If that wasn’t enough, the film further alleges that we are locked in a new kind of cold war with adversary countries (namely China and Russia), who have their own programs, to exploit technology so advanced that it could give the victor de facto military dominance over the entire Earth.

To some who are not familiar with the UFO/UAP topic, these allegations may sound like they came out of science fiction, from shows like The X-Files. This overlap and evolution of science fiction narratives and modern Ufology is not entirely coincidental, though the nature of this overlap is perhaps more complicated than either skeptics or believers would have you believe.

In short, there is a feedback loop that has been at play between real world UFO narratives (i.e. UFO reports and those who study them) and popular culture (i.e. science fiction) over many decades. That science fiction has been wielded and weaponized by both skeptics and believers in ways which both enhance and severely limit the discussion around what UAP could potentially represent.

I recently completed my doctoral studies on the bidirectional nature of science fiction narratives in the real world, which is informally called “The Sci-Fi Feedback Loop”. During this time, I have also been peripherally involved with several serious academic efforts to investigate UAP, including Harvard’s Galileo project, and The Sol Foundation, which was set up by a Stanford professor, finding myself at the intersection of these two worlds, and have met some of the whistleblower in the film and who testified to Congress.

The relationship between sci-fi and modern Ufology has many contrasts: of love and hate, inspiration and exposure vs. trivialization and dismissal. Science fiction has been used both to raise the profile of real-world UFO narratives by giving them a much large audience, but also used by skeptics and scientists to dismiss the study of UFOs as “conspiracy theories” and “pseudoscience” and insisting they couldn’t be aliens. Even Elon Musk has dismissed the idea of aliens currently visiting us, stating several times that he and the team at SpaceX, which is currently responsible for 90% of the space launches, would know if aliens were in orbit around the Earth.

When talking about UFOs within academia and scientific circles, science fiction inevitably comes up. For one thing, sometimes modern mythology built by science fiction is the only practical way to have a serious discussion about UFOs and potential alien contact. Within academia and other techno-scientific circles, the subject has been stigmatized since the release of the Condon report. The Condon report’s much publicized conclusion, presented up front in the intro to the 1000-page document and echoed by media around the world, was that nothing had been gained for science by studying this phenomenon. These conclusions were used to shut down Project Blue Book, the Air Force’s long-standing public UFO investigation program in 1969. This shutdown supposedly ended the government’s involvement in the “UFO business”.

A 2017 article in The New York Times belied this statement when it revealed in a front page story that there had been on-going efforts at the Pentagon to continue to study UFOs, including one program championed and funded with millions of dollars by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. This mainstream placement of the article and accompanying videos of UFO sightings, such as the Tic-Tac sighting off the coast of California in 2004, which pilots called “out of this world”, led to the current revival of interest the UFO subject in the media. Many of the whistleblowers in the recent documentary were involved in this particular government program that Reid funded and its successors, dubbed first AAWSAP and then later called AATIP.

The latest government public-facing UFO program, AARO (the All domain Anomaly Resolution Office) was, like its immediate predecessor, the UAP Task Force, set up by Congress after they had been briefed by many of the same whistleblowers who appear in The Age of Disclosure. As with Project Blue Book, the recent projects have found a number of sightings that have been classified as “unknowns”. While the normal scientific assumption would be that this is because there wasn’t enough information about the sighting to classify it as something human or ordinary (satellites, planes, balloons, atmospheric phenomena), this normal assumption would be wrong.

J. Allen Hynek, professor and head of the Astronomy department at Northwestern University, was also the principal scientific advisor to Project Blue Book. In his writings after Blue Book was shut down, Hynek made the important point that apart from the “insufficient data” sightings, there were always a number where there was enough data and information to rule out any known aircraft or atmospheric phenomena, putting them perhaps into a category that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld might call “unknown unknowns”.

This is where science fiction comes in; it gives us at least a context for something whose nature is, as of yet, still considered “unexplained”. By using science fiction examples, this both gives us a concrete way to talk about scenarios of what they might be, but science fiction also ends up limiting the possible scope and respectability of the topic.

In the 1950s, there was a deluge of science fiction films about invasion by “Martians” in “flying saucers” and the trope of “little green men” took hold. Today this trope is often used as a way to laugh off the subject rather than take it seriously, as former New Jersey governor Chris Christie attempted to do in a republican presidential debate in 2024 when the UAP question was brought up. When I interviewed scientists who study UFOs seriously, they mentioned the “laugh test” – which is the little chuckle and reference to “little green men” that is often made by mainstream scientists and cultural and media authorities when discussing the subject.

Today, much of the discussion around UFOs in the media is about whether they represent “aliens”, a decidedly science fiction framing. The discussion within ufology and government whistleblower circles, however, has shifted from “aliens” to NHI, or non-human intelligence, an acronym that now appears in official congressional legislation that was sponsored by senators Shumer and Rounds, known as the UAP Disclosure act (some parts of this act passed in the 2024 NDAA).

The use of NHI acknowledges that we don’t know what the origin of some UAP are, just as the new “official” acronym for UFOs, UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena), is an acknowledgement that these unknowns don’t just fly around in the air, but have been spotted in the water and can travel into outer space, making them trans-medium, one of the 5 observables that the Pentagon’s research team identified. Some of these unknown objects move at unbelievable speeds under the water, as testified by former Navy Rear Admiral Tim Galludet, both in front of Congress and in the recent film. The new terminology is also meant to get over the “little green men” reaction that often comes up when using the term UFO, which ironically was a term used by the government to overcome similar stigma around the older term, “flying saucers”.

If we look at the modern era of UFO science fiction, we see a number of real-world narratives from ufology not just included but integral to the plot. These plot threads have woven themselves into modern culture and discussions in ways that are difficult to separate out fact from fiction when discussing the UFO phenomena in a serious way, which documentaries like the new one, as well as previous films such as The Phenomenon, have attempted to do.

Nowhere was this intermixing of themes more exhibited than in Spielberg’s 1977 blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the film, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) was part of a mass UFO sighting in Indiana, which leads him a secret government program to understand and even communicate with these craft, an effort that was being covered up from the public.

In the film, the key investigator is a French scientist, Lacombe (Francois Truffaut), who was rumored to be very loosely based on real life venture capitalist and well-respected ufologist, Dr. Jacques Vallee. After Vallee had moved to the US and gotten his PhD in computerized database, he was recruited to Northwestern by Hynek and helped on the US Air Force’s public UFO program, Project Blue Book. If that wasn’t enough of an overlap, Hynek not only came up with a classification of sightings that gave Spielberg a name for his film, but the professor also made a cameo in the film’s climactic scene when the alien ship landed near Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, , complete with his trademark professorial pipe.

The idea of unexplained mass sightings didn’t emerge from science fiction but from real world reports. The US and Europe have had a number of mass sightings of UFOs, some of which were investigated by Hynek and Vallee. This included the mass sighting near Grand Rapids, Michigan in the 1960s. Hynek, in an attempt to explain away the sightings and to calm down residents, suggested that it could have come from “swamp gas”. This explanation angered the witnesses so much that it led to the constituents congressman, Gerald Ford (who later became President) to lead congressional hearings on the UFO subject. It would take 50 years before congressional hearings on the subject resumed, with the current crop of whistleblowers.

Mass sightings of UFOs didn’t stop in the Blue Book era. One of the largest mass sightings in US history occurred two decades after Close Encounters, dubbed the Phoenix Lights on the evening of March 13, 1997, which created national headlines after a group of seemingly interlocked lights flew directly over the Phoenix metro area and witnesses reported that it blocked out the stars as it flew overhead. After much public speculation, the governor of Arizona at the time, Fife Symington, held a press conference on June 19, 1997 to try to calm everyone down by having an aide come out in a rubber alien suit, ridiculing the idea that the lights represented “aliens”.

The other theme that comes out clear from Close Encounters and echoes to this day, even in the current class of documentaries, is the idea of a government cover up of its knowledge of UFOs. Surprisingly, while this narrative has been fueled by many whistleblowers, it was Hynek himself who had helped to shape this by the time Close Encounters was being filmed. Hynek later came out and said that Project Blue book wasn’t a sincere effort to study UFOs, but was simply trying to calm down the public, even if it meant coming up with implausible alternate explanations. Hynek would later become one of the leading voices in favor of seriously studying UFOs in debates with skeptical scientists like Carl Sagan who tried to dismiss the UFO phenomena. Hynek later would write extensively about the mystery and is now considered a hero in the world of ufology because of his courage to admit that these mysterious events and sightings shouldn’t be dismissed but should be seriously studied.

In a similar mea culpa which continues to fuel the theme of a government cover-up, Symington, the Arizona governor with the dismissive press conference, later came forward and admitted on the record that he himself had been a witness to the Phoenix Lights mass sighting and had no idea what the craft was that he saw. Symington stated “that he saw a large triangular ‘craft of unknown origin’ with lights, moving slowly.” He added: “It was dramatic. And it couldn’t have been flares because it was too symmetrical. It had a geometric outline, a constant shape.”

The press conference ridiculing the idea that it could be aliens shows the knee-jerk reaction that science fiction often influences discussions of UFOs in official circles. Not only did Close Encounters raise awareness for the UFO issue, but its depiction of the occupants of the UFOs as being aliens, friendly ones at that, has had an impact on our current UFO discussion. Many academics, including those who search for extraterrestrial radio signals as part of SETI, or those who study astrobiology and exoplanets, all of whom are naturally interested in the idea of extraterrestrial life, are dismissive of the UFO subject. They cite the distances involved reaching even nearby stars as making “aliens” visiting us as unlikely. Given our lack of understanding of how interstellar travel could be achieved (other than sci-fi sounding terms like “warp drive”, which came from Star Trek), the whole subject is waived away as a conspiracy and “science fiction” rather than a real phenomena of unknown origin.

On a related note, science fiction may be to blame for the narrow way in which the UFO topic is always presented as “aliens” or “nothing”. The new term, NHI, or non-human intelligence, acknowledges that in the world of modern ufology, there are a number of theories about the origin of these unknowns, and the extraterrestrial (ET) hypothesis is only one.

The uncomfortable truth is that these craft may in fact be real (debunking all of the skeptics) but not extraterrestrial at all (debunking many believers who insist on the ET hypothesis is the answer) and may not represent a national security concern at all (debunking many of the whistleblowers positioning).

This includes one theory that they have been here on Earth all along, a theory which has its own links to science fiction as well; it is sometimes called the Silurian Hypothesis, which also has sci-fi origins: it was named after a reptilian race in Doctor Who which lived on Earth millions of years ago and has retreated to inside the Earth and are in a state of long term hibernation. Other theories are that they are actually time travelers from the future, a theory which was seriously put forward by Montana Technology’s Dr. Michael Masters, an evolutionary biologist.

Of the alternate theories have been put forward, one of the most prominent is from Vallee himself. Vallee put forth the idea in his 1969 book Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, that cultures have reported non-human beings for centuries. These stories, range the fae (commonly called faeries in English) in Celtic lore to many different names via European folklore. The stories told about these beings often resemble modern UFO accounts of encounters with small beings. Although Vallee didn’t meet Spielberg until well into the filming of Close Encounters, he suggested that he disagreed with Spielberg’s insistence that the craft could only be extraterrestrial.

The X-Files, Government Secrecy and Abductions

The themes of government cover-ups of encounters with unexplained “aliens” is probably prominent in the modern era of sci-fi because of the massive success and cultural impact of the TV series, The X-Files. This show that first aired in 1993 1990s raised public awareness of another aspect of modern ufology: the abduction phenomena. Many of the initial episodes of the show included elements from real world close encounter reports: seeing small gray beings, missing time, being taken aboard craft, etc.

If the UFO phenomena in general has become more respectable (and the stigma somewhat lessened) because of recent news reports and government programs, the abduction phenomena remains stigmatized to this day and dismissed as hallucinations or sleep paralysis, not just in academia but even within certain corners of ufology.

Despite this sci-fi interpretation of this phenomena as originating with “aliens”, there have been professors who have taken it seriously. When I was a student at MIT, there was a conference on the abduction phenomenon led by Harvard Medical School professor and chair of psychiatry, John Mack, who had been collecting stories of his patients that later appeared in his 1994 book, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens.. Mack was attacked in the press, and there was a commission set up by Harvard Medical School which Mack’s biographer, Ralph Blumenthal (incidentally a co-author of the 2017 New York Times article) and Mack’s initial lawyer for the proceedings, Danny Sheehan, have both compared to “inquisition”. Mack was cleared of any wrongdoing and no disciplinary action was taken when he agreed to be less conclusive in his claims of encounters with aliens and more clear about his methods, separating psychiatric patients from research subjects.

The X-Files follows two fictional FBI agents, believer Fox Mulder (David Duchovney) and skeptic Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) on their search for the truth. Mulder’s search was inspired by the disappearance (and abduction) of Mulder’s sister in childhood. It’s hard to overstate The X-Files overlap with and influence on many young people of the time. Not only do many young women scientists reference the “Scully Effect”, which inspired them to go into STEM, but many modern UFO researchers might have a similar “Mulder effect”. One DOD scientist jumped at the chance to help out the UAP task force that was mandated by Congressional legislation. When she discussed it with colleagues, she said she relished at the idea of “helping to find Mulder’s sister”, a cultural reference that others would understand related to what might otherwise be considered a rather obscure topic.

Though The X-Files was fictional, it often referenced real world cases, including the famous Roswell incident. Rumor has it that series creator Chris Carter didn’t want his stars to appear at science fiction conventions because the show was (at least initially) based on real witness reports. I met Carter briefly through mutual friends in the mid 2010s, when he was in the Bay Area to attend, of all things, a UFO conference. This particular conference went to the deep end of the UFO conspiracy axis, much further than the recent crop of whistleblowers were willing to go. It was about the so-called “secret space program”, which alleges that not only have we recovered non-human craft, but that we have finished the reverse engineering effort and have a secret force of interplanetary and interstellar craft called ARVs (or Alien Reproduction Vehicles) that far outpace our public efforts at space, including those of NASA and private companies like SpaceX.

The allegations made at the conference seemed like science fiction, including one by Werner von Braun’s former assistant, Carole Rosin, about how the famous scientist had warned her about a fake staged alien invasion. I wondered what Carter thought of these, but Carter, whose presence at the conference was not advertised since he was there just as an attendee, was too busy feverishly taking notes on the allegations made at the conference. A few years later, I would see many of these same ideas play out in the revival of the X-files in 2016, complete with Mulder visiting a site with functioning ARVs.

Roswell, Independence Day and National Security Concerns

This brings us to perhaps one of the most common science fiction tropes: that of an alien invasion. The last time that UFO fever was at (or perhaps exceeded) current levels was at the height of The X-Files in 1996, with the release of the film Independence Day, about a surprise alien invasion. The film, of course, included modern UFO lore about craft recovered at Roswell, including alien bodies and a reverse engineering programs, which could have better prepared us for an invasion. In a sci-fi crossover that delighted fans at the time, the scientist in charge of this secret program was played by none other than Brent Spiner (best known as the android Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation). In an allegation that parallels current whistleblower complaints about secrecy, the lack of progress was blamed partly on the excessive secrecy and over classification. Not even the President knew about this program, as his CIA advisor tells him, it gives the chief executive “plausible deniability”, a theme which echoes in whistleblower accounts today.

In 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico town that was home to the only nuclear-armed air base, i the U.S. Army Air Force initially declared in a press release that it had recovered a crashed “flying saucer”. The story quickly went viral, appearing in headlines across the world. A few days later, the Air Force retracted the statement and said that they had only recovered a “weather balloon”. This explanation has fueled speculation ever since Major Jesse Marcel, a key player in the incident who appeared in the picture with the weather balloon debris, later suggested that there was a cover-up and that an actual flying saucer had been captured.

Which brings us back to one of the key allegations made in the new film, Age of Disclosure, which were also made directly to Congress in 2023 by whistleblower, UAP Task Force member and National Reconnaissance Office employee David Grusch: that we are in possession not only of recovered craft, but also alien bodies (or as Grusch called them, “biologics”). Such craft today be classified as TUO (technology of unknown origin), another official Congressional acronym that was in the UAP Disclosure Act. Rubio states in The Age of Disclosure that there are reports of classified programs that even the President may not be aware of, and tells us in an interview with Fox News recently that “admirals, generals and other officers” have reported not only the sightings but the coverup and the secret programs.

The framing of advanced alien technology and alien invasions pervades the UFO narrative. This is underscored by the fact many of the current crop of whistleblowers and interviewees in this new film, are or were part of the national security establishment, framing this as a national security issue. Two prominently featured whistleblowers in the Ag of Disclosure were DOD employees Jay Stratton, who headed up the UAP task force in 2021-2023 ( a precursor of today’s AARO), and Lue Elizondo, both of whom were instrumental in AAWSAP, the program mentioned in the 2017 New York Times article. Elizondo’s recent book, Imminent, was a New York Times bestseller, and Stratton’s book is expected to come out next year, eagerly anticipated even more now based on recent statements in The Age of Disclosure that he had seen both alien craft and alien bodies firsthand. I reached out to Jay to validate these statements, but he hasn’t responded.

The Independence Day version of UFO science fiction, of a hostile alien invasion, contrasts significantly with Close Encounters’ friendly aliens, though both seem to agree on some points. For one thing, they seem to echo that the government would deem UFO secrets to be covered up and the public not told.

These competing sci-fi visions also agree that if UFOs are real, then they must be extraterrestrial denizens of another planet coming to visit us in interstellar starships - i.e. the ET hypothesis. That is, of course purely a modern science fiction idea. Five hundred years ago, no one would claim unidentified lights or craft in the sky were extraterrestrial – at least that is, until science fiction took off as a genre in and of itself.

Historians of science fiction show how the genre arose as both a way to explain scientific concepts but also to project forward current scientific knowledge. The genre continues to evolve hand-in-hand with our knowledge of the universe around us. Kepler, known for his astronomical theories about the motions of the planets, is considered one of the first science fiction writers because of his novel Somnium, published posthumously by his son. Kepler’s aliens were residents of the moon, the only heavenly body we could really know much about the surface of at the time. Following the long arc of scientific progress, UFOs were presented as “little green men” from Mars in the early or mid-twentieth century as our telescopes taught us more about the surface of Mars. Today, UFOs are framed, often by both believers and skeptics, as representing alien interstellar craft, coming from planets on other stars in the galaxy, which we now know for sure exist, thanks to the appropriately named Kepler telescope.

This notion of interstellar visitors with advanced technology, fed to the public through generations of science fiction, is difficult to extricate from the UFO phenomena in the popular imagination. It is also used, even if subliminally, by the whistleblowers in the film and elsewhere framing the subject as a primarily a national security/defense issue.

But of course, the UFO question has implications well beyond the security of any single nation and may transcend both our current science and our current science fiction. The UFO subject has theological implications, political implications, scientific implications (across almost all scientific fields), economic implications, and in fact could change our knowledge and assumptions about the universe and our place in it. Today the public discourse in the media is often limited to UFOs could be alien technology invading our “sovereign airspace”.

It is possible, building on the ideas of Vallee, and as theorized by professors of religious studies like Jeffrey Kripal from Rice University and Diana Pasulka from University of North Carolina-Wilmington tell us, that these phenomenon are real but may have more to do with religion and the human experience than with aliens. The constant emphasis in films like the Age of Disclosure on the national security issues, and the constant stigma associated with the issue in scientific and academic circles, continues to obscure investigations into the true nature of this phenomena.

It will take more than a single documentary film to change perceptions in these areas, and for now, the real nature of UFOs remain “unknown” until there is an event which UFO enthusiasts refer to as “disclosure” and has been mentioned in the recent documentary and is the subject of Spielberg’s new film.

“Disclosure” itself is a mythical event envisioned in a certain way by UFO enthusiasts. Part of the reason, I suspect, it is viewed in this way is because we have all seen it already. Disclosure has been shown to the public in science fiction for decades: the President of the United States going on national TV at a press conference in the White House to announce that we are, in fact, not alone. This can’t help but inform o ur ideas about a future “disclosure” event.

Meanwhile, the sci fi feedback loop is still at work, being influenced by the latest and greatest revelations from UFO whistleblowers. Spielberg’s new film, coming out in June 2026, stars Colin Firth and Emily Blunt. Although we don’t know exactly what the plot will be about – its temporary name gives us a pretty strong clue: Disclosure.

Inevitably, there will be more UFO-themed films, both dramatic science fiction and sober documentaries, probably echoing and expanding on the themes we’ve outlined here. Until the mythical disclosure event arrives (and possibly even after such an event), the truth at the heart of this particular phenomenon will probably remain a mystery.

You might even say, if you are a fan of The X-Files, that the truth is still out there.

About Rizwan Virk

Dr. Rizwan Virk is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist and video game industry pioneer and bestselling author. He is a graduate of MIT and Stanford, founded Play Labs @ MIT, is currently with ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination, teaches at ASU’s Fulton Schools of Engineering, and is part of the Future of Being Human Initiative. He is the author of The Simulation Hypothesis, The Simulated Multiverse, and Wisdom of a Yogi. He recently completed his doctoral research at ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination, a

Follow him on Instagram @rizcambridge, on X @rizstanford, and at zenentrepreneur.com.

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