Loving the Alien

It turns out the best way to convince a skeptic that UFOs exist—or, at the very least, are worth studying—is to talk about how smart people once refused to believe in falling rocks. Such was the approach of a thoughtful, slightly somber Wellesley College planetary scientist named Wes Watters as he lectured one Friday morning this April at Rice University. “At 9:30 p.m. on the 24 of July of 1790 in Southern France, there was a fireball that soared overhead,” Watters began. Behind him, a PowerPoint projection showed a centuries-old illustration of a meteorite falling toward a walled city. “There was a loud explosion and then lots of rocks started raining out of the sky.” There were eyewitnesses. Lots of them. Peasants and countryfolk. And their stories reached a local scientist. The scientist knew, like all good scientists of that age, that rocks didn’t simply fall out of the sky. Everything from the work of Aristotle and Newton to contemporaneous theories about interplanetary space to religious notions about God’s providential designs argued against the reality of falling rocks. The scientist “found the whole story completely ridiculous,” Watters said. “Sounds familiar, right?”

Sitting in the Rice lecture hall, hanging on Watters’s every word, were the three hundred attendees of a three-day conference called “The UFO and the Impossible,” put on by Rice’s Archives of the Impossible, a growing collection of primary source documents on the paranormal and the unexplained. The crowd was a heterogenous mix of modern ufology—New Age-y boomers you might otherwise encounter at a mindfulness retreat, harried engineers on break from what one called their “muggle jobs,” a dozen or so moderators of the r/experiencers subreddit. They were all united by a conviction that UFOs were real—although I would quickly learn that UFO did not necessarily mean metallic alien spacecraft—and by the conviction that, like those French peasants, they were hip to a truth that the rest of society had chosen to deny.

Watters’s analogy was lost on no one. Europe in the 1790s was the United States in 2025, and in 1790s Europe, no matter how many learned men said it couldn’t be so, rocks kept raining from the sky. Scientists and philosophers strained for an explanation consistent with earthly priorities. Maybe the rocks came from volcanoes. Maybe lightning strikes? Probably just a rustic hoax. But as the rocks kept falling, a few iconoclasts began to study the phenomenon in secret. These rogue investigators came to a startling conclusion: not only were the falling rocks real but they came from outer space. “But that didn’t sway the scientific community,” Watters said. “In fact, it was met with a lot of scorn and derision.”

It wasn’t until 1803 that the evidence broke through. Some three thousand small rocks descended upon a field in Normandy over the course of a single afternoon. The government of Napoleon Bonaparte sent the physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot to investigate. Biot had been a skeptic, but as he talked with eyewitnesses and examined the rocks themselves, he became a believer. His account of his journey was widely read, and the reality of meteorites became conventional wisdom. For Watters, the lesson was clear. “Eyewitness testimony can and should be used to motivate rigorous scientific investigations,” Watters concluded. “Don’t push these things away or ignore them.”

These are boom times for the UFO. Not since post-World War II have Americans been more widely accepting of their existence, nor has our government so publicly acknowledged them. The original flying disc craze began in 1947 when an amateur pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted nine saucer-like aircraft flying in formation over Mount Rainier, and nationwide press accounts speculated on an imminent invasion. That same year came a mysterious crash in Roswell, New Mexico, and a succession of clandestine government programs with names like Project Saucer, Project Grudge, and Project Blue Book to watch the skies for something not-of-this-world.

Blue Book concluded its inquiry in 1969, with the secretary of the Air Force announcing that it “cannot be justified either on the ground of national security or in the interest of science.” But UFOs—sustained by perennial sightings and reports of abductions—never went away. The popular imagination heaped on the lore, from the sublime Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the deliciously conspiratorial X-Files and the popcorn silliness of Independence Day. And then, on December 16, 2017, the New York Times revealed that Project Blue Book hadn’t ended the government’s UFO research after all. In a front-page story titled “Real U.F.O.’s? Pentagon Unit Tried to Know” the UFO journalist Leslie Kean and two Times contributors revealed the existence of a black-money Defense Department program dedicated to investigating what they called UAP sightings. (UAP, or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon, is the more inclusive term for UFO.) The Times had big names on the record—former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and a Pentagon whistleblower named Luis Elizondo—as well as hazy cockpit videos from fighter jets as they observed strange craft zipping over the water at impossible angles and speed.

But the Times didn’t go full Roswell. The program had merely looked into UAPs; it made no conclusions. There was no mention of recovered alien spacecraft, nor anything to do with extraterrestrials. The story nevertheless set off a renaissance. Follow-up articles proliferated, Congress held hearings, and the Pentagon agreed to release annual reports of UAP sightings by military personnel, the number of which was on the rise. By 2023, a former military intelligence officer named David Grusch was testifying to a House subcommittee regarding a “multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program,” which included both recovered spacecraft and “biologics”—which is to say, the corpse of some non-human intelligence (NHI in ufology parlance). Grusch hadn’t actually seen any of this himself, but he’d heard about it and been denied access. Since he didn’t seem like a crank, congressional leaders didn’t brush him off. The same month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer cosponsored an amendment to the annual defense bill calling for the release of information on “recovered technologies of unknown origin and biological evidence of non-human intelligence.”

Given these developments, I wasn’t surprised when the Archives of the Impossible conference sold out in less than twenty-four hours. On the first day, I was more than thirty minutes early—at least, I thought I was early—but when I walked into the lecture hall, nearly every seat was taken. The room was buzzing. Everyone seemed to know each other—or they’d made fast friends. Directly to my right, a recently retired physicist who told me his work had been sponsored by the UFO-obsessed Prince Hans-Adam II of Liechtenstein was geeking out with a guy in the next row about the natural phenomenon of ball lightning before they segued into a discussion of UFO technology. (“If you can understand how the propulsion works, that’s the ball game,” the other man said.) To my left, a younger woman smiled and introduced herself as a local social worker who had come to hear the stories of the so-called “experiencers,” individuals who have come into contact—sometimes physically, sometimes telepathically—with NHI. Too many of her patients, she said, were pathologized when they told stories that transgressed our accepted boundaries of reality. A conference like this offered them hope for greater acceptance.

My seatmates represented the twin poles of ufology. There were the science guys, trying to figure out how something none of them had ever examined actually worked, and there were the touchy-feely folks, eager to make sense of stories that—on their face—seemed nonsensical. Early on, the science guys held the floor. Their talks reliably began with numbers, charts, and calls to follow the science wherever it might bend. The Stanford biologist Garry Nolan got things rolling with a feisty keynote in which he laid out the multitudinous possibilities of interstellar travel. Retired Army colonel Karl Nell showed a PowerPoint chart of seventy-two distinct hypotheses for what UFOs and NHI could be, among them “optical artifact/illusion,” “ancient/proto-human civilization,” “macro-quantum fluctuations,” and “emanations of godhead.” Open-mindedness was all they were asking for. But the longer the science guys talked, the more they ventured into the conspiratorial, sharing secret knowledge they’d gleaned from shadowy sources: Nolan revealed that people in the “claimed reverse-engineering program” had said that UFOs could be shot down with electromagnetic pulses, and Nell called for the government to disclose its top secret UAP findings, although he was a little murky on who exactly would do the disclosing. “How much do presidents really know about this? And how much are they in control of what the government’s doing?” Nell asked. “The authority may have started in the executive but it kind of shifted and drifted out.”

When the retired Navy rear admiral Tim Gallaudet delivered a lecture on USOs (Unidentified Submerged Objects), he took pains to dismiss junk reports and social media hoaxes. But by the Q&A, he was clarifying that while he had not engaged or met NHI he did “know credible sources that were in the legacy program.” His final words, greeted with rapturous applause, were: “What we’re talking about is the fact that we’re not alone, and that’s what we’re really calling for—to come clean on the nature of reality. The American people deserve to know that.” A few minutes earlier, Gallaudet had asked who had read Imminent, a book by Luis Elizondo, the Pentagon whistleblower, that alleged a massive decades-long UFO cover-up. As I watched nearly every hand in the room shoot up, a thought popped into my head: I have wandered into someone else’s church.

Outside the science guys and the touchy-feel folks, there was actually a third group at the conference: academics, particularly religious studies scholars. In fact, they were running the thing. The Archives of the Impossible and its conference are the brainchild of Rice professor Jeffrey Kripal, whose chosen field is Gnosticism, mysticism, and the paranormal. Kripal is the author of books with titles like Mutants and Mystics and How to Think Impossibly and boasts a cult following of boomer spiritual seekers. (One conference-goer, a former Big Law partner who had tuned in and dropped out, told me that Kripal was “the head guru of Woo Woo U.”)

But the scholar whose work was more or less the template for the conference was Diana Walsh Pasulka, a UNC-Wilmington religious studies professor, who has one-upped Kripal for most irresistible niche: after a career spent writing about medieval Catholic history, she transitioned to contemporary beliefs around UFOs. Her 2019 book American Cosmic unpacked the phenomenon as a “new form of religion” and made her the go-to translator of modern ufology to the masses, having been hosted by Joe Rogan, Ezra Klein, and every podcaster in between.

Pasulka’s thesis is elegant and compelling. Where traditional religions have angels and prophets wrestling with God, UFO believers have little gray men who visit at night and paralyze their non-consenting targets in their beds. Where established faiths have sacred sites and holy relics, ufology has Area 51 and strange alloys recovered from purported UFO debris fields. In American Cosmic, Pasulka writes that UFOs, like angels, are forever out of reach. They can’t be put under a microscope. “It is this aspect, the mysterious sacred, that distinguishes religion from other organized practices like sports or fandom,” Pasulka writes. “In religions, one finds the inexplicable, sacred event, or a mysterious artifact.”

Over lunch one day, I introduced myself to Pasulka and told her I wasn’t sure what to make of the fact so many speakers claimed they had been entrusted with government secrets. The information was so widely shared—and so closely resembled science fiction—I was finding it hard to buy. I had come into the conference more inclined to think of UFOs as a “universal mass rumor . . . reserved for our enlightened, rationalist age,” as the psychoanalyst Carl Jung described them in his 1957 book Flying Saucers. “It’s good you’re skeptical,” Pasulka said. “I don’t believe anything I hear.”

But Pasulka does think something real is going on beyond mere metaphysics—and that the government knows about it. In American Cosmic, she writes extensively about a pseudonymous contact she calls Tyler D., a former NASA engineer turned private-jet-flying biotech entrepreneur. Tyler D. claims to be part of a secret government space program that studies UFOs. “I would hear Tyler D. talking on his cell phone about a mission that was supposedly to launch satellites, but they were really looking for them,” Pasulka told me. “He offered to pay me not to publish American Cosmic. His people went through and took out classified info.” I told her I was surprised Tyler D. would have revealed any classified information to a curious religious studies scholar. Wouldn’t that be illegal? “Yeah, he might have gone to jail,” Pasulka said, then pulled back a little. “I have to be skeptical and have discernment. People trust me now.”

On the one hand, insinuations of Deep State secrets seemed all too familiar in 2025, yet another conspiracy theory in an age that is lousy with them. (When asked about UFOs on a podcast last year, RFK Jr said, “I have no idea whether UFOs exist, but I don’t think automatically that we shouldn’t be hearing about that, right?” He then immediately questioned 9/11 and the 2020 election.) On the other hand, the more you dig into the UFO phenomenon, the weirder and harder to classify it gets. At the Archives of the Impossible conference, everything was on the table. One speaker described repeated contact events with UFO-aligned owls; another encountered NHI in the form of wise, shapeshifting black grandmothers.

Among experiencers, these kinds of encounters with the numinous are commonplace. American Cosmic and Diana Pasulka’s follow-up book, Encounters, are full of descriptions of the “supernatural and paranormal aspects that . . . occur when people see UFOs.” She writes about tiny UFOs that materialize inside miniature clouds inside downstairs living rooms and dreamlike visits from Catholic priests who appear after more traditional sightings of UFOs in the sky. These stories are, on their face, absurd. No scientist or ex-military officer at the conference had a PowerPoint slide with a formula explaining the connections between UFOs and owls. But I would come to think that there was something deeply honest about many of these experiences, maybe truer than all the claims about reverse-engineering and crash-retrieval programs. I came to think that because I met Nancy.

The presentations had wrapped up on the first night of the conference, and we’d moved into the lobby for cocktail hour. As I talked with a few conference-goers, I noticed a solid wooden door at one end of the lobby would occasionally swing open and shut. I was curious. I walked in. At the front of the room, there was a tiny older woman with long straight black hair speaking in a whisper, dressed in a black pinstriped sport coat that appeared several sizes too large. Dark-rimmed spectacles like Sigmund Freud’s were perched on her nose. Her voice was constantly swallowed by the din, but her words were arresting. She said she was in contact with beings that controlled everything in her life. She didn’t believe in free will anymore. She only believed in them. It had started in 2008 when little gold pellets began appearing in her bathtub. Soon, she was finding crystals inside her socks. She’d had these substances analyzed and they were found to be chemically mysterious. She thought they might have properties that would one day aid humanity, although, for her, these substances were linked to great pain. “Once I started manifesting crystals, they started recreating my body. They gave me the stigmata of St. Andrew,” she said. “There’s an implant in my chest. There’s a Celtic cross in my back. I’m like a human toaster at night. I can’t touch my granddaughter when I sleep next to her, she might get hurt.” The beings spoke to her. They directed her thoughts. Sometimes even applied her makeup. Someone asked where the beings were from. But they were just balls of light, not “from” anywhere exactly, just undeniably “there.” Another person asked about their influence on her consciousness. “They decide what’s conscious,” the woman said.

My first reaction was that this all seemed quite bonkers. I was close to walking out of the room. But something about this woman with her whisper voice and pinstriped jacket grabbed me. I found out she was an artist, Nancy Burson, best known for a series of photographic portraits where she used software to artificially age faces, change their race, and morph their identities—the kind of thing that we’re now accustomed to seeing from iPhone apps but was cutting-edge art in the 1980s. Her work is in the collections of MoMA, the Smithsonian, and the Pompidou. It turned out Nancy lived in Manhattan, where I was born and raised, in Soho, where I worked for years, in a rent-controlled loft she said she would only leave in a body bag. I thought maybe I could understand the strangeness of what she claimed through the cozy familiarity of what we shared.

The next morning, I walked out of my hotel to catch a shuttle, and there was Nancy, wearing the same Morticia Addams garb of the night before. We got an Uber with another conference-goer, who turned out, like Nancy, to be an experiencer. He couldn’t describe what had happened to him exactly, but it was an unpleasant cocktail of “Havana syndrome symptoms” (a kind of explainable vertigo), precognition (where he’d seen the future before it unfolded), and plain old emotional struggles. “You know that they are the thoughts in your head,” Nancy broke in. “Next time you feel anything that’s negative, tell them to get the fuck off you.” After that bit of New York profanity breaking through at Woo Woo U, I decided to stick with Nancy and see the conference through her eyes.

After one science-laden presentation that ended with a critique of the Kardashev Scale for classifying extraterrestrial civilizations, Nancy grinned, “Such bullshit. I think the universe is a very simple place. This is all a game to confuse people.” During a more touchy-feely presentation in which a podcast host said that contact with NHI eliminated one’s fear of death, Nancy muttered “bullshit” once again. She was in contact with NHI, but she was also not far from her ninth decade on Earth. Death was real to her, and she could admit she was frightened. During one long, dry panel on how to analyze data sets of experiencer narratives, Nancy started doodling in a little notebook. She was holding pens in both of her hands and moving them like knitting needles, creating a matrix of squiggly lines. “Is that energy?” I asked, imagining I was engaging in her mystical reality. She let out a wry cackle. “I’m bored. I’m trying to keep myself awake.”

I was drawn to Nancy’s irreverence. She was my feisty Zen monk; in a conference of the earnest, starry-eyed, and conspiratorial, I admired her humor and stubbornness—authentically of this Earth. So many people at the conference hinted that they knew more than they were willingly share. They had secret sources of classified information. They’d experienced contact events they wouldn’t discuss. Nancy did not engage in this game of winks and nudges. She plowed forward into her story, knowing full well most people would reject it. But I didn’t need to believe that balls of light had mutilated her body and implanted a Celtic cross in her back to appreciate the honesty and openness with which she spoke about her pain. Nancy told me the beings could be sadistic. She said she hated them. But they were also intimately tied to her identity, and sometimes she described them as being almost like herself: blunt, funny, and mischievous. When one of the final speakers drew a direct comparison between NHI and djinn, Nancy practically leapt out of her seat. “She’s right,” she said. “Yep. The djinn are what runs the world. They are shapeshifters. They were the tricksters. Everything that everyone is seeing is djinn.” 

By then it had occurred to me why Nancy and I had been sitting together for the last two days. My mother, like Nancy, had been a New York Jew with a kooky fashion sense, dark hair, and an openness to strange ideas. She was around Nancy’s age, but my mother was no longer a physical reality. She died four years ago. Now I realized, sitting there at an academic UFO conference, that over the last four years, I had avoided looking for replacement mothers. I had just learned to live with the ghost limb of motherlessness. And then here, for a fleeting moment, was Nancy.

One observation Diana Pasulka makes in Encounters is that once someone sees one UFO, they tend to start undergoing all manner of paranormal occurrences. The experiencer becomes a receiver, and their personal circumstances shape what they see. According to eyewitness accounts, the UFO is both a window into a different world and a mirror of our own staring straight back.

I left the Archives of the Impossible conference not sure what to think. Was there actually a thread tying together deeply subjective encounters with the paranormal, scientific inquiries into anomalous aerial phenomena, and conspiratorial inquiries into government secrets? In his talk on the history of meteorites, Wes Watters had said that eyewitness testimony should motivate rigorous scientific investigations, but which eyewitnesses among the multitudes were worth following?

When I talked with Watters a few weeks after the conference, he said he found many of varieties of anomalous experience to be interesting, but he didn’t have a way to tie everything together into a unified whole. “I just don’t know yet how you deal with that kind of evidence and how you make that connection,” he said. “I’m working on instrumentation, which I acknowledge is only a piece of the whole UFO puzzle.”

Watters is part of the Galileo Project, a research group hosted by Harvard University that is looking to bring scientific rigor to “the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures of Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations.” That mission sounds grand, but Watters is a cautious scientist and his work is modest. He is methodically analyzing data and developing instruments, among them optical all-sky tracking stations and radar systems, to try to capture scientific anomalies in or near Earth’s atmosphere. So far, he hasn’t had any positive results. I asked him if he worried he never would, that the search for UFOs would end in futility. He smiled. “I think that could well be the case!” he said. “We may not find anything, and that’s okay. If your hopes are set on finding something, it’s not necessarily a good field to go into. It’s about the process, and it’s about investigating what you think of as a worthy question.” The UFO was too elusive for any certainty. “Time will tell,” he said. “Time may tell.”