disclosure without a spark

(my challenges within this field)

audio reading by the author

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I’m a guest on a lot of UFO podcasts, and at some point the host will ask my thoughts on “disclosure.”

I give everyone the same answer, “Well, I’m not really that interested.” This leaves them a little flustered, and I can tell they wanted something different from me.

I realize I need to explain myself, so here goes.

For over a decade, the focus of my research has been how owls are somehow tied into the UFO experience. So I’m considered fringy in an already fringe subject. I’ve come to see the ancient owl mythology as overlapping with the modern UFO mythology, and sometimes I’ll even proclaim they’re the same thing. I know they aren’t, but I say it in a way that anyone should know I’m trying to express my thoughts metaphorically. I realize that can work against me.

Joseph Campbell said our old myths were no longer serving us, and was then asked what our future myth might be:

You can’t predict what a myth is going to be any more than you can predict what you’re going to dream tonight. Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that have to find expression in symbolic form. And the only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet, and everybody on it. That’s my main thought for what the future myth is going to be. ¹

This is the UFO, it’s a new global myth. We are no longer a community of separate tribes, each with our own mythologies. We are no longer different than our brothers over the hill in the next valley. The UFO has been presenting itself as a presence from beyond Earth. We are confronted with a phenomenon that forces us to see ourselves as one community on this fragile planet.

But a myth isn’t meant to be literal—it’s symbolic.

I mean that, and for my own sanity, I’ve been seeing the overall UFO mystery as myth—like Campbell’s idea of an emerging global mythology.

The UFO is a symbol.

Let me also say I’m not much interested in the term UAP. This acronym has two meanings: unidentified aerial (or anomalous) phenomenon. As far as I can tell, there is an assumption that UFOs imply alien visitors, whereas the new "UAP" terminology is meant to reduce the stigma associated with anyone actually being on those things.

Here’s a story. I was at a UFO conference a decade ago, and they had a formal banquet on the final night. I wore a suit and tie, and spoke with Lee Spiegel, who at the time was writing about UFOs for the Huffington Post. I said, “I read your reporting, but you never write about abductions.”

He told me, “Yes. I do that on purpose. I want to be taken seriously.”

That made my heart sink. I’ve had nearly the same conversation with plenty of people in this field, and it feels awful every time.

The last few years have brought UFOs into the news, and there is testimony about tic-tac shaped objects chased by navy jets, and crashed saucers and retrieved bodies. All of this is framed with terms like threat assessment and isotopic ratios. This paints a tidy picture of metal ships from another planet, and I’m totally open to that being some part of this, but the overall mystery is much more complex. I say that because of all the people who’ve reached out to me, as well as my own experiences.

The UFO is now a UAP, and the committees are discussing the whole thing as if it’s nothing more than some advanced component from an airplane. But that’s not what I’m finding. The accounts I’ve been collecting are about spiritual transformation, newfound healing abilities, psychic powers, and synchronistic events that are so specific that they seem orchestrated for maximum transformative effect.

Yes, there are burn marks in farmers’ fields, and radar returns from airport control towers. There’s a physical component to this mystery, I’m not denying that. Yet, if you listen to the people who’ve had the direct experience, they describe it as something metaphysical, spiritual, mystical, transformational, and dreamlike. These are elements of myth, and much of the disclosure crowd is ignoring this non-physical information.

There is a story to the contact experiences, but there is nothing but data to the disclosure. The information they present is interesting and important, but there’s no magic spark.

It’s data without a story, and that’s not enough. I yearn for something more.

I’ve watched the hearings and read the reporting—but it all leaves me feeling hollow.

photoshop illustration to match my memory from 1974

When I was twelve years old, I saw an object of some kind from a second-story window. It was at night, and it was hovering above the neighborhood. It was cylinder-shaped and seemed close; it was maybe the size of a van. It was easy to see, and it looked like black metal with lights around its surface. It moved in a slow, eerie way that doesn’t match anything that could be in the sky. It might have been about the size of a tennis ball held at arm's length. I watched it with a friend for about thirty seconds, and it disappeared. Like, blink—gone.

That was my disclosure moment, and it was over fifty years ago. I’ve had a lot weird shit happen since then, and I don’t need someone in authority to tell me what I’ve known since I was twelve years old. I am not interested in proving that something is real—but I’m hungry to better understand the story. There’s a lot I don’t know, but I know what I feel.

Ray Palmer said, “...flying saucers intrude into our lives to make us think.” I would amend that to say they intrude into our lives to make us think deeply.

I am not an objective researcher. I’ve had my own experiences, some in connection with owls, and I cannot separate what’s happened to me from the work.

I was at a UFO conference early on in my digging into all this, and told someone I was doing research. He asked, “What are you researching?”

I had to think for a moment, then answered, “Myself.”

And that’s true.

1. Campbell, Joseph; Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth (pp. 40-41). 1988, Apostrophe Productions, Inc.