From a Distance

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." — Blaise Pascal, Pensées

I suppose I am being indelicate by writing about this subject on Easter Sunday but allow me to blame Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon’s God of War. As science propels us around the far side of the moon, a man in control of the planet’s largest military is dropping explosive terror on another country in the name of God, or, in his case, Jesus and Christianity. Maybe just fight your war, Petey, and leave religion out of it because, if there is a God, she’s washed her hands of human affairs. We claim God is on our side in battle and forget to ask where she was when our troops were killed.

Maybe, as was suggested by R.L. Dione more that a half century ago, “God Drives a Flying Saucer,” and the pilot of that craft turns around every time human behavior comes into view. I confess that I have been reading about this notion since I was barely a teenager, haunting the school library in search of books that serious adults had shelved in the section they reserved for things they hoped nobody would take seriously. I have followed the science, tracked the congressional hearings, read the declassified documents, and watched with a mixture of fascination and grinding frustration as credible witnesses like military pilots, radar operators, astronauts, and admirals were systematically laughed off the public stage for reporting what they saw with their own eyes. I have watched governments, especially ours, deny, redact, and obfuscate for decades while ordinary people who reported genuine experiences were subjected to professional ruin and public ridicule.

I arrived, after all these years, at a conclusion that is perhaps more disturbing than the existence of aliens themselves.

We don’t deserve the truth. Not yet. Possibly not ever.

There is a pretty simple case to make against humanity, and it’s damning even without embellishment. While you reading this, somewhere on earth a war is being prosecuted in the name of God. (See also: Pete Hegseth.) Not metaphorically. Literally. Human beings are killing other human beings because they read a different book, face a different direction when they pray, or use a different name for the same divine force they both claim to worship. In Ukraine, Russian Orthodox priests have blessed the weapons pointed at Ukrainian Orthodox Christians. In Gaza, ancient scripture is invoked to justify the killing of children. In Myanmar, Buddhist nationalism, yeah Buddhist, has been used to justify ethnic cleansing.

Avi Loeb, the Harvard theoretical physicist who directs the Galileo Project’s search for extraterrestrial technological artifacts, looked at this from a cosmic perspective and didn’t mince words. “If I were looking at Earth from a distance, I would be pretty disappointed. Most of our investing is dealing with conflicts to prevent other people from killing us or us killing others. Look at the Ukraine war over a little bit of territory. That is not a sign of intelligence.”

That’s a Harvard physicist describing our civilization the way a disappointed parent sees a child who has once again set the kitchen on fire. And, in my view, he is being generous. Because the wars we are currently fighting are not even purely about territory or resources, which are at least comprehensible motivations of biology and survival. Instead, our present conflicts are substantially about whose invisible friend is the real one. We are, in measurable, documentable, undeniable ways, murdering each other over metaphysics.

Which is probably why beings capable of interstellar travel might not be ready to introduce themselves to us.

I have spent decades watching what happens to people who try to have this conversation honestly, and it is not pretty. Military pilots with spotless records and decades of service report structured craft performing physics-defying maneuvers, no wings, no propulsion signature, moving at speeds that would kill any biological organism inside them, and they are quietly shuffled away from their careers. Radar operators who track unidentified objects for extended periods, objects confirmed on multiple independent systems, are told to file the report and never speak of it again. I met some of those witnesses. Ordinary civilians, medical professionals, engineers, teachers, farmers, who witness something genuinely inexplicable in the sky are met, if they’re brave enough to report it, with the specific social cruelty we reserve for people who threaten the consensus reality.

Debbie Dmytro, a fifty-six-year-old medical professional from Michigan, described seeing four yellowish-gold lights recently flying in perfect formation, roughly a hundred feet off the ground, in complete silence. “I’ve never seen anything so low without any noise and flying in complete uniformity,” she said. Her reward for this honesty was the implicit suggestion that she had either imagined it or misidentified something mundane.

This is what we do, the system we have built. Not to find the truth, but to protect the people who are most threatened by it.

The scientific establishment, which I respect enormously, has for decades treated the serious investigation of UAP as a form of professional leprosy. The researcher who pursues it with rigor risks grant funding, peer regard, and institutional standing. Even Bill Diamond, president and CEO of the SETI Institute, must speak carefully about the search for extraterrestrial life in the abstract, on distant planets, through radio signals, at safe astronomical remove, because that is scientifically sanctioned. The moment the conversation shifts to craft in our own airspace, right now, the shutters come down.

Retired Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet, a man who spent thirty-two years in the United States Navy, served as acting administrator of NOAA, and has viewed classified UAP video, has stated publicly and without qualification, “The nonhuman intelligence that operates them or controls them are absolutely real. We’ve recovered crashed craft.”

We’ve recovered crashed craft.

A retired flag officer of the United States Navy said that and the silence that followed was, in its own way, more revealing than the statement itself. This also might be where this gets truly dangerous, and why I think the people guarding these secrets, whatever they actually contain, may not be entirely wrong to guard them. Because approximately 85 percent of the world’s population identifies with a religious tradition. Most of those traditions share a common structural feature and that is a creation narrative in which human beings occupy a special, divinely intended position in the universe. We were made in God’s image. We were given dominion. We are the point of the whole exercise.

What happens to that story the morning after confirmed, documented, undeniable contact?

Probably, I suspect, a kind of chaos. Not the careful, Vatican-managed, gradual-disclosure version where theologians have eighteen months to prepare nuanced pastoral letters. The real version will be the one where it’s on every screen simultaneously and there is no controlling the narrative.

Priscilla Wald, who teaches at Duke University, has observed that our cultural depictions of aliens almost always reflect our own worst impulses back at us. “It seems to me it’s a reflection on who we are, that we’re projecting onto aliens the way we treat each other,” she said. “So the aliens are coming down, they want to conquer us, they’re violent. Who does that sound like? It sounds like us.”

Question asked. Question answered.

We have already demonstrated, at enormous historical cost, what happens when one group of human beings with a strong creation narrative encounters another group of human beings with a different one. The result, almost without exception, has been the attempt by one group to eliminate the other. The Crusades. The Inquisition. The conquest of the Americas. The partition of India. The sectarian violence threading through human history like a river of blood that never quite dries, all driven by mysteries that songwriter Tom Russell said, are “cured in centuries of blood and candle smoke.”

Now, try this exercise, and remove “different human group” from that equation and replace it with “confirmed nonhuman intelligence that has apparently been here longer than we have and may have had something to do with our creation.” Run that historical pattern forward and take a close look at whatever scenario unfolds.

The people who believe or have evidence of non-human intelligence in our world often turn to books that can be as credulous as religious tracts like the Bible. Zecharia Sitchin, for example, was not a credentialed academic. When I first read his book about the translations of Sumerian cuneiform, I thought it was bad sci-fi. His research, often vigorously disputed by professional Assyriologists, at the least posed important questions, like where did civilization come from and how did it arise?

The ancient Sumerians, among the first human beings to develop writing, mathematics, astronomy, and codified law, described their gods with specificity that reads less like mythology and more like reporting. These were beings who arrived, who communicated, who intervened in human affairs, and who eventually departed and promised to return. Nearly identical narratives appear independently in the pre-Columbian Americas, in ancient India’s Vedic texts, in the oral traditions of Aboriginal Australians, in the mythology of West Africa. Sitchin, somewhat fantastically, places the Sumerian Gods aboard a 12th planet that moves through an orbit near the Earth, which prompted its inhabitants to come down and give us a jump start.

The standard academic explanation, though, is that these aliens and gods are psychological archetypes, products of the human mind’s universal tendency toward narrative. That may be true. But it is also the explanation you would construct if you needed one badly enough, because the alternative, that disparate human civilizations separated by oceans and millennia were all describing encounters with the same nonhuman visitors, has implications that the academic establishment has never been institutionally equipped to absorb.

Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix and therefore not a man casually dismissed, spent years developing the theory of Directed Panspermia, the proposal that life on Earth was deliberately seeded here by an extraterrestrial civilization. Not accidentally nor via random cosmic distribution. Deliberately. He looked at the machinery of DNA, understood it more intimately than almost any human being alive, and concluded that its complexity could not be adequately explained by undirected processes alone. The God botherers might step in there to offer their answer, but it is no more scientifically acceptable than Sumerian explanations.

The most theologically explosive version of this question about alien life is the one nobody wants to ask directly, which is if an advanced civilization engineered or seeded or accelerated human life, why didn’t they simply make us good? Why give us four billion years of single-celled organisms, mass extinctions and evolutionary dead ends and the whole brutal, magnificent, wasteful apparatus of natural selection? Why not just build the endpoint? Put Darwin out of business.

My guess is because the endpoint isn’t what they’re after. What they’re watching for, again, if they’re watching at all, cannot be manufactured. Genuine moral agency, authentic conscience, real courage in the face of real consequence are not engineering problems. They are emergence problems. They only arise through the long, uncontrolled process of a creature becoming aware of itself and then deciding, in a million individual moments nobody is scripting, what kind of creature it intends to be.

And, my, oh my, is our decision-making route of travel littered with mistakes.

But that’s free will. That is also, if you follow the logic, what a sufficiently advanced civilization would understand immediately. You cannot shortcut consciousness into wisdom. You can only watch, with what I imagine would be a mixture of hope and despair not entirely unlike parenthood, and wait.

The problem is that we are not making it easy to wait. We have presidents now saying, or at least suggesting, that UFOs/UAPs are real. The Pentagon released hundreds of UAP reports in 2024. Donald Trump has directed the release of government files. Admiral Gallaudet is on the record about recovered craft. Professor Edwin Bergin at the University of Michigan, who teaches courses on the search for extraterrestrial life, notes that the statistical probability of life elsewhere in a universe of billions of galaxies containing billions of stars each is, conservatively, high.

“When has ignorance ever been a good national strategy?” Gallaudet asks.

Never, but historically, our democratic republic has been good at legislating it into existence. The answer to ignorance is not simply information. The correct curative for ignorance is readiness. And we are not ready. A species that is currently killing its own members over whose interpretation of God is correct is not ready to be told that the God question may need to be reopened from the very beginning. A civilization that ridicules its own most credible witnesses is not ready to process what those witnesses are describing. A culture that has spent seventy-five years treating this subject as the province of paranoids and Hollywood screenwriters has not built the institutional, theological, or psychological infrastructure to absorb a truth this large without catastrophic fracture.

I have been frustrated by this for fifty years, and, in particular by the absence of serious public science, the contempt directed at experiencers, and the gap between what credible people are reporting and what our institutions are willing to acknowledge. That frustration has not diminished. If anything, watching Congress hold serious hearings while cable news covers them with a smirk, watching decorated military officers stake their reputations on claims that are then treated as entertainment, well, it has only gotten worse.

The truth, though, has been leaking out for decades in classified briefings and deathbed confessions and documents with the critical paragraphs blacked out. The question was never whether it exists. The question has always been, and remains, whether we will still be shooting at each other over scripture when it finally arrives.

Based on current evidence, I would not bet heavily on our species.