Do Flying Saucers Really Exist?
Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal ushered in a new era of mainstream awareness of the UAP phenomenon with their December 2017 New York Times article (written with Helene Cooper), “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” It revealed a little-known Pentagon effort, funded from 2007, that had looked into reports of seemingly gravity-defying vessels, of various shapes and sizes, soaring across our skies.
Since then, we have seen a fitful series of further claims and disclosures, marked most notably by David Grusch’s July 2023 testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer who said he had represented his agency on the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force, testified under oath that he had interviewed some 40 witnesses over four years. On the strength of those interviews he said that a secret “UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program” exists, and that the United States holds “non-human” craft in its possession. The Pentagon has denied this, and in 2024 its own UAP office (AARO) reported that it had found no verifiable evidence of any such program. Grusch’s claims remain claims, but they have kept the question in the headlines.
The craft that witnesses and some military pilots describe display aerial behaviors that would transcend known laws of physics, such as instantaneous acceleration from zero to Mach 2, 5, even 12 without producing a heat signature or sonic boom; right-angle turns at speed; and, most fundamental of all, levitation without flight surfaces (wings, rudders, ailerons, fins and the like) or visible means of propulsion. In these reports, even massive craft hover in place silently as though gravity, for them alone, simply does not exist.
If such craft are real, physicists and engineers have struggled to unlock this profound mystery. According to those who say a recovery program exists, the prime directive within the United States government has been to reverse-engineer the craft in order to produce our own functional replicas and thus to gain, of course, worldwide military superiority. Defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman have been named in these stories, and the pursuit of the holy grail, anti-gravity technology, has been variously rumored to be a rousing success and a hopeless, quixotic folly.
For his part, Stanford professor and leading voice in the UAP research conversation Garry Nolan leans toward folly. Interviewed on Ryan Graves’ Merged podcast, he reports that “The word on the street is that nobody understands how these things operate.”
If Nolan’s sources are correct, some core secret continues to elude researchers. Why? One, because where is that military breakthrough? Two, because, in my view, any attempt to crack the gravity problem through current science is barking up the wrong tree: the tree of materialism.
Anti-Gravity without Technology
Investigative journalist Leslie Kean is respected for her careful reporting on UAPs. For the past seven years, she has joined a “home circle,” in other words a séance, with physical medium Stewart Alexander, whose group says it has been producing “impossible” paranormal phenomena for more than thirty years. On The Lehto Files podcast, Kean marvels at her experiences in Alexander’s circle:
When you can sit in a room and watch objects levitate before your eyes, which I’ve done many times, and so have many others, there’s got to be a physics…a scientific explanation of what is going on to make that happen, and I wish that more scientists were curious about this. This is actually happening. Where’s that curiosity?
Kean’s account is her own testimony, and séance phenomena have never been confirmed under controlled scientific conditions. But if they are genuine, then in my view the “physics,” the “science” Kean is craving will need to be a new, expanded kind that includes consciousness, because the only quality separating Alexander’s séance room from ordinary reality is consciousness. The question looms: What exactly is this quality?
For researchers into psychokinesis (“mind over matter”) across the centuries, the puzzle has always been: How can an invisible, apparently immaterial force influence our visible, material world? As I see it, this cannot be the correct framing; something cannot be affected by nothing, and if consciousness is something, it must be made of matter or energy like the rest of reality, albeit invisible.
Here, I am following the long-ago lead of Frederic Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research and often called the father of parapsychology, who asserted that consciousness is “so rarefied that it is invisible to the mortal eye and eludes the finest instruments of the scientists.” Crucially, he added, “It is of the material universe.” I put “mind over matter” in quotation marks above because the phrase is a fossil of the old way of thinking that holds mind in opposition to matter and energy rather than seeing it as its own special form of them.
What follows is my own hypothesis, not established science, and mainstream physics does not support it. As Einstein taught us, matter and energy are two sides of the same coin. My proposal is that consciousness, although of exceedingly low density, possesses an inversely proportional, exceedingly high, amount of energy. I draw an analogy with the electromagnetic spectrum, where higher frequency means higher energy: gamma rays average more than a trillion times the frequency of radio waves, and they pack a correspondingly greater punch. In my view, the energy of consciousness is typically held in reserve as potential energy, which certain gifted individuals may be able to activate.
I have attended séances myself at the home of Neal Rzepowski, where, like Leslie Kean, I have seen objects rise into the air without, as far as any of us in the group could tell, being touched.
Such demonstrations may look like parlor tricks, and we are accustomed to seeing them in the context of “illusionist” performances. Those who believe the effects are genuine, as I do, see them as part of a tradition stretching back more than a century and a half. A tiny fraction of these events were captured for posterity in engravings and in photographs taken long before Photoshop, such as the 1898 séance pictured at the top of this article. Skeptics point out that many of the best-known mediums were caught using tricks, so each case has to be weighed on its own evidence.
Levitations Long Ago
The phenomenon has roots deep in human history, too, reaching down millennia before the physical sciences came of age and invented modes of flight and propulsion. My own view is that consciousness is a form of energy capable of temporarily changing the nature of objects and their relationship to gravity. The specifics of this process lie outside the scope of this article, but in my view certain human beings have always been able to raise their level of consciousness and intensify their focus upon a localized volume of space enough to throw the ordinary ratio of inanimate and animate reality out of balance.
Some of the earliest explicit accounts linking deep meditative absorption (jhāna) to levitation appear in early Buddhist scriptures, traditionally traced to the Buddha’s teaching in the fifth century BCE, though written down centuries later. For example, in the Dīgha Nikāya, the Buddha describes iddhi (supranormal powers) attained through deep meditation: the practitioner can pass through walls, walk on water and travel through the air while seated cross-legged, “like a bird.” In my reading, these passages describe altering the density and gravitational behavior of physical things, though that is my modern way of putting it, not the language of the texts themselves. Maudgalyāyana (Moggallāna in Pali), one of the Buddha’s chief disciples, was renowned in the canonical texts for such powers; in one account he shakes a monastery building with his toe to startle careless monks.
Many today who can accept such feats, perhaps, in connection to mere external objects draw the line at the human body itself. And yet Yale historian Carlos Eire, in his book They Flew: A History of the Impossible, has examined hundreds of early modern sources, many of them sworn eyewitness testimony, describing the levitation of saints and other holy figures. Prominent cases include St. Teresa of Ávila (the “reluctant aethrobat,” as Eire calls her) and St. Joseph of Cupertino (the “Flying Friar”), famous for many witnessed levitations, including one reported in front of Pope Urban VIII. Those who became suddenly lighter than air reported entering a trance, a state of ecstatic rapture brought on by complete devotion to God. In my view, that is a radical shift in consciousness that releases its potential energy.
If that is right, the difference between a table lifting off and a woman or man doing the same is just one of degree, not one of kind. That is, if the mass of a physical object can be altered by consciousness, then in principle any physical object should be susceptible. By the same logic, this might apply even to the massive craft people report in the sky.
The historian Plutarch relates that, in about 74 BCE, the Roman general Lucullus was leading his army against the forces of Mithridates:
But presently, as they were on the point of joining battle, with no apparent change of weather, but all on a sudden, the sky burst asunder, and a huge, flame-like body was seen to fall between the two armies. In shape, it was most like a wine-jar, and in color, like molten silver. Both sides were astonished at the sight, and separated. This marvel occurred in Phrygia, at a place called Otryae.
Titus Livius (Livy), in his history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita, records divine omens (prodigia) reported during the Second Punic War, as Hannibal invaded Italy: phantom ships gleamed in the sky, and round shields (parmae) were seen in the heavens.
And in Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact, Jacques Vallée runs through myriad historical accounts of high-flying craft, for instance:
Japanese records inform us that on October 27, 1180, an unusual luminous object described as an “earthenware vessel” flew from a mountain in the Kii Province. On August 3, 989, during a period of great social unrest, three round objects of unusual brilliance were observed; later they joined together. In 1361, a flying object described as being “shaped like a drum, about twenty feet in diameter” emerged from the inland sea off western Japan.
The burning question before, or above, us is this: If contemporary UAP research has indeed hit a dead end because it is too mired in legacy materialism, if the missing principle is visible only through the maximum aperture, which encompasses consciousness, and if the reported craft really do hover by a tech-free anti-gravity that is none of our doing, then whose consciousness are we talking about? Which leads to an even more alarming follow-up: If this foreign form of consciousness can not only levitate monumental metallic ships (a feat we can barely pull off with wooden furniture) but also fling them at thousands of miles per hour through the heavens…just exactly what degree of power are we at the mercy of?
Read next: The Valentich Disappearance: A UFO Over Bass Strait or a Fatal Spiral?
By Christopher Noël
Christopher Noël holds a master’s degree in Philosophy from Yale University and is the author of books on psychic and spiritual phenomena and the Sasquatch species, most recently The Anatomy of Thin Air and Homegrown Monsters. Find out more at TheNearnessofYou.net. This is a guest article, and the views expressed are the author’s own.
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