Tl;dr: This community has been a critical part of an important period in my life, and I’m going to stop posting about it because it has inspired me to start operating a business working with the DoD.
Thank you.
Read on if you’re curious:
Before May of last year, I had some pretty firm beliefs about the presence of alien life, specifically that it was very sad that it didn’t exist. I’d spent a lot of my life grieving over the implications of the Fermi paradox and had experienced a lot of despair over what I believed that meant for the universe.
Then, a friend of mine mentioned the 4chan leak (and shared the Reddit link) in the course of a conversation. I’ve spent a lot of time on the internet; I was an early 4chan user, and so after reading it, my first thought was, “This is the most awesome larp I’ve ever seen.”
A few days later, David Grusch’s piece in the Intercept came out, which felt strange. I’ve posted on this board about this before, but I, like Grusch was once an Intelligence Analyst. I haven’t done that job for 20 years, but I come from a family with a long weird tradition of careers in Military Intelligence, and my first thought when I read that article was, “Oh no, that poor man has lost his mind.”
That night, at the local dog park, I started discussing the idea with a friend of mine, who is a pretty accomplished clinical + research psychologist. I said something like, “It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not going to dive in and investigate because I don’t want to be ‘one of those people’”, and he said something that has lived in my head ever since, “You’re interested in all kinds of stuff, you read all kinds of stuff, you’ve worked on projects that people think are crazy, and it’s gone pretty well for you. Isn’t it strange that you feel like this, specifically the topic of UFOs and aliens, is the thing you’re afraid to look into?”
A little-known consequence of being a scrawny kid who joins the Army when he’s 17 is that you will spend the rest of your life with a strong aversion to bullies and mind-numbing emotional reactions to the idea that you might be a coward. So, the emotional response I felt was… not reasonable. After I went home and thought about it for a bit, it became pretty clear what I had to do next.
Coincidentally, I quit my very high-paying tech industry job a couple of months earlier because I had gotten bored and, quite frankly, didn’t feel like the money was worth it anymore. I was spending my days working on generative AI projects and talking to people at my friends’ companies about how to plan AI projects, so I had plenty of time on my hands. So, I did what I’ve been doing for years professionally, but for a new domain. At its core, the Grusch article was a story about a person who was making some claims about technology and bureaucratic messes, and I investigate those claims all the time; the protocol is always the same:
Hone the claims down to their specifics Exhaustively gather data that confirms the claims Exhaustively gather data that contradicts the claims Immerse yourself in the data, then go with your gut Write it down, share it with people you trust, see if they can poke holes in it Go back to 1 until you’re done.
One of the first things I did was join this and other subreddits. Like Grusch, I thought to myself, “This is going to be one of the easiest investigations I’ve ever done. This is a claim that is so easy to disprove that I’m sure someone has already written a paper about it.”
1 month and ~$17k later, my investigation was over budget, and I had much more data that supported Grusch’s claims than contradicted them.
It has been about a year since this all started for me. In that time, I’ve reconnected with a lot of old friends that I thought I’d never have reason to talk to again. I went to the Sol Foundation conference to chat with Garry Nolan and Karl Nell directly. I got paid to do an LLM project working with UFO reports, and I’ve realized a lot of what I believed about the world was simply incorrect.
Subreddits like this have been integral to my journey, and I’m incredibly thankful.
A couple of months ago, a friend who operates a defense contracting company contacted me about a project he was working on for the Space Force that his team was struggling with and asked me for help. It turns out that this project is very in line with where I want my life to go from here, so I’ll be helping him operate that company for the foreseeable future. Fortunately/Unfortunately, that means reactivating my long-dormant security clearance and being once again subject to DOPSR review of potentially relevant publications.
I don’t post much anywhere, but subreddits like this are probably my most engaged internet community. I will have to stop because failing to do so would jeopardize the business and its employees’ livelihoods. I think disclosure is incredibly important if we want to call ourselves a democracy, but I have more reason than most to believe that the process is moving at a faster pace than any government program should expect to, and it doesn’t need my help.
I have a lot of empathy for the skeptics here. I was there myself not long ago, and I know from personal experience that it’s a tough place to be. FWIW, I went through an entire month of nightmares in the process of figuring this all out, and I don’t begrudge anyone their preference for a good night of sleep over a fulfillment of their curiosity.
To the soldiers, airmen, and guardians who are on this board, because it’s your job, it’s a shit job, and it doesn’t feel good, but it’s authentically not your fault, and I promise everything will be ok in the long run.
Garry Nolan’s talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2DqdOw6Uy4&ab_channel=SALT has been a giant influence on my past year; I can now confirm that what he’s said is correct, that we’re seeing an emergence of professionalization in this kind of study, and that if you’re interested, and have the skills, and are willing to put some work in, you can be a part of it. If you’re reading this post as someone with a strong CS background or a background in RF Engineering, have kept your nose clean enough to pass an SSBI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Scope_Background_Investigation, and want to chat about potential opportunities, please DM me.
Again, thank you all.
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