The Phenomenon, Disclosure, Consciousness, and Spirituality

I no longer find myself asking whether the phenomenon is real. That question belongs to an earlier stage of inquiry, one rooted in the assumption that reality must first pass through institutional permission before it can be acknowledged. My journey—spiritual, intellectual, and experiential—has carried me well beyond that threshold. The persistence of anomalous encounters across centuries, cultures, and belief systems tells me something far more important than whether governments admit to recovered craft. It tells me that human consciousness has always been in relationship with something that does not fit neatly into our material categories, and that our modern struggle is not one of discovery, but of interpretation.

For much of human history, we understood reality as layered. The visible world was never assumed to be the whole story. Myth, symbol, spirit, and consciousness were not metaphors for ignorance, but languages for engaging dimensions of existence that could not be reduced to objects. Modern science, for all its extraordinary achievements, narrowed the lens. Matter became primary. Consciousness became a byproduct. Anything that refused to behave like a machine was either ignored or pathologized. And yet now, at the very edge of scientific inquiry, we find ourselves circling back to ancient intuitions: that the unseen may be more fundamental than the seen, that observation shapes reality, and that consciousness is not an accident of matter but its ground.

The phenomenon—whatever name we assign it—exposes the cracks in our assumptions. It behaves neither like a foreign technology nor a purely psychological projection. It leaves physical traces and physiological effects, yet it also reshapes belief, identity, and meaning. It appears differently across cultures, adapting its symbolic clothing to the expectations and cosmologies of those who encounter it. This is not how conventional objects behave. This is how interfaces behave. This is how relational systems behave. This is how something that participates in consciousness rather than merely occupying space behaves.

Governmental attempts to manage this reality reveal more about institutional limitations than about the phenomenon itself. Organizations designed to track adversaries, weapons, and airspace are ill-equipped to engage something that dissolves boundaries between subject and object. When officials deny, minimize, or fragment the issue, I do not immediately assume malice. I assume category error. A system trained to see threats will see only threats. A system trained to see hardware will miss meaning. And a system dependent on control will recoil from anything that resists it.

What troubles me is not that governments struggle to explain the phenomenon, but that they continue to pretend that explanation must precede humility. Thousands of experiencers—across time, geography, and worldview—constitute a form of data that cannot be dismissed without intellectual dishonesty. These are not merely sightings; they are encounters that transform lives, unsettle identities, and provoke existential questioning. Such experiences echo religious awakenings, mystical visions, and prophetic moments found throughout spiritual history. They carry the same mixture of awe, fear, disruption, and renewal. To dismiss them because they do not conform to laboratory protocols is to misunderstand the nature of human knowing.

My own spiritual framework has long moved beyond a punitive, transactional model of God. I see the divine not as an external monarch policing belief, but as the living ground of being—consciousness expressing itself through infinite forms. In this light, the universe is not a dead mechanism occasionally interrupted by anomalies; it is a participatory field in which consciousness explores itself. Science, at its best, is not opposed to this vision. Quantum physics, information theory, and consciousness research increasingly suggest that reality is relational, probabilistic, and observer-involved. The more deeply we look, the less solid the world becomes, and the more central awareness appears.

This is why I am unmoved by the argument that the phenomenon must be either extraterrestrial or imaginary. Those are categories born of a false dichotomy. Consciousness does not respect such boundaries. If reality is fundamentally mental or experiential—as many philosophers and scientists now cautiously suggest—then intelligence need not be localized in bodies or machines. It may express itself through symbols, visions, physical manifestations, and encounters that blur the line between inner and outer worlds. In this sense, the phenomenon may be less about visitors arriving and more about veils thinning.

From a Christian mystical perspective—particularly one informed by Paul and John—this is not foreign territory. The language of unveiling, awakening, and transformation runs through the New Testament. Salvation is not rescue from reality, but the remembrance of who we are. The Christ is not merely a historical figure but a pattern of consciousness, a revelation of humanity’s divine participation. If the Logos is the ordering principle of all things, then encounters with a deeper intelligence are not intrusions into God’s world—they are expressions of it.

This does not mean we abandon discernment. Not every experience is benevolent. Not every narrative is true. But neither should we cling to materialist certainty as a defense against mystery. The real danger is not deception by unknown intelligences; it is the hardening of perception that renders us incapable of learning from the unknown at all. Fear-driven denial and uncritical belief are two sides of the same coin. Wisdom lies in holding the tension, remaining open without surrendering reason, and allowing experience to inform understanding over time.

I suspect that disclosure, as commonly imagined, will never arrive in the way people hope. There will be no singular revelation that settles the matter once and for all. Instead, there will be a slow erosion of old frameworks and a gradual expansion of what we consider real. This is not a failure of transparency; it is the nature of transformation. Consciousness does not evolve through data dumps. It evolves through encounter, reflection, and integration.

In the end, the phenomenon asks us a question rather than offering an answer. Are we willing to revise our understanding of reality itself? Are we prepared to see consciousness not as a latecomer in a cold universe, but as its source? And can we allow spirituality and science to meet not as rivals, but as complementary ways of engaging the same mystery? For me, that is where the real work lies—not in proving what the phenomenon is, but in becoming the kind of beings who can meet it without fear, without domination, and without forgetting who we truly are.