The Phenomenon: Under the Hidden Sky follows your investigation of UAP evidence and the competing theories that might explain it. Why was this an important book for you to write?

I’ve always been drawn to the unknown. I’m the kind of person who can’t leave a question alone once it has hold of me.

Which is why it’s strange, looking back, that I dismissed this subject for so long. It was infuriating to learn that the silence around this subject wasn’t an accident. It was policy.

So I went back to the documents: the radar cases, the pilot testimony, the physical trace reports, the congressional hearings. I tried to point my skepticism both ways. What I found was a record that’s larger, more consistent, and more credible than most people realize, and that nobody has conventionally explained.

Once I was convinced there was a “there” there, I wanted to build a way in for other people. The subject has a steep onboarding. There are eighty years of cases, a small library of competing theories, and a lot of noise to sort through before you can tell what’s solid. Most curious readers never get past that. I wanted to give them a bridge, something that lays out the strongest evidence and the serious explanations clearly enough that they can get in and start thinking about it for themselves.

Of the incidents you examine, which offers the strongest evidence, and what makes it stand out? 

The 2004 USS Nimitz encounter, the “Tic Tac” case. Most people know it from the video, but the video isn’t what makes it strong. What makes it strong is that several independent systems, none of them connected to each other, recorded the same thing.

Then there’s the physics. In 2019, a peer-reviewed paper applied basic Newtonian math to the radar data. If the observations are accurate, the object’s maneuvers required roughly 5,400 g’s of acceleration. Nothing we build could survive that.

That’s why it stands out. It isn’t one person’s story or one blurry photo. It’s radar, infrared, multiple eyewitnesses with thousands of flight hours, and official confirmation, all describing the same thing, with no conventional explanation after more than twenty years.

What it actually was is still an open question. It could be a human-built craft reverse-engineered from recovered technology, or something extraterrestrial. It could be humans from our own future, something cryptoterrestrial that has been here all along, something crossing over from another dimension, or part of what Jacques Vallée called a control system, an intelligence that shapes human belief over time. I don’t know which, and nobody can say for certain yet.

How did you develop the Layered Phenomenon Model, and what can it explain that a single theory cannot? 

It came out of frustration. I spent years working through the major explanations: the extraterrestrial hypothesis, Jacques Vallée’s interdimensional and control system models, John Keel’s ultraterrestrials, the cryptoterrestrial idea. Every one of them explained part of the evidence well. And every one of them failed on the rest, and not at the margins. It failed on something central.

The extraterrestrial hypothesis handles the physics of cases like the Nimitz encounter well. What it has a harder time with is how far back the record goes. Medieval fairy abductions follow the same template as the modern cases Budd Hopkins documented: the examination, the communication, the aftermath. If these are visitors from another star, they’ve been running the same operation here for thousands of years without finishing whatever they came to do, and without leaving one artifact anyone can confirm. The interdimensional model has no trouble with that, because something that shares our space doesn’t need to cross light-years. But then it has to explain why the phenomenon leaves physical traces: radiation burns, scoop marks, implants. Each theory forces you to set something aside to make the rest fit.

So I stopped trying to pick a winner. I sorted the evidence into layers, from the most grounded to the most speculative. First, the hard sensor data. Then the contact and abduction record, the government’s response, the deep historical record, and the consciousness research. The sixth layer is the conclusion all five point toward: some kind of purposeful nonhuman intelligence.

What the model can do that a single theory can’t is keep all of it in view at once. The Nimitz radar data, the Book of Enoch, experiencers who describe positive transformation, and the Colares case in Brazil, where people were injured, all stay on the table. Nothing gets discarded because it’s inconvenient.

I’m careful about what it isn’t. It’s a framework, not a theory. It doesn’t tell you what the intelligence is, and it can’t be tested as a whole yet. The layers pull against each other in places (and I say so in the book). But I’d rather have a model that accounts for all the evidence and admits its tensions than one that’s tidy because it ignores half the record.

What new evidence would most seriously challenge your current understanding of the phenomenon? 

Two things, and they point in opposite directions.

The first would be the full, raw sensor data from the strongest military cases, like the Nimitz encounter, turning out to have a conventional explanation. That could mean spoofing, a sensor artifact, or a classified program of our own. My whole framework is built from the ground up, and the hard sensor data is the ground. The contact accounts, the historical record, and the consciousness research all get taken more seriously because the physical layer holds up. If the best cases collapsed under full scrutiny, I would have to rethink a lot, and I would.

The second might sound strange: one clean answer. My current view is that several explanations are probably at work at the same time. If disclosure produced a recovered craft and a single origin that accounted for everything, from the Nimitz radar returns to medieval fairy accounts to what experiencers describe, that would contradict the core of what I’ve argued. I would welcome being wrong in that way, but I’d still be wrong.

There are smaller things too. If it turned out that the procedural details in abduction accounts had quietly spread through popular culture, or that the historical parallels could be traced to cultural transmission, those layers would weaken.

That’s the test I try to hold myself to. If I can’t say what would change my mind, I’m not doing research. I’m defending a belief.

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