I hadn’t intended for this, my second post, to touch on the same ground as the first: the point where consciousness – the thing that makes us ‘us’ – and unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP, formerly known as UFOs) meet.

But back then, more than a month ago, I didn’t know – nobody outside government did – that a Congressional hearing on UAP by the House Intelligence Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation Subcommittee would be taking place, as happened on 17th May.

This was, in its way, historic – the first time in 50 years that government – in the guise of senior officials from the US Department of Defense – had been summoned to testify before Congress on UAP/UFOs. My initial impression? Most people’s? Overwhelmingly underwhelming. But with the benefit of several weeks of hindsight, and with input in the interim from people whose business it is to know, I accept I shouldn’t have been quite as hasty to judge and dismiss in the way that I did.

Those first impressions, though, really weren’t favourable at all. Witness testimony was delivered by Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald S. Moultrie and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott W. Bray. The impetus behind the hearings were the string of events that have taken place since December 2017 (see my last post: http://www.nickcook.works/welcome-to-my-world/) when the New York Times revealed the existence of a secret programme within the DoD tasked with UFO investigation – the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. When the NYT blew open AATIP’s existence, its activities were repackaged as the UAP Task Force. When, at the end of 2020, the DoD and the intelligence community (IC) were compelled to tell Congress what they knew about UAP/UFOs in a report they had to assemble and deliver within six months, the UAPTF was repurposed again as the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group. If ever you needed evidence that the DoD and IC had been dragged kicking and screaming into the light of public accountability on this subject, ‘the AOIMSG’ surely is it. Few people in the committee room could remember how to spell it, let alone pronounce it; and this, it began to dawn on me, as I watched the whole show unfold, was intentional. When Under Secretary Bray stood up to share a video of a UFO encounter he had brought along as show’n’tell, there was a palpable quiver of anticipation from the room. But as he ran the footage, which appeared to have been taken on a smart phone from the cockpit of a fighter-jet, not only did we have trouble spotting the object he wanted to show us, but he did too – and when it came to trying to freezeframe said object, the hearing almost descended into farce.

The result set the tone for much of what followed, which became an abject lesson in how to do ‘plausible deniability’ – a technique that’s designed to let officialdom off the hook in situations like this, because the officials who are under the lamp attest very simply that they ‘do not know’.

This denial of knowledge of things almost anyone with a modicum of curiosity about UFOs ought to have known about was a frequent mantra of the hearing (for a full rundown on it, see The Debrief’s transcript here: https://thedebrief.org/complete-transcript-of-congresss-historic-hearing-on-unidentified-aerial-phenomena/). It included some remarkable official amnesia on issues as diverse as the existence of official studies on UFOs by the DoD between Project Blue Book, which closed in 1969, and AATIP, which opened in 2007, and the ‘Malmstrom Incident’, in which a UFO (or something remarkably like one) shut down a dozen or so Minuteman nuclear-tipped ICBM silos in March 1967. But for the perspicacious questioning of one or two congressmen, in particular Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin, the DoD might have got off scot fee. Here’s a soupçon of what he was up against, which I pick up here after Gallagher asks Moultrie if he was aware of the Malmstrom incident and if he had any comments on the accuracy of reports on it.

Moultrie: Let me pass that to Mr. Bray, since you (Mr. Bray) have been looking at UAPs over the last three years.

Bray: That data is not within the holdings of the UAP Task Force.

Gallagher: But you are aware of the report? That the data exists somewhere?

Bray: I have heard stories. I have not heard (sic) official data on that.

Gallagher: So you have just seen informal stories, no official assessment that you’ve done or exists within DoD ..?

Bray: All I can speak to is, you know, what’s within my cognisance, the UAP Task Force, and we have not looked at that incident.

Gallagher: Well, I would say it’s a pretty high-profile incident …”

In UFO lore, they don’t come much higher. And the Malmstrom incident isn’t the only case where UFOs have taken nuclear weapons off-line. It has become a mantra of mine that you can debunk any single incident in the canon of UAP/UFO stories, just as you can pretty much anything, but it’s hard to debunk all the data across the entire history of the phenomenon.

For anyone looking to ramp up on the subject of UFO ‘interventions’ at nuclear sites (which include nuclear powerplants and facilities involved in the production of nuclear weapons, as well as the weapons themselves), take a look at ‘UFOs and Nukes’, a large and authoritative work by researcher Robert Hastings, who, by the book’s second printing five years ago, had interviewed upwards of 150 former or retired US military personnel about their UFO encounters at ICBM launch facilities, fissile material storage depots and weapons test areas during the Cold War: https://www.ufohastings.com/book. What it provides is a large part of the backstory to today’s congressional hearings, which have emerged out of the so-called ‘180-Day Report’ – the report that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence submitted to Congress last June. Its unclassified section made it abundantly clear that range incursions by UAP/UFOs – incidents in which UFOs have appeared in closed military airspace – as well as close encounters between UFOs and civil air traffic have reached a point where there are serious concerns for people’s safety.

This point was picked up after the hearings by an evidently frustrated Gallagher in interview (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvgL310l0dE). “It is a fact,” he said, “that things are appearing on our (military) ranges – they’re fouling our ranges, that’s why they’re called ‘range-foulers’. It presents a safety risk to our pilots. We have to figure out what the hell is going on and right now we’ve gotten no answers from the Pentagon.” He then, in the same interview, made an extraordinary plea (one that I happen to agree with) that the current quest for answers to the UAP question needed to be opened up beyond the military. “(We must) declassify as much as possible and invite the help of the private sector – it’s not just fringe people looking into this; there are multi, multi billionaires in the VC (venture capital) and private equity community who are fascinated by this question,” he said. Via such an approach, Gallagher went on to say, (a) answers would begin to materialise and (b) the Pentagon would be prevented from further obfuscation or shutting inquiry down.

This in itself is revelatory – but perhaps we shouldn’t be all that surprised.

The tech community is leading science in wanting to know about UAP/UFOs, in my opinion, for a very simple reason: what we learn about them is going to tell us a great deal more about the reality we inhabit than is currently known – a reality science doesn’t have answers to either for another simple reason: its refusal (as mainstream science, at least) to entertain the notion we may not live in a solidly material world after all, but one that is more squirrelly, and far more surprising. That the tech sector is prepared to go here tells us something else: it sees opportunity in this knowledge.

On the frontier of this new frontier – one that folds consciousness into the equation (and more than this: one that acknowledges consciousness, not matter, as primary) – there is very likely an explosion of new knowledge that is waiting to be discovered, as well as solutions, potentially, to swaths of conundrums science is currently stuck on (dark energy, dark matter, anyone?). When this knowledge is unlocked, then, truly, we will have entered not merely a new paradigm of science and technology – including multi-billion dollar (or trillion even) breakthroughs in communications, computing, energy and space travel – but, even more widely, of humanity itself.

As a sometime professional ghostwriter, I like to say that everybody has a story in them.

An early encounter in my research into consciousness – a field that has been a developing interest over the past decade and is now a professional interest – was with the works of Joseph Campbell, whose 1949 book The Hero With A Thousand Faces went on to sell a million copies. THWATF set out the idea that all the great stories of the world come from a single ‘origin story’ linked to the birth of conscious humanity. Connecting myth also to the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’, the book also laid out Campbell’s model for The Hero’s Journey, a 12-point arc to any narrative that holds as true today as it did for the myths of Homer and Virgil.

The template of The Hero’s Journey, indeed, allows us to decode human psychology at its deepest, most fundamental level.

The heroes and villains of ancient myth turn out to be archetypes of human behaviour. These archetypes – the monsters, tricksters, enemies and allies encountered by our Odysseuses and Aeneases on their epic journeys – also turn out to be facets of our psyches. Myths are narrative representations, in other words, of the struggle to understand ourselves.

Viewed through this prism, every life on the planet becomes meaningful. Each day, we wrestle with our demons in the fight to notch up the little victories that permit us to put food and drink on the table – in essence, to survive for another day. And then, the very next day, we go and do it all over again. In Campbell’s ‘hero’s arc’, the prize – or ‘boon’: the thing that he or she brings back to the ‘real world’ at the end of the quest – is the thing that sets them and everybody else free. The prize can be a material thing (the destruction of the ‘Ring of Power’ in The Lord of the Rings) or an abstract thing (the revelation/message at the core of a religion or what the Holy Grail is revealed to be at the heart of the Arthurian legend: a representation of the fulfilment of the highest potentialities of human consciousness).

So, why call this blog ‘Rogue Icons’?

Before I was a ghostwriter, I was a defence journalist, then wrote a couple of novels, then a somewhat heretical non-fiction book about the ultimate defence secret, The Hunt For Zero Point, went on to consult to some of the world’s biggest aerospace and defence companies (about getting them to use some of their opaque technologies to act on global challenges – from climate change to food/water security to connected cities to environmental pollution) – before returning to novel-writing (The Grid) and corporate ghostwriting – working with companies to tell their stories, using techniques I’ve honed from four decades of storytelling. I’ve also just been made a director of a newly formed institute dedicated to investigating consciousness. If you’re wondering, I am, too: how did a former defence reporter end up working with some of the world’s leading consciousness experts?

As a journalist, I was never happier than when in the field, investigating ‘frontier’ stories.

Sometimes the frontier was physical (e.g. bringing stories back from the newly opened-up defence industrial complex of the former Soviet Union, or probing the edges of Area 51 for evidence of top secret, black world aircraft projects); sometimes, though, it was more, well … non-physical.

In my travels, I met people who were working on what one theoretical physicist referred to as ‘the frontier of a frontier’ – science so strange that it had been consigned to outer darkness by the science mainstream (what the mainstream dismisses as ‘fringe science’) – there never to be acknowledged, let alone discussed, in polite company or peer-reviewed science journals.

This science often underpinned novel, exotic forms of energy and propulsion, but not always.

Sometimes, it touched on other heresies – UFOs, for example.

As an aerospace and defence journalist (I worked for Jane’s Defence Weekly, the world’s premier defence journal), I had maintained a kind of weather-eye on UFOs but had avoided the subject in print because of the stigma.

That stigma evaporated overnight, on December 16^th 2017, when the New York Times published a story about a top secret Pentagon unit that had been studying UFOs since 2007. Three and a half years later, the DoD and US intelligence community admitted in a report to the US Congress that UFOs were ‘real’. It stopped short of saying what they were, but the possibilities, it said, ranged from ‘adversary tech’ – i.e. China’s or Russia’s – to something unknown and in need of deeper study. The old trope about UFOs being swamp gas, flocks of migrating birds or attributable to mass, psychotic delusions had gone.

UFOs have been with us in the so-called ‘modern sightings era’ since 1947, when the first ‘UFO wave’ was openly discussed. In the 75 years since, flying saucers have eluded any meaningful explanation. They might be real, but we still don’t have the first real clue what they are.

While the Pentagon hasn’t gone so far as to say this yet, one thing is for sure: though some sightings might be adversary tech, the stuff we really want to know about – the exotic stuff that involves UAPs (‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ to use the Pentagon’s own jargon) that can cloak and uncloak and/or go from hovering to hypersonic speeds in the blink of an eye – very definitely ain’t us. There is no technology on Earth that can do some of the things these craft are reported to do (by credible witnesses, to boot) – and I like to think I know what I’m talking about, having spent 20 years as an aerospace and defence hack investigating the secret stuff that does get built by the likes of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

Coming from a tech background, my first instinct was to explore the issue from a tech perspective. But this has been the approach adopted by most of those investigating the phenomenon from the outset, and it’s hardly got us anywhere in more than seven decades.

The rudiments of an altogether different approach were first promulgated by some real pioneers in the field, amongst them the US-based, French ufologist Jacques Vallée, who persuasively put forward the idea that there was a ‘consciousness component’ to the phenomenon that couldn’t be ignored. This is manifest in the fact that witnesses (including some of those frontier scientists mentioned earlier) have reported anomalies in conjunction with some sightings that can best be described as ‘weird’ – and slightly more scientifically as ‘psychic’: e.g. instances of telepathic communication and ‘missing time’, for example, when people come into contact with these things that point to shifts in how we perceive reality.

At the same time, whatever UFOs are, they also make real impacts in and on our environment: they are visible on radar and military infrared search and track systems, and they make dents in the ground when they land.

To research consciousness is to research the nature of reality. We tend to think that our 3D/4D world is solidly real, but it isn’t; we only perceive it as real. Atoms, the building blocks of solid matter, are 99.9 per cent empty space (Although, technically, nothing is empty space – space being filled with a seething mass of particles and fields).

The appearance of solidity – and the separation of things in the realm of our five senses – comes from the fact, if a US Army report on the subject is to be believed, that solid matter is made up of vibrating energy grids at the primal level of existence. Different sub-atomic vibration rates give rise to different types of matter – and, in the process, to rocks, trees, plants, amoebas, insects, animals, you and me … and, ultimately, to what we interpret as the physical universe.

One of my big problems with science is that most scientists aren’t good at putting it into language most of the rest of us can understand. And when we reach the frontier of the frontier, that’s a huge problem – because some of the stuff that crops up on it is so strange, even the DoD – if we acknowledge that UFO report to Congress – had all but washed its hands of things it definitely ought to know about – to wit, objects that have penetrated and interacted with its aircraft and systems in protected, highly secure airspace.

Given that UFOs have been reported over, and in some cases inside US nuclear facilities, this shouldn’t have been dismissed in the way the unclassified version of the report wanted us to believe it had been. But few people I know accepted that part of it as fact. The DoD – the highly secret parts I’ve occasionally brushed up against, at least – has been studying the hell out of UFOs for most of the 75 years of backstory the UAP report to Congress categorically dismissed. But that doesn’t mean to say it knows what the phenomenon is. The evidence, in fact, says it hardly understands it at all. This is because neither the military nor science has a handle on the real, underlying mystery of the UFO phenomenon – the nature of reality itself.

For as long as science continues to use arcane formulaic and mathematical descriptions of high-level ideas and concepts when briefing to a high level – or to us mere mortals – this issue is going to persist. Which is how and why I came to appreciate the model of reality put forward a few years ago by a professor of cognitive science at the University of Southern California at Irvine, Donald Hoffman, because he makes it relatable to something we do understand – the way we interact with a device most of us use every day: a computer.

In Hoffman’s ‘conscious realism’ model of reality, we don’t need knowledge of the ‘guts of the machine’ (a laptop, for example) – the workings of its hardware and its software – to interact with it. Instead, we forge a relationship with the icons and apps that it displays on-screen. So too with reality, Hoffman, tells us. We interface with reality via relationships with an infinite number of icons – governing our need for everything: from eating, to the way we learn, to making friends and falling in love – our brains, he informs us, act as ‘reducing valves’ to give us ‘no more than the reality we need for our everyday survival’. If we saw reality as it really is, it would (to coin David Bowie) ‘simply blow our minds’, Hoffman says.

It’s this screen – this interface – I’m interested in because it’s this that allows us all to play the same game – what we experience, for the most part, as ‘everyday reality’. Occasionally, however, there are apparent ‘glitches in the machine’ that give rise to anomalies on the interface that can take on material and immaterial form – i.e. things that are real and unreal. Sometimes these anomalies – UFOs, for example – are both of these things. One minute they’re there, the next they’re not. One minute they’re physical, the next they’re so ethereal, so other worldly, they can go through solid objects. As well as telling us something about them, this also tells us something about the interface – it, too, appears to have physical and non-physical properties. Our reality, in other words, isn’t what we think it is.

Given these fundamental observations, why isn’t science – mainstream science, that is – more on this? Good question, and one that I’ll be exploring in this blog. On the frontier of the frontier – the frontier of the known and the unknown – I’ll be looking at all kinds of ‘rogue icons’, including those that manifest in ‘everyday’ form: inter alia via a focus on the history, politics, geopolitics, tech, psychology and science of the ‘real world’.

But it is consciousness, especially, that I’ll be putting my attention on.

Because, as even mainstream science is increasingly acknowledging, we don’t live in a material world, but one that is infinitely more complex and more subtle – with that elusive thing, consciousness, underpinning everything; not, as science has insisted for the past 300 years, but the other way around. In this brave new world – what appears to be the actual world – matter emerges from consciousness, not vice versa. To visualise this, we need to accept what looks more and more to be the truth of the evidence: our brains don’t produce consciousness, as the mainstream says, but download it much as a radio receives a signal.

And, on the frontier of the frontier, people are downloading all kinds of ‘new realities’.

I wrote about this in an essay competition last year that carried a $500,000 top prize. The winner of that prize, Dr Jeffrey Mishlove, interviewed me on my runner-up submission, which, though ostensibly about the best evidence for the survival of our consciousness after death, was actually about how different ‘experiencers’ – from those that encounter UFOs to people who have near-death experiences – are ‘hacking the interface’ every single day.

What we learn from the experiencers’ experiences, I believe, is providing us with clues to a revolution in science that will make the Copernican revolution – the paradigm that gave us Galileo, Newton and our era of modern science – trivial by comparison. In short, reality is about to get a lot stranger and we need to be ready for it. Welcome, then, to Rogue Icons; welcome to my world …

It’s hard for many of us to recall right now, but right before the virus our news seemed to be a daily diet of disaster: forest fires, floods, melting ice-caps, a Middle East in flames, the deforestation of the Amazon … 

Whilst we all yearn for a return to normality, many are expressing the hope that a better world will replace the pre-virus world; a world, as we all know, that was – is – beset with huge, seemingly intractable global challenges: climate change, a rampant refugee crisis, food and water shortages, global poverty, conflict, terrorism, environmental catastrophe and humanitarian crises.

And, hard as it is right now to look beyond the outbreak, we need to remind ourselves that global pandemic is the apotheosis of just one of these challenges: disease.

Fifteen years ago, I had a vision of how we could tackle global challenges – not just pandemic, but all of them – including climate change, the biggest of them all (and, you could argue, the underlying cause of almost all of them).

The story involved the coming together of every single sector, but its central protagonist was an unlikely hero: the global Aerospace and Defence sector.

Why Aerospace and Defence? In my download moment, I saw that the industry I had come to know extremely well over a then 25-year career comprised a vast wealth of science and technology that simply never got used.

If you looked on the industry as an iceberg, the part above the waterline would constitute the ‘platforms’ (ships, tanks, aircraft, spacecraft), weapon systems and sensors it was known for. Everything below the waterline – pure science and technology paid for by us, the taxpayer – sat there, mostly untapped. A lot of it, I realized, could go towards, quotes, ‘saving the planet’.

The fact that it doesn’t is not, by and large, Aerospace and Defence’s fault, because (excluding the commercial/airline side of its business) the industry acts to serve a single customer – government/s. Governments direct, exclusively so, where this vast reservoir of science and technology goes.

I don’t think it has occurred to most governments that this pre-paid, untapped asset even exists. And it wouldn’t have occurred to me either, but for my last journalistic assignment: benchmarking the science and technology of the entire sector. In doing so, I saw patterns I wouldn’t otherwise have seen.

This deep reservoir of knowledge, I could see, really could save the planet.

Whether we’re aware of it or not – whether we like it or not – we all benefit from this reservoir – satnavs, telecoms, computers, the Internet … they all started out there. And they took many years to reach us.

In the fight against global challenges, we don’t have years. We need all the ideas, all the IP, all the know-how that’s locked up below that waterline now.

In 2011, I invited the Chief Technology Officers of the nine global Aerospace and Defence giants to a summit in Washington DC. President Obama’s science adviser, Dr. John Holdren attended; so, too, did the US Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus.

Could they turn their considerable technical and intellectual muscle to finding solutions to global challenges, I asked them? Yes, they said, but there’s a problem: the technology isn’t the hard part; it’s our business model that stops us: we contract with governments; we don’t know how to survive in the commercial arena where most global challenges interface with the real world.

For the next three years, I worked with Dr. Ray O. Johnson, the visionary then-CTO of Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest A&D contractor, in trying to crack this issue. I know that for Marillyn Hewson, LM’s CEO up until a few months ago, now its chairman, this was her dream as well. It didn’t make it, because back then it was too hard a problem to solve. Russia then annexed Crimea, ISIS emerged as a global threat and ‘business as usual’ won out. But a great many Aerospace and Defence insiders – right across the industry – had put their hearts and souls into trying to make it work.

That, however, was yesterday’s world. Today, as it is for all of us, everything is different.

At NickCook.Works, in the weeks and months ahead, we will be working to tell a very different story. We want to tell a story that ends differently from the one above.

Whilst doctors, nurses and healthcare workers the world over battle to save us from the virus, and while everyone in food and other vital industries fight to keep us fed and sustained, we will be turning our minds to the world that emerges after the virus.

The key to this, we know, are cross-sector solutions to the challenges outlined above.

But for them truly to work, we need everyone on board: government, academia and industry – all industries; and, yes, this time, we need the Aerospace and Defence sector as well.

We have to find a key that opens up that Aerospace and Defence business model. And not just so that its science and technology and IP get to where they’re so vitally needed. Aerospace and Defence has one other skill – a central skill – that will be just as vital in this fight: the systems-of-systems engineering expertise that will work with all the other sectors to stitch together the over-arching solutions to global challenges.

As an adult looking back to that ten year-old child who became inspired to report on the industry when it put a man on the Moon – one of the most extraordinary feats of engineering and technical problem-solving the world has ever seen – I know that the sector can do this. I know, too, that for many people it’s a controversial proposition. But this now is all about moving forward.

Today, Aerospace and Defence is suffering from a big recruitment challenge. Millennials and Generation Z’ers are not going into the business as we Baby Boomers did. Why? It’s not entirely clear, but one of the reasons may be because it no longer ‘macro-innovates’ in the way that it used to during the Apollo programme.

Another is because its purpose isn’t entirely clear either to a generation that identifies with a new set of values: one in which climate change – the biggest threat ever to our planet – is front and center of its concerns.

What greater purpose could there by right now than saving the planet? From switching Aerospace and Defence’s business model from national defence to global defence?

Here’s what we at NCW undertake to do:

• In the days, weeks and months ahead, we want to re-start this narrative – to make it a stimulus for action.
• It begins with a call for interview with a range of business leaders who would like to be a part of an initial discussion – one that will lead to action.
• Within this forum, which will be entirely transparent, we will corral and collate the data on the NCW website so everyone can see it and be a part of the conversation.
• This will be a top-down, bottom-up approach. At the top, we will be gathering the views and insights of strategic insiders across all sectors, A&D included.
• From the bottom-up, we will be reaching out across social media to engage all views, across all generations. We particularly want to engage those Millennials and Generation Z’ers now entering the workplace.
• Our core team of storytellers and management consultants will then collate and distill the arguments – and the data – into a series of ideas and plans that we will share with our participants. A key part of this dialogue will involve A&D, of course – what it can contribute to a cross-sector initiative for solutions to global challenges; not just to pandemic, but to all challenges.

Our team is ready. Please join the discussion. And please share this with anyone – across LinkedIn and/or social media more widely – who, exec or non-exec, academic, industrialist, NGO or government insider, you feel may be able to help too.