What Happens the Sunday After Disclosure?
UAP Disclosure, Human Responsibility, and Pastoral Readiness
President Trump should address the American people directly on UAP disclosure.
The process is already underway. Since May, the administration has released four tranches of government UAP records through the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. That matters. Further releases may matter too. But what is most needed now is not simply more material. It is authentication. (U.S. Department of War)
In an important sense, disclosure has already happened. Material has entered the public record over years through government investigations, congressional attention, document releases, books, interviews, and people directly involved in the programs. Some of it is extraordinary. Much of it remains in a peculiar position: publicly available, yet still suspended somewhere between disclosure and public acknowledgment.
The President does not need to tell the country what every UAP is, what forms of intelligence may be involved, or what ultimately lies behind the phenomenon. Nor should he disclose sources, methods, technologies, personnel or operations that genuinely require protection. He could do something much simpler: tell the American people that material already before them is substantially valid as far as it goes, that the investigations behind it were real, and that the questions arising from them deserve to be taken seriously.
There will be things the government cannot responsibly release, and questions it may not itself be able to answer. That is not a reason to postpone saying clearly what can already be said. Tell people what can responsibly be authenticated. Give them enough evidence to understand why it matters. Then leave the unfinished questions open.
Suppose the President does that.
The next morning, most of the world will look exactly as it did before. People will make breakfast, go to work, take children to school, walk the dog. Nothing in the physical landscape will have suddenly changed.
But something important will have changed in the human one. A category of experience that could previously be kept at the margins—dismissed as impossible, absurd, mistaken or simply unknowable—will have moved into acknowledged reality. People will begin reconsidering what they know, what they have experienced, and what they thought was possible.
That is where disclosure becomes more than a government problem. It becomes a problem of reception.
If we ask to be told the truth, we also assume some responsibility for learning how to receive it.
My own path into this subject did not begin with UFO culture. Before 2015, I cannot remember having any interest in UFOs at all.
That changed while I was living in Nashville, Illinois, at a place I called the Railroad House, with Scott Air Force Base in the wider area. One night I went outside to smoke a cigarrito. Something drew my attention upward. I encountered a conscious, physical UFO, and the interaction that followed was responsive.
It “pinged” me: my attention was drawn upward in a directed way. At the time I was already going through an intense period of spiritual and anomalous experience, much of which had forced me to reconsider what I thought reality permitted. I was overloaded. My response was essentially, “I can’t deal with this too. Not now.”
The interaction seemed to calibrate immediately to that recognition and receded. What stayed with me was not a sense that I had commanded or rejected anything, but of mutual recognition.
What I cannot tell you from that encounter is what the intelligence ultimately was, where it came from, or what larger ontology explains it. Those are different questions.
On another occasion, I had fallen asleep in my chair and woke suddenly with a shout. A large orange orb was hovering only a couple of feet from my head. Whatever had been happening before I woke, I cannot say. But I was fully awake when I saw it.
The Mutual UFO Network, MUFON, later interviewed me in some detail about these waking events. When I spoke with them, I confined my account to experiences I could describe directly in that register. I have had other experiences bearing upon the larger questions of contact and consciousness, but they did not occur in the same way. I did not think it responsible simply to collapse them into a conventional UFO report because they might someday prove related.
That distinction has become central to the way I work: take experience seriously enough not to explain it away, but seriously enough not to inflate it.
An experience and its interpretation are not the same thing. Physical, psychological, symbolic, spiritual and theological questions may intersect without becoming interchangeable. The interpretation should remain capable of changing when reality begins making distinctions that the interpretation cannot.
All of this began roughly two years before the December 2017 reporting that helped move Pentagon UAP programs and the wider subject into mainstream public discussion. By then, whatever the ultimate explanation of my own experiences, the question was already personally real to me.
Long before any of that, I had grown up around Ava and West Plains in the Missouri Ozarks, within what is now sometimes called the Missouri Triangle. It is the landscape I later described in The Stranger Seams of the Ozarks: Growing Up Where the World Was Not Always Sealed. I grew up close enough to Marley Woods and that wider country to know its stories of lights, odd encounters and places where the ordinary world could feel unexpectedly porous. But UFOs were not part of my conscious interest then, and I have no wish to project a later cosmology backward onto childhood.
Years later, while living in Greenback, Tennessee, Tim Burchett was my congressman. I contacted his office repeatedly over a period of years about UAP disclosure. Shortly before the first congressional UAP hearing in 2023, Noah from Burchett’s office contacted me. I do not know whether he was aware of those earlier communications.
My interest in disclosure therefore developed slowly—out of experience, place, reading, civic concern, and a growing sense that the inherited categories were not adequate to everything being asked of them.
Over the years I have followed James Lacatski’s work particularly closely, in part because so much of what people still speak about as though it were waiting to be disclosed is already sitting, in remarkably granular form, in his books. He can be exceptionally restrained in interviews, sometimes to the frustration of listeners, but the books themselves are not empty gestures toward hidden knowledge. They put a great deal on the table.
It was after working through that material that I wrote that, for what I would call authenticated first-tier disclosure, it may already be close to the right measure: no more and no less.
By that I did not mean that no more disclosure should ever occur, nor that Lacatski’s books contain everything that is known. I meant something narrower: this body of material, already publicly available and arising from people directly involved in the government work, may be sufficient for the first act of official authentication. Rather than asking the public to leap immediately into every disputed claim or unresolved ontology, a President could begin simply by saying: yes, this material is substantially valid as far as it goes.
That is the “no more and no less” I mean.
The next threshold may therefore be less a matter of producing disclosure than of authenticating what serious people directly involved in the work have already placed before us.
Robert Bigelow is similarly important, though for a different reason. His long engagement with unusual phenomena eventually widened into an explicit inquiry into consciousness and survival. In 2020 he founded the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies to support research into whether human consciousness survives bodily death and what that might imply about the nature of an afterlife. (Bigelow Institute)
I know some of the contributors to BICS, and Bigelow sent me the complete essay book collection as a gift. I mention this because his trajectory has interested me for a number of years. My own work, arriving from another direction, has encountered a similar widening.
The deeper one follows these questions, the harder it becomes to assume that they belong exclusively to aerospace.
That does not mean UAP, consciousness, anomalous experience and survival are all manifestations of one thing. The questions may begin to converge without necessarily having the same answer. Related does not mean identical.
My own attempt to hold that widening without turning it into one undifferentiated mystery became Stratified Reality and the Conditions of Intelligibility. The paper deliberately does not propose a new cosmology. It asks a prior methodological question: how can scientific, experiential, symbolic and interpretive forms of inquiry coexist without one being made to explain everything else? Its central claim is that intelligibility requires differentiation—that rigor is preserved, rather than weakened, when physical explanation remains physical, symbolic explanation symbolic, and experiential testimony experiential.
That matters here because a larger and stranger reality would not excuse us from epistemic discipline. It would require more of it. A radar return, a spiritual experience, a psychological effect, a biological injury and a theological interpretation might conceivably belong to the same larger event while still answering different kinds of questions.
But method alone does not tell us what to do when people actually have to live through such experiences.
In Spirit Without Return, a reading of Twin Peaks: The Return, I approached that problem from another direction: what happens when spiritual intensity remains active but the symbolic and communal structures capable of receiving it have collapsed? The essay describes a world of access without accompaniment, crossings without reliable return—a world in which Spirit still moves, but what arrives has nowhere adequate to land.
Symbolic Re-Architecting in an Age of Contact carries that problem directly into contact and disclosure. It begins to ask what pastors, chaplains, theologians, therapists and spiritual communities might actually need in order to accompany people whose experiences cross ordinary categories. The first task is neither automatic belief nor automatic disbelief. It is discernment.
And that discernment becomes surprisingly practical. Before deciding what an encounter means, someone may need to ask whether the person can sleep, eat, remain in relationship, work, pray and return to ordinary life. Pastors and companions may need to know when to listen, when to pray, when to refer for clinical care, when to challenge an interpretation, and sometimes when to say: do not follow this further.
When the Wind and Sea Obey Christ takes the specifically Christian step. It argues that Christianity already possesses a far richer grammar of Spirit, embodiment, healing, discernment and an open creation than much modern Christian practice remembers. The danger is therefore not only disbelief. It is misreading: calling everything unfamiliar demonic, everything luminous holy, or everything destabilizing merely psychological when what may actually be required is patient discernment, containment and return.
Out of all of that work, one question has become increasingly concrete for me:
What happens the Sunday after disclosure?
By then the question will no longer belong principally to Washington. People will have spent the intervening days talking at kitchen tables, texting friends, watching scientists argue, listening to people who had experiences years ago suddenly tell stories they had never told before. Some will be fascinated. Some frightened. Many will simply be trying to understand whether anything important about their lives has changed.
And some of them will go to church.
The question is Christian in its immediate form because that is one of the receiving structures with which I am concerned. But the responsibility is much larger than Christianity. Scientists, physicians, psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists and consciousness researchers will have questions of their own. Other religious traditions will bring histories and resources different from ours. Families and ordinary communities will have to make sense of the implications in their own ways.
My concern is with the part of that receiving structure for which the Church is responsible.
A person may walk into church frightened by what has been authenticated, or suddenly reconsider an experience kept private for twenty years. Another may arrive with a complete explanation already in hand—extraterrestrial, demonic, psychological, spiritual—when the experience itself does not remain neatly inside any one of those categories.
A pastor may find himself sitting across from someone describing something that seems at once physical and psychological, technological and spiritual, embodied and symbolic. The person may not actually be asking for a theory of UFOs. He may be asking whether the world he thought God created still exists.
“None of this can be real” will not be enough. Neither will affirming whatever interpretation happens to arrive with the experience.
Nor does pastoral care need to begin with a theory of the cosmos. It can begin by listening carefully enough to distinguish what happened from what the person thinks happened; by taking bodily and psychological health seriously without assuming they exhaust the event; by asking what the experience is doing to the person’s relationships, judgment and ordinary life; and by refusing both panic and spiritual inflation.
This is already part of the work I have tried to sketch in Symbolic Re-Architecting. The point is not to make pastors experts on UAP. It is to help them remain present when someone’s world has become difficult to interpret.
Christian discernment then asks a deeper set of questions. Does an encounter deepen truth, mercy, humility, courage and embodied responsibility? Does it return the person more fully to love, or bind the person to fear, fascination, superiority or dependency? Intelligence is not the same thing as holiness. Technological superiority would not establish spiritual authority. Contact is not automatically communion.
Creation may prove larger and stranger than we expected without displacing the Christic center by which we discern it.
That, to me, is one of Christianity’s possible contributions to the larger human problem. Not that we already know exactly what everything is, but that we have a center by which we can discern what we do not yet fully understand.
There is work here, but we are not starting from nothing.
Christianity has inherited traditions of discernment, spiritual anthropology, contemplation, sacrament, healing, communal interpretation and the testing of spirits. Some of those traditions have weakened or become abstract. They can be recovered without abandoning science, psychology or ordinary evidence.
The work is also unfinished. Symbolic Re-Architecting calls what it offers a starting architecture: grounding, prayer, containment, clinical referral where appropriate, communal review, refusal, integration and return still require fuller development.
But there is a direction.
For several years I have written in more expansive terms about the possibility that disclosure could participate in a larger civilizational transition—something loosely resonant with an Axial shift, a Renaissance, a Reformation or an Enlightenment, though certainly not on the same historical terms.
I still think that possibility deserves to remain open. A genuine enlargement of the human horizon could invigorate consciousness science, philosophy, anthropology, theology and religious renewal. It might reopen questions modernity sometimes declared closed too quickly, while requiring religion to reconsider answers it sometimes gave too quickly.
But I am less interested now in announcing a coming transformation than in asking what might actually help us receive one.
Where does Spirit land?
That question is no longer merely metaphorical for me. Where does new knowledge land? Where does anomalous experience land? Where does a person go when something has happened that neither the old secular categories nor the old religious reflexes can adequately hold?
What intellectual, psychological, communal and spiritual forms can receive a larger reality without immediately reducing it, exploiting it, worshipping it or breaking under its weight?
Some of those forms have yet to be built. Others can begin now.
That is why I support disclosure, and why I think authentication matters.
President Trump does not need to give the country an official cosmology. He can tell the American people what can responsibly be affirmed, what remains uncertain, and what still genuinely requires protection. Give us the authenticated ground from which better questions can be asked, enough evidence that serious inquiry does not depend upon presidential authority alone, and then trust people with what remains unfinished.
The work of receiving that truth will belong to all of us.
The papers I have described do not constitute a finished answer, but they show that the work has already begun. The problem need not first be discovered after the announcement. We can begin developing the language, disciplines and communities of reception before the moment arrives.
The first door is already open.
The President should tell the country what can now responsibly be authenticated. And those of us concerned with what comes afterward should be preparing the places—scientific, psychological, communal and spiritual—where its consequences can be received without panic, inflation or collapse.
The Church, for its part, should be preparing for Sunday morning.
Further Reading
James T. Lacatski, Colm A. Kelleher and George Knapp, Skinwalkers at the Pentagon: An Insiders’ Account of the Secret Government UFO Program (2021); Inside the U.S. Government Covert UFO Program: Initial Revelations (2023); James T. Lacatski, Inside the U.S. Government Covert UFO Program: New Insights (2025); and Future Visions: Inside the U.S. Government Covert UFO Program (2026). The publication details of the later volumes are independently listed in current bibliographic records. (Google Books)
Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) — current government releases and associated records. (U.S. Department of War)
Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies — research and publications concerning survival of consciousness. (Bigelow Institute)
Stratified Reality and the Conditions of Intelligibility
When the Wind and Sea Obey Christ: Spirit, Agency, and the Reopening of Creation
The Stranger Seams of the Ozarks: Growing Up Where the World Was Not Always Sealed
Spirit Without Return: Symbolic Collapse and Failed Integration in Twin Peaks: The Return is available with the other papers on the author’s Academia.edu profile. (Indiana University Academia)