The Unseen Hand: A Journey into the Spiritual Shadows of UFOs
By The Lone Gunman, Investigative Journalist
February 25, 2025
In the dim glow of a late-night broadcast, Tucker Carlson leans into the microphone, his voice a low growl of conviction. “These things,” he says, “these UFOs—they’re not just machines. They’re spiritual entities. They’ve been here for thousands of years, hiding under the ocean, beneath the ground.” The words hang in the air, heavy with implication, as if he’s peeled back the skin of reality to reveal something writhing beneath. It’s April 2024, and Carlson is on *The Joe Rogan Experience*, a platform that thrives on the edge of the known. He’s not alone in this belief. A chorus of voices—scientists, former intelligence officers, even lawmakers—has begun to hum the same eerie tune. As an investigative journalist, I’ve spent months chasing this thread, tugging at it until it unraveled into a tapestry of government secrets, hidden programs, and a question that gnaws at the soul: What if the truth about UFOs isn’t extraterrestrial, but supernatural?
The story begins in the shadows, as all good mysteries do. It’s December 2017 when The New York Times—my own journalistic haunt—drops a bombshell. Alongside colleagues Helene Cooper and Ralph Blumenthal, Leslie Kean reveals the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a clandestine Pentagon operation funded with $22 million of taxpayer money. From 2007 to 2012, it hunted UFOs—unidentified flying objects that defied physics, darting across military radar screens with an agility no human craft could muster. The program’s architect? Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a man whose fascination with the cosmos ran deeper than his Nevada constituents ever knew. Reid, in interviews, hinted at crashed vehicles and retrieved materials—secrets studied in silence by aerospace giants under government contracts.
But the program didn’t die in 2012, as the Pentagon claimed. Insiders whispered it morphed, slinking into the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, a rebooted effort that briefed intelligence officials, Congressional staff, and aerospace executives on sightings, crashes, and—most tantalizingly—materials that didn’t belong to this world. I dug deeper, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, poring over declassified memos, and tracking down those who’d seen the unseeable. What I found wasn’t a tale of little green men, but something far stranger—a narrative echoing Carlson’s wild-eyed certainty.
Take Luis Elizondo, the former intelligence officer who ran AATIP. In 2019, he sat across from Carlson on Fox News, his jaw tight, his words measured. “We may not be alone,” he said, hinting at “detritus”—wreckage from craft not forged by human hands. He invoked his security oath, dodging specifics, but the implication was clear: the government knew more than it let on. Then there’s Jacques Vallée, the ufologist immortalized in *Close Encounters of the Third Kind*. Now a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Vallée has teamed with Stanford immunologist Garry Nolan to analyze alleged crash materials. Their work, poised for peer-reviewed publication, promises to crack open the stigma that’s long shrouded this field. Vallée told me, off the record, that what they’ve found could rewrite science itself—but he fears the spiritual undertones might be too much for a secular world to swallow.
Carlson’s not the first to call these phenomena spiritual. In 1969, Vallée wrote *Passport to Magonia*, arguing that UFOs might be manifestations of a consciousness beyond our own—not aliens from distant stars, but entities from a realm we’d call supernatural. Fast-forward to 2023, and Missouri Congressman Eric Burlison compares them to Biblical angels—extradimensional beings flitting through our reality. Tennessee’s Tim Burchett, meanwhile, points to Ezekiel’s wheels-within-wheels vision, suggesting scripture itself records these encounters. Even Diana Walsh Pasulka, a religious studies professor at UNC-Wilmington, sees parallels. Her book *American Cosmic* chronicles Silicon Valley elites who view UFOs as harbingers of a new theology, their technology indistinguishable from miracles.
But what does the government know? That’s where the trail grows cold—and hot with suspicion. In 2021, the Pentagon released a tepid report on 144 UAP incidents, admitting most were unexplained but offering no conclusions. A year later, classified briefings suggested many were spy drones or atmospheric clutter—mundane answers that satisfied no one. Then, in June 2023, David Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer turned whistleblower, testified before Congress. Under oath, he claimed the U.S. held “intact” alien vehicles and even remains of their pilots—non-human entities stashed away in black-budget vaults. The Pentagon denied it, but Grusch’s credentials were impeccable, and his story aligned with whispers I’d heard from a retired DIA source: “They’ve got something. Not ships, not bodies—something that doesn’t fit any category we’ve got.”
I tracked down that source in a diner outside Langley, Virginia, his face half-hidden by a baseball cap. Over coffee gone cold, he spoke of a faction within the Defense Intelligence Agency that saw UFOs as “non-human entities”—not extraterrestrial, but demonic. “They think these things are playing us,” he said, his voice a rasp. “Not invading, but manipulating. And the brass? They’re terrified of what happens if the public figures it out.” He wouldn’t name names, but his words echoed Brian Allan, editor of *Phenomena Magazine*, who told me of an Anglican pastor, Ray Boeche, briefed by Pentagon insiders. Boeche claimed they believed UFOs were a spiritual deception—a ruse by forces older than humanity itself.
The deeper I dug, the more the pieces fit Carlson’s frame. In April 2024, he doubled down on Rogan’s podcast, insisting these entities defy science’s laws, their bases submerged or subterranean. “It’s clear to me they’re spiritual,” he said, “whatever that means.” Critics scoffed—here was the former Fox News firebrand spinning yarns for clicks. But others nodded. Avi Loeb, the Harvard astronomer behind the Galileo Project, searches for extraterrestrial artifacts but doesn’t dismiss a metaphysical twist. “Why assume we understand everything?” he asked me over Zoom, his eyes glinting with a Koontzian curiosity.
The government’s silence is deafening. Last August, a Pentagon review found “no evidence” of alien cover-ups, yet Major General Patrick Ryder admitted many sightings remained unsolved. If better data existed, he said, most could be explained. But what of the rest? In December 2023, Congress ordered the National Archives to collect UFO records, mandating disclosure within 25 years—too late for those of us hunting truth now. Chuck Schumer’s push for a nine-person review board hints at urgency, but the redactions in every declassified file I’ve seen suggest a truth too volatile to unleash.
And then there’s Jimmy Carter. In 1969, as a Georgia peanut farmer with a governor’s ambition, he saw a UFO—a glowing object that shifted colors and darted across the sky. He filed a report with the International UFO Bureau, later telling reporters, “It was unexplainable.” Carter’s faith was bedrock—Southern Baptist, unshakable. As president, he pressed for UFO transparency, only to meet a wall of bureaucratic stone. By 1977, his aides whispered of a man changed—haunted not by aliens playing God, but by something darker. What if Carter glimpsed the same abyss Carlson now stares into? Not invaders from Mars, but spiritual beings weaving a web through our government, our world—a manipulation so vast it could shatter a believer’s trust in divine order.
Picture it: a president briefed in the Situation Room, files spread before him, detailing entities that aren’t flesh or metal but thought made manifest. No spaceships, no ray guns—just a presence that’s watched us since Ezekiel’s day, nudging history with invisible hands. Carter, a man of prayer, might’ve seen not a challenge to God, but a betrayal of creation—demons or angels or something between, pulling strings in Washington while the faithful slept. That’s speculation, of course. But as I sit here, typing in the flicker of a storm-battered lamp, the wind howling like a voice from nowhere, I wonder: What if Carlson’s right? What if the secret isn’t out there, but within—a spiritual war cloaked as lights in the sky?