Turns out, lots of quite well-known people, and several commenters on The Unz Review believe these UFOs are demons. I would like to take a stab at seriously looking at this possibility.

There is a version of the UAP problem that is safe to discuss in polite company. It involves military pilots seeing objects that outperform known aerospace technology, radar systems confirming what the pilots saw, and a government that has spent decades lying about its level of interest in the subject. This version has congressional hearings, credentialed witnesses, and the imprimatur of the New York Times. It is, in the vocabulary of the national security establishment, a technology problem — something unknown is operating in controlled airspace, and the responsible question is what it is and who built it. Being alarming without being embarrassing is a considerable advantage. Senators can engage with it. Defense contractors can orient toward it. Journalists can cover it without their editors pulling them aside for a quiet word.

What this does not engage with, and has structural reasons not to engage with, is the rest of the record. Not the cleaned-up remainder after the strange cases have been removed, but the strange cases themselves, which constitute a substantial portion of the total evidence and which have been documented by researchers whose credentials are not obviously inferior to those of the people testifying before Congress. The abduction literature alone represents decades of systematic investigation involving thousands of witnesses, conducted by a Harvard psychiatrist, a professional historian, and an artist turned investigator who between them produced a body of work that any honest accounting of the UAP record has to address. The cattle mutilation evidence involves law enforcement testimony, veterinary analysis, FBI investigations, and physical characteristics that remain unexplained after half a century of attempted explanations. The cluster phenomena — locations where multiple anomalous event types aggregate simultaneously and then apparently follow investigators home — have been documented by scientists with advanced degrees who did not begin their careers expecting to write those reports. None of this material sits comfortably in the technology problem category. All of it gets quietly moved to a different shelf.

The technology researchers set high strangeness aside because it makes their core argument harder to take seriously. The secrecy investigators set it aside because it makes their sources look unstable. The congressional witnesses set it aside because their lawyers told them to. Each is a rational decision given the relevant incentive structure, and the cumulative effect is a public conversation about UAP from which the most significant portion of the evidence has been systematically removed before the conversation begins. What remains is impressive enough. What was removed is the point.

The serious theological and metaphysical literature that addresses the nature and behavior of the phenomenon directly — rather than its propulsion systems — has not set the strange material aside. It has organized its entire analytical framework around it. This is not because theologians and Traditionalist philosophers are less rigorous than defense analysts. It is because they were asking a different question from the start, and the question they were asking turns out to fit the data considerably better. That is an uncomfortable conclusion for people who have spent careers on the technology problem. It is nonetheless the conclusion the evidence supports, or at minimum the conclusion that deserves to be tested rather than assumed away.

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