The world of UFOs

In the early 1990s my parents were living in a house on a small hill in the woods in The Netherlands. One night I was visiting them with my girlfriend when we saw some strange lights in the sky. My girlfriend and I decided to check it out and we walked to a moor a few hundred meters from the house where the views were unobstructed by trees. What I saw that night I have never forgotten: there were different coloured objects erratically hovering in the sky. They seemed to move up and down in a random way. I had no idea what I was seeing, but because there was a military base close by I assumed it was some kind of military exercise. However, after a few minutes the lights suddenly flew away at an incredibly high speed. To me it seemed impossible that an airplane could all of a sudden fly this fast after hovering for quite some time.

I found it interesting but did not think about it until the next morning when the paper arrived and I saw an article on the front page about UFO sightings around Amsterdam. Amsterdam was about 100 km from my parents’ house at the time, but this could not be a coincidence. I still thought it was most likely related to the military. So I discounted the news report, but kept an open mind about it.

Fast forward 25 years. I am living in Vancouver and have a hot tub on my roof top terrace where I regularly relax late at night before going to bed. The house overlooks the sea and several islands in the distance. At night it’s quite dark (there is not much light pollution here) so you have an incredible view with thousands of stars above you. While sitting in the hot tub I regularly observe hovering lights above Bowen Island and Keats Island. At first I thought they might be drones, but they appeared almost every night and they moved erratically. They also changed colours sometimes, very similar actually to the lights that I had seen in The Netherlands years ago.

Once again I sort of dismissed it, but then I started paying more attention to it in other locations. I realized I could also see them while sailing and I occasionally even saw them from the marina in Vancouver late at night. Over the years I have seen them in Napa Valley and even on China’s Hainan island earlier this year. I showed them to other people but many thought they must be drones, satellites or distant airplanes. Sometimes they moved away very fast, however, and I was not so sure if any of these things could do that. I was mainly surprised that most people had never seen them. It seems most humans don’t pay a lot of attention to what’s in the skies above us or they just assume it’s something regular.

I started doing some research and found many videos online of similar objects in the sky. Many were shot around Vancouver and interestingly one article even mentioned Keats Island as a ‘nest of UFOs’ (not sure how serious that source is though). People call them UFOs, which to me means a flying object that I can’t explain. I did not necessarily think they would be alien objects, but assumed they would be military equipment using advanced technologies. I guess I am quite rational and have a problem with most conspiracy theories, simply because I want to see proof and do not want to rely on all kinds of (often absurd) assumptions. Like I said, I always keep an open mind and believe that one day it would become clear what these objects are. Maybe that day has come already.

A few weeks ago Netflix added a documentary called Bob Lazar, Area 51 & Flying Saucers. I saw some positive comments about it on social media, but when I watched the trailer I was not too impressed. I decided to put in on my watch list for the future. Then last week I was going through my podcast feed and saw that Joe Rogan had just interviewed Bob Lazar on his podcast. I respect Joe a lot, he is a great personality and a very good interviewer (check out his podcasts with Elon Musk and with Naval Ravikant as well!). So I decided to start listening to the podcast while doing chores around the house. Within minutes I was hooked and almost decided to binge-listen the whole 2.5 hour interview. But because the interview was based on the Netflix documentary I decided to stop listening after 30 minutes and watch that program first.

The documentary is interesting, it tells the story of Bob Lazar who in 1989 works for the US Navy at S4 (an area south of the well known Area 51 in Nevada). There he works on reverse engineering propulsion systems from UFOs until he gets fired for filming flying UFOs at night close to the base and discussing them with others. He is worried and decides to talk to the press as an insurance policy. I had heard this story before and didn’t really believe it, but this documentary started to change my mind a bit.

Seeing Bob speak about it 30 years later and explaining the physics behind the spacecraft makes a lot of sense to me. Not only did he never change his story in 30 years, a lot of things that he talked about in 1989 turned out to be correct (especially Element 115 that was used in the anti-matter reactor and that was only discovered in 2003 or gravitational waves that were only reported in 2016). It’s hard to believe that someone could make up these things and that they suddenly turn out to be true decades later. I won’t go into too much detail, if you are interested in this topic you should watch this documentary and decide for yourself.

After watching the program I went back to the podcast and listened to it. The podcast changed my views on Bob Lazar. He is either a super smart liar who was lucky with some of his predictions or he is for real. I have seen a lot of bullshitters in my (business) life and he does not seem like one. I think I believe him, especially after it turns out that people (the US government?) has been trying to erase his past. Not only did Los Alamos deny that he ever worked there (interestingly the documentary maker found evidence in a personnel directory that Bob indeed worked there), but also Caltech and MIT could not find proof that he studied there anymore, and even his birth certificate disappeared. It could all be a coincidence of course, but at a certain point the odds are that more is going on.

If you believe Bob it suddenly becomes clear what these hovering objects in the sky are. They are most likely not alien spacecraft, but reverse engineered flying objects using technologies that have not been publicized yet. What these UFOs use is a propulsion system based on anti-gravity. Basically a bubble is formed around the spacecraft that lets it move through space using gravity (compare it to 2 magnets that push the other away when you get too close). This could explain the hovering and the very fast movements (gravity could change space time as well, meaning that what you see could happen at a different time) of the objects. Crazy? Maybe. But I believe it could very well be true. I have seen too many of these UFOs to know that there are things out there that we can’t explain based on our current understanding of physics.

The biggest problem I have is the fact that Bob Lazar is the only person who has come forward with this story. That is just very difficult to understand and it is one of the main reasons why I don’t believe most conspiracy theories. For example, if you believe 9/11 is a set up, do you really believe that nobody would ever come forward with the real story? At least a few people must regret what they did and want to come clean, even if only on their death bed. The same with Bob Lazar’s story, there were a lot more people that interacted with the UFOs and that worked on the technology. I understand the secrecy and the fact that you only got very compartmentalized information, meaning you often did not know enough to put one and one together. But more people would know about the 9 UFOs in section S4 and nothing was ever published. Are people worried they would not be taken serious? That’s the main thing I could imagine that would stop people from speaking out. I know from personal experience that many people already find it strange if you mention regularly seeing UFOs, let alone when you should mention that you worked on them. Maybe fear of retribution plays a role as well, but on your death bed that should not be an issue.

If it is true I hope the government(s) that managed to reverse engineer this technology will use it for the good of mankind. Stable anti-matter reactors basically make fossil fuels redundant, meaning that we can go to a zero emissions world in a short period of time. I realize that that is not in the interest of the extremely powerful oil and gas industry, so that may be a reason why we have not heard much of it yet. Or maybe there are other downsides that we don’t understand yet (e.g. radiation and clean nuclear power). Actually, after some research I found that the US Secretary of Navy actually filed a patent for an anti-gravity aircraft in 2016, so who knows.

To me the topic is fascinating. I do believe we don’t know everything and maybe there is a good reason for that. But social media is powerful and if Bob Lazar’s story is indeed true more stories may eventually come out. In 1989 you needed TV programs and newspaper articles to spread the word, now anybody can publish anything and reach a huge audience in a matter of hours. For sure traditional media are more open to talk about it, for example the New York Times had an article about UFO sightings by fighter pilots a few weeks ago. And just last week Vanity Fair reported on US congress wanting to learn more about UFO sightings from the Pentagon. I am certainly looking at the UFOs in Vancouver’s night sky in a different light.