The World Is Much Weirder Than I Thought

In this essay

1. Reality is much weirder than I thought 2. Corruption runs deeper than I thought 3. Consciousness is more fundamental than I thought What do we do with what we’re beginning to see?

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If I have to put a stake in the ground and say, “This is what I believe,” these are the ideas I would start with.

Reality is much weirder than I thought. Corruption reaches deeper into our power structures than I understood. And consciousness seems to sit much closer to the heart of both subjects than I ever expected.

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Getting here has felt like a rebirth. I use that word deliberately. We talk about an awakening as though you open your eyes one morning and everything becomes clear. A birth is messier than that. There is pain involved. Something familiar has to give way before something new can begin.

Some of these ideas have fascinated me. Others have been hard to sit with. There are things I wish I could have learned without also learning how cruel people can be, or how easily the explanations we grow up with can become a substitute for looking more closely.

But this process has also opened something in me. The world feels larger. My questions have become more interesting. I find myself reconsidering beliefs I once treated as settled, and sometimes realizing I never really chose them in the first place.

I want to share where I currently stand, what brought me here, and why it matters to me. I’ve linked the conversations and reading along the way because a few paragraphs from me cannot replace sitting with these people and hearing what they have to say.

You may follow the same threads and arrive somewhere different. I would still like you to come along for a little while.

1. Reality is much weirder than I thought

I’m talking about the very basics of what we understand to be true.

Roswell and the Phoenix Lights are meaningful stories. They’re worth exploring. But the further I’ve gone into this subject, the more those familiar entry points have started to feel like the edge of something much deeper.

The possibility that another civilization has visited Earth is already enormous. Strangely, I’ve become almost comfortable with that idea. “There might be aliens” no longer captures what I’m trying to understand about the world I’m living in.

Listening to experiencer accounts is what pushed me further.

What happens to a person after something like that?

Listen to Randall Nickerson talking with Chris Ramsay on Area52 about the Ariel School encounter in Zimbabwe. Listen to the care with which he talks about the people involved, and about what it means to carry an experience that other people struggle to accept.

There were children at the center of that story. Those children grew up. The experience didn’t simply become an interesting newspaper clipping and disappear from their lives.

That is part of what John Mack’s work opened up for me. His book, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, belongs beside these conversations. Reading those accounts asks something different of you than glancing at a photograph of an unusual object. You have to spend time with a person whose understanding of reality has been disturbed, sometimes profoundly.

Left to right: Randall Nickerson — Filmmaker · Ariel Phenomenon; John E. Mack — Psychiatrist · author of Abduction

Mario Woods describes an encounter involving intense bodily sensations and a disturbed sense of time. Jake Barber recounts a retrieval operation and a profound experience of altered awareness during it. Then there are Whitley Strieber’s accounts and Travis Walton reflecting on the event that changed his life.

What catches my attention is what these accounts ask us to consider about perception, communication and the mind. Some include communication that doesn’t seem to happen through ordinary speech. Some describe altered awareness, missing time or a presence that affects the person in ways they spend years trying to understand.

Consciousness keeps appearing inside the experience. You cannot neatly remove it and be left with a story about an unfamiliar vehicle.

What are these beings? Where do they come from? How do they communicate? What happens to a person’s understanding of themselves after an encounter like that?

What in the hell are we dealing with?

I don’t think we’re alone, and I don’t think we ever were

Once I started asking those questions, I found it harder to keep this subject neatly separated from religion, mythology and older accounts of the world.

Angels. Demons. Jinn. Spirits. Aliens.

Different cultures have used different language for encounters with intelligences that seem to exist outside ordinary human experience. I wonder how much of that language describes the encounter, and how much describes the framework available to the person trying to explain it.

Diana Walsh Pasulka’s conversations about religion and the phenomenon are a useful place to explore that question. So is Chase Hughes’s discussion of older ideas about reality.

The possibility that stays with me is that we have been meeting something for a very long time, then giving it the names our cultures allow us to give it. That would mean the modern UFO conversation is one doorway into a much older human experience.

I don’t think we’re alone, and I don’t think we ever were. I just suspect that what “not alone” means is considerably stranger than the version we have learned to imagine.

Some of this is personal

I also have personal experiences involving the phenomenon that I don’t fully understand.

An AI recreation of one of my own experiences. A story for another time.

I’ve had experiences through sleep paralysis, while waking, and around sleep that truly fueled my interest in this subject. They felt too real to be fake or a dream, and yet they didn’t make sense outside of a dream. They left me with an insatiable curiosity to figure out the truth.

I do feel like I’m getting closer, but I’d like to talk about those experiences in another article because they deserve their own space. I just want you to know they are part of why this subject matters to me so much.

When somebody describes something that changed their life, I want to give them the time and attention to tell it. An experience like that can reshape someone’s relationships, their sense of safety, their beliefs and their understanding of who they are. I want to understand what it has meant for them.

There is something to learn there. Dismissing the person before hearing the story closes that door before we have even looked through it.

2. Corruption runs deeper than I thought

As these questions opened up, another one became harder to avoid: who gets to decide what the rest of us are allowed to know?

Information is and always has been power.

I used to understand corruption as something that happened inside an otherwise recognizable structure. A dishonest official. A company cutting corners. Somebody taking money they shouldn’t take.

What has changed for me is the scale at which I think about it. I increasingly suspect that some of the structures themselves reward concealment, protect the people who benefit, and make it difficult for anyone inside them to see the whole arrangement.

This has been happening for longer than we ever imagined

Roswell in 1947 is a familiar reference point in the modern UFO story. The histories I’m following reach further back, including the account of a recovery near Magenta, Italy, in 1933. UAP Gerb walks through that account and the documents associated with it.

That puts the earliest part of this reported history more than ninety years behind us. Nearly a century. It also opens the question beyond one government, one administration or one country.

Then there is Robert Hastings’s work on UFO encounters around nuclear installations. His interviews with military personnel and his research into these incidents belong in this conversation about secrecy: what was reported, who was told to keep quiet, and what the public eventually heard.

Follow the UFO history through Project Blue Book and into present-day arguments about AARO and the treatment of people who speak publicly. Tim Gallaudet’s account of his meeting with AARO gives you one contemporary conversation to listen to.

There are concrete examples of information being withheld or misleading explanations being offered. A CIA historical study describes public explanations used to conceal classified reconnaissance aircraft. The secrecy questions extend beyond UFOs, too: a later House inquiry identified information about CIA plots against Castro that should have been provided to the Warren Commission.

I see a pattern of information being managed around the public, then the public being talked down to for asking what is missing. That is what I mean when I talk about decades of gaslighting. We keep being asked to trust the official explanations while the people asking difficult questions are treated as the problem.

I no longer find that an acceptable starting point for understanding the world.

The board isn’t the whole game

Picture two people sitting on the grass, leaning toward a chessboard. They are comfortable. They know each other. They might be having a perfectly pleasant afternoon.

On the board, there are opposing sides. Every move threatens something. A piece is taken. A position collapses. From down there, the conflict seems to be the whole world. That is where most of us live: dealing with the consequences of the next move.

But there are also the players moving the pieces. They are making decisions beyond what a pawn, a knight or a bishop can see.

And beyond the players is another layer: the game maker. The person who invented the rules of chess to begin with. Why can a bishop only move diagonally? Who decided what a pawn is allowed to do, when it can move, and what counts as winning?

Think of that person as the game master in this analogy. Before a single piece moves, the rules have already determined what is possible. There are also people deciding where the game is played, what the stakes are, and who gets a seat at the table.

That is the part of the analogy I keep coming back to. We spend so much time arguing about which pieces are moving where, what got captured and what the new threat is that we can miss the players outside the board entirely. And the game master has already set the rules.

I suspect power operates through layers like these. Living with the consequences of a decision, making that decision, and having the power to write the rules are very different positions to occupy.

Someone can participate in a system, benefit from it, and still have very little understanding of its deeper purposes. A person’s place inside an institution doesn’t tell us everything about what they know or control.

It also means the shape of power may be much harder to recognize than a simple list of people with impressive titles.

It doesn’t stop at government

I’m talking about financial institutions, pharmaceutical companies, food industries and the relationships between private wealth and public authority, too.

Here are a few places to look further:

Pharmaceutical power: Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain, about the Sackler family, Purdue Pharma and the opioid crisis.
Finance and political access: Tom Wright and Bradley Hope’s Billion Dollar Whale, about the 1MDB scandal and the institutions around it.
Food and accountability: FRONTLINE’s The Trouble with Chicken, a 2015 investigation into poultry production and failures in the food-safety system. Its reporting on what follows a foodborne-illness outbreak also takes you into the Peanut Corporation of America case.

The way we turn living animals into units of production bothers me, too. Chickens, pigs, cattle, workers, the people eating the food: when the system is built around extracting as much value as possible, whose well-being becomes expendable?

These histories reach much further back. The Rockefellers helped fund the movement for Prohibition. The history of competition between alcohol fuel and petroleum includes oil-industry opposition to an alternative fuel. And Jack Herer’s account of hemp prohibition argues that powerful paper and petrochemical interests helped drive the suppression of a competing material.

That is the question of who writes the rules again. Policy can shape which industries grow, which alternatives struggle, and where wealth accumulates. I want to understand whose interests were served by decisions that helped build the world we now take for granted.

Then look at the JFK assassination and the information withheld from the Warren Commission. Look at Watergate, Waco, the failures and unanswered questions around 9/11, the Franklin case and allegations, and the Epstein files. I could spend whole articles on these, and I intend to. Nick Bryant’s conversation with Julian Dorey is one place to follow the Franklin and Epstein reporting that has stayed with me.

Line these histories up and I see much more than a few people behaving badly. I see institutions protecting themselves, powerful interests shaping the rules, and ordinary people carrying the consequences. To me, that is a strong case for corruption that reaches across industries and administrations, with roots much older and deeper than I understood. We start to glimpse the players around that chessboard, and the power involved in deciding how the game works.

Some of this material is infuriating. My anger is about the people harmed, the people who enabled that harm, and how much accountability still seems to fall short. I want consequences commensurate with what was done.

The government considered the mind worth investigating

From there, the history of experimentation on the mind becomes particularly important to me. MKULTRA, Project STARGATE and the later GATE and SOAR accounts bring the question of power into the most intimate territory imaginable: our own consciousness.

Tom O’Neill’s conversation with Jesse Michels offers a way into MKULTRA and the research he pursued into it. The historical record includes experimentation on people who did not know what was being done to them. Mind control was something institutions put resources behind, with human beings bearing the consequences.

And when it comes to remote viewing, we are well past asking whether the government was interested. It funded research and programs, including Project STARGATE. People participated in them. There is a history to read and people to hear.

Listen to Joe McMoneagle’s archival interview presented by Area52. There is something valuable about hearing a participant describe the work in his own words, rather than encountering the entire subject as a punchline. The Men Who Stare at Goats association might make it familiar, but it should also send us back to the people and the records behind it.

What did they think was possible? What made it worth the money, attention and effort?

Those questions matter to me because they bring the mind into the same conversation as secrecy, power and access to knowledge.

Left to right: Tom O’Neill — Investigative journalist · author of Chaos; Joe McMoneagle — Remote viewer and author

Then you get to the childhood accounts

Jordan Jozak, speaking with Jesse Michels, describes experiences he associates with GATE and alleged childhood training in psychic abilities. Julia Mossbridge, speaking with Chris Ramsay on Area52, describes her memories of a program called SOAR, including testing and troubling gaps in what she remembers.

I listen to these adults talking about what they remember as children, and the ethical question hits me before I have finished processing the rest of it. What was being asked of them? What could they possibly have understood or consented to at that age?

Then there is the other part. Psychic capabilities. Testing for them. The possibility that someone thought they could be developed or used.

So many things have to be true for that sort of story to even make sense. Your body rejects the very premise.

It sounds like Stranger Things, until you remember you are listening to a person describing their own life.

Left to right: Jordan Jozak — Co-founder, The Telepathy Center; Julia Mossbridge, PhD — Cognitive neuroscientist and author

The broader accounts of psionic work add another disturbing thread: Barber’s discussion of that work and Michael Herrera’s account of information he received about programs pursuing those abilities. I keep returning to the people inside these stories and to the possibility of abilities being pursued without the care or consent that pursuit should demand.

For me, the question of reality and the question of power start meeting here. What if part of what has been concealed concerns consciousness itself? What would it mean to control knowledge about something so fundamental to who we are?

That is the connection I am trying to follow.

3. Consciousness is more fundamental than I thought

Consciousness used to sit somewhere near the edge of these questions for me. Now it keeps moving toward the center.

It appears in the experiencer accounts. It appears in the history of remote viewing. It appears in these troubling stories about testing and childhood programs. Then I look beyond those subjects and find researchers and experiencers approaching similar questions from entirely different directions.

Eventually I have to ask whether the boundary I have been drawing around the mind is too small.

What if the mind reaches further than we assume?

The Telepathy Tapes is one of the places I would send you first. Ky Dickens follows accounts from nonspeaking people and their families that raise extraordinary questions about communication and awareness. Her conversation with Jesse Michels is another way into the material.

The accounts of the Hill particularly caught my attention: a shared place of connection described by people who seem, in ordinary terms, separated from one another.

Ky Dickens — Filmmaker · creator of The Telepathy Tapes · Explore the series

Sit with what that idea would mean. How much of a person’s inner life might we be missing because the forms of communication we expect from them are unavailable? What possibilities do we close off when we assume the limits of our tools are also the limits of their experience?

Then there is Rupert Sheldrake discussing the sense of being stared at, and his broader ideas about morphic resonance. I am interested in the possibility that mind extends beyond the boundary we habitually assign it. Even the question is a significant shift from the assumptions I once carried.

Donald Hoffman’s conversation with Michael Phillip takes another route, exploring a model in which consciousness is fundamental and space-time emerges from something deeper.

These are different approaches. What draws them together for me is the question they reopen: how much do we actually understand about what consciousness is, and what it can do?

Left to right: Rupert Sheldrake — Biologist and author; Donald Hoffman — Cognitive scientist · UC Irvine

Once that question opens, some of the experiencer accounts sound different. Telepathy, altered awareness and accounts of mentally initiated contact no longer sit in a separate box marked “too strange to consider.” They become things I want to look at more carefully.

I believe there was a before, and I believe there will be an after

My own psychedelic experiences are part of this, too.

I have had experiences involving entities and a communicated sense of universal consciousness that changed how I understand myself. Some of what I experienced felt more real than the everyday reality I returned to. That is difficult to explain to somebody who has not experienced anything like it. It is also difficult to simply put away afterward and carry on as though it meant nothing.

The idea that stayed with me was that my life is part of something larger than the boundaries I normally place around it. Consciousness may not begin and end with the version of me that has a name, a body and a particular number of years here.

I believe there was a before, and I believe there will be an after.

The brain-as-filter idea gives me one way to think about that: perhaps what we experience in ordinary life is a limited view into something larger. Dreams and lucid dreaming also make me curious about how much experience can change while still feeling immediate and real. Even Soul, the Pixar film, gives familiar imagery to questions that can otherwise be hard to put into words.

I don’t need every route into these subjects to look the same. I want to understand what they might let us see.

You start to see this thread, and you start to pull on it. An experiencer’s account sends you toward a question about consciousness. A history of secret research makes you reconsider who has been asking that question, and for how long. A personal experience makes it impossible to treat the entire subject as something happening only in other people’s lives.

That is how these three ideas became connected for me.

What do we do with what we’re beginning to see?

I know this is a broad view. I’m compressing a great deal into one article: many hours of listening and reading, and conversations that themselves draw on years or decades of somebody else’s life and work.

Think about that for a moment. Someone spends a lifetime inside a subject. They sit down for a three-hour conversation. I listen, carry part of it into another conversation or experience, and begin noticing a connection I couldn’t see before.

The links are there so you can go further than my summary. I hope you do.

I also hope we can do that without turning every new belief into another wall around ourselves. Dualistic thinking can hurt you more than help you. The demand to choose between two complete explanations can prevent us from seeing what either one leaves out.

I can take these ideas seriously, feel strongly about what I see, and remain willing to change my mind. I want the same freedom for you. You might follow a religious path into some of these questions. You might come through science, personal experience or a story you cannot quite shake. We don’t all have to arrive by the same road.

There is an uncomfortable personal responsibility in this, too. If I am going to look closely at the ways people use power, I also need to examine my own capacity to justify things that benefit me. How do I guard against becoming what I am criticizing? How do I keep my fierceness and direct it toward something good?

I don’t want this inquiry to leave us paralyzed by everything that is wrong.

I grew up while many of the histories I’ve mentioned were unfolding. I had a great life. Discovering more about the world doesn’t erase the good that existed inside it. Maybe I came out a little weird, but I came out fine. There is still a life to live, people to love, and good worth putting into the world.

I want that for my children, too. I want us to be able to look honestly at difficult things without surrendering our capacity for joy.

That is part of what I want Campfire Curiosities to become: a place where we can explore these subjects in deeper, more connected ways, without losing our humility, our curiosity or one another.

These are three ideas that changed how I see the world. What has changed the way you see yours? spend 5 minutes, listen to my song that helped communicate this idea for me.

Something Answers Back →

Listen to the soundtrack

~ A Special Thank you to The Muse Who Inspires Through Me

Records and further reading

The conversations are linked where they enter the article. These records provide another way to explore the history behind them:

UFO investigations and secrecy: Project Blue Book records; Gerald Haines’s historical study of CIA involvement in UFO investigations, including explanations used to protect reconnaissance programs; the House assassination committee’s review of the Warren Commission.
Other histories mentioned: the Senate’s Watergate history; expert recommendations following Waco; the 9/11 files; Nick Bryant’s written interview about his Franklin investigation; the Epstein records collection.
Industry cases: Purdue Pharma’s guilty plea; the Goldman Sachs/1MDB resolution; the Peanut Corporation sentencing record.
MKULTRA: the 1977 Senate hearing; the June 30, 2026 House hearing, with testimony and a full recording.
Remote viewing: the declassified STARGATE collection.
Consciousness: Hoffman and Prakash’s Objects of consciousness; Sheldrake’s paper on the sense of being stared at.