“Sorry, these aren’t my updated slides,” murmurs the speaker as she furiously bashes the clicker forward and backwards.
Each projection is packed with a ceremonial parade of corporate jargon, nonsensically placed directional arrows, and action-oriented buzzwords.
Defeated but unperturbed by the mix-up, the woman strides over for a sip of water to await a technical intervention.
It shouldn’t be a perceptibly awkward moment. Presentation mix-ups are a corporate conference’s bread and butter.
But this is no ordinary audience.
Because Maura Mindrila isn’t there to present on long-term investment prospects in emerging markets. Or to discuss complex regulatory compliance for venture funds.
The highly polished entrepreneur is there to talk about aliens. The ones that fly around in shiny saucers.
Those not accustomed to the banalities of the corporate conferencing scene appear oddly amused by the incident. Those used to the schtick don’t bat an eyelid.
The paradoxical scene is unfolding on an unseasonably hot day in late October in the conference room of the four-star hotel Grand Hotel Dino in Lake Maggiore, Italy, where about 300 people are gathered for the weekend’s SOL Foundation symposium.
The annual event is fast becoming a regular fixture in the calendars of those drawn to the suddenly respectable study of so-called “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena”, aka UAPs, aka UFOs, aka “flying saucers”. The allure is meeting an invisible college turned visible — reputable professionals now publicly open about their unconventional interests.
This year’s agenda includes a smorgasbord of panels and interviews with experts presenting everything from the French government’s official UFO investigations unit to the ethics of alien abductions (spoiler: aliens may not be signatories to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but they should behave ethically, and currently they’re not.)
Notable SOL elites include whistleblowers who claim knowledge of secret government crash-retrieval programs. Authors of consciousness-focused studies of the so-called ‘phenomenon’. Forward-thinking academics pursuing cutting-edge research. And many, many scientists.
I, however, am here as the Blind Spot’s UAP correspondent, since Izzy knows I’ve been obsessed with the topic since at least 2020.
Except, as she also knows, in recent years I’ve been trying to detox — a mindset shift that has dramatically improved my health (notably around my neck and sinuses) since I no longer have to spend untold hours staring stubbornly at immobile stars in the cold night air on the off-chance they accelerate out of view.
Even so, having me attend a world-famous UFO retreat is a bit like inviting a recovering alcoholic to a house party.
In the days leading up to the conference, the prospect of confronting the siren call of my former addiction fills me with dread. Initially, I imagine the threadbare charm of a formerly glorious Italian resort hotel and the inevitable parade of mildly mannered, yoga-practicing former hippies filled with fascinatingly weird ideas — just the sort of thing to trigger a relapse.
But luckily, the Grand Hotel Dino is nothing like I imagine. The hotel is refined. Sophisticated. Even elegant. Instead of the requisite shabby carpets of a hotel past its prime, contemporary finishes complement the grandeur of a legacy Renaissance style. An opulent biblical fresco sprawls across the ceiling of the hotel’s improbably lush conference hall.
Attendees, meanwhile, aren’t carrying yoga mats; they’re wearing blazers and suits. They include some defense contractors, venture capitalists, and private equity investors.
At almost $500 per ticket, I was expecting a polished affair. But I never imagined it would be this refined.
As I absorb the sensation of the conferencing machine around me, it hits me how much I’ve lost track of the field’s evolution since it first swallowed my curiosity.
UFO talk is no longer the domain of laid-back transcendentalists. It has become its own highly organized, well-financed civil-society lobbying bloc. Networked, professional and — most importantly — ‘serious’.
The old wavering voices of experiencers yearning to be believed are no more. The new “UAP” stars speak with the quiet confidence of boardroom executives and the conviction of those who know they hold the moral high ground.
The late-night conspiracy tones of Alex Jones or David Icke are now a distant and embarrassing memory. The new UAP elite channel the dulcet tones of corporate figures such as Larry Fink or Tim Cook.
As we Zoomers would say, UFOs have entered their Davos era.
And after all, why not?
In an age when normies can be convinced of anything — that women are men, censorship is freedom, war is peace, children are adults — why shouldn’t UFOs and reptilians have their day in the sun?
If we have learned anything at all from the “post-truth” phenomenon, it is that the strangest things can be normalized when staged with the right level of scale, authority, and officialdom.
This is precisely why “unidentified flying objects” aren’t even a thing anymore.
A presumably overpaid management consultant probably ruled the term UFO was “too toxic” and “too parodied” to ever achieve marketing reach or lobbying cred. Nor would it ever get you face time with a politician. The result has been the rise in prominence of an even vaguer and more dubious term: “unidentified anomalous phenomena”.
The rebrand is reminiscent of Labour’s reinvention under Tony Blair, which made Britain’s socialists cool and electable.
The Jedi mind trick at the heart of the voodoo is better known as the shadowy craft of “perception management”.
This primarily involves getting the electorate — or any population group — to focus on optics rather than substance. It’s achieved by controlling when and how people learn about things, especially the staging. Hence, the dominance of leaking in modern political media. If you control the faucet, you control the narrative. If journalists are competing over access, they won’t be competing over getting the truth.
In Labour’s case, the ruse transformed the party into “New Labour”, making the previously unpredictable and chaotic party seem suddenly reasonable and business-friendly.
At its core, however, perception management is a type of cognitive hacking and preys on the vulnerabilities of human psychology. Nor is it isolated to the political domain.
A dead giveaway that it’s being deployed is when terms that carry emotional, sensational, or stigmatizing connotations are suddenly and inexplicably replaced with vocabulary that appears procedural, neutral, and institutional. The idea is that by reframing an agenda in administratively weighted, seemingly technical language, even fringe issues can be moved into the domain of legitimate policy discourse.
So while UFOs sound nutty, UAPs sound inclusive, technical, and politically correct. That invites political capital. And that, in consequence, invites power.
The result is a UAP movement that is becoming entirely process-driven, bureaucratic, and risk-obsessed.
No more fuzzy pictures of crop circles. The new vogue is for data, stylishly presented in black-on-white graphics in PowerPoints or slides.
Not that there hasn’t been blowback.
As with the culture wars more broadly, today’s abundance of suits masks a very normie problem.
The “new UFO” movement is in the process of brewing its own subculture war. One that pits the so-called suits versus the woo traditionalists.
Arrival
Getting to Baveno in Lake Maggiore isn’t easy. After landing in Milan, an intrepid pilgrim heading to SOL must first take two confusing and perennially delayed Italian trains.
The journey is cumbersome, yet also feels as if it’s part of some ritual.
En route, SOL attendees stand out like sore thumbs amid Italian commuters, much the way elites heading to Davos from Zurich on the Rhaetian Railway stand apart from regular winter sports enthusiasts. It’s hard to pinpoint why. Mostly, I think, it’s the troubled looks they display, as if contemplating that the person sitting next to them could be an alien, or, failing that, an undercover agent.
So far, in any case, so woo.
After we arrive, I set off on foot to register at the designated location. As I walk through the Grand Hotel’s entrance, I’m struck by the impeccably manicured gardens. This is the first time I think to myself, hmm, this isn’t the ramshackle gathering of oddballs I was necessarily looking for.
Several suited-and-booted SOL staff greet me with the poise of people trained to shepherd investment managers and bureaucrats to registration desks.
I rationalize that I’m probably overthinking the vibe issue. After all, even the cosmically connected need to be processed correctly in this earthly realm.
Not long after, I spot a crowd of people heading to the first fringe group activity: a meditative seance to summon a UFO to the hotel’s lakeside gardens.
This, I think, is much more like it.
Except, our shaman is not a mystic. He’s a mathematical plasma astrophysicist from T.U. Leuven.
The group sits down, crossed-legged in a circle, and begins the stargazing experience. The engineer’s soothing voice beckons us to embody a loving, grateful sensation so we can send our vibes out to the universe.
If aliens were anthropologists, which, of course, they would have to be, I think to myself, they might mistake what’s going on for a cult ritual just before a consensual mass suicide.
Perhaps they’d have the same thoughts about the “mindfulness” sessions at Davos?
We emerge from the trance about a half hour later, none the wiser. There were no flying saucers. No dancing lights. At most, I mistook a plane for a UFO for about two seconds.
The blazer-wearing attendees, however, don’t stick around.
Trojan horse?
The next morning, we assemble in the dimmed confines of the conference hall. Garry Nolan, one of the SOL Foundation’s co-founders, steps up to introduce us to the day’s agenda. As a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, he speaks with the gravitas of a serious man who does serious things.
I am immediately reminded of the cryptocurrency space and how libertarian crypto enthusiasts started out as anti-government radicals, only to end up begging to be regulated.
I sense something similar is taking place here.
The difference is that in the UFO world, our cypherpunks are called the “woo”.
These are the traditional pro-UFO groups who have long been distrustful of authority and who prioritize personal experiences of paranormal events over institutional or official narratives. While the woo comprises many serious individuals, their belief system tends towards the radical, for example: reptilians exist, abductions happen regularly, and the U.S. government has the means to engage in secret intergalactic warfare.
Offsetting them is the political cleavage we can broadly term the suits: a new pro-UFO professional class that relies on quantification and credentials to advance their beliefs.
Schisms are naturally occurring phenomena. But not always.
Recall the strategy of tension, the favoured Cold War-era tactic that incentivises strife, chaos, and confusion to push the electorate to back the prevailing order.
The woo’s radical narrative, despite its healthy cynicism of power, easily strengthens skeptical arguments that deny reality to the UFO question. In that framing, both UFO denial and woo serve the same master: those who defend a status quo of denial.
This invites the question: what’s really behind the corporatization of UFOs?
Is it about using the narrative to advance one’s professional position (unlikely), or about advancing some other hidden agenda? A strategy better thought of as a hack?
If we assume that UFOs can be leveraged for all sorts of political purposes once enough credentials, money, and institutional backing are thrown at them, then the SOL Foundation suits may just be the radical ones.
Our modern political economy is jam-packed with this sort of relentless ends-justifies-the-means shape-shifting. Consider, as an example, how the “strategic autonomy” narrative in Europe is now being used to push through the very same policies that the “climate narrative” sought to deliver, but no longer can.
If that’s a fair assumption, the question we should be asking is: what agenda are the suits really pursuing?
As the afternoon winds on, a plausible and widely spread theory enters my mind. Perhaps someone is trying to break apart the military-industrial monopoly on defense contracts, special access programs (SAPs), and access to exotic materials. And perhaps they believe UFOs are a useful Trojan horse to achieve that objective…
Cui bono? Occam’s razor points to the masters of the modern technological revolution, especially those who started life as technological entrepreneurs.
The continuously repeating message over the day solidifies that view. The movement, we keep hearing, must leverage knowledge — like that obtained from David Grusch’s groundbreaking allegations — to force Congress to open up everything it knows about exotic programs and materials that exist within ultra-classified SAPs. In other words, the UAP faithful must exploit democracy’s own rulebook to get the truth about what exactly the “deep state” is hiding.
Since the enemy of one’s enemy is often one’s friend, however, it would be wrong to assume such forces are necessarily homegrown.
In the current geopolitical landscape, there’s a significant incentive for foreign powers to play along with the UAP kayfabe to suss out the progress of certain ultra-classified American programs. Consider the Chinese balloon controversy of 2022, the unidentified drone waves over New Jersey in 2024, or the ongoing drone sightings over northern Europe. All of them only compounded the argument for disclosure.
In an Orwellian twist to the perception management formula, this suggests the seemingly pro-establishment suits work against the deep state, while the ostensibly anti-government woo works for it, as a ruse.
Or that the suits are the true woo, and the woo are the secret suits.
Caution as a weapon
As the day drags on, another sharp contrast comes into display. There is a drastic gulf between the audience’s exotic experiences and the cautious tone the speakers take.
I realise this when, with Beatriz Villaroel, astronomer and assistant professor at the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics and the first presenter, shows her groundbreaking study into mysterious ‘transients’. These are lights in space that appear once and then disappear, all around the Earth. The blue-chip, carefully assembled methodology and research, is the product of a partnership with official government bodies.
Serious? Definitely.
Engaging? Not really.
“Beatriz is impressive… but have we really learned anything from some flashing lights?” an unimpressed Scotsman says to me during the break.
The rest of the day is filled with similarly cautious, well-prepared but unsurprising presentations.
As I exit the hall and walk over to the terrace, I overhear an American physician speaking emotionally and audibly: “This is a fucking disappointment!” he says, as he grips the sides of his armchair, swaying angrily; “It’s a fucking psyop!”
The mounting frustration channels the field’s prevailing assumption that a single good photograph or a single verified story will be enough to persuade the government to change its official position. But, of course, it never does. And hasn’t since the earliest days of the modern UFO phenomenon, which started in earnest in 1947 with the Roswell incident.
The suits seem to understand this. They know facts and stories will never force disclosure: only money and power can. When the power shifts, governments will follow. And disclosure won’t just bring transparency about secret science. It will bring transparency to shadowy off-balance-sheet cash flows and finance.
The name of the game in that case is psyopping the original UFO psyop by normalizing the whole phenomenon until it’s so respectable and so boring that it can no longer be ignored by lawmakers.
A path forward
If the battle plan is normalization, then it’s internet-savvy Zoomers who will be used to execute the plan.
Unlike previous generations’ relationship to the unknown, which oscillates between devout belief and fervent denial, we Zoomers have grown up differently.
Our introduction to UFOs began with Leslie Keane and Ralph Blumenthal’s 2017 NYT article — a moment in time when most of us were either leaving or entering university.
At SOL, it’s we Zoomers who seem best equipped to cope with the paradoxes of this civilization’s most confounding untold story, unceremoniously exploring the topic’s darkest corners while chain-smoking cigarettes.
We are neither frazzled by the quiet and weighty aplomb of the suits nor the quasi-frantic, intense exhortations of the woo. Our brains seem capable of existing on both planes.
That’s not to say we don’t have our weaknesses.
As the last night draws to an end, a band of us Zoomers finds ourselves loitering in the environs of the hotel’s bar that has just shut up shop. We are reflecting on the weekend’s goings on, and our chatter catches the attention of a local drunk Italian bystander, who is relieving himself by some bushes.
Alert to the topic of the conference we’ve been attending, he stumbles over to our gang uninvited, intent on exposing our naivety. His main request? For any of us to successfully point out north without resorting to an iPhone or Google Maps.
Predictably, very few of us can.
Each of our successive failures only exasperates the Italian gatecrasher more. “Vaffanculo!” he shouts mockingly, while making obscene gestures at all of us.
Upon my own failed attempt, he scolds me directly: “Tutto alieni… alieni… and you can’t point North!”
I look on despondently, aware that two decades’ worth of Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube has hatched a generation of copious intellect but few street smarts.
With that, the evening draws to a close. I think to myself, even if SOL was a psyop, it was a benign one. I can’t see any downside in encouraging honest dialogue across opposing viewpoints and generations, all united by a fervent curiosity in humanity’s true purpose in the universe.
At this point, the Italian man gathers his impressive e-bike to bid us a warm farewell.
“Nice bike”, I tell him.
“Grazie”, he answers. “It’s stolen.”
