Ufology

Disclosure Graph

My current project is disclosuregraph.com, a knowledge graph of the people, programs, events, and documents in the UFO/UAP story, with timeline and network views of how they connect.

How I Got Into Ufology

It probably started with Bob Lazar’s appearance on Joe Rogan in June 2019. Since then I’ve had an insatiable curiosity about the phenomenon.

At first I wanted the truth, plain and simple. Part of that was about the phenomenon itself, and part of it was about corruption: if the government wasn’t telling us everything, that felt like something worth exposing. Over time, what I thought “the truth” even meant started to shift. I got more jaded about the whole topic, and pretty pessimistic about what I saw of the cover-up.

Gradually I realized that very, very few people actually understand what’s going on. I’m not on a quest to prove anything myself. I don’t need that; I already know what my own truths are on the matter. But there is still so much unknown, so many loose ends, and so many different ways people interact with the phenomenon, that I keep getting pulled back in.

People Who Inspired Me

Jacques Vallée. The almighty Vallée. As a researcher I think he’s super cool, and I love the way he thinks and talks. Long before it was fashionable, he was arguing that the phenomenon is stranger than visitors in spacecraft. Books like Passport to Magonia connect modern sightings to centuries of folklore.

Dr. John Mack. For most of my time in this topic I was firmly anti-abduction. I figured those were people being silly or chasing attention. Mack’s two books, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994) and Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters (1999), completely changed my mind. They’re very well written, and they make you zoom out and realize you have no clue what reality we actually live in. Mack, a Harvard psychiatrist, also went to Zimbabwe to interview the children of the Ariel School sighting. In 1994 dozens of kids reported seeing a craft land near their school during morning break. It’s an incredible case.

Travis Walton. Another incredible case. In 1975 a logging crew in Arizona watched Walton get struck by a beam of light from a glowing object. He was missing for five days.

YouTube. A huge amount of what I’ve taken in came through YouTube. I have to give it to Red Panda Koala for his earlier research, before things got a little weird with him. And Jesse Michels of American Alchemy is legendary as a person.

Beyond Nuts and Bolts

Cases like these are why I don’t sit around asking where my high-definition photo of a flying saucer is. There have been super interesting, tangible interactions with the phenomenon, and it clearly isn’t all about flying saucers. More recent research, with all the orbs and the like, makes that obvious.

I think the nuts-and-bolts approach only gets you so far. To truly understand what’s going on, we have to shift toward a non-material way of thinking. That’s hard for humans, and it’s something I work on myself. It’s also reflected in how I’ve built Disclosure Graph.

Mapping the Phenomenon With Data

A few years ago I started approaching the topic with data. My first attempt was Project Amanita: a collection of nodes and edges linking people, events, institutions, and documents. It was built with old-school machine learning, natural language processing and sentence transformers, to group related material and pull entities out of text. It got me surprisingly far, and I learned a ton about coding along the way.

Then came ChatGPT and the era of large language models, which changed what one person can do. LLMs make it far easier to research, to build and maintain a network graph that stays clean and useful, and to build applications that help people digest the data. Putting together a system that researches and surfaces these connections is now very doable.

Why Disclosure Graph

There are a lot of smart people doing nose-to-the-grindstone research on this: calling people, interviewing witnesses, and carrying an enormous amount of knowledge around in their heads. But this story spans decades, with countless threads, disinformation, different kinds of leaks, and competing factions. It’s really hard to take in.

My goal with Disclosure Graph is to translate that work into something people can actually navigate: a way to see who’s who, what happened when, and how it all connects.