We’ve seen the movies - the alien mothership takes up position over major landmarks (because the landmarks always look good on the big screen). There’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing of good looking people pretending to be scientists, pilots, and rogue computer programmers. The plucky humans end up coming up with a plan to defeat the alien invaders, and secretly discover that the Americans knew about it all along and were hiding this knowledge at Area 51. Will Smith saves the day, and they all live happily ever after until the studio needs to make more money off the IP and plans a sequel. We’ve seen this story play out at least once because I’m specifically referencing Independence Day here, but the overall point is that this is a cliche story we’re all familiar with.
But let’s imagine that it wasn’t a movie. Imagine this scene (or some version of it) was really true. Let’s take the most simple version - when humans meet another intelligent life form - and think of how disruptive it might be. How would our day to day life change if we all learned with 100% certainty that humans are not alone in the universe, and that these other intelligent creatures have technology that makes our best tools look like a stone wheel? Many people hold this belief already, but to be confronted with the reality of it in our skies is different than the belief that they are "out there" somewhere. Ronald Reagan once gave a speech to the United Nations where he wondered if it would take a threat of alien invasion to unify mankind and give us perspective on our terrestrial differences and conflicts. Science fiction authors have been writing about it for generations. We all hope it’ll be like Star Trek - Zephrym Cochrane meets the Vulcans, has a dance party, and the rest is (future) history. But deep down, we fear it’ll be more like the ‘discovery’ of America, and humanity won't be Christopher Columbus in this version of the story. For some, there’s a lot of fear and feelings about this kind of a topic.
No matter how you look at it, the implications of this “First Contact” are pretty profound - even at the most basic, how did they get here? One of the things we do know for sure is that planets are really far apart - to get from one to the other would require technology that we don’t yet know about.
Or maybe we do. Not in your imagination - but in real life.
This Sunday Story is a bit unique, because it’s either informing you of the incredible power of disinformation, or it’s talking about one of the biggest secrets in human history. Like all good stories, let’s start this one at the beginning.
It was 2017, and the New York Times published an article that caught our attention - “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious UFO program” detailing the United State’s Government’s continued interest in the UFO phenomenon. I say continued, because throughout the 20th century, the US Government studied UFOs in fits and spurts - Project Grudge and later, project Blue Book, among others - but since the 50s and 60s, they had publicly proclaimed that the UFO topic had nothing to it, was of no merit for scientific inquiry, and should be relegated to the world of conspiracy theorists and tin-foil hat wearing crackpots. That was what I believed to be true for most of my adult life, but then here in 2017 was an article, in a reputable newspaper, saying the Pentagon had spent millions of dollars on this topic in secret. Why would they secretly spend millions of dollars on something that was clearly nonsense?
Of particular note in this article was its featuring of two videos. These videos, allegedly taken by US Military equipment, showed objects that are flying and unidentified, so let’s call them what they are - UFOs - that were outmaneuvering our best jets and pilots back in 2004. The objects were apparently seen on radar, caught on video, and observed by highly qualified eyewitnesses - not crackpots wearing tinfoil hats, but military pilots. The objects were observed going from water, to air, to space, and accelerating near instantaneously to 20,000 miles per hour (For reference, our fastest anti-aircraft missiles attain less than half that speed). At times, this was a daily occurrence - not a one time thing.
But, I’ve seen raptors hunt children through a kitchen in Jurassic Park, so some video isn’t going to fool me - people have been hoaxing this stuff for decades or longer and it’s wise to approach these stories with hefty skepticism.
Then, in 2020, the Department of Defense confirmed that the videos were real. And then former President Barack Obama went on Late Night with James Cordon and said, without a word of humour or jest, that there are things flying around that the Government cannot explain.
The New York Times article caused me to raise an eyebrow and more or less move on. But these statements by the DOD and President Obama seemed to make this a bit more official, and that’s when I started to take the issue more seriously. I began my research, and the initial research showed me I’m not the only one - former presidents, retired admirals and other high-ranking military professionals, senators, congressmen, and Ivy-league academics - the list of serious people taking this issue seriously is already a mile long, and my name is at the bottom of that list. Maybe after reading this, your name will be added under mine!
Here’s why we think this is a major disruption that people should be paying attention to, based on the only possible explanations for this incredibly interesting bit of news:
1) It’s all a big hoax. The US Government is no stranger to making things up to sway public opinion - we know that was the case with WMDs in Iraq, and in the generation before, the Gulf of Tonkin was partially fabricated to justify America’s increased involvement in Vietnam. A story about UFOs is a great way make your nation-state enemies worried; “if America is studying UFOs, we better study them too, or they might learn something we don’t know and have an advantage”. Indeed, that’s already happened - China is quite loud-and-proud about its UAP program (UAP = Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon).
But here’s the problem: If this is all some kind of government fabrication designed to fool our enemies into wasting resources or some other motive that is entirely based in terrestrial politics, then we have a serious case of “Friendly Fire”. There is the aforementioned mile-long list of serious people taking this issue seriously, which is a huge waste of time and energy if this is all a hoax, but there are also congressional hearings, bipartisan legislative efforts that include Senate Majority Leaders, and millions of dollars of taxpayer money spent on this issue. It’s also an issue for the citizenry - over 65% of us believe UFOs are real and more than half believe that the Government is hiding them, which is rapidly approaching ‘consensus’ levels. These numbers have been steadily increasing with all of this government attention.
What happens when all of these people find out that this is all a hoax? With trust in government already at an all time low, and those internal to the government seemingly caught up in this big lie, this hoax has the potential to be incredibly disruptive to people day to day. The power of this misinformation is incredible - if this is true, it means countless people (including the author) who are reasonably well educated, professional people have fallen for an extremely well orchestrated lie. On the bright side this explanation, while still disruptive, is the least disruptive option - in the same way the world did not change overnight with the Panama Papers or the Snowden revelations, the world is unlikely to change overnight with the revelation of this hoax. It does create a leadership challenge, but one of morale management, which is already on the radar due to all of the incidents that have contributed to that aforementioned "trust in government" number.
2) It’s not a hoax. If it’s not a hoax, there are three additional logical possibilities:
2-A) This is secret US Government technology. If that’s the case, it’s going to be highly disruptive as well. As mentioned, these objects are noted for their ability to travel in ways that we cannot explain. Imagine all of the money spent on popularizing electric cars for the sake of protecting our environment - now imagine what that investment could have done with whatever technology the US Government cracked to be able to build things like this? The best analogy is nuclear weapons - even today, there are scores of classified information related to nuclear technology because generally speaking, having people wandering around knowing how to build nuclear bombs is a bad thing for humanity. But nuclear power is studied openly and the fruits of that effort provide relatively clean, cheap energy to millions of people. Nuclear power is the result of human academia gaining access to once-protected information that resulted from a secret government program (The Manhattan Project); if this technology was a breakthrough in 2004 (when the NYT article videos were filmed), then we’ve lost 20 years of research into technology that could profoundly impact how we produce and use energy.
2-B) It’s secret technology held by an adversary to the US Government. Since most of the free world is under the umbrella of the United States, this means the technology was developed by states like Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea. That means that a foreign adversary has technology that allows them to enter the US Airspace with impunity, which ought to make all of us feel a little less safe - the whole point of spending billions on military might is to protect our territory, and if we can’t do that, we’ve got a problem.
I believe this is an unlikely explanation; given the conflicts around the world that some of these nations are engaged in, it seems likely this technology would have been deployed in some way by now. These nations also regularly seem to struggle getting non-advanced known technology to work correctly. Plus, when you consider the world 20 years ago (when one of the NYT videos were made), it seems even less likely that an adversary nation has this tech but has managed to not use it, or have even hints of how it works enter the rest of the world’s awareness.
2-C) This is the big one: It’s not human technology. This doesn’t mean aliens - there are a number of plausible hypotheses, so the parlance being used by those in government actively pursuing this topic is “non-human intelligences”. This speaks to the fact that as far as we know today, human beings are the only creatures that are able to build any sort of craft or vessel. If human beings did not build these craft that are giving our military so much concern, then who did?
Our White Paper series, Leading in a Time of New Intelligence, was intended to use the zeitgeist & popular interest around these disruptive forces - Artificial Intelligence and UAPs - as a way to use front-of-mind pop culture topics to bridge people into talking about how to lead in times of disruption. With Part One, we learned early in our research that the AI technology on display was akin to the discovery of fire, agriculture, and even the Industrial Revolution. In other words, our research has shown us that AI is humanity-changing technology, the creation of which is experienced only by a few, but the existence of which benefits countless generations afterwards.
When we started researching Part Two - the part focused on UAPs - we figured the most likely explanation was it was a big hoax, or secret US tech. Either case is a great example of the type of disruptions we’ve seen in ample fashion over the last 10+ years - from election interference via Facebook to the Panama Papers to Snowden - and these situations all have a destabilizing impact on humans that leaders need to navigate. But over the course of the research, things got even more real. In 2023, a former Intelligence officer named David Grusch testified under oath that the US Government had been hiding a secret craft retrieval program, including recovering the non-human pilots of said craft, and the United States Government took unprecedented legislative effort to get to the bottom of this issue.
We still do not know the truth of this matter, and you can make your own mind up about which of the above scenarios explains UAPs, but we have done extensive research into this topic and are unable to find explanations that don’t match the scenarios above. That in and of itself is actually a bit of a problem - there’s no explanation for these things that isn’t at least significantly disruptive, and when the least disruptive option is “The government has been lying in a very big way and has even fooled their own people”, it’s a bit uncomfortable. We’ve actually held off on publishing Part Two of our white paper series for months because of the discomfort of our conclusions, and are waiting for a bit more information (which we expect to see this summer) to further guide that work - so stay tuned.
We don’t know how this story ends, but the point of this series is that it doesn’t matter if the story is UFOs/UAPs, AI, or some other black swan that we’ve not accounted for: Disruption is normal.
If this series has illustrated nothing else, it's the normalcy of things not being normal - from volcanoes to sunspots to super-smart AIs to Alie-- sorry, Non-Human Intelligences; disruption is the rule, not the exception, and even if we can't be 100% sure what the disruption will be, we can be reasonable confident there's more coming.
So what do we do about it?
A mid-20th century statesman once falsely attributed the phrase “May you live in interesting times” to an ancient curse from China; though accurate he was not, the sentiment expressed in this statement is well conveyed. Even focusing only on the technological implications, between artificial intelligence and UAPs, it would seem our times are indeed interesting. Remember, AI has the near-term potential to be a “solutions box” - feed it a problem, and as long as it has electricity and microprocessors, it will work on that problem until it finds a solution or determines no solution exists. The speed at which UAP apparently move and maneuver represents a totally different concept of manipulating mass, energy, or both, which suggests a massive shift in our technological capabilities if we can figure this out. Either of these technologies has the opportunity to disrupt our labour markets, create abundance out of scarcity, change the way humans live every day, and maybe even profoundly alter our understanding of our place in the universe in the same vein as Copernicus’s heliocentrism. When faced with the spectre of two transformative and potentially disruptive shifts, both driven by non-human intelligences, what do we do?
We be more human.
That’s it - that’s the solution. Be human. Change is something that we’ve literally evolved to manage - the scope and scale might be different, but you are reading this today because one of your ancestors adapted to the discovery of fire. A different ancestor adapted to agriculture, and you - well, you’ve adapted to the internet, a pandemic, and now maybe AI and Aliens. You are a natural savant at adaptation - because you are human. Humans are adaptable by design, and all we need are other humans helping us do that to be great at it.
Here’s how you do it at as a leader: Identify what matters most to you. Tell other people those things. Make sure your actions align with those things. This is the values-based leadership cycle that we previously wrote about, and it’s the only tool we know to reliably navigate incredibly disruptive times. In times of great disruption, folks turn to the stability provided by leaders as their beacon of hope and calmness. If we are correct and that significant disruption is on the horizon - and remember it doesn’t have to be these disruptions for the disruptive impact to be the same magnitude - then it underscores that your leadership isn’t about your role in a large organization or as a manager of a team. It’s about how you show up for other humans and help them solve the problems they are facing that day. Sometimes that means you flex your management skills, sometimes it means you flex your mentor or coaching skills, but what it always means is you are helping those around you be better at tackling the challenges that are placed before them. That can be in their job or their lives - leadership shows up in both.
We don’t know what the next 10 years will look like - nobody does. But odds are good that something disruptive will come up, and even if we are wrong about the reality of AI or UAP (and we don’t think we are), as a leader you’ll need to deal with whatever the universe decides to throw at you next. And whatever that is - don’t worry. You’ll catch it.
(And don't forget our courses and services are here to help give you a glove)
Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next Sunday.
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