Messengers of perception: Inside the campaign to reshape the UFO narrative

As Washington’s elites, led by Marco Rubio, go all-in on UFOs, The Blind Spot reports from the Davos of “UAPs” in Italy, where the real story is the corporate takeover of the alien conversation.

Photo by Jonathan Martin Pisfil on Unsplash

“Sorry, these aren’t my updated slides,” murmurs the speaker as she furiously bashes the clicker forward and backward.

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.

And Maura Mindrila, the speaker, 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, who typically negotiates multi-million-dollar deals, 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 are oddly amused by the incident, even as others more used to the ritual 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 of the gathering comes 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 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.

As for the late-night conspiracy tones of Alex Jones or David Icke, they are a distant and embarrassing memory. The new UAP elite channel the dulcet tones of corporate figures such as Larry Fink or Tim Cook.

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 must have ruled the term UFO was “too toxic” and “too parodied” to ever achieve marketing reach or lobbying cred. Nor would it ever be able to get you face time with a politician. The result is 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, notably with respect to 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 to the truth.

In Labour’s case, the ruse helped to transform the party into “New Labour”, making the previously unpredictable and chaotic party appear reasonable and business-friendly.

At its core, 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 creates political capital. And that, in turn, 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.