Introducing 'The Light Beyond The Mountains'

My New Book: A Journey into Consciousness, Anomalous Phenomena and Next Generation Humanity

(The Light Beyond The Mountains © cover artwork by Tristan Maduro)

For years, people have been asking me when I’m going to write a follow-up to The Hunt For Zero Point, a book that created something of a stir when it was published two decades ago. The answer I gave until recently was non-committal – soon, maybe; not long now; I’m working on it; watch this space … If you’re one of those people, there was truth in what I told you, but it wasn’t the whole truth. Let me wind back the clock a little and explain.

As well as being a physical journey – whilst the aerospace editor at Jane’s Defence Weekly, the world’s premier defence journal, I undertook a ten-year research initiative of my own (in that it had not been officially sanctioned by the magazine) to find out if the US had cracked the secret of antigravity – The Hunt For Zero Point turned out to be, against all my expectations, as much a journey of the mind as it was about destinations on a map.

The process of writing – up until The Hunt – had always been a necessary corollary to the investigative process, which was the part of journalism I enjoyed the most. If there had been a way of getting the story out without the writing, that would have suited me just fine.

Because for me it was all about the investigation; the writing part being a necessary evil – the means purely by which to get the data out.

Full disclosure: that is no longer true. One of the welcome by-products of The Hunt’s writing journey was that I learned to love to write. Over the years, I have done just about every kind of writing: journalistic, fiction, non-fiction. I’ve written for TV, and I’ve written for companies. I’ve even written, as a ghost-writer, for other people. It took a long time, but, professionally, I think of myself first and foremost as a writer, with my former parallel career as a consultant now as its subsidiary.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Back in 2001, when The Hunt was published, I couldn’t wait to get back to what I saw as ‘the real world’. The research had taken me to some dark places. To know if the US military-industrial complex had achieved a paradigm-changing physics and engineering breakthrough to give it the secret of antigravity, I’d had to journey deep into a part of it – the black or highly classified part - I’d only peripherally visited during my day-job at Jane’s.

But it had taken me to other places I’d not expected to visit – Nazi Germany, for example – and, whilst I might have been physically separated from the events I’d researched and written about by (back then) a good half-century, what I’d not anticipated was the way they would imprint.

In early 2001, while I was editing The Hunt’s second draft, my wife and I decided to take a weekend break in Paris. I’d just edited the part of the book that had taken me from the relatively safe world of German physics and engineering into the Holocaust – a turn I’d not anticipated when I’d set out on the journey. In the taxi on the way to the Eurostar train terminal, the muscles in my legs started to seize up. By the time I got to there, I could hardly walk. I had no idea what was wrong with me, but the pain was excruciating.

Over the course of the weekend, it slowly dissipated and by the time we were back home I’d regained most of my mobility. I went to see my doctor, but he had nothing to account for it. Physically, he told me, I was fine. So, I forgot about it. It was only years later, while working on a book I was ghosting for a renowned psychiatrist that I learned about the work of another psychiatrist called Bessel van der Kolk, a book called The Body Keeps The Score. In it, I learned that trauma takes many forms, including one that moves from the mind into the body. The part of The Hunt I’d been editing had ended with a reminder to myself – in case I was ever tempted to think otherwise – that the story had veered from a technology quest into one of the darkest chapters of human history.

The Light Beyond The Mountains is the story of my next non-fiction journey into the unknown. Although not a sequel to The Hunt, the format – a first-person narrated investigation into a question that, once posed, cannot be unseen or ignored – will be familiar to its readers; and personal – not just for me, but for everyone.

Because The Light is about us …

Despite my fears, expressed semi-jokingly in The Hunt, that I’d be out of a job as soon as the book was published – this because of the heretical nature of its subject-matter – my bosses, whom I’d kept briefed during my years of research, were incredibly supportive. I went back to doing what I’d done before – reporting on developments in and around the aerospace and defence sector, travelling to trade shows, interviewing industry leaders and government officials.

After some of the esoteric turns I’d taken while researching The Hunt, I wanted the grounded aspects of this work to tell me that the world was reassuringly solid; and the book had been nothing more than a small deviation in my resumé; that my career – my life - was now back on track.

But I was wrong.

Nothing – but nothing - has been the same since.

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In The Light Beyond The Mountains, I find myself – reluctantly again – the narrator of the story I’m about to tell. I’m out of my comfort zone once more, only this time, for a different reason.

The Light has been several years in the making. When I first floated the idea to my literary agent, he expressed strong interest. It’s going to be about consciousness, I told him. His enthusiasm was based on the fact I’d just had a thriller published – The Grid – that had taken mind and consciousness as its backdrop too. The reasons for this he’d known: I’d been confronted a few years earlier by an experience – someone else’s experience – I could not begin to account for. That person being an unimpeachable source: my wife.

I will describe this moment in the book – I’ve described it elsewhere already – but it took place while we were in the room in which her mother died; a moment in which something happened, I learned later, that was far from unique; that had a pattern to it.

To try to make sense of this pattern, I started to research consciousness, the result being The Grid. I wrote The Grid as fiction because, professionally, I lacked the qualifications to write it as anything else. It emerged, I’m happy to say, as one of The Times (of London’s) top ten thrillers of 2019.

But as deep as I’d immersed myself in the book’s background research, I realised I’d barely scratched the surface.

I wanted to know more – about what consciousness is, who we are, why we see the world the way we do – and why, occasionally, there are glitches in our modes of perception that admit other stuff into what we can loosely call ‘consensus reality’ - experiences, like the one that happened to my wife and countless others (something, I learned later, that is known as a ‘shared death experience’). My standing start in this field was frustrating – I wanted to know as much as I possibly could right now, but that was impossible because of my day job – I had real paid work to be getting on with.

But then, something of a miracle occurred: out of the blue I was contacted by a philanthropist who’d somehow intuited where I was headed next. For the next two years, this individual funded me to do the research, providing me with what I (semi-jokingly) refer to as a PhD-equivalent in this most beguiling of subjects: the thing that makes us ‘us’; consciousness, a thing nobody has an adequate explanation for.

At the end of my two-year ‘PhD course’ I was deliberating what to do with my new-found knowledge when another small miracle occurred: the American hotel chain and aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, well known for his interest in UFOs, announced he was holding an essay competition to launch his new institute, BICS: the Bigelow Institute of Consciousness Studies.

The exam question – ‘What Is The Best Available Evidence For The Survival Of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death’ – paraphrases something we all ask ourselves at some time or other: what happens to us when we die?

I realised I’d enough data to be able to give the contest a go; and one year later – confounding a lot of expectation on my part and others’ – I found myself in Bob Bigelow’s giant aerospace facility on the edge of Las Vegas receiving my prize. A month after that, Bigelow offered me and several other contestants a part-time role as a BICS director.

It was this journey and its underlying accumulated knowledge that I pitched to my agent.

And when the problems started.

On advice, I was told my qualifications weren’t good enough for my observations on consciousness to be published as an ‘expert’ – for that, I’d need to be a real PhD. My background, they reminded me, was in aerospace and defence. Fair point, I thought: let’s recalibrate.

A few years earlier The New York Times had published a stupefying article about a secret unit in the Pentagon that had been studying UFOs 40 years after it had supposedly closed the book on them, insisting there was nothing there; that UFOs were of no interest because they didn’t constitute a national security threat, because they weren’t, quotes, ‘real’ – just products of people’s imagination, bizarre natural artifacts (like the now iconic ‘swamp gas’) and misidentified aircraft. The Times’s article not only demonstrated this was untrue - the $22 million the Pentagon had earmarked to the programme said as much – it supplied video evidence: three pieces of film from sensor pods carried by US Navy F/A-18 fighters (the modern equivalent of WW2 gun-camera footage) showing three different UFO encounters. And after some hoo-ha, the Pentagon confirmed the clips as genuine.

UFOs were real after all.

This would be my way back into the story – the story I really wanted to tell.

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Whilst at Jane’s, UFOs had occasionally come across my desk – someone had had a sighting of something they couldn’t identify and wanted the experts to tell them what it was. The Hunt had touched on the UFO issue, but it wasn’t about UFOs. It was about man-made stuff; buried, secret technology, breakthrough propulsion physics – another taboo altogether.

When I began researching consciousness, somewhat to my irritation, and however hard I tried to get away from them, the pathway always seemed to meander on to the subject of UFOs.

And it wasn’t just happening to me.

From my research I could see the military’s interest in consciousness (for reasons that will become clear in the narrative) frequently intersected with the UFO question too – the issue it wasn’t supposed to have been interested in following the official closure of its investigation more than 50 years ago.

But time and again, there it was.

My way back into the consciousness story, then, could legitimately be via this portal – the military portal - one in which I had the qualifications I needed to be considered an ’expert’. So, to coin newsroom parlance, I gave the proposal a new ‘news nose’ - the military/UFO angle - and, through my agent, resubmitted it.

Bingo. A large, international publisher said it wanted to make an offer – a big offer; it just needed to put the proposal to its ‘committee’ (manuscript purchases are rarely decided these days on the strength of an editorial director’s word alone but by a panel of stakeholders, ranging from sales and marketing and PR to the cover-art and design departments) that would decide the level to which it was ‘in’ – i.e. the strength of the offer, how it would fit into its publishing schedule, etcetera, etcetera.

Only it never happened.

It never happened because the committee was confused about what the book was trying to say.

Was this a UFO story?

Or was it about consciousness?

Or was it about something else altogether?

So, the offer was withdrawn, but not before I’d been given advice – sincere, appreciated advice - on how to resubmit. One of its tenets was to ‘avoid complex terms and jargon’ (a hangover from my Jane’s days): keep it simple without dumbing it down.

So, I did.

In the meantime, the UFO story had gone nuts.

Under all kinds of pressure from Congress after the New York Times story, the Pentagon released a report on UFOs – now given the sanitised acronym ‘UAP’ for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena – then sent two of its most senior intelligence experts to Capitol Hill to tell politicians what it knew.

Only they didn’t. In their show’n’tell to a subcommittee of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, neither seemed to know anything about anything – even when asked why UAP were repeatedly penetrating closed and highly sensitive military range areas. They didn’t have the data, they said, playing the ‘plausible deniability’ card – knowing full well that if you don’t have the data, or say you don’t, you can’t incriminate yourself.

The can got kicked down the road to a newly formed organisation within DoD called the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), but that hasn’t fared any better either.

There’s a golden rule of thriller-writing that says when the reader is across the plot before the protagonist, suspension of disbelief goes out the window - no-one believes in the plot anymore … or the protagonist. It became clear during late 2022 and early 2023 that the Pentagon didn’t just want the whole UFO issue to go away; it really did have something to hide.

When I resubmitted the proposal, shortly after the Chinese balloon shootdown, the UFO issue had become, at long last, mainstream news – media outlets were still sniggering at it, but it was, at least, now on the news agenda. And the stories were getting bigger. A few months after the shootdown of three genuine UFOs in the days after the Chinese incident (in that, as of this writing, we remain in the dark as to what they really were), a whistle-blower stepped forward – one David Grusch – to allege that crashed-retrieved UFOs had been recovered and spirited into the military-industrial complex for decades.

With social media all over it, and with growing coverage of the UFO story now in the mainstream media, I sat back and waited for the phone to ring.

But it didn’t. And then I realised why. I’d allowed a book whose direction of travel I’d been sure of from the beginning to be knocked off course – like a boat in a storm – by a host of different inputs as anyone I’d ever looked to for a professional opinion had given me their two cents. Make it about this; make it about that; avoid this; avoid that. To try to shoehorn into a proposal of a few thousand words the essence of the book I wanted to write just wasn’t possible. Because you can’t do that with consciousness – at least, I told myself, not this book about consciousness. In trying to please everybody, it had become rudderless - not my own anymore.

So, I told my agent to pull it.

I was going to serialise it instead. Here, on Substack.

I’m an inveterate chiseller of my own words. I’ll revisit past chapters, adding and subtracting, until I’m ready to let the completed book go. I won’t have that luxury here, which is why I’m out of my comfort zone again – this time, I’m going to be publishing on the hoof; and the OCD editor in me is, to say the least, already kicking up a stink.

So, to keep him happy, I’ve come up with a compromise. I’m going to release The Light Beyond The Mountains by chapter, at least to begin with, every two weeks, but to ease the pressure a little I’m telling the rebellious editor in me that the format will be text-with-a-difference: not as polished as the editor in me would like, but still very much narrative-led – a book with a beginning, middle and an end. In its rawness I’m hoping, too, there’ll be an immediacy that you, the reader, will find some value in.

But there is another key difference. One of the things I couldn’t do in the aftermath of The Hunt was to maintain a real time dialogue with its readers – the people for whom it had touched a chord. This time, with The Light, we all get to go on the journey and – thanks to Substack again – we’ll do so in a bold, experimental new way.

This, too, requires explanation.

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At the beginning of 2019, consciousness was still unfinished business for me, so, on a whim, I fashioned a goal-board for the year ahead with the following sentence at the top written in bold caps (in the present tense, as advised, as if it had already happened): ‘I AM WORKING WITH THE WORLD’S LEADING CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCHERS’.

I propped the board in a corner of my office, glanced at it for a day or two, then pretty much forgot about it. Not knowing a single world-leading consciousness researcher, I’d decided there was simply no way for me to achieve such an ambition.

But this, I learned along the way, isn’t how the universe works.

Because four months later that philanthropist went and reached out to me. A propos of very little, he’d had this hunch, he said, that, post-The Grid, I was interested in continuing my consciousness research. “What if I were to fund you to do it? No strings attached. Just come back every few months and tell me what you discover.”

As if that wasn’t’ extraordinary enough, Robert Bigelow then runs his essay contest. I win a prize, get offered a part-time role at BICS and, yes, find myself working alongside, some of the world’s leading consciousness researchers.

Then, in the spring of 2022, I had a moment of insight. Russia had recently invaded Ukraine, the climate emergency, depressingly yet again, was headline news, and the world, generally, seemed to be heading hell-ward in a handcart.

What, I asked myself, was our problem?

That we should be behaving this way in the third decade of the third millennium was beyond sad – it was pathetic.

Having reported on the aerospace and defence (A&D) sector for years – and having consulted in the field after I left Jane’s – I knew it had knowledge, know-how and tech that could save as well as destroy us.

The fact it wasn’t saving the planet was largely a problem of mindset: governments need the defence industry to focus on the things they want it to do – like building weapons (and defending us).

However, with the threat of a nuclear exchange between East and West as close as it had come since Cuba in 1962, war, too, was – is - a problem of mindset. But then, all global challenges, I saw in that moment, are. If we want to heal the planet - and ourselves - we have to have a mind to do so. The fact we don’t is bound up in what appeared to me to be an overarching materialist mindset, linked to a materialist/reductionist science paradigm, which says space, time and solid matter are our real reality and consciousness - the thing that gives us our awareness, that makes us ‘us’ - is merely a by-product of it.

For the past century, the twin underpinnings of physics – General Relativity (which gives us a big-picture view of reality) and Quantum Mechanics (which gives us the science of the very small) – have served us well. The 20^th century was pretty much built on the knowledge they’ve given us.

But something in this century is fundamentally broken.

We need a new understanding of the world – one that embraces those glitches in our modes of perception that mainstream science tells us aren’t real; even if much of the rest of the world, the Pentagon and Congress included, begs to differ.

I don’t want to plot-spoil, but this is the glow on the horizon of the book’s title – the light in the background of its cover-art (for which I’d deeply like to thank my friend Tristan Maduro, @deepfryguy76 on X, graphics maestro par excellence and a true consciousness pioneer), because it captures the many essences, emotions, and feelings of the journey I’m about to describe.

We need a home for an expanded science model that embraces the weird and the wonderful because in it we might just find the seeds of a new Copernican Revolution with the capacity to work the miracles of a much-needed transformation.

What will this transformation look like? What will it be?

I don’t know – I don’t think anyone does – but it’s coming. And I’d like this to be a place, a forum, where we don’t just talk about it but become the architects of the change we want to see.

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I’ve only ever had what I consider to be a true download and that was almost two decades ago.

I get to describe what happened in the book (a story in itself) but the short version is it came to me – as downloads do - in a flash. I was deep into a series of articles I’d persuaded my editor at Jane’s to run across a three-year time span. I named it ‘Technology Audit’, an attempt by the magazine to benchmark the science and technology of the world’s top-tier aerospace and defence prime contractors and, extrapolating from the data, make some predictions about where the industry was headed. My editor, however, pointed out it would be next to impossible: no A&D firm was ever going to open its ‘science and technology basement’ (metaphorically speaking) to a reporter; that was the stuff they normally wanted to keep out of the light. I agreed, by and large. But there was another argument that said maybe, just maybe, they might.

By the end of the 1990s, the sector had been through a series of mergers that had led to a coalescence of capability in the US and Europe around nine ‘primes’ – four in the US (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon) and five in Europe (Airbus, BAE Systems, Finmeccanica [now Leonardo], Saab and Thales).

These companies did everything: they built aircraft, ships, tanks and missiles, they designed, built and managed huge defensive architectures. e.g. ballistic missile defence shields, regional early warning systems and networked combat systems. They ran supply chains that stretched right around the world. They were systems integrators: they knew how to put vast architectures together like no other sector.

And they all looked pretty much the darned same.

So – if you removed the nationality card for a moment (the primes still professed to be ‘national champions’ for their governments even though they were intensely multi-national), there was no real reason you’d choose one over another.

They needed to distinguish themselves – to point to the ‘differentiators’ (aside from price) that would make their government customers choose them over a rival.

Not unnaturally, when I pitched the series idea to the PR execs of the nine companies involved, I got the same initial pushback I’d received at the magazine.

Fiercely protective of their brands, they told me I’d have to try harder.

OK, I said, just give me 15 minutes with your chief technology officer.

All the CTOs I spoke to agreed and gave their blessing. A number of them even went on the journey with me – the physical journey across the transnational borders of their own corporations, because, some of them confessed, they had indeed become so big and amorphous even they weren’t sure what went on in those ‘science and tech basements’ of theirs (there’s irony in this, I know, when it comes to the UAP issue, since in their not-so-metaphorical basements, crashed-retrieved UFO artefacts are said to be stored beyond the reach of Congress and public oversight).

My download moment came when I’d completed around half a dozen of these audits. The primes had knowledge of the planet from the ocean floor to interstellar space – they knew the environment better than any other sector – and the planet was in trouble. Not just from a climate perspective, but across all ecosystems. Forests were burning, coral reefs were dying, oceans were being poisoned and species were disappearing at eye-watering and heart-rending extinction rates.

As systems-integrators - companies that had the know-how to see all this, pull the data together, act on the data and build architectures - they had the capacity to save the planet, in addition to the technical means – the wherewithal - to destroy it.

I didn’t begin to know what to do with this data, except I had to do something.

So, I contacted a few senior A&D sector execs and asked if they’d come to a meeting in London. Several did. I put the basic premise to them and there were nods of assent. The next year, I invited them to a conference in London and they spoke about the kinds of capabilities they had that could act on environmental challenges.

The following year, I brought together eight CTOs from nine of the primes at a conference in Washington DC – together with President Obama’s science adviser, Dr John Holdren, and the Secretary of the US Navy, Ray Mabus. The audience was extraordinary, too, made up of cross-sector experts - from banking to the non-governmental organisation arena (one of them being from a major humanitarian charity).

The CTOs – from Airbus, Boeing, Finmeccanica, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Saab and Thales – hadn’t met in one room before. After Dr Holdren’s speech, we sat on a panel, and I asked them straight: Could you save the planet? Do you have the technology and the knowledge to do so? There was a beat, then, yes, but there’s a catch. We have the know-how; we don’t have the business model …

They spelled out the problem: A&D companies contract with governments. The companies themselves do nothing at their own risk – all their research and development, all their production work, is paid for by their government customers. The work we were talking about would fall outside that remit, so they couldn’t do it.

Maybe, I suggested, they needed to do something about that business model.

For the next couple of years, I worked with a number of A&D primes to see if this could be done.

In that window in time before East and West decided they hated each other all over again, and while companies like Lockheed explored renewable energy joint ventures in China, I worked with some remarkable Canadian venture capitalists, the British city of Bristol, a whole host of global insurance brokers, an Anglo-Russian investor, numerous clean tech start-ups and a bunch of companies in Sweden to see if we could unlock a business model to allow A&D contractors to operate in the ‘real world’ where their technology and know-how could act on global challenges. But sadly, it wasn’t to be.

Push come to shove, we were up against that old problem of mindset.

Within a few short years, ISIS had emerged, conflict in the Middle East had flared, the east-west security environment had deteriorated into hybrid warfare and proxy wars and the world had gone crazy again. And it’s been that way ever since.

To compound it all, we have a singularity on the horizon with three major paths of convergence: the threat of nuclear conflict, AI’s acquisition of artificial general intelligence and moves in Washington DC towards ‘disclosure’: an admission we may not be the apex species we’ve always presumed we are. These problems aren’t going away – they seem, indeed, to be hyper-connected - which, to corrupt Einstein, means we’re not going to solve them using our current mindset. We need to go well and truly out-of-the-box, which is what I want the conversation around The Light to be: a bottom-up/top-down discussion that begins to act on our deeply stuck paradigm of thought.

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First, bottom-up.

All paid subscribers get to go on the journey as the story of The Light Beyond The Mountains unfolds – and we can all converse along the way. Every two months, I’ll hold a Q&A Zoom call that will allow me to answer questions raised by the unfolding narrative, and anything else that subscribers at this level want to ask. There’ll be ‘bonus features’ such as interviews between me and people who’ve helped shape the narrative or experts with particular views on chunks of the chapters I’ve posted. This price-point will be $7.50/month.

For those who don’t want to pay-subscribe, there’ll be some free content under the banner of my Rogue Icons blog (on which The Light will be hosted). This will be in the form of generalised stories on issues that have long been of interest to me: from developments in the aerospace, defence and intelligence fields to science, psychology and the process of writing. I’ll be posting this additional content between book chapters. Some of it will cross-feed with thoughts that have emerged in the previous few weeks’ book writing, some of it won’t; and it is this part – the interaction between a book I’ve mapped but not yet written and a consciousness story that is playing out before our eyes as the UAP/UFO drama – that I’m most excited about.

Because, as the book will relate, there is no doubt the two are connected; or that what’s unfurling is huge - the biggest story there could possibly be; an evolving narrative in need of a dynamic stage on which to tell it, which is what we have here.

Next, top-down.

I want The Light to lead to outcomes; of the kind I was previously trying to get to with A&D, only now for the interaction and collaboration to be truly multi-sectoral.

Systems integrators are only as good as the systems (and the people) they work with - and to fix the planet every sector needs to be involved.

Having reported on A&D half my life, I used to tell people with objections to it that, with some notable exceptions, we shouldn’t be too quick to point the finger.

My experience of the sector is that it’s stuffed full of talented people working complex engineering problems at the coalface of a nuanced business – in which airliners, interplanetary spacecraft and (during the pandemic) hospital ventilators - in addition to combat aircraft, ships, tanks and weapons – roll off its production lines.

If there is a fundamental issue, it is with that business model – the one that says A&D only works under government direction.

Something needs to reinvigorate A&D in the way Apollo did 60 years ago.

That something, I believe, is right here: helping to solve our many planetary challenges with the same focus, cohesion and urgency it dedicated to getting 12 humans to walk on the Moon.

For us to work our problems at scale, we need to be inclusive, not exclusive.

So, once we’ve worked the problem of mindset, which is, as I elucidated above, bound up in our current paradigm of science and thought, we’re going to need to get busy on the mechanics of getting it done.

A&D will work where it’s directed to by its government customers. If you run the numbers, there’s more money to be made in saving the planet - coupled to what I call ‘sustainable defence acquisition’ (more on that another time) than there is (even) in runaway procurement, wherein the global cycle of threat – perceived or real – fuels new iterations of the cycle. Plus, I know there’s a real will – certainly amongst the great majority of the people in A&D I engaged with before – to work the many life-threatening problems the planet faces as part of a multi-sector solutions-set.

This is a big conversation – it’s also counter-intuitive and controversial - so I’m inviting a handful that can afford it – corporates, banks, utilities, think-tanks, government advisers, rock stars (I’m not kidding – there’s precedent here), movie producers, philanthropists, Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs, opinion-formers and influencers – to come in at a much higher subscription price. The basic condition of entry, however, is the same: a desire to unstick thinking and make change happen.

Here, we’re no longer talking about something that’s exclusively book-centred, but something that is also project-led.

Some or all of those who come on board at this level will want to remain anonymous and that’s absolutely fine – this is going to be a conversation with trust at its core operating under a Chatham House-rules based reporting system (I’ll moderate the conversations and report key takeaways on the Rogue Icons forum without attribution, unless permission to do so is given by the individual/s involved); and, all being well, it will meet the bottom-up discussion coming the other way.

The final weeks of 2023 witnessed immense pushback on Capitol Hill to an amendment to the 2024 National Defense Authorisation Act. If passed in its entirety, the amendment would have forced A&D contractors in possession of crash-retrieved non-human technology – including craft of non-human origin – to bring them out of those basements and hand them over (or back) to the US government.

That this is even a thing is almost unbelievable, but it is - it’s called the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act of 2023.

Towards the end of its passage through Congress, however, the legislation got eviscerated of almost all meaningful content, leaving little to cheer about for those who saw it as a ‘route to disclosure’.

But maybe there’s another way of coming at it.

Whether you believe aerospace and defence companies possess recovered ‘alien tech’ or not, there’s a deal of ufological lore (backed, it should also be said, by some very credible sources) that relates how A&D’s attempts to understand, let alone back-engineer it, have, over eight decades, failed to make much headway.

Why?

My guess, if they do exist, is that these crash-retrieved artefacts are puzzles.

Figure the puzzle, and, like a lab-animal that gets its reward by successfully performing an experiment, my corollary guess is that it would be Open Sesame time.

Some of the rewards in the Cave of Wonders this door would open on to would undoubtedly be technological – new propulsion and energy sources with the potential to restore the planet’s damaged equilibrium, for example.

But the real treasure would be greater still.

If UAP operate on as-yet unknown scientific principles, then we’ve got a lot of figuring out to do. There’s a strong argument that says an all-of-science approach – not just a defence and intelligence one – needs to be brought to bear on the problem.

The inside story of the decimation of the UAP Disclosure Act is yet to be written – and when it is, it may not be as conspiracy-driven as many think. I’m told by people who have the inside track that prosaic, human factors were at least partially responsible – exhaustion on the part of politicians who’ve done the heavy lifting for years in trying to get the truth out; and last-minute concerns on some of their parts that if disclosure is, quotes, ‘catastrophic’, they’ll be blamed for contributing to the catastrophe.

So, why not turn the whole thing around?

Let A&D keep those putative artefacts – at least pro tem – but let it also embark, in lockstep with other sectors, on a true ‘moonshot’: saving the planet.

Don’t give up the day-job: we need responsible, sustainable levels of defence.

But the consciousness shift denoted by this commitment to a new Apollo era would, I’ve little doubt, act as the bingo moment when it comes to getting any of that dead tech in those A&D basements to work as it would seem to be meant to: in the hands of people who can show in thought and deed they – we - are responsible, grown up enough, to handle it.

This, as I hope The Light will elucidate, is the journey we’re all on.

So, let’s get started.

What follows in the Prologue, my next post, and in the opening chapters is how and where, for me at least, it all began.

(Anyone wishing to contact me re the above can do so via my office here: emma@nickcook.works)