Strange Incursions: A Guide for the UFO and UAP-curious

By Stephen Hunt

Are aliens visiting Earth, right now, even as you’re reading this?

For a long-time, best-selling science fiction author Stephen Hunt believed - as you might do - that UFOs and the chance extraterrestrials are presently calling on Earth was a load of... (let’s keep this family-friendly), complete old nonsense!

What was it that changed his mind? Interestingly, not his encounter with an alien probe in 2001. He wrote that off as a council pollution-monitoring drone - even though the first commercial drone wasn’t used until 2006.

No, it was the New York Times’s article revealing that the Pentagon had been running, and denying the existence of, a top-secret alien-hunting program so covert it had to change the word ‘UFO’ to ‘UAP’ just to escape the stigma created by the CIA around the term. This feature came with confirmed videos of the latest U.S. navy fighter jets being made to look like paper planes by anti-gravity effect vehicles. Craft racing at mind-boggling speeds that would turn human pilots into meat-paste.

Since then, Stephen has been exploring deep down this rabbit hole.

Now, in his very first non-fiction book, he brings you the results of his strange voyage of exploration, seeking the answers to such eye-opening questions as...

- Has the U.S. government (a) lost its mind, or (b) are they really trying to back-engineer crashed alien craft wreckage?

- What is the connection between UFOs/UAPs and high strangeness (portals, ghosts, Bigfoot)?

- Given there are between 100 and 400 billion star systems in our Milky Way Galaxy, where the heck is everyone else? Is humanity truly that unique? The only machine-using species?

- What does the U.S. government know that we don’t?

- Are UFO witnesses and whistle-blowers influenced by popular science fiction entertainment, or are our media companies dropping approved UFO/alien bread-crumbs?

- Is this new wave of official U.S.-sanctioned UFO openness a prelude to something shocking coming our planet’s way? Revelations so improbable, they’ll change humanity forever?

Stephen Hunt examines this fascinating and astonishing universe through the eyes of a science fiction author, drawing the parallels between our sci-fictions, and what just might be a bizarre classified reality of actual alien-derived sci-facts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen Hunt
• Release date: Aug 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005328702

Stephen Hunt

Stephen Hunt is the author of several fantasy titles set in the Victorian-style world of the Kingdom of Jackals and is also the founder of www.SFcrowsnest.com, one of the oldest and most popular fan-run science fiction and fantasy websites, with nearly three quarters of a million readers each month. Born in Canada, the author presently lives in London, as well as spending part of the year with his family in Spain

Book preview

Strange Incursions

A guide for the UFO & UAP-curious

Stephen Hunt

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Green Nebula

What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are. We can’t explain how they move, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.

- President Barack Obama, May 17th 2021: The Late Late Show with James Corden, CBS.

I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us?

- President Ronald Reagan, September 21st, 1987: address to the United Nations General Assembly.

Strange Incursions: A Guide for the UFO & UAP-Curious

First published in 2022 by Green Nebula Press.

Copyright © 2022 by Stephen Hunt.

Typeset and designed by Green Nebula Press.

Cover illustrations by Luca Oleastri.

The right of Stephen Hunt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.

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Praise for Stephen

‘Mr. Hunt takes off at racing speed.’

- THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

‘Hunt’s imagination is probably visible from space. He scatters concepts that other writers would mine for a trilogy like chocolate-bar wrappers.’

- TOM HOLT

‘All manner of bizarre and fantastical extravagance.’

- DAILY MAIL

‘Compulsive reading for all ages.’

- GUARDIAN

‘An inventive, ambitious work, full of wonders and marvels.’

- THE TIMES

‘Hunt knows what his audience like and gives it to them with a sardonic wit and carefully developed tension.’

- TIME OUT

‘Studded with invention.’

-THE INDEPENDENT

‘To say this book is action packed is almost an understatement… a wonderful escapist yarn!’

- INTERZONE

‘Hunt has packed the story full of intriguing gimmicks… affecting and original.’

- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

‘A rip-roaring Indiana Jones-style adventure.’

—RT BOOK REVIEWS

‘A curious part-future blend.’

- KIRKUS REVIEWS

‘A ripping yarn … the story pounds along… constant inventiveness keeps the reader hooked… the finale is a cracking succession of cliffhangers and surprise comebacks. Great fun.’

- SFX MAGAZINE

‘Put on your seatbelts for a frenetic cat and mouse encounter... an exciting tale.’

- SF REVU

Contents

1. Into the Unknown

2. The Pyramid of Puzzlement

3. Deja Woo?

4. Science of the impossible

5. Trouble at the UAP mill?

6. Invasion Earth

7. Weirder Science

8. Fearing FERMI

9. Which came first, the chicken or the PSYOP?

10. Elvis isn't dead, he just went home?

11. The State of the Art

12. The most boring UFO encounter, ever.

Chapter one

Into the Unknown

Into the Unknown: with more acronyms than you can CSASA (comfortably shake a stick at)

There has, to quote an incredibly famous movie franchise, been a disturbance in The Force. Something supremely big and miraculous happened. But oddly, few people sat up and noticed.

It’s understandable, really, what with so much else sent to occupy and try us. There was Brexit. President Trump was being voted in and then being voted out. Next there came a global pandemic where we were deeply uncertain whether we were going to be forced to relive the plot of the scifi movie Contagion for two years (spoilers: we were), or at the higher end of the mega-death scale, finish like the victims in the underground world of the film 12 Monkeys. Post-pandemic prisoners surviving below the plague-riddled Earth in a plastic bubble existence of locust-tank meals and vicious dystopian society control. The disease thankfully never reached those giddy heights. But back when all this broke, admit it, you were kind of worried it might, right?

If that wasn’t enough, we reached 2022 and suddenly found ourselves thrust, in the best-case scenario, back in Cold War 2.0, facing off against an aggressive, assertive Russia/China pursuing a totalitarian new world order; or in the worst instance, mirroring the plot of the American TV series Jericho, huddling in Kansas during the aftermath of a nuclear assault on the USA. Although, if you are actually living in Ukraine, you’re sadly reliving the flick Red Dawn - but without the comfort of Patrick Swayze.

You could be forgiven for wondering if the first particle accelerator experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in September 2008 might have knocked us all off into some parallel reality of craziness. Or has the world always been this mad? Possibly you’ve been speculating if all that tosh about Simulation Theory - whether we are living in one great big software experiment on some alien supercomputer somewhere - is true? Have we reached the end stage of the last level, but there is no more game, and so bored, we can nuke ourselves into oblivion? Game over, man.

But let’s think positively. What is that miraculous discovery I mentioned earlier? Why, it was the official acknowledgment by the US Government that UFOs (aka Unidentified Flying Object), or as the officials are now calling them, UAPs (aka Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon), are indeed a thing. Not to say that the authorities have coughed up to the existence of invading extraterrestrial scout craft. More, there are deeply weird things happening in our airspace, which seem to be intelligently controlled and have the characteristics of technology that the US Government claims not to possess itself.

This is the quintessential definition of the term UFO - an unidentified flying object. Each time you see a strange bird in the sky you do not recognise, every night you spot an unfamiliar shape zipping across the horizon. Is it a comet? Is it a satellite? A meteor burning up? Is it the International Space Station, or a formation of Elon Musk’s many thousands of tiny Starlink satellites? That sighting could be anything, right? Which rather gets to the nub of the unidentified portion of UFOs/UAPs, doesn’t it?

Even this limited admission by the Man seems to have passed much of the world by. Indeed, some people who are less informed, or had a busy and distracted life back in the day, might still challenge the notion. But there is no more doubting it. This thing is a thing. There is a there, there. The only real question left now, and it’s a big’un, admittedly, a proper doozy, is what the heck are they?

First off, let’s answer one of the few questions we do definitely have a solution to. How did all this UFO/UAP stuff re-enter the official narrative?

Well, back in 2017, the New York Times, the American Pravda, the paper of national record for the USA, ran a story ¹ featuring the release and confirmation of UFO videos taken from fighters operating off the Nimitz aircraft carrier, complete with camera gun footage and sensor information. It showed US pilots were regularly being harassed by some strange kind of white tic-tac-looking drones. Four elite navy fighter pilots saw a mystery flying object at close range in November 2004, a craft that seemed to exhibit advanced technology. The enigmatic vehicle sped to hypersonic speeds instantly, according to the aircrew, with no obvious engines, wings, or other control devices. It could drop from near space to sea-level in a heartbeat. Radar operators on ships nearby and a command-and-control plane in the air back up what the pilots say about these amazing events.

This weird material had been circulating for a while on UFO chat boards, but it took the New York Times’ intervention to bless the story with the imprimatur of entering the official narrative. At the same time, the same New York Times piece dished the dirt on a top-secret Pentagon effort to look into UFOs called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (let’s call it AATIP). This was much to the shock of many in the mainstream, given steadfast U.S. Government denials of any such outlandish organisation over the decades.

A little later, details of an earlier, larger, and better-funded UFO program called the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program (how about… AAWSAP) emerged. After a while, it became clear that AATIP was a smaller successor agency to AAWSAP, launched by government insiders to keep the flame alive after the money ran out to support the more extensive spook show. Or maybe AATIP was a nickname for AAWSAP, intended to hide the program from unfriendly brass inside the Pentagon? Things get purposefully opaque mighty quickly when you examine the UFO file in any detail.

Some of the people ² on this earlier AAWSAP effort even published a book in 2021 called Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, revealing how they were early in on the action at the Skinwalker Ranch, examining this veritable pocket Bermuda Triangle located in Utah’s Uinta Basin before the peculiar location got made into The Secret Of Skinwalker Ranch TV show.

There were numerous attempts in the initial days from the usual line-up of gainsayers and professional sceptics to debunk this unexpected, bizarre news. Real-life X-File Units funded by Uncle Sam. WTF? The phenomena were clearly seagulls flying strangely, or super-advanced Russian/Chinese drones, or secret American next-generation vehicles from that Area 51-of-the-Seas, the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Centre (aka AUTEC) in the middle of the Bahamas. But the steady drip-feed of a variety of follow-on pieces from the New York Times and its sources put all the easy and trite explanations to bed. A few alternative options still exist, although not officially as far as the USA is concerned. Innovative electronic countermeasures tech - spoofing via plasma ³ object creation, is one avenue suggested. LIPS, or laser-induced plasma to create plasma-based spoof signatures. In this scenario, think of the fighter jets as cats, and some laughing goofball from AUTEC playing with their laser pointer during a secret weapons test against their own forces.

There was a later briefing of the US Congress held in secret in which the USA’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence presented a report and footage said to shock and unsettle several elected representatives of the American people. According to this paper published in June 2021, the U.S. government could not explain 143 of the 144 occurrences of unidentified flying objects recorded by military craft between 2004 and 2021. The only sighting they could definitively resolve was an oddly shaped, deflating weather balloon, by the way.

Acting on said sense of shock, Congress demanded a new office to look into the UAP mystery more deeply, a Project Blue Book for the 21st century. A proposed amendment to the Senate’s passing of the National Defense Authorization Act, sponsored by U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, specified the construction of what was then provisionally dubbed the Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution Office (ASRO ⁴), weeks before the U.S. Department of Defence’s announcement of a rival even more unpronounceable agency titled, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG ⁵).

So, we actually might end up with two offices. The official Congress-backed agency is still being established, and a rival ‘Do we really need to tell anyone, anything?’ affair run by the Pentagon. Or maybe, much like Highlander, ‘There can be only one,’ and the Pentagon’s new UAP agency will become the only game in town.

And that’s kind of where we are today. We appreciate that there are strange things in the skies that cannot be readily identified as a product of the Superpower with the most advanced aerospace tech in its labs (and the best-funded military on the planet). The USA, of course, for the moment. But we don’t know what these UAPs are… so, questions, questions. There are so many curious matters that emerge from this profoundly puzzling topic.

What are these things? How are they getting here? What do they want? Why are they here? Where are they going? What music do their crews listen to while they are rustling cattle to mutilate?

What I would like to do with this book is to examine these questions, both from the perspective of First Principles-thinking, and the point of view of a published science fiction author who’s written about such subjects in literary form for HarperCollins, Gollancz, Tor Macmillan and similar corporate publishers for two decades. Of course, before working as a full-time fiction writer in the field, I was a long-time science fiction fan enjoying and sampling the delights of the scifi world in books, movies, TV, and comics from an early age.

Along the path of this odyssey, I aim to give you my best guess, through logic, of what the truth of the matter might be, as accurately as anyone can know without being fully read-in on the secrets.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Senate.

So, we have glommed onto the fact that weird stuff exists in our airspace thanks to a limited release of official information, using the conduit of the New York Times. This material was possibly leaked by an ex-AATIP Director called Luis ‘Lue’ Elizondo. Lue worked for the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and served as a U.S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent. A curious high-placed fellow, one Christopher Mellon, helped Lue in this disclosure. Mellon was the USA’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, and also Staff Director of the Senate Intelligence Committee working in the mid-1980s up to 2004.

Christopher Mellon appeared in the 2020 UFO documentary The Phenomenon ⁶, where he confessed to being the source for the Pentagon UFO films shown on the front page of the New York Times on December 17th, 2017. Mellon claims he met with an unidentified person (my suspicion: the same Luis Elizondo) in the Pentagon parking lot and was delivered a box containing three movies shot by US Navy pilots between 2004-2015. All very Watergate.

Rumours were circulating before 2016 that the newly elected President Hillary Clinton intended to disclose details about the UAP mystery to the masses. Donald Trump unexpectedly beat Hillary to the post, and a more fully rounded disclosure never happened.

We’ve made great strides recently in developing humanity’s understanding of the universe. When I sat in primary school, the only planets we could speak about with any definitive knowledge were those inside our Solar System. All our guesses about alien life and what might be out there in the Solar System and beyond were just that, guesses. The galactic version of a game of pin the tail on the donkey. We didn’t know how many bodies the average