Inside Rice University’s 2025 UFO Conference

_Friday and Saturday didn’t let up. Astronomer Dr. Wes Watters, physicist Dr. Kevin Knuth, and anthropologist Dr. Peter Skafish attacked the topic from their respective disciplines. There were panels on ethics, ontology, owls, remote viewers, and experiencer narratives moderated by scholars like Kimberly Engels and Karin Austin, the latter of whom is overseeing AI-driven analysis of the John Mack and Whitley Strieber archives. If you weren’t rethinking your place in the universe by the end of these talks, you either weren’t paying attention—or you had fallen asleep like I had.

Because, you know, PowerPoint.

Ironically enough, the most revealing moment of the conference for me didn’t come from a dramatic keynote or an abductee testimony. It came from two of the driest PowerPoint slides ever projected—courtesy of Retired Colonel Karl Nell, a career Army intelligence officer and Pentagon UAP advisor who has, by all accounts, been in the room where it happens when it comes to UFOs (and probably still is).

Slide One: a five-phase disclosure timeline, starting with “Prove UAPs exist” in 2024 and ending with “Engage with Non-Human Intelligence” sometime after 2034. It looked like something you’d see at a quarterly strategy meeting—except the objective wasn’t optimizing inventory or rolling out a new app. It was preparing the human race for contact with something that might not even have lungs, language, or linear time.

And here’s the thing: you don’t build a twenty-year roadmap to reveal something that doesn’t worry you, or that you don’t already believe is real. Yet here was a Retired United States colonel—a man with clearance, pedigree, and an immaculate side part—standing in front of an academic audience with a clicker in hand, calmly walking us through a public acclimation strategy for a reality-shattering truth: we are not alone.

The timeline wasn’t sensational. That’s what made it alarming. It was color-coded. Bullet-pointed. Executable. It assumed existence. It presumed contact. It mapped out when we’d learn—not if.

Slide Two: a grid of  “93 Origin Hypotheses,” each one more reality-dissolving than the last. Sure, the top rows listed familiar culprits: foreign tech, atmospheric phenomena. But as my eyes drifted south, I passed through simulation theory, cryptoterrestrial, stranded “gods,” dimensional overlap, time travelers, and finally—demonic forces.

Colonel Nell didn’t flinch. He didn’t wink. He simply explained that these are the models being considered. This is what’s on the table. This is the framework being used to understand the phenomenon.

What Nell showed wasn’t speculative—it was procedural. The military industrial complex wasn’t debating if something was here. It was building frameworks for how the rest of us would emotionally metabolize that fact—and how to avoid what he called “catastrophic disclosure.”

The Colonel’s slides were methodical and profoundly bureaucratic. The Pentagon and their agencies and contractors didn’t know what this UAP phenomena was any more than I did—otherwise, they wouldn’t have needed ninety-three guesses. 

So for me, the more urgent question isn’t what is flying around out there. It’s: Which of those “93 Hypotheses” wants to screw with our nuclear missile silos?

Because that scenario is not theoretical. It’s documented. Former officers have recounted the exact moment a glowing object allegedly hovered over Malmstrom Air Force Base and knocked ten ICBMs offline. That event mirrored reported incidents in the former Soviet Union—only there, the warheads allegedly turned on.  

“The UFO and The Impossible” are not just interesting topics—they’re essential questions, central to understanding humanity’s place in the universe and, perhaps, to survival itself. Yet for decades, the Condon Report helped push these inquiries to the fringe, effectively banishing them from serious academic and governmental consideration.

That is, until now.

Events like “The Archives of The Impossible” offer the necessary space for researchers, officers, doctors, and programmers like Stephanie to compare notes, share stories, and begin to quietly, collectively reckon with  a universe perhaps far stranger than ever imagined.

Because if this is real—any of it—then the moment has come for an ontological course correction. One where the question isn’t “Do you believe in UFOs?” but “Why isn’t everyone talking about this more?”