Cosmic Junkyard #1: Are UFOs here to help us?

Chris Bledsoe's UFO of God, and the possibility that aliens and angels might be one and the same

Cosmic Junkyard is finally here! I’ve been wanting to start this newsletter for years, and this week I decided life is too short and I should just…go ahead and start it. It’s meant to provoke big questions about the world’s biggest questions. I hope you enjoy it. Thanks for reading.

So, over four years after the pandemic hit Earth, I have COVID for the first time (that I know of)… And so, I spent a lot of this week being very sick in a Chiang Mai hotel room, reading Chris Bledsoe’s book UFO of God.

I’ve been fascinated by UFOs for years, and even took my own excursion to Area 51 on a cross-country road trip back in 2021. I feel strangely drawn to aliens and UFOs — I think it might be because of my long-running belief that things are not as they seem, that something is going on under the surface of ordinary reality and if I could only identify it, maybe I could start to understand it.

Anyway, Bledsoe’s book tells the story of his experiences with what he calls “phenomena” — brightly-colored orbs and creatures of various appearances that have visited him over the years, starting in 2007 when he and his son encountered three giant glowing orange orbs in a forest near his hometown.

To make a long story short, he keeps seeing the phenomena, only he becomes convinced they’re messengers of compassion and love from the beyond. He then goes on to interact with countless members of the military and government, and even seemingly predicts and stops an assassination of the Pope with the help of some kind of psychic intuition.

And I kind of believe him.

I believe him because, first of all, we know UFOs (or UAPs, if we’re getting technical — that’s unidentified autonomous phenomena to you) are real. The US government has admitted this.

And so many people have reported UFO and alien abductions over the years. Many of them have similar experiences. Bledsoe’s aliens were luminous, with triangle-shaped insignias on their chests and red eyes. But we often hear about The Grays, with their large black eyes and trademark grey skin. (These are the ones that probably come to mind when you think of alien abductions, unless you’re still hung-up on little green men).

So many people have reported alien abductions that it’s truly hard for me to believe everyone is making this all up. Plus, is it so absurd that aliens should be out and about in the universe, when so much about the universe in and of itself seems impossible? We live on a miraculously habitable blue-green planet in the midst of an airless, infinite soup of rocks and gas and light — of course there’s a lot we don’t know. At the very least, I don’t think believing in aliens is any more improbable or insane than believing in God.

Bledsoe posits that the aliens he encountered are connected to God, attached to or born of a kind of benevolent, unifying, cosmic force. He doesn’t go quite as far as to suggest the aliens are angels, but he definitely implies it.

The connection between aliens and angels runs deep. Indeed, many people over the centuries have described seeing luminous angels descending from the sky — and that certainly sounds like UFOs, doesn’t it? The Vatican might agree.

I can’t say I know much for sure about any of it, but I personally think there’s a good chance that aliens are, at least, real. And I hope that Bledsoe is right when he says they are deeply compassionate, wanting the best for humanity. I think it’s possible that they’re aware of the environmental destruction we’re wreaking on the earth, and they’re here as apocalyptic Angels of Death, warning us we must change our ways before it’s too late.

I can’t prove any of it, of course. But I do know that I met a stranger on Ocean Beach in San Francisco who flat-out swore she’d been abducted. She remembered all of it, she said. And what had the aliens told her when they’d taken her on their ship?

All is love, she said. Everything is love.

And that’s the same message that every person, from Kendrick Lamar and Jim Carrey to your local neighborhood preacher, your friendly NDE survivor, and your favorite ancient philosopher (OK, I’ve been spending a lot of time watching semi-viral inspirational YouTube videos while sick) will tell you.

We are all connected. It’s so basic, yet so hard to put into practice. Maybe there are aliens and maybe there aren’t, maybe there’s God and maybe there’s not, but if there’s one thing I know, it’s that every wise person I’ve ever known seems to agree that love is the most vital and powerful force in the universe. Maybe the aliens know this too, if they’re out there.

I hope they are. And I hope they do.

Thanks for readingCosmic Junkyard, an Ink Roads newsletter! Subscribe to receive dispatches on interesting and thought-provoking phenomena in your inbox every single week.