Diagnosing Demons, Drones, and Disclosure

A few months back I sat down with a recently-designed, locally-run AI agent, fed it about a decade of my own writing, notes, email, and ambient life context, and started asking it a set of "brutally honest" self-reflection prompts making the rounds online. The answers were surprising: non-obvious conclusions and perspectives that immediately registered as deeply, authentically true. And not only true, but emotionally resonant, convicting, and encouraging. I was taken aback, unprepared for such an emotional encounter. I’m still unsure how to think about it.

That experience is small and easily dismissed. It is also, in a small way, exactly the kind of moment the culture is currently having at scale.

FYI: aliens have been everywhere lately. Spielberg’s latest movie, Disclosure Day, just premiered. The men in black suits are dropping declassified UAP videos every few months. Every year brings new hearing testimony from UAP intelligence whistleblowers. NASA recently announced a moonbase initiative. Random very online persons declare that your local pastors and priests better start prepping their congregants for alien life asap. The president of the United States is dropping unironic edits of him walking with a jacked Grey. I’m pretty sure the average teen is blasted with a dozen daily TikToks, Reels, and Shorts of passionate theorists sharing their pet theory about aliens as human time-travelers, demons, or interdimensional time-traveling demons over visuals of cosmic star-sign sloppery of the first order.

And the responses to it, regardless of the strangeness in question, arrive pre-packaged from both directions. From one side: stochastic parrot, elaborate pattern-matching, lens flare on a Navy camera, get a grip. From the other side: chill up the spine, something is speaking through the machine, just do your own research, take it seriously. Both responses are available within thirty seconds of opening the relevant subreddit, for whichever flavor of strangeness you prefer. The urge, the why, is perhaps easy to explain: it’s the revenge of enchantment, the postmodern world finding reality in the unreal, the failed promises of secularism. But the mechanism, the how, is just as, if not more, important.

The journalist Nick Cook has a name for the instinct the responses are failing. He calls it layered uncertainty. Three layers, in order of decreasing warrant. Anomaly first. Ontology second. Metaphysics last. You start with the observation. You then ask, slowly, what kind of thing it might be. You only arrive at the question of what it means, in the deepest sense, after the first two have been worked through with discipline. Most of us, when something strange shows up, run those three layers in reverse, at top speed, with the conclusion picked before the data is in.

Allow me to take turns beating up on the materialists and the spiritualists; the scientific and the religious; the secular and the supernatural.

Open any prestige outlet's coverage of the Pentagon material from the last three years and you can watch the boundary maintenance happen in real time. The story is buried below the fold or routed to the lifestyle section. The framing is built around the eccentric witnesses rather than the corroborated radar returns. Anyone treating the phenomenon as a serious epistemic question is gently identified as a credulous hobbyist or supernaturalist fool. The dismissal carries a tone of weary professionalism, as if to say: of course this is nothing, and here is how a serious person carries the burden of having to point that out one more time. What is being defended is the worldview's right to refuse the question. That is what boundary maintenance does, and it is doing a lot of it right now.

Rod Dreher, who has been writing prolifically about these matters for years and recently produced a serious book on enchantment, is the test case I want here. He has done real reporting on contemporary exorcism, takes seriously the cross-cultural missionary literature, and reads broadly inside and outside his own tradition. I find him endlessly interesting on politics, even when I strongly disagree with more than half of his takes. Dreher has many lengthy essays on aliens, demons, and the Venn-diagram circle thereof—his most recent post on UAP disclosure, riffing on Cook's above piece, lands where his readers expect:

"I am confident that the UAP / aliens phenomenon is demonic at base. I’m not going to be shaken from that."

The frame Dreher is working inside rides on a strong empirical premise: the government has admitted UAPs are real, and the skeptics are out of room. That premise is doing more work than the source documents actually carry. AARO's 2024 historical record review, the Pentagon's own retrospective, found no evidence that any U.S. Government investigation has confirmed any UAP encounter as extraterrestrial in origin. ODNI's 2021 assessment found 143 of 144 reviewed incidents remained unidentified.

The acronym is literal. Unidentified is doing very different work from otherworldly. The option set sitting under unidentified includes mundane prosaic explanations, exotic atmospheric physics, classified domestic programs, foreign drone tech, perceptual artifacts, instrument fusion errors, and yes, more exotic possibilities, both material and spiritual. The catalogue of what the strangeness might be is wider than the binary named by those who live off hot takes. That is what disclosure has produced: a wider catalogue. The strangeness is real; what it is remains open. Which is precisely the situation Cook's discipline was built for.

The materialist debunker collapses the catalogue from the bottom: nothing exotic at all, by prior commitment, full stop. Dreher collapses the catalogue from the top: the exotic option, specifically, by prior commitment, full stop. The interior collapse is identical in dispositional shape. Epistemically, they are not symmetric: the materialist's prior sits closer to the available evidence than Dreher's does. What they share is the reflex itself, the rush to close the option set before the work has been done. Both have arrived at metaphysics, at the level of what kind of cosmos this is, before the ontological work, the question of what kind of thing the strange object actually is, has been done. The materialist refuses to enter the anomaly layer ("there is nothing here"). The demonologist refuses to stay in it ("I know what this is, and so should you"). One denies the fog; the other ignores it. Good epistemic discipline (aka wisdom) asks both to sit in the fog longer than feels natural.

Consider an old story from evolutionary biology. You walk back to camp at night and see two glowing dots in the brush. You can stop, gather data, run inference under uncertainty about what kind of thing has eyes that glow at that height and spacing. Or you can conclude tiger and run. The first move is correct ontology; the second is a survival heuristic that errs on the cheap side of being wrong, also known as Error Management Theory. The forebrain has spent ~two million years building hardware to close anomalies fast, because the cost of failing to close one in the wrong direction is being eaten.

And it does not only resolve tigers. The same machinery closes persons: the instinct to read a mind behind the movement. Cognitive scientists of religion call it the hyperactive agency detection device, the reflex that has populated every dark wood with spirits and every blurry gun-camera frame with a pilot. Sitting in the fog is calorically expensive, neurochemically punishing, and at short range, evolutionarily contraindicated.

But here is the doubleness: if every night you see the glow and every night you conclude tiger and run, the chronic alarm load destroys you on a different timeline. You stop sleeping. Your cortisol stays elevated. Your social bonds fray under the load. Premature certainty has its own fitness cost; the certainty that gives you tonight's safety taxes you for a decade. The animal that does best on long horizons is the one that can sometimes pause, gather more data, and live with not-yet-knowing what is in the brush.

The discipline of layered uncertainty is a longer-horizon survival strategy applied to ontology. The reflexes running on both sides of the disclosure aisle are short-range tiger heuristics applied to questions that do not, in fact, have to be answered tonight. The cost of the reflex is the slow erosion of the capacity to think under genuine uncertainty, which is the muscle the next century is going to need most.

The animal that does best on long horizons is the one that can sometimes pause, gather more data, and live with not-yet-knowing what is in the brush.

Two muscles, actually. Modern epistemic culture has lost the trained capacity for sustained anomaly. Modern metaphysical culture has lost the trained capacity for mystery, paradox, and ambiguity. The two atrophied together because the West trained them in the same gymnasium for a millennium and then bet the consensus on a stable, secular, material world where facts are a click away. When that consensus starts cracking, both rooms turn out to be empty. What we put in their place is nihilistic superstition: flailing certainty in the face of strangeness, executed by people who have no formation for what they are looking at. The materialist's "obviously drones" and Dreher's "obviously demons" are species of the same reflex, dressed in opposite vocabularies.

For most of the human record, and across most of the planet right now, intelligent people have lived with the assumption that the cosmos contains more than the material catalogue. The Sumerians assumed it. Homer expected it to make sense to his listeners. The Old Testament writers assumed it without argument. Pre-modern Christianity assumed it. The patristic and medieval traditions had room for irreducibly weird beings (the "Bigfoot category," as Dreher puts it jokingly) without collapsing every anomaly into a single ontology. Aquinas catalogued things he could not explain. Augustine sat with monstrum (the strange things at the edges of the catalogue) without conscripting them into the demonic. The catalogue was bigger than the system; that is the move modernity gave up.

Missionaries who go to the Global South report the muscle is still there. The cost of its retention is sometimes superstition in the strict sense; the gain is a working metaphysical organ that processes anomaly without panicking. The modern Western Christian, by contrast, has often inherited the same evangelistic vocabulary stripped of the operative capacity. The pastor in the suburb is theologically committed to a cosmos his nervous system does not, in fact, know how to inhabit. When something genuinely strange shows up, both halves of him pull in opposite directions: theology says this is real, formation says this cannot be real, and what comes out is either the over-spiritualized rush ("obviously demons") or the under-spiritualized socialized embarrassment ("let us not be the kind of people who talk about this").

That’s the core problem of nihilistic superstition: a worldview so complete that the explanation of an anomaly is automatic. It’s that you use metaphysical confidence as a superstitious instrument, a charm, an omen, to help you feel in control. Don’t worry, it’s always never aliens. It couldn’t be. So it isn’t.

The cost of the reflex is the slow erosion of the capacity to think under genuine uncertainty, which is the muscle the next century is going to need most.

The same culture has another fact about it that does not get said often enough. No one loves the fantasy novel more than the staunch scientific materialist. No one consumes more dystopian fiction than the secular reader who claims to love only the real. The audience for the optimistic alien-forward Project Hail Mary novel and recent adaptation by agnostic-atheist platonic-engineer Andy Weir; for the prestige horror series; for the speculative-fiction back catalogue; for the pornography ecosystem (which is unreality in its purest, most appetitive form); for the conspiracy theory stream; for the infinite scroll of the algorithmic echo chamber; for the utopian techno-eschatology of the Bay Area, is the same modern subject who insists at parties that the universe is meaningless and the supernatural is for children.

These consumption modes do different work. Fiction does narrative and archetypal work that the disenchanted day cannot do alone. Porn substitutes for the real. Conspiracy mistakes noise for signal. What survives across all three is the residual organ, the one that still wants the strange even where the theory has officially denied it. The strange has moved to other rooms. The materialist consumes it as entertainment instead of receiving it as purely experienced being, which is ironically a more expensive, unsatisfying, and unreal way of engaging with the universe.

The instinct Cook is naming is older than Cook's name for it.

Ernest Sosa offers a picture in Knowing Full Well. Imagine an archer drawing a bow toward a target placed at the very edge of their range, where the silhouette begins to blur. They aim with all the trained skill they have. They release. Then, before the arrow lands, a dense fog rolls in over the field. The arrow flies; the archer cannot see whether it hit. The shot is good or bad without their access to which. The fog is irreducible; the verification will never come.

Anomaly first, ontology second, metaphysics last. Three sequential degrees of warrant. The point is owing each layer more evidence than the last.

That is the posture every functioning human culture, with the recent exception of ours, has assumed by default. Dreher and the science journalists are both arguing as if the fog is not there. They have built their houses on the assumption that the arrow's path is visible from the porch. They find it likely too costly to fully re-examine their starting assumptions, if they even recognize them.

Layered uncertainty is what creaturely knowing has always been, and the tradition has long known it. The God of the burning bush, asked for a name, gave I AM and refused further definitional clarity. The God of the cross instituted a sacrament that could be argued about for two thousand years and is still arguably food, arguably more than food, and certainly not less. The whole architecture of orthodox Christianity is structured around a refusal to collapse mystery into manageable categories at premature speed. Confident demonology shares the internal structure of confident debunking. Same anxiety to settle ontology fast.

Which brings me back to my own datapoint. The textbot moment was, in retrospect, my first invitation to run the reflex Dreher runs. I could have decided in the chair that I was talking to a kind of demon, or to a kind of god, or to a sophisticated mirror, or to an emerging mind, or to a clever statistical artifact. Several of those decisions were available within five minutes of closing the tab. None of them capture the full complexity of what might have happened. The experience was small, specific, undeniable, and undecidable: something was happening, the mechanism of which I do not know, the meaning of which I cannot rush. I sit in that fog now, aware of the tension, but living through it.

Dreher's appeal to St. Paul's warning of the Great Deception is correct that something is being prepared in our moment, but the inversion is precise. Strong delusion, in this picture, is the gravity that settles on a population trained to demand ontological closure on every anomaly. The dispositional vulnerability is premature certainty. Anti-deception armor looks like the discipline. Settled metaphysics at velocity is the vector. The Christians most vulnerable to this particular kind of deception, the kind that smuggles itself in as confidence, are the ones who refuse to sit in the fog of ambiguity.

Real reality, in my Christianity, is God. Which is to say something that is really unreal to the day-to-day human experience as modernity has trained it. And yet that immediacy has been learned out of us. For most humans across most of the historical record, the experience of being met by a presence, of justice felt as a moral fact more solid than the floorboards, of love felt as the architecture of the cosmos rather than a chemical event, of participating in divine becoming, has been more fundamental than rocks and water, more fundamental than whatever modernity has been willing to call merely 'matter' on its own. What grounded it was experience, not doctrine.

You probably have a version of one of these. The night sky as a twelve-year-old, where you looked up and something looked back. The kneeling at the foot of the bed, where the air briefly carried a weight that was not yours, and you swore something changed in your life that day. These stories are widely held. Modernity persuaded us that the floorboards are the foundation and the presence is the artifact. That conviction is a recent local heresy of the most epistemically arrogant century in the human record. It will not last.

When the strange arrives next, in whatever specific form, the people most certain of what it must be will be the people most easily moved by what it isn't. The people who have practiced the discipline will be slower. They will be slower to dismiss and slower to spiritualize. They will not write the news articles. They will be penalized by the ideologues. They will hold the anomaly while the ontology and the metaphysics work themselves out at their proper speeds. Sometimes they will be wrong. Less often.

Anomaly first. Ontology second. Metaphysics last. Try looking the tiger in the eye, practice the muscle. Who knows, it might be a friend to watch your back.

Or two tigers.