Phenomenology at 30,000 Feet

How UAPs Challenge Our Understanding of Reality, Meaning, and What It Takes to Be Taken Seriously

Written by Greg Scaduto

When the Debrief article dropped – the one by Kean and Blumenthal on David Grusch – I spent the next few days drifting around in a kind of epistemological hangover. Grusch wasn’t some YouTube crank – he had TS/SCI clearance with presidential – level access to compartmented programs, and sat on the UAP Task Force. The people saying these things weren’t guys with podcasts and mustaches shaped like conspiracy theories.

It felt like the biggest story of my lifetime had just quietly detonated, and yet no one around me seemed remotely disturbed by the fallout. The group chats stayed mostly silent. Life went on, emails got answered, grocery lists updated. The dissonance was almost psychedelic.

At some point I texted a close friend, someone bright and decent and working seventy – hour weeks in an industry that slowly liquefies your soul into Outlook calendar invites, and I asked him, basically, “Why is no one else freaking out?” And he wrote back:“Assume it’s true. You still have to go to work in the morning.” And it wasn’t flippant – he meant it with kindness, almost like he was offering me a kind of metaphysical Tylenol. But it landed like a trapdoor opening under my sense of shared reality. Because what he was saying, basically, was that even if you find out we’re not alone in the universe, the slide decks still need to be updated, and your kid still needs to be picked up from daycare. And I just kept thinking: if that’s true, then what is reality now? And what kind of species have we become, if proximity to the profound doesn’t move the needle at all?

I think the shared sense of oblivion around UAPs has to do with – what’s become increasingly common in the discourse lately – human consciousness. But not necessarily in the mystical or esoteric sense. I mean something more basic, even bureaucratic: the way we assign meaning to things. What we collectively decide to take seriously. What we allow to matter. This is, in some ways, a question of social constructivism – the idea that much of what we call “reality” is scaffolded not by matter but by agreement.

Take the dollar bill. On its own, it’s just paper and ink – worthless in a vacuum. You can’t eat it, build with it, or use it for warmth. And yet, we trade it for food, shelter, surgeries, survival. Not because of what it’s made of, but because of what we’ve agreed it means. Its power lies in consensus reality – shared belief, upheld by institutions, habits, and repetition. It’s not valuable because it’s real. It’s real because it’s valuable to us.

UAPs may operate on a similar plane. We haven’t decoded their propulsion, origin, or intent. They don’t slot cleanly into the physics or biology departments. And so, many people dismiss them outright: “Not real.” But they’re seen. Tracked. Recorded. They affect pilots, scramble radar, influence national security protocols. In phenomenological terms, they have intentionality – they appear in consciousness, alter perception, and leave behind meaning. In short: they change behavior. That, by definition, makes them real.

Saying UAPs aren’t real because they don’t conform to our current categories is like saying a dollar isn’t real because it’s not gold. It misses the point. As both phenomenology and constructivism remind us, reality isn’t just what exists independently – it’s what shows up, what endures, what reorganizes our shared frame of reference. And maybe the real reason UAPs unsettle us is that they don’t just challenge our science. They challenge how belief itself works.

Which is why the Sol Foundation matters. Truly. It’s the only group I’ve seen that’s actually willing to sit with the ontological vertigo of this thing instead of papering it over with press releases or Pentagonese. They’re not pretending it fits neatly into propulsion or psychology or adversarial tech – they’re saying, in essence, “We don’t know what this is, but it’s real, and we need everyone – physicists, philosophers, linguists, codebreakers, priests – to even begin to ask the right questions.” It’s that rare combination of rigor and humility that makes them feel less like a think tank and more like the early architecture of a new way to think. Which is also why the UAP Disclosure Act can’t just be some symbolic gesture that dies in committee while everyone debates the definition of “non-human.” It needs to pass – because no one ever fixed a leaky roof by pretending it wasn’t raining. And whatever this phenomenon is – machine, intelligence, mirror, myth – it’s dripping right through the ceiling.

---

A heartfelt thank you to Greg Scaduto for both writing this thought-provoking piece and joining me on The UAP Files Podcast (linked below). To read more of Greg’s work, visit his Substack, and follow him on X for ongoing reflections at the edge of meaning, reality, and the unknown - UAP Files - Jimmy