Rachid Echahly
Founder & Editor-in-Chief

Rachid Echahly

Founder · Editor-in-Chief · MUFON Field Investigator (NY Chapter)

It started with a book. Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods — that strange, maddening, impossible book — landed in my hands and refused to leave my mind. The premise was simple and staggering: what if the gods of ancient civilisations were not myths, but memories? What if the flying chariots, the divine fire from the sky, the superhuman beings who taught early humans to build and think and organise — what if they were real, and the evidence was still there in stone, waiting for someone willing to look at it differently?

I was that person. I had always been that person, even before I had the vocabulary for it. Von Däniken gave me the vocabulary — and then Zecharia Sitchin gave me the depth, and Giorgio Tsoukalos gave me the connection to a community of people who refused to accept the official silence. I read everything I could find. I followed the archaeology into corners that textbooks wouldn't go.

Then came The X-Files. I know that sounds like a strange thing to say seriously, but hear me out: Chris Carter's show was not just entertainment. It was a repository. Every season pulled from real cases — Roswell, Betty and Barney Hill, the Men in Black, government mind-control programmes, cattle mutilations, recovered craft, non-human biology. The fiction was a thin wrapper around a genuine investigative tradition, and for millions of viewers in the 1990s, it was the first time anyone had pointed at all of it together and said: what if this is connected?

It deepened everything for me. By the time I found MUFON — the Mutual UFO Network, the largest civilian UFO investigation organisation in the world — I wasn't a casual curious person anymore. I was ready to do the actual work. I joined the New York chapter as a field investigator and started taking cases.

Nothing in a book or a television show prepares you for sitting across from a real witness. These were not impressionable people. They were teachers, engineers, retired military, parents driving their kids home from school. They described what they saw with the kind of specific, involuntary detail that you cannot fabricate: the way the light moved, the silence where there should have been noise, the physical sensation, the duration. Case after case, the same characteristics appeared independently, from people who had never spoken to each other and had no reason to lie. I came away from that experience with one firm conviction: something is happening, and it has been happening for a very long time.

I built TheUFOTimes because the information was scattered and the commentary was often poor — either too sensational to be useful or too cautious to be honest. I wanted a place that took the ancient astronaut hypothesis seriously alongside the modern UAP evidence. A place that connected von Däniken's ancient Sumerian carvings to David Grusch's congressional testimony, because I believe they are part of the same story. A place that treated the people reading it as intelligent adults capable of weighing the evidence themselves.

The site has been running since 2010. In that time, the world has moved significantly in the direction the research always pointed. Pentagon videos released. AARO established. Congressional hearings. Whistleblowers testifying under oath. None of this surprises me. All of it matters enormously. We are, I believe, approaching the moment when the full picture becomes impossible to conceal — and when that moment arrives, I want this site to have been part of the preparation for it.