I want to tell you something I have never written directly on this site: I am not a journalist by training. I am someone who has been fascinated by this subject since childhood — who read Erich von Däniken and never stopped asking, who joined MUFON as a field investigator and sat across from real witnesses, who spent years following the archaeology into places the textbooks would not go. The UFO Times began as a place to collect what I was learning. It became something more than that.

I am writing this column because I think you deserve to know who is making the editorial decisions you read here, and why.

The Problem With UFO Coverage

Most coverage of UAP falls into one of two traps. The first trap is uncritical enthusiasm: every sighting confirms the theory, every whistleblower is taken at face value, every government document is a smoking gun. The second trap is reflexive dismissal: anyone who takes the subject seriously is naive, every account has a prosaic explanation, the official position is the only responsible one.

Neither of those approaches serves you. The first one makes this site useless the moment someone says something that turns out to be false. The second one ignores the fact that multiple governments, serious scientists, and credentialed military pilots have now said publicly that there are objects in our airspace they cannot identify, and that the official explanation has repeatedly been that there is no explanation.

I wanted to build something in between. Not neutral in the sense of having no position, but honest in the sense of following the evidence where it actually leads — which sometimes points toward something genuinely strange, and sometimes points toward a claim that does not hold up.

“Other sites ask: Could this be aliens? The UFO Times asks: What does the evidence actually tell us?”

That distinction sounds simple. It is harder to maintain than I expected.

A Mistake I Made

Earlier this month, I published a piece about accounts from Lockheed Martin employees describing alleged crash retrieval programs. The article was careful in most respects. But I used a phrase in the subtitle — "what it means that the corporate wall around UAP retrieval is finally starting to crack" — that was stronger than the evidence warranted.

The accounts I cited are significant. But I characterized them with the kind of metaphorical certainty that belongs in opinion writing, not in a piece that is presenting itself as evidence-based reporting. A wall cracking is a conclusion. What I actually had were accounts from individuals whose identities I could not independently verify, whose claims I could not cross-reference against public documents, and whose allegations — however credible-sounding — have not been confirmed by any external source.

I corrected it. The updated language reads: "These accounts are significant. The evidence they rest on remains largely unverified by independent public sources." That is what the evidence supports. That is what I should have written the first time.

I am telling you this not to be self-flagellating about one sentence. I am telling you because the whole point of this site is that the subject deserves careful treatment, and I want you to be able to trust what you read here. That means acknowledging when I fall short of that standard.

Why I Cover Ancient History Alongside UAP

Some readers have asked whether the ancient history content — the Göbekli Tepe articles, the Vimanas pieces, the work on Puma Punku — belongs on the same site as the congressional testimony coverage. It is a fair question.

My honest answer: the connection I find interesting is not that ancient structures were built by extraterrestrials. I find that claim speculative and, in most cases, unnecessary to explain what we observe. What interests me is the deeper pattern of human experience across time — the persistent presence, across cultures that had no contact with each other, of descriptions of flying objects, unusual lights, encounters with beings from elsewhere, and technologies that seem to exceed what we assume was possible at the time.

That is not proof of anything. It is a question worth taking seriously. The UFO Times covers it the same way it covers everything else: here is what the evidence establishes, here is where speculation begins, and here is the line between them.

I was also genuinely inspired as a young person by shows like Ancient Aliens. Giorgio Tsoukalos may occasionally push an interpretation further than the evidence supports, and I have always said so on this site. But he was asking “why not?” at a time when very few people were willing to ask it at all. The question matters even when the answer turns out to be complicated.

What I Am Still Learning

I am learning that the most important editorial decision is not what to include. It is what language to use once you decide to include it. A fact and a fact wrapped in dramatic metaphor are not the same thing. One of them is journalism. The other one is storytelling that happens to be attached to real events, and the reader deserves to know which one they are reading.

I am learning that covering this subject with discipline is harder than covering it with enthusiasm, and that the discipline is what makes the enthusiasm worth something. Anyone can write that something is extraordinary. The useful thing is to explain precisely what is extraordinary about it and why, and to be clear about what we do not yet know.

I am also learning — slowly, and not always gracefully — the difference between a source whose credibility I find compelling and a source whose claims I can actually verify. These are different things. I try to say so.

Why This Column Will Be Monthly

I decided to write a regular editor’s note because the articles on this site do not really tell you much about the person making the decisions. They tell you about David Grusch’s testimony and Ryan Graves’ flight data and the Pentagon’s document releases. What they do not tell you is why I chose to frame them the way I did, what I was uncertain about, what I left out, and what I think I got wrong after the fact.

This column is for that. It will be personal. It will not always be comfortable to write. That is probably a good sign.

Thank you for reading The UFO Times. I mean that simply: thank you. This site exists because the subject matters, and it matters more now than at almost any point in the past seventy years. I want to be worthy of covering it.