It's official. Lies Above is now live!
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I came to this as a skeptic and an outsider, with no public background to show for it, having drifted away from organized groups, and conferences long ago. That's part of what makes this one worth telling. I wanted to share how I came to work with the pseudonymous "Missileman" and Rob Jones, two people who are recognizable voices in the UAP community. At the time I met them, I didn't know who either of them were. Both ended up shaping the book in ways I didn't see coming, and both became friends.
I first crossed paths with Missileman in 2023, in passing, at a UAP conference. I didn't know who he was, but he asked an informed question, which was apparently enough for me to remember his face.
When the 2024 Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU) conference was announced with Ross Coulthart giving the keynote, I jumped at it. I'd been trying to get in touch with Coulthart without any luck, and this looked like my chance. As an American, I only knew his 60 Minutes Australia work by reputation, and I wanted to talk with him privately.
We never got to speak; I had to leave early for a consulting engagement. But I stuck around for most of his keynote, and lucky for me, it was largely about exactly the things I'd hoped to ask him about, including how he identified some of his early sources. I'd recommend watching it if you have the time, and I've linked it below.
Ross Coulthart's Key-Note Speech at the 2024 SCU Conference in Huntsville
While attending these conferences, I made a point of talking with as many people as I could, to get a feel for why they were there and what they were like. I was genuinely curious who I'd find, and how accurate the stigma really was.
Toward the end of the day, I noticed someone sitting alone who seemed a little shy. He turned out to be a senior software engineer at Microsoft. I asked him what got him into it, and why he'd come. The same questions I asked everyone else. He told me he was an experiencer. After his own sighting, he'd followed the topic ever since, open to whatever it turned out to be. He gave me his social media so I could stay in touch, though he barely seems to use it. He wasn't looking for publicity or attention. Just a sincere desire to understand what he'd been through. I had heard similar stories through most of the day, with similar situations.
Just before leaving, I recognized "Missileman," but couldn't place him until we spoke. It turned out we'd crossed paths at the original Sol conference, and he was the one who'd asked the informed question that stuck with me. He's a physicist at a major aerospace company with over twenty years of experience, and stays pseudonymous because of his day job. A conversation about our shared love of science fiction turned to the ways UFOs had crept into television. I pointed out that the "shadowy" civilian organization in Stargate SG-1, the NID, seemed like a nod to the real-life National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS). He lit up at that, so I asked if he'd be willing to keep in contact and help translate the aerospace and physics concepts I kept running into. He agreed.
Getting back to the hotel, I'd find out he was fairly well known in the community, having appeared in various podcasts, like American Alchemy. At first we only traded messages here and there.
SCU Huntsville 2025
Even with my limited time there, the 2024 SCU conference had been useful for my book. That, and how close it was, had me looking forward to the 2025 SCU conference in Huntsville. I brought along a longtime friend and fellow skeptic, Ryan.
The 2025 conference was much larger, this time with the former director of the UAP Task Force (UAPTF), Jay Stratton, giving the keynote. I was surprised to see so many people from Skywatcher there, including Jake Barber and James Fowler. I also ran into "Missileman" again, which I hadn't expected. I'd been looking forward to asking him about a recent video from a YouTuber who goes by UAPGerb. I frequent cybersecurity conferences like DEF CON, where it's common to know people only by their online handle, and use it in person when seeing each other. Despite this, it felt unusually awkward to use "Gerb" in the context of this conversation. Before getting to the video, I asked "Missileman" whether he knew Gerb's real name. I hadn't realized the name wasn't public, deliberately so (though that may have changed since). Despite our friendly rapport, Missileman just gave me a funny look and a flat "no." I actually took it as a good sign about him, even if, at the time, he probably thought I was phishing for information.
With the bigger crowd, seating was tight. The only table with two open seats together for Ryan and me happened to be next to Rob Jones. I asked what brought him to the conference and how he'd gotten into it, and he told me a touching story about his brother, who had passed a little over a year earlier and had been deeply into the subject. After losing him, Rob started digging in, and like me, found there was far more to it than the stigma had ever suggested. He'd been seriously into it for only about a year and a half, but I was blown away, not just by how knowledgeable he was, but by how detailed, well-sourced, and aware of his own bias he was. I asked whether we could keep talking, and after the conference, whether he'd help edit the book. He agreed, and ended up helping me find its voice.
I asked Jake Barber, who's a giant in person by the way, if he'd be willing to speak off the record, and gave him my card. He was polite, and asked a couple of questions about my book's thesis. I never heard from him again. I didn't take it personally.
James Fowler was just as approachable, and very polished. I was interested in doing some pro bono work with Skywatcher. That's not an endorsement of them either way. In the UAP circle, people commonly feel they're being targeted by malware, and my interest was purely in getting my hands on a sample to take apart. Skywatcher was at the tip of the spear in the UAP space then, so I figured it was worth a shot. That apparently raised a red flag. A bald man, who seemed to have at least some grasp of network security, put himself between Fowler and me, which gave Fowler an easy way to move on to other people's questions. The bald man turned out to be an executive at the organization, and the move seemed deliberate. No hard feelings, though.
If I were the one consulting for them, and a self-proclaimed "hacker" started talking to a VIP with access to our most sensitive IP, I may have stepped in too.
This time I was able to stay for most of the talks, and several stuck with me. In his keynote, Jay Stratton likened the intelligence failures around UAP to the ones that led to 9/11. He'd lost people close to him, and said he doesn't want to see another tragedy caused by a failure to share UAP data, which is a big part of why he's pushed so hard on the issue. I found Dr. Stephen Bruehl's "UAP Cluster Analysis from Witness Reports", Gene Greneker's "The Role of Radar in UAP Detection and Tracking", and Dr. Laura Domine's "Foundational AI Model / IR Commissioning" especially interesting, and I'd recommend all three.
Meta-Disinformation in the Wall Street Journal
During the conference, the Wall Street Journal published an article full of disinformation, which I've written about before. I regret not pestering people more about what they made of it, but speakers and the more prominent figures usually have a line of people waiting to talk to them between sessions, so I didn't get the chance. Dr. John Blitch, a former Delta Force operator and experiencer, called it "meta-disinformation, or disinformation about disinformation." I agree with his assessment.
Post Conference
After the conference, I kept in much closer touch with "Missileman." Once I started editing the book, he was invaluable. I could run questions and clarifications by him in real time, instead of waiting days, sometimes a week or two, for the professors helping me, where things were more formal. They still offered another perspective whenever I thought there might be a conflict of interest with "Missileman," or when a question might put him in an awkward spot because of his day job.
With Rob now my editor, we spoke often. I didn't realize it at the time, but he also opened a lot of doors I couldn't have on my own. It seems obvious in hindsight, but it never occurred to me that a lot of people were starting to think I was a fed. While writing this, I've tried to hint at why. A high-level hacker, befriending people in the community, asking questions, offering help for nothing in exchange. Rob had seen what I was actually working on, and without my knowing until the book was finished, he helped put those fears to rest for a couple of key people I'd spoken with privately.
To be clear, I've never held a clearance, worked for the federal government, or worked as a federal contractor. I did work at an aerospace company once, but it was a defensive cybersecurity job, and I spent all my time running a security operations center. Anyone familiar with that job knows there's no time for anything else. People who've known me outside of all this are going to get a kick out of it.
Closing
Over the time it's taken me to finish this book, the three of us have grown close, and like I said earlier, the book wouldn't be what it is without them. Rob has since become a research producer and journalist at NewsNation. "Missileman" is becoming a more prominent guest on major podcasts, sometimes as a subject-matter expert himself, sometimes as the rare person who can translate between a layman and an academic.
I'm not an aerospace engineer or an academic, but my day job as a cybersecurity researcher means I have to follow the statistical analysis, machine learning, and software engineering closely enough to catch when they don't hold up. Where the talks leaned on any of it, it held up.
Going in as a skeptic, the stigma had primed me to expect conferences full of academics pushing conspiracy theories. Instead, the rooms were full of professors from major universities, people from aerospace companies, and professionals from just about every field. I met people in their thirties planning to go back to school for advanced STEM degrees because the subject had pulled them in.
If you ever get the chance to attend an SCU conference (or a Sol Symposium, for that matter), I highly recommend it. I often see people looking for a way to get involved but unsure where to start, and volunteering with organizations like these is one of the best ways in. The "truth" here won't be settled by debate. It comes from real science, from publishing the data and putting it out for others to review. That's what these organizations are trying to do. They won't always be right, but it's how we get closer, and regardless of how you feel about them, it's the direction the topic is moving.