31．Ufology: Outside the Reality Matrix

After the public storm, I began looking for somewhere to turn. The obvious doors were law, the media, human-rights organisations, perhaps even the international institutions created to protect people when power closes in. Yet each possibility led me toward the same unsettling problem: before anyone could decide whether I had been harmed, they first had to decide what kind of person I was—and whether the world I had been speaking about belonged within recognised reality at all.

That was when I began to understand the deeper isolation of the UFO community. Its vulnerability came from more than ridicule. It occupied a space for which modern institutions had little language: too strange for politics, too contested for science, too fluid for religion, and too easily dismissed to command protection. What I was confronting was a question larger than my own case: what happens when an experience becomes dangerous before the world has agreed that it is real enough to defend?

The Institutional Isolation of the UFO Community

After Liu Boyang’s denunciation set off a public storm, silence arrived before any formal resolution.

The once-lively group chats went quiet. Some people left; others deleted old messages. A few wrote privately to ask whether I was safe, then avoided mentioning my name in public. Those who had attended the conference and once spoken freely about UFOs and consciousness quickly learned a new form of self-protection: when the political climate turned cold, step away from the name that had become dangerous.

The campaign began with a single denunciatory article. It spread through media outlets, online platforms, chat groups, and private relationships. Fear drove some people away, while others watched from a safe distance or used the confusion to rearrange their loyalties. By the time the visible attack began to subside, one question remained: where could someone like me turn?

I began with the institutions that, in ordinary circumstances, are meant to offer recourse. Could the law protect me? Would overseas media understand what had happened? Might a human-rights organisation, an international body, or an informal network of support be willing to listen?

The deeper I looked, the clearer the difficulty became. Evidence mattered. Yet before an institution could recognise an injury, it first had to recognise the person who had sustained it. I had to fit inside a category the world already knew how to see.

Most persecuted communities possess, at minimum, a language of recognition. Journalists can invoke press freedom; religious believers can appeal to freedom of conscience. Lawyers, civic activists, and dissidents can be understood through the established vocabulary of law, rights, and political liberty. These frameworks often fail the people they are meant to protect. Even so, they allow suffering to be named, documented, and carried into public view.

The UFO community has no comparable language.

It has little institutional power and no settled public identity. It lies uneasily between science, religion, dissent, and private experience, without fully belonging to any of them. Its members include researchers who study sightings and anomalous technology; experiencers whose lives have been altered by encounters they cannot easily explain; and people drawn into questions of consciousness, extraterrestrial intelligence, and the unexplored margins of human history. There is no central doctrine, recognised authority, or stable public vocabulary to hold them together.

Once UFOs, alien contact, or consciousness exploration become central to a case, questions of expression, association, research freedom, and personal safety can quickly cease to be taken seriously. Conduct that might otherwise be recognised as intimidation or repression is recast as fantasy, superstition, delusion—or, in China, something politically more dangerous.

I came to see that social prejudice was only the surface of the problem. Beneath it lay a deeper exclusion. Modern institutions grant reality most readily to what they can classify, measure, and administer. Experiences that resist those forms are pushed to the outer edge of the imaginable.

That is where the isolation of the UFO community begins. It may be exposed to real pressure, yet find no clear path into international solidarity. Excluded from modern systems of knowledge, its members may also discover that the political and legal languages of protection have no place for them. The danger is real. The recognised door through which to appeal is absent.

The deepest injury reaches beyond reputation or public standing. When an experience cannot be named, and the surrounding world refuses even to grant it the dignity of a question, fear and isolation begin their quiet work. A person may eventually be asked to distrust the evidence of her own life.

This chapter follows that dilemma: how does a community protect itself when it has neither stable institutions nor a public language for what is happening to it? How does a person preserve her inner compass when the world’s refusal to understand begins to erode her sense of what is true?

I. Beyond the Reach of Verification

My search for protection led to a more fundamental question: What becomes of a field held to the highest standards of proof while denied the conditions in which proof can be gathered?

UFO inquiry has long been caught in that contradiction. Contact experiences are often private, unpredictable, and impossible to reproduce at will. The deeper obstacle is institutional. Once an inquiry reaches questions of extraterrestrial intelligence, anomalous technology, or contact with non-human beings, serious investigation frequently gives way to ridicule, dismissal, or suspicion. The subject is pushed beyond the boundary of what respectable institutions are willing to examine.

I encountered this tension directly when I interviewed Paul Hellyer, Canada’s former defence minister. Hellyer told me that governments had been asked to sign secret agreements pledging not to disclose the existence of extraterrestrial civilisations independently. He said that, as Canada’s defence minister, he had been invited to sign on its behalf.

I could not verify that claim from a single interview, and I did not take it as a final answer. Yet his words stayed with me. They sharpened a question I had already begun to carry: why do certain subjects remain so difficult to bring into public view? A lack of interest could not fully explain it. Some questions appeared to reach boundaries guarded before the evidence could be properly examined.

Once a field has been treated as absurd or forbidden, evidence cannot develop in ordinary ways. Research struggles to attract support. Witnesses learn that speaking may cost them credibility. Material that might invite further study is easily dismissed before anyone has the chance to examine it seriously. The ground on which evidence might grow is removed before it can take root.

Within UFO research, accounts of this pattern recur. Daniel Nemes, a Colombian researcher, was frequently cited. Using infrared equipment and what he called a ‘black-light camera,’ he claimed to have captured nearly a thousand images of suspected interdimensional beings. The images drew attention for their apparent clarity, then attracted ridicule and dismissal. Over time, Nemes himself receded from public view, leaving behind far less accessible material than one might expect from work once presented as extensive.

Dr Roger Leir followed another path. He reported removing unusual objects from the bodies of people who described themselves as contactees, then sought to preserve and analyse them through medical and materials-based methods. His work suggested that UFO inquiry might move beyond private testimony toward physical evidence. Yet the research never fully matured. Leir died before it could develop further, and the objects he studied gradually fell from public attention.

The case of Phil Schneider has remained equally unsettling. Schneider claimed to have worked on classified government projects before speaking publicly about underground facilities and extraterrestrial involvement. He later died at home in circumstances that generated lasting doubt and speculation among those who followed his work.

These cases do not amount to proof of a single, coordinated system. Many details remain contested, incomplete, or beyond independent verification. What matters here is the pattern of unease they have left behind. Within the UFO community, they have reinforced a persistent fear that, whenever an investigation draws close to material capable of disturbing the accepted story of reality, the researcher, the evidence, or the witness may simply fade from public view.

This is the particular trap in which the UFO community finds itself. Any lead that might move the question of extraterrestrial life from private experience toward public measurement and open verification may meet stigma, ridicule, or the loss of conditions necessary for further research. Official recognition remains elusive. Replicable data are difficult to accumulate. Witnesses rarely feel secure enough to speak over time. Even instruments, samples, and methods struggle to survive in a field denied stable institutional space.

The subjective character of contact experience deepens the difficulty. It resists the language of conventional science and fits uneasily within the categories of religion, psychology, or culture. Those who have lived such experiences are repeatedly asked to prove them while being denied the conditions under which proof might become possible.

Over time, I came to believe that, where UFO research approaches questions capable of unsettling the accepted story of reality, it often meets forms of resistance that exceed ordinary skepticism. Ridicule, dismissal, silence, and the loss of institutional support can have the same effect: the field is denied the conditions under which it might ever become science.

That does not diminish the meaning of these experiences. It sharpens a more unsettling question: who decides what may count as knowledge, and what must remain at the outer edge of reality?

II. Outside the Modern Order of Knowledge

Verification was only the first barrier. The deeper problem was classification. In the modern world, a community survives partly by being legible: it needs a name, a recognised place, and a language through which its injuries can be understood.

Most marginal groups can eventually be translated into an established public language. Dissidents can be understood through civil and political rights. Journalists belong to the struggle for free expression. Religious communities have traditions, institutions, and legal protections. Even contested practices such as qigong and other mind-body disciplines can be placed, however uneasily, within medicine, cultural tradition, or folklore.

The UFO community has no such settled home.

It straddles scientific inquiry, spiritual experience, anomalous technology, and private testimony. Its members share no single doctrine, authority, or explanation. Some study sightings and aerial phenomena. Some pursue questions of extraterrestrial intelligence. Others have been changed by experiences that forced them to reconsider consciousness, the universe, and the unexplained margins of human history.

That complexity is rarely met with patience. The outside world often seizes on the detail that seems most extravagant, then lets it stand for the whole field.

What the community possesses is intimate and fragile: personal testimony, small circles of mutual recognition, and the inward conviction of people who have lived through something they cannot easily demonstrate. Modern institutions, however, privilege what can be repeated, measured, certified, and placed within an accepted body of evidence. The UFO community has little access to those forms of legitimacy. It also lacks a stable social identity through which law, academia, media, or even other marginalised groups might recognise and defend it.

I came to see that this exclusion reached beyond scepticism about UFOs or extraterrestrial life. Modern systems of knowledge draw an invisible boundary around what may be studied seriously, what may count as knowledge, and what must be assigned to fantasy, superstition, or delusion.

The UFO community has long lived under that form of exile. Its struggle reaches beyond proof of any particular phenomenon. It concerns the right of unexplained experience to remain present long enough to be questioned.

Its deepest isolation begins there. It is pushed beyond the categories through which reality is recognised and beyond the territory science is permitted to explore. Experience, witnesses, and questions abound. What is missing is a world prepared to make room for them.

III. Beyond Political Recognition

Exclusion from the modern order of knowledge was only one part of the problem. When I looked beyond my immediate circle for support, I encountered a colder reality: the UFO community had no secure place in the political and moral languages through which international solidarity is usually organised.

Every system of protection depends, to some degree, on recognition. Journalists can appeal to press freedom. Religious believers can invoke freedom of conscience. Lawyers, civic activists, and dissidents can be understood through the established language of law, civil rights, and political liberty. These frameworks often fail the people they are meant to protect. Yet they give suffering a public form. They allow an injury to be named, documented, and carried beyond the private life of the person who has endured it.

The UFO community enters this world without an equivalent political vocabulary.

It has no settled political identity, recognised institutional role, or single public claim around which support can gather. Its members may be researchers, experiencers, spiritual seekers, or people drawn to questions of extraterrestrial intelligence, consciousness, and hidden technology. Their concerns overlap, yet they do not constitute a conventional movement. No central authority speaks for them. No established institution can easily translate their experience into a familiar public cause.

When pressure falls on someone in this community, the underlying harm may be recognisable enough: surveillance, intimidation, reputational attack, restrictions on expression, or pressure on association. Once the story is framed through UFOs, alien contact, or consciousness, attention can shift away from the harm itself. The central question becomes whether the person’s experience deserves serious consideration at all.

That shift has consequences. A case that might otherwise be understood through freedom of expression, personal safety, or political intimidation becomes difficult to place. Outside institutions may sense that something is wrong, yet remain uncertain how to describe it, whom to approach, or what form of intervention would be legitimate.

Other persecuted communities may at least stand beneath banners the world already recognises. Their suffering can be linked to principles that carry moral force beyond their individual lives. International attention may not change their fate, and many remain painfully unprotected. Still, recognition grants a public legitimacy: their struggle can be understood as part of a justice that others have a duty to defend.

The UFO community is rarely granted that entry.

It is pushed to the outer edge of public concern, beyond the language through which sympathy, advocacy, and resources are usually mobilised. Even institutions inclined to help may find no obvious point of entry. The result is a severe form of isolation. People who believe they have encountered truths the world is not yet prepared to acknowledge may be left to bear the consequences alone.

In the material I encountered and the interviews I conducted, UFO-related questions repeatedly touched on claims of government secrecy, military projects, and ideological boundaries long held under tight control. Such questions offer little stable advantage to established political narratives. Their controversy, together with their resistance to easy verification, encourages most political actors to keep their distance.

In recent years, public discussion of unidentified aerial phenomena has widened in some Western countries, though largely within carefully managed limits. Selected material has entered public view. The deeper position of the wider UFO community, however, has changed little. Within the reality matrix I had begun to recognise, it remained institutionally unplaceable: too difficult to classify, too controversial to defend, and too easily dismissed to be granted standing.

Power could still reach it. Protection rarely did.

IV. The Limits of Protection

After the storm, I turned to the language of protection. I read asylum law, refugee decisions, and the procedures of international human-rights bodies, searching for a category that could hold what had happened to me without reducing it to something unrecognisable.

There was no easy path.

A person seeking refugee protection must show more than fear. Generally, the claimant must be outside the country of origin and able to demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution linked to a recognised ground: race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group.

In theory, a UFO researcher or contact experiencer might seek protection as a member of such a group. In some cases, the facts might also support a claim based on imputed political opinion or religious belief. The difficulty appears almost at once. The UFO community is fluid, diverse, and internally divided. Its members share neither a single doctrine nor a common explanation of what they have seen. Some investigate aerial phenomena. Some pursue questions of extraterrestrial intelligence. Others have been altered by experiences that led them to rethink consciousness, the universe, and the accepted limits of human history.

Refugee law requires more than loose affinity. Legal tests vary by jurisdiction, but a claimant must show that the proposed group has a defining shared characteristic or is perceived as distinct in society, then establish a clear connection between the feared harm and that identity or attributed belief. The UFO community’s openness—one of its most human qualities—becomes a legal vulnerability. It can be difficult to define, represent, and defend in the terms the law requires.

The greater problem lay in the nature of the pressure itself. UFO-related questions often touch state secrecy, military interests, and ideological boundaries. Harm may arrive indirectly: through surveillance, reputational attack, warnings relayed through others, professional isolation, or the sudden withdrawal of people who once appeared close. There may be no written order, formal charge, or named perpetrator. Yet fear can settle into the ordinary texture of a life.

Within UFO research, stories of disappearances, strange accidents, sudden deaths, poisoning, and unexplained crashes have circulated for decades. I cannot treat them as proof of a hidden system. Many remain contested, incomplete, or beyond independent verification. Still, they have shaped the emotional weather of the field. They suggest that danger may arrive without a courtroom, a prison cell, or an official document—quietly, deniably, leaving behind a sequence of events that feels wrong but cannot easily be joined together.

Such ambiguity is devastating when one seeks legal protection. Courts and journalists must work from evidence they can test. They distinguish apprehension from fact, pattern from coincidence, allegation from proof. Yet the injuries that are hardest to pursue often unfold through forms of pressure that leave the least trace.

The law was not entirely closed to people in the UFO community. It demanded an unusually difficult labour of documentation: preserving messages and dates, identifying witnesses, and building a chronology that could show how isolated incidents might form a coherent pattern. One had to turn an atmosphere of fear into something the law was prepared to see.

For someone already living under pressure, that burden could feel like a second persecution.

V. The Limits of UN Protection

After working through the possibilities of asylum and refugee protection, I turned to the United Nations human-rights system. In theory, it offered a way to place a record of state pressure before an international audience. For cases arising from China, however, the routes to an individual remedy narrowed quickly.

China signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1998, yet has never ratified it or acceded to the First Optional Protocol, which permits individual complaints to the Human Rights Committee. It has likewise not accepted the individual-communications procedures under Article 22 of the Convention against Torture or Article 14 of the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Before the substance of a case could be considered, the most direct procedural avenues were already closed.

Some channels remained. The UN Special Procedures could receive allegations and raise them with governments; the Human Rights Council maintained a complaint procedure for consistent patterns of gross and reliably attested human-rights violations. Yet these mechanisms were channels of attention, not adjudication. They could seek clarification, urge action, and create an international record. They could not compel protection, deliver a binding remedy, or make a vulnerable person safe in the present moment.

For someone already living under pressure, that distinction mattered.

International human-rights law had language for the conduct surrounding a UFO-related case: surveillance, threats, public vilification, restrictions on expression or association, and interference with liberty or safety. What it could not readily assess was the larger field of meaning in which those acts had occurred.

Once a case was introduced through UFOs, contact experiences, or consciousness, the inquiry could stall at the threshold of credibility. The focus shifted from the conduct of those exerting pressure to the experience of the person under pressure. The essential question—whether someone had been targeted for researching, speaking about, or sharing an experience—could disappear beneath the prior demand to decide whether that experience belonged within reality at all.

I came to see that seeking protection required a painful act of translation. To make the harm intelligible to an institution, I had to separate it from the very world of experience that had made the harm possible. The system could recognise intimidation. It had no ready place for the reality through which that intimidation had entered a life.

This was the enduring predicament of the UFO community. Existing institutions possessed words for censorship, coercion, and persecution. They had far less capacity to recognise how those forces might operate against people whose experiences had already been assigned to fantasy, unverifiability, or delusion.

The obstacle was procedural, yet it went deeper than procedure. Before the world could decide whether our rights had been violated, it still had to decide whether we were real enough to be heard.

Conclusion

By the time I had followed the available legal and international avenues, I understood that I had been looking for more than protection. I was searching for an acknowledged place in the world for an experience already judged implausible.

The question reached beyond the willingness of a court, an agency, or an international body to intervene. It concerned the boundaries by which a society defines reality: what it is prepared to examine and what it consigns to the margins before inquiry has even begun.

Years of listening taught me, however, that the subject cannot be reduced to isolated accounts of extraterrestrial civilisation. It lies along a deeper fault line: between authorised knowledge and forbidden possibility; between what institutions can absorb and what they are organised to exclude.

This was the meaning I came to give the phrase reality matrix. It names the web of institutions, habits, fears, and official assumptions that determines what may be seen, named, investigated, and defended. Power moves through that web, shaping public language and attention while establishing the cost of certain questions. It can narrow the historical record, withhold technology, dismiss experience, and make silence appear like common sense.

For those who have encountered something they cannot easily explain, the work demands a harder discipline: to distinguish knowledge from inference, preserve evidence, remain open without surrendering discernment, and resist the slow pressure to betray one’s own perception because it has become inconvenient to others.

Some experiences carry a quieter demand. They suggest that consciousness may be larger than the categories through which modern life is administered, and that human beings may be answerable to realities for which our institutions have no language. For some, they also carry the sense of a summons from a wider field of consciousness. Such possibilities do not spare us rigour; they deepen the need for humility, moral restraint, and fidelity to truth before it has found a public form.

Perhaps a time will come when our collective imagination is wide enough to revisit what an earlier age dismissed. The witnesses who were mocked, silenced, or driven to the margins may then be seen differently: as people who kept difficult questions alive when their own time had no place for them.

Truth can be buried, ridiculed, distorted, and driven from public sight. Yet what is kept alive with integrity can outlast the structures that sought to contain it. At history’s threshold, even a small remaining flame may show another generation where to look.

That question soon carried me beyond the margins of ufology. In 2019, as Hong Kong filled with people defending freedoms they feared were slipping away, I began to watch what happened when conscience moved from private conviction into public risk.