Bernardo Kastrup - UAPs, UFOs, Aliens & High Strangeness | With Reality In Mind

ELI5/TLDR

Bernardo Kastrup, a computer engineer turned philosopher who runs the Essentia Foundation and is the leading living voice for analytic idealism, sits down to talk about flying saucers. The bridge is that the UAP phenomenon, as it has been reported for decades, refuses to behave the way a purely physical thing should: it leaves radar traces and lands in hangars, but it also reaches directly into the minds of witnesses, planting insights and feelings of cosmic meaning. That two-faced behaviour, Kastrup argues, doesn’t prove idealism, but it does fit idealism more elegantly than any other ontology, because under idealism the line between “out there” and “in here” was never a hard line in the first place. Along the way he splits the phenomenon into two categories, dismisses the idea that aliens are coming to save us, and points out that the most striking fact about recent disclosures is that almost nobody seems to care.

The Full Story

The relationship between UAPs and idealism

Kastrup is careful from the first minute. He is not saying flying saucers prove his philosophy. The evidence is either classified or, if public, easy to suspect as disinformation, and in any case it is dwarfed by the data from neuroscience and foundations of physics that he usually leans on. The argument runs the other way. Idealism is already on the table for other reasons. The question is whether it makes more sense of the UAP record than physicalism does. He thinks it does.

The bridge is the so-called “Slide 9”, a leaked intelligence assessment that has been circulating publicly for years. He paraphrases it generously rather than quoting:

The phenomenon of UAPs seems to make no distinction between the physical and the mental. It has direct mental effects in the mind of the witnesses… It has these two aspects concurrently in a very natural spontaneous way.

Radar picks the things up. Cameras photograph them. Pilots track them. And yet the witnesses, in the same breath, report telepathic insight, a sudden expanded understanding of life and self that arrives bundled with the sighting, like a free gift. Physicalism has no place to put the second half. Idealism doesn’t need a place: under idealism everything is mental to begin with, and what we call physical is just one category of mentation, the perceptual one.

Two categories: high strangeness vs. nuts and bolts

This is the cleanest cut Kastrup draws all evening, and he uses it repeatedly. The phenomenon comes in two flavours that may or may not have the same origin.

High strangeness is the Jacques Vallée material — alien abductions, encounters with absurd messages, the patient John Mack documented. A being asks a witness what time it is, the witness answers correctly, and the being replies, no, you’re wrong. Read literally these accounts collapse into nonsense. Read as scaffolds for meaning, they start to make sense.

Kastrup borrows Jung’s idea of the archetype as an “empty image”. He explains it via diamonds:

Carbon atoms arrange themselves in a very stable lattice… there is a sense in which you could speak of that lattice structure as existing even when there are no diamonds.

The crystalline structure exists in the laws of physics before any actual diamond forms. In the same way, the high strangeness phenomenon may be projecting an empty scaffold of archetypal meaning — a Star Trek universal translator — that we clothe with our own symbols. In the 19th century the airships, in earlier centuries the elves and little people, today the grey aliens in the operating room. The wardrobe changes; the underlying message — your conception of time is wrong, your conception of reality is wrong — stays put.

They are creating the storm outside. They figured out that the degrees of freedom of their perceptual screen are just that, the degrees of freedom of their perceptual screen, not the degrees of freedom of nature. And they don’t give a damn about this distinction we make about the physical and the mental. They walk all over it and piss all over it.

Nuts and bolts is the other category. It tends to cluster around military installations, especially nuclear-related ones. Witnesses describe a stable, restricted set of shapes — tic-tacs, spheres, cubes inside spheres. The phenomenon is stable enough to sit in a hangar for seventy years. It is not, Kastrup suspects, trying to communicate at all. It is doing something, pursuing some agenda of its own, and the fact that we can see it is incidental to that agenda rather than the point of it.

The high strangeness has been around forever. The nuts and bolts looks more like a twentieth century thing, broadly synchronous with the development of nuclear weapons. They may not even be the same phenomenon.

Crafts in hangars, and the cost of disclosure

Kastrup is careful to distinguish his confidence levels. He is “not privy to the most privileged information”, but takes seriously, from people he trusts in private, that there are intact craft and even biological occupants in government storage, primarily American. None of that contradicts idealism: under idealism the moon is also stably there whether you look at it or not, and the same logic applies to a crashed disk.

What’s more interesting is why disclosure has stalled. The standard story is that governments are afraid of mass panic. Kastrup thinks the real obstacle is institutional embarrassment:

Nobody has figured out what it is… when a government that wants to be respected and wants to be seen as being in control, when it does not have a story to tell you about what it is that it’s disclosing to you, when it can’t tell you ‘yes, this has been happening and we are sorry we didn’t tell you, but don’t worry, we are on top of it’ — they can’t say that, because they don’t know.

You don’t go to the cameras with seventy years of failed reverse engineering. You delay until you have a story, and the story isn’t coming.

Sean Kirkpatrick and the don’t-look-up syndrome

The most striking news of recent years, in Kastrup’s reading, is a five-minute segment buried inside a two-and-a-half hour NASA press briefing in July 2023. Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon’s AARO office and previously seen by the UFO community as the chief denier, calmly described metallic spheres that are seen all over the world, by the most sophisticated military sensors, performing manoeuvres without wings, exhaust, or visible means of propulsion. He showed a video taken by an MQ-9 Reaper drone.

If this had happened in 2015 it would be news all over the world. But somehow the don’t-look-up syndrome is now so prevailing… that we think everything is banal.

That cultural shrug, Kastrup argues, is the actual story. We have lost the ability to be surprised by the largest possible kinds of news. The Truman Show ending — “wow, that was amazing. What’s on the next channel?” — has become standard operating procedure for the species.

He runs through three views of where disclosure is heading. One elder figure in the community says ten years, controlled. Another view says full disclosure within this decade because by then it’ll be impossible to avoid. A third says it’s not under our control at all, that the phenomenon is increasing its own visibility and forcing the issue. Kastrup himself thinks the process started in 2017 and will conclude this decade.

What they are not

He spends a long time killing one particular fantasy. The aliens are not coming to save us:

They have the technology to turn off nuclear missiles on the silos. They didn’t stop what’s happening in Ukraine. They didn’t stop what’s happening in Israel. They surely are monitoring, to the point of making all the parties involved very uncomfortable, but they are not stopping anything. They never saved us from ourselves.

Whatever the phenomenon’s agenda, it does not seem to include rescuing us from our own weapons or our own politics. Every piece of evidence we have, contradictory and limited as it is, points to non-intervention. Ascended masters, second comings, galactic federations — Kastrup waves them all away. “I’m Jewish, and we’re still waiting for the first coming.”

He also pushes back on the idea that these things must be aliens from another planet. There is no evidence for that interpretation. They share too much with us — they can reach inside our minds, which means they are ontologically close to us, much closer than the next-door neighbour. He invokes the uncanny valley from AI research:

The UAP sits in the uncanny valley. It can be surprisingly intimate and close to us, and yet operationally so fantastically alien… that’s the uncanniness of it.

If they share a substrate with us, then the language of “another planet” is probably the wrong language altogether.

Kastrup’s own childhood sighting

He has an experience he kept to himself for decades, including from his partner. As a child of nine or ten, in broad daylight, he watched a bullet-shaped metallic object pass between himself and a tree five metres away — too fast to be a balloon, too rectilinear to be ballistic, no wings, no exhaust, with absurd little fluttering ribbons at the tail. He felt no awe. He felt annoyed:

You shouldn’t be here. What the hell are you doing here? Get the effing out of here.

His last conscious thought was that he would intercept it where it was about to land. Then a complete blank in memory. He has, by his own admission, never made anything of this episode. He shrugged it off like a software bug that corrected itself. He uses himself as a case study in the don’t-look-up syndrome — even the people who see one of these things rarely seem to change their lives over it.

Evidence, paradigms, and the moving goalposts

A long stretch of the conversation turns on what counts as evidence. Kastrup splits this too: in the nuts-and-bolts category, evidence matters enormously — radar, infrared, films, materials under electron microscopes, possible biology in freezers. National security and the avoidance of nuclear miscommunication ride on it.

For high strangeness, evidence is the wrong tool:

Stop looking for the alien implants behind the ear, I mean stop that nonsense. Go with what the experience did to you. What insights did it lead you to? How do you incorporate that into your life and your view of the world?

This is John Mack’s “ontological shock”. The point is the message, not the artefact.

He then turns the lens on science itself. He notes a contradiction in how randomness is defined operationally. In particle physics, three-sigma significance — one in a million odds against random fluctuation — is enough to award a Nobel Prize for the Higgs boson. Meanwhile, the Princeton Global Consciousness Project ran quantum random number generators around the world and found deviations correlated with major events like September 11th, with odds against chance of around 10 to the ninth — a million times stronger than the Higgs threshold. The reception was “no, no, no, it’s just randomness.”

We can move that boundary at will depending on what fits the paradigm or not… that’s the most straightforward way to self-deception. You will believe anything you want to believe if you move that boundary at will depending on the circumstances.

The honest move, he argues, is to fix the threshold somewhere reasonable and then stay with it no matter whose team wins.

Abandoning conceptual categories

The deepest thread of the conversation is about how thinking gets stuck. Kastrup describes his own breakthrough into idealism this way: in his twenties, as a computer engineer, he kept trying to design a conscious machine and kept hitting the same wall. No reconfiguration of structure and function gets you experience. Eventually the wall stopped feeling like an obstacle and started feeling like a clue. He abandoned the category of “physical configurations are primary.” One brick out of the wall, one new door open.

Every conceptual category gives you an extra tool but it closes a door.

He calls this simulated annealing for the mind. Every now and then you have to allow your worldview to get measurably worse for a while, so you don’t get stuck at a local minimum. The UAP problem, he thinks, is one of the few things in modern life that might actually force this — not because it’s interesting, but because it isn’t on our timeline. The hard problem of consciousness can be deferred indefinitely because we invented it. The phenomenon can’t be, because it isn’t asking permission to keep showing up.

Politics, populism, and the failure to understand

Asked whether the cultural interest in UAPs and AI might be a flight from a frightening world — Ukraine, Gaza, the far right surging in Argentina and the Netherlands — Kastrup says no, the danger is real but the data doesn’t support it. The UAP enthusiast community has not expanded. The mainstream is bored by the topic, not gripped by it.

His political diagnosis is interestingly orthogonal. He thinks the rise of figures like Wilders in the Netherlands and Trump in the US is not stupidity but rage. The voters know what they’re voting for. They are willing to throw a lit match into a barrel of gasoline because they have been linguistically heard but not actually understood:

We have to spend less energy trying to win and more energy trying to understand… It’s very easy to listen, it’s very easy to hear, it’s very easy even to understand conceptually in language what the other person is saying. What is difficult is to understand the meaning that’s trying to be conveyed.

Stupidity, he says, is rampant — but it’s not a tribal marker. It is most dangerous when suffixed by the letters PhD.

Perennialism, introspection, and what culture can’t carry

The conversation closes on the perennial philosophy — the claim, going back to Huxley, that the Sufi mystics and the Christian mystics and the Hindu mystics are all pointing at the same underlying non-dual reality. Kastrup agrees, with a caveat:

Religion of course is the history of variety. So if you are willing to do a mild amount of cherry picking, you can argue for anything in religious philosophy.

The perennial reading requires seeing past the imagery to the archetypal scaffold underneath. It requires the same move that high strangeness asks for. Introspection is the royal road to it. The problem, he says drily, is that introspection doesn’t transfer. It can convince you. It cannot convince anyone else. For culture-level argument you are stuck with logic and evidence, which means the deepest things are unsayable in the public square.

Key Takeaways

The UAP phenomenon refuses to respect the line between physical and mental. Idealism doesn’t prove the phenomenon, but it accommodates it more elegantly than physicalism does.
The single most useful cut Kastrup draws: high strangeness (communication via archetypal scaffolds, unstable physical form) vs. nuts and bolts (stable craft and biology, military focus, no apparent communicative intent).
Jung’s empty image as a model: an alien intelligence with no shared semantic references can only communicate by projecting an empty scaffold of meaning that we clothe with our own symbols. This explains why UFO encounters look like the technology of their era.
The most striking recent UAP news — Sean Kirkpatrick’s NASA briefing on globally distributed metallic spheres performing impossible manoeuvres — was greeted with a collective shrug. The “don’t look up” syndrome is now strong enough to absorb almost any disclosure.
The aliens are not here to save us. Every piece of evidence points to non-intervention. Whatever the agenda is, it is not rescue.
Evidence matters for nuts and bolts (national security, geopolitics). Evidence misses the point for high strangeness; the point is the ontological shock, the message for the witness.
Science quietly cheats on its own randomness threshold — three sigma is enough for the Higgs, but ten-to-the-ninth isn’t enough for the Princeton consciousness experiments, because the latter doesn’t fit the paradigm.
The way out of stuck thinking is simulated annealing: be willing to abandon a conceptual category for a while, accept a temporarily worse worldview, in order to escape the local minimum.
Populism, in Kastrup’s reading, is not stupidity but rage at being heard linguistically but not understood. The political prescription is the same as the philosophical one: spend less energy trying to win, more trying to understand.

Claude’s Take

Kastrup is one of the few people who can talk about UFOs in public and not embarrass himself. The reason is that he refuses to play either of the two standard moves. He doesn’t enlist the phenomenon as proof of his philosophy, and he doesn’t dismiss it as social hysteria. He just sits with it and asks which ontology accommodates the data with the fewest contortions. That is unusually grown-up work for this topic.

The cleanest contribution here is the high-strangeness vs. nuts-and-bolts split. It is the kind of distinction that reorganises a whole field. Once you have it, the literature stops being one big mess and becomes two smaller, distinct messes, each of which can be approached on its own terms. That alone earns the video its score.

The weakest stretch is the second-hand-source material. Kastrup is clearly relaying things told to him in private by people closer to the action, and he is honest about being unable to verify any of it. He hedges, but you can hear him wanting to believe his sources. The “biologicals in freezers” claim is the obvious example — it is either a civilisational hinge point or it is industrial-grade misinformation, and there’s no way to tell from inside the conversation. He knows this and says so, which is the right move, but it does mean a lot of the talk is conditional on something we cannot check.

His best instinct is to keep returning to epistemology. The bit about science’s moving goalposts on randomness is sharp and useful, and the bit about simulated annealing as a model for paradigm shifts is one of the cleaner metaphors for intellectual humility I’ve heard. The political tangent, where he refuses to call Wilders or Trump voters stupid and locates the problem in elite refusal to genuinely understand, also lands harder than it has any right to, given that it appeared in a UFO podcast.

Score is 8/10. A 9 would have required either harder evidence or tighter editing — the conversation meanders, and several of the host questions are looser than the answers deserve. But Kastrup himself is in good form, and the framework he builds is portable: the high-strangeness/nuts-and-bolts split, the empty scaffold of meaning, the don’t-look-up syndrome, the demand to be consistent about evidence thresholds. Those are tools you can carry out of this video and use elsewhere.