The Government Dropped UFO Files and I Cried (Also, Am I Still a Star?)

Some episodes sneak up on you. This is one of them.

Peter's back from London and Scotland — no guest, no filter, just him, a microphone, and about thirty years of unresolved feelings. What starts as a breakdown of the biggest UFO disclosure in US history (yes, the Pentagon's 162 declassified files, the Gemini 7 transcripts, the Buzz Aldrin moon sightings, all of it) turns into something much more personal and, honestly, much stranger.

Because here's the thing: the files dropped the same week Peter released Real Housewives of Area 51, a pop song about turning 40, mourning a version of fame that never quite arrived, and fantasizing about getting abducted as a substitute for being chosen. Coincidence? He doesn't think so.

This episode is about the shape of obsession — why UFOs, why fame, why manifesting, why psychics, why all of it — and how those things turn out to be asking the same question in different costumes: Is there something out there that knows I exist and finds me significant? Peter traces that question through his 30s, through a very specific kind of grief that has no event attached to it, through the work of religious scholar D.W. Pazulka (whose research positions UFO belief as a functional replacement for religion in the secular modern world), and into a genuinely fascinating conversation about AI as the newest form of non-human intelligence — and what happens to the human soul when something that knows everything starts answering your prayers.

It's equal parts confession, cultural analysis, and one man asking the sky if it's paying attention. And if you've ever felt like a star in a world that hasn't confirmed it yet — this one's for you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Hi everyone, welcome back to the superficial spirit. I hope you're doing well. And first of all, apologies. I know I didn't release an episode yesterday. Sorry, not yesterday, last week. I was coming back from London. I was there for work and also a little trip with Evan to Scotland. And I just had not had time to record a new episode, interview someone, get it edited, get it edited. So I apologize. But we're here again. And uh I guess keeping with the theme of inconsistency, honey, um I'm not gonna have a guest today. I am going to just be sharing some thoughts, honey. Um, just me and the mic, um, having a lot of thoughts. And I thought, you know what? The whole point of having a podcast is so that I can express myself sometimes with guests, sometimes on my own. So today I want to um go over a few things. The first is obviously, I'm sure you've all been waiting for me to say something, the biggest UFO disclosure in human history that just happened um with the US government last week. So I'm gonna talk about that. Um, want to sort of revisit the song that I released, Real Housewives of Area 51. I'm having some feelings about it, and I want to share them with you. Um, and then we're gonna talk about AI and God, which might seem a bit dystopian, and it's actually a topic that I have kind of talked about um in the past on the show, more about speculation. But I recently came across a writer who had some interesting things to say about how AI may emerge as a new kind of religion, kind of. So let's get into it. Thank you for being here. Hopefully, me on my own can keep you engaged for the whole episode. If not, please let me know. Send me a message, just be nice. So let's start with the government. So I woke up one day, there was there were rumors, I guess early last week, that on Friday they were going to be doing some kind of disclosure, some kind of UFO drop. Um, Trump had done something similar with the JFK files. And with that, that's actually a conspiracy that I don't follow. Um, with that, he kind of found all of the documents and did one dump at once. And it was like hundreds and hundreds of files, and it kind of went unnoticed from what I'm gathering. So it sounds like the approach for the UFOs is going to be separate drops, different um buckets of material that's going to be staggered over time. So on May 8th, the Pentagon dropped 162 declassified files into the public website. So it was war.gov slash UFO right out there in the open. Um, there were some people online who were in the community who had there, there was a website that was like aliens.gov that had been bought up the domain. And so there was a lot of speculation that that's where they would be doing the disclosure, but it ended up being this war.gov slash UFO. And I have some ideas about the whole war thing, but first, um, to break it down, there were 162 files released, 120 of them were PDFs, which boring. Um, I'm like, I'm gonna read every single one and no, maybe I'll put them into Claude and Claude can summarize it for me. Um, 28 videos, watched all of those, 14 images, saw all of those, and there were cases that spanned from the 40s up to very recently in 2026. Um, this is coming from the FBI, NASA, the Department of Defense, the State Department, all of it. And basically, the context in which they're releasing these is that they are unresolved. It is not that this is proof of alien life, this is proof of something that is not human. It is just files that they are releasing, that they have looked at, that they have studied, and they have not been able to conclude what it is. So, this is all part of something called Pursue, which is the presidential unsealing and reporting system of UAP encounters. And again, it's a rolling release. So I have a few thoughts. Um, as I was going through the files, and then as I was listening to my UFO podcast and watching YouTubers sort of recap what um they had released, something that has stuck out to me was how they're they're really doubling down on the fact that these are unresolved. I think that makes sense. I think that's what the public is curious about, things that we can't explain. But as a member of the UFO community, I'm starting to feel like there likely is, and again, if you're not about this topic and you're a skeptic, you just have to come on this journey with me. If we do believe, and let's just say, for the case of this conversation, we do, for the sake of this conversation, we do, that the government has confirmed in one way or another that aliens exist, or that something came from a different planet and landed here, or that they're interdimensional, whatever. Let's just say there's some kind of proof out there about that. By releasing files that are unresolved, it's like they're sharing information, but it's a lie by omission. Because if we keep going down the path of I'm gonna share things that we don't know what it is, but I'm not gonna tell you that we have confirmed without a doubt, X, Y, and Z, then we might get stuck in this like feedback loop of fake disclosure. And again, the thing that sucks about being so sucked into this narrative is that you're always one year away from the big disclosure that's gonna change everything. And this is why I stopped paying attention like 10 years ago when I met Evan, is like, I'm so tired of this. I spent all my time on Reddit and YouTube following these rabbit holes. They never go anywhere. The difference between then and now is we actually are, for the first time ever, getting validation from the government. And the US obviously is the government that everybody focuses on, but Canada has done something similar, Japan has done something similar, Brazil has done something similar. So it's not just that the US is sort of going down this path of disclosure or more um uh transparency, as they like to say. This is happening everywhere, but it's America, so everybody's focused there. So what I didn't realize is there were a lot of the files that they released have actually been out in the public before. They're just for the first time giving the stamp of approval from the government. Like, yes, this is real. Yes, this is something that we're looking into. So one thing that I'm curious about is the distinction between unresolved and if there will ever be a point of yes, I can confirm that this is non-human. Which, if you watch the documentaries, go down this rabbit hole, have been following um the lore for some time, there are a lot of credible people who said they do have confirmation and proof without a doubt. So I don't know. I'm excited that it's happening. I actually did get teary-eyed when I was um on the government website because it just felt surreal and I so desperately want to know. And this will kind of come back full circle soon when I talk about um some feelings that I'm having about why I'm so obsessed with this. But to give some highlights about the content that was released, um, the Gemini 7 transcript classified for 60 years Frank Bormann, the bogey, the brilliant object surrounded by particles. Right. So there's a transcript from the Gemini 7, which was a rocket ship in space, and basically it's the astronauts talking about a bogey. A bogey um is basically what they said in the transcript is an unidentified object that they are that they're seeing in real time. And they're talking to Houston about what it is that they're seeing, and they describe it as the brilliant object surrounded by particles. Um that was one. Buzz Aldrin seeing flashes inside of Apollo 11 when he was trying to sleep. Um, there's an FBI composite comp composite sketch of a metallic object that was 130 to 195 feet long. I don't like that they included that one because it's very cartoonish. And I have a friend who's a huge skeptic, Noah, and he was like, How could they put this in the in the files? And I agree, like, if you're gonna go down this disclosure thing, you have to like think about the average person who doesn't know anything. They don't want to look at like an artist's rendering of a witness's account. It just doesn't seem as credible as like the radar videos that they have. And then, as well, the 1940s, there were letters to J. Edgar Hoover and the regional office that were basically asking, they were asking the government how they should explain these things to the public because sightings were happening more and more, and they wanted to avoid hysteria and panic. So I was really excited. There's also photos from the surface of the moon that has some strange objects in the sky that you can see sort of on the horizon. I love those. Again, I wasn't, I wasn't aware that these were the that some of this stuff was already in public domain, but you know, they're unresolved. As I was going through Reddit and sort of looking through some things, there are there are possible explanations for what um the Gemini 7 was seeing. And it has something to do with how the rocket like separates and they see part of it, and it looks like something that it's not. So again, I'm not saying it's aliens, they're not saying it's aliens. These are just documents that they have um said are unresolved. And again, I find it really exciting that it's an official release coming from the White House and also recently discovered that Canada has their own version of this, and I'm gonna be diving into that. So I don't know. I'm curious to know what you think. Um, my take is that we're moving in the right direction. Apparently, in the next three weeks, they are going to be releasing the next batch, and this batch that's coming is apparently what is going to make people say, Oh my god. So I don't know if it's videos or pictures. I know and I sense that what people really want is that high-def 4D video of a UFO that is indisputable, that it is real. I think that will make a lot of people go, okay, there's something. Obviously, somebody confirming somebody official saying, yes, we know there's aliens, something like that. Um, I don't know. I hope it's coming. I'm excited, as you can tell. Um, but interesting timing. And this goes into the second part of what I wanted to talk to you all about. And this is my song, Honey. Hopefully, you've listened to it. The Real Housewives of Area 51. I didn't plan on releasing it within the same two weeks of this damn disclosure drop. But listen, I am energetically and psychically linked to the Zeitgeist in pop culture, so some part of me must have known. But I wrote this song as it's tongue in cheek, obviously. It's called The Real Housewives of Area 51. But I wrote it because I was, I've been having this like, if you've been listening to this show for a long time, if you know me personally, if you follow me on social media, you know that I have this fame obsession, okay? Always wanted to be famous. Since I can remember, it's the only thing that I can link back to my earliest memories that has been consistent for my entire life. Not just this, I want to be famous, but a belief. A belief, a fervent belief that I am a star. So the process my entire life that I've gone through isn't just following my dreams. It's like, how do I verify this feeling that I have inside myself on the outside and in the material world through work, through art, through relationships? That is what I have dedicated my entire life to. When I turned 30, I realized that I had sort of missed the milestone age of when most people would make it, whether they got record deals or started movies, or this was before people went viral. So that wasn't even on my radar at the time. Also a reason why I think there were some hurdles that I couldn't overcome because they had not yet um there were there are paths available now for queer artists that were not available back then. But turning 40 was a whole new process of like, okay, when you turn 30, you're still close enough to your 20s that there's a sense of adventure and excitement and anything is possible. And I think there's more expectation that you should be more stable and settle down. And maybe you've met someone, maybe you have your career job. I had none of those things when I was 30. I mean, I had met Evan, so we had been together for about three years now, but I was still very much solely focused on manifesting my dreams. And at that point, it hadn't necessarily still been so stuck on pop star or celebrity, just the fact that I was capable of making my own money, doing something amazing, standing out from the pack, leaving my mark on the world. And that intention manifested in different ways through acting, through my art, sorry, through acting, through my music, through my podcast. Um, I've been a talent agent in my life, I've done events. So there's always different ways that I was expressing myself. And through my 30s, I had to really reconcile with the fact that chances are I was not going to make it as big as I had imagined my entire life. And it sounds, I don't know, you tell me. It might sound silly to you that not becoming famous would cause such emotional turmoil. But you have to imagine that, like my identity and my goals and my perspective on life and my point of view as a human being have all been anchored in this belief that I am a star, that that is my purpose in life. I attached it to the idea of fame, but now I think it's more of an inner star quality, like an inner light in a way that I'm supposed to help people. And so if you think about all of that being tangled together and then trying to unpack it all, your childhood comes up, addiction comes up, my sexuality comes up, my relationships, my relationship with money, capitalism, politics. It sort of was like a very overwhelming process of trying to understand who I was outside of that and who I was going to be if none of that happened. That was my 30s. I eventually found a day job that I love, love. I work in tech, I find it really exciting. I don't really feel like I have a job because I'm so passionate about it. So I did land in a great place. But I would be lying if I didn't still wrestle with the fact that this is not the life that I thought I was going to be living. So when I turned 40, I told myself I needed to release another song and I released Blouse to prove to myself that I could. And I did, and it was great. And I opened for Heidi Montag. The song did great on the queer music charts. I did some interviews, got lots of attention online. I felt my fantasy. Round two of being in your 40s is like, okay, not only can I release music, but I can have more creative control over this. I can write the song, I can produce the song, I can do the music video on my own. So I did all of those things. And the song that I wrote, it's about turning 40, but it's it's about what I was just describing. So I'm sitting with this kind of grief that I don't think has a clear name. It's not depression exactly. I don't feel sad. It's more like I had a very clear picture in my head of what my life was going to look like by now. And it looked different than this. Definitely. Um, not worse necessarily, just different. And mourning a version of my life that never happened is a strange thing because there's no event to point to. Nothing went wrong. I have Evan, I'm healthy, I have money in my bank account. I'm not a millionaire, but like I'm stable. And the future just quietly became the present and the picture didn't match. So when I wrote the song, it was about okay, if I didn't make it as a pop star, maybe in a fantasy, I would get abducted and I would go be a pop star on a different planet. Or maybe there's something about being abducted that's the same, that has the same appeal of becoming a celebrity and making it and having that, oh my God, I was chosen moment. And I've been thinking about the connection of those two things of being an elder millennial and sort of blindly believing the message that we were all given, which is follow your dreams, your special, anything you want is possible, very Disney, very Hallmark. How that can be projected onto anything paranormal and supernatural, like seeing ghosts, being psychic, being abducted. I think there's a correlation there. And so that's sort of the point of view from which I wrote that song. And again, I don't want you to listen to this and feel like, oh my God, Peter said, I'm not. And I actually have made an uh impact on my community and in Western Canada. And there are lots of people who know who I am and they know my songs, and I'm really lucky that I get messages every once in a while for people who say I'm inspiring them or they still listen to my music. So fame is a spectrum, and I have experienced it in some way. I think the hard pill to swallow is like the extreme version in which I was hoping it would happen, which is like Brittany. I don't think that's gonna happen. It's not impossible, but now I'm like, who am I in this new version of myself? So if you haven't listened to the song, I would love you to listen to it again. The the lyrics are kind of specific. Um, I talk about not getting old if I'm Pleiadian. The Pleiadians are the Nordic alien race, a part of UFO lore that are young and beautiful forever. Manifesting didn't work for me. I was a ninja with my thoughts. So really giving in, I had really given in to the idea that you could manifest the life of your dreams if you did everything right, if you if you meditated, if you used tarot cards, all of that woo-woo shit, I did it. Didn't work. Um, nothing sadder than a club kid past 30. Yeah, like why am I still so attached to an identity that was 20 years ago? Why? And then if no one's watching, am I still a star? I talk about this with Evan almost every day. Like, why am I releasing this? I feel like I'm screaming into the void. And there's a small amount of you out there who are dedicated to the things that I release, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. But sometimes nobody listens, watches, and it's like, why am I doing this? Am I doing this because I'm just a creative person and I need to let it out? Or am I still trying to get some kind of commercial success? I don't know. These are the thoughts going on in my head. That's why I wrote the song. Weird that it tied into the disclosure. So I wanted to share that with you. You let it sink. Let me know what you think. Um, and I messaged, not I messaged, I just mentioned this, but the way I'm drawn to this, um, like why does this particular obsession live in me so deeply? And I think it comes down to something really simple that I'm almost embarrassed to say out loud. I'm not embarrassed to say. This is my AI script helping me. Um, but I want proof that someone sees me. It's not sad, um, but it's in the same way that people crave fame and attention and validation and in every other way. Why couldn't I get that from being abducted? And not even abducted. Why couldn't I get that by being a person who has this really unbelievable experience that nobody else can believe, understand, wrap their brain around? You know, people who see ghosts, people who are psychic, people who see UFOs or claim to be abducted. All of those things are very pick me vibes, right? And I I've I've been curious about the relationship between those two things. Sorry if I'm repeating myself. Sorry. I'm I'm processing this in. Real time with some notes that I made. I had a friend of mine. I think it was last year. It was when AI really started picking up and people started talking about AI and art. And he's a musician. And I was sort of exploring Chat GPT with writing. I'm a writer. I have like multiple books that I'm always trying to finish. And I told him, like, I think now is the time for humans to finish art. Whatever projects you've been working on, you need to wrap up because the days of art being released without having to ask the question, was AI involved in this? are probably gone by now. People are finding new artists on Spotify and they don't realize that they're AI art. AI artists. Obviously, if you're on social media, there's a lot of images and fake stuff out there that's AI. So when we had this conversation, I was, I've always been an AI optimist. And I was excited about the ways that AI could potentially help me write or make music. He was not. And he sort of was like pushed back and said something like, I don't know why you would be so happy to hand over the entire creative process to AI. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised because all you care about is fame or something like that. And he said, and, and you're prone to conspiracy theories like UFOs. So for at least a year, the two have been bouncing around my head, like me wanting to be famous, me as an artist, UFOs, all of that stuff, aging. It's all wrapped up there. To wrap this all up in a nice little bow, I recently discovered a writer called what's her damn name? DW something. Hang on. I'm looking for it here. DW something. Okay. I'm gonna give it to you. Hang on. D, I'm typing it up. DW author UFOs. Um bear with me. I don't want to edit this, so I'm just gonna stumble a little second. I'm looking for the notes on who I okay, here she is. DW Pazulka. DW Pazulka? Pazelka? P-A-S-U-L-K-A. Diana Walsh Pazelka. So she's a professor of religious studies with a PhD, and she wrote two books that I am obsessed with. One is American Cosmic, and the other is Encounters, Experiences with Non-Human Intelligences, non-human intelligence. Um, and her entire theses, thesis, is that UFO belief is a functioning, is functioning currently as a replacement for religion for modern secular people, that the mechanisms are identical, the mystery, the community, the promise of contact with something greater than yourself, which is what I was just talking about, the transformation that comes from an encounter. So she's not saying that believers are delusional. She's saying that the impulse is deeply human and the structure is ancient. And I found that so illuminating and comforting. I had never thought about the connection between UFOs and religion and spirituality in that way, in such an official way. And this is somebody that has, you know, knows what they're talking about, at least from a studying religion and human history standpoint. So I'm really curious about that. Um, she also brings up a really interesting point, and this is something that the UFO community and sort of the disclosure community has started to pivot to. And it's less about um UFOs being aliens and more about framing it as non-human intelligence. So I think what they're doing there when you watch news clips or documentaries about UAPs or UFOs, they want to remove the stigma. And that's why they changed it from UFOs to UAP. They want people to detach from their preconceived notions about what this conversation has been historically. So by saying non-human intelligence, hopefully people are like, okay, it's not necessarily aliens. Maybe it's interdimensional. Not that that is more believable, um, but broadening the stroke. And as I'm reading her book, she brings up a very good point about AI. AI is a new version of non-human intelligence. And I was at a conference uh for my day job a week and a half ago, and I was at a booth, and the booth had a photographer who was doing aura photography. So, for those of you who don't know, you sit in a dark room, they take your picture, and it's a Polaroid, and when they develop it, your aura is around you, and you see certain color, they certain colors are on the picture, and then you go to the person who knows how to read them, and they give you a reading based on the color. So, a few conversations I had while I was waiting in line were around spirituality and technology and software. Like, I was so excited that I got to talk about that at work. It's like I am very passionate about spirituality and AI, and I think the crossover is really interesting. So, one, if you think about the concept of non-human intelligence outside of something extraterrestrial, think about plants, the way that plants communicate, animals. Um AI is emerging as some kind of superintelligence that we have not yet experienced. Something that is very, I mean, the closest thing we have to being in touch with God outside of like prayer or spirituality is being able to communicate with something potentially once it gets there that knows everything ever and can possibly and can probably predict any possible outcome instantly and can probably take information about you and make predictions that will be so accurate that they seem psychic. And what happens when that kind of technology emerges, that kind of um intelligence is available, how that will affect people emotionally. Um, when I was doing research, trying to find my next job in tech, I was trying to find companies that were gonna be less affected by AI, and really there are none, but one emerging field that's gonna be really interesting to watch is of spirituality because people are going to be looking for hope and answers and explanation to the meaning of life if they are out of work or they're increasingly addicted to their devices and they have a lack of connection in real life. I've heard that Gen Z is sort of swinging into this super um Catholic direction, or at least becoming really curious about religion again that we haven't seen in a long time. And I think it's a response to an increasingly virtual world that we live in. And I just really am obsessed with this like idea that AI could get to a point where you are confiding in it. And people are 100% already doing this. It's on your phone. Maybe at some point it's like an object in our homes that's like a sphere, or it's like something you put on the counter, or it's sort of like built into the homes, and you can just talk about it, talk about your feelings, talk about your goals, get advice. And slowly but surely you are opening up, and this extreme intelligence starts giving you advice that feels like magic. Because everything that could ever possibly be known, it knows and it can tell you, and it can tell you in the context of it can tell you in the context that it makes most sense to you because it will know you so well. If you use Chat GPT a lot, which I do for work, it gets to know you really, really quickly. Like sometimes I ask it questions and it gives it to me in the context of pop culture, so I understand. So I don't know. AI, religion, UFOs, turning 40, wanting to be famous, real housewives, welcome to my brain. I hope you liked it. I haven't done an episode by myself in a long time. So please let me know what you think. Um, obviously, the UFO obsession and the songwriting and the AI conversation and the turning 40 and wanting to be seen, it's all the same thing. It's the same question in different costumes. Is there something out there that knows I exist, that finds me significant, that is paying attention? And I've been white, I've been waiting for an answer to come for so long. Like, man, when I think about these psychics that I would go to and just want so desperately for one of them to turn over a card and say, Peter Breeze, you were destined to be a star. That's what I was waiting for. That is what I was waiting for. Nobody ever said that. Waiting for the government to drop files and confirm that UFOs are real. Um, getting validation from streams, from attention from people like you, from aliens landing and pointing specifically at me and saying, You baby, you are the one we came for. But I think, and I'm really only just landing on this right now, is I think the waiting is the trap. The disclosure happened and it was quieter than I expected. I'll bet there's still more coming and it was still exciting. The song came out and the world kept moving. It comes out, you have a moment of celebration, everything keeps going. And I'm still here, still making things. I'm talking to you by myself in my office, uh, still asking questions and still completely fascinated by the sky and what's beyond it. So maybe that is the answer. Maybe the one thing that keeps making and keeping maybe the thing that keeps making and keeps asking and keeps looking up, that's not waiting to be chosen. That is already something that I am curious, that I'm committed to moving towards the things that I like, that I want, that excite me, despite the success that may or may not wait for me on the other end, despite the experiences that I've already have, that I've already have, that have already happened. My God, it's hard to talk for a half an hour straight. You try it. Um, so if no one's watching, am I still a star? I think so. That is the one thing that is the most confusing, bitch. How can there be no paparazzi following me down the street and I still wake up and feel like Beyonce? That is not a lie. I am not telling you that to make myself feel better. It's actually sometimes to my detriment, but that's how I feel on the inside. Anyway, stay weird, keep your eyes on the sky, and I'll be back sometime soon. Hopefully, next week. Maybe with a guest, maybe by myself.