People have been seeing unexplainable things in the sky for millennia. While it is easy to dismiss them as hallucinations or flights of fancy, it is much harder to ignore photographs and videos from reputable sources. This is exactly what the office of the director of national intelligence in the US released in 2021. Its report Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena detailed that the US Department of Defense’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena task force was investigating 144 UAP reports made between 2004 and 2021, mostly by military personnel. It also released three declassified videos of some of these UAPs in action.

It was such material that helped persuade Stubbings to take the subject seriously. He interviewed people who believed they had seen something they could not explain, interested in identifying any underlying mental health needs, or common personality types among them. He found that all kinds of personality profiles see UAPs and many are left with unmet psychological needs.

“Initially I felt confident that the UAP issue could be explained by prosaic psychological and/or situational factors, but the more I looked into real cases the less sure I became,” says Stubbings.

“I started realising this is a very credible topic. If true, it’s a game-changer,” he says. “If it’s not true, it’s deeply concerning. How did we get to this point in society where we are thinking all this stuff is true, and we’re spending all this money looking into it?”