THE BOOK
Closer Encounters, by Jason Reza Jorjani, London, 2021. An Introduction, seven chapters and a Conclusion, written in response to the June 2021 Pentagon UAP report.
In June 2021 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released nine unclassified pages conceding that 143 of 144 military UAP incidents remained unexplained. Most books written in the wake of that report ask whether it went far enough. Closer Encounters is the only one I know that treats it as a confession designed to conceal a greater crime, “the first stage of an elaborate lie that is going to be told in order to cover up the truth in perpetuity.” That sentence, from the book’s Conclusion, is a fair sample of the register throughout: total confidence, maximum stakes, and a genuine argument underneath it that deserves a more careful reading than either its admirers or its detractors tend to give it.
The thesis, compressed to one breath, runs like this. The UFO phenomenon is real but is not extraterrestrial. The occupants are human time travellers, the “Nordics” of the abduction literature, a breakaway civilisation seeded by a nineteenth-century occult and plutocratic elite, matured in the SS Bell experiments of 1944 and 1945, and now resident across our entire timeline. Their craft are time machines, “Matrix re-programming devices” in the book’s phrase. The deep past is their construction site: Atlantis on a temperate Antarctica, ruined cities on Mars, a hollow manufactured Moon. The world religions are their control infrastructure. And behind them moves something older and stranger still, a shape-shifting, precognitive Trickster intelligence that Jorjani locates in Earth’s far-future oceans, adversarial to the Breakaway Civilization’s sealed order, which humanity must learn to face on Promethean terms. The book ends with three words that tell you exactly how far it is willing to go: “We are the aliens.”
Before the argument, a word about the author. Jorjani’s philosophical credentials are real: a doctorate from Stony Brook, a body of prior work in which the book’s Promethean concepts were developed, a Parapsychological Association book award, and a fluency with Heidegger, Schmitt, Bergson, Jung and Feyerabend that no other writer in this literature can match. He is also a controversial and polarising figure, and readers who follow these debates will have their own view of him; my concern here is the book, which deserves to be met on its own argument, and that is what the rest of this review tries to do.
What the book does well, it does better than anyone. The strongest layer is political theory. Following Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall’s “Sovereignty and the UFO”, and radicalising it through Carl Schmitt, Jorjani argues that the UFO taboo is not an accident of embarrassment but a functional necessity: modern rule is anthropocentric, and a confirmed superior other dissolves its foundations, which is why “an authoritative taboo on UFOs is functionally necessary for rule to be sustained in its present form.” Run through the nuclear-interference record, Malmstrom’s twenty dead missiles, Minot’s unauthorised countdown, Big Sur’s disabled dummy warhead, the argument becomes the best short answer in print to the question every newcomer asks: why would they hide it? Because no state can admit that something toys with its strategic arsenal and abducts its citizens at will, and survive as a state. Whatever else is true of this book, that chapter is publishable political science, and its cold reading of what Disclosure would actually cost has not been bettered.
Two other layers deserve their due. The metaphysics of time is a serious minority position argued with energy: against block time and the Many Worlds interpretation, Jorjani defends a single revisable timeline in a quantum-computational cosmos, on the ground that free will and moral responsibility require it. “Time travel does change the past. Not the past of another universe. Our past.” You do not have to accept the ufology to find the argument interesting, and philosophers of physics have defended stranger things. And the Fort chapters are, I think, the best thing in the book: the most philosophically serious treatment Charles Fort has ever received, making a genuine case that the author of “I think we’re property” anticipated Kuhn and Feyerabend on how the sciences exclude the data that would embarrass them. The book’s title for its religion chapter comes from Fort’s “bland and shining Stupidity that has so often been mistaken for God”, and the exegesis earns the borrowing.
The difficulty is how much those strong layers are asked to carry. The book asks the reader for a lot of trust: sources of very different reliability are often set side by side at the same level of confidence, Robert Hastings’ multiply attested nuclear cases next to Corso, channeled Contactee material, the Cook and Farrell Nazi Bell literature, Sitchin’s etymologies that Assyriologists dispute, Brandenburg’s Mars isotopes, hollow-Moon numerology. Often a rhetorical question settles into an assertion within a page or two, and the time-travel hypothesis comes close to being methodologically unfalsifiable, since any counter-evidence can be said to have been edited into the timeline. The question I kept coming back to was what, even in principle, would count against the thesis; the book is more interested in building the picture than in testing it, and a reader is best served by holding that in mind.
The part I found hardest to sit with, and would not feel right leaving out, is the book’s handling of race. To its credit, its genealogy of a “Nordic” master race is framed as an exposure of an ideology, not an endorsement, and the Conclusion is explicitly anti-Nordic and anti-custodial. Even so, a few passages sit uneasily with that framing, the approving citations of Richard Lynn and Charles Murray, a reading of David Reich that many geneticists would question, Savitri Devi used as a hermeneutic resource, and I think a reader is better off having those flagged than not. I flag it only to give a careful reader the fuller context, not to single out Jorjani; the book is strong enough elsewhere that it will be read.
The religion chapter will polarise readers completely, and is meant to. Over 120 pages, the longest stretch in the book, Genesis, Exodus, Ezekiel, the Gospels and the Quran are reread as Close Encounter reportage and engineered control: Sinai as a landed craft, Jesus as “the leader of a UFO cult”, the Black Death as biowarfare, the afterlife itself as a “Psychotronic” soul-management system. The readings lean on translations and etymologies that specialists set aside long ago, and the tone toward revealed religion is uncompromising. Scholars of scripture would contest much of it. As mythography, though, a dark inversion of the whole ancient-astronaut tradition, it has an undeniable pull, which is part of why the sourcing is worth keeping in view.
And then, strangest and most interesting, the book turns on itself. Not everything, Jorjani concedes, reduces to the Ancestors. The orbs, the owls, the mantids, the Men In Black, the whole Skinwalker repertoire belong to something else: a precognitive, shape-shifting Trickster super-organism that he argues entered our world from Earth’s far-future oceans, with the octopus as its avatar, “borrowed from the future.” It is adversarial to the Breakaway Civilization’s crackless, sealed order; it dissolves every fixed structure it touches; and the book’s prescription is neither worship nor war but seduction, coaxing it into appearing as Promethea, patroness of a new aeon. This is the book at its most original and most speculative, weird thought of a high order, and I confess it is the layer I keep thinking about. It is also a structural admission: the Ancestors thesis explains too little, and the book knows it.
The Conclusion is where the book turns from analysis to programme. Real Disclosure, it argues, is structurally impossible; what is coming instead is “the Biggest Lie”, a staged alien threat paired with Pleiadian saviours; and the response Jorjani calls for is that “we must overthrow all governments and abolish all nations”, replacing them with a universal Prometheist order. He says outright that the goal is not to save humanity. It is an openly revolutionary vision, and for many readers it will be the part that stays with them.
So what is Closer Encounters, finally? It is the fringe canon’s summa: the one book that connects the 2021 UAP moment, the nuclear-interference record, the abduction literature, the breakaway-civilisation genre, alternative archaeology, comparative mythology and the Fortean tradition into a single continuous argument, with real philosophical instrumentation and total sourcing enthusiasm. As a map of that territory it is indispensable, a vivid annotated index to the entire literature, and its strongest chapters deserve engagement on their merits. As a guide to the actual world it asks to be read with more caution: it shows how far a single bold idea can be carried when the author lets very little stand in its way. The distance between its best chapters, the sovereignty argument and the Fort exegesis, and its most contested stretches, the scriptural rereadings and parts of the genealogy, is the truest measure of the book, and of both its exhilaration and its limit.
The 2021 report was five years ago this summer. The staged alien threat the book predicted has not arrived, so its boldest forecast has, so far, gone unmet. What remains is the question the sovereignty chapter asks better than almost anyone. Read it slowly, and check as you go; it rewards a curious and sceptical reader, and it is one of the most ambitious books its field has produced.
References and further reading
- Closer Encounters, Jason Reza Jorjani, London, 2021
- ODNI, Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, 25 June 2021
- Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, “Sovereignty and the UFO”, Political Theory, vol. 36 no. 4, 2008
- Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, 1919
- Robert Hastings, UFOs and Nukes, 2008, for the nuclear-interference cases the book draws on
- Michael P. Masters, Identified Flying Objects, 2019, the future-human morphology argument the book adapts
- Jason Reza Jorjani, Prometheus and Atlas, 2016, and Prometheism, 2020, where the book’s philosophical programme was developed