2026

THe yeAr tHaT EVerYthINg ChaNGeS!!1

After Tom’s departure, Mal and I have decided to call the next episode of Gods, Ghosts & UFOs the beginning of season 2, as a way to formalize the death of the old thing, and the birth of whatever it is now.

This also seemed like a good time to talk about the year, this year, 2026, which will be, according to a shocking variety of sources, and in terms of all the things they said weren’t real…

Cray.

Take, for instance, a retired Army colonel, who stood up at a Stanford symposium to say that non-human intelligence has interacted with humanity, and that 2026 would be the pivot point between an orderly disclosure and a chaotic one.

Or a Stanford pathology professor, who has 350 published papers and 50 patents, and who told a Manhattan conference that within five years, something will happen that makes it undeniable we’re not alone.

Or a contractor-turned-UFO-mystic, who claims a luminous feminine entity told him that on Easter 2026 (last week!), “a new knowledge” would enter the world.

Or a channeler in California, who says 2026 is the year of disclosure and 2027 is the year we meet them, face to face.

Or a blind Bulgarian woman, who’s been dead for thirty years, but who also predicted a massive alien spacecraft would enter our atmosphere by November of this year.

Astrologers are charting “a Genesis moment.” Remote viewers are sketching chaos. Christian prophets are foretelling impossible earthquakes. Ray Kurzweil is calmly stating that artificial general intelligence will be here by 2029 and that robots will be doing your dishes by next year.

And then, the most trustworthy source of all, a former CIA officer said, quote, “I think the word got out within the government that they’re showing up in 2027 and we better be prepared.”

It’s not possible that all of these people — military intelligence operatives, academics, scientists, astrologers, remote viewers, channelers, Christian prophets, tech futurists, obscure experiencers — are somehow coordinating these predictions.

But all of them are like, yo, this year’s gonna be a big deal.

I’ve been hearing fits and fragments of this idea for at least the last two years, so I finally decided (better late than never!) to go deep on it.

And it turns out that if you actually catalog all of the predictions and claims that pin some kind of global significance to 2026, you end up with a list of about twenty or more distinct sources, which you can then arrange along a rough spectrum.

Over on one end, there’s the official disclosure-adjacent stuff, like the FY 2026 National Defense Authorization Act passed with three UAP-specific provisions, and Trump’s promises to declassify UFO files, which we can agree is probably a distraction tactic. Regardless, the legislative scaffolding for disclosure is in fact being built right now.

Then, spanning the middle of the spectrum, there are a whole bunch of supposedly credible people making incredible claims. Garry Nolan (that Stanford professor with all the papers and patents) saying with “100 percent” certainty that ET has visited Earth. Karl Nell (former Army colonel) laying out a disclosure campaign plan with 2026 as the fulcrum. Lue Elizondo telling people to find a five-year hobby because by 2027, quote, “everything will be ready.” These are people with security clearances and publication records. Could they also be intelligence assets? Of course, but that doesn’t make what they’re saying meaningless, it just makes the meaning harder to discern.

Finally, all the way over on the other end, you’ve got the remote viewers, the astrologers, the mystics, and they’re all sort of saying the same thing. Which feels, I don’t know, unprecedented? I personally can’t think of any other time in history that so many traditions and ideologies and belief systems and YOU NAME IT, have all converged on such a specific window of time.

For example, Bashar — the entity channeled by Darryl Anka — has been narrowing his “open contact” window for forty years and has now landed on 2027. The entire Western astrological community is claiming February 20, 2026, was a civilizational reset, because that’s when Saturn and Neptune met at the very first degree of the zodiac for the first time since 1702. (PS that was my birthday!) And hey, it’s not for nothing that the US and Israel started an open war with Iran on February 28th, almost like they were on a deadline.

Then there’s Baba Vanga, that blind Bulgarian mystic, whose followers are pointing to November 2026 for alien contact — though it’s worth noting she left zero written records, and her previous 2025 alien prediction already failed. (At least I think it did? Who even knows anymore.)

And Chris Bledsoe — who probably needs his own whole episode at some point -- made that prediction about Easter Sunday this year, which he said would be when the star Regulus aligns with the Sphinx and everything changes. Although, some months ago, astronomers pointed out that Regulus would actually be setting behind the Sphinx at that time, not rising in front of it.

To which I say, HMMM...

Anyway, I’d like to attempt here to ride that sexy balance between full crackpot credulity — “the prophecies are converging, something is coming, buckle up” — and full debunker dismissal — “these are all unfalsifiable claims from grifters and cranks.”

And I think the balance has something to do with looking at the whole pattern, rather than trying to parse out the veracity of any particular claim or prediction.

Part of this pattern is the strong correlation between credibility and falsifiability. The more credible the source, the more modest and testable the assertion. The more dramatic stuff that tends to blow up subreddits is almost always delivered in a way that makes it impossible to disprove.

“A new knowledge will come into the world.”

“There will be a global awakening.”

“Humanity’s consciousness will shift.”

“The veil will become thin.”

These are basically just vibes, and you can retrofit them onto pretty much whatever you want.

If something big happens, the prophecy was right. If nothing happens, well, it was internal, or symbolic, or the timeline adjusted, or we weren’t vibrating at the right frequency to notice.

Ed Dames, a controversial remote viewer, predicted a solar flare from the sun would wipe out almost all life on earth. He called it the Killshot, and he said it was coming, any day now, for THIRTY YEARS.

He died last month, and by my count, solar flares haven’t managed to wipe out any life on Earth. But you can still buy his DVDs.

Hard not to compare him to Chris Bledsoe’s prediction of “a new knowledge” coming on Easter. It doesn’t really matter that he was wrong about the position of Regulus -- I mean it does if you’re looking for something to hang your hat on -- but what really matters is that the prediction is basically meaningless. A knew knowledge? That could be anything!

So when you boil all of these things down, all the predictions and prophecies from across the whole spectrum, you kind of have to conclude that most of them are either unfalsifiable or already false.

Which means the seeming convergence of all of them around this, the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty six, is probably just a self-reinforcing information ecosystem where algorithms feed these claims to the same audiences until it *feels* like the universe is sending a big important message to humanity.

Ahem.

HOWEVER

2026 actually is, already, turning out to be, literally, extraordinary.

We’re speed running what might be the most disruptive technology in human history (AI obviously), which will either entirely and rapidly reshape the global economy, or simply crash it to the ground. (Or, damn it, probably both.) And that’s not even counting how slop and deepfakes are melting away the last vestiges of consensus reality we’ve been clinging to.

Meanwhile, institutional bodies all over the world are taking the idea of UFO disclosure more and more seriously, with some kind of big revelation lurking behind practically every corner.

Plus oh yeah we’re probably watching the inexorable ramp up to world war three in the Middle East.

Globalism is over.

Simultaneously, religion and spirituality are rolling back into Western culture like a tsunami.

In other words, we are, by any reasonable metric, at a genuine inflection point. So it seems like maybe it doesn’t matter what the so-called seers are saying.

The zeitgeist itself is the prophecy

Astrologers read celestial cycles, but they also read culture.

Remote viewers interpret subconscious impressions through the lens of their own minds, which are living in this moment.

Channelers and experiencers and prophets are all, at minimum, swimming in the water we all share — acceleration, instability, the sense that the center cannot hold.

Carl Jung might call this a product of the collective unconscious.

A systems theorist might call it emergent cultural pattern recognition.

A strict materialist would probably call it algorithmically amplified confirmation bias.

In the stock market (about which I admittedly know very little), if enough people believe a crash is coming, their behavior causes the crash. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. It happens all the time. That’s why there’s a term.

If enough people believe this is the year the world will radically and incontrovertibly change, then it will. Full stop.

And that, finally, leaves us with the actual question that I keep circling lately.

So what?

What, if anything, should any of this change about what we’re doing with our time and attention, about how we make choices?

The world is falling into unprecedented chaos -- horror and beauty blossoming together to fill the sky and cover us all.

What do we do about it?