What’s Under the Great Pyramid: Trying to erase the past

I didn’t want to go down this rabbit hole. I really didn’t. I’ve commented before on what they’re finding at Giza, on the engineering that went into those pyramids, and how they stand there as these massive, precise works that feel equal in their own way to the earthworks and mound structures scattered across central Ohio. Markers of cultures that came, did their thing with the land and the stars, and then faded or got overwritten. But the more I hear about these recent scans—satellite radar picking up giant columns, what sound like enormous cylindrical structures, spiral staircases, and a whole underground megastructure or even a “city” beneath the Khafre Pyramid and across the Giza Plateau—the harder it is to stay quiet. Italian researchers using SAR technology have been talking about this since around 2025, mapping vertical shafts, horizontal passages, branched tunnels, and something so large they’re calling it a sprawling subterranean citadel. There’s even talk of a second Sphinx hidden under a sand mound, with lines of symmetry connecting it to the known one. They’re still analyzing, waiting on permissions to dig, but the data is out there now, and it lines up with what a lot of people have suspected for years about chambers under the paws, voids inside the pyramids themselves, and structures that go deeper than the water table should comfortably allow.

I see the Great Pyramid the way I see those Ohio mounds—not as the starting point of a civilization, but as a marker left by or built upon something that came before. The conventional story puts the pyramids at Giza around 2580–2560 BC, built for Khufu and his successors in the Fourth Dynasty. Incredible precision in the alignment to true north, the star shafts pointing to Orion and Sirius, the mathematics that still makes engineers shake their heads. But step inside the Great Pyramid proper and you notice something striking: there are no hieroglyphs in the main chambers. Quarry marks with Khufu’s name appear in some of the relieving chambers above the King’s Chamber, but the core structure lacks the elaborate inscriptions you’d expect from a royal Egyptian tomb of that era. That absence has always nagged at me. It suggests the thing might predate the full flowering of dynastic Egyptian writing and ritual, or that it served a different primary purpose than what the later pharaohs used it for.

The Sphinx tells a similar story when you look at the erosion. Robert Schoch has been arguing for decades that the vertical, undulating solution features and deep fissures on the enclosure walls and body of the Sphinx come from prolonged heavy rainfall, not just wind or salt crystallization. Those patterns don’t show up the same way on other Giza structures from the same limestone layer. Schoch’s timeline keeps getting pushed back—originally before 5000 BC, then toward 9700 BC, aligning with the end of the last Ice Age and the wetter conditions of the African Humid Period, what we call the Green Sahara. Back then the desert wasn’t a desert. There were lakes, rivers, grasslands, and room for people to build and sustain more complex societies. The Nile itself behaved differently. Sea levels sat hundreds of feet lower during the depths of the Ice Age, and even several thousand years later the coastlines and water tables were not what we see today. Critics say the erosion could come from occasional heavy rains that lingered into the Old Kingdom or from quarrying and later flooding, but the concentrated vertical weathering on the Sphinx enclosure still looks to me like it records a wetter climate that ended long before the conventional date for Khafre’s complex.

What the recent scans are hinting at underneath changes the picture even more. Giant columns or cylinders deep below, structures that appear to sit below the current water table in places. People always bring up the practical problem: how do you maintain chambers or machinery under the water table without constant pumping or sealing? But I’ve seen the same thing here in Ohio. The aquifers under Butler County and the Great Miami River valley are some of the best in the world, fed by glacial melt from the Ice Age. Data centers are going up in Trenton partly because that ancient freshwater is right there under the surface, abundant and cold. And if you go out to Lake Erie, to the quartz caves under South Bass Island, you can walk around chambers that sit below the lake level itself. The water doesn’t have to be an absolute barrier if the builders understood the geology, the rock, and how to work with pressure and sealing. So the idea that something substantial sits under the pyramids and Sphinx, possibly older than the stone we see on the surface, doesn’t strike me as impossible. It strikes me as consistent with how advanced cultures mark territory and time.

I keep coming back to the same human pattern. When a new culture or a new group of people moves into a place with existing monuments of power and knowledge, the first instinct is often to build on top of them—literally and figuratively. You claim the site, you add your own layer, you put your symbols on it, and you try to make the previous work look like it was always leading up to you. It’s the ex-husband syndrome played out at civilizational scale. The new husband comes in, takes the old pictures off the wall, redecorates, and dreads the day the ex shows up to pick up the kids because the reminder threatens the new narrative. In business you see the same thing: new ownership or new management comes in, replaces the old team where they can, puts up the “new management” sign, and quietly sidelines anything that reminds people the previous regime had real competence or deeper roots. In politics and in cities it happens constantly. Here in Ohio, plenty of our towns and developments sit on or right next to ancient earthworks. The Adena built conical mounds and ritual spaces as early as 800 BC or before; the Hopewell created those vast geometric enclosures and ceremonial landscapes across central and southern Ohio a couple thousand years ago; later Fort Ancient people added their own layers. Many of those mounds got plowed flat or built over as European settlement expanded. Sometimes a street gets named after the mound that used to be there, but the living memory and the full context get erased. It’s the same instinct: we don’t want the reminder that somebody with different knowledge or different priorities was here first and did impressive things with the landscape.

I think that’s exactly what happened at Giza. A previous culture—whether entirely human or with some non-human intelligence component we’re only now starting to confront through UAP disclosure—left behind markers. Massive stonework, precise alignments to the stars, possibly functional technology or energy-related structures that later scans are picking up as those giant columns and underground networks. The Egyptians who rose in the Nile Valley encountered those markers or the remnants of the people who maintained them. They decided to revere them in their own way, or to dominate them by building their own magnificent versions right on top and around them. They added hieroglyphic language that shows clear influences from Sumerian cuneiform traditions and broader trade networks that stretched across the ancient world—networks that likely included people moving by boat along coastlines and island chains even when the climate was colder and sea levels different. The pyramids we see became the Egyptian statement: we are here now, we are the inheritors, this is our story. But the bones underneath, the deeper structures the SAR scans are revealing, tell a longer tale.

That pattern repeats across the planet. You hear stories of pyramid-like structures or aligned markers in China, in parts of Russia, even satellite interpretations of features in Antarctica that some claim look artificial from a time when the continent wasn’t fully ice-covered. The Piri Reis map from 1513 shows a southern landmass with detail that has fueled arguments about older source maps depicting Antarctica before the ice. Mainstream scholarship debates whether it’s truly Antarctica or a distorted South America, but the existence of such maps at all points to lost or transmitted knowledge that doesn’t fit the tidy timeline of “civilization starts in Sumer and Egypt around 3000 BC and spreads from there.” Lake Superior copper mining offers another data point. The Old Copper Complex shows indigenous people extracting and working native copper on a significant scale going back at least to the Middle Archaic period, with some evidence and arguments pushing activity earlier, around or before 4000–5000 BC in places. That’s sophisticated work for the time—pits, fire-setting, hammering, annealing—and it suggests networks and knowledge that could move materials and ideas across long distances. When you combine that with lower sea levels during and after the Ice Age, easier land bridges in some regions, and the simple fact that determined people in boats have always been willing to push beyond the horizon (the “lunatics” who kept going island to island across the Pacific, proving the world wasn’t flat by coming back with stories), the idea of earlier, wider human or hybrid activity becomes a lot more plausible.

The reluctance to fully excavate and publicize what’s under Giza fits the same pattern. If you’re the new culture trying to own the narrative, you don’t want hard evidence that a previous layer had superior engineering, possibly superior spiritual or technological connection, or simply existed on a timeline that makes your own story look derivative. You control access, you control the permits, you let the sand and the official story do the work of erasure. But the longer you sit on it, the more conspiracy theories bloom in the vacuum. That’s what we’re seeing now. The scans are forcing the conversation. People are asking what those giant columns and cylinders are doing down there. Are they structural? Are they part of some energy or resonance system the earlier builders understood? Are they tombs, or something else entirely? We don’t know the engineering details yet. What I do know is that the human instinct to build on top of and then minimize the previous is so consistent across families, businesses, cities, and civilizations that it would be strange if it didn’t happen at Giza too.

This ties directly into the larger picture I’ve been exploring in my own work. In The Politics of Heaven, I’ve been laying out how hidden motivations and narrative control operate across time—biblical conspiracies, giants, Nephilim, spiritual warfare, population agendas, and the way power structures try to keep certain layers of history and reality concealed. The same forces that try to manage what we know about current UAP encounters and non-human intelligence are often the same institutional reflexes that prefer to keep archaeological questions safely within the approved timeline. Disclosure is accelerating now, partly because we’re pushing into space in a serious way and the old containment strategy no longer holds. Governments and agencies that spent decades telling the public there was nothing to see are having to adjust because the data and the public pressure won’t allow the old story to stand. The same thing is happening with these Giza scans. The smoke is visible; there’s fire somewhere underneath.

I’ve watched the same dynamic play out in smaller arenas. During the Covid years I took the family RV out to New Mexico for a stretch, partly to clear my head and partly because I was furious at how business and government institutions were behaving. I spent time walking the ground where the Lincoln County War and the John Chisum ranch conflicts played out—Billy the Kid territory. That land teaches you something about resilience and about how stories get written by the survivors and the powerful. I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business out there, drawing on what I’d learned in aerospace and in dealing with consultants and new management trying to overwrite previous knowledge. The gunfighter ethos isn’t about shooting first; it’s about seeing the situation clearly, imposing your will on circumstances when they’re trying to impose on you, and refusing to let the official story erase what you know to be true. That same refusal is what’s needed now with these ancient sites. We don’t have to accept the most outlandish theories, but we also don’t have to accept the most defensive official timeline that treats every anomaly as a threat to be explained away.

The Sphinx itself carries that tension. Napoleon’s soldiers supposedly found it buried up to the neck in sand. The Dream Stele in front of it tells the story of Thutmose IV being promised kingship if he cleared the sand away. Now the scans are suggesting there might be a twin monument and a whole network underneath. If the erosion really does record a much wetter climate, and if the underground features turn out to be as extensive as the SAR data implies, then the Sphinx and the pyramids above it become even clearer as layered markers. One culture’s sacred or functional site gets sanded over by time and climate, another culture claims it and builds bigger, and the process of reverence mixed with domination repeats. We do it in our personal lives every time a blended family tries to pretend the previous spouse never existed. We do it in corporate takeovers. We do it when cities pave over historic neighborhoods or when political movements try to memory-hole inconvenient parts of the past. The scale is different at Giza, but the psychology is the same.

So what do I think those coils and columns under the pyramids actually are? I think they’re remnants of a previous technological or ritual system that the later Egyptians either didn’t fully understand or chose to incorporate and then overwrite with their own monumental statement. I don’t see them as simple extensions of the pyramid construction itself. I see them as evidence that something older and possibly more advanced was already operating in that landscape when the people we call Egyptians arrived or consolidated power. The same way the Ohio earthworks mark the presence of cultures that had their own sophisticated understanding of geometry, astronomy, and ritual landscape before later groups moved through or settled on top of them. The same way global distribution of pyramid forms and aligned monuments hints at knowledge that traveled or arose independently in multiple places during windows when climate and sea levels made long-distance movement more feasible than we sometimes assume.

The most disconcerting part, as I’ve said before, is realizing that the culture we credit with the pyramids may itself have been a kind of cargo or inheritor culture—impressive in its own right, but building on foundations laid by others. That doesn’t diminish the achievement of the Egyptians who maintained and expanded the site. It simply puts them in a longer chain of human (and possibly more-than-human) activity on this planet. And it explains why there’s such institutional resistance to letting the excavations go where the scans are pointing. Admitting a deeper timeline or a previous layer of capability forces a rewrite of the story we tell ourselves about progress and about who gets to claim the mantle of “most advanced.”

I keep saying the same thing to anyone who will listen: if you don’t want the conspiracy theories, go dig. Put shovels and ground-penetrating tools and proper archaeological teams on the sites the SAR data has flagged. Publish the raw results. Let the evidence speak instead of letting silence and restricted access breed every wild speculation imaginable. The water table is a challenge, not an impossibility, as anyone who’s worked around glacial aquifers or island caves knows. The technology exists to investigate safely. What’s missing is often the will, and that absence of will tells its own story about narrative control.

We’re living in a time when multiple lines of evidence—UAP disclosure files, these Giza scans, re-examination of global mound and pyramid sites, genetic and archaeological work on ancient migrations—are converging on the same conclusion: we were never alone, and the timeline of high civilization on Earth is longer and more layered than the standard model allowed. Previous cultures left markers aligned to the stars so that later people would know when they were in history and that they were not the first. Some of those markers got built over, sanded over, or deliberately minimized. The human pattern of the new husband erasing the old pictures, or the new management pretending the old company had nothing valuable, plays out at every scale. But the markers keep surfacing. The scans at Giza are just the latest reminder that the ground itself remembers what official stories try to forget.

So I say let’s look. Let’s measure those columns and cylinders properly. Let’s see what’s under the second Sphinx if it’s there. Let’s connect it to the water table realities and the climate history of the Green Sahara and the Ice Age sea level changes. Let’s compare it honestly to the earthworks in Ohio and the copper networks around the Great Lakes and the persistent stories of older knowledge preserved in maps and myths. And let’s do it without the reflexive need to make everything fit the shortest, safest timeline. The truth doesn’t need protecting from evidence. Only insecure narratives do.

The pyramids and what lies beneath them are not just engineering marvels or tombs. They are signposts. They mark a time when a previous layer of capability existed, got partially overwritten by the next wave of culture, and left enough of a trace that we’re still arguing about it thousands of years later. That argument itself is the proof of the pattern. Every time we choose to dig instead of dismiss, we push back against the oldest human habit of all: the habit of building our monuments on the bones of the previous world and then pretending we were always the ones who mattered most. The scans are forcing the issue now. The question is whether we’ll have the courage to follow the evidence wherever it leads—into the water table, into the deeper timeline, and into the uncomfortable recognition that we are part of a much older and more crowded story than we were taught.

I’ve been saying variations of this for years, in conversations and in my writing. The more the data comes in—from Giza, from disclosure channels, from re-readings of ancient texts like the Book of Enoch and its accounts of earlier presences—the more consistent the picture becomes. There was something here before. It left markers. Later cultures built on those markers, sometimes revering them, sometimes trying to dominate or erase the memory of them. We’re doing the same thing in our own time with information and with history. The only way out of the cycle is to stop being afraid of what the ground, or the scans, or the disclosure documents actually say. Go dig. Publish everything. Let the previous layers speak for themselves. That’s how you break the pattern instead of repeating it.

And when we do, I suspect we’ll find that the “coils” and columns under Giza are not anomalies to be explained away. They’re evidence. Evidence of a previous technological or ritual presence that understood things about energy, resonance, water, and alignment that we’re only beginning to rediscover. Evidence that the Egyptians were not the sole authors of the Giza Plateau but participants in a longer conversation with the past. Evidence that human nature—magnificent, insecure, creative, and destructive—has been playing the same overwriting game since the first monuments went up. The scans have already started the next chapter. Now it’s up to us whether we read it honestly or keep trying to paste our preferred story over the top of it.

Bibliography / Sources Referenced

1. New York Post, “Researchers detect second Sphinx beneath Pyramids of Giza,” March 27, 2026 (reporting on Filippo Biondi SAR satellite radar claims of megastructure, columns, tunnels, and possible twin Sphinx under sand mound).

2. Jerusalem Post and related coverage of Italian-Scottish Khafre SAR Project announcements, March 2025–2026, detailing underground “city” or megastructure detections beneath Giza Plateau.

3. Ancient Architects YouTube analysis and related discussions of “Giant Cylinders Below the Khafre Pyramid” from 2025 SAR scan data releases.

4. ScanPyramids project documentation and updates on internal voids and corridors in the Great Pyramid and other Giza monuments (ongoing muon and thermal scanning work).

5. Robert M. Schoch research highlights on the Great Sphinx water erosion hypothesis (robertschoch.com and associated publications); see also Wikipedia summary of the hypothesis for overview of vertical solution features and rainfall arguments.

6. Mark Lehner and mainstream Egyptological responses on Sphinx enclosure, erosion causes, and integration with Khafre complex (various publications and interviews, including Getty Conservation Institute and geoarchaeological studies).

7. Wikipedia and academic summaries of the African Humid Period / Green Sahara (roughly 14,500–5,000 years ago, with regional drying timelines affecting Nile Valley and potential for earlier complex societies).

8. Ohio History Connection / Serpent Mound site information; Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks descriptions; Adena and Fort Ancient mound-building chronologies (circa 800 BC–AD 1650 range for major activity).

9. Wikipedia “Old Copper Complex” and National Park Service Isle Royale / Great Lakes copper mining history; additional reporting on Middle Archaic copper metallurgy dates (~4000 BC and earlier activity claims).

10. Wikipedia “Piri Reis map” and related discussions of 1513 cartography showing southern landmasses; alternative history analyses of possible Antarctica ice-free source data.

11. Standard Egyptological references on Fourth Dynasty pyramid construction, alignments, and lack of extensive internal hieroglyphs in the Great Pyramid core (e.g., Mark Lehner, The Complete Pyramids; Zahi Hawass statements on Giza access and discoveries).

12. Broader climate and sea-level literature on Last Glacial Maximum and post-Ice Age changes (lower sea levels ~120 m / ~400 ft, land bridge and coastal migration implications).

13. UAP disclosure reporting and statements from 2024–2026 period regarding non-human intelligence, archaeological implications, and institutional narrative control (various government releases and public commentary).

14. Personal and philosophical context drawn from the author’s body of work, including The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming 2027) and The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, on hidden motivations, narrative erasure, resilience, and layered history.

15. Additional cross-references: Graham Hancock-style alternative history perspectives on lost civilizations and global monument distribution (for color and contrast with mainstream timelines); Book of Enoch and related ancient texts on earlier presences and spiritual layers (as interpretive framework in the author’s writing).

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

MK ULTRA: The Most important part of Disclosure Day

I did not attempt to cap my enthusiasm when I walked into the theater for Steven Spielberg’s new film, Disclosure Day. I had listened to a lot of the reviews that had been out for several weeks by the time I saw it. I had read the commentary, watched the clips, and absorbed the consensus that was forming around this picture. And yet I kept coming back to one element that almost nobody seemed to be talking about—the one part that mattered most to me. It was not the surface spectacle of the aliens themselves. It was not whether the gray figure at the end looked convincingly real or a little too much like polished CGI. It was not even the marvelous score by John Williams or the career-highlight work from Emily Blunt as the meteorologist who finds herself suddenly able to read minds and speak in strange tongues. Those things are all fine and good, and they make for a compelling piece of summer entertainment. But the film’s real power, the thing that has stayed with me and kept me turning it over in my mind for days afterward, lies in something far more unsettling and far more relevant to the world we actually live in right now.

Disclosure Day is a story about the long, quiet interaction between non-human intelligence and this planet. The premise is that these visitors have been here for decades, moving in and out of our reality with an ease that makes our notions of locked doors and secure borders feel almost quaint. The characters in the film discover fragments of this truth through whistleblowers, through grainy archival footage of interrogations and examinations, through personal experiences that cannot be explained away by conventional science. The public revelation—the Disclosure Day of the title—arrives as both a shock and a kind of confirmation for anyone who has been paying attention to the steady drip of UAP testimony from Congress in recent years. But Spielberg, being Spielberg, does not stop at the wow factor of little green men or gray men or whatever form they take. He uses the revelation as a doorway into something much older and much more personal: the question of who really controls the territory inside our own heads.

That is the part the reviews mostly missed or chose to glide past. People came out of the theater talking about whether the alien looked fake, whether this was Spielberg’s best work or merely a solid return to form, whether the wonder of Close Encounters or E.T. had been recaptured or diluted by a more conspiratorial tone. They talked about the chase sequences, the mind-reading set pieces, the late reveal that lands with a mixture of awe and unease. All of that is fair game for conversation. But the deeper current running underneath the plot—the one that actually kept me awake after the credits rolled—is the depiction of how easily sovereignty can be stripped from a human being when someone else possesses the right technology or the right knowledge. In the film, that stripping occurs via a piece of alien-derived hardware wielded by a powerful figure within a shadowy aerospace-adjacent organization. The device does not simply persuade or threaten. It reaches into the mind of the target and begins to rewrite loyalties, plant impulses, and turn a person into an instrument who may not even remember why they are doing what they are doing—the subject acts without full memory of the programming. Compliance is tested, reinforced, and deployed. It is MKUltra logic dressed in twenty-first-century production values and tied to the arrival of non-human intelligence.

I have been thinking about this for a long time, long before this particular movie came along. I have listened carefully to the UAP whistleblowers who have testified under oath in recent years. I have read the declassified documents. I have watched how the conversation has shifted from outright dismissal to grudging acknowledgment that something real is happening in our skies and has been happening for a very long time. Congressional testimony has now put on the record that non-human biologics have been recovered from crash sites. Whistleblowers have described multi-decade crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programs run in collaboration with private aerospace companies. They have spoken of threats, of intimidation, of people harmed or worse to keep the secret. David Grusch and others have indicated that the United States government is aware of several distinct kinds of non-human life forms—ranging from bipedal entities to other, stranger morphologies. Some estimates in the broader research community suggest four or more species have been documented through various channels, with speculation about larger networks or agreements among them. The precise numbers are less important than the underlying reality: we are not alone, we have not been alone for a very long time, and the institutions that have known this have gone to extraordinary lengths to manage the information and, more importantly, to manage us.

What Disclosure Day does so effectively—and what so many viewers seem to have glanced off—is to dramatize the next logical step in that management. If advanced non-human intelligences can move through our atmosphere and through our physical defenses with impunity, then the old model of sovereignty—the locked door, the national border, the personal boundary of skin and skull—has already been breached at the highest level. The film does not need to show fleets of saucers landing on the White House lawn to make this point. It shows something quieter and more insidious: the ability to reach inside a human being and turn that person into a vector for someone else’s will. In one sequence, a character under this influence is compelled toward betrayal and violence. The resistance, when it comes, is not primarily physical or technological in the conventional sense. It is moral and spiritual. A crucifix is clutched until it draws blood. A hand is stabbed to break the connection. Faith, or at least the memory of a deeper allegiance, becomes the firewall. That is not an accident of plotting. It is the thematic core. This is a theme with Spielberg going back to the Indiana Jones film, The Temple of Doom. When under possession, Indiana Jones is burnt with a torch to break the spell over him. A fantasy movie full of fun with some very deep things to say about possession.

I had a conversation with one of my grandsons not long ago that has stayed with me in exactly this context. We were at a campsite, and we came across a particularly striking beetle moving through the undergrowth. It was an interesting little character—armored, purposeful, going about its business with the single-minded intensity that insects possess. I pointed it out to him, and we talked for a long time about life forms, about how many different ways there are to be alive on this planet, about the vast gulf between a beetle’s experience of the world and our own. The beetle has autonomy within its limits. It can move, forage, reproduce, and respond to threats in accordance with its nature. But it has no concept of the larger forces that might casually end its existence. If I had chosen to step on it, there would have been no trial, no moral reckoning on my part beyond a momentary twinge, and certainly no legal consequence. The beetle’s sovereignty is real but radically circumscribed by its place in the order of things.

That is the feeling the film left me with regarding our own position. If there are intelligences that have mastered physics we do not yet understand, that can appear and disappear at will, that have been studying us for decades or centuries while we argued about whether they existed at all, then from their perspective we may look a great deal like that beetle looks to us. They would not necessarily hate us or wish us active harm. They might have priorities that do not include preserving our illusions of control. They might regard our political arrangements, our legal systems, our carefully constructed borders, property rights, and personal boundaries as charmingly provincial. And if they—or, more disturbingly, if human beings who have gained access to fragments of their technology—possessed the means to step inside our minds the way we can step on a beetle, then the question of sovereignty becomes existential rather than theoretical.

This is where the film’s connection to the real history of mind-control research becomes impossible to ignore. Project MKUltra was not a fever dream. It was a documented CIA program that ran from the early 1950s through the early 1970s, involving experiments in hypnosis, drugs, sensory deprivation, and psychological manipulation on unwitting subjects. The Church Committee hearings in 1975 exposed the broad outlines, and subsequent document releases have filled in more of the picture. While the formal program officially ended, the underlying impulse—to understand and ultimately to control the territory of human consciousness—did not simply vanish. Parallel lines of research into remote viewing and psychic phenomena were funded through the 1970s and 1980s under names such as the Stargate Project, which involved the Defense Intelligence Agency and contractors like the Stanford Research Institute. Ingo Swann, Pat Price, Joseph McMoneagle, and others demonstrated abilities to describe distant locations and events under controlled conditions. The results were mixed from an intelligence standpoint, and the program was eventually terminated, but the fact that the United States government spent serious resources exploring whether consciousness could be projected and information gathered without the ordinary constraints of space and time is itself revealing. It tells us that at least some people inside the system took seriously the possibility that the mind is not as bounded as we like to believe.

Disclosure Day takes that possibility and runs it forward into the present. The mind-control technology in the film is attributed to either reverse-engineered or directly supplied alien hardware, wielded by human actors within powerful institutions. The effect is the same as the old MKUltra aspirations: the subject’s agency is compromised, their memories may be fragmented or absent, and their actions serve purposes they may not fully understand or endorse. The film does not need to name the three-letter agencies explicitly to make the point. The shadow of those agencies, and of the aerospace companies that have long operated in the black-budget world alongside them, hangs over the story. In our real history, those same institutions have been accused—sometimes with documentary support, sometimes in the realm of persistent allegation—of using every tool at their disposal to protect secrets that would destabilize public assumptions about who is really in charge. The film dramatizes what that protection might look like when the secret in question is not merely a crashed craft or a recovered body, but the ability to edit human loyalty itself.

What makes Disclosure Day more than a standard conspiracy thriller is that it refuses to let the audience off the hook with easy answers. The aliens are not purely benevolent teachers, nor are they cartoonish invaders. They are other beings whose priorities and capabilities place them so far outside our frame of reference that our usual categories of friend or enemy feel inadequate. The human beings who have been managing the secret are not monolithic villains either. Some are genuinely trying to protect a population they believe would panic. Others are protecting power, careers, and the ability to continue operating without oversight. The film suggests that the greatest danger is not the arrival of the other, but the way that arrival can be used to justify ever-greater concentrations of unaccountable control over ordinary people. When the institutions that know the truth also possess tools to edit minds, the old social contract based on informed consent and transparent governance has already collapsed. The disclosure event itself can then be managed—shaped, delayed, or spun—to serve the interests of those who have the most to lose from genuine transparency.

This is why the film’s political dimension feels so charged, even if Spielberg himself has not always aligned with the political instincts I hold most dear. There is a long pattern in American governance of taking problems created or exacerbated by one set of policies and then offering expanded government power as the only solution. The same voices that spent decades denying or ridiculing the reality of UAP phenomena are now in a position to say, in effect, “See? We told you something was happening. Now let us manage the disclosure, the contact protocols, and the integration of whatever technologies we have recovered. Trust us. We are the only ones who can keep you safe.” The film does not have to spell this out in dialogue. It is evident in the conspiracy’s architecture that the characters are fighting. The same institutions that ran MKUltra, that ran Stargate, that have run the black programs around crash retrievals, are the ones positioned to become the gatekeepers of the new reality. Their argument is always the same: the public cannot handle the truth; therefore, we must control the narrative, the technology, and ultimately the minds that might resist the narrative.

I have seen this pattern up close in smaller arenas. Years ago, I served as foreman of a Butler County grand jury. We interviewed hundreds of officers, toured facilities, and listened to prosecutors describe cases that revealed repeated institutional failures—places where the system protected itself rather than the people it was supposed to serve. I came away with a clearer understanding of how two-tiered justice actually operates, how emotional intelligence and personal integrity can be in short supply even among those charged with protecting the public, and how easily ordinary citizens can be left without recourse when the institutions decide that transparency is too risky. That experience has colored everything I have observed since about larger structures of power, whether they are local school boards, federal agencies, or the aerospace contractors that move between them. The film’s depiction of a powerful organization using advanced tools to enforce compliance feels less like science fiction and more like an extrapolation of patterns I have already watched play out on a smaller scale.

The same pattern appears in the way certain political movements have approached questions of sovereignty at every level. Secure borders are not merely about keeping physical threats out. They are about preserving a people’s ability to maintain their own culture, laws, and capacity for self-government. When borders are treated as optional or as moral inconveniences, the message is that sovereignty itself is negotiable. The same logic that says a nation has no right to decide who enters its territory can be applied, with only a slight shift in framing, to the territory inside a citizen’s own mind. If outside forces can reach the mind—whether those forces are foreign governments, domestic agencies, or non-human intelligences with superior technology—then the individual’s ability to give or withhold consent becomes the first casualty. The film makes this connection visceral. The character who resists the mind-control device does so not by hacking a computer or shooting a drone, but by invoking something deeper and older than the technology arrayed against her. She invokes a loyalty that predates the institutions and the visitors alike.

That is why I keep returning to the role of faith in the story. It is not presented as a magic shield that automatically defeats advanced technology. It is presented as a form of resistance that operates on a different frequency—the mind-control device works by reaching into the spaces where memory, desire, and identity are formed. Faith, in the film’s treatment, appears to occupy some of those same spaces but answers to a different authority. When the character grips the crucifix or drives the blade into her own hand to break the connection, she is not performing a technological countermeasure. She is asserting that her ultimate allegiance is not available for reprogramming. Whether one shares the particular religious framework or not, the broader point stands: any system of control that treats human beings as programmable units must eventually reckon with the fact that many human beings experience themselves as having a dimension that cannot be fully captured or rewritten by external hardware. That dimension has been given many names across history—soul, spirit, conscience, the image of God. The film does not need to resolve the theological questions. It only needs to show that the control system encounters resistance precisely where that dimension is active.

This is also why the movie’s value extends far beyond the theater. Art of this kind enters the sovereign spaces where real conversation happens—around kitchen tables, in living rooms, on long drives with family members, in the quiet hours after children have gone to bed. Those are the places where people still feel they have some measure of control over the narrative. A film like Disclosure Day can plant questions in those spaces that mass media and official channels cannot easily reach or manage. People will talk about the alien at the end. They will debate whether it looked real. But some of them will also talk, eventually, about the mind-control sequences. They will wonder, out loud in the safety of trusted company, whether the technologies depicted are purely fictional or whether they represent an extrapolation of capabilities that already exist in fragments. They will ask each other what it would mean if the institutions that have lied for decades about the existence of non-human intelligence also possessed tools to edit citizens’ loyalties. Those conversations, multiplied across thousands of sovereign households, are where genuine cultural shifts begin. They are also where resistance to the next phase of control can take root.

I have spent a good portion of my life watching how power actually operates in the spaces between official stories and lived experience. In my younger years in the Cincinnati area, I had to move in circles connected to the old organized crime networks that ran through Newport, Kentucky, and parts of the Sharonville corridor. I saw firsthand how cash, documents, and high-profile individuals were handled, how coded language functioned, how plausible deniability was maintained, and how networks of influence could reach into law enforcement and the courts when necessary. I learned early that the visible structures of authority are not always the real ones, and that the people who truly understand the game rarely advertise the fact. Those lessons have served me well in analyzing everything from local political races to national policy debates to the larger questions of who benefits from keeping certain realities off the public table. Disclosure Day resonates with that accumulated experience. It shows a system in which the official story and the operational reality have diverged to the point that ordinary people no longer possess the information required to give meaningful consent to the world they live in.

The film also resonates with the work I have been doing on my own book, The Politics of Heaven. That project has taken me deep into questions of biblical conspiracy, ancient interactions between humanity and other intelligences, the role of giants and fallen entities in the historical record, and how spiritual warfare has manifested across centuries as struggles over who gets to define reality for the rest of us. The idea that non-human intelligences have been present and active for a very long time is not new to me. What Disclosure Day adds is a contemporary, technologically inflected version of the same ancient pattern: beings with superior capabilities interacting with humanity, human institutions attempting to manage or exploit that interaction for their own ends, and ordinary people caught between forces that treat their sovereignty as an inconvenience. The film does not frame the conflict in explicitly biblical terms, but the underlying architecture is recognizable to anyone who has studied how power has been exercised in the shadows since the earliest recorded civilizations.

I do not expect everyone who sees Disclosure Day to come away with the same set of questions I have. Some will enjoy it as a well-crafted thriller with strong performances and a dose of wonder. Others will criticize it for not going far enough in one direction or for going too far in another. That is as it should be. The measure of the film is not whether it converts every viewer into a full-time researcher of UAP phenomena or declassified mind-control programs. The measure is whether it succeeds in getting people who would otherwise never discuss these things to talk about them inside their own sovereign circles. On that score, I think it succeeds more than its early reviews suggest. The conversations it provokes are the point. The spectacle is secondary.

I hope the film does well at the box office. I hope it reaches enough people that the questions it raises cannot be easily contained or dismissed. I hope it encourages more artists to explore the territory where advanced technology, ancient mysteries, and the enduring human hunger for sovereignty intersect. And I hope that viewers who find themselves unsettled by the mind-control elements will take the time to look into the real historical record—the MKUltra documents, the Stargate files, the congressional UAP hearings, the whistleblower testimony—rather than treating the film as pure fantasy. The line between what has been documented and what remains speculative is narrower than most people assume.

In the end, Disclosure Day is not primarily about aliens. It is about us. It is about what happens to a species that has spent generations being told it is alone in the universe, only to discover that the institutions it trusted to tell the truth have been managing a much larger reality behind the curtain. It is about what happens when those same institutions acquire tools that can reach inside the last private space—the space between a person’s ears—and begin to edit what that person believes, remembers, and chooses. It is about whether faith, conscience, and the stubborn refusal to be rewritten can still function as firewalls when the technology of control has advanced beyond anything the framers of our Constitution could have imagined. Those are the questions worth carrying out of the theater and into the conversations that happen in the places we still control. Those are the questions that will determine whether disclosure, when it finally comes in full, leads to greater freedom or to a more sophisticated form of captivity.

Footnotes

I have no interest in putting a cap on that conversation either. The film has done its job if it leaves people talking long after the popcorn is gone. My own contribution is to point out that the most important part of Disclosure Day is not the part everybody is already discussing. It is the part that touches the deepest fear and the deepest hope we carry as human beings: the fear that our minds are not our own, and the hope that something in us remains beyond the reach of any program, any device, or any agenda that would turn us into instruments rather than sovereign souls. That hope is what makes the film worth seeing, and worth arguing about, for a long time to come.

[1] Project MKUltra was a covert CIA program focused on mind control and behavioral modification that officially ran from 1953 until its termination in the early 1970s. The Church Committee hearings of 1975 brought many of its activities into public view. See John D. Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (New York: Times Books, 1979).

[2] Remote viewing research received significant government funding beginning in the early 1970s at Stanford Research Institute under CIA and later DIA sponsorship. The Stargate Project operated from approximately 1978 to 1995. See Joseph McMoneagle, Remote Viewing Secrets: A Handbook (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 2000); and the declassified CIA documents available through the agency’s reading room.

[3] In July 2023, former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch testified before Congress that the U.S. government had operated a multi-decade crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program involving non-human craft and recovered “non-human biologics.” He has since elaborated that the government is aware of several distinct kinds of non-human life forms. See the official transcript of the July 26, 2023, hearing before the House Oversight Committee, Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs; and Luis Elizondo, Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UAP (New York: William Morrow, 2024).

[4] Spielberg has long explored themes of consciousness, communication across boundaries, and the loss or recovery of personal agency. In Always (1990), a deceased pilot communicates with the living through intermediaries and grapples with unfinished emotional business. In E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), the alien’s presence both disrupts and ultimately restores family bonds fractured by divorce. Catch Me If You Can (2002) examines manipulation, identity, and the ability of a skilled individual to impose his will on institutional systems. Disclosure Day continues and darkens these threads by introducing technologies that can directly edit loyalty and memory.

[5] The concept of multiple non-human species or “federations” appears across decades of UAP research literature, from Jacques Vallée’s Passport to Magonia (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969) to more recent compilations of whistleblower and contactee testimony. While precise numbers remain contested, the existence of morphological diversity in reported encounters is a consistent thread.

[6] The author’s service as foreman of a Butler County, Ohio, grand jury provided direct exposure to institutional dynamics, two-tiered justice, and the human costs of systemic failures. These experiences inform the analysis of larger structures of unaccountable power.

[7] The author’s background in aerospace program management and long-standing interest in black-budget activities provide additional context for interpreting the role of private contractors in managing sensitive technologies and information. See also the author’s forthcoming book, The Politics of Heaven, which examines biblical and historical patterns of interaction between humanity and non-human intelligences.

[8] The beetle metaphor draws from direct observation during family camping and model rocketry activities with the author’s grandson. The contrast between limited insect autonomy and human technological vulnerability serves as a recurring image for the asymmetry of power when advanced intelligences interact with less advanced ones.

[9] Hillary Clinton’s public defenses of her husband during the 1990s scandals frequently emphasized themes of personal control and boundaries. The film’s exploration of mental sovereignty resonates with those older rhetorical claims about locked doors and complete self-knowledge.

[10] The evolution of surveillance and influence technologies from mid-century mind-control experiments to contemporary digital systems (facial recognition, always-on microphones, algorithmic curation of information) represents a continuous thread rather than a clean break. Smartphones and AI interfaces can be understood as distributed, voluntary extensions of earlier aspirations for remote influence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR FURTHER READING

Primary Sources and Government Documents

• Church Committee. Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. U.S. Senate, 1975–1976.

• Central Intelligence Agency. Declassified MKUltra and Stargate Project documents. Available through the CIA Reading Room.

• U.S. House of Representatives. Hearing on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, July 26, 2023. Official transcript.

• Elizondo, Luis. Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UAP. New York: William Morrow, 2024.

• Grusch, David. Congressional testimony and subsequent public statements, 2023–2026.

Historical and Analytical Works on Mind Control and Remote Viewing

• Marks, John D. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control. New York: Times Books, 1979.

• McMoneagle, Joseph. Remote Viewing Secrets: A Handbook. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing, 2000.

• Swann, Ingo. Natural ESP: A Layman’s Guide to Unlocking the Extra-Sensory Power of Your Mind. New York: Bantam, 1987.

• Schnabel, Jim. Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies. New York: Dell, 1997.

UAP and Non-Human Intelligence Research

• Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969.

• Kean, Leslie. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. New York: Harmony Books, 2010.

• Dolan, Richard M. UFOs and the National Security State (two volumes). Rochester, NY: Keyhole Publishing, 2000–2009.

• Imbrogno, Philip J. Interdimensional Universe: The New Science of UFOs, Paranormal Phenomena and Otherdimensional Beings. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2010.

Biblical, Archaeological, and Spiritual Warfare Context

• The Book of Enoch. Translated by R. H. Charles. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1912. (Multiple modern editions available.)

• Biblical Archaeology Review. Various issues, 1975–present. (The author has been a subscriber since childhood.)

• Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural World of the Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015.

• Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming 2027). Manuscript in circulation among select readers.

• Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: Winning Strategies from the American West. (Earlier work establishing the author’s philosophical framework of sovereignty and will.)

Spielberg Filmography and Thematic Studies