Month: July 2026

I like the Ostrich: A little chaos usually makes things better

I had been telling stories about visiting The Wilds, that impressive safari park and conservation center affiliated with the Columbus Zoo out in the hills of Ohio. It is one of those places worth the drive no matter where you are in the state, a sprawling expanse of reclaimed land turned into something that feels close to the real thing—vast pastures under open sky, exotic animals moving with room to stretch their legs. They have rhinos and giraffes in good numbers, along with camels, zebras, cheetahs, and others, all managed with a light enough hand that the illusion of wild freedom holds up pretty well from the back of an open-air safari vehicle.¹

You climb aboard one of their customized tour buses or trucks—solid machines built for the terrain—and set out through a series of large paddocks. The gates are there for a reason. They control movement between sections so the animals do not mix in ways that would cause trouble, and the whole operation runs on a balance between giving the creatures space and keeping things workable for keepers, vets, and paying visitors who want the Serengeti experience without the actual risks of the real wild. Supplemental feeding stations and strategic placement of water to help keep the herds where the staff wants them for health, breeding programs, and viewing. It is wildlife management at a high level, about as good as you are going to get when you are dealing with dangerous and valuable animals on thousands of acres that used to be strip-mined ground.²

The compliant animals make it easy. The rhinos—those massive southern white rhinos—graze and wallow near the resources provided for them, powerful but predictable in their routines. The giraffes tower elegantly, moving between browse stations and open pasture in ways that fit the management plan. Camels shed their coats in season, zebras stay in loose groups, and the whole scene looks like freedom while functioning inside a carefully designed system of fences, gates, rotations, and incentives. It is not a cage, but it is not the true untamed wild either. It is managed pasture with the look of the wild, and most of the animals play their part without fuss.³

That is what made the ostrich stand out to me.

I noticed him early, standing apart from the clusters near the food and water. Tall, alert, head turning with that sharp, curious rhythm ostriches have. While the rhinos and giraffes and camels stayed close to what the keepers had laid out for them, this bird was watching the vehicle. As we moved from one paddock into the next, the gate system did its job—or tried to. The tour vehicle went through, the mechanism closed behind us, and there he was again on the other side. He had figured it out. He waited, timed his approach, slipped in close behind the bus or jeep as it passed, and crossed into the fresh section before the barrier fully secured. Now he was loose in new territory, running with a different group, exploring ground the plan had not assigned him that day.⁴

The reaction from the staff told the whole story. You could hear it in the radio chatter and see it in the quick deployment of groundskeepers in another vehicle. They had to go after him, work him back toward his proper paddock without stressing the other animals or ruining the tour for the people who had paid to see a smooth, wild-like experience. It was not the first time. The bird had made a habit of it. One fence, one gate at a time, and he had learned the vulnerability. He did not need the food station to stay content. He wanted novelty, new company, the chance to impose his own will on the layout the humans had built.⁵

I was rooting for him the whole time.

Here was an animal refusing the script. The other creatures accepted the pasture as given—the convenient food, the predictable safety, the lanes they were expected to occupy. The ostrich treated the whole setup as a puzzle to solve. He used the tour vehicle itself, the thing the keepers relied on to move visitors through their controlled world, as his ticket to the next field. He did not stay near the bowl. He risked the chase, the herding, the temporary disruption, because something in him wanted to see what was over there and who else was around. That kind of ambition is rare in a managed environment, and it is exactly what makes systems better when you let it play out instead of crushing it on sight.⁶

It struck me then, and has stayed with me since, how perfectly this mirrors what I have seen over decades in aerospace and manufacturing. We build our own versions of The Wilds every day. We lay out departments like paddocks, write procedures like fence lines, and place compensation, titles, benefits, and job security like feeding stations to keep people content and predictable. We install gates—approval chains, compliance checklists, annual audits, legacy safety rules—and we staff them with officers whose job is to make sure nothing slips through unplanned. Most people, like most animals in the park, adapt. They stay near the resources, do the expected work, and the machine runs smoothly enough from a distance. Visitors and shareholders see order and productivity.⁷

But then there are the rebels and learning the actual work from the ground up, often see the single-gate weaknesses first. They know which rules came from someone who retired twenty years ago and never got revisited. They spot the places where the process has become theater—compliance for the sake of compliance, documentation that protects no one and slows everything. When they point it out or, worse, quietly work around it to get the real job done, it can be deeply disconcerting to layers of management that have never turned a wrench or stood on a shop floor during a real problem. Knowledge from the ground threatens the illusion of total control. So the system often responds the same way the keepers responded to the ostrich: more rules, more oversight, more “training,” or direct pressure to get back in the assigned pasture.⁸

The cost of that approach is enormous and mostly invisible until you add it up. Direct spending on regulatory compliance labor alone runs into the hundreds of billions annually across American business, with manufacturing carrying a heavy share. Broader economic drag—capital and talent diverted from productive work into compliance bureaucracies, innovations delayed or abandoned because the approval path is too long, small and mid-sized firms crushed under burdens that larger players can absorb—pushes the true opportunity cost into the trillions over time. We lose competitiveness, we lose resilience, and we lose the very people who could have fixed the problems if we had listened instead of herding them back into line. It is not dramatic like a factory closing overnight. It is the slow erosion of capability, the quiet decision by talented hands-on people to stop trying or to leave for places that still value initiative.⁹

SpaceX has shown what happens when you refuse that model. Elon Musk walks into meetings and asks the questions most compliance cultures are designed to avoid: Who wrote this rule? Why did they write it? Does it still make sense, or is it just legacy that nobody wants to touch? A shocking number of requirements get deleted or radically simplified once you trace them back to their origin. The company builds, tests, fails in public view, learns fast, and iterates. Reusable rockets, vertical integration, rapid launch cadence—these did not come from following the old aerospace playbook of exhaustive upfront documentation and risk aversion at every step. They came from treating the rulebook as a starting point to be challenged, not a sacred pasture to remain inside.¹⁰ The results speak for themselves in cost per launch and flight rate. The ostrich approach, applied at scale, forces the entire system to get better.¹¹

I have always had a soft spot for the ostriches in any workforce. I advocate for them on purpose. The ones who will not stay in their lane, who figure out how to get behind the jeep and into the next field, are usually the same people who reveal where the real weaknesses are and who come up with fixes nobody on the compliance side would have imagined. Sometimes they bite you—disrupt schedules, question authority in uncomfortable ways, make the tour guides nervous. That is the price of having them. The alternative is a pasture full of well-fed, predictable animals that look impressive when the bus drives by but generate very little genuine progress or resilience. Their souls get crushed under the weight of never being allowed to test the fence, and the organization slowly loses the capacity to adapt when the real world stops cooperating with the plan.¹²

In my own years moving from hands-on roles into executive responsibility, I saw this pattern repeat across programs and companies. The people who had done the work with their own hands carried an instinctive understanding of what was theater and what was necessary. They were often the first to spot when a procedure had become detached from reality or when a new requirement was solving a problem that no longer existed. Management that lacked that grounding sometimes viewed them as threats to order rather than assets to be unleashed. The organizations that protected and empowered those voices moved faster and solved harder problems. The ones that prioritized perfect compliance and predictable behavior above all else eventually found themselves defending processes that nobody could explain anymore, while competitors who tolerated a little productive rebellion pulled ahead.¹³

The same dynamic shows up far beyond factories and boardrooms. Education systems that reward sitting still and repeating approved answers over curiosity and independent problem-solving. Government bureaucracies where the safest career move is to add another layer of review rather than remove an obsolete one. Cultural institutions that present curated narratives as the full range of choice. We all live inside versions of The Wilds at times—the illusion of open range while the fences, feeding stations, and gate protocols quietly shape what is possible. Most days it feels normal. Then something like that ostrich reminds you that the system only works as well as it does because enough creatures choose not to test the boundaries too hard.¹⁴

What I liked most about watching that bird work the tour was how it improved the keepers. They had to confront the limitation in their current gate setup. They had to think about whether single-point control was enough or whether double-gate airlock procedures, better behavioral enrichment, or adjusted resource placement would reduce the escapes without turning the place into a tighter prison. The ostrich was not just causing trouble; he was doing unpaid consulting work for the management team. He showed them where their assumptions about animal movement and motivation had gaps. A purely compliant population would never have forced that improvement. The rebel paid for his freedom by making the whole operation a little sharper.¹⁵

I left The Wilds that day still thinking about him. The rhinos were impressive in their size and presence. The giraffes were beautiful against the sky. The cheetahs carried that coiled power that makes you respect the food chain. All of them cool in their own ways, and all of them content to operate inside the lanes the humans had drawn. The ostrich was the one I kept coming back to—the non-compliant one, the rule-questioner, the creature willing to go where the keepers did not want him and to accept the temporary chase as the cost of exploration. He did not need the easy food to stay interested in life. He wanted new ground and new company, and he found a way to claim it using the very system designed to contain him.¹⁶

That is the quality I look for and try to protect in the people around me, whether in aerospace programs, manufacturing operations, or just everyday life. Give the ostriches some room. Listen when they show you the weakness in the single gate. Accept that a little productive chaos now and then is cheaper than the long-term stagnation of perfect compliance. The organizations and societies that figure this out keep their edge. The ones that treat every deviation as a threat to be chased back into the assigned pasture eventually discover that their well-managed animals have lost the capacity to handle real trouble when it arrives.¹⁷

I have no interest in living in a world where the only acceptable animals are the ones that stay near the bowl. I would rather deal with the occasional escape, the radio calls, the groundskeepers earning their pay, and the improvements that come from being forced to see the system through the eyes of someone who refuses to accept it as final. That ostrich at The Wilds was doing exactly what the best innovators and problem-solvers do everywhere else: he treated the fence not as an absolute limit but as a problem to be solved, and in doing so he made the entire managed landscape a little more honest and a little more capable.¹⁸

When people ask me now what my favorite animal was on that visit, I do not hesitate. The big ones were impressive. The compliant ones were easy on the eye and the schedule. But the ostrich—the tall, curious, gate-hacking rebel who would not stay in his lane and who spent half the tour where he was not supposed to be—was the one that mattered. He reminded me why I have always had more respect for the people who figure out how to get behind the jeep than for the ones who never leave the feeding station. Encourage that spirit where you find it. Protect it when the compliance officers come with their herding tools. The future does not belong to the perfectly pastured. It belongs to those willing to test the gate now and then, accept the chase, and show the rest of us what we missed by staying comfortable.¹⁹

This experience at The Wilds lingered in my mind long after I returned home, connecting to deeper patterns I have observed across my life and work. The managed illusion of freedom in those paddocks is not so different from the structures we encounter in corporate America, where layers of policy and oversight create the appearance of progress while often stifling the very innovation needed to survive. In aerospace, where I have spent much of my career, the contrast between traditional approaches and more agile ones is particularly stark. Legacy programs can become bogged down in requirements that originated decades ago, defended not because they remain relevant but because changing them would require admitting that the original rationale might no longer hold. Hands-on experience reveals these disconnects quickly, yet articulating them can mark you as difficult rather than valuable.²⁰

Consider the broader implications for American manufacturing. When compliance becomes the primary metric of success, resources flow toward documentation and auditing rather than research, development, or process refinement. Studies have documented how regulatory burdens disproportionately affect smaller firms, creating barriers to entry and expansion that favor incumbents who can afford dedicated compliance departments. The result is slower adoption of new technologies, reduced experimentation on the shop floor, and a workforce trained more in navigating bureaucracy than in solving novel problems. The ostrich in such an environment would be quickly reassigned or sidelined, and the whole system suffers for it.²¹

Elon Musk’s approach at SpaceX offers a compelling counterexample, one I have followed with great interest. By insisting on first-principles thinking—breaking down every assumption to its fundamentals and rebuilding only what proves necessary—the company has achieved breakthroughs that seemed impossible under conventional paradigms. Reusability was not just an engineering challenge; it was a direct challenge to the accepted economics of spaceflight, where expendable vehicles and massive cost-plus contracts had become the norm. Questioning those foundations required a culture that rewarded the kind of boundary-testing the ostrich exemplified. The payoff has been dramatic reductions in launch costs and an unprecedented cadence of operations, reshaping the industry.²²

In reflecting on these matters, I often draw parallels to larger questions of human agency and the systems that seek to channel or constrain it. The ostrich’s refusal to remain content within the provided pasture speaks to something fundamental in the created order: a drive toward exploration, adaptation, and the exercise of will that resists overly deterministic management. In my ongoing work exploring the Politics of Heaven and the deeper spiritual and historical currents shaping human affairs, such metaphors take on added resonance. Just as the keepers at The Wilds maintain an illusion of wildness for educational and conservation purposes, larger forces in society—whether economic, cultural, or institutional—often construct environments that prioritize predictability and control over the messy vitality of genuine freedom. Individuals who, like the ostrich, find ways to slip through the gates challenge those illusions and force reevaluation.²³

This is not to romanticize chaos or dismiss the need for structure. Successful wildlife management at The Wilds demonstrates that boundaries serve important functions: protecting animals, enabling breeding programs, ensuring visitor safety, and advancing conservation goals. Similarly, in business and society, rules around safety, quality, and ethics are essential. The problem arises when those rules multiply unchecked, when compliance officers outnumber innovators, or when the original purpose of a regulation fades from memory while its enforcement mechanisms grow ever more elaborate. The ostrich does not demand the removal of all fences; he demonstrates the value of testing them and adapting the system in response.²⁴

My own background has given me a particular vantage on this tension. Having worked my way up through various roles in industry, from tasks requiring direct physical engagement to overseeing complex programs, I have witnessed how domain knowledge from the “shop floor” often clashes with abstract managerial frameworks. Those who have turned wrenches understand intuitively where procedures add value and where they have become ritual. Encouraging such perspectives requires leadership willing to tolerate temporary disruption for long-term gain—much like the keepers who, instead of permanently punishing the ostrich, likely considered improvements to their gate protocols or enrichment strategies.²⁵

Culturally, the pattern repeats in media and entertainment, where narratives often reinforce managed expectations rather than celebrating the disruptive questioner. From my observations of shifts in popular music and storytelling over decades, there has been a movement away from themes of individual agency and moral courage toward more passive or hedonistic portrayals that keep audiences comfortably within prescribed emotional and ideological lanes. The ostrich disrupts that too, by refusing the easy feed of convention and seeking fresh territory.²⁷

Politically and economically, the stakes are high. Over-reliance on compliance culture contributes to the kinds of institutional failures I encountered during grand jury service, where layers of bureaucracy sometimes obscured accountability and human judgment. Challenging stupid rules is not rebellion for its own sake but a necessary corrective to systems that drift toward self-perpetuation at the expense of their intended purposes. In local Ohio contexts, from school levies to commissioner races, I have seen similar dynamics: entrenched approaches defended vigorously, while innovative voices advocating for accountability and efficiency are treated as threats to the established order.²⁸

Ultimately, the lesson from that lone ostrich at The Wilds is one of balance and appreciation. Systems need structure to function, but they thrive when they incorporate the energy of those who test the edges. In manufacturing, this means streamlining regulations that no longer serve their purpose and empowering frontline workers to propose and implement improvements. In broader society, it means fostering cultures that value inquiry and agency over rote obedience. As someone who has long championed self-mastery, resilience, and the imposition of individual will on challenging circumstances—symbolized in my own life by the whip as a tool of precision and discipline—I see the ostrich as a kindred spirit. He navigates the managed wild with determination and ingenuity, improving it in the process.²⁹

When I share this story, people often smile at the image of the bird sneaking through gates and evading keepers during the tour. But beneath the humor lies a serious point about human flourishing. We are not meant to be permanently pastured, content with provided resources and predictable routines. The drive to explore, to question, to innovate—even at the risk of temporary conflict with authority—is part of what makes progress possible, whether in conservation parks, factories, or the grander arenas of history and spirit. I prefer the company of ostriches, even if they occasionally complicate the tour. They keep things alive, force adaptation, and remind us that true freedom, however constrained by reality, involves the courage to move beyond the feeding station and into the next field.³⁰

So the next time you find yourself in a system that feels overly managed, remember the ostrich at The Wilds. Look for the single gate, time your move, and be willing to run when the keepers come calling. The disruption might just lead to better management for everyone involved. In my experience, it almost always does.

Footnotes

¹ Official descriptions of The Wilds as a 10,000+ acre conservation center with open-range safari experiences, emphasizing educational value and animal welfare. See The Wilds website resources on mission and operations.

² Details on reclaimed strip-mined land conversion, paddock management, and gate systems for species separation and rotational grazing in large wildlife parks.

³ Visitor accounts and park literature highlighting predictable behaviors of rhinos, giraffes, and other megafauna near supplemental feeding and water sources.

⁴ Observations of ostrich curiosity and vehicle-following behavior in safari settings, consistent with ethological studies of ratite intelligence and learning.

⁵ Reports from guides and staff on recurring challenges with individual animals exploiting procedural gaps during tours.

⁶ Analysis of problem-solving in captive animals and its implications for enrichment strategies in conservation management.

⁷ Corporate analogies drawn from organizational behavior literature on incentive structures and departmental silos.

⁸ Personal reflections informed by decades in aerospace, noting tensions between experiential knowledge and administrative layers.

⁹ Quantitative assessments of regulatory compliance burdens, including labor costs and opportunity losses in U.S. manufacturing sectors.

¹⁰ Public statements and case studies on SpaceX’s first-principles engineering methodology and requirement rationalization processes.

¹¹ Industry analyses of launch cost reductions and operational cadence improvements attributable to iterative, challenge-based approaches.

¹² Discussions of innovation cultures versus compliance-oriented management in business strategy texts.

¹³ Insights from program management experience in aerospace regarding the value of shop-floor perspectives.

¹⁴ Broader applications to educational and governmental institutions, drawing on critiques of bureaucratic inertia.

¹⁵ Principles of adaptive management in wildlife conservation, where outlier behaviors drive procedural improvements.

¹⁶ Comparative evaluation of animal temperaments in managed environments and their contributions to system dynamics.

¹⁷ Recommendations for fostering psychological safety and autonomy in high-performance teams.

¹⁸ Philosophical ties between individual agency and systemic resilience, informed by long-term observation.

¹⁹ Synthesis of the ostrich metaphor as applied to personal and professional philosophy of resilience and inquiry.

²⁰ Examination of legacy requirements in traditional aerospace programs versus agile methodologies.

²¹ Empirical studies on regulatory impacts on firm size, innovation rates, and market entry barriers.

²² Detailed accounts of reusable rocket development and associated regulatory and engineering challenges.

²³ Connections to explorations of power structures, agency, and historical patterns in spiritual and societal contexts.

²⁴ Balanced view of necessary boundaries versus over-regulation, with examples from safety and ethical standards.

²⁵ Reflections on career progression and the role of practical knowledge in leadership effectiveness.

²⁶ Applications to intergenerational knowledge transfer and character development through hands-on challenges.

²⁷ Cultural critiques of shifts in media narratives and their effects on perceptions of agency.

²⁸ Observations from civic engagement and public service experiences regarding institutional accountability.

²⁹ Integration with personal symbols of discipline, precision, and moral agency in navigating constraints.

³⁰ Concluding emphasis on the long-term benefits of embracing productive non-conformity for societal and organizational health.

Bibliography

The Wilds. Official website and publications on conservation, safari operations, and animal management (thewilds.org).

Trebbi, Francesco, et al. Research papers on the costs of regulatory compliance in the United States, including establishment-level data analyses (NBER and related).

National Association of Manufacturers. Multiple reports detailing per-employee and aggregate regulatory burdens on U.S. industry.

Musk, Elon, and SpaceX team. Interviews, presentations, and public documentation on engineering philosophy and operational innovations.

Christensen, Clayton M. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Harvard Business Review Press.

Schumpeter, Joseph A. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Harper & Brothers (on creative destruction).

Various ethology and conservation journals on ratite behavior, wildlife park management, and behavioral enrichment.

Hoffman, Rich. Prior essays and books including The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and ongoing work on The Politics of Heaven, exploring agency, structures of power, and human systems.

Organizational psychology and management texts on compliance versus innovation cultures (e.g., works on psychological safety and adaptive leadership).

Visitor and video documentation of The Wilds experiences highlighting animal-vehicle interactions.

Government and think tank analyses of manufacturing competitiveness, opportunity costs, and regulatory reform needs.

Additional readings on free will, institutional critique, and historical patterns of rebellion against managed orders for deeper contextual understanding.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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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.

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

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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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.