The Burden of Seeing
Dear Friends,
Sometimes, being awake feels remarkably like a curse.
I realize how grandiose that may sound, especially coming from someone who has spent much of his life questioning things most sensible people have long since filed away as settled. But I mean it in a much less self-congratulatory sense. There is a price to seeing the world differently from those around you, especially when what you believe you have discovered disturbs assumptions on which friendships, institutions, and sometimes entire lives have comfortably rested.
My own journey in that direction has been gradual, spanning more than half a century, and I cannot pretend it has made life easier. Greater awareness—if indeed that is what it has been—does not necessarily make one happier, wiser, or better company at dinner. Quite often, it merely leaves one standing a little farther from the herd, wondering whether the distance is worth it.
Plato captured the dilemma beautifully in his allegory of the cave. The prisoner who escapes discovers that the shadows he and his companions have spent their lives accepting as reality are merely shadows. Having seen the world outside, he does what any decent fellow might do: he goes back to tell his friends.
They think he’s mad.
I’ve always loved a less dignified version of that story. The fish that was accidentally hauled aboard a boat. For a few extraordinary moments, he lies, flapping, on the deck, confronted by a universe he never knew existed—men, sky, sunlight, machinery, an entire reality above the water’s surface. Then, by some magnificent stroke of luck, he flips over the gunwale and lands back in the sea.
Imagine the poor bastard spending the rest of his life trying to tell the other fish what he saw.
I suspect I know something of how he felt.
Beyond the Familiar Shore
For much of my early life, I inhabited roughly the same consensual reality as those around me. I trusted the institutions we had been taught to trust, accepted the broad contours of history as presented to us, and assumed that those in positions of authority possessed information and judgment unavailable to ordinary mortals. I was hardly naïve; I simply had no compelling reason to suppose that some of the foundations themselves might merit examination.
Then came a winter night in Alaska.
I was flying when my crew and I encountered an object in the sky that I could not reconcile with anything my training as a pilot or aeronautical engineer had prepared me for. Whatever anyone else might call it, I knew what I had encountered was not imaginary, and the experience opened a door that would never fully close again. I began investigating the UFO phenomenon—what we now rather more respectably call UAPs—and eventually found myself confronting questions far larger than strange objects in the sky.
If intelligent life beyond our familiar world were ever conclusively acknowledged, the implications would hardly stop at astronomy. Some of humanity’s most deeply rooted religious assumptions would have to accommodate a vastly enlarged creation; scientific orthodoxies would face questions for which existing frameworks prove inadequate; and even our fierce attachment to national boundaries might begin to look faintly ridiculous when viewed against the immensity in which this tiny planet travels.
Once I began thinking along those lines, the old map of reality became increasingly difficult to fold back into its original shape.
Therein lies the problem. When something fundamentally alters your understanding of the world, you cannot simply decide on Tuesday morning that you would rather not know it. You can remain silent about it, certainly. I learned to do that rather well. Unless a subject arose naturally in conversation, I generally saw little point in trying to drag unwilling companions onto the deck of my metaphorical fishing boat. Nobody enjoys being told that their conception of reality may be incomplete, and evangelism—religious, political, philosophical, or otherwise—has always struck me as a particularly effective way to lose friends.
So I learned to coexist with things I believed I knew and things the world around me believed it knew. And for the most part, that arrangement worked.
Then came September 11, 2001.
9/11 was different because its implications could not be confined to some remote philosophical shelf. The event reached directly into the world in which we all live. Wars were launched in its wake, nations were devastated, surveillance expanded, civil liberties were curtailed, fortunes were made, government powers were enlarged, and an entire generation was taught to accept measures that would have been politically inconceivable before that September morning. Its consequences entered airports and courtrooms, foreign policy and domestic law, national budgets and private lives. Twenty-five years later, we still inhabit the world it helped create.
That is why, once I became convinced that the official account could not withstand serious scrutiny, I found it impossible to simply shrug and move on.
And God knows, at times I have wished I could.
When Knowing Becomes a Burden
There is an emotional burden in carrying a conviction that places you outside an overwhelming public consensus. I have watched others encounter the same evidence, react with astonishment, spend months or years pursuing it, and eventually withdraw—not because they had resolved the contradictions that first awakened them, but because they had grown weary of the social friction that came with acknowledging them. Jobs had to be done, children raised, marriages tended, mortgages paid. Life has an extraordinary capacity to reclaim our attention, even after something has profoundly altered our understanding of it.
Over the years, I have shared books, technical papers, videos, and invitations to engineering presentations with countless people. Some dismissed the material outright. Others were profoundly disturbed by what they found. A few took up the inquiry with an enthusiasm that initially exceeded my own, only to discover how lonely an unpopular conclusion can be.
And then there were those who simply kept going.
Dr. Robert Bowman was one of them.
What drew me to Bob was not merely that we reached similar conclusions. Agreement is cheap, and I have never considered another man’s agreement proof that either of us is right. What impressed me was his willingness to risk a formidable professional reputation, standing, and personal comfort for what he believed the evidence demanded. Here was a decorated combat pilot and aerospace engineer operating at the frontiers of advanced military and space technology, a Caltech Ph.D., and a former Director of Advanced Space Programs Development for the United States Air Force—a man who had spent his professional life within the very establishment whose narratives he was now prepared to challenge.
He became my mentor and my friend, and his death left me with a debt I have long wanted to repay.
As we approach the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, I find myself thinking less about whether everyone will ever agree on what happened that day and more about what happens to a civilization when people lose the willingness to ask questions.
That, to me, is the larger question.
We are living through a period when human beings have access to more information than any generation in history, yet we simultaneously surrender an extraordinary amount of responsibility for deciding what deserves our attention. Algorithms increasingly determine what appears on our screens; institutions sort the credible from what they deem disreputable; political tribes tell their members which facts belong to which side; and inconvenient evidence that challenges an established narrative can be summarily quarantined under labels such as “conspiracy theory,” “misinformation,” or “fake news.”
Once branded, an idea need no longer be examined on its merits; the label itself becomes sufficient reason to dismiss it. In this way, skepticism—once considered an indispensable instrument of intellectual inquiry—can itself become suspect when directed toward the wrong authority. Amid the sheer volume of information confronting us, such intellectual surrender becomes increasingly tempting. It is much easier to choose a trusted authority and let someone else do the troublesome work of deciding what is true.
I understand the temptation. But a lifetime of research and personal experience no longer allows me to trust it.
The freedom to think is of little value if we gradually lose the inclination to exercise it. Perhaps that is what troubles me most as I look at the world my generation is preparing to leave behind. These days, that thought has become intensely personal. I increasingly wonder about the world I am bequeathing to my son, and now to a granddaughter just beginning her journey through it.
The threat to human autonomy need not arrive wearing the jackboots Orwell imagined. It may prove far subtler. It can arrive quietly, through convenience, conformity, technological dependence, and the slow atrophy of faculties we no longer use. More troubling still, the technologies of influence are advancing beyond merely persuading us to conform, toward increasingly intimate means of shaping perception, behavior, and ultimately consciousness itself—sometimes without our even recognizing that influence is being exerted.
The Threshold
That urgency is no longer philosophical. As I write these words, the confrontation between the US/Israel and Iran has entered a dangerously volatile phase. I know I’m not alone in seeing Trump as a tool of Israel. The US has exhausted its conventional arsenal, which has failed to persuade Iran to meet its demands or make concessions. As matters stand, Trump is running out of runway and must decide quickly what course to take. Added to this, of course, is the pressure of being prominently featured in the Epstein Files. All things considered, I honestly feel Trump has only two options: He can either withdraw and accept defeat—something his gargantuan ego is unlikely to allow—or use nuclear weapons. There is no third option.
The nuclear option is the elephant in the room that most pundits have tried to avoid acknowledging. The reality is that the possibility of this escalation crossing the nuclear threshold can no longer be dismissed as the stuff of Cold War nightmares. I fear—not unjustifiably—that it is imminent.
Perhaps that is why I feel such urgency as this twenty-fifth anniversary approaches. The questions raised by 9/11 no longer belong merely to history. For me, they lead directly to the larger question confronting us now: whether humanity will continue to surrender its judgment to the machinery of power, fear, and perpetual conflict—or awaken sufficiently to arrest the trajectory before someone, somewhere, makes a decision from which there can be no retreat.
I have long been fascinated by what became known as the “hundredth monkey” phenomenon, which originated in observations of Japanese macaques on the island of Koshima in the 1950s. When the population acquired a new behavior, it seemed to spread across the water to other island colonies with remarkable speed. The story gave rise to an intriguing possibility that has stayed with me ever since: that our individual consciousnesses may not be the isolated “islands” we imagine; that awareness, once it reaches a certain “critical mass,” may possess a collective dimension; and that when enough individual minds arrive at a new understanding, a threshold can be crossed beyond which an idea gains momentum of its own.
I have increasingly come to believe that such thresholds exist in human consciousness. Ideas can lie dormant for decades, resisted, ridiculed, even suppressed, while awareness quietly accumulates beneath the surface. Then something shifts. What yesterday belonged to a scattered handful suddenly appears everywhere, as though an invisible dam has broken and an idea whose time has come can no longer be contained.
I believe we may be approaching such a threshold with 9/11.
I feel this anniversary marks such a threshold. Perhaps it does not. I cannot know.
What I do know is that I am now in the autumn of my life, and the luxury of postponement has begun to lose its charm.
What We Leave Behind
I am less concerned these days with what will become of me than with the kind of world our children and grandchildren will inherit. What troubles me most is the growing sense that humanity is not merely drifting toward greater dependence but is being steadily conditioned for it—nudged toward conformity, seduced by convenience, and encouraged to surrender, piece by imperceptible piece, the very faculties that make us sovereign human beings.
Behind the extraordinary technologies being woven into every aspect of our lives, I discern an unmistakable direction of travel: toward a society that is more easily monitored, more readily influenced, and ultimately more malleable to those who possess the means to shape it. Most disturbing to me is that this intrusion no longer stops at the boundary of the human body. The accelerating convergence of biology and nanotechnology—coupled with the alarming proliferation of certain injectable technologies—raises a darker prospect: that technologies capable of interacting intimately with our biological systems are being introduced without our full knowledge or meaningful consent, extending the machinery of influence from the world around us into the very biology that makes us who we are. (Recommended reading: TRANSHUMAN, Volumes 1 & 2, by Dr. Ana Maria Mihalcea, MD, PhD.)
That extremely troubling agenda strikes at something far deeper than privacy. It touches the sanctity of human autonomy itself. My fear is that unless we recognize this trajectory and resist it, our descendants may inherit a world in which independent thought, personal sovereignty, and the courage to challenge authority have been so thoroughly eroded that they scarcely remember what was lost.
The Debt I Owe
Those concerns are why I have spent the past several weeks almost obsessively immersed in a project I had contemplated for years.
I wanted to honor Bob Bowman.
What began as a tribute soon became something much larger because the difficulty with 9/11 has never been finding material. Quite the opposite. After twenty-five years, the volume of testimony, technical analysis, archival footage, official records, and unanswered questions is staggering. My task became one of ruthless exclusion—compressing what I considered the most consequential material into a film that would not require the viewer to surrender a week of his life to watch it.
Even so, the damned thing kept growing.
The result is a feature-length documentary, roughly an hour and a half long: The Man Who Challenged Empire.
I have not made it because I expect everyone who watches it to agree with me. After all these years, I would regard such an expectation as both arrogant and absurd. What I hope is that people will grant Bob—and the evidence he believed so strongly deserved to be examined—the courtesy of their own independent judgment.
Watch it skeptically. Challenge it. Question the assertions. Examine the evidence. If it does not withstand scrutiny, discard it. But if it does, have the courage to follow the question a little farther, even if you dislike where it appears to be leading.
Ultimately, that is all I have ever asked of anyone and all I can reasonably ask now.
There is a peculiar peace in reaching an age when one’s remaining obligation seems less about being believed than about leaving behind an honest account of what one came to believe and why. I have lived an extraordinarily fortunate life, one that has carried me across continents and through experiences I could scarcely have imagined in my youth. I have flown airplanes over wild country, raised a family, known remarkable people, changed my mind about things I once considered certain, and accumulated enough mistakes to cure me permanently of any claim to infallibility.
But curiosity has never deserted me.
Neither, I hope, has the willingness to be wrong.
Perhaps that is the only useful compass any of us has: the determination to keep looking, coupled with enough humility to know that seeing farther does not necessarily mean seeing everything.
So I offer this film in that spirit and in memory of a man who taught me that conscience occasionally demands the discomfort of standing apart.
I hope you will find time to watch it.
If it unsettles something you had previously considered settled, don’t be too quick to push the discomfort away. Certainty has a way of building walls around what we are willing to see. Perhaps, like Plato’s prisoner, you have simply begun to notice something beyond the walls of the familiar.
Leonard Cohen, one of my favorite philosopher-balladeers, once observed that “there is a crack in everything… that’s how the light gets in.”
Sometimes a crack in the wall is merely a crack.
And sometimes, if one has the courage to look through it, there is an entire world on the other side.
In peace,
Nila
