Well. I'm 40 today.

It's time to shoot my shot.

It’s my 40th birthday today, and the only gift I want is for you to read this to the end.

Prayer hands.

---

This movie also turns 40 this year.

Remystification

Nearly two years ago, my company’s first client commissioned us to develop a pilot for a podcast about UFOs.

Friend, I didn’t know anything about UFOs. If you had asked me for my best guess about what they are or aren’t or whatever, I would have said I have no idea, but probably they’re nothing.

If you had posited that aliens are visiting us, or that shadow agencies are hiding craft and bodies, or that countless people are abducted every year, or any number of other wild-eyed theories — I would have believed you were probably either lying or delusional. And frankly, I hadn’t really heard anyone making those kinds of claims, anyway.

The point is, I knew basically nothing about UFOs, despite a deep, almost painful childhood desire for the reality of interplanetary life and galactic civilizations and, most of all, faster than light space travel. But by the time I was old enough to know anything, I was convinced no one had discovered life anywhere but here. Once, back in high school, I loaned my computer’s meager processing power to SETI on nights and weekends. I wanted to do my part in the search for contact. But I thought the odds were pretty damn long. I bought the Fermi Paradox hook, line, and sinker.

All of this is to say, developing a podcast pilot on the subject was not something I sought out. The opportunity to do it came completely unexpectedly. The biggest reason I accepted the job was because we needed the money, and the second biggest reason was my lifelong love for science fiction.

And then I started to do the reading. And what happens when you start to do the reading, is that you find out you really didn’t know anything about anything. Within a short handful of weeks, which turned into months (which has now turned into years), I got fully UFO-pilled.

Actually, that’s way too narrow of a frame. The truth is that my disenchanted soul woke up to an enchanted universe.

In the months that followed, I worked on three other pilots for that same company along a similar theme. Topics of the numinous, the strange, the paranormal and metaphysical. Lots of research on near death experiences, cryptids, heretical cosmologies, even spontaneous human combustion.

At the same time, I was also reacquainting myself with the truth claims of my own faith tradition. Wild stories about ancient texts, miraculous healings, angelic visitations, and revelations of divine mysteries. More and more of them started to seem more and more plausible.

I found myself, over and over, sitting back, blinking under strange new lights, and saying, “Well, shit. It might all be true.”

You might have read some of the essays I’ve written and published along these lines. In the most recent, I teased a project I’ve been working on.

Today, it’s time for me to tell you about that project.

It started, naturally, with the impulse to do a podcast. I had lots of ideas about how to produce it. I’m a writer, after all, so maybe it could just be a series of audio essays. But I also love conversations, so interviews seemed like a good idea. Maybe some combination? I even came up with a title.

Gods, Ghosts & UFOs

But I could never summon the energy to take action on any of my ideas. Really, I just couldn’t justify launching yet another big project on my own, by myself.

Introducing My Co-conspirators

Around Thanksgiving of last year, I found out that one of the pilots I had developed for that company was going to be consigned to the backburner indefinitely. A real bummer, since it was my favorite of the four, owing mainly to how perfectly awesome the hosts were — Mallory Everton and Tom Maxwell.

Mal and I went to film school together almost fifteen years ago. She’s an accomplished writer and filmmaker, and one of the most genuinely funny and talented people I know. She’s also one of my favorite people to talk to about all the things we don’t have answers for.

I met Tom when he auditioned to be Mal’s co-host on that project. An exceptional thinker who also happened to be a rockstar in the 90s, Tom seems to have a natural gravity that attracts the supernatural. Things like hauntings and synchronicities and visions. And he has this way of speaking with the casual authority of a trusted uncle. I loved him immediately, and so did Mal.

Together, they had this incredible alchemical energy, and I couldn’t help but fantasize about how joyful it would be to work with them on a weekly podcast.

So, when their pilot went into purgatory, it finally clicked. I reached out to them with an update on the state of the pilot, and pitched them on the project I couldn’t bring myself to start alone.

To my deep, abiding delight, they agreed to give it a shot.

Now there was just the trivial matter of how to do it.

The Plan

We thought we might be able to produce and sell a brand new pilot, but it didn’t feel right. Keeping complete creative control felt more important. But none of us could afford to grind for the next year or more, trying to build an audience and an income from scratch for a highly produced podcast like this. These kinds of things take an enormous amount of time and energy, and we’re all busy grinding out a living on other things.

So what could we do? If not selling the show to a network, and if not producing it on spec for however long it might take to build a meaningful audience, was there a third way?

The model we came up with was to run a Kickstarter to fund the first set of episodes, and then parlay the backers into Substack subscribers. With a lot of hard work and a little luck (alright, a lot of that, too), we might be able to get the plane into the air.

The Pilot

The first thing we knew we needed to do was to actually produce a pilot. So we did.

And wouldn’t you know it, it ended up being about UFOs. It wasn’t our fault! Back in December, when we recorded, there were all those drone sightings along the east coast. What could we do?

Anyway, it ended up being pretty serendipitous, because this gave me a great excuse to reach out to Kelly Chase for an interview. She’s the creator and host of The UFO Rabbit Hole Podcast, which, if you don’t know it, is the biggest (and also the best) UFO podcast there is. I was pretty confident she’d do it, since I’m already working with her to help relaunch her own show under a different brand. (More on that later, I promise, including how big of a role she’s played in my own journey of re-enchantment.)

And as if those weren’t good enough reasons to start with UFOs, Tom sent Mal and I this message in the middle of development:

I just saw the most extraordinary thing and wanted to share it with you guys first. I was listening to music in my office and happen to look up through the window in front of my computer. I saw what I first took to be a flight of seagulls, but then saw a real seagull and realized that’s not what these things were at all. They were 15-20 silvery white, oval shaped, flying–floating, beautiful, shimmering things that almost danced from West to East above the powerlines. I couldn’t honestly tell you how big they were or how far away. I watch them for 15 or 20 seconds in amazement and saw that they didn’t move like birds or drones, much less aircraft. I ran and got [my partner] and she was able to see one before it disappeared from view by shooting straight up in the air. I have no idea what to do with this experience.

In case you’re wondering, yes, friend. I am jealous.

Shooting My Shot

Alright, so we made a pilot, and we made a trailer, and we are building this Kickstarter campaign, and here I am, announcing it early, to you, my people.

ON MY ACTUAL NO KIDDING FORTIETH BIRTHDAY.

On the one hand, this project makes practical sense. It aligns with my passions and talents, and it fits cleanly into the business I’ve been building for the past two years — a podcast production agency focused on “premium” content.

More importantly, though, it makes spiritual sense.

The point of this is to build something that is real. As AI slop fills the internet, as social truth fractures across a hundred billion digital channels, as we all fight to resist the constant siren calls of the culture wars, I want to think about and talk about and look for the things that really matter.

I want enlightenment. I want connection. I want salvation.

I’ve been a dilettante all my life, but if I have to pick a lane? I’m picking this one.

This is me shooting my shot.

I’m turning off paid subscriptions for this publication, so that anyone who wants to support me or my work can direct that toward this show. Because if it can get off the ground, if it can do the things it’s meant to do, it will be the most important creative and professional endeavor of my life so far.

I said at the top that for my 40th birthday, you could give me the gift of reading this whole thing.

So if you got this far, thank you so much. You’re a real one.

In five days, the Kickstarter will officially launch. You’ll get an email from the

Gods, Ghosts & UFOs

Substack on that day to let you know.

Wish me luck. Pray for me. Burn some incense. Whatever. I’m pretty sure it all works, and I’ll take whatever I can get.