Home / Classified Science (May 2026)

I've been listening to some of Jesse Michels' content. He researches heretical ideas. Think UAPs, remote viewing, and a bunch of other things that come across as a little unhinged when you first watch one of his videos.

If you can get past his clickbait titles and you don't instinctually stop listening when he suggests something like military contractors might be abducting kids from developing countries because they have psionic abilities to attract flying saucers, you might notice that he comes across as intelligent, curious, and thoughtful. Maybe that's why he got a job investing for Peter Thiel.

Jesse makes a lot of claims but there are two broad themes in his videos that I find the most compelling.

The first is non-local consciousness. We know that the US goverment experimented on US citizens by dosing them with psychedelics for "mind control" tests through MK Ultra. We also know that the government studied remote viewing via Project Stargate, and UAPs through various programs like Project Bluebook, AARO, AATIP and others.

What hasn't been discussed as broadly is that all of these programs might be studying the same thing from different angles. Non-local consciousness. Is it that crazy to think that consciousness might act like a field?

If that turns out to be true, it would make sense that certain humans have a weak and variable ability to tap into that field, in the same way that some dogs seem to be able to detect certain illnesses through scent. Paired with the possibility that consciously studying consciousness could potentially interfere with the results, this could be why so much of the research is inconsistent and inconclusive.

The second broad theme is that important scientific breathroughs may be being classified by the government at an unprecedented scale. Clearly some scientific breakthroughs, perhaps even most of them, have defense implications. If Thomas Townsend Brown discovered anti-gravity or there are effective protocols for remote viewing or we created a new type of metal with unique properties, I understand why the military would want to keep it secret.

We also know that the government has effectively classified science at a massive scale through programs like the Manhattan Project and the subsequent effort to regulate nuclear weapons. I have to imagine that since the 1950s the government has only gotten better at it, especially when you think about how intertwined the government is with universities and funding and regulating research.

If you watch his talks, Peter Thiel has been obsessed with the idea that "the world of atoms" has had slow progress relative to the "world of bits." In the 1950's it seemed like things were moving fast and we would cure cancer, have flying cars and colonize the stars in a matter of decades. And then, everything in those categories seemed to stagnate... coincidentally, right after the Manhattan Project, when it became abundantly clear how scientific breakthroughs could reorder geopolitics.

While I'm fairly confident that the government is classifying some import scientific research, what I'm less confident about is the scale and what the implications are for society and technological progress more broadly.

One possible outcome is that we are all living in a world that is 50 years behind where it should be because major breakthroughs are being classified and then suffocated by government incompetence and secrecy.

Another possibility is that the government is sharing the research with select private companies, which are more innovative, don't report to congress, aren't subject to Freedom of Information Act requests, are easy to funnel money into via government contratcs, and have the ability to hire and compensate former government employees.

If this is the case, we could have private companies that possess technology way beyond what we can comprehend and whose power could rival that of our own government.

Silicon Valley thinks of itself as the center of innovation but what if we're the sideshow? Maybe we're being allowed to get rich playing with the internet, while the military and private defense contractors are building the future.

One thing that gives me some hope is that there isn't some private defense contractor consistenly launching futuristic tech into the market and making quadrillions of dollars or overthrowing governments. The market cap of these companies is still well below the tech giants. This implies that either they don't have futuristic tech at all or the government is at least still competent enough to keep what they do have on lock down for strategic reasons, and there hasn't been a big enough conflict since WW2 to force the government's hand to use whatever they have.

My guess is that reality lies somewhere in the middle. I'd bet some meaningful amount of important research is being classified for strategic defense reasons and that it's then advancing at a rate much slower than it would in the private sector due to a combination of the structural limitations of large entities and especially the consequences of having to silo research in order to keep it secret. But then at a certain point, ideas get rediscovered and it becomes too hard to keep them classified.

If this is true, it'd imply that the private sector is something like 20 years behind the government and defense contractors, even though we might all be 50 years ahead if the free market was allowed to do its thing. Being net 30 years behind might not be all that bad if the alternative is that we'd all be dead because some rogue dictator had access to futuristic tech. But then again, we're the only country to have ever used a nuclear weapon. Ugh, it's so hard to know what's happening and what the implications are. It's much safer to play with the internet.