Consciousness, my UAP experience, and the key to seeing UFOs

Is your mind your own worst enemy when it comes to UFOs? In this blog, I’ll explore our brain’s built-in consciousness filters, how they fight against you in the face of strangeness, and the role I think they played in my own UAP encounter.

There’s a good reason why we’re talking about what happened to me nearly 20 years ago. The UFO encounter should have elicited a wild reaction from me. The object was huge, appeared somewhere very public, and did so in the middle of the afternoon.  

I should have slammed the brakes on my car, and all the traffic around me should have done likewise. Alien craft or some hitherto spectacular, undocumented mirage, it matters not. Using “football fields” to describe the seeming scale of the object would be inadequate.  

But I didn’t seem to be fazed, and nobody else seemed to notice. Well, that second part wasn’t quite true; a witness did ring the newspaper where I worked the next day. But we can discuss UFOs and newspaper reports another time. 

Coming back to our theme of consciousness and UFOs, it’s fair to say my brain was doing something unexpected in its indifference. 

UFOs and consciousness – the ultimate rabbit hole

This piece is about the strange dissonance between seeing a UFO and the muted reaction we might have to it.   

We’ll look at my sighting, as well as a case I once dismissed. In light of what I consider here, it might just want revisiting.  

From there, we’ll consider something called the Oz Factor, as well as an academic paper published in 2025 that might explain how the brain filters UFO experiences. The same paper also considers how we might bypass those blocks in our brain. 

The UFO over Cleethorpes – an incredible sight met with indifference

Back at the time I saw the UFO, I was a journalist on a regional daily paper. The job was great, with lots of variety. The patch included a British seaside town called Cleethorpes, in Lincolnshire. That was where I was driving, along a busy road, when I saw the UFO in question. 

I remember conditions being bright, with a blue sky, and maybe some clouds. A typical, clear, sunny mid-afternoon. 

Somewhere between watching the cars in front and for people crossing, I looked up. 

I can’t give you a distance, but I can say that, based on what appeared to be windows, there was a huge thing. It was a seemingly metallic UFO, structured and high up in the air. Imagine a scene from a sci-fi movie where they put huge spaceships in the background, like Star Wars. It looked like that. 

My reaction? I said to myself something like “there’s the spaceship”. Not “a” spaceship, but “the” spaceship.

It was like one of those moments when you become aware of the everyday, mundane things and pay fresh attention to them. A beautiful tree you pass every day, for instance. A reawareness. And I treated it as something totally normal. 

Then, I just kept on driving. I’m not sure I gave it a second look after initially locking eyes with it. 

But I’m not alone in having this unexpected, “carry-on-as-if-nothing-happened" reaction. 

More UFO witnesses like me have had this weird quirk of consciousness

I’ve spoken to at least one person who witnessed a UFO and had the same strange reaction. Here is that story. 

One night, a farmer in Coningsby woke up and headed for the loo. As he passed a window, he could see a giant, tentacled UFO. It was wrapped around one of the wind turbines visible from his farm. He watched it for some time... before deciding that it would be better if he went to bed. 

That’s right. After witnessing an incredible UFO, he went to bed and went to sleep. 

The next morning, he discovered the wind turbine was broken – one blade torn off, another buckled. The company that managed the turbines would eventually say they thought that this was just an issue with the turbine. These things happen.

But over the years, two things stuck with me. The first is that this would NOT be the last time I heard of a tentacled UFO. Now, we are seeing reports of similar tentacled UFOs apparently being videoed by the US military, released by researcher Jeremy Corbell. The second thing that stuck with me was the farmer’s matter-of-fact reaction upon seeing the UFO. Like me, he witnessed something spectacular, then promptly carried on with what he was doing. In my case, I drove to an appointment; in his case, he went back to bed. 

So, what is happening here?  

The answer, I think, lies in our state of consciousness when we witness a UFO. 

UFOs are a “fuzzy phenomenon”, and that means strange things happen to our brain upon seeing one

It happens that in the case of the wind turbine, I spoke to Jenny Randles, the UFO researcher.

I wish that I’d asked her about the farmer’s somewhat unfazed reaction. Chances are that she would have brought up the Oz Factor.

The Oz Factor is perhaps Randles’ most famous theory. It’s all about stepping into an “unreality” when we see a UFO – although she stresses the phenomenon is real; we’re not talking about psychosis here.

The Oz Factor suggests people could be next to each other, and if they were not in the same so-called “dimension”, one person might see a UFO fly past, the other might not. Telltale signs you have stepped into this zone of strangeness are ambient sound seeming to die down, a tingling, and knowing that something is happening.

That would explain why there were not thousands of witnesses in my case, and why nearby RAF Coningsby didn’t scramble fighter jets if what the farmer saw was real.

In Randles' experience, sightings of “clear structured objects” have just 2.6 witnesses. Close encounters, where there are some interactions, are even lower, with 1.2 witnesses on average.

Jenny writes: “The Oz Factor implies that the UFO Close Encounter has a visionary component. You might interpret that as meaning it is all in the imagination, but it really means that there is a direct feed, if you like, from the source of the encounter to the consciousness of the witness. Something makes them pay attention by tuning out the normal sensory flow and looking up to watch the show.”

So, where can we look into this in more detail? What connection is there between consciousness, the observer and the tuning out of “normal sensory flow”? One great place to start is a paper that was published by two scientists in 2025.  

Their paper suggests our brain works against would-be UFO witnesses. It actively blocks the unusual out. I think it also explains our muted reaction when we see something truly anomalous.

Does our brain work against us when we see a UFO?

The answer, according to two researchers, is yes. Our consciousness might explain how extraordinary events, like witnessing a UFO, can have matter-of-fact reactions.

Neural Filters to Conscious Awareness and the Phenomena that Reduce their Impact was published in the International Review of Psychiatry in 2025. Written by Marjorie Woollacott and Marina Weiler, the review article considers a non-local view of consciousness. Their hypothesis is that the brain’s filters affect our experience. Nothing massively new there on the face of it. We are all familiar with a version of the "did you spot the gorilla at the basketball game” test. That’s the one where you’re so focused on the action, you don't see someone in a creature costume walking across the shot.

Where the theory diverges is that it leans into how the mind might not just be ignoring gorillas at ballgames, but psychic, non-local information. Woollacott and Weiler posit that consciousness might not be something formed in the confines of the skull (a physicalist view), but that the brain is a filter.

Think of a radio tuning into a show. You don’t tune into all stations at once, and in the case of our brains this is evolutionary. For the most part, it keeps us safe by being focused on what matters. But sometimes it keeps the truth from us.

Woollacott and Weiler explain that this “reducing valve” is formed by:

1. The senses

2. How the brain filters sensory data

3. A part of the brain housing the “ego”

4. The mathematically inclined left hemisphere.

Here’s a quick breakdown as to how each of these might stop you from seeing a UFO.

#1 The senses mean you might never be aware of some UFOs

If something is not visible to human eyes or ears, then we won’t notice it at all. We only perceive a narrow range of light and sound. On both counts, we’re well outclassed by our resident moggies. Cats can hear up to 64,000Hz and see into the ultraviolet spectrum.

#2 The brain filters out a lot of sensory information

But even if you have superpowered hearing and vision, the senses have a gatekeeper. The sensory data we do capture has to get through the Ascending Reticular Activating System, or ARAS. This sits in our brainstem and inhibits “unnecessary” data.

If that wasn’t enough, distracting conversations fire up in the thalamo-cortical loop. This is the part of the brain that literally distracts you from stopping and smelling the roses. Why? Because you’re lost in thoughts about work, relationships, and so on.

#3 The ego tells you what should be real

Finally, we get to the real beast – the home of the ego, your Default Mode Network (DMN). This takes up nearly 90% of brain energy. Key regions in the DMN, the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex, constantly process autobiographical memory, self-reflection, and our mental orientation in space and time. In other words, we ALL have an ego problem – we're probably way too absorbed in the idea of who we are to spot most things that are around us, let alone a UFO.

#4 The left hemisphere compartmentalises everything into tidy math

The final doorman is the left hemisphere’s conceptual filters. The right side is very holistic, and about “being consciousness”, and the left is its opposite. It does the math, quite literally, and chops the world into discrete, dualistic parts. It also defines our perception of time... making sure you are, y’know, not missing any.

How to lower consciousness barriers to UFOs (according to scientists)

If UFOs are “out there”, there's a good chance you’ll miss them. But what’s particularly interesting about Woollacott and Weiler’s paper is that it covers all aspects of UFOs... “nuts and bolts” and the “woo”.

All you have to do to experience the esoteric, they posit, is lower the brain’s barriers. The scientists looked the effects of meditation, psychedelics, shamanism, mediumship and near-death experiences (note: I don’t endorse illegal psychedelics or near-death experiences, I’m just relaying what these scientists said).

Woollacott and Weiler believe it is possible that by lowering the barriers in the brain, you not only see more but that you can capture more information considered “psi”. The report cites research with meditators and Buddhist monks suggesting their lifestyle helped them beat chance on psychic tests.

The Woollacott and Weiler conclusion: “The implications of these findings are profound. They suggest that the brain’s filtering mechanisms, which typically reduce the overwhelming influx of sensory information and build our sense of self, may also limit access to a broader spectrum of consciousness. We hypothesize that when these filters are diminished, individuals can experience a heightened state of connection, connecting with a more expansive perception of reality.”

UFOs and consciousness… what do I think?

I think it's fair to say I experienced a shift into seeing something that perhaps another part of my brain was already aware of. The thoughts that played out suggested some part of me had seen this UFO plenty of times before.

But how did I become conscious of it? I was not in some meditative state and I wasn't in the same state of mind as a farmer heading to the loo late at night. I hadn’t been driving for mare than a couple of minutes, so a driving-induced hypnotic state is unlikely. And remember, I was was not the only witness.

Maybe this change of consciousness is subtle. Instead of passing through some glowing portal into a fantastic realm, our trip into Oz may sometimes catch us when we’re busy, or when we’re doing something incredibly mundane. Until more research is done, we’ll never know exactly when these strange forces might come knocking on the doors of our consciousness.