UAP: Decoding the Phenomenon. A three-part series exploring a new framework for the UAP phenomenon - Part 3: Editing Reality
In Part 1 we mapped the theories. In Part 2 we shifted the frame, showing how an information-first view of reality can dissolve the contradictions that plague every matter-first explanation of UAP. Now comes the leap: if the substrate of reality is information, then UAP are not vehicles. They are edits.
The First Baby Steps Toward Substrate Engineering
We already glimpse what it means to operate on information rather than matter. Quantum computing is the clearest signpost. Unlike classical computers, which flip physical switches between “on” and “off,” quantum computers manipulate qubits — entities that can exist in superpositions of states. A single qubit can explore multiple possibilities at once. Entangled qubits share states instantaneously across distance, as if space itself is secondary to information.
Think of qubits as explorers of probability space. A quantum algorithm doesn’t push electrons down a wire; it shapes the informational landscape, letting outcomes interfere until the right answer emerges. We’re not yet rewriting reality, but we are playing with its source code.
In this sense, quantum computing is our first fumbling contact with the substrate — the informational layer beneath matter and energy. It hints that matter is display, not essence. That it can be manipulated and controlled with the proper tools and understanding of the underlying nature of the substrate.
UAP as Information Handlers
If information is the substrate, UAP behaviors stop looking like impossible aerodynamics and start looking like ordinary programming. If you were a coder building a game, you would not write code that physically moves your NPC across the game map. You would simply insert a snippet of code that terminated their presence in one area and wrote them into the area you want them to be next.
Apparent accelerations that would crush any pilot? That’s not movement through space-time; that’s the re-instantiation of state. A craft appears at one coordinate and then another without traversing the distance between — no inertia, no sonic boom, no travel.
Shape-shifting and transmedium travel? Those are changes in parameters, not stress on materials. If the local code is editable, water and air are just different renderings of information; an object can “move” between them by changing its local conditions, not by brute-forcing through densities. Again, not crashing, not splashing - because not traveling.
Even vanishing acts make sense. An informational craft can be “deallocated” from the local code when its process ends, leaving no debris because nothing material was ever there in the first place.
Under this view, UAP are not ships. They are handlers of information, executing temporary conditions in the code we call reality. What we see as a glowing orb or metallic disc may be only the visible artifact of an informational process running in our local space-time. Through this lens, not only are UAP plausible, but their behavior makes sense.
J. Allen Hynek, scientific consultant to Project Blue Book, repeatedly wrote that many UFOs “appear to materialize and dematerialize” and “do not behave like solid objects” — his way of flagging that they seemed present but not fully “in” our space-time. This is what you would expect of objects that are, in fact, not in our space-time.
Well… Who are they?
Short answer: No idea. Frankly, that’s not the problem I’m here to solve. But in an information-first ontology, I believe we launch from the right pad to find out. This framework opens the door to scenarios that sounded totally outlandish under matter-first physics but now feel almost inevitable:
Post-human civilizations editing their own past. A far-future humanity, having mastered substrate engineering, could reach back into its timeline not by sending physical ships but by instantiating processes at earlier coordinates. UAP could be our descendants doing fieldwork.
Non-human intelligences native to the substrate. Life as we know it may be just one expression of information’s drive to cohere. Other forms of intelligence might exist entirely within the informational layer, only occasionally manifesting in our perceptual space. UAP could be their interfaces, not their bodies.
Automated processes — weather systems of information. Not every storm has a mind. Some UAP might be emergent phenomena of the substrate itself, like eddies in a river or whirlpools in an ocean. In this case, the phenomenon is not a visitor but a local fluctuation in reality’s code. In the book, It From Us, I also explore this possibility of religious experiences and other anomalies. The bias of the substrate toward coherence could cause myriad manifestations of information, all of which are assumed impossible by matter-first understanding.
Each scenario sounds wild, but in an information-first framework each requires fewer assumptions than “aliens crossed the stars and built anti-gravity ships.” All they require is that information is primary - a view mainstream science is already inching toward. And once we adopt that understanding the direction of the investigation shifts drastically.
A Testable and Integrative Framework
The beauty of an information-first approach is that it unifies rather than fragments. It explains UAP behaviors without exotic propulsion. It aligns with our best physics rather than contradicting it. It places the phenomenon on a continuum with what we ourselves are beginning to do — quantum computing, neural networks, massive data storage — instead of in a category of exotic magic.
More importantly, it offers testable hypotheses. If UAP are informational events, we should look for anomalies in the informational structure of our measurements — timing irregularities, state-level artifacts, nonlocal correlations — not just better photos of metallic craft. We should design experiments to query the code, not chase the object.
This is the pivot. Stop asking “How do we catch the thing?” Start asking “How do we interrogate the process?” Jake Barber, a man who claims to have been a contractor for the United States government - tasked with recovering crashed UAP, claimed that government programs explored using “psionics” — psychically gifted individuals — to “summon, communicate with, or even pilot” unidentified aerial phenomena. In an informational ontology, one where consciousness is a substrate interface, this isn’t even weird. It’s obvious.
Rethinking Reality and Intelligence
Seeing UAP as informational operators does more than solve a mystery; it reframes the nature of intelligence itself. We’ve assumed intelligence must ride on neurons or silicon. But if information is fundamental, intelligence could be possible anywhere patterns persist — in DNA, in cultures, perhaps in the substrate of the universe itself.
We’ve also assumed exploration means ships crossing space. But if space-time is just one rendering of information, exploration may mean editing local conditions rather than traveling through them. What looks to us like a ship may be a script.
This doesn’t diminish the mystery; it makes it bigger. The phenomenon may not be alien in the way we imagine but in a deeper, stranger sense — a glimpse of how information behaves when it becomes self-aware and self-directing. Or of what happens when a species develops the power to rewrite reality itself - technology I believe we are on an obvious trajectory toward.
Closing the Series
Across these three essays, we’ve moved from dismantling the old frameworks to glimpsing a new one. In Part 1, we saw why every major UAP theory fails inside a matter-first worldview. In Part 2, we explored how information-first makes sense of physics, biology, and culture. And here, in Part 3, we’ve taken the bold step: UAP as informational processes, reality edits rather than vehicles.
This isn’t the final word; it’s a starting point. By shifting the question from “What ships are these?” to “What processes are these?” we open the door to a research program rather than a guessing game - science instead of storytelling. We give ourselves a framework that doesn’t collapse under its own assumptions.
This is a key argument in my forthcoming book It From Us - An Information-First Framework and the Purpose of Consciousness: If information is fundamental, then the phenomenon isn’t impossible — it’s inevitable. The challenge now is to learn to read, and maybe one day to write, in the same language the phenomenon already speaks. We’ve been asking the wrong questions. Information-first shows us the correct ones.