UAP: Decoding the Phenomenon. A three-part series exploring a new framework for the UAP phenomenon - Part 2: A Different Kind of Universe
In Part 1, I walked through the prevailing explanations for UAP — alien spacecraft, interdimensional visitors, time travelers, secret military projects, or psychological misfires. Each had surface appeal but buckled when logical pressure was applied. They all shared the same root flaw: they assumed UAP were things moving in a universe made of matter. When the model itself is wrong, every explanation ends up tangled in contradictions.
So let’s step back and ask the deeper question: what if matter isn’t the bedrock of reality at all? What if information is?
From Bits to Its
The idea that reality might be informational at its core is not a New Age invention. It comes straight out of the foundations of modern science. Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, showed in 1948 that all signals — words, numbers, images, even music — can be reduced to sequences of yes/no choices. “Information,” he wrote, “is the resolution of uncertainty.”
That insight revolutionized communications and computing, but it also hinted at something deeper: perhaps information is not just something humans craft in order to organize understanding. Perhaps matter is something the informational universe crafts in order to organize coherence.
Physicist John Wheeler, one of the architects of quantum theory and general relativity, pushed this further. “It from bit,” he declared. “Otherwise put, every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom — an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes–no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses.”
And in our own time, theorist Carlo Rovelli has echoed the same shift. “The world is not a collection of things,” he writes, “it is a collection of events.” For Rovelli, reality is not hard objects but relational interactions — informational exchanges.
Across disciplines, a pattern emerges: the closer we look, the less reality resembles solid stuff and the more it resembles structured information.
The Bias Toward Coherence
What does information actually do? It persists. It organizes. It encodes. Across scales, the universe shows a clear bias toward coherence — structures that maintain identity against entropy.
At the quantum level, entangled particles share states across vast distances, as if information, not space, is the true link. Information-first shows us that a probability cloud is simply the upper barrier of a pre-reality state of information. The collapsed or instantiated particle is the lower barrier of physical reality itself. Quantum mechanics is where information becomes the universe.
At the biological level, DNA carries instructions in four chemical letters, copied with astonishing fidelity across billions of years. Literally a self-replicating information-carrying persistence system.
At the cultural level, myths and languages carry meaning far longer than the lifetimes of their speakers. Religion, the first encoding of humankind - an operating system - builds a shared understanding of values and traditions. Another self-sustaining, self-replicating node in an information matrix. The beauty - and the irony - of religions’ error-correcting code is that it is the dogma itself which insulates the packets of core data, ensuring transmission and protecting against corruption.
At the civilizational level, monuments, rituals, and legal codes embed memory into media durable enough to outlast empires - earth and stone. Another example of reality unfolding along a persistence bias.
As geoscientist Robert Hazen and astrobiologist Michael Wong put it, “The universe is biased toward increasing complexity.” Complexity here isn’t chaos; it’s patterned information. From molecules to life to consciousness, the cosmos tends to produce and preserve informational structures that persist and cohere.
Physics as Code
Seen through this lens, physics itself looks different. Quantum information science now treats qubits and entanglement as fundamental, with particles emerging from informational processes rather than the other way around. Quantum computing advances on these principles, converting hypothesis into theory before our very eyes (interferometric sensors).
The holographic principle suggests that everything in our three-dimensional world may be encoded on a two-dimensional boundary — an extraordinary claim that makes perfect sense if information is the substrate.
Even black holes, once feared to destroy information, are now understood as processors of it. Information may never be lost; it simply transforms. Black holes are the ultimate information processors - the final encryption.
In this view, what we call matter is less like a pile of bricks and more like a running program. Forces such as gravity may not be fundamental pulls but emergent tendencies of information to cluster and cohere. If this is true, everything must be reassessed and the starting points which may be most telling are the ones that science has largely ignored. Like UAP.
Biology as Code
Life makes the point even clearer. DNA is code. It is read, copied, corrected, and expressed by cellular machinery with precision that rivals any digital system we’ve built. Evolution is not a contest of brute strength but of information efficiency — who can best sense, respond, and adapt. An algorithmic process of selection with error correcting systems of redundancy.
Shannon’s definition of information as uncertainty reduced applies perfectly: organisms survive by reducing uncertainty about their environment, storing those solutions in their genes, and passing them forward. We are each living, breathing information packets - one of many parts in a coded information transmission system.
Consciousness itself may be another layer of code: a self-referential simulation running in the brain, an informational loop that gives us continuity across fleeting perceptions. An advanced operating system.
Culture as Code
Humans extend this bias at the civilizational scale. We encode identity not only in DNA but in stories, rituals, and monuments. Languages are algorithms for thought. Myths compress cultural memory. Laws and contracts preserve agreements across generations.
Even stone can be code. As I’ve argued elsewhere, megalithic structures such as Stonehenge or the pyramids are “persistence systems” — civilizations carving their memory into media durable enough to resist time. They are less about kings or gods than about information enduring through cataclysm.
Culture, in this sense, is not decoration on reality. It is an extension of the same drive toward informational coherence that animates physics and biology. Just like the particles, atoms, stars and planets. Just like living things - herds, families, tribes, and societies. Civilizations also persist and they craft and employ methods of persistence.
UAP as Information Events
And now we return to UAP. If matter is fundamental, UAP must be craft: solid objects flying with impossible propulsion, making impossible turns, and vanishing in impossible ways. That’s why all the conventional theories collapse. They’re all based on matter-first.
But if information is fundamental, UAP don’t need to be craft at all. They could be better seen as events — temporary operations carried out on the substrate.
Apparent acceleration without inertia? That’s not movement but re-instantiation of state. Vanishing? That’s deallocation. Transmedium travel? That’s a change of code parameters, not punching through different densities of matter.
There is no current theoretical framework within even our most lofty trajectories of physics which allow for this type of behavior of physical material within the rules of this reality. But if what we’re seeing, if these behaviors are not subject to the rules of material within this reality, the picture becomes clearer.
In an information-first universe, UAP are not breaking physics. They are showing us physics from a deeper level — a level where information is the rulebook and matter is just the display. It’s not a craft, it’s a reality rewriter. Not a ship, a substrate-based rendering engine.
Why This Isn’t Just Philosophy
This might sound like metaphysics, but it aligns with where our own science and technology are heading. Quantum computing already manipulates probability states instead of hard bits. Neural networks already process information in ways that mimic cognition without needing biological matter.
Our own civilization is obsessed with persistence. Data centers, satellites, and blockchains are our modern pyramids — colossal investments designed to encode our memory against time. We are already building monuments of information, just with silicon instead of stone.
From this perspective, UAP may not be foreign visitors but demonstrations of what it looks like when someone — or something — can operate directly at the informational level. And we may be currently engaged in the process of developing this ability ourselves. If quantum computing is moving toward manipulation of quantum states, the literal boundary between information and existence, then I believe we are witnessing the development of our first reality rewriters.
Toward Part 3
That leads us to the inevitable next question: who or what is doing the editing?
Are UAP expressions of post-human civilizations, reaching back into their own past? Are they non-human intelligences native to the substrate itself? Are they automated processes, like weather systems of information rather than storms of air?
In Part 3, we’ll explore how quantum computing gives us the first glimpse of such editing powers, and how this may explain the strangest behaviors attributed to UAP. We’ll look at scenarios for what these phenomena might be, and more importantly, how an information-first framework finally gives us a basis to investigate them without twisting physics into knots.