The Real Reason We’re Obsessed With Bigfoot and UFOs
How a Father’s Day Lake Trip, a Fantasy Card Game, and a Book About UFOs Unraveled Our Theology, Rewired Our Curiosity, and Made Us Wonder If Stranger Things Was Actually a Documentary?
It starts on a quiet Father's Day weekend. You know the kind—music on, brains unwinding, staring out over a lake with nothing but time to think. And out of that space comes this whole spiral of thoughts about why we’re so drawn to the mysterious: Bigfoot, UFOs, ancient myths, and the stuff that doesn't quite fit.
The spark? Magic: The Gathering. That one card game leads us to talk about mythologies, artwork, and our shared love for stories that blend magic, mystery, and sci-fi. From Pinterest boards full of fantasy art to local game nights and deck building, it’s more than a hobby—it’s a bridge to imagination. We joke about Egyptian crocodiles and RPG-style creatures, tying the game's visuals into our own novels and storytelling minds.
Between Belief and Skepticism
From there, the dialogue explodes into aliens, Bigfoot, ancient civilizations, and our hunger to understand what we can’t quite touch. We admit we walk the line between belief and skepticism. We’re fascinated by theories on UFOs, cryptids, fairies, and the unexplained.
One of the core tensions we explore is the brain's need to find patterns—faces in clouds, figures in wood grain. It's called pareidolia, and it’s a window into how deeply we crave connection and familiarity, even in randomness. That desire might fuel our obsession with mysteries. We want the universe to make sense, and when it doesn't, we either find a story or make one.
But there's another layer: our innate hunger to know and to orient ourselves in a complex, often contradictory world. Dom describes his inner compulsion to understand, a drive that’s pulled him into a 15-year journey of studying psychedelics, ancient texts, UFOs, and theology. The deeper he goes, the more he realizes the models he inherited can’t contain the full weirdness of the universe.
Faith in a Strange Cosmos
This isn’t just about aliens. It’s about what it means to be people of faith in a universe that seems way stranger than Sunday school ever prepared us for. It’s about how ancient civilizations may have known more than we think, how megalithic structures and ancient myths might tell real stories, and how dismissing the "other" too quickly is often a mark of cultic thinking.
Graham Hancock’s "The Sign and the Seal" was the starting point. At 17, Dom didn’t understand most of it, but years later, rereading it changes his assumptions. He opened the door to figures like Erich von Däniken and ideas that maybe history isn’t as neat as we think.
We touch on ancient architecture submerged under seas, precision-engineered megaliths, and how ancient Jerusalem might be far older than modern narratives allow. These aren’t throwaway theories—they’re consistent puzzles that don’t fit existing maps.
Dreams, Spirits, and Esoteric Christianity
And it’s not just history. The journey goes through psychedelics, dreams, astral projection, and esoteric Christianity. We start to see that spiritual practices we dismiss as fringe were once central in many cultures. What do we do with this?
We reconnect biblical stories to experiences of spiritual warfare, and see how much context has been stripped from Scripture, making it neat, clean, and incomplete. We lament growing up in faith cultures that treated everything outside a narrow framework as evil. But now we seek nuance, discernment, and honest engagement with other traditions can deepen—not destroy—belief.
Stranger Things becomes a metaphor throughout: a town safe in its bubble, shattered by the intrusion of another world. That’s the risk we all face if we build worldviews too brittle to adapt when reality pushes back. In contrast, the hero kids in the show represent what we aim to be: curious, adaptable, humble, and open.
We talk about how people collapse complex mysteries into simple moral judgments. Dom admits a compulsion to follow truth wherever it leads, even if it risks losing community. The fear? Getting stuck in a lie or untethered in the pursuit of endless knowledge. Some of us are wired to explore and bring back wisdom, like mythic wanderers returning from the edge of the map.
A Universe Made for Sharing
We hit a climax: what if being itself is good, and God creates not out of lack but to share his life and joy? That changes everything. The mysteries aren’t threats. They’re invitations. Theosis—sharing in divine life—becomes the goal, not just obedience.
We talk about how the new age community is often wrestling with questions the Church avoids. The problem isn’t curiosity—it’s the lack of grounding. But if we root ourselves in love, humility, and the gospel, we can explore far without getting lost.
A lot of institutions suffer from cult-like thinking. They fear new ideas. But real faith isn’t fragile. It welcomes questions. It holds up under scrutiny. And it stretches to fit a stranger, older, more mysterious universe.
Mystery isn’t a bug—it’s a feature. And it’s probably the doorway to everything we’re meant to be.