I’m planning a make-up stream next Friday, November 13 at 10pm ET. Same introduction, same show — just with the tech sorted out first. I’ll be troubleshooting it earlier in the week so Friday night isn’t the first time we’re finding a problem.

One other change: I won’t be posting my next article until after next week. I want to get the first stream right first, then the writing picks back up.

Thank you for sticking with me. See you next Friday.

My name is Nathan Walters. I was born in Boulder, Colorado, in 1984. We moved around a lot when I was a kid, so I went through a string of elementary schools before things settled down for a while in Memphis. I left school after the tenth grade, worked at a movie theater, later got my GED, worked at Hastings, and spent a good part of my adult life working factory jobs in Tennessee and Ohio.

I am a father and a grandfather. My family is a big part of why I am doing this. I have spent most of my life listening to music—The Beatles first, The Doors as a teenager, and later everything from classic rock to industrial. I read Stephen King and never minded the long books. For years I also called in to late-night radio shows like Coast to Coast AM, Ground Zero, and Fade to Black. People who have heard me there have heard pieces of this story, but never the whole thing in one place.

That is partly what this is for.

The first strange thing about the house was not a light in the sky. It was the paint.

Before we moved into the house in Middletown, we did some light remodeling—paint, carpet, wallpaper. My wife and I had chosen maroon wallpaper and paint for the kitchen and living room. Once it was finished and we started settling in, I began getting these flashes of déjà vu from it. I could not place them, other than a feeling that perhaps I had seen that room in a dream long ago. I seemed to associate it with a nightmare from some earlier point in my life.

At the time, I chalked it up to ordinary déjà vu. That turned out to be both right and wrong.

Strange things seem to have been part of my life since early childhood. That does not mean I walked around with one clear, continuous story in my head. On the surface, much of my life looked average. A lot of the memories were forgotten, blocked, scattered, or covered over. Then, beginning around September 2013, things started resurfacing—through dreams, déjà vu, synchronistic events, and manifestations I could not easily explain away.

That period changed everything. It also raised more questions than it answered.

A word about the cast, because you’re going to meet them by name and I don’t want you lost.

The short, stocky blue beings were first. They came in pairs, mostly to watch, and they’ve shown up in every era since — no matter who else was there. The Nordics I met as a small child in Illinois: tall, blond, paler than people, dressed in black. The Mantis types ran through my teens into my twenties, often around triangular craft. The Greys are in the record too, but they’re not the whole story the way television says they are. The tall, willowy white ones I met mostly in childhood, on a purple-and-gold disk I’ve seen a handful of times since — mostly then, but not only then.

The places are pinned to the encounters, so here’s the map: born in Boulder, Colorado; the Illinois years; Wisconsin; Memphis, where things settled for a while; Missouri, where the single most vivid night of my life happened when I was fourteen; McMinnville; and Middletown, Ohio, where maroon paint on a kitchen wall knocked the memories loose. Each of these gets its turn in the pieces ahead. This is just the legend for the map.

I want to be clear about something from the start: I am not writing this to prove extraterrestrials are real. I only have my experiences and the research I have done because of them. Much of what came through those experiences concerned my own personal life. Some of it went in many directions. Some of it felt less like a single lifetime and more like memories spanning many years, perhaps even different incarnations of my own existence. The visitors themselves showed me these things, but that does not mean I automatically trust every message or every messenger.

I take all of it with a grain of salt. You should too.

As I see it, there is not one catch-all answer. I believe there are nonhuman intelligences—entities of some sort—which I have come to break down into different categories, each with different attributes. Some experiences seem physical. Some seem dreamlike, spiritual, mental, or somewhere between those things. I do not know exactly where one ends and another begins.

I am not a mathematician or a physics major. I know what I have read and what I have lived through. I am not out to prove a thesis; I am attempting to understand it myself. I cannot escape it. It is part of who I am. That, I think, is the difference between most researchers and experiencers. A researcher can close the book and go home. An experiencer is still living in the story.

For a long time, I thought everyone might be susceptible to this. Maybe they are. Maybe this is what being psychic feels like. I do not know. I have seen enough to know that everything is very different from what we are told.

I am not asking you to believe me. I am asking you to think.

Think about the dreams that seem to know something before you do. Think about the memories that do not fit where they are supposed to go. Think about how much of reality might be happening just outside the part we are normally allowed to see. Think about what it means that an ordinary person can live most of his life before realizing how much of it may have been happening beneath the surface.

Human beings are capable of horrible things. I do not pretend otherwise. But at our best—in art, music, creative endeavors, and plain human ingenuity—we rise above that. Our individuality is part of our value. Our sense of self creates our creativity and makes us suited for it. Whatever else these experiences have taught me, they have not made me anti-human. If anything, they have made me more protective of what makes us human in the first place.

This blog is the beginning of putting the pieces in order. Some entries will be about my experiences. Some will be about the research I have gathered while trying to understand them. Friday the Livestream goes live.

We will not always move in a straight line, because that is not how these memories came back to me. Sometimes we will begin with an experience and work outward into the research. Sometimes the research will lead back into something personal. That is the nature of this subject. It is easy to get lost in rabbit holes, so I am going to try to keep bringing us back to the original question:

What has been happening, and what does it mean?

Next time, I want to begin with the record: what happened, when it happened, and the people who tried to make sense of it. That’s the room we walk into first.

For now, welcome to the edge of reality.

Pull up a chair. We have a lot to talk about.

Episode 0 of At The Edge of Reality streams Friday, November 6 at 10pm ET, for 90 minutes.

This first episode is the introduction — who I am, the house in Middletown, the déjà vu that started all of it, the awakening, and what this show is and isn’t. Then a monologue on the week’s topic, followed by your questions and comments through the live chat.

Blog Zero posts here on Thursday, November 5, and sets up Friday’s show. The stream link will be announced here first.

The first episode is the introduction — who I am, the house in Middletown, the déjà vu that started all of it, the awakening, and what this show is and isn’t. Then a monologue on the week’s topic, followed by your questions and comments through the live chat.

I’m taking another week to get everything squared away before going live. The articles keep coming on Thursdays either way. When the stream date is set, it’ll be announced here first.

Yours might be little green men. It might be the Threat narrative — the Elizondo lineage, the implication of menace. It might be angels or demons, depending on the door you came in. None of those is what I mean, and since the word carries the whole project on its back, I need to set it down carefully before we go any further.

When I say alien, I mean what the Latin meant: alienus, belonging to another. Position, not verdict.

I tend to use the term alien because I see them as something outside. Outside the world as we perceive it. Outside the border of consciousness. Outside the stream of time.

That’s it. That’s the whole definition.

It’s deliberately neutral. It says nothing about benevolence or hostility. It says nothing about origin — not extraterrestrial, not interdimensional, not anything else. It takes no position on what they are, where they’re from, or what they want. The word tells you where they stand in relation to me: outside. Everything else stays open.

There’s a discipline in that, and I’ve been applying it in private since I started this project. Today I’m making it public.

I keep my vocabulary distinct. Alien is not ET — ET says extraterrestrial, and that’s already answered the origin question, which I haven’t. Alien is not visitor — visitor says someone came calling, and that’s a relationship claim, and the relationship is exactly what’s in dispute. Entity is the most neutral word I have, and it’s deliberately flat: a thing that is. Others is my shorthand for whoever is on the other side of this, taken together, without sorting them.

Each of these words is a different claim. Blurring them smuggles in verdicts. If I call them ETs, I’ve told you where they come from. If I call them visitors, I’ve told you their manners. I don’t know either of those things, so I don’t say either of those words unless I mean the claim. When you see me switch words mid-piece, it’s not carelessness — it’s precision. Watch the words. They’ll tell you exactly how far I’m willing to go.

This is my editorial rule, and I’m putting it on the page for the first time so you can hold me to it: whenever a term tries to close the verdict for you, I’ll warn you that it’s doing it. Even — especially — when I’m the one using it.

Then there’s the history of the names, because names have been steered before.

In 1947, Kenneth Arnold described objects moving like a saucer skipped across water, and the press gave us the flying saucer. The mockery was baked into the name from the start — a saucer is a kitchen joke. The word did the debunking before any investigation began.

In 1952, Air Force Captain Edward Ruppelt coined UFO — unidentified flying object — partly to escape that mockery. Where the saucer named the shape and smirked, UFO named the ignorance and stayed flat. Ruppelt’s rename opened the subject up: it cleared the stigma so investigation could happen.

And now UAP. The modern rebrand. On its face it’s the same move — a neutral term replacing a loaded one. But notice the direction. Ruppelt’s rename widened the subject; this one may narrow it back down — recentering the phenomenon on military sensors, on post-2004 encounters tracked by jets and caught on FLIR, and quietly archiving out the experiencer record. The bedroom visitations, the dream intrusions, the entities at the foot of the bed: no room in the acronym.

Watch it happen in real time: the government’s own PURSUE disclosure archive, tranche six, jumps from 1952 — Ruppelt himself on audio, the Tremonton film — straight to 2022–2025 video. Seventy years fall into the gap. And the gap isn’t empty by accident; it reproduces the official position, held since 2017, that Blue Book ended investigation until recently. The archive’s own chronology enforces the narrative. The decades between — the abduction-research years, the experiencers, my own lifetime — are the missing middle the files are shaped around. I’ve written about this narrowing before. I’ll keep the question open here the way I keep it open there — intent versus effect. Maybe the rebrand is honest hygiene. Maybe it’s selective memory. The effect is the same either way.

Which is why naming matters, and why this piece comes where it does.

Whoever names the thing steers the fight over what it means. That’s the Division thesis in linguistics form. Hand people opposing names — savior, invader, demon, angel — and they’ll fight over the names forever instead of demanding answers from whoever’s actually out there. The names are the battlefield. I’ve said before that the narratives may have been handed to us to sow discord; the words are where the planting happens.

So here’s the contract, stated plainly so there’s no confusion later.

When I say alien, I mean the outside thing. Outside the world as perceived, outside the border of consciousness, outside the stream of time. Neutral on benevolence. Neutral on hostility. Neutral on origin. The verdict stays open — not because I’m hedging, but because closing it is nobody’s job until the testimony is heard, and the testimony is the whole project.

You know the word now. We can begin.

The livestream is on the way. There’s more to come — we’ll announce it when we can.

When someone starts telling stories about entities in the night, about experiences that rhyme with religion — with angels, with demons, with the afterlife — it looks like he’s about to tell you what to believe. About God. About what happens when we die. About what the visitors are.

I’m not going to do that. And I want you to know why, because the misunderstanding is easy and the stakes are real.

What I report here are my memories, as I remember them. That’s the whole contract. It’s not so much about proving it — it can’t be. I’m not out to prove a thesis. I’m attempting to understand something I can’t escape, because it’s part of who I am.

So when I describe experiences that read like religion, I’m describing what happened to me, not preaching it. I wasn’t raised religious — my family was mostly Agnostic. The spiritual content was running through my encounters before I’d learned much about the subjects it resembled. I report it the way a witness reports weather: it was there, I saw it, make of it what you will. It is not an argument for anyone’s theology, and it is not an argument against it.

The same goes for the research. It points where it points. I follow it where it leads, and I say so when it leads somewhere uncomfortable — including uncomfortable for me. Nothing in this project gets a free pass, including what was shown to me. There’s testimony, and there’s the record, and I hold the two up against each other to see where they rhyme and where they don’t.

And the interpretations — the frameworks I keep coming back to, trying to make sense of a lifetime of material that doesn’t fit anywhere else — those are mine. I hold them lightly. I could be wrong about any of it.

Here’s what I’m actually asking of you.

Not that you change what you believe. Your faith, your skepticism, your settled positions — those are yours, and I have no interest in trampling them. I’m asking you to think about the implications.

If even part of what I describe is real, what follows? What does it mean for how we understand consciousness, or death, or the stories every religion has been telling about visitors from elsewhere? You don’t have to accept my account to sit with that question. The question stands on its own.

And if none of it is real — if I’m misremembering, or dreaming, or confabulating a lifetime — the implications are still worth sitting with. Millions of people report experiences like these. The phenomenon of the reporting is real even if the visitors aren’t. Why do human beings keep having the same encounters, in the same rooms, across every culture that ever kept records? That’s not a small question either.

I’m not building a camp. I’m setting down testimony and asking you to think.

Your beliefs are yours. I’m not here to take them. I’m here to lay my cards on the table and ask what you see in them.

The livestream is on the way. There’s more to come — we’ll announce it when we can.

That lens doesn’t stop at my own material. It applies to the community around this subject, too — and right now, the community is divided.

There is way too much arguing about whose interpretation of this and related phenomena is correct. This is because there are multiple narratives that humanity has been exposed to, over many generations. There are folks who are just curious, people who have only seen strange objects, and genuine experiencers too. Most of us have our own understanding about these issues. But it goes beyond a difference of opinion.

It appears, from my perspective, that there are several narratives which have existed in the UFO community for almost as long as it’s been around, and each has circumstantial evidence in support of it. One narrative is the Alien savior group. One is the Alien invasion group. Yet another is the Ancient Astronaut view — mostly that they’ve been with us all along. The fundamentalist religious view is its opposite. I could go on.

The problem is we have been lied to. Most likely since mankind began, with help from those we have entrusted to protect and guide us — human and non. Why are so many experiences similar yet so very different? Is it because we are so very different that experiences must be individualized? I would have to say yes.

My question is: are the lies we have been fed coming from “Them”? Have the Others themselves planted opposing narratives in us to sow discord?

It seems this topic, like so many others, is being used to divide us. As long as we debate who’s right or wrong instead of grouping together to solve the problems of the world — without the government and military industrial complex, or aliens for that matter — we’re doing their work for them.

The only way to get answers is to demand them. But more people have to speak up.

most people never will — craft I couldn’t explain, beings that shouldn’t exist,

and stretches of my life I have no memory of at all. For a long time I didn’t

even know how much I’d forgotten. Then, in my late twenties, the memories

started coming back, and I’ve spent the years since trying to understand what

happened to me.

This publication is where I tell it straight: the experiences, the search

through every explanation on offer, and my conclusions — stated on my terms.

Every week I publish the story behind the story, and on Friday nights at

10 p.m. Eastern I take it live: *At The Edge of Reality*, ninety minutes,

questions welcome.

I’m not here to sell you a theory. I’ve seen too much that doesn’t fit any of

them. I’m here to separate the wheat from the chaff, out loud, one piece at a

time. Subscribe free and hear me out.

“Welcome to the Edge”

*It was a December evening in 2012, and I was heading out to third shift.*

*I’d just gotten in the car when I saw it — a bright flash in the sky over

Middletown, Ohio. No sound. Not fireworks. The flash grew into something:

rings of light around a large, dark mass, hanging there, bigger than my phone

could fit in one frame. I ran through the house to the backyard as it passed

overhead.*

*The next thing I knew, I was standing in my kitchen. I don’t remember coming

back inside.*

My name is Nathan Walters, and that night was not the beginning of my story.

It was closer to the end of the first act.

What I’ve come to understand — slowly, and against my own resistance — is that

nights like that one reach back to my earliest childhood. Visits I couldn’t

remember. Craft of more than one kind. Beings of more than one kind. And, on

more than one occasion, human beings standing alongside them. When the memories

began resurfacing in my late twenties, I did what anyone would do: I went

looking for answers. Researchers, books, late-night radio, years of calling

into shows and comparing notes with strangers who’d seen the same things.

Here’s what I found: nobody has this figured out. Anyone who tells you

otherwise is selling something. What I have is a forty-year file of

experiences, a shelf of other people’s explanations, and a clear-eyed sense

of which parts of each survive contact with what I actually lived.

That’s what this place is for.

Each week I’ll publish a piece of it — an experience, an explanation weighed

and measured, a conclusion I’ve reached or rejected. On Fridays at 10 p.m.

Eastern, the same material goes live on stream: ninety minutes, my story and

your questions. Everything here eventually feeds a book I’m writing, because

some stories are too big for one telling.

I won’t ask you to believe me. I’ll ask you to hear me out, and think deeply

about what you hear. That’s reason enough.

Welcome to the edge. Subscribe, and let’s get started.