Christopher Bledsoe and the UFO Cult of Intelligence, Pt. 1
An Analysis of UFO of God, Chris Bledsoe, and Those Who Believe in Him (or Want You to Believe in Him)
On February 23rd, 2021, a Scottish man named Christopher Gray murdered his elderly father by stabbing him 110 times and posted the video to Twitter. The post was captioned: “Down with Satan and his minions.”1 Gray was a paranoid schizophrenic who was found not responsible for the killing due to his disorder. He is currently in a mental institution for ongoing treatment. As covered on a livestream of Steven Cambian’s Truthseekers, Gray was apparently obsessed with UFO Twitter. Because of this obsession, he had sent messages to numerous prominent people in the field with a video of him committing the crime attached—an email list including Lue Elizondo, Tom DeLonge, Bruce Maccabee, Kit Green, Chris Mellon, George Knapp, Nick Pope, and Jack Sarfatti among many others. It is through this email that it becomes clear just how familiar Gray was with the realm of UFO researchers and personalities. Further, in his rantings to his brother on a telephone call recorded on the day of the murder, Gray spoke of seeing UFOs and being taught by someone he referred to as “the lady.” He also claimed that someone had his picture and was trying to kill him.2 Cambian and other UFO researchers at the time saw this as being possibly related to the claims of Christopher Bledsoe, a man who has claimed to see orbs and had religious visions involving a Virgin Mary-type figure he calls “The Lady”. Other investigators have postulated that Gray was the target of a broader harassment campaign, but the references and possible connection to the Bledsoe mythology illustrate the power of belief in this specific UFO experiencer. As such, it is worth looking at the Bledsoe story in depth, explore the people who have granted it legitimacy, and analyze its appearance in the popular culture arena.
And the story has become a bit of a mainstay in the present UFO and fringe scenes, reaching consistent and, at times, prominent media coverage. Bledsoe is a former businessman and UFO/ET witness from North Carolina who has made appearances in a variety of books, TV shows, and podcasts throughout the past decade. In recent years, this exposure has only increased, with a guest spot on The Danny Jones Podcast and even a Fox News segment. Even a feature film is supposedly in the works. His family, particularly his children, have played an integral role in spreading the good word. With his son Ryan hosting a podcast covering the paranormal and the family’s continual supernatural experiences as well as his daughter Emily cultivating a substantial following on TikTok, the growing Bledsoe social media presence has become a family affair. While the popularity of the contactee-like movements of the 50s and 60s has been mostly dormant, Chris Bledsoe and his experiences, prophecies, and teachings have constituted a resurgence in the spiritual side of UFO contact—a George Adamski for the internet age.
The start of this journey was relatively conventional by paranormal experience standards: Bledsoe, his son Chris Junior, and a trio of friends encounter unearthly glowing orbs while on a fishing trip. As described in his recently published book, UFO of God, Bledsoe witnesses an incredible sight after wandering away from the campsite.
As I climbed the hill I saw a second sun, the same size and color as the first. I was stunned. It took my breath away. I dropped to my knees in awe of what I was looking at. Not only was it strange that these sun-like objects did not light up the sun as suns would, but also that they were close, barely farther than the far side of the field two hundred yards away. Two flaming spheres hovering in the distance in perfect silence, each about forty-five feet in diameter, as big as houses. Having spent so many years flying, I knew that these were not any kind of aircraft I had ever heard of.3
Bledsoe then sprinted back to camp to make sure his son and companions were unharmed only to find that he had several hours of missing time. His son Junior, who had gone to search for him, was found in another wooded area severely traumatized by threatening red spheres in the wilderness. These were later described as “two little entities, glowing softly with red fiery eyes (…) mechanical in nature, about an inch and a half round, opening and closing like shutters, straight up and straight down.” Bledsoe writes: “The little translucent beings (…) would pick up sticks and bits of broken branches and look at them curiously then throw them back on the ground.”4 Junior was paralyzed and apparently closely watched by these entities, unable to act until his father found him again. With the entire party sufficiently spooked, the group tried to make their escape but soon found themselves followed by the same glowing objects. While everyone with him was begging him to step on the gas, Bledsoe is overcome by the awe of the experience, especially when one of the objects appears at the same stretch of road where his first wife had passed away 25 years prior. “I could not say why, but this orb’s presence above the site of the most traumatic moment of my life filled me with a sense of peace,” Bledsoe writes.5 After continuing the tumultuous chase, the orbs eventually shot up into the sky and disappeared.
However, the encounter was far from over. The same strange lights and even stranger beings followed Bledsoe and his son to their home. After being alerted by their barking dogs, Bledsoe spots something in the woods surrounding his house: “Standing four feet in front of me was a three-and-a-half foot tall being, gently glowing the color of the moon. Two red eyes. A glassy translucent triangle was fixed on its chest.”6 Despite his immense terror at this close encounter, Bledsoe was nevertheless told by the being that the entities wanted to “help” him. The otherworldly figure disappeared when Bledsoe’s dog jumped towards it. With both father and son extremely shaken, they decide to sleep in their car miles away from home after seeing another being through the window.
The sightings continued throughout the months that followed this night of terror with marked changes taking place in Bledsoe’s personal life. After one specific encounter with the same moonlight-colored beings, he felt the “obliterating ephiphany” of “the singular, ultimate importance of all living beings.”7 He claims that his Crohn’s disease symptoms completely disappeared after several run-ins with the entities. With this inner growth, however, came an ostracization from his community, most of whom seemed to think the whole story was either “sinful folly or the work of the devil.”8 He eventually reported the incidents to UFO investigators, although was slow to do so for fear of further damage to his family’s reputation.
Despite this initial reticence to come forward with his story, Bledsoe’s encounter was eventually taken seriously by the Mutual UFO Network. The organization was impressed by Bledsoe’s believable demeanor and the incident’s corroboration by multiple parties. Part of their investigation was filmed for an episode of the short-lived Discovery Channel documentary series, UFOs Over Earth, in 2008. Bledsoe came to view this decision as something that “would follow” the family “for the rest of their lives.” While clearly expecting “vindication, celebrity, or revelation,” the Bledsoes instead received what they felt was “a nationally televised interrogation of (their) character with inconclusive results.”9 Even though Bledsoe ruminates on the TV episode and how it effected the family’s lives often in UFO of God, the episode was, in general, a very sympathetic portrait of the Bledsoe encounter. UFOs Over Earth follows MUFON investigators such as Rich Lang and James Carrion (then International Director) as they go through the typical procedure of investigating a UFO sighting or close encounter. Not to give away too much of where the Bledsoe case heads, (and Carrion does not mention Bledsoe in this context,) but it is nevertheless interesting that Carrion left the organization in 2009 and stated in a blog post after resigning:
The phenomenon is based in deception—of the human kind—and that there is no way ANYONE will understand the real truth unless they are willing to first accept that. No, I am not talking about some grandiose cover-up of alien visitation, but instead the documented manipulation of people and information for purposes that I can only speculate on.10
Regardless, the MUFON team put Bledsoe through a battery of questions, a psychological exam, a polygraph test, and a hypnotic regression. They also developed CGI recreations of Bledsoe’s sighting to illustrate more accurately what he claimed to witness. The only instance where the producers and hosts seem to “interrogate” Bledsoe as he claims is via an inconclusive polygraph test that noted some deception—hardly a surefire measure at establishing truth, a circumstance which the investigators even acknowledge. The MUFON investigators express some doubt about Junior who seems filled with “angst” but tend to find Bledsoe himself believable.11 Bledsoe, however, says that a “storm of ridicule and judgement (…) fell” upon him and his family in the immediate aftermath of its airing.12 Junior ran away from home. Chris himself fell into a deep pit of depression. But, Bledsoe would later write, there was one positive that came from appearing on this dreaded TV show: “Of the whole experience, the only worthwhile ordeal was the regression therapy, which over the next year slowly unlocked my blocked memories.”13
The timbre of Bledsoe’s paranormal experiences shifted to the more intensely spiritual in 2012, after years of apparent harassment and a soiled reputation from the episode of UFOs Over Earth. This is where some of the strangest elements within the recurrent oddness surrounding the man would blossom. Led out his back door one night by “shadow beings,” he is handed a strange object. Bledsoe describes it as:
About the shape a small chihuahua dog without a head or tail, it had rough prickling fur. It squirmed slightly. It was alive. There were no discernible limbs. Then the fur sharpened, as if into the spiked quills of a hedgehog. I dropped the creature out of surprise. It writhed and twitched helplessly at my feet.14
In this weird dreamlike state, he was instructed to care for this odd lifeform—representative of humanity itself. More visions or images developed as his eyes adjusted to the darkness: A translucent bull leaped over him and, strikingly, a woman bathed in golden light appeared before him. This entity, a recurring figure in Bledsoe’s pantheon who he calls The Lady, instructed him that he was serving a higher purpose. “She talked of the beings as guardians she sent to do her bidding, of my apocalyptic visions as a possible future for earth, of our agreement requiring absolute trust in her,” Bledsoe writes. “She vowed that if I continued in this mission, she would protect my family and me, she would allow the orbs to be photographed, and she would allow me to show these phenomena to witnesses outside of my family.”15 Granted this holy mission over a decade ago, Bledsoe has spent the ensuing years preaching his story to a variety of outlets and taking (admittedly extremely blurry) photographs and videos of the UFOs that he can supposedly sense preternaturally.
After this reawakening, he was told by his spiritual guide to tell people all about his experiences in hopes that humanity could learn important lessons. He returned to speaking publicly to satisfy this request. At a 2012 North Carolina MUFON chapter meeting, he spoke of his encounter with The Lady and gave prophecies that materialized in his head: “There will be a 6.8 magnitude earthquake on September 23, 2012 in Baja, California. In New York this fall, elections will be disrupted.”16 As far as I could tell, an earthquake of this magnitude and location did not occur on that date.17 The election was disrupted by the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, but the prediction is so broad as to be applicable in any election. Nevertheless, after this Edgar Cayce-esque reemergence and other appearances, the humble North Carolinian would begin to attract the attention of a variety of esoterically-inclined individuals—some well-known and others more obscure. With the apparent validation that Bledsoe had been seeking beginning to come from NASA personnel, intelligence officers, and religious scholars, one is left to wonder if the story of Chris Bledsoe is one of a modern day prophet—or if it is the story of a novel, homegrown religious movement that is somehow useful to the military and intelligence apparatus of the United States.
Thank you for reading Getting Spooked. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read, consider becoming a regular subscriber to get posts directly to your inbox. Become a paid subscriber to read over a dozen archived posts and support the continuation of this publication. I also started a referral program that rewards archive access to those who share the newsletter with others, so be sure to tell any friends who might find this work interesting. Email me at gettingspooked@protonmail.com with any questions, comments, recommendations, leads, or paranormal stories. You can find me on Twitter at @TannerFBoyle1, on Bluesky at @tannerfboyle.bsky.social, or on Instagram at @gettingspooked. Special thanks to The Anomalist for linking to this newsletter’s previous article and their continued support. Until next time, stay spooked.
McCabe, Grant. “Killer son who stabbed Scots dad 110 times and filmed him on Twitter ordered to remain in state hospital.” The Daily Record. 14 February 2022. https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/killer-son-who-stabbed-scots-26224452.
Cambian, Steven. “Murder in UFOLAND : The Christopher Gray story.” YouTube, uploaded by Truthseekers, 26 October 2022. Available here.
Bledsoe, Chris. UFO of God: The Extraordinary True Story of Chris Bledsoe. Self-published, 2023. Page 60. Available here.
Ibid., page 65.
Ibid., page 75.
Ibid., page 80.
Ibid., page 87.
Ibid., page 90.
Ibid., page 121.
Carrion, James. “Goodbye Ufology, Hello Truth.” Follow the Magic Thread: The Personal Blog of James Carrion. 3 July 2023 (originally published April 2010). http://followthemagicthread.blogspot.com/2010/04/goodbye-ufology-hello-truth.html.
“The Fayetteville Incident.” UFOs Over Earth, directed by Robert M. Wise, season 1, episode 1, The Discovery Channel, 2008. https://www.amazon.com/UFOs-Over-Earth-Season-1/dp/B01MAYDRNE.
Bledsoe, Chris. UFO of God: The Extraordinary True Story of Chris Bledsoe. Self-published, 2023. Page 125.
Ibid., page 121.
Ibid., page 163.
Ibid., page 167.
Ibid., page 172.
So psyched for this series 🥳🥳
There is information missing from this story. I was the first to write about this in 2022. https://venniekocsis.com/2022/11/09/reaping-ufology/