Full disclosure: I’ve been into the UFO/UAP stuff since I was twelve. I had four unexplained experiences before I was twenty-five. I’m also an unrepentant X-Files fan. If any of that just cost me a follow, we probably weren’t going to work out anyway.
I’ll get to the experiences in a bit. First, the joke that started everything.
Trading cards
Almost two years ago, my brother and I were at drinks, and the conversation drifted — as it periodically does — to the subject of Dr. Steven Greer. Greer is one of the older figures in the modern disclosure conversation. He ran Project Disclosure. He organized the National Press Club briefings. He wrote most of the books that hooked the current generation of UFO-curious people, myself included. In the past few years he’s been quietly pushed to the background as Tom DeLonge and the newer crop of institutional-adjacent voices have taken over the room.
My brother, off-handed: “He needs a trading card.”
We laughed. He forgot about it by morning.
I couldn’t.
The Manus moment
A few months later, Manus dropped, and everyone I follow was messing around with it. I was looking for a first real project to test what agentic research could actually do — something I actually cared about, with enough gaps in my own expertise that AI would have to fill something meaningful. I came back to the joke.
What if I built the whole game around it?
I know how to design cards. I know how to establish a look, a feel, a vibe. What I don’t know — what I have never known — is anything about trading card game mechanics. Turn economies. Cost curves. Rock-paper-scissors balancing. The craft that people build entire careers on. Ten years ago, that expertise gap probably kills this project by dinnertime. In 2025, agentic research and a couple of frontier models filled it while I did the thing I was already going to do.
If you read Doc Ock’s Arms — this is the trading card game that piece was referencing.
Fifty cards, three categories, one governmental cover-up
The current deck is fifty cards across three categories: Characters, Phenomena, and Conspiracies. Every card is illustrated with MidJourney, typeset in Affinity Publisher, and stamped with a faded government-agency seal that makes each card look like it’s been sitting in a warm filing cabinet since 1974. Character costs sit on paper-clipped index cards. Categories are color-coded on a fold-out tab at the bottom. The whole thing is designed to feel like something you’d find in a shoebox in your uncle’s basement, next to the Zener cards and the “have you seen me?” flyers.
Character cards are all real people, obscured just enough to keep the lawyers out. Manus suggested a Garbage-Pail-Kids-style parody approach early on — enough of a phonetic and visual echo to be recognizable, changed enough to be its own thing. Dr. Steven Greer became “Dr. Steven Clear.” Bob Lazar became someone I won’t name here so I don’t spoil the reveal. And so on down the roster.
About that title spelling
Yes. It’s on purpose.
It’s not “Disclosure is Imminent.” It’s “Disclosure is Eminent.” The pun leans into MJ12 and the older strand of the disclosure narrative — the one that says the ultimate truth about our place in the universe is reserved to a majestic few, and those waiting passively for a complete government confirmation will be waiting for a long time. What we’re actually getting is soft, small-scale, heavily redacted acknowledgment. Not disclosure. Confirmation. And it’s already begun.
If you get the joke, welcome. If you don’t, don’t worry about it. There’s a whole strand of UFO folklore that runs on wordplay, misdirection, and inside jokes; this project is affectionately in that lineage.
Envelopes and the WarGames form
Once the first fifty were printed, I mailed decks in nondescript brown envelopes to a handful of gamer friends I trust. Each envelope contained the deck, a rulebook, and a slip of paper pointing to a feedback form built to look like it came straight out of WarGames. Green text on a black terminal. Deliberately jankier UX than any modern designer would let past their own door. The URL reads like something that leaked: redacted-2393-fwiw.netlify.app.
The playtesting was real. The feedback was real. The rebalance was necessary — several cards were broken, one was so overpowered we called it “the nuke,” and a category needed a fundamental rework.
Fable 5 and the alpha web app
I burned my last few days of Claude Fable 5 trial access this month rebalancing the game. Fable 5 turned out to be exceptionally good at this — hand it the current card set, describe the observed problem, and it would surface not just a fix but why the fix worked in the underlying math. Multiple passes, converging on a set of numbers that actually played right.
Which brings me to the reason I’m writing this post now.
The alpha web version of Redacted is live at redacteddisclosureiseminent.netlify.app. It is very rough. It is very ugly. It plays.
Reid Hoffman famously said: if you’re not embarrassed by your first release, you shipped too late. I’m embarrassed. I’m shipping it anyway. The visual layer is placeholder. The interaction model is minimal. The animations don’t exist. What does work is the game. The mechanics are baked. The card interactions are wired. The turn economy holds.
I’m calling what you’re about to see AI proto — as distinct from AI slop, which is what most people would call something that looks this rough. The difference between AI proto and AI slop is that AI proto has a designer leading it toward something. AI slop is a destination. AI proto is a milestone on the way somewhere else. Somewhere I’ll get to with, most likely, Rive doing the animation heavy lifting once the underlying mechanics stop moving. But we’re a long way from that.
About those four experiences
I promised. Briefly:
The orb. I was around thirteen. Looking out my bedroom window on two consecutive nights, I saw a glowing orange sphere hanging in the sky about three hundred yards out. Motionless. First night I told myself it was the moon and the rolling movement inside it was clouds. Second night I got on my BMX bike and investigated the location I thought it was above. No streetlight. No power source. I later confirmed the moon is never visible from that window. I don’t know what it was.
The circle of light. Early twenties, walking home through the wooded neighborhood with a friend after a long evening at the cranberry bogs. One house away from my parents’ place, a circular column of light appeared around us, following us. Bright enough to cast crisp shadows of the tree leaves above. My friend and I looked at each other — the classic “you’re seeing this too?” look — and then simultaneously looked up. Nothing. No sound. No aircraft. We both walked home in near silence and decided out loud, to each other, that it must have been a helicopter searchlight. Neither of us really believed it.
The other two I’ll save. One is probably a false memory conflated with an X-Files episode I’d just watched. One is inexplicable but not a UFO experience — an early-teenage sensory event I’ve never quite figured out.
I don’t claim any of these are proof of anything. I claim they happened, that I still can’t fully explain them, and that they’re part of why the disclosure conversation has always felt personal.
What’s next
Near-term for Redacted: keep the alpha web version live and evolving. Rework the printed edition to match the rebalanced rules. When the mechanics really stop moving, do a small drop of updated physical decks — probably later this year — for anyone who wants one.
Medium-term: build the visual and interaction layer properly, most likely in Rive. Rive is one of the most exciting design tools I’ve seen in a decade, and the recent MCP work makes it viable to develop a real production animation layer largely solo. That’s its own post. I’ll write it when I’ve done enough of it to have something honest to say.
The long-term plan is more nebulous. What I actually want is for this project to be a conversation starter with people who take this subject matter seriously as a creative and cultural space. If you’re working in that space professionally — Jesse Michels, Danny Jones, anyone in that broader documentary-and-podcast circle — I’d love to talk. Not to sell you anything. To compare notes.
The truth isn’t out there. The truth is in my PowerPoint presentation.
And also on a small ugly website in Massachusetts.