A note on what follows. I am not claiming to know what the object was. I am stating what I witnessed. My wife witnessed it with me.

On December 4, 2021, my family and I attended the annual Christmas tree lighting at Island Grove Park in Abington, Massachusetts. The evening included Christmas activities for the children and ended with the lighting of the town tree. The park is bordered on three sides by Island Grove Pond. We parked on Lake Street, where we could see the tree lights shimmering across the water.

As I guided my children back to the car, I noticed something hovering a few hundred feet above the pond. My first thought was that it was a drone filming the event. A second thought followed at once. If UFOs are real, this is probably what they look like. I had children to buckle into car seats, so I told myself I would take a closer look once everyone was settled. If it was still there.

My attention was divided that night. I was entering finals week of my first semester in a graduate computer science program, and I had planned to go home and study. I remember thinking that I did not have time for this.

The object did not leave.

After my wife and I got into the front seats, I leaned toward her and asked, "What is that?" Several hundred feet away, an object hovered in the air with blinking lights. Over the next few moments it moved slowly toward us. At one point I was no longer looking across the pond but up at it. Eventually it hovered about two hundred feet in front of us.

I could not make out its exact contours, but it was large, roughly the size of a small SUV. Several lights ran along its side. They were unlike any lights I had seen. They did not illuminate the body of the object or reflect off it. The light seemed self-contained, as if it served some purpose other than visibility. Even its quality felt unfamiliar.

What struck me most was the silence. The object made no sound at all. Nothing I have ever observed, no aircraft, helicopter, or drone, can hover and maneuver at low altitude without producing noise. This object did exactly that.

We sat in the car and watched it for thirty to forty-five minutes. I felt no fear. I felt peace, and something like gratitude. The moment seemed like a gift, a chance to see how narrow my sense of God's creative power had become. After years of graduate theological study, it is easy to fixate on fine points of revelation and lose the capacity for wonder. Sitting in that car, I felt like a child before the Father. Creation is greater, stranger, and more expansive than I had allowed.

I also felt a strong interior prompting simply to watch, to take it in quietly. I had the distinct sense that I should not film it, and that if I tried, it would leave. Eventually curiosity won. I stepped out of the car to take a photo. When I looked back, the object was gone. My wife, who never took her eyes off it, said it moved rapidly across the pond and disappeared. Whether it shut off its lights or accelerated instantly, I cannot say.

Growing up, I was frightened by stories of aliens and abductions. I assumed that if I ever encountered something unexplained, I would feel dread. I felt the opposite. Through my spiritual life I have tried to practice Ignatian discernment, which teaches that persistent fear is not from God. As I looked at the object, and imagined it looking at me, I felt a quiet and grounding conviction. We were both creatures within God's creation.

Afterward I set the experience aside. I knew that integrating it would mean reexamining some assumptions, and I was not ready. It was finals week. I filed it away and moved on.

Several years later, reports emerged of unidentified drones hovering over parts of New Jersey. The memory came back. Witnesses described silent, SUV-sized objects hovering at low altitude, and the grainy footage resonated with what I had seen. I was frustrated by how quickly people dismissed those reports. When multiple witnesses watch a large object hover silently for half an hour, the question is not whether something was there. The question is what it was.

About a year after my sighting, I bought a small drone for my son and me. Even at several hundred feet overhead, it produces a noticeable buzz. I have never seen or heard of a drone the size of a small SUV that hovers at low altitude for long stretches in total silence. The silence remains the unmistakable detail. Nothing in our known world operates that way.

I have kept this experience mostly to myself. I have prayed over it and reflected on it within the context of my faith. I am not claiming to know what the object was. I am stating what I witnessed. A large, silent object, moving with apparent purpose, holding low altitude for an extended period, unlike anything I have encountered before.

Some months ago I began drafting a research paper on whether nonhuman intelligence could fit coherently within the hierarchy of being as Thomas Aquinas presents it. Before that night at Island Grove Park, I assumed the existence of extraterrestrial life would detract from the faith. To my surprise, as I examine my own experience in light of the faith, I feel that I am finally doing real theology.

Congressional hearings, military sensor data, and credible witnesses have moved the UAP question out of the tabloids. The question is no longer whether people see things they cannot explain. They do. The question is what these things are, and that question does not belong to physics alone.

The Catholic Church has made no doctrinal pronouncement on nonhuman intelligence. It doesn't need to for the question to be serious. The tradition has always taught that creation contains intelligences that are not human. We confess it every Sunday, all things visible and invisible. Angelology is nonhuman intelligence studied for two thousand years.

Two easy answers dominate Catholic conversation. The first says every anomalous encounter is demonic. The second says the phenomenon disproves the faith. Neither survives contact with the tradition. Aquinas teaches that all truth, no matter who speaks it, comes from the Holy Spirit. If something is real, it belongs to God's creation before it belongs to anyone's theory about it.

The real questions are harder and more interesting. Where would embodied nonhuman intelligence fit in the hierarchy of being? What does the Incarnation mean for other rational creatures, if they exist? How does a Catholic discern an anomalous experience without credulity and without fear? What should pastors say to believers unsettled by disclosure headlines?

"Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth."
ST. JOHN PAUL II · FIDES ET RATIO

St. John Paul II opened his encyclical on faith and reason with that sentence, and it is the charter of this site. The Church has never asked believers to choose between honest inquiry and fidelity. Reason investigates what these objects are. Faith knows who made whatever they turn out to be. A Catholic needs both wings, and refusing either one is how you fall.

The Church has weathered Copernicus and Darwin. Each time, the panic came first and the synthesis came later, and the synthesis was better theology than what it replaced. This site is a small attempt to start the synthesis early, with fidelity to the Magisterium and the intellectual patience of St. Thomas.

Fear is not the Catholic response to a new reality. It never has been.

I am available for podcasts, interviews, panels, and parish or conference talks. I speak from a rare position in this conversation, as a trained Thomist, a working AI security researcher, and a witness.

Topics I can speak to:

Bio

Mark Foudy holds a Master of Theological Studies from Boston College and produced the first published English translation of Thomas Aquinas' commentary on Lamentations. He has presented Thomistic research at conferences in the United States and Europe. He is an AI security researcher and the author of AI Agents for Offensive Security (Manning). He writes at uaptheology.com on Catholic faith and the UAP phenomenon, a subject that became personal for him in December 2021.

A note for experiencers. If you are a Catholic who has seen something you cannot explain and you have kept it to yourself, you are welcome here. I will treat your story with the same discretion I wanted for my own. Nothing you send is shared or published without your permission.