Attention UFOlogists: Beware Grifters, Scam Artists, and Liars
Our Shifting Reality By CJ Arabia
December 2025
In my WOW! column for this month, I would like to speak about something that is near and dear to my heart -- that is, the topic of grifters and scam artists in the UFO community. Our cup runneth over with frauds in UFOlogy because when you’re studying the unknown, there are few facts and little evidence to go on. Hardly anyone even bothers to take the time to fact-check these people, who can generally go around saying whatever they want, roaming unchecked through our world like a black hole... sucking clicks, views, and dollars into their gravitational pull.
Why is the UFO community such low-hanging fruit for these grifters, scam artists, and liars? I mean, we all like to say things like "The truth is out there" and "Trust no one” - right? But the UFO community doesn’t seem to be searching for the truth so much as we seem to be desperately seeking some kind of confirmation, and we are willing to trust ANYONE who will make us feel validated in our own personal beliefs.
We need to do better. Those of us with social media followings, YouTube channels, and positions that lead others to pay attention to us for some reason or another need to do better for the people who look to us for truthful information and answers.
For example, let’s look at a few rogues…
Let’s start with 1I/‘Oumuamua’, detected by astronomers in 2017, and holding the title of the first object we have been able to observe passing through our solar system that is actually from another solar system - so cool, right? Captured by our sun’s gravitational pull, it was sucked into our solar system, was sling-shot around the sun, reached escape velocity, and shot right back out into interstellar space. This interstellar object attracted a lot of attention. Its unique shape, trajectory, and tumbling motion caused a lot of people to make wild speculations.
1I/‘Oumuamua’ was the first “rogue comet” or exocomet that we were able to observe, but soon after ‘Oumuamua’ came another rogue comet we named 2I/Borisov in 2019. Then most recently, on July 1, 2025, we found yet another exocomet that we named 3I/ATLAS.
The scientific community is not confused in any way as to what these objects are.
The only person who seems to be confused by these objects is Avi Loeb who proposed that ‘Oumuamua’ could be a Solar Sail, an alien probe from another solar system, or some kind of advanced technology. Did Avi do any research on the object to confirm or deny his speculations? Nope! He just kept spewing his ideas to humanity and sucking in clicks and views, leveraging his title and degrees to create clickbait gold and make lots of money.
Don’t believe me? Listen to astrobiologist Karen Meech, who gave a wonderful TED Talk on ‘Oumuamua’ going into great detail about how the spinning motion and unusual shape of the object caused it to flicker like a light going on and off (you should just watch the video because she explains it much better than I possibly could). Definitely not a solar sail, just a really cool object that the public might have learned a lot about… if Avi Loeb wasn’t working so hard to create clickbait headlines.
Then again, Avi Loeb made numerous statements that our most recent rogue or exocomet 3I/ATLAS was “most likely aliens.” But as professors like Dave Farina have stated, “all of the anomalies are fabricated by Avi Loeb, there are no anomalies, there has never been a single second where 3I/ATLAS was ever not behaving exactly like a comet, there’s nothing anomalous about it. There’s nothing it does that isn’t comet-like and everything that comets do… it does. That’s all there is to it.”
We are just getting much better at identifying and spotting exocomets at this point, we discovered 3I/ATLAS when it was at a distance of 4.53 AU (or 677,678,354 kilometers) from the Sun. Dave Farina states, “3I/ATLAS has never once looked like anything other than a comet.” It was discovered on July 1, 2025, and by July 2, the astronomical community had identified it as an interstellar comet. We’ve been studying it and learning from it ever since.
You can do a deep dive with Flint Dibble and Dave Farina for yourself.
If you don’t like what you hear in this podcast, do your own research and prove them wrong or prove your theories right. That’s how we learn! That is the kind of passion and diligence we need in our community! I love finding out I was wrong about something. I literally get a thrill when someone proves me wrong. Sometimes I feel a little stupid for a moment or two, but then, ultimately, I feel excited to learn something new and share my newfound information with others.
I may not be the smartest person in the UFO community, but I do know that degrees and titles don't mean someone won't lie to your face. As long as clicks = cash, we need to think twice about what we are clicking on and who we are supporting in the UFO community. We need to support science because when the world finally wakes up to the UFO reality, we are going to need scientists to help us understand this whole thing better. Real scientists, not pseudoscientists and people with degrees who are willing to say anything to make a buck.
And don’t even get me started on the long list of scam artists and charlatans in the Experiencer community!
We need to stop seeking confirmation, be more discerning, and stop trusting people simply because they say things that make us feel justified in our beliefs or that which we know to be true and not yet proven.
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A longtime UFOlogist and lifelong Experiencer, C.J. Arabia is both Chief Investigator and ERT Case Manager for Southern California MUFON.
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