Robert Bigelow Says Aliens May Abandon Humanity

Real estate billionaire and longtime UFO researcher Robert Bigelow has laid out a sobering view of where humanity stands with non-human intelligence, and the outcome he fears most is not an attack. It is abandonment. According to his comments in episode three of the Bigelow Podcast alongside investigative journalist George Knapp, these intelligences may one day decide the human species is not worth the effort, and simply leave.

https://youtu.be/ko_9xC0Hx3Y

Bigelow’s argument is that the real problem is not whether humanity is intelligent enough. It is that we may be, in his words, spiritually bankrupt, and therefore not eligible for contact at all. He frames it as a gap between our technological growth and our spiritual maturity, two lines he says may never cross. If they do not cross, he argues, we will never be responsible enough to handle what we create. He describes the outcome as waking up one day with nothing unusual left on the doorstep, as if whoever was reaching out had stopped trying.

That fear connects to a question Bigelow says few people are willing to face, which is who communicates on behalf of the human species. He runs through who he would keep out of that role. He said he does not want military leaders, because he believes hostility is already built into their mindset. He would avoid politicians for carrying their own agenda, and he gives no pass to international bodies either. He points out that the United Nations gives five nations veto power, which he argues makes unanimous agreement close to impossible. His conclusion is that the “how” of contact is as unsolved as the “who.”

He also suggests the few humans who have already made contact may have caused relationship damage. Military officials have been engaging these objects for some time now, and Bigelow’s worry is that trust may already be broken in ways we do not know about. That raises a harder issue he returns to throughout the conversation, which is how you rebuild trust with something you cannot verify. He notes there is fraud in anomalous fields, including in the reported spirit world, so even when a being communicates, the problem of knowing whether it is honest never fully goes away.

Bigelow adds another concern by asking whether artificial intelligence should frame our questions in any contact scenario. He describes a scale of AI development with roughly 14–15 stages and says we are already around stage 9, because it has, in his words, learned to lie. His worry is that handing communication to AI means losing control to a speed no human can match.

His conclusions come from decades of self-funded research, including his years owning Skinwalker Ranch in

Utah, studied through his own group and later the government-connected program AAWSAP. He said the phenomenon there seemed to communicate but would not let itself be recorded, which he offers as one reason there are so few clear UFO videos. In one account, a camera on a pole was pulled apart and disabled while a second camera watching it recorded nothing approaching. Bigelow read that as a message that the phenomenon does not want to be filmed. 

Sources

Bigelow Podcast. (2026, August 18). ET communication: Politicians, lawyers, A.I. or telepaths | Bigelow Podcast Ep. 3 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zawJJ1lHFvs

Jesse Michels. (2026, August 13). UFOs, psychics and the afterlife with PhD Jeffrey Mishlove [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcaY-rd9Dhc