On March 15, 2024, Alejandro Rojas published an episode of Open Minds UAP News that, in a single hour of content, managed to review Enigma Labs video submissions, cover what he described as a "controversial report" just released by the Pentagon's UAP research office, and interview a biological anthropology professor about a theory that UAPs are time-traveling humans from the future. The breadth was almost casual. For longtime observers of the UAP media ecosystem, it was also very familiar.
Rojas is not a household name outside UAP circles, but inside them he functions as something closer to a junction box. He writes for Den of Geek. He hosts Open Minds UAP News, which distributes through Spreaker and is supported through a Patreon he promotes explicitly to listeners. He is the through-line connecting a rotating cast of scientists, journalists, government officials, and fringe theorists — each appearing on his platform, each reaching an audience that might not otherwise find them. The question worth asking, carefully, is what that platform is actually doing: reporting on the UAP story, or shaping it.
The AARO report and who gets to explain it
The episode from March 2024 is instructive. AARO — the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the Pentagon's official UAP investigation body — had just released its historical report, a document meant to address the core allegation that the U.S. government has been concealing evidence of recovered non-human craft and biology. Sean Kirkpatrick, the former AARO chief who oversaw the office's early work, had staked his professional credibility on the report's conclusion: that investigators had found no verifiable evidence supporting those claims.
The report landed hard in UAP communities. Critics argued it was superficial, that it had failed to interview key witnesses, that it papered over the specific allegations made under oath by whistleblowers like David Grusch. Rojas framed it on air as "controversial" — which is accurate, though that framing also reflects the perspective of the community most likely to reject it. What the episode did not appear to include, based on available episode materials, was a substantive engagement with the report's actual findings, or any response from Kirkpatrick himself.
That gap matters. Kirkpatrick left AARO in late 2023, and his departure was itself the subject of considerable speculation. His position — that the evidence reviewed by AARO did not support claims of non-human intelligence — put him at direct odds with much of the advocacy community that has driven UAP to congressional prominence. Whether his detailed assessments of specific cases, including the Nimitz encounter and associated pilot testimony, have been fully aired in any public forum remains an open question. The May 2024 episode of Open Minds UAP News mentions Kirkpatrick in its summary description, but the specifics of what was said about his views are not documented in available materials.
This is one of the structural features of UAP media that doesn't get discussed enough. AARO produces official reports. Congressional hearings generate testimony. But the layer between those official outputs and the public — the podcasts, the YouTube shows, the Patreon-supported broadcasts — exercises significant editorial discretion over what gets amplified, what gets scrutinized, and what gets quietly set aside. Rojas occupies a prominent position in that layer.
Enigma Labs as infrastructure
Running through multiple Open Minds UAP News episodes is a consistent relationship with Enigma Labs, a company that crowdsources UAP sightings and provides video analysis tools. The March 2024 episode, the May 2024 episode on ball lightning with Dr. Karl Stephan, and the Sarah Scoles episode from later that month all include direct links to specific Enigma Labs sighting pages — not just general references to the platform, but curated URLs pointing to individual case submissions.
Enigma Labs describes itself as providing UAP video analysis, though the specific methodology behind its assessments is not publicly documented in detail. The company's repeated appearance across Rojas's content, combined with the practice of embedding direct links to its database, positions it less as a subject of coverage and more as a partner infrastructure. Whether there is a formal editorial or financial relationship between Open Minds and Enigma Labs has not been disclosed in the materials reviewed, and no official statement from either party addresses the question.
That doesn't mean there's something wrong with the relationship. Media organizations link to databases all the time. But in a beat where the line between journalism and advocacy is already contested, the nature of these partnerships deserves transparency that isn't currently visible.
Scientists, skeptics, and the framing problem
The guest roster across recent Open Minds episodes is genuinely eclectic. Dr. Karl Stephan appears to discuss ball lightning research — a legitimate scientific inquiry into a poorly understood atmospheric phenomenon that some researchers have proposed as a prosaic explanation for certain UAP reports. Dr. Michael Masters, a professor of biological anthropology, appears to discuss what he calls the Extratempestrial Model, the hypothesis that UAP occupants are future humans traveling backward in time. Sarah Scoles, a working science journalist who has covered UFOs with notable skepticism, appears to discuss her experience on the beat.
Putting Stephan, Masters, and Scoles in the same content ecosystem is, in one sense, admirable pluralism. In another sense, it reflects a strategic ambiguity that has defined UAP media for decades — the ability to present speculative and rigorous frameworks side by side without clearly distinguishing between them. The Extratempestrial Model is described on the episode page as "an alternative to the Extraterrestrial hypothesis," which is accurate but not particularly informative about its evidentiary standing. Ball lightning is a real phenomenon supported by peer-reviewed research. These are not equivalent, and a reader encountering them in adjacent paragraphs of an episode summary might not know that.
"an alternative to the Extraterrestrial hypothesis"
Scoles, for her part, has written critically about the UFO disclosure movement and the gap between its claims and its evidence. Her inclusion in a Rojas episode is interesting precisely because her perspective cuts against the grain of much UAP advocacy coverage. What she said in that conversation, in detail, is not available in the materials reviewed here.
The April 2025 episode and a question that lingers
On April 21, 2025, Rojas published what the episode page described as a discussion of "the state of UAP research and the best path forward" — a framing that sits somewhere between journalism and advocacy. The episode distributed through Spreaker, linked to his Den of Geek author page, and directed listeners to his Patreon. The note also referenced, without elaboration, "the latest UAP headlines" and unspecified UAP videos.
The timing is notable. By April 2025, the UAP disclosure legislative landscape had shifted significantly. AARO had reportedly released its Fiscal Year 2025 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, though questions have been raised about whether that report arrived months after the statutory deadline established by Congress under 50 U.S.C. § 3373(k)(1)(A). Congressional interest in UAP intercepts around North America remained active. The episode's description offers no window into whether any of that specific material was engaged with in depth.
None of this is disqualifying. Open Minds UAP News is not a newspaper of record. It does not claim to be. But it has enough reach, and Rojas has enough cross-platform presence, that the choices made in his editorial chair — which guests, which reports, which Enigma Labs cases — carry real weight in how a substantial audience understands what the government has and hasn't said about UAP.
The connection that hasn't been fully traced in print is the one between the crowdsourced data infrastructure that Enigma Labs represents, the media platform that Rojas runs, and the policy conversation happening in Congress — a triangle in which each vertex influences the others in ways that aren't always visible. Enigma's data shapes what cases get discussed. The podcast shapes how those cases get framed. The framing shapes what audiences bring to their reading of official reports like AARO's.
The specific document that would clarify the picture is any formal disclosure of the editorial and commercial relationship, if one exists, between Open Minds UAP News and Enigma Labs. Without it, the nature of that partnership remains one of the more consequential unanswered questions in UAP media.