UFO of GOD

About the Author

Chris Bledsoe operated a construction business in Fayetteville, North Carolina from the mid-1980s until the mid-2000s, and multiple secondary sources describe him separately as a licensed pilot; he is married to Yvonne Bledsoe and the father of four children. None of this biographical detail is in serious dispute, and this site's own case file on the underlying 2007 encounter documents his pre-encounter life, the MUFON investigation that followed, and the extensive skeptical record built up around his subsequent public claims in far more depth than a book review needs to repeat. What that case file does not cover is the book itself as a published object, and specifically the two men who agreed to put their own names on its cover.

Jim Semivan spent 25 years in the CIA's National Clandestine Service (its Directorate of Operations), retiring in 2007 at the Senior Intelligence Service rank and receiving the agency's Career Intelligence Medal. After retiring he co-founded, and served as Vice President of Operations for, Tom DeLonge's To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA) alongside physicist Hal Puthoff and former defense and intelligence officials Luis Elizondo and Christopher Mellon — the same organization whose 2017 activities helped precipitate that December's New York Times UAP story. His foreword supplies the book's most direct real-world credibility marker: a career CIA operations officer willing to publicly attach his name and rank to Bledsoe's account.

John B. Alexander enlisted in the Army in 1956, commanded Special Forces units in Vietnam, and retired as a full Colonel in 1988 after later service in Army Intelligence, including work connected to the Army's Cold War-era remote-viewing research. At Los Alamos National Laboratory he went on to help pioneer the U.S. military's non-lethal weapons program, and in the 1990s he consulted for aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigelow on founding the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), the private institute that first investigated the Utah property now known as Skinwalker Ranch — Alexander is reported to have been the first NIDS researcher to spend a night on the ranch itself. One credentials detail is worth stating plainly rather than glossing over, because a critical Goodreads reviewer raised it directly: Alexander's PhD is in thanatology (the study of death and dying) from Walden University, an online distance-learning institution, which sits at some remove from the hard-science authority the book's framing implicitly lends him.

It is worth being precise about what Semivan and Alexander actually contributed, since the book's marketing leans on their names more heavily than its actual division of labor: per the book's own official site and retailer listings, Semivan wrote the foreword and Alexander wrote the introduction. Neither man is credited as a co-author or as having independently investigated the claims in the chapters that follow; their role is to vouch for Bledsoe from their own institutional standing, not to add reported material of their own.

Historical Context & Origins

The book arrives within, and partly because of, the same post-2017 wave of mainstream UAP attention that TTSA itself helped generate: Semivan's involvement in that organization is the direct institutional thread connecting a Fayetteville contractor's 2007 river encounter to the CIA-and-Pentagon-adjacent UAP disclosure conversation that dominated U.S. coverage from late 2017 onward. Alexander's own career runs on a parallel, older track through the same general UFO-research world — his NIDS work at what became Skinwalker Ranch predates the TTSA era by roughly two decades, and it is a genuine, if generationally separate, connection between the Bledsoe story and the Skinwalker Ranch media franchise rather than a direct personnel overlap with TTSA.

Self-publication, under the imprint name “UFO of GOD” itself, is the book's actual publishing route rather than an incidental detail: its ISBN prefix (979-8) is the block IngramSpark and Amazon KDP assign to self-published titles, and 979-prefixed ISBN-13s have no valid ISBN-10 equivalent under current ISBN standards — a structural fact about the numbering system, not a gap in this article's research. As with several other titles on this site's own reading list, self-publication here appears to be the only realistic route available for a first-person religious-UFO memoir rather than an editorial choice, and it carries the same real vetting limitation this site flags elsewhere: no outside publisher's editorial or fact-checking process stood between Bledsoe's account and print.

The book was released with at least three distinct print ISBNs across 2023 — a January 30, 2023 hardcover, an initial paperback, and a second paperback edition dated September 14, 2023 with a different page count — alongside a Kindle ebook and an Audible audiobook narrated by Daniel Roueche. Spanish (OVNI de DIOS) and Italian (UFO di DIO) translations followed. That multiplicity of editions in a single release year is itself a small, verifiable indicator of a self-published title being actively repackaged and re-marketed rather than issued once and left alone.

The book situates itself, and Bledsoe's own account of “the Lady” and related visions, within an explicitly religious-spiritual framing that both major retailer taxonomies for the book reflect: it is catalogued under Religion & Spirituality/Christianity as well as under UFOs & Extraterrestrials. That dual shelving is a fair description of the book's own stated territory — it is not presented as a conventional ufology case study but as a testimony of divine or angelic contact using UFO imagery, a framing this site's Critical Reception section below treats as a documented interpretive choice rather than editorializing on our part.

Core Arguments & Key Concepts

The book's narrative extends well past the January 2007 encounter that this site's case file covers in full, including the MUFON investigation, the remission of Bledsoe's Crohn's disease that he attributes to the encounter, and the several hours of missing time he reported. Per the book's own description and independent secondary coverage, its central ongoing figure is a recurring feminine entity Bledsoe calls “the Lady,” whom he says first appeared on Easter Sunday, April 8, 2012, with a follow-up appearance that October and further appearances reported in 2013 and 2019 — consistently around the Easter calendar, by his own account.

Bledsoe describes visions accompanying these later encounters, including one in which orbs of light intervene during an imagined missile exchange between Israel and Iran; this article treats that specific claim as reported by secondary sources describing the book's contents, since it could not be independently checked against the book's actual page proofs. A distinct, separately dated encounter in 2020 is referenced in some online discussion of the book but could not be independently confirmed as a discrete event separate from the well-documented 2012 Easter appearances, and is not treated as established here.

The book also names a wider cast of institutions and concepts beyond the CIA and Army backgrounds of its foreword and introduction writers — NASA, an unnamed reference to “the Vatican,” the Cold War-era U.S. remote-viewing program, and the Monroe Institute (the Virginia-based consciousness-research nonprofit) — and describes an alleged healing involving the son of an unnamed Washington power broker, per retailer and secondary-source description of its contents. None of these specific claims carry independent documentary corroboration beyond Bledsoe's own account as retold in the book.

Structurally, then, the book's argument is cumulative and personal rather than evidentiary in the way a testimony-compilation project like this site's own UFOs & Nukes is: it does not marshal multiple independent witnesses or declassified paperwork toward a single documented pattern, but instead asks readers to accept one man's continuing first-person account of an expanding series of encounters, on the strength of his own credibility and the institutional standing of the two men willing to introduce it.

Key Cases & Evidence Discussed

The book's foundational case is the January 2007 Cape Fear River encounter itself, and readers who want the full, independently sourced treatment of that event — the 2008 MUFON investigation, the psychological evaluation that found no indication of fabrication, the polygraph examination that a retired FBI examiner reportedly found showed deception on some specific answers, and the subsequent 2024 technical debunking of two 2025 videos Bledsoe circulated — should read this site's own Chris Bledsoe (2007) case file directly rather than a compressed summary here; this article does not re-litigate that ground.

What the book adds is the extended aftermath: the 2012 Easter Sunday first appearance of “the Lady,” the October 2012 follow-up, and further appearances Bledsoe reports in 2013 and 2019. A specific alleged healing episode — involving a stroke victim, said to have occurred at a bar mitzvah reportedly attended by former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell — is one of the more specific and more contested claims associated with the book's aftermath narrative; it is discussed at length by a critical outside source examined in the Critical Reception section below, and this article treats it as a disputed claim under active, named scrutiny rather than settled fact.

The book's own official website advertises “New York Times Bestseller” status. This article could not find that claim corroborated anywhere independent of the book's own promotional material — not in any archive of New York Times bestseller lists, not on any retailer page, and not in any press coverage. A separate promotional bio instead describes the book as “the No.1 Bestselling book,” language that reads as an Amazon category-ranking claim rather than a New York Times list placement. Given this site's own documented history of catching fabricated or unsubstantiated details in UAP-adjacent material, the NYT bestseller claim specifically should be treated as unverified and likely misleading rather than repeated as fact.

The book's television footprint is real and independently confirmable, distinct from its print claims: History Channel's Beyond Skinwalker Ranch devoted Season 1, Episode 8 (aired August 1, 2023) to Bledsoe, and Gaia's Beyond Belief with George Noory devoted a Season 26 episode to “UFO of God: The Chris Bledsoe Story.” The original 2008 MUFON-adjacent investigation into the underlying case aired even earlier, as Discovery Channel's UFOs Over Earth: The Fayetteville Incident.

Critical Reception & Controversies

As of this article's research (August 2026), the book carries a 4.31-out-of-5 average rating on Goodreads across roughly 3,025 ratings and 272 written reviews — a substantial and largely positive reader response by that platform's numbers. The book's own official site separately claims a 4.5-star Amazon rating, but this article was blocked by repeated access errors from confirming that figure directly on Amazon itself; per this site's Amazon Rating Display Protocol, an unverified rating claim is not repeated here as fact, and no Amazon rating is displayed in this article's Book Profile for that reason — the Goodreads figure above is the one independently verifiable number in hand.

The most extensive skeptical treatment of the book and its surrounding claims is Tanner F. Boyle's multi-part Substack investigation, Christopher Bledsoe and the UFO Cult of Intelligence. Boyle's reporting questions the bar-mitzvah healing claim directly — noting the absence of corroborating witnesses beyond Bledsoe's own account — and raises, as one interpretive possibility among others he considers, whether elements of the Bledsoe network reflect deliberate intelligence-community “perception management” rather than genuine paranormal contact. Boyle's reporting is also critical of TTSA's own finances, citing a reported $37 million deficit by 2018, and of Semivan's specific role within that organization. These are a critic's arguments and interpretations, not established facts, and are presented here as such.

Nick Pope — a former British Ministry of Defence UFO desk officer turned journalist — wrote a direct critique of the book's “Lady” narrative in Skeptic magazine ("Ufology: From Fringe to Mainstream to Fringe?", February 2026), describing the Israel-Iran missile-intervention vision specifically as part of an “end times” theological narrative he says he doubts “holds any validity,” and situating both Semivan and TTSA within his broader critique of how mainstream UAP disclosure efforts have, in his view, drifted toward fringe theological claims.

A separate, detailed critical review circulating on Goodreads raises several concrete evidentiary gaps: co-witnesses to various claimed events are described as unnamed and have not independently corroborated Bledsoe's account; the book references “thousands of videos” without, per the reviewer, actually presenting photographic or video evidence to substantiate its more dramatic claims; and specific financial-hardship claims made in the book are described as not fully reconciling with other available information. The same review is the source of the Alexander thanatology-PhD detail noted above in About the Author.

On the positive side, a review by Steve Stred (stevestredauthor.ca, April 2023) and one by physician Larry Burk, MD, published on Medium, both exist and read as favorably framed in available search-result summaries; this article could not directly retrieve either review's full text due to access restrictions, and so does not quote either verbatim or characterize their specific arguments beyond noting that they exist and are broadly positive in tone. This article also searched specifically for coverage of the book on The Debrief, on Kevin Randle's UFO-research blog, and on MUFON's own website, and found none on any of the three as of this research — an absence worth noting explicitly rather than silently, since it means the book has not, as far as could be determined, drawn direct engagement from three of the more established outlets in UAP journalism and research.

Influence & Legacy

The book's clearest measurable legacy is televised rather than literary: its story has now been adapted or covered across at least three distinct television and streaming properties — Discovery Channel's original 2008 investigation, History Channel's 2023 Beyond Skinwalker Ranch episode, and Gaia's Beyond Belief — giving the underlying 2007 case a media footprint considerably larger than a self-published memoir alone would typically achieve, and one that runs on a parallel track to, rather than in place of, the book's own reader reception on Goodreads and Amazon.

Structurally, the book also functions as a real-world node connecting several separate threads this site tracks elsewhere: Semivan's foreword ties it directly to the TTSA-era UAP disclosure wave and its own well-documented controversies; Alexander's introduction ties it to the earlier NIDS-era Skinwalker Ranch research program; and the book's own religious framing connects it to a smaller but persistent strand of specifically theological UFO-contact literature, distinct from the government-document-driven research this site's other Essential Reading entries, like UFOs & Nukes, represent.

Whether the book itself will have lasting influence independent of its television adaptations, or whether it will be remembered chiefly as one entry point into the broader, still-unresolved Bledsoe story this site's own case file documents in far greater depth, is not yet settled as of this article's research and is not a question this article attempts to resolve.

The Book

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