Since shaking off the burden of being a Silicon Valley CEO, Joe Firmage has been spending his time asking the eternal questions. However, if his recent remarks to a crowd of UFO researchers are any indication, he's only received enough answers about those persistent lights in the sky to deepen the mystery.

As part of his ongoing attempt to put UFO phenomena and coming technological developments into a broad historical and cultural context, Firmage began his PowerPoint digital presentation with a tour of the "history of homo sapiens."

Although his precise diction and spiraling, oracular cadences managed to round out his comments here, the meat of the message was neither complicated nor novel -- basically, the truth is the marriage of science and religion, and any true understanding must fall somewhere between the two methods for explaining the world.

After saying he believes in evolutionary principles -- a dangerous enough topic in a room dotted with people whose fundamentalist relatives harp on the notion that "all abductees have meddled in the occult" -- he noted that evolution is incomplete in itself.

"Something is missing from purely random selection," he said, quoting boyhood hero Carl Sagan's "you are star-stuff" to justify his conviction that, while "science has informed knowledge of our ultimate creator," human life is also a product of "spirituality."

He then launched into a sketch of how these forces -- largely dominated by the rising power of scientific thought -- had shaped the 20^th Century and especially the "cusp" or "brink of destruction" on which the century now teeters. After taming the electromagnetic spectrum, exploring the moon and embodying the "mind of humanity" as the internet, he said, spirituality, or "the power of consciousness" bound by ethics, is waiting to re-enchant the world.

"It looks increasingly like science fiction is soon to be fact," he said. "Art predicts the future."

While noble enough in itself, this dream of fusing religion and science, meaning and data, told the audience little about the truth behind those lights in the sky.

Firmage himself seemed, if not uncertain, then unwilling to share much concrete detail on this matter beyond the fact that he believes that UFO phenomena do in fact exist and have been with us for millennia, and that they have been debunked and ignored in recent times largely due to the efforts of the scientific establishment.

Otherwise, the entities apparently remain as "mysterious and discrete" to Firmage as they do to any investigator less sanctified by newspaper headlines. Significantly, he characterized UFOs only as phenomena that "maintain their distance" and may or may not follow "multiple agendas."

When he asked whether the chaotic body of UFO literature can be interpreted as "an integrated saga," no answer was forthcoming.

Instead, Firmage seemed content to point to the conditions under which the answer will appear, as though he hoped, like John the Baptist, that the crowd would choose not to follow him, but one to come after him.

Since UFOs represent "an intermediate paradigm in the ontological debate between science and religion" -- along with near-death experiences -- he promised that only a unified scientific/religious mindset could ever solve the UFO riddle in its entirety.

Once that union occurs, he said, the field of UFOs and other "anomalous" experiences will be eligible for re-admission into the scientifically-sanctioned universe of explainable, predictable "reality."

Firmage did not explicitly refer to this decoding of the UFO mystery as one of humanity's "graduation requirements" that, once met, will allow our species to travel the universe on our own with, as he put it, a spacecraft in every back yard.

Still, in his opinion, the integration of spirituality with 21^st-Century science is likely to be one of those requirements and, as such, the understanding of UFOs would necessarily be a pleasant side benefit.

In a last nod to Carl Sagan, Firmage wondered whether the UFOs may be not only a symptom of the flaws in our understanding -- the as-yet-unidentifiable "anomalies" in our otherwise orderly universe -- but also the force prodding us to repair our errors.

"Can we rule out the concept of extraterrestrial evangelism?" he asked the crowd, again without answering his own question (originally Sagan's).

What the crowd gave back was mostly applause punctuated with bewildered silence. They'd come to hear Firmage's truth because they were tired of their own questions going unanswered, and they had hoped to get some answers out of the man in the newspapers.