The fact that the government was secretly studying something previously considered pseudoscience helped rehabilitate the image of UFOs. It was called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, and, after it was disbanded, its existence was disclosed by the New York Times in 2017. senators, the Pentagon created a secret office dedicated to studying such enigmatic reports. Interest in UFOs had been boosted further by the revelation that in 2007, at the behest of several U.S. The report by the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force followed a series of prominent articles in recent years about videos taken by Navy pilots showing mysterious objects, some of which appeared to be moving at astonishing speeds and with motion unlike any known terrestrial aircraft. national intelligence community released a long-awaited report on UFOs. Let’s review the UFO renaissance for those of you who have been paying attention to other, purely terrestrial stuff, like the pandemic. The subject is interesting only to the extent that the phenomena under scrutiny remain mysterious - and therefore outside the normal boundaries of logic, journalism and science. ![]() The lack of resolution to the UFO debate appears to be built into the inquiry. But which mercifully are not perfect, thus allowing military pilots to see them, sometimes, and even capture them on poor-quality videos. And who right now are … hiding? Watching us? Their location cannot be discerned because they have special cloaking technologies. We’re talking about elusive spacecraft piloted by unknown beings, of unknown biology, using unknown technologies. The classic UFO narrative - the interesting conjecture, the one with extraterrestrial beings in it - involves a ziggurat of unknowns and unknowables. Earlier this year, in an appearance with late-night host James Corden, former president Barack Obama spoke about videos of UFOs shot by Navy pilots: “here is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.” But Obama could have gone further: We don’t know where they are. And this isn’t the kind of story where you can do a lot of fieldwork. To do any kind of UFO story requires a descent into the rabbit hole of ufology, and that hole is bottomless. There are practical, mechanical reasons for being reluctant to engage on this. It doesn’t matter how many front-page stories there are about UFO sightings, or that the Pentagon acknowledged it had an in-house UFO-probing office, or that some government officials think UFOs might be aliens. That would be a great, career-making story. I want my name on a front-page story with a 72-point headline saying THEY’RE HERE. Make no mistake: I want to be the reporter who goes out on a limb and breaks the space aliens story. People don’t need someone with a fanatical desire to be correct to come along and pry their fingers loose. They are our handrails on a shaky planet. We all rely on our beliefs to get through the day. It gets old, always telling people to stop reading the horoscope. ![]() Over the years I have found less joy in telling the believers that what they believe is not true. ![]() Thus it was a major disappointment for readers who bought a copy after finding it in the “Occult” section at Barnes & Noble. When I wrote my aliens book I made a disastrous marketing mistake by not including any aliens in the story, focusing instead on people who believe in aliens. Science journalists regularly disappoint people by refusing to confirm really cool things like UFOs, past-life recall, astral projection, telekinesis, clairvoyance and so on. A better story would be that, after all these decades as a skeptic, I’ve converted, because the recent rash of UFO sightings has persuaded me that these are, in actual fact, spaceships from somewhere else in the universe, or perhaps from the future, and could even be future humans, such as grad students getting their PhDs in paleoanthropology. This skeptical take, however, is the boring take. I would put the likelihood at 0.0000 and then add some more zeros, before eventually, begrudgingly - because I’m so intellectually flexible - putting in a little 1 out there somewhere to the right, a lonely sentinel, because who knows? (Yes, I’m saying there’s a chance.) My strong suspicion is that the number of UFO sightings that involve actual alien beings, from deep space, with the tentacles and the antennae and so on, is zero. But I’m wary of returning to that strange universe, because anything I write is guaranteed to be unsatisfying for everyone involved.
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