These aren't your grandfather's UFOs
or are they?
The problem with the question do you believe in aliens is that there’s no satisfactory answer. The most appropriate answer goes something like I believe they exist and that’s the extent of my belief — but that’s too boring to say aloud. But then if you answer yes, and I think the aliens used sound waves to built the Pyramid of Giza, people are likely to start moving away from you on the bus. If you answer no, there’s no such thing as aliens, well then you’re just a party-pooper.
But, over the past few years, the answer given by the typical American millennial has shifted more firmly into the yes column. Now, I’m not talking about the sort of neanderthalish American millennial who gets their information from Joe Rogan — I’m talking abut a certain type of person, a person like many of us, who is wary of anybody too enthusiastic or certain of anything. Rather than sit around pondering extraterrestrial existence, we have busied ourselves with the shitshow presently unfolding on our own planet.
Aliens didn’t really occupy much of our consciousness until sometime around 2020 when things were so broken and weird that alien intervention (or even annihilation by aliens) was looking like the most promising outcome. We were in the early stages of what seemed an interminable pandemic and, somewhere in that wash of disillusionment, UFOs began to be treated seriously in places like The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Everybody seemed to be wising up to the fact that not only are UFOs real but also that they appear to be popping up more-and-more frequently (or, at least that with our improved technologies, we’re seeing them more-and-more frequently). The people-in-charge were no longer belittlingly dismissive about the question of extraterrestrials. When asked about UFOs in 2021, Barack Obama said “there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.” A month later, the Director of National Intelligence released a much-anticipated report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon in which he said these objects in the skies “appear to demonstrate advanced technology.” In 2022, Congress held its first UFO hearing in half a century.
And then of course, 2020 was the year that the Pentagon declassified the videos of UFOs spotted by Navy pilots.1 And those videos were everywhere; they were featured prominently in The New York Times and 60 Minutes. I was living near the White House at the time and it seemed like everybody Washington was talking about them. And they noticeably shifted public opinion, making believers out of a lot of us. It felt like the government was finally telling us about the aliens.
Since the release of those videos, the government’s line on the aliens been militantly agnostic. They can’t tell us what’s in the sky. All they can say is that these things aren’t weather balloons and they aren’t American and they’re almost certainly not Chinese or Russian either.2 According to the DNI report, these are designated as other — a category “pending scientific advances that allow us to better understand them.” 3
It’s not the government telling us about the aliens, but it is the government admitting its own befuddlement, which is the sort of thing you never expect from a big brother. And when your big brother can’t tell you the answer to a vexing question (like what’s that in the sky), you tend to make up your own answers (like it’s the aliens, stupid).4
This pro-extraterrestrial shift in public opinion is not an unprecedented shift — rational, level-headed humans have continuously had to update our scientific understanding of the universe we live in. We had to be told that the earth wasn’t flat and that it’s not in the center of the universe. But I doubt anybody much minded, because the earth’s position relative to the sun had no more impact on the life of a 16th century Italian shopkeeper than the U.S. government’s tacit acknowledgement that aliens are probably zipping around the stratosphere has on the life of a 21st century programmer.
The darkly comical interpretation of the government’s recent openness about extraterrestrials is that they chose to be honest with us at a time when America is diseased with conspiracy theories as basic as Joe Biden didn’t win the election and as outlandish as Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks drink the brain-blood of children. I guess what I’m saying is when Americans live in this many different realities, does it really matter what the government tells us?
We’ve been living in that conundrum for the past two weeks. When the Chinese spy balloon first transversed the country, the argument was easy for Biden critics — China Joe should shoot it down. But that argument fell apart after we started blowing things out of the sky like we were drunk rednecks and the government’s policy of we don’t know what the hell is up there quickly became a problem. Because when an American asks a question of his government — even if he doesn’t trust his government — he expects an answer. 5
Those videos were first published in The New York Times in 2019 but the government didn’t confirm that they were real until 2020. And after they were authenticated, I remember asking a lifelong buddy of mine — who has spent the last decade as a pilot in the Air Force — about UFOs and he told me that he and just about every single military pilot he knows has seen something like that in the sky, something moving in a way they couldn’t explain. But he said he didn’t report it and I could tell from the way he answered that there’s still a huge taboo within the military associated with coming forward about these sightings. Anyway, that’s what changed a lot of this for me — when somebody I trust was like yeah, all this shit is real.
It seems pretty obvious to me — and I’m no theoretical physicist — but it seems pretty obvious from the way that these objects move that they are operating outside the Earth’s gravitational pull. Which means that the aliens (if these crafts are aliens) have unified gravity with the other forces. Again, I’m not a physicist and I’ve only read the same Stephen Hawking and Michio Kaku books that everybody else has read. But isn’t that the simplest explantation to the question how do the UFOs move like that?
This idea — that we need to make scientific advancements to achieve an extraplanetary goal — reminded me of JFK’s moon speech where he said our yet-unmade rocket will be “made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced.”
I have a really hard time with the people who think the government knows all about the aliens and they’ve got some kind of a treaty with them and we have a secret lab full of aliens and all that shit. The government obviously knows a little more about the UFOs than the general public; they probably have some hi-res pictures they aren’t showing us. But the American government has never been too brilliant at hiding anything. And since every single thing that happened in the Trump White House leaked into the press, I have a difficult time believing that the government is in on the game.
The government’s current bewilderment at the UFO phenomenon is best personified comedically by Florida Senator (and Senate Intelligence Committee member) Marco Rubio who had spent portions of the past five years wandering around the Capitol, pointing at the sky and frustratingly scratching his head, complaining to military brass, experts and even Politico in 2021: “how can we have stuff flying over restricted military airspace and not even be curious — not to mention concerned — about who it is and why they’re here?”