The UFO report is out! It sucked. Now what?
So much anticipation! So much excitement! So much daily googling of “UFO report released.”
So much disappointment.
Not exactly disappointment, more like a wash of ennui. And along with the ennui, a return to a familiar world where we continue to know precisely nothing about intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The release of the government’s June 2021 UFO report left me as deflated as the balloon they proved wasn’t a UFO.
Not that any serious people really expected the government to release a photo op of Trump’s summit with our new UFO overlords. The Times had already shot that expectation down a month prior. But here’s what I did expect: I expected an introduction very similar to the 9-page document we did get. And then I also expected some detailed briefs on 140+ bizarro-world reports about unexplained objects the military had collected in the last few years. I was excited to pore over pages and pages of stuff, that in the context of a government report, left one’s most logical conclusion to be that the world had turned upside down. My imagination was primed for the experience of visualizing strongly documented evidence of the weird and the unknowable.
But no. All we got was more of the same: some stuff is happening; we don’t know what it is or why. I would have been more satisfied if they had found it was all just deflating balloons.
No, that’s not true. The New Yorker came to the rescue by pointing out that there are still very weird things out there, and the government report, in a small way, just reinforced that. There’s hope for exciting disclosures yet. And the government, at least, is pretty sure the UFOs aren’t foreign tech. That’s exciting, it its way.
The thing about the report that really let me down is the way it came out: late on a Friday, in the middle of summer, with as little fanfare as they could manage. And the report itself couches the nearly unbelievable in as mundane terms as possible. The medium is the message here. If you are a believer that the government is and has been covering up aliens on Earth for decades, then this once again fits the government’s tired modus operandi: they will continue to cover the UFOs and aliens up.
But for a brief moment, I had the sense that there could be a “disclosure timeline” in the works. That somewhere deep in the bowels of a pentagon server is a Powerpoint with a graphic showing something like this:
- 2017: Release questionable footage of ufos
- 2020: Confirm footage is real
- 2021: Release all further information on ufos we have
- 2022: Admit we think they are alien craft
- 2025: We all live in Futureworld
But the idea that there’s a disclosure timeline really gets a bullet to the head when the “big report” turns out to be basically the same information they released years ago. Either there is no disclosure timeline, and the government really doesn’t know anything more than they are saying, or for some reason they decided to push back the disclosure timeline in a big way.
Either option kicks up that big wave of ennui. How is a person supposed to stay excited about this topic!? How did you old-school UFO nuts carry that torch for all those years? It’s sooooo boring when there’s no new information!
So what now? What can we do to keep this pot stirring, and hopefully get more real and verifiable information based on what we do know? I would suggest soldering the connection between what the government has documented and confirmed and the long history of reports that closely echo the characteristics of the government’s recent evidence. The 18 events the report calls out as being truly bizarre (objects holding steady against the wind and performing inhuman feats of maneuvering and velocity – documented by multiple systems and witnesses, and all in just the last two years) have an uncanny resemblance to the “objects in the sky that go zip” reported by so many people around the world for the last 80 years or so. Let’s start putting those pieces together.
I know some groups have been collecting UFO sighting reports for decades. And their data might be very useful. But let’s go at what we know with a sharp razor: let’s eliminate any claims of visitation (for now) and most if not all claims of interacting with an alien ship on the ground. Actually, let’s pull out anything where a witness is sure it was aliens. I would like to see someone put together a database of strong reports focused on “objects in the sky that go zip.” Match what people have been seeing historically with what the government has documented with its sensors. If we do this, we might find a huge collection of unexplainable but believable sightings that goes back through most of the 20th Century (if not further) and are seen around the entire globe.
Next, I keep wondering about this question: are these things in space? There is some evidence that satellites have occasionally tracked them, but mostly it seems like those objects within the confines of our atmosphere – like vaguely in range of air craft.
I want to know if astronauts on the ISS have spotted anything weird when looking out the window. Or have sensors read objects behaving strangely at extremely high altitudes. Has the space shuttle ever bumped into anything? Is Buzz Aldrin considering recanting his (convincing) explanation that Apollo 11 was being followed by space garbage, not a strange craft?
Adding good documentation of “objects that go zip” in space would make a much stronger argument that these things are not domestic Earth objects. Surely the first step would be to encourage astronauts to come forward and speak up without fear of ridicule. The culture has shifted recently toward opening that call to pilots (possibly in no small part because of the government report). Let’s see it explicitly extended to astronauts as well.
If we put all that data together, we can unleash the experts on it. What they might find is an unassailable and overwhelming argument for the existence of something extremely strange regardless of what the government has admitted. That is a report that could get me excited.