A subcommittee of the House of Representatives on Intelligence and Combating Terrorism met this week to discuss unidentified aerial phenomena. On one level, this was a very unusual event – the rare UFO congressional hearing, the first in more than 50 years. And yet he continued, as many others do on Capitol Hill: dry, polite, and hassle-free. Which seemed strange. Shouldn’t there be a little more? You know, alien stuff?
The hearing included more than an hour of congressional examination of two very important people, the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security and the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, before moving into a closed, secret environment. There were shots of mysterious objects moving in the sky. Still, a live comment summed up the whole affair quite well: “Well, it all looks pretty anti-climatic,” the viewer wrote. Are they trying to make it boring?
Witnesses do mention aliens, but only to say that US military officials have not found evidence of them in the 400 modern UFO sighting reports they currently have in their books, by military pilots and some civilians. This week’s hearing was not about uncovering, once and for all, indisputable visual evidence of alien ships passing through Earth’s atmosphere. It aimed to review the progress of a working group set up by the Department of Defense in 2020 to “discover, analyze and catalog the UAP” – unidentified aerial phenomena – “which could potentially pose a threat to US national security”.
And yet, when we hear something like the first congressional UFO hearing in half a century, we viewers can expect more. Representative Adam Schiff, a member of the subcommittee on intelligence, called the subject of the hearing “one of the most enduring mysteries in the world” – then at least give us a new and ghostly clue! If casual observers have high expectations for an event like this, it’s because they are exposed to it without a real context.
And this story desperately needs context. Without it, we can miss important details, trust information when we need to be skeptical, and see things that don’t really exist.
Read: Just don’t call them UFOs
There is no way to circumvent the fact that in popular usage the term UFO – unidentified flying object – is synonymous with alien spacecraft and has been around for decades. The assumption that UFOs may represent something truly beyond is right there in the language that people use to look closely at supposed images; they “debunk” the initial observations, suggesting that before careful study they could be the real deal. (The government tried to get away with the gravest version of the UFO discourse, preferring instead to use the term UAP, which somehow sounds even more mysterious.)
But the reality is that unidentified flying objects or unidentified aerial phenomena are just that, and there is no reason to immediately assume that they are something so interesting. In the same way that astronomers have to go through a checklist of possible explanations for a strange new phenomenon in space before considering an alien option, aviation experts have at their disposal a number of more secular culprits: drones, experimental planes, meteorological phenomena, birds, balloons – even the planet Venus, which looks extremely bright and ethereal through the fog of the atmosphere of our planet. The alien alternatives are certainly more boring, but the alternatives are there and always have been. A report at the center of a previous UFO hearing in the late 1960s found that the lights observed over a military base were birds and weather conditions.
Indeed, the mysterious objects in one of the videos shown at this week’s hearing, glowing triangles in the night sky, turned out to be the result of an artifact of the camera’s equipment that captures the footage. Most of the reports provided to the Pentagon’s task force remain unexplained, but Ronald Moultrie, deputy secretary of defense for intelligence and security, said that did not mean the response should be something extraordinary. “We do not have enough data for the event itself [or] the site itself, “Moultrie said at this week’s hearing. “So this is a data problem we’re facing.”
Read: If aliens are there, they are very far away
The next point in the context, which is often missing, is why anyone even talks about aliens in 2022. The last jump in interest in UFOs began in 2017, when The New York Times published an article entitled Shining Auras and Black Money: The Pentagon’s Mysterious UFO Program, for the government’s shady efforts to catalog the UAP, along with two Navy videos including the UAP. But the suffocation of reflection over the past few years does not match the breadth of evidence for an alien explanation, of which there is not much. (One of these videos will later be explained by an independent video analyst and eventually by Pentagon officials.) Many media outlets followed the Times’s example, leaving the thrill of writing about UFOs with a big wink to surpass their normal sense of decency. “Reporters believed their sources without corroborating data, let documented controversy slip through, and ignored the motives of both foreign and government government campaigners,” said Sarah Scholes, a science journalist and author of They Are Already Here: UFO Culture. and Why we see plates, wrote in The Atlantic last year. “If these stories did not say the word aliens outright, many indulged in what-ifs, while going beyond the available facts.”
Many of the stories, Scholes said, accept the credentials of certain people – say, the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program – as nominal evidence that their claims about the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs are true. Similarly, part of the reason astrophysicist Avi Loeb received so much coverage for his discussion of aliens over strangely shaped interstellar objects is that he is a professor at Harvard. So when people see a UFO story in The New York Times, they tend to trust the newspaper. But these articles appear out of context: UFO reporters who revealed the history of the Pentagon’s previously undisclosed program are longtime UFO activists who argue that such sites may have extraterrestrial explanations. .
People can read the latest news that the government has 400 reports of UFOs and imagine a recent explosion in observations. After all, when the Pentagon and UFOs appeared in the headlines last summer, defense officials said they were looking at only 144 reports! Here the context also matters. The increase is due to the fact that the Ministry of Defense requested reports from servicemen in a more deliberate way and promised, at least publicly, to take their reports seriously. The inexplicable things in heaven are really questions of national security; an unrecognizable technology may belong to a hostile nation. Expect the Pentagon to report higher numbers, but find out why those numbers are higher. The consequence will be: “Oh God, they were hiding something. I knew it!’ as if that means “These things are aliens,” not “War is secret, and now you know it was secret,” Jason Wright, an astronomer at Penn State University who works in the field of SETI, the search for alien intelligence, my said in an interview last year.
Every time I see a news story or a UFO TV interview that calls for more context, I think of Edward Rupelt, an Air Force officer who worked on one of the Pentagon’s earliest efforts to figure out strange, fast-moving things. the sky. Rupelt coined the term UFO in the early 1950s. In 1956, Rupelt wrote a report on UFOs. No one asked him to do so, but he was disappointed with the “secrecy and confusion” and wanted the public to have all the facts. He finished the document with a reassuring note. “I would not like to risk guessing what the end result of a UFO investigation will be, but I am sure that in a few years there will be a proven answer. Within a few years! I’m sorry, Rupelt.
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