Never Mind, Say the U.S. Government’s UFO Hunters
Operation clean-up is easy to explain, but why the five years of taunting the Roswell crowd?
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. hedcutBy Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.Follow
Jan. 13, 2023 5:48 pm ET
The Pentagon’s UFO hunters seem to coin new acronyms at a rate of about one a year, and may now need another—unexplained delayed object.
The UDO in question is the intelligence community’s second annual report on military sightings of what are now called unexplained aerial phenomena. Originally expected in October, then promised by year-end, it appeared Thursday, sticking another pin in the five-year UFO belief bubble fostered by the U.S. government itself.
In an irony the world will be slow to appreciate, 60 years of Roswell paranoia has been stood on its head. The intelligence the U.S. was hiding is intelligence that suggests UFOs are not alien spacecraft but ordinary drones, balloons, wind-blown plastic bags, etc. The government’s desire to keep its own secrets was a key inflator of the UFO bubble.
In the new report, all hints of woo-woo and uncanniness are gone, in favor of worry about the hazard airspace “clutter” poses to air traffic. Unsurprisingly, the reported sightings increased with the increased attention. Of 195 incidents that could be explained, 100% were not due to alien visitation. Of course, the genie won’t go back in the bottle easily because 171 remain unexplained. But the truth is out there: If 100% of explained events don’t involve aliens, what is the assumed rate of alien involvement in the unexplained events? If thousands of incidents are examined over decades and none yield proof of alien visitation, what should we assume about the background incidence of alien visitation?
On the flipside, if aliens ever do visit, expect the evidence not to be ambiguous or hiding behind a pile of ordinary unexplained events.
Ukraine perhaps accounts for the change in tone. Suddenly, it was no longer suitable to have the world believing the Pentagon either had lost its mind or was using UFOs to hide its own possession of uncanny, destabilizing military capabilities. The risk of a mass-hysteria outbreak also couldn’t be ruled out. Suppose, in a context of widespread belief cultivated by the government, a military pilot were to crash after chasing a UFO, as happened in 1948 to a Kentucky air guardsman who crashed his P-51 while pursuing what was later judged to be a secret U.S. government balloon?
One puzzle remains: why the U.S. government for so long seemed pleased by its role in propagating the UFO frenzy, before turning on a dime a year ago—a shift paralleled by the overnight shift from credulous to skeptical of its chief stenographer, the New York Times.
Interesting now is to chart the progress from misleading to non-misleading. A previous national intelligence report, issued in June 2021, implying dozens of unexplained sightings by military pilots of “physical objects” exhibiting “advanced technology”—clearly misleading.
John Brennan, the Obama CIA chief who in a 2020 podcast pointed to a “type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life”—misleading.
John Ratcliffe, President Trump’s intelligence czar, who ruled out an earthly explanation for apparent “technologies . . . that we are not capable of defending against”—misleading.
NASA Chief Bill Nelson, who invoked the possibility of parallel universes and added, “We hope it’s not an adversary here on Earth that has that kind of technology”—misleading.
Any doubt that Operation Clean-Up is now under way should have been dispelled in late November. The Pentagon’s intelligence undersecretary and its UFO office chief held a briefing to sing in unison that the U.S. has no information to support the alien-visitation hypothesis. NASA is in repentance mode too, letting the media know its own forthcoming study won’t point to extraterrestrial explanations.
Kudos are due a relative few, such as Popular Mechanics, the Intercept and Reason magazine. Since the suggestive leak of Navy pilot videos in 2017 indicating unexplained encounters, they have been nearly alone in upholding the standards of American journalism in an unpopular cause, namely not assuming that every passing mystery that eludes explanation is due to alien spacecraft.
Then there’s PBS, which last week aired a part-documentary, part-docudrama on the alien-visitation thesis. In the end, PBS was also a non-misleader if you stuck around long enough. Just before the closing credits, its panel of astronomers and astrobiologists was allowed to emphasize that, for time and distance reasons, humans are unlikely ever to have a direct encounter with an alien civilization. At best, we will discover they existed long after they’re gone, or vice versa.
