Yeah, yeah, the X-Files are real, but how are the Leafs doing?
If aliens ever make contact, would we even care?
I suppose we’d pay attention for a bit. The story would ride roughshod over the news cycle for a week with headlines such as, “UFO Lands on Parliament Hill,” “Extraterrestrial Life Confirmed” and “Trudeau Takes Historic Selfie With Space Visitors, Offers Bizarre Apology, Gives Them Socks.”
Then, assuming the aliens come in peace and do not liquefy our organs or reveal their leaders are already living among us and known across the cosmos as the Kardashians, we Earthlings would yawn and move on to something else.
We’d shrug. We’d get bored. We’d change the channel.
If you don’t believe me, consider the shockingly blasé reaction to a front-page story in the New York Times last weekend. This was the most important Times story of the year. Maybe of the decade. No, maybe ever. This story should be the only story anyone is discussing because the implications are profound.
I’m sorry, what? The Pentagon green-lit a shadowy project called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program in 2007? The goal was to investigate unidentified flying objects?
Many military pilots have witnessed and recorded aerial phenomena that seem to violate the laws of aerodynamics and defy explanation?
The Times posted a video of one such close encounter, in which the pilots of an F/A-18 Super Hornet track an unknown object that is rotating while moving at high velocity. The pilots sound gobsmacked by what they are seeing, including a craft slicing above the clouds with no visible form of propulsion.
The footage is startling — or at least it should be, especially when you consider this is just a sliver of the evidence gathered over the past decade, or that investigators have recovered “metal alloys” and other materials scientists can’t yet identify.
Think about that for a second: We allegedly now have UFO debris. It’s as if aliens on a faraway planet were actively studying the fender from your Hyundai.
Watching the video the other night, I called my wife over and said, “You gotta see this.” She sighed and leaned over the couch to peer at my laptop. The clip is 44 seconds long. Before we hit the halfway point, she straightened up and said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you put on your headphones? I need to make lunches for school.”
It was like I was trying to show her a trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Sure thing, honey. I’ll grab my headphones. Just don’t expect me to hear your shrieks when the mother ship beams you up through the kitchen window and those thermoses full of ravioli are all that remains of your disgusting apathy.
The intelligence official who ran the Pentagon’s secret program, Luis Elizondo, resigned in October to protest “excessive secrecy and internal opposition.” That is not new. Since 1947, when the U.S. first started investigating UFOs via a wave of post-Second World War clandestine operations — Project Mogul, Project Sign, Project Grudge, Project Blue Book, Project Ozma — excessive secrecy has been standard operating practice. Blanket denials were the norm, and not just at Area 51 or Wright- Patterson.
So even beyond the disquieting possibility aliens are visiting Earth, what Elizondo is now doing — breaking the silence by way of a wake-up call — warrants much closer attention. As he told CNN’s Erin Burnett this week: “My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone.”
That is not whistle-blowing — it’s banging a gong.
And, remember, Elizondo is familiar with all of the files, not just the ones that are declassified. He quit the government, but not the mission. He is taking his expertise into the private sector, where his new gig is Director of Global Security and Special Programs with To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, the company started by former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge.
The footage is startling — or at least it should be, especially when you consider this is just a sliver of the evidence
And yet, by Wednesday, interest had crashed like a saucer in Roswell.
The irony may be as shocking as the new revelations.
For decades, while engaging in disinformation or stonewalling freedom-ofinformation requests from UFO researchers, the U.S. government rationalized its “excessive secrecy” with a belief that any such information could lead to mass hysteria and a panic that could bring about the collapse of society.
Or they stigmatized any interest in the subject as the stuff of occult nonsense. UFOs? That’s no different from the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot or the Bermuda Triangle. Stop being so ridiculous.
The stigma continues to this day, another reason Elizondo quit. But in 2009, the director of the Pentagon’s secret program wrote a briefing summary that included, “What was considered science fiction is now science fact.” Then, as now, crickets. The truth is out there. And the truth is, we don’t seem to care. vmenon@thestar.ca