UFOs: Why the military isn’t scoffing anymore
After decades of blaming weather balloons, bird clusters, and odd cloud formations, the U.S. military is finally taking UFOs seriously, said Helene Cooper in The New York Times. In December, the Pentagon acknowledged it has been studying them through the “shadowy, little-known Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” (AATIP), formed in 2007. In April, the Navy issued new guidelines on how pilots should report encounters. Now five airmen have publicly described a host of “strange objects” they observed off the East Coast in 2014 and 2015. With no visible engine or exhaust plumes, the objects darted around at hypersonic speeds, making sudden stops and starts impossible for man-made craft, and nearly crashed into a pilot who came in for a closer look. “Wow, what is that, man?” one pilot exclaimed in a taped close encounter. “Look at it fly!”
“UFOs have finally come out of the fringe and into the mainstream,” said Nick Pope in the New York Post. We now have video of and details on “multiple events where UFOs have been tracked on radar and chased by military jets,” including a 2004 incident in which the USS Nimitz carrier strike group was buzzed by several high-speed objects. Last year, the Senate Armed Services Committee interviewed the Nimitz pilots, and the Defense Intelligence Agency briefed Congress on the AATIP’s work. As a former UFO investigator for the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense, I can tell you, “Something is happening. Something big.” Let’s not get carried away, said Mike Wall in Space.com. UFOs may exist, “but that doesn’t mean E.T. has been violating our airspace.” The sightings may be experimental aircraft or drones from another nation, or the result of glitches in the jets’ new radar systems. We can’t say for sure these weren’t alien spacecraft—just that the odds favor many “possible prosaic explanations.”
Still, it would be close-minded to rule out aliens, said Tyler Cowen in Bloomberg.com. Scientists are discovering “more potentially life-supporting planets all the time.” Humanity in the 21st century might be like Native Americans in the 15th, glimpsing wondrous sailing ships filled with strange beings approaching the shore. “To be oblivious of another civilization for a long time, and then suddenly encounter it, is a common theme in human history. Perhaps this has not happened for the last time.”