Big News About UFOs: They Exist

I’m sure you have seen clips of the saucer-shaped squiggles dancing around in footage from a Navy fighter plane’s gun camera. Along with silhouettes showing a round center and a modest pair of wings are pilots saying how they see them all the time and military brass declaring the US has nothing like this. The takeaway is that a swarm of UFOs – now called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) – have been playing cat and mouse with the Navy.

We have a lot to unpack here. How long has this been going on? Why are we just now being told? Why can’t we get a clear picture of whatever it is? What’s the political capital here? And most importantly, what the hell are these things up to?

Media predictably goes bonkers

We’ve had bogies flying around our skies since at least the 1940s, so why all the excitement now? These images aren’t any better than hundreds of other films we’ve seen of fuzzy objects dancing about.

The story here is that the military has finally acknowledged the objects really exist, even though they are still unidentified. The brass usually treat us to a scene where someone marvels at their speed and maneuverability and says since we don’t have anything like those things flying around, they must come from an advanced alien civilization or, worse, the Russians or Chinese.

This is a media gold mine. Our military says UFOs are a legitimate story! The media has thrilling gunsight footage with pilots whooping it up. Reporters can show dated sci-fi images for fun and make alien jokes. It’s about time the government officially recognizes these things are real, they seem to say.

This approach leaves no room for questions about whether we’re seeing secret US technology. You never heard a shred of skepticism about the military’s claims. No, UFO/UAP sightings are either a sign the US is losing the arms race to Russia and China – or space aliens. In any case, we need to give the military lots of money to either catch-up or defend ourselves.

The switch from UFO to UAP reflects the military’s history of denying the reality of the phenomenon. They just can’t bring themselves to say UFO. Now, they can discuss UAPs without the same disparagement and stigma UFO reports have be subject to in the past.

They may also use the term UAP as a marker to see who in the media is in the military’s pocket. If a media star chooses to use the term UAP over the popular UFO, I think it signals they are following the military’s line. Let’s see who picks up on it.

Why now?

The Pentagon just released a report to Congress on more than 140 sightings of UAPs. Why now? Why put out something that makes the Navy look defenseless?

Part of the reason is they had to. It was a requirement inserted into the 2021 Defense Budget bill by Florida Senator Marco Rubio. The topic has political capital, as a long line of politicians have promised to get to the bottom of the sightings. Carter, Clinton and Obama all made explicit yet unfulfilled promises of disclosure. Speculation is that new presidents are given a briefing of the government’s black secrets, shocking them into joining the coverup.

Another explanation: The Navy wants to punch up belief in flying saucers because they are flying something else around and want those sightings to be lumped in with common UFOs. This way, when someone gets blurry shots of, say, a naval EMP (electromagnetic pulse) interceptor drone, they’ll be filed away with the rest.

A better possibility: by escalating tensions with foreign enemies in space, the military can gin up support for increased funding. This militarization of low orbit is the backstory for Space Force. We’ve had a covert cold war in space for a good while now. As usual, the US military is pursuing total domination, while other countries are trying to gain parity. The conflict with Russia is heating up with their deployment of anti-satellite predators, and the Chinese are following suit. As long as UFOs are fictitious, a fruitful source of funding has remained closed. But if foreign enemies are ahead of us, then we must spare no expense.

Publicizing these images keeps the aerospace bucks flowing, especially to the Navy, which got cut out of the space war spoils when Trump launched Space Force. The media is delighted to play along.

Here’s what UFOs might really be

Many people don’t realize the films we see are taken with infrared cameras. We aren’t seeing the object’s outline, but its heat signature. The symbols and numbers on the images reveal how far away an object is, which lets you figure out its size. According to some analysts, the Navy bogies are about 3 feet wide. The heat signature is the same as a bird’s. They are at the altitude birds fly. They move in flocks. So, these puzzling UAPs are most likely seabirds. The unbelievable maneuvers? That’s an effect of parallax as the camera passes the trajectory of the object. The frame shifts make the object appear to zoom off.

Nevertheless, UFOs remain a puzzling phenomenon. Unfortunately, UFOs have been zipping around for at least 70 years with tens of millions of sightings, but not one clear picture. Plenty of fuzzy shapes and loads of fakes, but no authentic image showing the details of a ship. Three-and-a-half billion smartphones with cameras and not one clear shot.

I can’t give you a definite answer, so I’ll wrap this up with a shopping list of possible explanations for UFOs. You can read all about them on the Internet, so I’m just dropping starter links and making some witty remarks.

• Alien spaceships. By far the most popular opinion is that UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors flying about in saucer-shaped craft, remaining out of sight with the rare sighting. A Gallup poll last year found that about a third of the public believes in extraterrestrial spacecraft. The science fiction image of saucer people has burned its way into the public consciousness, and shows like Ancient Aliens have promoted them as real. Alien visitors will range from evil lizard men to beneficent Nordics. The bad guys want to eat babies, while the good guys want us to join a Galactic Federation (they must all be Liberals). The theories here can become quite