What We’re Learning About UFO Sightings

I Believe, I Want to Believe, Fox Mulder, X-Files, aliensAs I wrote many years ago, there are two kinds of people: mundanes and fantastic. This division has more relevance to UFO phenomena today than ever before:

  1. Mundanes: People who are firmly grounded in reality. They like facts and history. They have a firm grasp on the real world and are made very uncomfortable by anything outside of it. When reading, they like contemporary and historical novels, biographies, and non-fiction books of all kinds.
  2. Fantastics: Folks who love the idea that we don’t know all there is to know and haven’t yet discovered everything. They love finding the unknown or unexplained and discussing what might have happened or what could be going on. When reading, they like fantasy and science fiction, ghost stories, and non-fiction books about strange places and events around the world.

Looking Behind the Curtain

I must admit that (A) I am a fantastic and (B) I am really enjoying the sudden burst of publicity around unidentified flying objects, whatever we or the government chooses to call them.

Now, I’m not a conspiracy theorist (although I don’t think Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide) but I am a big fan of common sense. Also, I have a tendency to look behind the curtain to find out who’s really running the show and ask uncomfortable questions that the dog-and-pony show of media publicity often gloss over.

The Defense Department’s report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena won’t be released for two weeks but the New York Times got their hands on a draft and published a story summarizing what the report would say.

Is their article accurate? Did it represent the report truthfully? We won’t know for another couple of weeks but one finding did jump out for me. While the Pentagon can’t prove the mysterious aircraft are of alien origin, they can’t prove that they’re not, either. Donald Rumsfeld would call UAPs a “known unknown

The Known Unknown

Battle of Los Angeles, UFO, UAP, Coast Watch Brigade, Some Americans—dare I say the majority—are mundanes who will seize on the first part of that finding to dismiss the whole thing. After all, if the Pentagon can’t prove UAPs come from aliens, who cares?” We have more important or interesting things to think about. Like where Covid-19 originated, why some commodities are out of stock, or who is going to win Dancing with the Stars.

Fantastics, on the other hand, will look at the second part and say, “Hmmm. This is very concerning. We now admit these things exist but we don’t know who is making them or why, what they are doing here, or how to stop them. This is, to quote Mr. Spock, “Fascinating.” We want to know more.

What side you come down on may depend on whether you think we should investigate these unknown aircraft and determine why they are here.

A Few UFO Points to Remember

Just to be clear, consider the following:

  • Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Madonna and Child, Fra Filippo Lippi, Madonna with UFO

    “Madonna and Child” possibly by Fra Filippo Lippi with UFO

    UFOs/UAPs have not arrived on our planetary doorstep just recently. While you may not have noticed until someone leaked those military videos, history has recorded many sightings in official documents, literature, and works of art. America’s first UFO sighting was recorded by John Winthrop in 1639 while some people think the Bible’s account of the Prophet Ezekiel in the Book of Revelations describes an alien craft.

  • Many, many people have witnessed Unknown Aerial Phenomena—and photographed them. In 1942, for example, thousands witnessed the Battle of Los Angeles and California’s Coast Artillery Brigade even fired on the UFOs.
  • There may be more than one kind of extraterrestrial visitor and they’re not necessarily allies. That would at least partially explain the Battle of Los Angeles. Hindu scriptures, including the Mahabharata describe fighting in the skies that was witnessed by multitudes. And in 1561, the citizens of Nuremberg, Germany, witnessed a battle between flying crafts over the city. Allies don’t try to shoot one another down.

Recent Revelations

What we have learned recently is that the Pentagon

  • Knows UAPs exist and that they operate with impunity,
  • They fly over and into restricted airspace,
  • They perform maneuvers that defy the laws of physics and would kill a human pilot,
  • Our aircraft cannot catch up to, much less intercept, them,
  • Sightings have been increasing
  • After nearly 75 years of obfuscation, denial, and ridicule they have lost the ability to keep this information under wraps.

The Big Question on UFOs

And, of course, the big question—the one I have been asking all along—is why the U.S. government has been keeping UFO / UAP sightings under wraps to begin with. For decades.

Men in Black, Forgetting Device, coverup, smokescreen, UFO, UAPWhen the smokescreen first went up after the infamous Roswell incident of 1947, the military probably thought they could stay on top of the data forever. They could not have anticipated that people would one day walk around with video cameras in their pocket or that a method of distributing videos instantly would be available to almost everyone. For free. Now that those two things have happened, the cat has left the bag.

I doubt if the Pentagon report will touch that question. Also, I doubt if anyone in the media will ask it. Like cats with a laser pointer, they focus only on the shiny new thing in front of them and don’t look any deeper. The cat doesn’t ask where that moving red dot comes from and neither do they.

Fooling the People

I’m just happy that, for once, it’s not all getting swept under the rug. I expect that interest from the general public will die down after the report comes out. Unless, of course, more leaks occur. Our pilots are not happy about being put in harm’s way so the Pentagon can maintain a cone of silence.

That’s where the common sense comes in. I find it simply impossible that all those reports and sightings, all over the world, for centuries, could lacked any basis in fact.

Or, as Mark Twain (not Abraham Lincoln) once said: “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”