PD Editorial: No confirmation, no denial in UFO report

UFOs are real! So says the U.S. intelligence community. There’s no need to deploy the bacteria, child geniuses or Apple PowerBook 5300s to defend the planet just yet, though. The highly anticipated, recently released, unclassified report to Congress was kind of a dud.

The idea that the federal government is covering up proof of extraterrestrial visitors has been around for decades. The proof is at Roswell, Area 51 and Hangar 18. For true believers, every government denial is more evidence of the cover-up.

Hopes were high, then, that the unclassified report would provide proof of unidentified flying objects. And it did, sort of.

The report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence admitted that from November 2004 to March 2021, U.S. government sources — military, etc. — reported 144 incidents of unidentified aerial phenomena, about half of which involved multiple sensors. Experts have only identified one of them — a balloon, deflating. The rest remain a mystery.

So, they are unidentified, they are flying, and they are objects. That means they are UFOs in the most literal sense. Just please don’t call them that anymore. The government is trying to rebrand them as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAP. That could be a useful distinction now that UFO is almost synonymous with alien spaceship, but it’s so boring.

The report offers no evidence that aliens walk among us or that they are abducting people and dropping them off at Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. Rather, there’s insufficient information to identify what the pilots and sensors saw one way or another. They could have been alien ships, sure, but there are many more sensible possibilities.

The incidents likely fall into one of five explanatory categories: airborne clutter (birds and balloons), natural phenomena (clouds and atmospheric sprites), aerospace development programs (test planes), terrestrial foreign adversaries (spy planes or new technology) or “other.” The last group certainly leaves room for one’s imagination to run wild.

The report concedes that there has been a cover-up; it just wasn’t an intentional, coordinated one. Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek didn’t show up dressed in black to convince people they’d really seen the planet Venus. (Ask an “X-Files” fan.) “Men in Black” Agents J and K didn’t bring neuralyzers.

Rather, aviators and analysts felt peer pressure not to talk about strange things they saw in the air. They feared disparagement, stigma and harm to their reputation. That has changed over time as leaders and scientists have taken descriptions of UAP more seriously.

Visitors from another world or another dimension have a lot of physics to overcome. Without warp drives or oscillation overthursters, the trip is nigh impossible.

Even if the truth is out there, it isn’t always accessible. That’s OK. Many things that people believe in lack solid evidence — UFOs, the Loch Ness monster, sasquatch or chupacabra. Myths and legends make life a little more interesting.

As long as belief in the incredible doesn’t become an obsession that disrupts one’s life, there’s no harm in taking a flight of fancy or having a little faith. It doesn’t hurt to look up and imagine who or what might be coming from the stars.

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