Why does the United States not stop talking about UFOs?

The long love affair between the United States and UFOs is experiencing a torrid second honeymoon. Disclosure in 2020 by the Department of Defense of a series of videos from 2004 and 2015 of encounters by military pilots with unidentified flying objects (UFOs) has set the imagination of public opinion soaring in recent years, and has moved a group of congressmen in Washington to shake taboos in search of answers about what the authorities prefer to call Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) to scare away the conspiracy echoes that the term UFO carries. Spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin fit into the UAP category, yes, but also, and above all, balloons (spy, weather or other types), threats to national security in the form of supersonic devices from rival powers such as China and Russia, aerospace junk, Elon Musk’s satellites or, simply, the illusions created by certain optical effects.

UFOs landed this week on Congress in a hearing that was explosive, despite the fact that all their revelations were already known. In it, a confidante (whistle blower) named David Grusch, who worked in the intelligence services for 14 years, was sworn under oath that he was convinced that the government had damaged alien spacecraft in its possession, as well as “non-human biological remains.” He has not seen it with his own eyes, he added; they told him when he was investigating for the Pentagon. In all, he said, he interviewed 40 people over four years.

68% of Americans are convinced that their government knows more about UFOs than it is letting on, according to a 2019 Gallup poll. 33% believe, like Grusch, that some sightings correspond to alien spacecraft visiting the Land. “My testimony is based,” he said on Capitol Hill, “on information given to me by people with long histories of legitimacy and service to this country, many of whom also shared compelling evidence in the form of photographs, official documentation, and testimonials. classified orals”. As it is classified information, he did not provide further evidence: “Otherwise, I would go to jail,” he added.

The Pentagon responded to that testimony with a resounding denial, a statement that said its investigators had failed to obtain “verifiable information to corroborate these claims.” Skeptical voices were also heard on Wednesday amid a climate of bipartisan harmony. Eric Burlison’s, for example. A Missouri Republican, he said he did not like that “an alien species technologically advanced enough to travel billions of light-years” would then be unable to survive on Earth and avoid crashing his ship. “It seems crazy to me,” he said.

Grusch’s complaint, which incorporates some of the classic elements of ufological conspiracy theories, had actually seen the light of day in a fringe media article in June, after headlines such as The New York Times either The Washington Post decided not to publish those allegations. The two authors of the piece had written another article in the New York newspaper in 2017, a milestone in the new golden age of American fascination with UFOs.

In it, they revealed the existence of a Pentagon program that has been studying UAP military sightings since 2007. It has an endowment buried to go unnoticed in the US defense budget. Behind its launch was Nevada Senator Harry Reid, who died in 2022. Nevada, home to the secret military base known as Area 51, is a mecca for lovers of alien conspiracy theories, who believe that there the Army keeps the alien biological remains.

Jimmy Carter on Venus

Reid belonged to a lineage of US politicians who have shown sympathy for UFOs. The list includes such illustrious names as Hillary Clinton, who, when she was a candidate in 2016, responded to a question about UAPs. “There are enough stories out there” not to believe that “those people make them up, sitting in their kitchens at home,” she said. Also Jimmy Carter, who had a meeting in 1969 and did not dare report it until four years later to the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma. That body concluded that what the future president had witnessed was actually Venus doing her thing.

Kentucky Republican Glenn Grothman, leader of the subcommittee that organized last Wednesday’s congressional hearing, recalled Carter in his speech. He also quoted another White House occupant, Gerald Ford, but there he skidded: Ford’s history with UFOs, according to his presidential library documents available online, is limited to a request in 1966 when he was a congressman to investigate recently recorded sightings in his state, Michigan.

At that time, the fascination with UFOs was in robust health in the United States. The newly released mass culture enthusiastically embraced the first “UFO incident” of the modern era, recorded a couple of decades earlier, on June 24, 1947. Then a pilot named Kenneth Arnold described a string of nine glowing unidentified objects They flew over Mount Rainier, south of Seattle, at enormous speed.

Arnold’s description introduced the expression “flying saucer” into popular parlance and sparked a veritable fever, with hundreds of similar complaints in the following weeks. The air force studied more than 12,000 sightings before canceling the program Project Blue Book in 1969. Most were attributed to stars, clouds, conventional or spy aircraft, though 701 were left unexplained. Then, as now, astrophysicists advise not to forget that the fact that there is no plausible justification, or of this world, does not make the extraterrestrial hypothesis the most probable.

What happened after Arnold’s experience contains the big problem (and the golden rule) of UAPs: the more you look for them, the more you find. Especially in a time like this, with the skies populated by drones and other gadgets, and in which everyone carries a camera on their smartphone. In a hearing before the US Senate Armed Services subcommittee, Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the wonderfully named All-Domains Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) confirmed that theory in April. Between 2004 and June 2021, he had reported 144 UFO incidents. At the beginning of this year, there were 350. Four months later, that number had risen to 650. By this time in July, it already exceeds 800, of which it is estimated that only between 2% and 5% are deserving of the doubt.

The incident of the Chinese balloon that crossed the United States in February before being shot down in the Atlantic Ocean had to do with this boom. It left behind, in addition to an escalation of tension in diplomatic relations between the two countries, a trail of sightings of suspicious objects. After that, defense agencies recalibrated their airspace surveillance systems, so they could detect smaller, slow-moving objects that would not have counted as threats before.

The Chinese balloon was cited repeatedly at Wednesday’s hearing, at which two retired military pilots, Ryan Graves and David Fravor, also testified. Both recounted two separate encounters with UFOs, recorded by the videos that released three years ago the Pentagon in view of the fact that they had been circulating on the internet for some time. It was those recordings that pushed lawmakers to push the Pentagon toward greater transparency and hold a congressional hearing, the first in half a century, in May of last year.

In the Capitol they do not seem willing to drop an issue that seems to have lost some of the aura of stigma along the way. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, introduced a bill this month to create a commission with authority to declassify documents on UFOs and extraterrestrial affairs. And the director of NASA, Bill Nelson, an 80-year-old former Democratic congressman, confirmed this Thursday, on an official visit to Buenos Aires, that he had commissioned “a committee of very distinguished scientists” with a report, in view of the renewed interest in the matter. . They will publish it, he promised, in August.

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