The Congress of the United States will soon get an unclassified report from the nation’s intel folks about unidentified flying objects. Insert joke here.
Then, after the punchline, the situation needs to get serious.
We’ve all seen UFOs before. Anything flying through the sky that we can’t identify is technically a UFO. The military types have decided to call these encounters “Unexplained Aerial Phenomena.” So replace UFO with UAP. The American military loves acronyms.
These phenomena have been occurring with some frequency, and air flight is no place for fun and games. There is a chance that these encounters really aren’t—and that instrumentation in the human airplanes is faulty. That would be a serious enough issue for a congressional report on its own.
But another explanation is that something is out there. And that something is frequently interfering with flights.
Back in the Aughts, the U.S. Navy took the unusual (but interesting, and entertaining) step of releasing once-classified videos of UAPs. The so-called UFO enthusiasts were, well, enthused. Some members of Congress were more interested in whether these things might could be technical threats from adversaries. If a 14-year-old kid with a summer’s worth of allowance can buy a drone that can climb thousands of feet, what could another worldwide power do?
ABC News reports that Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida was able to include language in the 2020 Intelligence Authorization Act that “required the intelligence community to prepare for [Congress] a detailed unclassified report on UAPs.” That report is due June 29.
“Men and women we have entrusted with the defense of our country are reporting encounters with unidentified aircraft with superior capabilities,” Rubio told the network. “We cannot allow the stigma of UFOs to keep us from seriously investigating this. The forthcoming report is one step in that process, but it will not be the last.” A physics and astronomy professor at George Mason University said experts will be curious about the details. Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi said the way things move can give hints at technology.
But: “The fact that you see something and is doing something that you don’t understand doesn’t mean oh, let’s jump to a wild conclusion. It means let’s get the data that we can, let’s put it all together, and let’s get an understanding of what we’re dealing with, because either it’s ours, or it’s not ours. And if it’s not ours, then we need to really understand what’s going on.” The experts say Americans should be forewarned: This will be an intelligence report. It will be written by those who have an interest in keeping secrets secret. And to protect sources and methods from adversaries, and to prevent other powers from learning how we learn, the “unclassified” report will necessarily have to be incomplete.
We’re good with that. It’s a matter of national security. Besides, if we’re already behind in some technology, why fall back even further by giving away our own secrets?
And if all this is a matter of some outfit trying out “recon tech” at the Pentagon, they should be told to stay over Area 51 and leave the rest of us alone. Before they cause an accident.
WANT TO start a fight among letter-writers? How about this for a theory: Earth will never be visited by little green men from outer space, because outer space is so outer. That is, expansive.
If a civilization of some sort did figure out a way to travel at the speed of light, it would still take years, decades, centuries to get here. Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri are the closest stars to our sun, and they are more than four light years away.
Then you’d have the problem of fuel, food, and radiation that kills what we consider life. And what if they got here, to this planet, and our gravity didn’t fit their evolutionary needs? They could crumple like a beer can.
There’s bound to be intelligent life out there. But the distances are so great that we’d need something stronger than a big flashlight to send signals. And that flashlight hasn’t been invented yet.
Then again, one day not so long ago, somebody refused to believe that man could ever fly. Maybe we shouldn’t be too sure of ourselves. Cue music from “The X-Files.”