We've all seen UFOs. Yes, even you. If there's something in the air, and you can't identify it, by definition it's an unidentified flying object. But there's a difference between sitting atop an Arkansas hill and wondering if the thing over yonder is a bird or a plane (or Super Man?) and having some object dart in front of your airplane. For all the jokes about the UFO hearings in Congress this week, pilots know how serious this is.
Well, not UFO hearings. The brass has now started calling UFOs something else--UAPs. In traditional military fashion, the new acronym isn't any shorter, but at least the phrase is longer: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
The deputy director of Navy Intelligence, Scott Bray, appeared before the House subcommittee hearing yesterday and told Congress that pilots for the United States government have recorded upwards of 400 UAP sightings in the last few years. He showed footage of an object being tailed by Navy aircraft, before the UAP took off. Some of these recordings show objects doing things that can't be explained by unclassified knowledge of man's air flight capabilities. Emphasis on "unclassified."
For there is a school of thought that many of these objects are highly secretive government programs. In fact, Mr. Bray told Congress that much. He said investigators put these things into five possible categories: 1) airborne clutter, 2) natural atmospheric phenomona, 3) U.S. government or American industry developmental program, 4) foreign adversary systems, or 5) an "other" bin.
The late-night comics, movie producers and the tabloids can have the "other" bin. But we'd be more worried about three of the other ones, mostly airborne clutter, development programs and especially foreign work above our skies.
(There is a chance that these encounters really aren't--and that instrumentation in the human airplaines is faulty. That would be a serious enough issue for a congressional report on its own.)
Air flight is no place for fun and games. If this is airborne clutter or natural phenomona, then the government needs to find out what. So it can be cleaned up or avoided. But if these UAPs are more sinister, the government needs to know that, too.
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? What could Russia afford? What could Iran afford? Goodness, what could Red China afford? And could they be playing cat-and-mouse over our bases?
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.
Sure, it's more fun to think about E.T. on a joy ride. But like the kid in that movie said, "This is reality." Better if investigators got to the bottom of it now, before some accident knocks a pilot or two out of the sky. Then these kinds of congressional hearings would take a much darker path.