Why is the U.S. government saying it has extra-terrestrial technology?
The Army and Department of Defense have a long history of releasing statements suggesting or outright reporting that UFOs are from beyond our planet. Why do they do that?
Recently, the Pentagon has been releasing a lot more UFO related pictures and statements, all culminating with this claim that they have pieces of the technology behind these advanced aircraft, and that it isn’t human in origin. Why would they say such a thing?
First, I invite you to take a journey through this spooky forest of tweets from real elected officials, opaque Department of Defense press releases, and a retraction from The New York Times:
Pentagon Has ‘Off-World Vehicles Not Made on This Earth’
While this press release truly is unprecedented, it is one step further than what the U.S. military shares about unidentified aerial phenomenon. Why have they suggested this before, and why are they nearly confirming it, now?
Hypothesis 1: They have, or think that they have, extraterrestrial technology, that is responsible for UFO sightings, and they decided to tell us rather than continue denying it.
There’s no real way to prove or disprove this definitively, so I’ll move on.
Hypothesis 2: They are saying this to cause fear.
Lest you mistake me for setting aside Hypothesis 1, I want to assure you of my credibility as a fringe paranoiac. I have given more thought than most would to the existence of intelligent aliens, spiritually aware lightning balls, mega ghosts and so on. The kind of skepticism most people have for the paranormal is the level of skepticism I direct at most people.
When I was a child the program Art Bell Coast to Coast aired on AM radio at night, when sunlight couldn’t scramble the weak signal. He hosted skeptics, authors, and anyone who wanted to call in to share their paranormal or extraterrestrial experience. On a weekend as a child I might get primed on a midnight Dr. Who episode on PBS and go into listening to Art Bell, but eventually someone noticed that and put a stop to it as listening to a call-in show for the paranoid didn’t reliably lull me to sleep like classical radio. Coast to Coast ran from 1am to 5am Pacific time, which means in the middle of the country, I had to wake up at 5am to catch the final hour of Art Bell. You didn’t get the feeling like the callers were the early riser type for that portion. Sometimes, I slept through my radio alarm, and my dreams carried me into people’s alien abductions and encounters with the angry six fingered archangel Michael.
If you watched the show The X-Files, you might think that UFO nuts are eagerly awaiting the government confirming near miss encounters with alien craft. But if a hundred year old UFO club were still kicking, it’d be old news to them. Much of the central mythos of flying saucers came directly from the government and the Army, themselves.
While the military understandably undertook studies of any strange sightings in the air, they also consulted with and encouraged Hollywood’s flying saucer craze, with anti-proliferation messages like The Day The Earth Stood Still being the exception. They well understood that the idea of a military terrorized by an unknowable advanced civilization is a nationalistic one, and if they know that when they’re using science fiction for recruitment, they know that when they are suggesting to the public that UFOs are alien spaceships after all.
Hypothesis 2: They are starting a compelling rumor in order to study how information spreads.
Alan Moore’s assumption in Watchmen is that a terrifying unknowable danger would unite us and keep us from nuclear annihilation. 2020 crisis Reese has some feelings about that one, and will have to get back to you in 2021 for an informed opinion on how global dread creates pacifism. I am less sure than ever, now, that a dead alien would cause us to have a blue marble moment and see our petty squabbles as small. What I do think that such a report would do, is become a rumor that would spread beyond all national boundaries. Take North Korea, for example. A North Korean citizen gets a certain spin on any news about rival global superpowers, but they do hear some things.
When New York City’s World Trade Center fell on September 11th, 2001, the story reverberated around the world. There are isolated island nations of hunter gatherers who live in the forest and have a picture of the outside world unchanged since their military use in World War 2, and they heard about September 11th. People who have never seen any building, at all, have heard more than one September 11th story.
This hypothesis then is that the department of defense released the wild assertion that they have extra-terrestrial technology, not because it’s true, but because it’s wild and disruptive for anyone with any interest in such a thing, from conspiracy podcasters to world leaders, from political prisoners to secret police guards. There is something compelling about this information, news about our place in the universe, a perspective shift in what it means to be human. We can debate it, but we cannot completely bury the idea. If it’s something that world leaders are concerned about, and also deeply ponderous to any person, then there’s no real way to stop the information getting in.
As for why they wouldn’t lie about something else if they just wanted to see a rumor spread, consider what would be a harmless thing to lie about if you were a former global superpower. Just try to think of one lie that would be interesting enough to spread to every corner of the world but wouldn’t hurt you, wouldn’t muck up some already delicate situation or ruin your credibility when it was discovered that you were lying. The U.S. military has always claimed to have shocking footage of unidentified flying objects, and there were certainly times when they knew full well what that object was.
So why is the government dismissive and uninterested in aliens in between cold wars? And why are they vocal and open in sharing the prospect of unknowably powerful technology in the sky during periods of intense competition with highly secretive super powers? Why have they been so transparently invested in the idea of space aliens razzing their fighter jets, and financed movies about that, and should that fact give us pause when they suggest to us that they have otherworldly technology?
Let’s revisit Hypothesis 1: Aliens are real and the government is admitting that UFO sightings are related to alien technology.
If all you need is a fighter jet and a camera to hunt down some alien technology, well, we sell those things to countries all across the globe. Other militaries have indeed recorded very similar unknown visuals like what the Pentagon has highlighted recently. Surely they would have data and even wreckage, if these were vehicles interfering with military business throughout history. Why have other countries adhered to some statute of secrecy about it, and, why hasn’t that reason held up for the U.S. government, now?
I’ve followed many of the popular UFO sightings over the years. I’ve opened up my heart, loved naively and openly like a child, and I have been burned most every time. An exciting, impossibly nimble new shape and sound of craft will be sighted again and again, and with increasing specificity of what is recorded or remembered, something too quiet, too vertical, too fast, something that doesn’t show up on the radar. The sightings are shared and mocked and then reported again, like it’s building to something, and it is, but nothing satisfying to a paranormal fanatic.
Every time, my life changing unknown craft is eventually declassified as an advanced spy plane, just as soon as they make better radar to make our former UFO into a publicly identified flying object. All I have left is flying saucers, but there’s no real reason to doubt whether they too were just an experimental aircraft design that could beat the radar of that era — A very dry British TV show called The History Project surmised as much in an episode about the topic, without treating that conclusion as particularly controversial.
Paranoia is, it seems, a double edged sword for me.
The government confirming extraterrestrial technology is the one thing that makes me believe that they have nothing of the kind.
