So at this point (mid-June 2021) it’s pretty clear the government is not going to bring an alien out onto the stage when they release their big report later this month. Cool as that would be, it was never very likely, and the recent Times article pretty much cinched it up. At the same time, while the Times article tried to tamp down expectations, for any person willing view it as a part of the bigger picture of what’s going on in the world with UFOs the implications are astounding.
All journalism, including (if not especially) the Times, suffers from a lack of critical thinking. Or maybe it’s a lack of critical conjecture. This makes sense. The Times is respectable, and to stay respectable they have to report verifiable facts. But there’s no such thing as just straight facts, all reporting needs to place those facts into a frame. The NY Times frame is almost always one of deference to systemic power. Therefore if the government wants their report on UFOs framed with “no evidence of aliens” the Times is happy to oblige.
But as a number of people have pointed out, and as is hinted at in the article itself, “no evidence of aliens” does not mean there’s any proof that it’s not aliens. Always difficult to prove a negative, sure, but if you read between the lines, the government report and the Times article clearly want to leave this possibility open, even if they want to make it a bit more remote than some people hope. Even if the chance of the phenomenon being extra-terrestrial in origin is a million-to-one, the government does not want to take it off the table. That alone is astounding. Especially when you consider that our government is generally willing to deny basic facts and call scant evidence a truth any time it happens to align with their systemic goals. (eg, Face masks don’t help with covid, weapons of mass destruction, crack babies, etc.) It’s astonishing that in this age where nobody seems to understand how anything works yet for some reason we have total deference to every “expert” who states things with conviction, on this subject we are getting government officials leaving the door open for “hey, we just don’t know for sure.”
The framing of the Times article and — by extension of their sycophantic reporting — the coming government report itself have a very narrow field of vision: the government is analyzing and reporting on what they know about these UFOs. This too makes sense in its way. We probably shouldn’t expect a government analysis, particularly on this topic, to speculate beyond the hard facts of the footage and data they have gathered with modern equipment in recent years.
But that framing completely ignores the long history of credible witnesses reporting objects in the sky with precisely the same unaccountable behavior: A thing that hung in the sky, and then, zip shot off at incredible speed. You can see this description retold hundreds of times by pilots, military officers, farmers, suburbanites, police, scientists, presidents and presidential candidates, and maybe your next-door neighbor. When I was in high school, my best friend was a level-headed mechanically-savvy dude who lived on an 800 acre dairy farm. He casually told me one evening about the lights he regularly saw, hanging motionless in the sky in the distance, until they suddenly shot straight up in the air at insane speeds.
These stories go back 80 years or more and are reported by all classes of people, all around the world. What’s new is only that the military now admits to having documented them with their super-fancy high-tech equipment. But even if the military isn’t doing it, this confirmation from the government should be placed into the larger framing of this history of sightings that matches them exactly. And when this is done, a whole world of possibilities opens up.
Including, of course, that every South-Park-Season-One-Cartman-style abduction story is true, and aliens are regularly carving up our dairy cattle. If “objects in the sky that go zip” are real — as now seems likely — then “aliens shoved a probe up my butt” could be real too, right? I’d like to leave that possibility at could be, and pass on. Because here’s the thing: the evidence for aliens landing and visiting us is still pretty scant and weak. Whitley Strieber is just a guy trying to sell books. But the evidence for objects-in-the-sky-that-go-zip is, suddenly, pretty strong. Let’s be excited about what we know is true, because it is insanely exciting just as it is without having to assume anything more ridiculous. Let’s leave the alien visitations for conjecture (unless proven otherwise). But let’s put the objects-in-the-sky-that-go-zip into a frame that is serious, and consider the implications of that.
