There has been so much media buzz about UFOs lately that even conservative pundits such as the New York Times’ Ross Douthat have written columns such as “Does the U.S. Government Want You to Believe in U.F.O.’s?” Ezra Klein, also at the New York Times, recently had a podcast with the title “What the Heck Is Going On With These U.F.O. Stories?” A big part of the recent buzz has been because of a whistle-blower who has claimed that the U.S. government possesses crashed UFOs, or at least pieces of them.
Back in 2019, I wrote a post here about the UFO that I saw in the early 1970s in eastern North Carolina. I included the sketch below to try to help describe what I saw, especially to make the point that it was no mere “light in the sky.” Lights in the sky don’t impress me (or any UFO watchers). Images from military radar don’t impress me either. My reasoning is this: If little old me has seen what I’ve seen, then the U.S. military has seen much, much, much more.
So what might be going on?
One theory, as Douthat suggests, is that the government is using some sort of procedure to gradually disclose UFOs to us, to condition us to the existence of UFOs so that some Big Announcement won’t freak us out too much. That’s an interesting and maybe even plausible idea, but those of us who have been interested in UFOs for a long time recall that, back in the 1980s, the same idea was prevalent because of films such as Close Encounters, E.T., Enemy Mine, and even the Star Wars films. But nothing ever came of it. The government is just as secretive as ever, really. As I see it, the purpose of the release of military radar video is to deceive us into thinking that the government is still mystified about what’s going on. I cannot believe that.
Recently I sent a copy of my UFO sketch to a friend who lives in France. She replied with a link to the sketch above, which looks very much like the sketch I made in 2019. The sketch above comes from a story in the Syracuse NewTimes from January 2015, “15 Years of Cylinder UFOs Over New York State”. Never before had I seen a UFO sketch that looked so much like what I saw.
I’ve made this standard disclaimer countless times, as many times as I’ve told my UFO story. That’s that my anecdote is just another anecdote among many thousands of anecdotes. The epistemological value of an anecdote is pretty much zero. So there is no reason why anyone should take seriously what I say, and no reason why anyone should take any UFO anecdote seriously. But the epistemological calculus for me personally is very different. I know what I saw, I saw it clearly, I remember it clearly, and I have no more reason to doubt what I saw than I have reason to doubt that I saw Donald Trump’s Boeing 757 parked and mothballed at La Guardia airport when I was last there in 2019. Thus my question is not “Do UFO’s exist?” but “What is the full story of what is going on?” I can only speculate, though some possibilities are more probable than others.
For one, I have zero doubt (or doubt that is as close to zero as is ever possible in a human mind) that, because I’ve seen these things, the U.S. military has seen them too — no doubt lots and lots of them. The idea that the U.S. military has collected the remains of crashed UFOs seems entirely plausible.
It would be a wonderful thing if humanity gets the Big Announcement soon. I can’t express how much I’d like to see that in my lifetime.
But people sort roughly into two categories — people such as religious people whose worlds and minds would completely fall apart because they can’t handle it; and people like me who are eager to get on with a huge expansion of human knowledge and heavy revisions in human philosophy. I’ll admit here that there is a whiff of vindictiveness in my point of view. Primitive minds — closed minds, religious minds, ugly minds — have held all of us back for far too long. If such minds were unable to deal with the Big Announcement, their defeat would be total, and there’d be nothing in the world (or in the galaxy!) that they could do about it other than go home, load their guns, and lock their doors. Then the rest of us could participate in a renaissance like nothing humanity has ever seen before.
Primitive minds will ask, “What if they’re here to eat us or to enslave us?” In fact, the primitive mind of Ronald Reagan thought that a war with aliens would be just the thing to unite humanity. Such nonsense. If E.T. visitors were here to enslave us or eat us, and if they have the power to do that, they’d already have done it.
Though I’d have a thousand questions for them, three questions stand out. First: How does their propulsion work? Second: Are they capable of faster-than-light interstellar travel, or did they get here much more slowly and do they therefore have some sort of outpost near earth? And, third: Is there a galactic federation with laws, a capital, and libraries? I’d imagine that if such a place exists, it must be a lot like the Star Wars planet Coruscant.
Maybe I’ll never find out. But future generations of earthlings surely will, and I envy them.
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