"The truth is out there." That was the tagline for the popular science fiction TV series “The X-Files,” where the central plot device was the United States government keeping secret the existence of aliens.
Next month, some of the truth will be revealed as Congress receives an unclassified report from the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. The task force was set up by the Department of Defense in August 2020 to “detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.” Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAP, is an acronym coined to avoid the public and media ridicule often attached to the term UFO.
UFOs have a long history. The foundational event in the United States was the crash of a military, high-altitude balloon in July 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico. Since then, tens of thousands of sightings have been reported, along with hundreds of claims of alien abduction. The U.S. military has been looking into UFOs since the Roswell incident. For much of that time, the investigations have been kept secret. That’s about to change.
Nearly half of Americans think that UFOs represent aliens visiting the Earth. It’s not reassuring for that to be less than the number that believes in ghosts. Government secrecy on the issue contributes to the conspiracy theories that swirl around UFOs. Even though UFO simply means “unidentified flying object,” something with no obvious explanation, UFOs have attained mythic status in the popular culture. In fact, they have some of the trappings of a new American religion.
Scientists are in an awkward position regarding UFOs. On the one hand, they’re fairly confident that there is life beyond Earth. Dramatic progress in the search for exoplanets means there are about 300 million planets that could host life in our galaxy, the nearest of which are less than 20 light years away. Intelligent aliens probably do exist and it’s unlikely that we are the most advanced civilization.
On the other hand, evidence that UFOs represent alien visitations is very weak. Most sightings can be attributed to weather balloons or astronomical phenomena such as meteors, fireballs and the planet Venus. There are many resources giving mundane explanations for UFO sightings, including some of the Navy videos that have caused such a recent stir. Even highly trained observers can misinterpret what they see, and statements that UAPs display impossible or unphysical behaviors make unverified assumptions about size and distance of the objects being observed.
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