Earlier this year, I found myself in the Pentagon, the vast headquarters of the American military apparatus, for a meeting, when I spotted a striking sign on a door. It seemed to indicate the office was dedicated to research into unidentified flying objects, aka UFOs. Security was tight, and yet I asked, “Is that a joke?” I did not get a clear response. But in late June, the Pentagon released a widely discussed report revealing that officials have been studying sightings of UFOs – or, as they now prefer to call them, UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena) – for many years. Of 144 UAP sightings between 2004 and 2021, only one can be easily blamed on a normal object (in that case, a deflated balloon). “[We] currently lack sufficient information in our dataset to attribute incidents to specific explanations,” the report concluded. Speculation about top-secret Russian, Chinese or even American technology, not to mention the wilder theories about aliens, has run rampant ever since.
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