Sharp: Wait, the military is releasing videos of UFOs? What is going on?
Andrew Sharp
I was baffled to read this week about UFOs in the Washington Post. Not articles about crazed people who suffer from delusions of seeing UFOs, as you might expect, but serious articles about recently released video from the Pentagon.
It’s hard to believe I just typed that.
The footage shows Navy fighter jets tracking unidentified flying objects. In the background, you can hear bewildered pilots chatter about what they might be seeing.
These are not the traditional UFO tales — the talk of Area 51 cover-up conspiracies by the government, the psychoanalysis of grays vs. reptilians, the dissection of alien dissections, that story from your friend’s uncle Jerry who left the New Year’s Eve party at 1 a.m. to walk home, having consumed about eight too many, and woke up in a ditch with vivid memories of being abducted.
This is from the U.S. military, which has spent decades debunking these kinds of ridiculous tales.
If it wasn’t on video, I wouldn’t believe it. After all, it’s well-known that pilots sometimes experience out-of-body hallucinations. It would be easy to shrug this off as the kind of thing that happens when humans fling themselves around at speeds and under pressures they were never meant to endure.
But no. This footage shows, well, flying objects that you just can’t figure out. Round objects traveling at jet speeds, but rotating, or suddenly shifting directions at a 90-degree angle. It’s difficult to explain away.
I’ve long lumped UFOs into a category with Bigfoot, ghosts, vampires, elves and fairies. Myth, adapted to the modern age — a product of the stories we tell ourselves as a culture, driven by our anxieties and our eagerness to explain the mysterious.
Before people had spaceships or knowledge of what stars really were, weird unexplained phenomena got chalked up to Thor tripping over things in the night, or evil spirits up to mischief.
In a sort of weird modern version of this, I once heard Chuck Colson, the ex-Watergate convict turned Christian leader, expound about a book he’d read* in which UFOs were revealed to be piloted by demons, tricking people who were into the occult into believing in aliens. (I know it sounds like a fever dream, but I am not making that up.)
The case of the Navy fighters is hard to fit into this kind of narrative, unless you are willing to believe the demons got a hold of some mind-blowing technology and were buzzing fighter jets with it.
So what were those things? Just because I can’t explain these videos doesn’t mean I’m ready to jump on board the E.T. train. That would be the same kind of mistake ghost hunters make, and before them, the priests of the storm god — just because you can neatly fit events into your explanation doesn’t mean your claims are true.
In this case, there isn’t a shred of evidence in those videos that there’s an extraterrestrial pilot steering those thingamajigs. We simply don’t know what they are. They can be explained as alien spacecraft, sure, but that doesn’t mean they were.
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Such spacecraft would raise all kinds of troubling questions. How have they not killed us off by bringing lethal alien bacteria into our atmosphere? Or avoided picking up a deadly bug from us? All those abductions surely would have resulted in some germ swapping. Where have they been keeping themselves since they started showing up in the 1940s? Do they have a base hidden somewhere out around Saturn or something? How do they cover interstellar distances in such tiny craft?
The answers to these kinds of questions — hyperdrives, wormholes, they’re hidden among us in human form, they built the pyramids, etc. — prove only that it’s easy to bolster wild theories with even wilder theories.
In the end, our alien mythology may be just as mistaken as the myths of past cultures. All we can really say for sure is we have no idea what those things are in the Navy’s videos. It would be a mistake to leap to conclusions beyond that.
That won’t stop people from leaping. We feel compelled to explain everything, and besides, wild speculation is so much fun.
As a science fiction fan, I hope it turns out these really are signs of extraterrestrial life. That would sure make things more interesting around here. Species extinction? Borrowed technology leading to star travel? There are a wide range of possibilities.
We live in a very weird universe, and there’s a lot we still don’t know about it. Stay tuned — and stay skeptical.
Report UFO sightings to Andrew Sharp at asharp@delmarvanow.com. Find him on Twitter @buckeye_201 and on Facebook @andrewsharp201.
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