The Truth Is Out There. Who Cares?
A reportedly far-reaching UFO investigation is on the way to a disinterested public
Hundreds of people may have witnessed an “unidentified aerial phenomenon” over Tinley Park, Ill. in 2004, three lights in the sky moving in unison. It’s possible that the U.S. government will tell us a lot more about such incidents as early as June 1 if a sweeping UFO analysis is finished on time. (photo courtesy Sam Maranto)
The feds have promised to release a comprehensive report on unidentified flying objects next month but barely anybody is talking about it.
This is surprising, especially because it’s predicted to lean away from weather balloon-type explanations and toward Holy Cow Territory.
Legislation, tucked into the 2020 COVID relief bill, requires the report include “detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence.” And there are, reportedly, pretty good pictures.
I thought a lot of people have been waiting a long time for something like this, but if they are enthused, they’re pretty quiet about it.
There wasn’t all that much interest 13 months ago, either, when the Navy declassified three videos of its pilots chasing around some super-speedy flying things.
Maybe we were too distracted to yearn to learn more about fast-moving triangle-shaped lights in the sky, or even squirreled-away bodies of unfortunate space travelers. After all, in April 2020, we were preoccupied with news of numerous corpses of our own species turning up in unexpected places.
For instance, 17 were found stacked like cordwood in a New Jersey nursing home, and a couple of appallingly leaky trucks parked at a Brooklyn funeral home were jammed with dozens of formerly-living people.
“Bodies are coming out of our ears,” the funeral director memorably told the New York Times.
The beat has gone on. As of this writing, the pandemic has killed 584,000 Americans. A tenth of the population has been infected by COVID-19.
Even without considering a worldwide plague, we’ve had other significant recent distractions, of course. Our last president was impeached twice. And we all watched while a police officer murdered a man in Minneapolis, leading to a shift in public opinion that made cop shows a much riskier bet in prime time.
“What a perfect time for this to start coming out,” said Sam Maranto, head of the Mutual UFO Network’s Illinois chapter. “The whole world has PTSD.”
“Life as we experience it has become so surreal, we don’t need” UFOs, said Scott Elliott, a retired Cook County probation officer, who hadn’t heard about the upcoming report. Now that he has, he isn’t on the edge of his seat.
“We need life to be less surreal,” he said. “The last four or five years have been so lunatic, we need more normal, not more paranormal.”
Much of the life of MUFON’s Maranto has been all about UFOs since he reportedly saw one as a boy in 1959. His experience since then gives him scant confidence that the upcoming report of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) will be compelling, despite official assurances. He’s seen other government reports, here and overseas, that have been less than forthcoming, he said.
Like Maranto, Cynthia Gallaher has been a UFO believer since her own eyewitness experience, years ago in Wisconsin. The UAPTF release, to the Chicago poet, is a sign her government is “finally admitting that we’re not alone.”
But also like Maranto, she’s not getting her hopes up.
“I think people have heard stuff like this before,” said Gallaher, whose most recent poetry collection is called Epicurean Ecstasy.
Lately, it seems especially hard to trust anything that comes out of Washington. After all, U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, was just punished by her political allies for the crime of telling the truth. And no one was surprised.
So it’s easy to imagine a dearth of excitement over promised official revelations about a once-fascinating topic like UFOs, even after the government announces that This Time, We’re Not Lying. Really.
Journalist Sandra Pesmen has been interested in UFOs for 70 years, but she's not waiting on the government to tell her what to believe.
“What can that do for us?” the Northbrook woman asked, referring to the report. “What will that do for my life?”
It’s too bad that few seem to care much because there’s a lot more to think about than whether aliens are traveling thousands of light-years to Earth just to play hide and seek in the sky.
Rich Chwedyk, the science fiction writer who authored the Nebula-award winning Brontë's Egg, usually keeps his supernatural speculation between covers of his books. But, like Maranto, the Chicagoan wonders whether there’s a reason that people who report UFOs usually say they appear out of nowhere, zip around, then disappear without a trace.
“Could it be time travel? An alternate dimension?” Chwedyk asked. “Maybe they don't have to come here because they're here all the time.”
He’s not weak-kneed in anticipation waiting for the government to explain it all.
“So many things have been so sensational that people are sort of jaded out there,” he said. “More people might get interested once the report comes out.”
People are apparently still fascinated by the idea of seeing a UFO, even when there’s only a tiny possibility that it’s not easily explainable. Last week, strands of strange white lights were seen in the sky across the country. Lots of witnesses whipped out their phones and took pictures to send to their local TV stations.
The lights turned out to be Starlink internet satellites newly launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocketship company.
Elon Musk may be from another planet, but the lights weren’t.
Retired U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, was for decades Congress’ top supporter of UFO research. Late last month, he said that Lockheed Martin may have been given recovered alien spacecraft parts years ago, but he was never allowed to see them.
The former Senate Majority Leader, 81, also said that Russian drones might be responsible for some of the U.S. military’s more recent UFO sightings.
Mysterious alien spacecraft parts might have gotten some folks excited. But the Russian angle throws cold water on everything. Everybody’s tired of hearing about Russian deceit, and a significant minority of our people even seem to think the Russkies would run our country better than the Democrats.
Reid has begged that President Joe Biden get briefed on UFOs, but that may not have happened yet. Perhaps he’s hoping Biden will hear some cool stuff and won’t be able to keep it to himself.
Maranto doubts that’s possible. He said he suspects only a few bureaucrats know the whole truth, and they’ve got the system rigged so they don’t have to tell anybody who gets elected, even presidents.
But many UFO aficionados seem to think that presidents are told oodles of supernatural secrets, and they don’t let on because we’re too fragile to handle the truth.
There might be aliens or time-travelers who walk among us. And who knows what they’ve been up to.
“I feel we’ll never know,” Gallaher said. “It’s too horrifying.”
But it’s a little surprising that the president who admitted sleeving state secrets to Vladimir Putin hasn’t let on, if he knows something.
America’s former conspiracy-theory-commander-in-chief has been oddly reticent about this subject, despite signing off on commissioning the UAPTF report.
“I did have one very brief meeting on it," President Donald Trump said in 2019. "But people are saying they're seeing UFOs. Do I believe it? Not particularly."
When the president who promoted the concept of intravenous infusions of Clorox as a virus-fighting tonic is briefed on UFOs and emerges dismissive of them, it’s hard to know what to think.
Considering the Bizarro World that is Trump’s brain, maybe it’s good news for UFO fans. Trump often gets excited about things that don’t exist while rejecting things that do.
So by that measure, space/time travelers might be behind every bush and boulder.
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