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      in US Politics

      No evidence of ‘alien or extraterrestrial’ activity in shot-down objects, says White House – video

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      The White House has confirmed that the objects shot down over North America did not come from worlds beyond. ‘There is no indication of aliens or terrestrial activity with these recent takedowns. I wanted to make sure that the American people knew that,’ press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said. John Kirby added that closer scrutiny of airspace may partially explain the increase in objects detected but that they were not assessed as a threat to people on the ground and showed no signs they had manoeuvring or propulsion capability More

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      Is the truth out there? The US government prepares its landmark report on UFOs – podcast

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      A hotly anticipated US government report on decades of mysterious sightings of UFOs is due for release this month. The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt and former Ministry of Defence employee Nick Pope investigate

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      In December 2020, just before Donald Trump left the White House, the CIA was given six months to release all of the evidence it had gathered in the last 14 years about UFOs. So later this month a highly anticipated report will be released. Guardian reporter Adam Gabbatt tells Anushka Asthana that in recent years a series of government videos showing unidentified objects have been released, including footage from a navy F-18 fighter jet which showed an oblong object flying through the sky near San Diego in 2004. The wave of recent videos and the imminent release of the government report has ignited excitement around unidentified flying objects not seen for years. Nick Pope spent the early 1990s investigating UFOs for the British Ministry of Defence. He tells Anushka that despite mockery from some of his colleagues, the idea that we are not alone in the universe and may have been visited is worth serious consideration. More

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      in World Politics

      They Are Coming for Us

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      Quoting its favorite source for everything we need to know about the world, The New York Times clarifies the burning question of UFOs: “American intelligence officials have found no evidence that aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots in recent years are alien spacecraft.” This is The Times’ way of telling its readers that there ain’t much there.

      The fact that The Times cites “intelligence officials” is unfortunate. Intelligence officials are trained in the dual skills of obscuring the truth and fabricating alternative truth. That is in essence the purpose of intelligence. Its agents are also trained to exploit the media, and The New York Times in particular, to spread their message. The trusting relationship between The Times and the intelligence community is what enables the newspaper to be the first to give credible shape to whatever stories the intelligence community wants the public to believe.

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      The Times journalists, Julian Barnes and Helene Cooper, inform us that “a vast majority of more than 120 incidents over the past two decades did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology.” The Times, as expected, takes that statement at face value. “That determination would appear to eliminate the possibility that Navy pilots who reported seeing unexplained aircraft might have encountered programs the government meant to keep secret,” Barnes and Cooper write.

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Unexplained aircraft:

      The opposite of explained aircraft. Flying objects that for the past 80 years have been seen by Americans and no one else.

      Contextual Note

      CNN gets straight to the point when, quoting “one of its sources,” it explains that “US officials also cannot rule out the possibility that these flying objects were aircraft belonging to American adversaries, namely Russia and China.” The Times less dramatically reports that there is simply “worry among intelligence and military officials that China or Russia could be experimenting with hypersonic technology.” Of course, they “could be” doing lots of other things.

      MSNBC’s Chuck Todd requisitioned Barack Obama’s former CIA director, Leon Panetta, to offer some clarity on the issue. Todd asked him, “Is it your assumption that it is Russia or China testing some crazy technology that we somehow don’t have, or are we sort of over-assuming the abilities of China and Russia and that the only other explanation is that if it is not us ourselves then it is something otherworldly?”

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      This confused question should surprise no one. A significant part of Todd’s job at MSNBC is to focus the public’s fear on Russia and China. Panetta stepped willingly into his role of respected authority. He quite reasonably suggested that the most likely place to look would be in the direction of drone technology, which has become far more sophisticated than most people imagine. As expected, Panetta cited Russia and China, but few commentators have noticed that he didn’t stop. “I believe a lot of this stuff probably could be countries like Russia, like China, like others, who are you know using now drones, using the kind of sophisticated weaponry that could very well be involved in a lot of these sightings,” he said.

      Who could the “others” be that Panetta mentions after the obligatory Russia and China? This could produce an interesting guessing game. Could it be Cuba, a nation that once threatened the US with Soviet missiles? Or Mexico? But it seems to have its hands full with the war on the drug cartels. India, which has begun to assert itself as an active player in space? What about the Europeans, especially France and the UK? As part of NATO, they wouldn’t dare. The list could go on, but when every other nation besides Russia and China is eliminated, only one remains: the United States.

      On the CIA’s “Innovation and Tech” website, the agency proudly announces its deep engagement in technology. The spy agency’s research is not directly connected to what the Pentagon does and certainly not shared with it at anything but the highest strategic level. The website proudly announces: “At CIA, we’ve pioneered bold and innovative technologies for decades.” It invites the visitor to appreciate its work. “Learn how our cutting edge solutions have helped solve America’s biggest intelligence challenges.”

      What the site describes is impressive. This should lead any discerning visitor to speculate about what it doesn’t describe. A former high-level CIA operative once explained to us in a private conversation that when the CIA technology team briefed insiders, even at his level, about research on drone technology, they were only allowed to show technology from the past, which was already mind-blowing. In other words, it is unlikely that if the unusual behavior of an unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) observed by a Navy pilot happened to be a CIA invention, that pilot would have any clue to what it might be. And in no case would they be briefed afterwards on the experience. The CIA is specialized in keeping all kinds of things “unidentified.”

      Does this mean that The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC and the others are unaware of the possibility that it could be “our guys” who are up to these visual tricks? Both The Times and Chuck Todd evoke the possibility, only to dismiss it with no further discussion. That alone should raise questions in the public’s mind. 

      When The Times’ journalists write that “a vast majority of more than 120 incidents over the past two decades did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology,” and then state that that “would appear to eliminate the possibility that Navy pilots … might have encountered programs the government meant to keep secret,” they are admitting two things while creating the opposite impression. By evoking a “vast majority,” they admit that a significant minority actually did originate with US technology. The journalists never bother exploring that paradox. And when, in a Times article sourced from the intelligence community, a sentence begins with “would appear to eliminate the possibility,” the discerning reader should see the verb “would appear” as a signal that the possibility in fact exists.

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      Panetta may have inadvertently revealed the truth to Todd, who, as an inquiring journalist, could have asked the former CIA chief which “others” he had in mind. But the media have a mission to reduce the question to exactly two possible explanations of the UAPs: extra-terrestrial invaders, on the one hand, or one of the two officially recognized adversaries of the US, Russia or China (or both), on the other.

      The further implication is that because serious scientists have pretty much dismissed the thesis of intelligent, technologically advanced extra-terrestrial visitors, there is one logical conclusion: The US needs to beef up its military technology in a new arms race justified by what the media have been promoting for at least five years: a new cold war. Donald Trump provided the nation with a new branch of the military, the Space Force. It’s time for President Joe Biden to make it work.

      Historical Note

      With his novel, “War of the Worlds,” the British author H.G. Wells launched a new genre of fiction involving space travel. The serialized novel was later turned into several Hollywood films and a famous radio broadcast by Orson Welles in 1938. Advances in aerial, military and rocket technology that came to prominence during the Second World War turned extra-terrestrial science fiction into a genre that quickly displaced the Western in Hollywood’s culture. Martians vs. earthlings came to replace cowboys vs. Indians.

      Unsurprisingly, Wells set his story in England. Equally unsurprisingly, Hollywood’s extra-terrestrial dramas always take place in the US. Those movies may have tipped off the non-fictional extra-terrestrials about where to guide their crafts, though no one has bothered to explain how they managed to access the films.

      On “60 Minutes,” former US Navy pilot Ryan Graves claimed that pilots training off the Atlantic coast were seeing UAPs regularly: “Every day for at least a couple years.” The fact that the tell-tale sightings all seem to occur in or near the US tells us that either the intergalactic visitors are fascinated by US culture or there is some magnetic force that draws them to North America. Unless, of course, the technology itself, which may be the drones Leon Panetta mentions or nothing more than optical illusions, was made in America.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Ex-Senate majority leader Harry Reid on UFOs: ‘We’re at the infancy of it’

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      Former US Senate majority leader Harry Reid may be retired from Congress, but he still has ideas on how lawmakers should study unidentified flying objects, or UFOs.A report detailing US military encounters with UFOs requested by the Senate intelligence committee is due to be released in June, (although it may be delayed). However, the findings should not be seen as the end of the current investigations into UFOs or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), he said.“Congress should make this an ongoing program. I don’t think the report is going to tell us too much. I think they need to study it more and not just have one shot at it,” Reid told the Guardian.The former Democratic senator from Nevada has long been fascinated by UFOs and has been increasingly more vocal on the subject since his retirement in 2017.In 2007, Reid joined his colleagues Senators Ted Stevens, a Republican from Alaska, and Daniel Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii, to invest $22m in a clandestine Pentagon operation that would be called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The program investigated military reports of UFOs and other inexplicable aerial objects. It was shut down in 2012.“They had many sightings, hundreds and hundreds of these sightings. I didn’t know if it would be 20 or 40 – I was stunned – it was hundreds of them,” Reid said.AATIP was the predecessor to the current Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, which is expected to release its findings shortly.The US is enjoying an exponential surge in interest – and rapid shedding of taboos – regarding taking UFOs seriously. With scientists and high-profile politicians weighing in on the conversation – including former President Barack Obama, Reid’s efforts are now more fully appreciated. He compares the current era with that of the Wright Brothers and the beginnings of modern air travel.“I believe it’s just as if we were starting airplanes. Airplanes were not understood very quickly. There’s so much to learn. Technologically, everything today is happening quickly. UFOs fascinate people who are pilots, physicists, because they can’t understand how these UFOS have no vapor trail, no lights on them, yet they can go so fast, so quickly. If it was under the technology we have today it would kill the pilots. We’re at the infancy of it,” he said.When asked about the role of private sector companies and space travel, he expressed admiration for entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, who the former senator said he has met “several times”.“We’ve not talked about UFOs because the last time I met with him we weren’t even talking about UFOs and now we are,” Reid said, leaving the door open for that conversation with the tech mogul.“The work that Musk has done is really breathtaking and how it has influenced the public forum today … people are fascinated by what he’s doing. We have these spaceships going up and coming back, he fixes them up … sends them back up,” he said referring to SpaceX’s successful launches of reusable rockets.Reid also expressed optimism that there are people alive now who may live to see much more commonly available space travel in their lifetimes.“There’s every indication that there’s going to be a lot more space travel, they’ll have colonies on the moon and we’ll have room beyond that,” he said. More

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      in US Politics

      Everyone is now serious about UFOs. But they reveal more about earthling politics | Andrew Gawthorpe

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      The truth probably isn’t out there, but something is. Next month, the Pentagon will deliver to Congress a long-awaited report on its research into what the military calls unidentified aerial phenomena but the rest of the world calls UFOs. Ever since the New York Times reported the existence of a $22m Pentagon program dedicated to studying reported sightings of UFOs by military personnel – along with startling videos of the phenomenon – a steady stream of leaks have followed. Senators from Harry Reid to Marco Rubio have weighed in, demanding the issue be taken seriously. Now even Barack Obama has said that for years the government has been seeing flying objects that “we can’t explain”.A society’s reaction to things it can’t explain always tell us more about the society than about the thing itself. And so far, the reaction has been remarkably muted. Perhaps the simplest explanation for the relative shrug with which these latest revelations have been met is that many Americans already believe the most radical explanation for them. According to one poll, two-thirds of Americans believe there is intelligent life on other planets, 56% believe that we have already made contact with them or will within 100 years, and over half believe UFOs might be alien spacecraft. Polls have shown similar results – albeit with high sensitivity to how the question is phrased – for decades.Despite the enormous metaphysical and spiritual consequences which would flow from them, few people organize their lives around these beliefs. Those dedicated “ufologists” who do so are widely mocked. As America’s response to the coronavirus has shown, many people have trouble reckoning with the moral implications of the existence of other human beings, much less other sentient species. The topics which absorb the country’s political and media elites are much more immediate and visceral. If the shapes in the sky have a position on abortion, gun rights or Mitch McConnell, they haven’t yet made them known. Until they do, their relevance to the news cycle will remain limited.Some commentators, though, have already dared to go where (almost) no commentator has gone before, and in doing so they are revealing of our political moment. The liberal writer Ezra Klein, for instance, has hoped for a unifying moment, the kind which happens in science fiction when first contact with an alien species is followed by humanity putting aside its differences. But, like American society, science fiction has been changing in ways which show how stifling and artificial such moments can be.Science fiction has always been a sort of magical mirror in which we see what we want our own species to be, or conversely fear that it will become. A genre which used to consist largely of strong white men standing united against alien hordes is also home to authors such as Becky Chambers, Ann Leckie and Octavia Butler, whose fiction highlights the variety of human identity and relationships – sexual, gendered, class-based and racial. These different perspectives reveal how politically and culturally divisive a real first contact would be. Observers would rifle through the evidence (What is the alien’s family and economic structure? Do they believe in God?) to find validation for their own values, and as a cudgel to use against those of others. The fracturing of modern identity and the understanding that consensus often hides oppression makes unifying moments hard to imagine in even the most extreme of circumstances, liberal hopes notwithstanding.On the right, Christian writers and thinkers have made a subtle claim for the superiority of their own worldview in interpreting the phenomenon. Some Christians argue that nothing in their faith precludes the existence of alien beings, and that Christianity may even welcome such beings on to the path to redemption. But more revealing of views on the right is Tucker Carlson’s recent intervention in the debate, in which he blasted the Pentagon for taking diversity issues more seriously than the threat of UFOs. This reminds us that sections of American Christianity – especially white evangelical Protestantism – are often as much about identitarian nationalism as they are about religious faith. Groups who were the most supportive of a crackdown on refugees and other humans they consider “aliens” might feel differently about actual aliens. But is it likely?Indeed, most of society seems ready to view UFOs as primarily a security threat to which a response by the military is required. This not only says something about the human psyche, but it comes at a cost for understanding the phenomenon. It stifles the free flow of information. It also means that those at the heart of the investigation are predisposed towards certain kinds of questions. The narrow matter of whether UFOs represent a national security risk is worth investigating, but it hardly exhausts what we need to know. A world in which most curiosity is snickered or shrugged at while the military monopolizes serious research is one with its priorities out of balance.We shouldn’t expect the Pentagon report to provide proof of life on other worlds. But that doesn’t mean it is useless, or that it should be ignored by even the most ardent of skeptics. After welcoming it and casting our eyes briefly to the stars, we should use it as an opportunity to remember the other truths which UFOs can reveal – the ones that aren’t out there, but buried deep within ourselves. More

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      in US Politics

      Marco Rubio urges US to take UFOs seriously ahead of government report

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      The Florida senator Marco Rubio has urged American lawmakers to take the issue of mysterious flying objects seriously ahead of the expected release next month of a US government report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), better known as UFOs.The report follows a renewed push by former government officials and senators including Rubio to investigate reports of UFOs seen by the military.“I want us to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously,” Rubio told CBS’s 60 Minutes in an interview that aired Sunday night.The Florida Republican said a system was needed to catalogue data on these objects until answers had been found.“Maybe it has a very simple answer,” Rubio said. “Maybe it doesn’t.”When Rubio was acting Senate intelligence committee chair last year, he asked the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense to provide an unclassified report on UAP by next month.“Anything that enters an airspace that’s not supposed to be there is a threat,” Rubio said.Rubio acknowledged that the military and others have a history of dismissing this issue.“There’s a stigma on Capitol Hill,” Rubio said. “I mean, some of my colleagues are very interested in this topic and some kinda, you know, giggle when you bring it up. But I don’t think we can allow the stigma to keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question.”Despite this stigma, the issue has gained momentum in the past year.In January, a website that archives declassified government documents, the Black Vault, published thousands of declassified CIA documents on UFOs.In August, the Pentagon resurrected its program to collect and analyze information on mystery objects and military members are encouraged to report strange encounters to this UAP taskforce.Luis Elizondo was part of the Pentagon’s earlier version of this group, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), from 2010 to 2017.He told 60 Minutes there were simple explanations for some of the mysterious sightings, but not all.“We’re not just simply jumping to a conclusion that’s saying, ‘Oh, that’s a UAP out there,” Elizondo said. “We’re going through our due diligence. Is it some sort of new type of cruise missile technology that China has developed? Is it some sort of high-altitude balloon that’s conducting reconnaissance? Ultimately when you have exhausted all those what ifs and you’re still left with the fact that this is in our airspace and it’s real, that’s when it becomes compelling, and that’s when it becomes problematic.” More