I've been closely following the UFO/UAP topic ever since the 2017 NY Times article that featured a couple of US Navy pilots who had both seen an inexplicable "Tic Tac shaped" object out maneuvering their state of the art fighter jets and doing things that, in their words, "defied the laws of physics".
Before reading about their experience I was a firm, almost dogmatic, skeptic about anything of the sort. People who believed in UFOs were in the same camp as people who hunt ghost, bigfoot, and the loch ness monster, or so I thought.
After looking into the subject, something which I strongly invite every skeptic to do, I found that there are a few key differences between UFOs and other unbelievable supernatural sightings. First and foremost being the large number of sightings by credible witnesses. Second would be the extremely suspicious behavior of the US government around the topic. We've spent millions of taxpayer dollars over the decades investigating the topic, while at the same time saying that there is nothing worth investigating.
You can't say the same thing about ghost, or bigfoot.
Over the last few years there have also been a handful of congressional hearings on the subject of UAP, you would think that if there was nothing there that this would quickly be cleared up with a top secret closed door meeting or two, but in fact the opposite has happened. There have been several top secret meetings in secure facilities and while the congresspeople can't say what they've seen it is very clear that they are coming out with even more questions.
In recent months the increasing political pressure has gendered a response and the Whitehouse has directed the DoD (Department of Defense) to begin declassifying and releasing UFO information. The announcement was made in kind of a tongue in cheek way, and because Republicans are generally seen as anti-science and the kind of people who believe in bigfoot and ghosts anyway it still hasn't gotten the attention of the general public.
As of yesterday the government has dumped four tranches of content, one every month or so since the announcement. There are lots of documents and several dozen videos, mostly low quality military grade stuff that you would need to be a trained observer to interpret. There's definitely some weird looking stuff in there, but nothing that I've seen so far that feels definitive.
A couple of weeks ago the notable skeptic and very popular public science figure, Neil deGrasse Tyson quite suddenly changed his tune from, "If UFOs were real, why in the age of the iPhone don't we have more than a few blurry pictures of them" to, “The real question is not ‘are we alone?’ it’s ‘are we ready?’ Are we?”
When asked why he is suddenly more open to the topic he cites a recent shift in the level of credibility of the people who are making the claims, but really credible people have been blowing the whistle for decades. So this makes me wonder if he's been given some inside information.
This morning I woke up to headline where Dr. Phil says that he has been given insider info and that "our government has been lying to us for 79 years", raising my suspicion even further.
When you zoom out and look at how all of these individual gears and cogs in the government are slowly moving in the same direction it starts to look like we might be seeing a coordinated government disclosure of...something.
The alternative is that we have a truly epic story of waste, fraud, and abuse on our hands. One where some clever clogs in the military figured out that the best way to steal money from the government was to claim to be studying UFO technology, and that they somehow got away with it for 80 years.
I'll be continuing to follow this closely as it unfolds, until next time, watch this space.