Congress has requested and required that the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense answer their questions about UAP (UFOs) by compiling a report that is due in June 2021. But what exactly does Congress want to know? See below.
Timeline:
June 8, 2020 –Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 (S. 3905) reported to the Senate.
June 17, 2020 – Senator Rubio from Select Committee on Intelligence filed Report No. 116-233, which contained the UAP language.
July 23, 2020 – S.3905 passed by the Senate as part of National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 (S.4049)
December 27, 2020 – COVID relief bill signed by President Trump. The IAA was included in the bill.
Here is the summary of the bill that contained the original language mandating the UPA report: “This bill authorizes various intelligence-related activities for FY2021 and contains other related provisions.”
This is a kitchen sink document, where the Senate Intelligence Committee members attach all sorts of orders on topics such as child care for government agents to the proper use of the whistle blower statute. Reporting indicates that Senator Rubio added the UAP section.
The UAP section is just over half way down the document, under the section Committee Comments
Advanced Aerial Threats
The Committee supports the efforts of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force at the Office of Naval Intelligence to standardize collection and reporting on unidentified aerial phenomenon, any links they have to adversarial foreign governments, and the threat they pose to U.S. military assets and installations. However, the Committee remains concerned that there is no unified, comprehensive process within the Federal Government for collecting and analyzing intelligence on unidentified aerial phenomena, despite the potential threat. The Committee understands that the relevant intelligence may be sensitive; nevertheless, the Committee finds that the information sharing and coordination across the Intelligence Community has been inconsistent, and this issue has lacked attention from senior leaders.
Therefore, the Committee directs the DNI, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense and the heads of such other agencies as the Director and Secretary jointly consider relevant, to submit a report within 180 days of the date of enactment of the Act, to the congressional intelligence and armed services committees on unidentified aerial phenomena (also known as ``anomalous aerial vehicles''), including observed airborne objects that have not been identified.
The Committee further directs the report to include:
1. A detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence reporting collected or held by the Office of Naval Intelligence, including data and intelligence reporting held by the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force;
2. A detailed analysis of unidentified phenomena data collected by:
a. geospatial intelligence;
b. signals intelligence;
c. human intelligence; and
d. measurement and signals intelligence;
3. A detailed analysis of data of the FBI, which was derived from investigations of intrusions of unidentified aerial phenomena data over restricted United States airspace;
4. A detailed description of an interagency process for ensuring timely data collection and centralized analysis of all unidentified aerial phenomena reporting for the Federal Government, regardless of which service or agency acquired the information;
5. Identification of an official accountable for the process described in paragraph 4;
6. Identification of potential aerospace or other threats posed by the unidentified aerial phenomena to national security, and an assessment of whether this unidentified aerial phenomena activity may be attributed to one or more foreign adversaries;
7. Identification of any incidents or patterns that indicate a potential adversary may have achieved breakthrough aerospace capabilities that could put United States strategic or conventional forces at risk; and
8. Recommendations regarding increased collection of data, enhanced research and development, and additional funding and other resources. The report shall be submitted in unclassified form, but may include a classified annex.
When Star Trek’s first regular episode after the pilot was in pre-production, the director Joseph Sargent noticed a glaring problem. All of the seats that ringed the futuristic bridge of the Enterprise, including the communications chair, were to be filled with white, male actors. Sargent reflexively felt it was wrong that Black people should not be represented in the show’s vision of the future.
Sargent later recalled: “We had a good representation–a good diversity in virtually all ethnic areas–except Black people. There wasn’t a Black actor in the group and I gingerly, and obsessively, approached Gene.”
When filming began on The Corbomite Maneuver, Nichelle Nichols’s Uhura was seated at her iconic and historic place on the bridge. Sargent and Roddenberry’s idea–whites and people of color inhabiting the same space as equals–was a radical, and risky, departure from most Americans’ lived experience in 1966.
They were also following precedent established in the pilot Where No Man Has Gone Before, which was filmed a year earlier. When we first enter the bridge in that episode, there are two Black officers present. When the department heads arrive one is an Asian man, George Takei; one is a Scotsman, James Doohan; one is a woman, Sally Kellerman’s Dr. Dehner. One of the Black actors, Lloyd Haynes, has a piece of dialogue, and he remains on the bridge throughout the episode. He was seated at the communications console, and identified in the script as Communications Officer Lt. Alden.
According to Marc Cushman’s These Are The Voyages, Roddenberry expected Haynes might have a larger presence if the series was picked up. That did not work out, and in the next script a white man was called for to become the Enterprise’s comms officer. Instead, thanks to Sargent, a Black woman–Nichols–was chosen to fill the seat.
Uhura and Sulu were able to explore, argue, tease, flirt, sing, and swashbuckle with their white peers. But their inclusion is only part of the story of Star Trek’s racial diversity. People of color were chosen as background extras, small speaking roles, and guest stars. Every week of the 1966-67 television season except for one, you would have tuned in to see Black and brown people in uniform on board a starship. The white writers, directors and producers of the show, in ways big and small, made sure that the Enterprise was not a whites-only space.
Sociologist Elijah Anderson coined the term white space to describe “settings in which black people are typically absent, not expected, or marginalized when present.” Black people “typically approach that space with care… they can feel uneasy and consider it to be informally ‘off limits.’” Meanwhile white people are scarcely aware these spaces exist or of how uncomfortable Black people become when in them. Think of it as a dimensional realm of subspace. To the people who live there, it’s home sweet home. But for trans-dimensional beings, you get noticed, and it can be a chilly, hostile place to visit. Anderson explains: “When the anonymous black person enters the white space, others there immediately try to make sense of him or her—to figure out ‘who that is,’ or to gain a sense of the nature of the person’s business and whether they need to be concerned.”
Anderson wrote this paper in 2014, trying to explain the peculiar ways our modern society still segregates by race, and the conflicts–sometimes deadly–that arise when Black people enter white spaces. But the reason we have white and Black spaces today is because of the entrenched segregation of Jim Crow. Star Trek’s first viewers lived in a society where laws enforced racial separation just about anywhere you could think of.
In 1937 Oklahoma required telephone companies to install whites-only phone booths. In 1955 Tennessee passed a law that required mine operators to install separate bathrooms for white and Black miners. In 1956 Kentucky passed a slew of Jim Crow laws: separate waiting rooms and bathrooms; separate tuberculosis hospitals; separate public transit; facilities that served food had to have separate dining rooms and provide separate sets of eating utensils. In that state and many others it was illegal for a Black person to dance with a white person or walk together through a public park or playground. Spock and Uhura’s musical performances in the rec room would have been punishable by jail time in some of these places.
Well into the 1960s in Seattle, and many other American cities, realtors were barred from “introducing into a neighborhood… members of any race or nationality, or any individual whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.” In Texas in 1960 it was a crime for a Black and white person to live in the same house, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Interracial marriage was illegal until June 1967. The 1950s saw a raft of laws prohibiting mixed race adoptions, which Amanda Grayson and Sarek would have found quite illogical. In 1967 Sarasota, Florida passed this law: “Whenever members of two or more races shall be upon any public…bathing beach within the corporate limits of the City of Sarasota, it shall be the duty of the Chief of police or another officer… to clear the area involved of all members of all races present.”
The service branches that Starfleet was modeled after had only recently been desegregated. Truman’s executive order desegregating the military was signed in 1948, but it was ignored or slow walked for years. The last racially segregated unit of Black soldiers was not abolished until 1954. None of the former service members who worked on Star Trek–men like Roddenberry, Robert Justman, and James Doohan–would have ever had the experience of serving equally with any African American.
During the two decades preceding Star Trek’s debut, America had been–and was still–engaged in a fit of declaring itself a white space.
1960s Hollywood was not immune from this racism, and so the prime-time lineup was also a white space. Roddenberry’s show prior to Star Trek, The Lieutenant (1963-64), was set in a contemporary Marine Corps training camp. One episode depicted a Black Marine taking abuse from a racist white Marine. The network refused to air it, and soon after the series was canceled. In Riverboat (1959-61), there was a network edict that warned script writers “no Negros were ever to be seen” on the series, which was set in 1860 Mississippi, a time when the population of that state was 55% Black. If the networks could berate progressive-leaning writers and directors into pretending that all the Black people were simply “below decks” on Riverboat, it would have been just as easy to pretend they were out of sight on the Enterprise too. But Star Trek refused to play along.
Consider these numbers for season one:
75% of episodes had people of color as background extras
39% of episodes featured people of color with guest speaking roles
5 episodes featured people of color in the main guest star role
Background Extras
The presence of diversity in background extras may sound trivial, but it was a subtle yet powerful way that Star Trek demonstrated inclusivity. The Enterprise crew was filled with people of color working and socializing alongside their white crew members as equals. In the first few moments of Balance of Terror, we see a Black man, Black woman, and Asian woman attending the wedding ceremony, and on the bridge a Filipino man takes over the helm.
In Court Martial, at least two Black officers are seen in the starbase club, and an Indian man named Captain Chandra was seated with Commodore Stone on the judges panel. In The Conscience of the King we see in the background an Asian and Indian man, and the same Filipino man, who had an important part as the security guard who confronted Kodos. Many extras reappeared throughout the series. The Filipino actor, Ron Veto, was in ten episodes.
One of the wedding guests was played by an unknown Black extra who appeared in two other episodes, including on the security detail that went after the Horta in The Devil in the Dark. In Memory Alpha his name is listed as Lewis.
If you watch the background extras on the bridge and hustling past our regulars in the corridor, you are also struck by the near parity between men and women, and many of them are women of color. In Operation: Annihilate!, of the four female officers seen on the bridge one is Latina or hispanic and one is Yeoman Zarah played by Moroccan actress Maurishka Tagliaferro. She also got in on some away team action.
It would have been easy to have all the extras look like this guy:
And in many shows and movies, especially in science-fiction, that’s how it was for decades: a monochrome pallet of square-jawed white faces. Star Trek’s directors and producers chose diversity.
You might say diverse background extras are fine, but can you give them some lines? That was done too.
Speaking Extras
We’ve already mentioned how Lloyd Haynes was given a few lines and some reaction shots in the series pilot, teasing the possibility that he could become a recurring character. At least 9 episodes in season one had actors of color with small but noticeable speaking roles.
In The Enemy Within, Black actor Garland Thompson played a transporter technician who was prominent throughout the episode and had more lines than Uhura. Thompson was also a background extra in Charlie X. In Shore Leave, Lieutenant Esteban Rodriguez was one of the non-regular characters who had adventures on the pleasure planet. He was played by Julios Caesar Lopez, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent, and was billed as a co-star for this episode. In Space Seed, Lieutenant Spinelli, played by native Hawaiian actor Blaisdell Makee, had some scenes bravely resisting Kahn.
In Court Martial, the Enterprise’s Personnel Officer is played by Asian actress Nancy Wong. In A Taste of Armageddon, Yeoman Tamura is played by Japanese-American actress Miko Mayama. In early scripts, both of these roles were to be portrayed by Yeoman Janice Rand and had to be rewritten after Grace Lee Whitney left the show. The producers and directors could have recast the roles with white, blond actresses who looked like Whitney, but instead they chose these two Asian women.
One of the most significant and interesting cases in this category is Janet MacLachlan as Lieutenant Charlene Masters in The Alternative Factor. Gerd Oswald, the episode director, and Joe D’Agosta, head of casting, wanted to hire a Black actress to play Lazarus’s love interest. It would have been TV’s first interracial romance, complete with passionate kissing and ending with the two of them joined together for eternity in the inter-dimensional corridor. Unfortunately NBC balked. As Marc Cushman put it, there was concern about “how affiliates in the South might react.” There were many other script problems, including the fact that Masters sabotages the ship over a man she just met, and so Gene Coon kept the character and the actress but jettisoned the love affair. While the role was much smaller than intended, MacLachlan got to play a competent and heroic officer whose quick action saves the ship.
MacLachlan’s presence is important not just for her skin color but also her hair. Someone decided that MacLachlan should not wear a wig, that Masters would wear her hair natural. Cushman quotes from an interview he did with Coon’s secretary Ande Richardson-Kindryd, who was deeply moved by this choice:
“My mother had made me swear that I would always wear a wig to work because I should not ever let them see my natural hair. It was just too radical. It was very courageous that she wore her hair in an Afro at that time… But the people at Star Trek thought in those terms–individual rights; personal choices. It was a very freeing environment, and a very positive message. So now I knew I was finally at a place where I felt that we had a chance to be–we, being Black people. I took off my wig and stuck my head under a water tap and combed out my Afro and went back to work. I sat down at my desk and no one ever said a word to me and I knew I was at a place where I belonged, that this was home and I was with good people.”
In 1966-67, for many Black women and girls, and Black men and boys, it must have felt that Star Trek was a place they belonged too.
Guest Stars
Full-fledged guest stars had to carry the weight of at least half of the episode, going toe-to-toe with the series’s regular heroes. The actors got top billing after Shatner and Nimoy, and would have been familiar faces to much of the TV audience. In five episodes of season one, this coveted spot was filled by people of color, all men.
In The Galileo Seven, the bad guys were the cavemen aliens of Taurus II, but since the real conflict was Spock’s internal struggle for the command of his crew, the true antagonist was Lieutenant Boma, an astro-physicist, played by Don Marshall. From the first time we see him in the shuttle, Marshall gives Boma a gravitas unusual for a lieutenant-of-the-week. His stance in the seat behind Spock is relaxed and confident. He looks like a man who knows he belongs there. Boma assertively pushes back on Spock’s command decisions, and McCoy ends up convincing Spock that Boma’s criticisms are justified and correct. Boma gets Spock to the right place and the script never turns him meek or apologetic.
Marshall later said about the role: “There was no shyness or hold back because of race. You didn’t get that a lot on TV at that time, where a Black man could speak his mind to a white man without being regarded as out-of-line. Gene Roddenberry and the other people on the show, like Leonard Nimoy, were greatly concerned about the show and about the people on it, and how it depicted the future. There’s so much beauty in that.”
In Court Martial we have another no-nonsense, commanding Black guest star, Percy Rodriguez as Commodore Stone, the commanding officer of Starbase 11. This was the first time audiences had visited a Starbase or met a commodore. Stone not only put Kirk on trial but said this famous quote: “Not one man in a million could do what you and I have done. Command a starship. A hundred decisions a day, hundreds of lives staked on you making every one of them right.” When those lines were written, the U.S. Navy had no African American captains. Samuel Lee Gravely Jr. became the first Black officer to reach the rank of captain in 1967.
Two episodes had major guest star roles played by Jewish actors. In The Menagerie we meet Commodore Jose Mendez, another commanding officer of Starbase 11. Even though the actor, Malachi Throne, was born to Austro Hungarian Jews before World War II, we might be able to infer based on his name that the character is Hispanic. In A Taste of Armageddon, the alien Anan 7 is played by David Opatovsky. Born in New York City, his father was a Yiddish novelist from Poland. Opatovsky had semetic features that landed him both Jewsish and Arabic roles. Both characters are devoid of any ethnic stereotypes whatsoever.
Finally, the most significant guest role of the season, if not the entire franchise, was Ricardo Montalban’s Kahn Singh in Space Seed. Mondalban was born in Mexico City, moving to Los Angeles to have a film career. While Khan was most likely of Indian descent, not Hispanic, he was a person of color portraying the ultimate villain who nonetheless earned the respect, even grudging admiration, of the Enterprise crew. There is also an anti-colonialism aspect to the character. For a hundred years the native peoples of European or American colonies, whether Indian or Hispanic or Asian, had been depicted in popular culture as obedient, slovenly, lazy, and stupid. Khan is the opposite of those things. In fact the writers gave him the courage, cunning, and ruthlessness typical of white colonizers. “I’ve gotten something else I wanted,” he tells Kirk before beaming down to Ceti Alpha V. “A world to win, an empire to build.” By reversing these roles, the episode makes a mockery of colonial racism.
To show how Star Trek’s message of inclusivity was noticed at the time, I will close with two quotes from fan letters Roddenberry received after some of the episodes mentioned above.
“The ethnic backgrounds represented within the cast are exactly as they should be, for it will require the best of all Earth to achieve in fact what you are presenting as today’s fiction” (1967)
“The crew of the Enterprise, comprised of all the nations and races of Earth working together in a joint effort, provides hope for the future of mankind. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be alive when these ‘fiction’ stories of today becomes tomorrow’s truths. (1966)
Not alien–that is so far inconclusive. But in the literal sense of the term. Unidentified–no one seems to know what they are. Flying–fantastically so. Objects–solid physical matter that people have actually observed.
Since I was a boy I have always stared into the night sky and wondered about alien life–desperately wanting to believe that on some planet around one of those stars there was another little boy looking back and thinking about me. But, taking my cues from Carl Sagan and his generation of space buffs, I never believed that aliens had visited the Earth. UFOs were nothing more than fun ghost stories.
My views began to change after The New York Times began reporting in late 2017 on current and on-going government studies of UFOs. Several videos have been released, and the military has publicly confirmed that they are in fact UFOs, although they renamed them UAP (unidentified arial phenomena).
Perhaps as a result of the public and political interest generated by this recent wave of reporting, the Pentagon is about to release a report in June detailing their official views on the evidence of UAP.
For the past year, and especially this spring, there has been a slew of new reporting and commentary on the subject. Having consumed much of it, I have come to the conclusion that UFOs are real–by which I mean truly, genuinely unidentified. I want to lay out three fact patterns that support this conclusion.
UFO Capabilities
The most significant reason that UFOs remain unidentified and mysterious is because their observed capabilities are genuinely inexplicable. People in the military and U.S. government (and allied governments) have been saying for decades that these crafts have capabilities that are simply not possible with present-day technology of any nation.
No doubt a lot of so-called UFO videos on the internet are in fact drones. Commercial drones have proliferated since 2015. But the capabilities ascribed to genuine UFO/UAP have been described consistently for longer than we have had current drone technology.
On 5/14/21 this video was released of a spherical craft entering the ocean. This was recorded by the USS Omaha on 7/15/19.
The US Navy photographed & filmed “spherical” shaped UFOs & advanced transmedium vehicles; here is some of that footage. Filmed in the Combat Information Center of the USS Omaha / July 15th 2019 / warning area off San Diego @ 11pm PST. No wreckage found. No craft were recovered. pic.twitter.com/tK1YTG8sJ7
— Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell (@JeremyCorbell) May 14, 2021
Debunkers might claim it’s a simple drone that someone splashed into the ocean, or even that someone has developed an advanced drone that can move through both air and water. But consider this. One of the UAP sightings that helped kick off the recent wave of reporting in 2017 was recoded by the USS Nimitz in November 2004 (showcased in last week’s 60 Minutes report). Read the conclusions about craft capabilities from the report that was produced after that encounter, especially the last one:
The ‘Anomalous Aerial Vehicle’ was of unknown origin and represented technology not currently in the possession of the U.S. or any other nation.
It featured broadband RF stealth making the use of radar against it largely ineffective.
The craft manifested extreme performance but did not have lifting structures or control surfaces required for traditional flight.
It showed that it has some kind of advanced propulsion capability making it able to go instantly from hovering to very high speed and to make very abrupt course changes.
It was able to ‘cloak’ itself, becoming invisible visually to the naked eye.
Possibly capable of operating undersea without being detected by the most advanced sub-surface sensors.
At the time, even though the sailors and pilots who witnessed the craft did not see it enter the water, the Navy had enough reason to suspect it did that the submarine USS Louisville was sent to search for it. So we have two crafts exhibiting similar capabilities 15 years apart.
Just to pull one of many examples that goes back even farther, here is an account from an eyewitness to a series of UFO sightings over Loring Air Force Base in 1975: …Then the Lt Colonel said: “This damn thing was there one second and gone the next, vanished….then radar analysis showed this bogey was so far away and at such a high altitude…..let me tell you this -… there is NOTHING on THIS PLANET that can do the things this aircraft or damn UFO did….”
Witness claims of UFO capabilities based on inexplicable technological prowess has been consistent for a long time.
2. Military Intentions
Recent reporting on UAP, and on-the-record statements by military officials and people in Congress like Senator Rubio, indicate that the government views this issue as a national security threat. For obvious reasons the military cannot just blithely accept foreign operators entering our airspace, buzzing our ships, and spying.
The way the national security apparatus has handled the UAP issue leads me to believe that they are telling the truth when they say that they genuinely do not know what these things are. From 2007-2012 the Pentagon budget allocated 22 million dollars for a special office dedicated to studying UAP. In 2019 the Navy began drafting guidelines for what to do during UAP encounters. And on 5/1/2020 the Office of Naval Intelligence convened a briefing on UAP. According to someone involved, the goal was “to de-stigmatize the UAP problem and to promote more intelligence collection regarding UAP incursions and encounters with active military deployments.”
Ask yourself: why should there be a need to de-stigmatize sightings among military personnel? What are other examples in a military context of sightings that require an official push to be de-stigmatized? (Sexual assault is the only example I can think of). No one needs to be de-stigmatized about seeing a missile launched over the horizon. If our intelligence officers concluded that these sightings were actually most likely experimental Chinese technology, the Pentagon would simply adjust training to account for that fact: Here is what the craft can do; this is who we think it is; here is the checklist you follow when you encounter it.
The fact that they are unidentifiable–and repeatedly classified as unidentified by the military–cannot be glossed over. The term has a specific meaning and implications. One of which is the stigma. Now the military is essentially saying: You are going to see something you will not be able to explain. It may shake your worldview. You may be afraid to report what you have seen, and you must resist that fear.
And the stigma is a real barrier for intelligence gathering in the military. The pilots in the Nimitz encounter were mocked into silence for a long time. One of them only went public with her story this month in that 60 Minutes interview. There was no follow up investigation. It was officially ignored. The military seems to be coming around to the idea that they can’t operate that way any more.
The Air Force originally defined a UFO’s unidentified nature this way: “unusual features does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object” An updated definition for UAPs reads in part: “remains unidentified after close scrutiny of all available evidence by persons who are technically capable of making … a full technical identification.”
In other words, unidentified does not mean probably Chinese or probably a drone. Experts have already ruled out those possibilities.
It’s easy for laymen and People on the Internet to watch the recently released videos and think that someone with a toy-store drone could film it, or it’s a camera trick like sweeping the camera away from a stationary object. It’s one thing to debunk random videos people post online with that kind of analysis, but the videos we are talking about are the product of U.S. military tools. And not just video. There are radar data and other measurements of each craft’s observed capabilities, as well as numerous eyewitness accounts. I for one assume that the military did their own math and did it well. And they are saying they don’t know what these things are. If they were most likely drones, they would say that.
I presume this is why Congress asked the Pentagon for the report that is to be released in June. They want the military to share its conclusions and show its math. If they ere on the side of disclosure, it may settle this question one way or the other. Their math could support that idea that there is simply no way man-made technology is involved. It could even show–as some insiders believe–that the crafts break known laws of physics. The results could be more inconclusive than that.
Whatever the report says, Congress’s demand for a public report will force the military to show its hand. They can no longer get away with a no-comment.
3. Recovered UFO Material
Evidence of the UFO phenomenon is not limited to sightings and flight data. Many people believe that UFO materials may have been recovered from one or more crash sites. These debris are often described as chunks, shards or fragments of nondescript metal.
Diana Walsh Pusulka is the Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Carolina. In her book American Cosmic (published in 2019), she recounts how she and another researcher were blindfolded and driven deep into the desert where, they were told, a UFO had crashed in 1947. They used specialized metal detectors and found several pieces of the debris, which are presumably still being studied.
Pasulka wrote: “It was analyzed by research scientists, who concluded that it was so anomalous as to be incomprehensible. According to these scientists, I was told, it could not have been generated on Earth.”
Materials like these, or perhaps the same ones they collected, are currently part of a peer-reviewed study that may someday be published in a refereed scientific journal.
On 7/23/20 The New York Times reported on these materials: “a small group of former government officials and scientists with security clearances who, without presenting physical proof, say they are convinced that objects of undetermined origin have crashed on earth with materials retrieved for study.”
Senator Harry Reid, former senate majority leader and the most powerful politician in Nevada, believes these artifacts exist and tried to get a look at them. He recently said in an interview published in The New Yorker: “I was told for decades that Lockheed [Martin] had some of these retrieved materials. And I tried to get, as I recall, a classified approval by the Pentagon to have me go look at the stuff. They would not approve that. I don’t know what all the numbers were, what kind of classification it was, but they would not give that to me.”
Assuming Reid is not fabricating this story, it’s telling that the Pentagon’s response was not, “Sorry Senator, we can’t let you see the materials because they don’t exist.” The response was that his position in the government was not high enough to grant him access to the materials, whatever they are.
All of these elements add up to something that cannot be so easily dismissed. When the typical UFO story is a farmer seeing some strange lights in the sky while driving alone down a dark road , it’s easy to ignore. But the UFO phenomenon is not limited to that story and it never has been.
If one accepts that many of the people who have witnessed and recorded UFOs actually did see something, and that something is unidentifiable because it represents technology that is impossible to have originated from present-day humans, one can’t help but ask: What is the origin of these things? To take this question seriously is like standing on a ledge, peering over it into the unknown. Do you take the leap, or do you turn and run as fast as you can back into the comfort of boring reality? The implications of this leap are so consciousness-shattering that most of us want to stay as far away from that ledge as possible, so we won’t be faced with the choice. But the ground may be shifting and the ledge may be rushing at all of us sooner than we think.
