Most Americans believe in aliens. Stories of mysterious craft hovering in the air or travelling at hypersonic speeds have fuelled interest in unidentified flying objects since the 1950s. The US government is the latest UFO enthusiast.
This month, the US held its first congressional hearing on UFOs since the 1960s. Pentagon officials testified that they had received 400 sightings from military personnel, including a formerly-classified video in which a spherical object apparently zipped past a fighter jet.
Some cultural critics see a postwar fascination with aliens as reflecting the fear of communism and aggressive foreign powers. Between 1947 and 1969, the Air Force collected 12,618 reports of sightings. More than 700 received an “unidentified” label. The project was then disbanded. The US military was cagey about publishing reports of unexplained aerial phenomena after that. Official investigations went unpublished until a report released last year.
Public reports collected by the US National UFO Reporting Center show that people are still spotting plenty of strange objects in the skies. Since it was created in 1974 there has never been a month without a sighting.
Government efforts to encourage standardised reporting could spark an uptick. Real unregistered airborne objects pose risks to air traffic and national security, regardless of their origin. There are fears they could represent breakthrough technology developed by foreign adversaries.
US officials are keen to avoid the word “extraterrestrial”. They often attribute UFO sightings to drones, military activity or airborne clutter, such as deflating weather balloons. The human mind is highly suggestible, though the scientifically-respectable infinite universe theory implies the existence of other life forms on other planets.
As the latest government report admits, most UFO sightings remain impossible to identify. But if they proliferate, it may point to something other than little green men in flying saucers. The data may instead reflect rising paranoia. The US and its allies are once again trapped in a dangerous confrontation with Russia and China.
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