One obstacle to figuring out why, exactly, parts of the American government have developed a strange fascination with “unidentified aerial phenomena” and “nonhuman intelligence” — in lay terms, U.F.O.s and aliens — is the journalistic embarrassment that attends asking directly about the subject. Unless they’re all-in and unencumbered by respectability, it’s hard for reporters to treat this as a pressing matter, an issue where they can legitimately (as opposed to winkingly) demand answers the way they would on Iran strikes or immigration policy or even the Jeffrey Epstein affair.
But look what a few direct questions can accomplish. Last week a YouTuber and podcast host named Brian Tyler Cohen asked Barack Obama about aliens, and the former president indicated that they exist while disavowing any personal knowledge of extraterrestrial secrets. This led to a subsequent clarification from Obama that he just meant that aliens are probably out there somewhere. (It’s a big universe!)
But the dominoes were set in motion. At a White House news conference, Karoline Leavitt was asked about online rumors that Donald Trump has an aliens speech ready to go (she denied knowledge). Then Peter Doocy of Fox News asked Trump himself about the Obama alien comments, yielding a weird claim that the former president had revealed classified information and then, via social media, a Trumpian pledge to declassify everything related to “these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.”
I would bet against this supposed disclosure delivering more than a lot of heavily redacted teases. But now that the press corps has warmed to the subject, it’s worth setting out the reality-based questions that a declassification effort could help us resolve and that administration officials can be reasonably pressed about.
First, does the United States military possess more classified aerial footage like the videos from U.S. Navy jets that this newspaper published in 2017, setting in motion the current age of heightened interest in strange vessels over skies and seas? If so, how much more? Is the government more persuaded today than in the past by the attempted debunkings and optical-illusion explanations of these mysteries? Or is there still a widely held view that they offer evidence of “technologies that we don’t have and frankly that we are not capable of defending against,” as the former director of national intelligence and current C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, put it in a 2021 interview?
Second, why has the national security state produced a steady supply of would-be whistle-blowers who claim to have encountered some sort of hidden “legacy program” dedicated to contact with nonhuman intelligence? Are these figures liars? Are they self-deceived, perhaps through some kind of misunderstanding of normal classified programs? Is this all just circulation of rumors associated with the former Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, and his creation of a clandestine U.F.O.-studying group inside the Pentagon? Is it possible that some permanent government disinformation apparatus exists to encourage false U.F.O.-related beliefs in government officials? And if so, is it part of a continuing effort to deceive the public as well?
Third, why have prominent United States senators, led by the minority leader, Chuck Schumer, and the resolutely vanilla South Dakota Republican Mike Rounds, repeatedly behaved and sometimes spoken as though they believe the national security state is concealing information or material related to this subject from elected officials? What is the concrete motivation for the measure encouraging ““unidentified aerial phenomena” disclosure that Rounds and Schumer have put forward repeatedly and so far unsuccessfully? Why did Rounds stand on the Senate floor and seemingly entertain the possibility of “recovered U.A.P. material or biological remains” being in the hands of private-sector entities?
Fourth, is there truth to the claims that government agencies or officials are in contact with self-described U.F.O. experiencers or pursuing other paranormal threads? Is the intelligence community’s Cold War-era research into paranormal subjects continuing? If so, what explains or justifies this effort?
Fifth, how does all of this relate to the accounts of the Nephilim in the Book of Genesis and “the Watchers” in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, and … er, OK, maybe I only have four reality-based questions.
But four is enough to a set reasonable bar for any Trump administration disclosure effort. If it resolves just some of these questions in a reasonable and prosaic manner, then it will have done a public service — even it doesn’t satisfy every theorist, and even if many details remain classified or swaddled in deep-state mystery. (I would personally be content to concentrate my attention on the nonhuman intelligence potentially emerging from Silicon Valley rather than the sky or sea.)
If it can’t or won’t resolve any of them, though, it will only strengthen my sense that parts of our government, for some unknown reason, are very happy to encourage Americans to wander in a strange and haunted fog.
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