“Next month, the director of national intelligence, acting at the behest of Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, is scheduled to release a report that collects from across the government all relevant material on what the officials now call ‘unidentified aerial phenomena.’ Regardless of what ultimately emerges in this report – whether it’s a trove of blockbuster reveals or a disappointing dud – the mere prospect has catalyzed a wave of mainstream coverage of government UFO research, from the New Yorker to ’60 Minutes.’ A bewildering and still highly controversial subject has achieved a surprising level of public respectability as a national security concern.”

“In just the three years since the existence of the Pentagon UFO office was made public, the federal government has become increasingly less cagey about a subject that was mocked as absurd and feared as taboo; YouTube is now filled with cockpit videos from military pilots, some verified by the Pentagon, of strange encounters with objects that seem to defy known laws of aerodynamics. Just this month a video taken by the USS Omaha off the California coast in 2019 shows an identified spherical aircraft hovering over the water, before disappearing beneath the waves. Even Barack Obama has spoken recently about encounters ‘we can’t explain.’ The quarter-century saga stretching from Harry Reid’s first attendance at one of Bigelow’s NIDS meetings to the forthcoming release of once-secret documents offers a modern case study in how marginalized ideas can make their way into the mainstream” – Politico.