UFOs are freaky shit. If you’ve had even just a casual interest in the topic in the last few decades then what’s happened in the last few years is nothing short of groundbreaking. The United States government and military have come forward and said more or less “We don’t know what these things are, but they’re real insomuch as we can observe, we’re going to study them and report on them publicly going forward”. Congress is legitimizing study of the subject with a “UAP rapid response force” attached to the National Defense Authorization Act.

Four years ago this week, on December 16th, 2017 was when the New York Times published the first reports of a secret government program studying aerial phenomena in an article titled “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program“. The acknowledgements that came since marked a rapid shift from 70 years of “No that was just a weather balloon you saw execute a 90 degree turn at an estimated 4,000 mph” or “That was ‘swamp gas’ reflecting the light of Venus that melted the front of your grandma’s car and put her friend in the hospital for 12 days”.

A paragraph like “Under [Bigelow Aerospace founder billionaire Robert] Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that [Military intelligence official Luis] Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes” is not something you read in the New York Times every day. Like it or not, we’re in a new era – one that would be probably an even bigger deal if we weren’t preoccupied worldly threats like white nationalist fascism, a raging virus pandemic entering its third year, the ever-present threat of war with China and/or Russia, global warming, the supply chain crisis, legislative gridlock, et cetera.

But once you ignore all of that shit, plus all the secondary and interconnected problems our civilization faces, well hey! Here’s one more potential threat to humanity for you to worry about!

Skepticism is healthy. A skeptic says “Well I still do not believe these craft – if they even are craft – are anything extraordinary, but because I cannot see any conventional explanation I do need to remain open to the possibility that these objects are indeed something extraordinary.”

So what could they be? Let’s examine some of the possibilities:

1. They’re of intelligent extraterrestrial origin: Debunkers always go straight for “But why would an alien civilization fly a million light years just to visit our stupid planet?” and the answer is “Because fuck you and your flippant jokes”. Human biologists fly to the African wilderness to observe primates and their behavior. Nobody ever said “Hey, we just saw baboons throwing their shit at each other, so I guess we’re done studying them.” Human governments have spent billions of dollars just to see if there might be microscopic life on Mars and other rocks in our solar system.

The comeback then of course goes “Well how do you know aliens would want to do the same?” Well we don’t know that. But we do know that the one intelligent species that evolved to become the apex predator of its world is indeed a very curious one and devotes a significant amount of its resources to scientific inquiry in the collective interest of self-preservation and advancement. If they’re here, they’re doing exactly what we would do if we had the capability to traverse the interstellar void. You can argue all you want about the individual evidence of this or that sighting. You cannot however seriously argue that a crew of alien explorers would cruise across the galaxy but skip a planet that looks like it might be inhabited to go check out Mercury instead.

2. They’re something even weirder: This is not mutually exclusive with possibility #1, though it could be. The idea that the craft are either “manned” or not “manned” probes from distant alien civilizations is easy to wrap one’s head around, should they believe it or not. What’s a struggle to articulate is that they’re not, but there from… somewhere else. Or from here. It’s quite possible that some, or even all sightings of UFOs are visual manifestations of some really, really, really insane metaphysical phenomena, and simply calling them “extraterrestrial” is the easiest way to accept them. It could very well be that some extra-dimensional phantom or phantoms, a sentient wrinkle in the very fabric of reality itself, is now disguising itself as alien spacecraft after spending previous centuries dressed up as the devil, angels, dragons, fairies, sphinxes, and yes, even the kraken.

3. Future time travelers: Sure, I guess. But that’d be kind of a stupid ending.

So that’s where we’re at right now. That “foreign military tech” story is bullshit. There is nothing even remotely capable of making a 90 degree turn at hypersonic speed that was made by 21st century human technology. These things didn’t come from us or from “here” as we understand it. The sooner people begin to accept and understand that the better off we’ll all be if and when the big day arrives. It may never come, but it’s hard to argue that we’re not closer now if it does.