If I were a UFO enthusiast, someone who believes that some UFOs (now UAPs) are aliens visiting the Earth and that the US government knows this and is covering it up, I would be really disappointed. I might engage in some serious motivated reasoning to convince myself that the recent release of documents by the Pentagon was somehow dramatic, but down deep how could you escape crushing devastation. Lucy once again put the football out there for Charlie Brown and then yanked it.
Trump wrote that his administration will, “begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).” The Pentagon announced they will make their files available to the public. The NASA director applauded this transparency. The media is now hyping up these
“never before seen” documents.
And the result – an absolute nothingburger. We get more indistinct blobs, dots of light, blurry nothings, camera artifacts, and stories of people seeing dots of light. The Pentagon acknowledges – there is no evidence that any of these things are alien phenomena, but also that some of the blobs and lights have not been fully explained. So we are exactly where we have always been – there is no compelling or unambiguous evidence of aliens. Believers can weave whatever anomaly-hunting stories they want from the terrible evidence. Skeptics will continue to point out that the evidence does not tell us anything. Conspiracy theorists will continue to argue that the government is covering up the “real” evidence, and this data dump must be a false flag.
What was not in the data dump from the Pentagon? There were no alien bodies. The US government is not in the possession of an alien spacecraft or any part of an alien spacecraft. There were no unambiguous alien artifacts. There were no videos or pictures of clear alien spacecraft or aliens. There was no evidence that would have ended the debate. The government did not acknowledge that it was ever covering anything up about aliens.
There were also no obvious fakes – no “alien autopsy” videos, no shaky flying saucers, no CG videos. These were all, at least, legitimate pictures and videos. That’s why their quality was so consistently terrible. As I have said numerous times – the low quality of the evidence is the phenomenon. UAPs are low quality evidence by definition, because high quality evidence is not unidentified. It is not the strangeness of the phenomena that makes it hard to identify definitively, it is the low quality of the evidence. When objects come into focus, they are birds, planes, balloons, and other aircraft.
The simplest explanation for this situation is – aliens are not visiting the Earth, or if they are they have the technology to remain completely hidden from us. So we are just getting the residue of low quality evidence that the Pentagon was unable to explain, a residue that will always exist given enough data and is not predictive that something strange is going on. It would be remarkable if the Pentagon were able to positively identify 100% of every blurry photo or blob of light one of their people ever recorded.
UFO skeptics like Mick West will spend some time carefully examining videos to show that the claims of enthusiasts are not accurate and nothing preternatural is going on. Some of the videos look like birds to me – when you are flying above a bird which is flying over the water it creates the illusion that the bird is moving much faster than it is. Some are clearly camera artifact, like the star distortion patterns or afterglow. These careful analyses are convincing to skeptics and dismissed by believers.
How is the mainstream media dealing with these Pentagon releases? Total failure, in my opinion. They talk about it with a smile and a glint in their eye – “Ooh, we get to talk about UFO’s with a veneer of legitimacy because it’s coming from the Pentagon.” But they give no context, no useful analysis, and often not a hint of skepticism. At most you get a dry qualifier, “The Pentagon says there is no evidence of aliens,” but that’s like the fine print that wizzes by in a commercial. Some of the more gullible journalists think there is actually something going on here, likely because of profound ignorance of the UFO phenomenon over the last 80 years. They often don’t even feel the need for token skepticism.
If you are holding out for the really juicy evidence to be released in a later batch – don’t hold your breath. It seems unreasonable to assume that the Pentagon is holding onto smoking gun evidence at this point, and starting off with a bunch of crap. To think the government is holding on to solid evidence at this point you need to believe that Trump is impotent on this issue, or that he is lying and is now part of the cover up. Neither of these hypotheses seem likely. As is typical, you have to deepen the conspiracy in order to explain away the lack of credible evidence.
I know I have said all of the above before – because there is nothing new or interesting in the Pentagon release. As I said – this is all more of the same, and everything remains status quo. UAPs are all blurry nothings and fish stories. There is no compelling evidence of aliens. The government is not covering up their knowledge of aliens. The press are loving the clickbait. I can only hope more people will see this as the giant nothing it is.
