The Pentagon says UFOs are real. So why do we still dismiss them as a joke?
The Pentagon says UFOs are real. So why do we still dismiss them as a joke? The US government now admits the existence of UFOs, but many in the media, in science and in public life refuse to take the issue seriously. That needs to change… Charlie Burton UFOs are real – and we have videos to prove it. It's an extraordinary claim, but that's precisely what the Pentagon told the world last year. On 27 April 2020, the US Department Of Defense (DoD) released three videos, one from 2004, two from 2015, shot from the targeting cameras of US Navy Super Hornet fighter jets. They show close encounters with fast-moving, strange-looking objects and include audio of the pilots' astonishment ("Wow! What is that, man?"). The footage had previously leaked to media organisations, but now the government was putting it on the record. "DoD is releasing the videos in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real," it said in an official statement. "The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as 'unidentified'." The pilot who captured the 2004 UFO footage, while flying a mission from the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier, has described the smooth, white, oblong object as resembling a Tic Tac. Although it was observed by multiple military aviators and detected by radar, it seemed to defy the laws of physics. The Navy pilots say it had no visible wings, rotors or propulsion system – infrared cameras didn't even detect an exhaust plume. Yet it could achieve hypersonic speeds without making a sonic boom; it could descend from 50,000 to 100 feet in a matter of seconds; and it could change direction instantaneously as if without inertia. None of that should even be possible. One of the other pilots who saw the UFO, Commander David Fravor, then head of the US Navy's Black Aces combat squadron, said the 40-foot object ran rings around his jet, reacting to its manoeuvres and jamming its radar, before disappearing in a heartbeat. "After 18 years of flying, I've seen pretty much about everything that I can see in that realm, and this was nothing close," he told ABC News. "I can tell you, I think it was not from this world." It wasn't a one-off. The New York Times reports that between 2014 and 2015, Navy pilots observed UFOs almost daily. There was even a near midair collision.  Commander David Fravor In 2017, the New York Times made the Navy sightings – and the existence of a secret Pentagon programme investigating such occurrences – a front-page news story. Since then, further Navy videos have emerged and "unidentified aerial phenomena" (or "UAP", the new official term that has replaced the now-stigmatised "unidentified flying object") have become a serious talking point. Last July, for instance, the US senator Marco Rubio told CBS that the issue was a pressing national security concern: "We have things flying over our military bases and places where we're conducting military exercises. We don't know what it is and it isn't ours." The following month, the Pentagon created the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force "to improve its understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAPs". Most significantly, in December, Congress passed a bill requiring the director of national intelligence and the defence secretary to submit a report on what they know about the UAP issue. The report is due in June. Let's step back. For decades, the notion of UFOs has been ridiculed. It has been a field defined by a lack of hard evidence – apocryphal tales, uncorroborated witnesses, dodgy photographs – and state denials. In that context, the US government admitting UFOs are real is monumental. And the incidents that have been publicly acknowledged so far are the tip of the iceberg. ("There are a lot more sightings than have been made public," former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe said recently.) What's more, while officials haven't made the leap to calling these objects extraterrestrial, some refuse to rule it out. In December, former CIA director John Brennan, who served under Barack Obama, said UAPs might involve "a different form of life". If they do, the implications for science, technology, religion – for our sense of our place in the cosmos – are profound. And yet, UAPs are still often treated as an "and finally" item by news anchors trying to disguise their smirks. In science and academia, it remains taboo – where it is taken seriously it is typically viewed as fringe research. Swaths of the public are unaware of any of the recent developments – and many who are either refuse to believe them or simply don't care. Christopher Mellon, a former senior defence official who has been pushing for meaningful action on the issue, told Joe Rogan this month that, after the 2017 New York Times front page, almost nobody in Congress asked for a briefing: "I was stunned."  A UAP (more commonly known as a 'UFO') shot from a US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet How myopic do you have to be? Even if UAPs aren't extraterrestrial, the consequences could be seismic. If China, say, has beyond-next-gen technology that can violate restricted airspace with impunity, that's a paradigm shift. Clearly with a global pandemic raging, there have been other priorities. But Christopher French, professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University Of London, tells GQ there could be deeper impulses at play to explain the lack of interest. "If people have made up their minds, one way or the other, it's one of those issues where it's very hard to change [their views]," he says. "Arguably the most powerful cognitive bias that we all suffer from is confirmation bias. We pay more attention to evidence that supports what we already believe to be true or what we would like to be true." Decades of stigma and ridicule are also hard to shake. But in other contexts we are happy to countenance the idea of extraterrestrials. Nasa's primary goal for Mars exploration is to "seek signs of life". The University Of California, Berkeley, facilitates a $100 million project called Breakthrough Listen "aimed at finding evidence of civilisations beyond Earth". As Mellon told Rogan, "Meanwhile we have these things flying around our atmosphere, that we're seeing on the radar, that kind of look and act like what you might expect if somebody sent a probe [to Earth]... And yet the scientific community and the government have not wanted to dare to ask the question." It's vital this attitude changes. Not only for national security, but because even if you believe there is only the slimmest chance UAPs represent hitherto impossible technology, humanity owes it to itself to investigate fully. It has been said there are only two Holy Grail questions: is there an afterlife and are we alone in the universe? If we have a credible lead on the latter, surely it merits serious enquiry. Let's be clear: whether you want to call them "flying objects" or "aerial phenomena" they remain "unidentified". Are UFOs real? That's no longer the question. The question is: what the hell are they?
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