Extraterrestrial First Contact: UFOs in the Spotlight

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I don’t usually watch TV shows about UFOs. What I have seen in the past has been silly, overwrought, and lacking in evidence. A new series on the History Channel is quite different. “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation” is based primarily on video and first person accounts from U.S. fighter pilots. The Pentagon released the videos in 2017. The thoughtful investigation for the TV show is led by a group of former military members. The videos show pilot encounters with objects off the west and east coasts of the United States. The video and descriptions are fascinating. The producers don’t jump to conclusions. They let the pilots describe why these UFOs were operating outside of the current parameters of human aviation technology. The videos came to light in the New York Times in 2017. The Times followed up with another article recently. Senators even had ameeting with some of the TV show researchers this week in Washington. It is perhaps the most attention paid to UFO accounts by legitimate sources in many years.

Let us not forget that UFOs are Unidentified Flying Objects. In the great majority of cases those objects are finally identified. Kansas City had a recent UFO sighting by members of the public. It turned out to be a highly classified type of surveillance balloon by a subset of the U.S. military. Many of the pilots in the TV series say they assumed the objects they encountered were part of a military test, something they were not made aware of, and that the disappearance of the video and radar files of those UFO observations were related to those tests. For me, the most interesting angle to come up in the TV series is an examination of the cover-ups that occurred after each incident. On closer examination of those cases, the disappearance of those digital records didn’t appear to happen as part of a government conspiracy, but could have simply been the actions of superiors who didn’t want to be embarrassed and risk their career success by reporting a UFO. That seems like a much more believable reason for UFO encounters not being reported by the government. They are kept quiet, and not connected, not because there is an organized conspiracy, but rather the actions are taken by individuals trying to protect their careers. The pilots say so themselves in interviews. The only connection between the pilots experiencing UFO encounters, on different days or different shifts, comes when they talk amongst themselves. Could it be that the so-called government UFO conspiracy was simply a collection of individual decisions to cover-up specific incidents?

So, where does that leave us in terms of extraterrestrial First Contact?  It certainly provides more questions to ask if we do make contact with aliens some day. Contact in this sense would be an actual conversation of some sort, one where we could share a great deal of information, and in real-time, not spread out over many years because of distance. One of the first topics would have to be previous extraterrestrial history in our solar system and inside Earth atmosphere. Have they had drones or piloted crafts in Earth atmosphere?  If so, why?  And if so, what other types of contact have occurred?  If they have been here in the past, we would have to discuss reports of alien abduction and direct contact with humans. I personally don’t believe such things have occurred. But in the event of a conversation with extraterrestrials, a discussion of their history of contact with humans would be a top priority.

I have always found talk of government conspiracy when it comes to UFOs to be ridiculous given how disorganized and full of leaks the government is with every other issue. Perhaps we have all missed this angle because of a shared fear of embarrassment? I understand why astronomers and astrophysicists avoid the discussion of UFOs like the plague. It really has been a plague for some scientific careers, just as it likely would have been for military careers. I have avoided such discussions on this blog for many of the same reasons. However, in the realm of complete speculation, which is what any discussion of extraterrestrial contact is at this point, is it wise to leave this issue unexamined? We have no evidence of alien contact. But that doesn’t mean that such contact has never occurred. We need to keep our minds open to any eventuality until we receive evidence to the contrary.

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