Aliens Are (Probably) Not Harassing the U.S. Navy
Unidentified flying objects have been interacting with military ships with alarming frequency. Congress
is right to take the issue seriously.
By Editorial Board
May 19, 2021, 1:00 PM GMT+1
It almost certainly isn’t aliens. And yet …
In recent years, videos have been making the rounds online
of strange aircraft surrounding U.S. naval vessels, often in ostensibly secure
waters. The unidentified craft make surprising (and sometimes outlandish)
maneuvers. In some cases, they seem to emit no exhaust, display no obvious
means of propulsion, and evade American pilots with apparent ease. In one 2015 incident, which the Pentagon has
confirmed, fighter pilots scrambled from the USS Theodore Roosevelt strike
group express bafflement as a fleet of mysterious objects seems to surround
them.
No one can quite say what they are. In military-speak,
they’re known as Unidentified Aerial
Phenomena, or UAPs (the fancy new term for UFOs). Some have speculated that
they’re drones, optical illusions, software glitches, weather events or other
prosaic occurrences. To other (more vocal) constituencies, they are undoubtedly
of otherworldly origin.
Whatever they are, the government is taking them seriously.
In December, Congress directed the intelligence community to submit a
comprehensive report on the incidents (due in June). This month, the Pentagon’s
inspector general announced a probe “to determine the extent to which the DoD
has taken actions regarding Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.” Several members of
Congress have vowed to get to the bottom of things.
They should indeed. A number of reports — including an
investigation by The Drive, based on Freedom of Information Act requests —
suggest that UAPs are interacting with U.S. ships with alarming frequency. Such
incidents are potential national-security threats, yet pilots seem reluctant to
discuss them for fear of being stigmatized. As a report from the Senate
intelligence committee warned last year, there’s also no standardized way to
report or analyze them. The committee called for the creation of an interagency
process, involving representatives from across the military and intelligence
agencies.
Such an approach — formal, bureaucratic, extraordinarily
dull — is precisely what’s needed. It should lend sobriety and legitimacy to
any findings, while ensuring that various parts of the government are sharing
information. If necessary, it should also allow for a coordinated response. The
question is how transparent it should be. Obviously, if the aircraft in question
are part of a classified U.S. military project, then secrecy is imperative.
Likewise, if they belong to an adversary, security issues arise. But being
cautious is very different from being overtly misleading — and, unfortunately,
there’s precedent for the latter approach.
Starting in the
1950s, as UFO sightings began proliferating across the U.S., both the Air
Force and the CIA tried to conceal their interest in the matter. They did so in
part because they feared that the Soviets were trying to sow hysteria and
wanted to calm the public, but they also knew that many of the sightings were
of top-secret U.S. spy planes. In the end, such deceptions were
counterproductive. Nobody believed the denials, the government lost
credibility, and the hysteria only grew. An internal CIA review in 1997 found
that the agency’s duplicity only added “to a growing sense of public distrust.”
That skepticism is one reason why, in the decades since,
garden-variety military incidents and mishaps have repeatedly been transformed
into galactic conspiracies believed by a shockingly high percentage of Americans.
With trust in the U.S. government once again at a low ebb, misleading the
public with regard to UAPs would be a serious mistake.
And what if, this time, it really is aliens? Well, that
would also be worthy of sober investigation. It could even justify some new
interagency processes.
To contact the senior editor responsible for Bloomberg
Opinion’s editorials: David Shipley at davidshipley@bloomberg.net .
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