Bureaucracy of Weird, Dispatch #1: Uncle Sam Vs. the Flying Saucers

Welcome to the Bureaucracy of Weird, where PAUL C.K. SPEARS breaks down history and current events surrounding UFOs and paranormal phenomena.

Lately, to shake off the Delta blues, I’ve been rewatching The X-Files. Despite the late-series missteps, it’s a classic. You gotta love David Duchovny hamming it up for the camera, and Gillian Anderson is utterly peerless as his constant, skeptical counterpart. The two of them seem to contain, as characters, a duality of public opinion regarding the paranormal. You’ve got the wide-eyed, hopeful truth-seekers represented by Mulder. His endless curiosity contrasts with those who embody Scully’s cynical, debunking approach to the Weird. 

One idea popularized by The X-Files was the notion of a massive government cover-up, around the paranormal in general, but especially around UFOs. Government agents are constantly chasing Mulder around, shooting at him, and sending cryptic warnings, all to keep him from the “truth behind UFOs.” Endless tax dollars and rounds of ammunition are spent playing “goalie,”  blocking Mulder from the truth of alien visitation on our planet.

This assumption—that the government knows Something About Aliens, and won’t tell us—has so completely saturated pop culture that it’s impossible to find an “alien invasion” movie without the trope. Independence Day, Men In Black, and many others carry this default assumption that the Feds know exactly what UFOs are, and they’ll stop at nothing to keep you, Loyal Citizen, from learning the truth! In fact, a National Geographic study in 2012 found thirty-six percent of Americans believed UFOs are real, and a similar poll in 2020 produced much the same results. The 2020 poll confirmed that roughly 70% of those polled believed the U.S. government would hide evidence of aliens, if it existed. 

Apparently we’re pretty convinced, as a nation, that the Feds have some kind of alien saucer in a garage somewhere, and we’re similarly resigned (with a kind of glum, childlike disappointment) that they’ll never let us see the damn thing. It would be Too Much for the Public to Take, after all! Mass hysteria would inevitably follow!

But—and hear me out on this—what if this popular assumption is completely wrong? What if the government never had secret knowledge about UFOs in the first place? What if they are just as confused as we are, about the UFO phenomenon, and have been desperately trying to hide that ignorance for over seventy years? 

Recent developments are starting to suggest this is the case. 

In 2017, the New York Times published an astonishing article about a secret department of the Pentagon, run by a man named Luis Elizondo. According to the Times, the department was established in 2007 by then Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid. As a former U.S. intelligence agent, Luis Elizondo put his skills to work gathering evidence of “Unknown Aerial Phenomenon” crossing into U.S. airspace. But by 2012, the clandestine project had run out of funding, and it became clear there were no new funds on the way.

The Times claimed that at this point, Elizondo essentially went rogue, continuing his work despite a lack of “official” funds. Liaising with the Navy and the CIA, he continued to pile up startling amounts of evidence—until 2017, when he resigned after encountering what he called “excessive secrecy and internal opposition” in the halls of the Pentagon.

Since then, things have gotten even stranger. In early 2021, Elizondo’s attorney announced that he was being “disparaged and discredited” by “certain individuals” in the Department of Defense, and Elizondo himself suggested there might be a disinformation campaign in the works to discredit him. 

If he was just some Joe Schmoe off the street, this could be dismissed as the ravings of a conspiracy theorist, some kind of Fox Mulder live-action roleplaying. But coming from a former intelligence official, the claims are deeply troubling. 

And in the background of this controversy, more and more Navy videos have surfaced, showing “Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon” (or UAPs, the new military term for UFOs) flying near military aircraft, or hovering above Navy destroyers. These videos have taken YouTube by storm, garnering hundreds of thousands of views. The footage is fuzzy and indistinct, shot on night-vision cameras and infrared—but the military has confirmed the legitimacy of these clips. 

This open admission that something is in our airspace is unprecedented, especially for a community as tight-lipped as the American military. But what does it all mean? Are we on the edge of true military disclosure about UFOs, at last? 

Opinions are mixed, to say the least. Arguments continue to rage online, with civilian UFO investigators trying to decide if Luis Elizondo is legitimate, or just another puppet of “the big government cover-up.” Increasingly, it looks like that “cover-up”—if it ever existed—is starting to slip. In late June of 2021, Congress was briefed by the Department of Defense on the aerospace threat presented by UAPs. This briefing came after senators demanded answers about the leaked Navy videos. In this briefing, a classified report on UAPs was shared with Congress, with a redacted version issued to the public. 

While the redacted version is predictably brief and lacks any “smoking gun” evidence, it does establish some startling facts. Nearly 140 government-certified reports of military encounters with UAPs were compiled as part of this briefing—and these are rumored to be a fraction of the cases collected by Elizondo. Radio emissions and other forms of “managed signals” are described as emerging from UAPs during certain encounters, suggesting the objects are technological in nature. And finally, the report describes eleven incidents of pilots having “near misses” with UAPs, which could have resulted in harm or death to Air Force and Navy personnel. 

Overall, the report concludes that UAPs are a clear threat to aircraft safety, and possibly even a threat to national security… but it refuses to speculate on what the nature of UAPs might be, or where they come from.

After decades of military silence on the topic of UAPs, this is a veritable avalanche of information. The implications are terrifying—there is something in U.S. airspace endangering pilots, and whatever it is, it’s under some sort of intelligent control, since it seems able to evade collisions and even “tail” our aircraft. 

This should be an earth-shattering revelation… and yet, the civilian UFO community has met the news with an overwhelming yawn. Most investigators have mocked the lack of info in the public report, and there is widespread insistence online that the disclosure itself is part of a clandestine disinformation-op. You really can’t please some people, it seems.

And of course, demands to release the classified version of the report are pouring in, via the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. This is a fool’s errand—the disclosure we’ve seen so far has already seen a backlash from the D.O.D., and it’s unlikely that the military will be offering an olive branch to us civilians anytime soon. 

But the government admitting that they don’t know what UAPs are is a considerable step in the right direction. Ever since the 1940s, military personnel claiming to have seen “flying saucers” or other strange craft have been ridiculed, silenced, and even thrown out of military service. This kind of aggressive silencing is bad for morale, especially in the Navy and Air Force, who seem to have more UAP sightings than other branches of the armed services. But there’s a change in the works: as part of the Congressional briefing, the D.O.D. has committed to “changing the reporting structure” around UAPs, with the goal of funneling sightings towards some sort of (classified) central database or analytics team.

While it may seem like a small step, this is actually a huge deal. Announcing their ignorance about the true nature of UAPs is in itself, a kind of olive-branch to the public from the military. “These things are here, and we can no longer ignore them” is a much better public-facing approach to UAPs than “They don’t exist, now shut up, you crazy kooks.” Cautious acceptance and study—instead of hostile silence—should be celebrated as progress.

And while the report is not exactly the world-shaking revelation most UFO hunters had hoped for, I for one am eager to see what comes next. Without access to Elizondo’s Pentagon files, we only have a few pieces of the puzzle—this might be just the first step of some larger, weirder disclosure narrative yet to come. I hope you’ll join me on this journey, as we look to both the future and the past, to try and solve the mystery of what the hell’s been flying around our skies.

There are stranger times ahead, reader—stay tuned for more, from the Bureaucracy of Weird!!