Few people will discuss UFOs, dreading the label of a conspiracy theorist. The U.S. government claimed for years that it had not discovered any UFOs or evidence of alien life. But all that may be changing thanks to Republicans.
In 2019 under President Donald Trump, the Navy admitted that three leaked videos taken by Navy pilots showed UFOs. One was taken in 2004 and two in 2015. The pilot who saw one of them said it flew in a way he could not understand. Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, Christopher Mellon, who is related to the late conservative billionaire funder Richard Mellon Scaife, has claimed that he was responsible for leaking the videos. He said, "We know that UFOs exist. This is no longer an issue."
The Pentagon followed up last April releasing the videos with the statement, “The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified.’” Then the DOD admitted UFOs exist in December. Now Republicans are forcing the government to turn over information. Sen. Marco Rubio, chair of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, included a provision in December’s $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief and appropriations bill that Trump signed requiring intelligence agencies to provide a report on UFOs within 180 days.
That deadline is almost here, and things are continuing to change in anticipation. John Ratcliffe, former Director of National Intelligence under Trump and known as one of the most conservative members of Congress, said during a March interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that there have been sightings of flying objects which are hard to explain: “Movements that are hard to replicate that we don’t have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.”
But Democrats are rushing to take credit first, even though Republicans set the ball rolling. Confident that the issue is no longer being framed as a conspiracy theory, they want to pretend to be the first high-level officials to acknowledge the evidence. During an interview this week with CBS's The Late Late Show with James Corden, former President Barack Obama said, "What is true, and I'm actually being serious here, is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are."
It’s finally no longer a fringe issue. While many reputable people have come forward in recent years and vouched for their existence — in large part due to the efforts of an emergency room doctor named Steven Greer who brought together a large community of authoritative people from ex-military officials to scientists — it has taken years to get the government to admit anything, much less produce any of its research.
Democrats may finally be coming around on the issue because of how it’s being framed. Greer says that the government’s obsession with building up the military-industrial complex relies on oil and gas fossil fuels. Focusing on those has shut out a lot of interest in green energy sources. Reducing the military-industrial complex would make it easier to shift to alternative energy sources. The military-industrial complex always has an enemy, whether it’s hostile countries, terrorists, or the unknown. So far our knowledge of UFOs reveals that they’re not hostile. Letting the public have access to this type of information would remove UFOs as a pretext for keeping the military-industrial complex so huge.
Why is the mainstream media barely covering the government’s turnaround on UFOs? It is probably because they don’t want to give Republicans the credit for turning the stigma around. Just like there are always a handful of brave journalists working for the MSM who dare to cover things that are anathema to the left, there are a few exceptions in this area. There are so few articles by the MSM about this that people actually refer to them like “The New Yorker article about UFOs,” “The New York Times exposé on UFOs” and the “60 Minutes video.”
It may also be because of the left’s hatred for anything that might give credibility to the existence of God. Anything supernatural, outside the realm of what they can see and hear and quantify, gives weight to the argument that God exists. Billionaire Elon Musk, who is an agnostic or atheist and admired by the left, has taken the lead in making the search for aliens acceptable by his interest in life on Mars.
Just as important, why hasn’t the government acknowledged UFOs until now? Former Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), obviously under pressure considering Area 51 is located in his state, secured funding for UFO research, but none of the results ever reached the public until the Trump years. Reid admitted in the 2020 UFO documentary “The Phenomenon” that “the federal government all these years has covered up, put brake pads on everything, stopped it.” He discusses a 1967 incident where an object appeared over a U.S. missile base at the same time 10 of the missiles became inoperative.
Much of the money Reid helped get was awarded to Robert Bigelow, a friend of Reid’s who owns an aerospace research company. Bigelow went public several years after the program he was involved in ended in 2019, saying on “60 Minutes” that he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that UFOs have visited Earth. Luiz Elizondo, who led the Pentagon’s effort to investigate UFOs, resigned in 2017 to protest excessive secrecy and internal opposition to the program. He said he was blocked from informing superiors, including Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis.
Tom Rogan, who writes about national security for The Washington Examiner, believes it is because the government is afraid UFOs have negative intentions. This is because they’ve had significant interaction with U.S. Navy planes operating off of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and near Air Force nuclear weapons bases and nuclear submarines. The government doesn’t want to cause panic.
Don’t expect to get any apology from the left for being wrong about this “conspiracy theory.” They’re too busy taking credit now.