Are UFOs now unifying or dividing us?

Bill Knight column for 7-19, 20 or 21, 2021

 Donald Rumsfeld died June 29, four days after the release of the U.S. Department of National Intelligence report to Congress on UFOs (now called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: UAP). The study might as well have featured the former Defense Secretary’s 2002 comment:

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know,” he said. “We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.”

The report’s declassified parts about various sightings is inconclusive about whether beings pilot UAPs or if the truth has been hidden for years, but something’s been happening for decades.

“U.S. intelligence officials have found no evidence that the aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots in recent years are alien spacecraft,” the report says, “but they cannot yet explain the unusual movements that have puzzled scientists and the military.”

Just between 2004 and this year, the Navy studied 144 sightings by government personnel (crew on the USN cruiser Princeton saw an object drop from 60,000 feet to the surface of the sea in seconds, hover, then speed away).

The report adds, “Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects.”

In Illinois, the National UFO Reporting Center in Davenport, Wash., says since 1947, the state had 2,758 sightings, though that’s probably a fraction since people were reluctant to go public.

The late author Philip Jose Farmer recalled seeing a UFO after work at a Peoria steel mill.

“I along with several hundreds of other people saw a UFO one summer night in the early 1950s; a round blue ball. It shimmered. The Air Force claimed it was a weather balloon, but weather balloons don’t glow bright blue or stop suddenly and reverse path or dart off quickly at right angles or circle or dive swiftly down and then ascend even more swiftly and then just disappear.

“Weather balloons always go with the wind; they don’t go against the wind or shoot off in the south direction when they’re going east. Nobody’s controlling them,” he continued. “What I don’t know is what caused this – electromagnetic or astronomical or meteorological.”

Also in Illinois, a Tinley Park crowd including police and people in aviation and the military in 2004 saw three colored balls, apparently connected, moving through the sky, and in 2006 a dozen United Airlines workers witnessed a big disc floating above O’Hare airport, then speeding upward through the clouds.

The topic is no longer dismissed as something from kooks or frauds, and polls show 1 in 3 Americans (Democrats, Independents and Republicans!) believe the world has had extraterrestrial visitors.

Illinois Congressman Mike Quigley, a 5^th District Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said, “The stigma is gone. That’s as big a change in policy as I’ve witnessed about this issue.”

Indeed, NPR, “60 Minutes” and Scientific American all have covered the question and its implications, but New Yorker magazine writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus conceded there’s difficulty in reporting things we don’t know or understand because we think we already understand them.”

Decades before the deceptions called “deepfakes” (videos of people, places or things that didn’t actually exist), a photo in a hardback book I checked out of my small-town library excited my imagination, already enthused about space: George Adamski’s 1953 best-seller “Flying Saucers Have Landed.”

            Adamski, a non-scientist who dabbled in philosophy in the 1940s, launched a career lecturing about hosting extraterrestrials and visiting other planets. Even at age 10, my excitement turned to “Hey, wait a minute!” since I knew they were uninhabitable. Adamski, it turns out, was a hoaxster.

            But I also thought aliens could exist. Assuming there’s no intelligent life anywhere except Earth seems incomprehensible. And vain.

Some physicists, such as Michio Kabu and the late Stephen Hawking, warned against seeking alien contact because superior civilizations could harm our world. But Albert Einstein is reported to have said, “It is entirely possible that behind the perception of our senses, worlds are hidden of which we are unaware.”

Maybe because I enjoyed novels such as H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” or Robert Heinlein’s “Door into Summer,” I wonder whether drive-by visitors come from different times.

 “We can’t, as yet, explain them,” Farmer said, “and maybe these unexplainable things or beings can’t explain us.”

Although DNI’s report is inconclusive, it also accepts our ignorance: We don’t know what we don’t know. Whether that’s comforting or troubling, maybe in realizing how little we know, humanity could benefit from some healthy humility.