The Truth About Aliens Is Still Out There

 

The Truth About Aliens Is Still Out There

The question is not whether aliens exist—I’m firmly in the “Hell yeah, they do!” camp—but rather when we’ll have enough hard evidence to end the decades-long debate over said existence.

Believers in UFOs have gotten some tantalizing clues over the past few years. Those 2019 New York Times videos of zig-zagging, Tic Tac–like vessels with curious propulsion are always worth a rewatch. Likewise, the huge New Yorker feature by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “How the Pentagon Started Taking UFOs Seriously,” is pretty much required reading before you offer a qualified opinion on the issue. As my colleague Marina Koren wrote yesterday, UFO sightings are indeed getting more frequent, even if the data don’t necessarily scream ALIENS!

Nevertheless, it’s not just you; the events of the past week have felt different. Our military’s targeted takedown of multiple aerial objects over North America brought UFOs back to the forefront of our national conversation—enough to elicit a presidential address on the matter this afternoon.

Hollywood has primed us for what to expect from our commander in chief ahead of an interstellar crisis. (Think Bill Pullman’s predawn megaphone pump-up speech before the Independence Day climax, or Morgan Freeman somberly telling his Deep Impact constituents that, yes, the comet is coming, and millions of you are screwed.) Today, sadly, President Joe Biden did not unveil the grand truth about UFOs with clasped hands on the Resolute desk, nor did he march down the dramatic carpeted corridor leading to the East Room for an Osama bin Laden–is-dead-style surprise. Like much of the Biden presidency, today’s event had a decidedly un-Hollywood feel to it. In fact, the speech wasn’t in the White House at all but next door, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building’s sterile and cacophonous South Court Auditorium. It felt less like a triumphant milestone in our shared knowledge of the universe and more like an inoffensive midday presentation at an auto show.

Biden began by explaining that the U.S. and Canadian militaries were still working to recover the debris from the three recently downed somethings. “We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were,” he said, tantalizingly. “But nothing right now suggests they were related to China’s spy-balloon program or that they were surveillance vehicles from any other country.”

This is when the aliens-are-real crowd’s ears momentarily perked up. A sentence later, they perked back down.