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Unexplained Phenomena and the Eternal Return
May 16’s 60 Minutes report on UAPs — Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, more commonly known as UFOs — feels like a major blockbuster. For the first time, it seems, American pilots are going on the record with what they’ve seen, including strange things they simply cannot explain.
Lue Elizondo, who spent 20 years in military intelligence, told 60 Minutes’ Bill Whitaker that we’re “beyond” the question as to whether or not UFOs exist. “The government has already stated for the record that they’re real. I’m not telling you that. The United States government is telling you that.” In the course of the piece, Whitaker also interviews two pilots, Alex Dietrich and Dave Fravor, who were over the ocean near San Diego in 2004 when they were diverted to investigate a “little white Tic Tac-looking object,” hovering above a roiling area of water in an otherwise calm sea. Fravor tells Whitaker, “Oh there’s, there’s definitely something that… I don’t know who’s building it, who’s got the technology, who’s got the brains. But there’s, there’s something out there that was better than our airplane.”
It’s really compelling television! Hard to not feel like we’re on the verge of a major discovery. But, before we get ahead of ourselves, some caveats.
First of all, it’s important to remember that finding pilots who’ve witnessed things they can’t explain is not all that unusual or particularly noteworthy. In the wake of The X-Files, I think, we’ve developed this perception of the American government that it is a tight ship impervious to leaks, and that anyone who comes forward and says that they’ve seen things is a singular iconoclast, someone risking it all to get the truth out there. But getting American pilots and officials to tell the public about UFOs has never been much of a problem, as it turns out. Leslie Kean got a number of retired officers to go on the record in her 2011 book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. And long before that, in 1950, Donald Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucers Are Real contained a number of eyewitness accounts by government officials and airmen.
I point this out only because conspiracy theories tend to rely on an obscuring of history. Every thing must be new, must be breaking, must be unlike anything we’ve ever seen or heard before. It can…
