On June 25, 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released its much-anticipated report on UFOs or what it now prefers to call unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). Spoiler alert: It doesn’t say anything definitive about whether extraterrestrials have been visiting Earth in flying saucers (or “tic-tacs,” “pyramids,” “spheres,” or any other unfamiliar shapes that people have been seeing in the sky through the years).
Instead, summarizing the investigations of the Department of Defense Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), it declared that the evidence to explain UAP was “largely inconclusive” and that observations of “unusual flight characteristics” in a minority of 18 cases “could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception and require additional rigorous analysis.” Of the 144 total reports of UAP occurring between 2004 and 2021, most of which were firsthand accounts of military pilots, only one could be identified as a weather balloon—the rest remain unaccounted for.
In the end, the report amounts to an admission by the US government that UAPs—phenomena that appear in the sky that it can’t explain—seem to exist, but are still unidentified. And they may or may not be “flying,” thus the preference for the new term “UAP” over “UFO.”
The report also concludes that UAP “lack a single explanation” but might be explained by five broad categories of phenomena: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric effects, classified US government programs, foreign adversary systems, and “other” unknown sources. "Other" presumably includes both extraterrestrial sources (though neither "extraterrestrial" or "alien" are mentioned in the report) as well as human errors of subjective misperception.
When I was around 8 years old, I saw a UFO myself. I was looking out my bedroom window one night while getting ready for bed. As a looked out across my backyard into our neighbor’s and beyond, I saw an orb of white light zipping back and forth at great speed. When I went to ask my father to explain what it was, he was frustratingly unable to see it. After a while, even at the age of 8, I realized that what I was seeing was a kind of motion artifact caused by a streetlight as I quickly moved my head back and forth scanning for the object. My unidentified flying object was identified. And it wasn’t flying after all.
Later, when I was a teenager, I read fiction writer Whitley Streiber’s supposedly non-fictional memoir of his own alien abduction, Communion: A True Story. It was a haunting read, especially when I later discovered that a Harvard psychiatrist, John Mack, had been compiling similar firsthand accounts of people’s encounters with aliens and their supposed abduction experiences. At first glance, the striking similarity of people’s purported alien abduction experiences suggested that they might be real.
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