Six months after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, delivered a report to Congress that failed to explain more than 140 reports of unidentified flying objects—mostly because no one in government tried all that hard to explain them—Congress is set to approve legislation to create a new office within the Pentagon tasked with investigating military UFO sightings. The new office will gather reports of sightings, analyze them, and deliver reports to Congress on the subject at intervals. At least that’s the aspect of this decision on which the legislators who pushed for the new office want the public to focus. Underneath the surface, Congress is about to require the Pentagon to get weird. Very weird. Like, imaginary crashed-saucer wreckage weird.
It’s beyond doubt that people see strange things in the sky. It’s also quite likely that there is no single explanation for these oddities. So-called “unidentified aerial phenomena,” as the government now calls UFOs, are likely a combination of natural and human-made objects along with a strong dash of people misinterpreting what they see under the influence of more than a century of alien-themed science fiction. Investigating individual military sightings should be encouraged; uncovering whether some of these perhaps represent adversaries’ efforts to spy on America should be an obvious counterintelligence step. That doesn’t justify leaping to conclusions about superhuman technology or alien invasion, particularly when reasonable explanations have been proposed for nearly all the allegedly incredible sightings.
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