OK so let the jokes begin. No seriously, The Aliens Are Coming and they bring Trump a present.
OK let’s start over.
This will get our mind off taxes for about five minutes. I hope.
Two pieces in Washington Post got my attention today — there have been several recently about Harry Reid and the secret project to investigate UFO’s and other alien phenomena — don’t tell POTUS or he’ll build a wall around the planet or something — but people are starting to take the idea of visitors from space more seriously.
For most of his 18-year career as a U.S. Navy pilot, Cmdr. David Fravor said his mother-in-law used to ask him a question: Had he seen a UFO? For 15 years, the answer was no.
But one clear afternoon off the coast of California in 2004, he says, that changed.
Fravor, the commanding officer of a Navy squadron at the time, said he saw a flying object about the size of his plane that looked like a Tic Tac after a break in a routine training mission. The object moved rapidly and unlike any other thing he had ever seen in the air. He has not forgotten it since.
Fravor’s story emerged this week after the Pentagon publicly acknowledged for the first time the existence of a recent program dedicated to studying unidentified flying objects. The funding for what was known as the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program ran from 2007 to 2012. But officials familiar with it said some of its efforts have continued.
The news of its existence marks one of the most significant disclosures about government research into flying objects — and the so-far-unproven possibility of extraterrestrial aircraft — since Project Blue Book, a lengthy Air Force study of thousands of UFOs that was shut down in 1969. Project Blue Book failed to find“any technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge,” and no evidence of any “extraterrestrial vehicles,” according to the Air Force, though a small portion of the events it studied remain unexplained.
www.washingtonpost.com/…
And this editorial,
The aliens are coming, and no one cares, by Molly Ball
Ms. Ball refers to the NYT piece about the UFO project, and writes,
The program gathered recordings of reported UFO sightings, including military footage of a glowing ship shooting through the sky. It also collected metal alloys of, well, alien composition. Its director declared in a 2009 briefing summary that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact.”
Personally, I find this fascinating. I grew up in the Space Age, out West where the sky at night is absolutely dazzling. You’ve got to go to 10,000 feet up in the mountains, or deep into the desert, to see the stars — the ribbon of light we call The Milky Way; the cold blue dazzlers of winter in Orion’s Belt; the Great Bear pointing to Polaris, the Polar Star — which we now know is part of a binary system infinitely far away. Yet how it sparkles!
I can’t remember a time when people weren’t talking about flying saucers. Ancient people recounted stories too, too many to count. Flaming chariots from the skies; mysterious beings; strange drawings — whether people bore witness or whether we just want badly not to be alone, of course, is the mystery.
Gradually though it seems that people are taking seriously the probability that life exists beyond our solar system; and may visit us.
It says something that it took the sun disappearing for us to tear our eyes away from Trump and look somewhere else for a second. But however disheartening the all-consuming chaos of today’s politics may be, this summer’s astrological rarity was a reprieve, and a comfort.
A total solar eclipse, those who have seen one all seem to say, reminds you that the universe is very big and you are very small. On one level, that’s terrifying. No one likes to hear they don’t matter. On another level, it’s reassuring to think that each of us is connected to some transcendental community. Even if we don’t matter alone, we matter together — as a collective piece of something much, much larger.
www.washingtonpost.com/…
How I hope that people come like the Vulcans, with secrets for the improvement of mankind.