MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS
Last night, I took the time to look up and take a look at the Harvest Moon. It was beautiful. As I was glancing at it, I saw out of the corner of my eye something that I thought was unusual. It was a brilliant light that was moving towards the moon. I thought that whatever it was, it made the whole moon affair less beautiful and more spooky.
Now I am not saying that what I saw was a flying saucer or an alien spaceship undefined it could have been one of Elon Muskundefineds toys; anymore, you have to be careful not to be fooled by bright lights because they can be almost anything.
When spooky things appear in the sky, witnesses have often been reluctant to report them for fear of mockery by others, especially in the halls of government.
These days, fewer people are laughing.
Unidentified flying objects, or unidentified aerial phenomena as the government calls them, have been taken more seriously by U.S. officials in recent years, starting in 2007 with a small, secretly funded program that investigated reports of military encounters.
The program, whose existence was first reported by The New York Times in December 2017, was revived by the Defense Department last summer as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.
The department said the task force’s mission was to “detect, analyze and catalog” sightings of strange objects in the sky “that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.” Service members were newly encouraged to speak up if they saw something, with the idea being that removing the stigma behind reporting something weird would provide the authorities with a better idea of what’s out there.
It has been 3 months since the government filed their report about the UAP/UFO incursion that was reported by our Navy. The reports really gave us no idea what was going on because as usual the government is two faced and full of misleading answers when it comes to the safety and well-being of the people.
Stories about strange phenomena continue and reports suggest that these UFO sightings are increasing and yet the media has ignored them because the government has issued their statement and so the media has abandoned their interest in these matters.
It is like the sightings increase but the media has out all sightings and reports on hold.
The idea that aliens had frequented our planet had been circulating among ufologists since the postwar years, when a Polish émigré, George Adamski, claimed to have rendezvoused with a race of kindly, Nordic-looking Venusians who were disturbed by the domestic and interplanetary effects of nuclear-bomb tests.
In the Summer of 1947, an alien spaceship was said to have crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. Conspiracy theorists believed that vaguely anthropomorphic bodies had been recovered there, and that the crash debris had been entrusted to private military contractors, who raced to unlock alien hardware before the Russians could.
Documents unearthed after the fall of the Soviet Union suggested that the anxiety about an arms race supercharged by alien technology was mutual.
All of this, ufologists claimed, had been covered up by Majestic 12, a clandestine, para-governmental organization convened under executive order by President Truman.
All this is UFO history and well, as crazy as it all sounds, this was our first attempts at disclosure and even though a relatively small crowd started listening — there were plenty of scientists and skeptics that were always there to say “Nothing to see here” and so these stories were left to discernment.
We can say that for decades UFO and alien stories have reached the point of folklore and urban legend. Hollywood hasn’t helped, and there are a few newspapers and news reporters that love to mock people who have seen something in the sky that just doesn’t belong to anything here on In some respects there are definitely a few people that have trivialized the subject.
The unrelenting denial of possible extra-terrestrial or ultra-terrestrial activity on this planet by the U.S. government has precipitated an uninterrupted deluge of accusations, acts of COINTELPRO, and cover-ups. This contributes to conspiracy theories, fringe speculations, faux scientific inquiries and a growing multitude of reports of unacknowledged encounters and abduction cases.
In addition, the subject has become so thoroughly inundated with obvious disinformation, hearsay, manufactured artifacts, forged films, hoaxed film and video of alien autopsies, misunderstandings by media, missing information, added inapplicable information again provided by the media and a myriad of other conflicting data which have made the subject hard to grasp for those who consider themselves skeptical.
When you try to break through misinformation and disinformation, it has always been wise to realize that, no matter how smart you think you are, if you are operating with erroneous or incomplete information, you will never uncover or find a solution to any issue.
That is why I find it so discouraging that there are certain individuals that tend to have a myopic view of what is around them and that they fear the idea of opening their minds to the new understanding of old ideas.
There seems to be this willful ignorance that can be worn comfortably by individuals of different political and religious beliefs. It contributes greatly to a dysfunctional and hypocritical society.
But the fight for the truth continues and some people in places of power give subtle hints that they know that there is at least something to be said about alien interactions with human beings.
If we go back in history, presidents like Truman. Kennedy, Ford, Carter, and Reagan, all told us that the flying saucers were real.
It seems that this history has been ignored.
During the Cold War era, the public enthusiasm for UFOs and the mountain of sightings was a double-edged sword. While the military developed their public relation stunt of haphazardly investigating UFOundefineds with Project Blue Book, many people walked away unsatisfied because they know what they saw undefined and it wasnundefinedt some weather balloon of the gods.
The military has now claimed that alien visitation was a helpful theory to explain away the top-secret programs developed near Roswell and in Nevada’s Area 51, where the Air Force and the CIA developed reconnaissance programs intended to look deep into the Soviet Union, early CIA documents show the agency worrying that the American public’s obsession with aliens in the 1950s could make the public vulnerable to Russian disinformation efforts.
In the 1950s, the CIA reviewed the test flights of the U-2 reconnaissance planes and then A-12 aircraft (the predecessor of the iconic SR-71 Blackbird) in the 1960s and found that roughly half of UFO sightings were attributable to those top-secret programs.
So, in a sense, the public fixation with space aliens provided a degree of cover for the CIA But taking advantage of public obsession had a cost. A 1997 historical study by the CIA found that while they believe their deceptions were justified, they “added fuel to the later conspiracy theories.”
However, if the military thinks that a few sightings of experimental craft is enough to say that most of these UFOundefineds were theirs -then how do we account for the 5 per cent of sightings that go unexplained? How do we explain the advent of UFO sightings that even baffle the military?
Times have changed and now we have Navy videos that show some unexplained phenomena that has resonated with the public much as reports of UFO sightings 50 years earlier.
While government officials may be frustrated with the public gravitating to reports of space aliens to understand unexplained phenomena, some experts say the government’s own reflexive silence contributes to the speculation.
The latest UFO report filed by Congress leaves to the door wide open for the possibility that there are unknowns that are yet to be identified and that there is no explanation for their existence.
When the CIA first made public a batch of documents about UFOs in the late 1970s, the press suggested that the government was continuing the cover-up. The reply form the CIA was again a denial that they were covering anything up and that they were opening up in order to show the inner workings of how UFOundefineds are reported undefined but they also have shown how simply they can be sanitized and released through redacted files that send a message that some things just donundefinedt add up.
The government has long examined reports of unidentified flying objects or unidentified aerial phenomena — sometimes with skepticism, other times more credulously.
Project Blue Book, an Air Force effort running in the 1950s and 1960s to examine UFO reports, is undoubtedly the most famous, fascinating young people for generations and inspiring television programs.
The CIA viewed Project Blue Book positively, believing that many of its investigators had done a good job debunking reports of UFOs. But the effort was shuttered in 1969 after a 1,485-page University of Colorado report, commissioned by the Air Force, cast doubt on the scientific value of examining U.F.O. sightings.
Rumors of alien visitations and the government possession of alien bodies persisted. And in 1985, officials at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio issued a fact sheet saying they no longer wanted to hear flying saucer reports.
Now the government has a problem on their hands. Their investigation into UAP has sparked a whole new interest in what is out there -and it has been less of a curiosity and more of an obsession and that obsession is not only with the public at large but with government officials who have been wanting disclosure for decades.
In June, the UAP Task Force presented a report to Congress that covered 144 UAP sightings by military and other federal sources between 2004 and 2021. While the report found no evidence of aliens, it did note that “UAP clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security,” and that “Some UAP many be technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or non-governmental entity.”
While the report attempted to silence any and all thoughts of alien visitation -the bottom line is that the motivation for such a study was the possibility of alien visitation.
Now, Congress wants to expand the UAP Task Force or set up a permanent office to study sightings of these unknown objects.
Sections of two proposed intelligence appropriation bills, H.R. 4350 (the Fiscal Year 2022 National Defense Authorization Act in the House of Representatives) and S.2610 (the FY 22 Intelligence Authorization Act in the Senate) take different approaches to expand the work of the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force.
Those hoping for a full-throated Congressional hunt for technologically advanced aliens are going to be disappointed because the bills are specific in national security and safety concerns.
If the bill becomes law, Section 345 of S.2610 would require the entire intelligence community to share any information about UAPs with the task force and the National Air and Space Intelligence Center immediately. It would then mandate classified reports about any UAP events to Congress beginning 90 days after the actundefineds passage and quarterly from then on.
Section 1652 of H.R. 4350 — a provision added by Democratic Congressman Ruben Gallego of Arizona — would establish a permanent office to study UAPs within the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
If the provision remains unchanged when the bill becomes law, it will charge the new office with creating a database for recording UAP incidents and “evaluating links between unidentified aerial phenomena and adversarial foreign governments, other foreign governments, or non-state actors,” and whether the incidents pose a threat. The House bill provision would also require reports to various Congressional committees.
In August 2020, the Pentagon created the UAP Task Force, and the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2020 mandated a report to Congress in 2021. The report, released in June, was only able to identify one of the 144 UAP sightings examined and determined it was a balloon.
The task force couldn’t explain the remaining 143 reports. And while the report concluded some of the sightings could have resulted from instrument failure or pilots making a mistake, more than half of the sightings were confirmed by multiple sensors to be real objects rather than phantoms.
Both the House and Senate bills have been introduced, but have yet to be voted on by their respective chambers. The House bill has passed out of committee and been placed on the Congressional calendar. If the bills pass intact, their contents will need to be reconciled between the two houses before going on to President Biden.
This hyper-interest in UFOs and what might be out there is not just an American phenomenon – that it is truly more global in nature. From Europe to China, from Russia to Australia, public interest in UFOs is very real, observers say.
A world wide survey, published in December 2017 and covered at the time by Reuters, reached more than 26,000 people from 24 countries and asked them about the possibility of the existence of alien life. Close to 50% of respondents which is most definitely undefinednot a marginal minorityundefined – have said they believe in the existence of intelligent alien civilizations in the universe. A greater percentage – 61% – said they believe there is some form of life on other planets.
The differences between the countries show that Americansundefined interest in UFOs is likely not insulated. Russia, Mexico and China – all reaching at least 60% – had the highest rates of belief in intelligent life on other planets. Thirteen countries, including Canada and Italy, had higher percentages than the U.S., which came in at 45%, according to Glocalitiesundefined research. The Netherlands (28%), Indonesia (34%), Turkey (36%) and South Africa (36%) all had the lowest rates among countries surveyed.
The heightened interest in UFOs and the possibility of alien life is not just happening in the top countries listed in the Glocalities survey, experts say. Argentina – not included in the survey – has hosted a festival in recent years in its city of Capilla del Monte to honor a reported sighting there from 1986, according to The Associated Press.
Thereundefineds certainly interest in Europe – in France, for example. France is really big into UFOs. It appears to be a universal thing.
One country that might appear lower on the list when it comes to UFO interest is Australia. The country – where 44% of respondents believe in alien civilizations, according to Glocalities – has had sightings reported in the past with similar circumstances, but the numbers do undefinednot come anywhere close to what is reported in the U.S,
One thing is clear: The interest in and more mainstream coverage around UFOs is likely not going anywhere, even after the inconclusive DNI report. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby announced recently that the Defense Department will continue the work of a task force created to support the UAP investigation.
