The American UFO boom might just be a distributed intelligence gathering effort

There's no one single explanation for UFO weirdness - but there doesn't need to be, either

An interesting development in the United States has received scarce attention in Finland, and little notice in many other European countries either; the UFO boom of the last few years, with American mainstream politicians and media often discussing numerous sightings of unexplainable aircraft or undersea vehicles.

Not only that, but some of them have given at least implied credence to the so-called “extraterrestrial hypothesis” as to why there are unidentified flying objects, well, flying around. Or occasionally swimming around.

Of course, UFO booms and extraterrestrial crazes are nothing new, whether in America or globally, starting right from the times of the Roswell crash in the 1940s (even before, if one considers all the reports of flying vehicles, foo fighters and strange apparitions preceding the term “UFO”) and then ebbing and flowing as new narratives rise and fall.

The current phase might be considered to have started with “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program”, an article in New York Times, sometimes considered America’s newspaper of record, by Leslie Kean, a longtime journalist on the UFO beat.

At some times, the UFO booms revolve around stories of alien abductions, at other times around grandiose visions of aliens as the progenitors of human civilization. The current effort is mostly concerned with “nuts-and-bolts” ufology, harkening back to the Roswell times. No close encounters of the third kind are featured here; Kean’s article offers an impression of a considerable effort by Pentagon to concentrate on flying unidentified craft doing maneuvers not heretofore seen.

This is often seen as the “sensible wing” of so-called ufology, which increases its media credence. Another source for extra credibility was that there was a concrete goal here – and a suggestion of a concrete governmental organizational effort to back it up. The Pentagon has had organizations called AAWSAP/AATIP and UAPTF studying the issue at least in some form, which form the backdrop to Keane’s article.

All the drama and high weirdness related to these groups would extend this post. Suffice to say, at least according to journalist Steven Greenstreet, the Pentagon effort was considerably different from how the New York Times portrays it; a money pit concentrating on a literal ghost hunt, with its name later recuperated by UFO enthusiasts and then turned into a stamp of credibility on an incredible issue.

Nevertheless, bolstered by the credibility of the report, UFO enthusiasts successfully lobbied the US Congress to mandated Pentagon to issue a report on what it knows on the topic in the COVID bailout bill. This led to the expectation that report might contain something conclusive on the identity of the UFOs. Even the disclosure of extraterrestrial life! Even parts of the US political class, such as an important US senator, seemed to hint at it.

STRANGE COMMUNICATIONS

Unsurprisingly, this phase ended when the report was issued and was largely a nothingburger. Some ambiguous government statements have had enough room for interpretation to allow UFO enthusiasts to interpret them to their liking, but neither in the report or at any phase no point has the US government in fact formally said that UFOs are likely to be something other than human in origin. A new UFO report has been expected to drop at any moment, but preliminary information suggests little there is conclusive and new there, either.

Whatever the UFOs are, though, the messaging by American media and government has been odd. There are obviously at least some people in high reaches who believe, or claim to believe, that there’s more to UFOs than just stereotypical birds, planes, balloons and similar natural and human phenomena – standard UFO skeptic explanations for most UFO sightings.

At the same time, the discourse would also sound weirdly disinterested *if* they thought there was something there. Actual proof of space aliens or supernatural phenomena would undoubtedly be one of the biggest stories in human history. Even if there was a considerable reason to suspect this, it would surely require far more resources than even the original cool 22 million given to AAWSAP, promptly (according to Greenstreet) spent on investigating ghosts and werewolves, not the UFOs.

Some UFO enthusiasts suggest the government is trying to “slow-walk disclosure,” or let out information only in drips for “preparing people for the eventuality of the truth about extraterrestrial life” … well, why? They have been doing it for 70 years. Most people in US, when polled, believe in aliens. You would think they would be getting to it, eventually.

HUMAN EXPLANATION?

As such, many people are wont to find other explanations for all of this. A simple explanation is that it is all just grifters and loonies, obsession of a few high-level UFO believers in politics, bureaucracy, and media, bolstered by cynical grifters out for publicity and money. However, this cynical explanation is bit too simple for me, not something that would allow for getting *this* much attention.

In many previous cases of American UFO sightings, when an explanation isn’t found from mundane phenomena, they have been explainable by the testing of new technology, such as triangle-shaped UFO spotting being connected to testing of, for instance, B-2 stealth bombers.

This does not necessarily mean that whatever craft is being tested is using hyper advanced propulsion, but might rather be cases of spoofing technology; not tech that can perform the maneuvers UAPs are reported to perform, but tech that makes it look like some object is performing such maneuvers, i.e., visual illusions, IR camera spoofing, radar spoofing, sonar spoofing etc. and arrays bringing such tech together to produce consistent or at least semi-consistent multi-sensor results.

Such craft might also be of non-US origin, presumably by some adversaries by America. US Senator Marco Rubio has specifically raised the scenario that it's Chinese or Russian military tech. Of course, if it were Russian technology, there would be the question as to why it is not used in Ukraine. (Or is it?)

Unknown foreign military capabilities in a dire situation – cold war, possibility of hot war – would surely frighten the US military. One of the main bases of America’s ongoing global dominance is the whole idea that US military can effectively see and do everything, at least as far as frustrating all foreign powers (apart from individual terrorists etc.) goes.

However, whatever the explanation for individually spotted potential phenomena is, they could be simply managed internally, without massive media attention. One answer for all this cageyness and “will-they-or-won’t-they,” unclear communications might be the real motive is not the answer itself, it is the search for one.

OPEN-SOURCE INTELLIGENCE

For a long time, the amateur ufologists – those taking the pictures and grainy videos of the flying saucers, the enthusiasts, the “loons” – have been something of a problem. They produce mounds of data about things that might be interesting, but until recently, there have not been sufficient data-analysis capabilities to shift the wheat from the chaff.

The main thing the UFO enthusiasts would previously offer Pentagon would be mailboxes full of people sending in photos of benign aircraft, planet Venus, swamp gas, all the standards etc., as well as plain jokes and frauds. Even potentially useful info would not have sufficient data to indicate where and when it has taken place.

 Besides, there has not really been a platform for them to share their findings – expect in low-circulation magazines, zines, just posting their photographs to parties they might imagine are interested, whatever.

Well, now there is. We certainly know that the US government takes a great interest in social media and has done so since the beginning, as demonstrated by articles like this one. The effective voluntary surveillance abilities offered by Facebook and other security-state-connected social media means that there can now be what amounts to a voluntary distributed vast civilian surveillance operation by the security state.

If media successfully rekindles interest in UFOs, there's going to be photos all over social media, *and* they might be of some use, as there's timestamps and location data, and you can use rapidly advancing machine learning abilities to, for instance, give credence to pilot sightings by checking if there's relevant civilian sightings, or photographs.

By stoking interest in UFOs, having people photograph or otherwise talk about whatever strange lights in the sky they have seen, they will receive data that they can now categorize and utilize – true open-source intelligence. They can then figure out whether there is a cause for further interest and concern.

Such civilians might not do this just voluntarily. Indeed, many of them are exactly of the suspicious type that would actively refrain from watching the skies if the government directly told them to do so. And it is not just Americans. A successful operation would provoke sightings all around the world, even in enemy countries (as far as those allow the penetration of American social media). And as automatic data analysis capabilities improve, so would the capabilities to use that data.

Indeed, social medias amount to a vast mean to get the pulse of the nation – nations all over the world, in fact – in the real-time, constantly, checking various indicators to see whether whatever event gets positive or negative reactions in the nation, fear or anger or what, one might even guess there’s an increasing temptation to just start pulling off weird stuff simply to see what sort of reactions it provokes, a nationwide testing of psychological reactions and how to utilize or cause them.

It should be noted that theorizing abut the role of American intelligence agencies or intelligence figures in promoting the UFO narrative is hardly a fringe theory – it’s been recently featured in the pages of Wall Street Journal, for example. However, WSJ does not offer much in the way of suggesting *why* this is happening.

Contrariwise, of course, it would not be just Americans who would surely want to run such an OP; Russians, Chinese and other powers might as well want to use such data. However, they do not dominate the social media markets in the same way as Americans do, at least worldwide. Perhaps, though, this would be one purpose the Chinese might find interesting in their ties to TikTok.

THE TRUTH WON’T BE OUT THERE

This theory does not even require any opinion as to the “realness” of the UFO phenomenon. Indeed, there probably is no one single explanation to cover everything related to all the strangeness related to this issue.

Even if the UFOs were aliens, though – or astral creatures, spiritual or extradimensional creatures, a theory that would in some ways explain things that the extraterrestrial hypothesis does not – stoking such an open-source intelligence project would benefit the US government to such a degree it would be odd to assume they would not want to do it.

Of course, all of this is just theorizing. However, there is at least one way to assess the central thesis behind all of it. How will the UFO debate evolve? If the US government announces that extraterrestrial life is flying around in small craft conducting weird maneuvers to dab on humanity, well… at least that would turn the entire discussion around in a short order.

On the other hand, if they officially and for good declare there’s absolutely, no positively evidence of extraterrestrial life acutely visiting us, that is that. But if everything continues to be in a limbo, constant toying around with disclosure but never proceeding to it, well… something is afoot, and it is not necessarily the aliens.