Getting our heads round UFOs

Friday 25 June came and went. The long-awaited report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to Congress about unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) recorded by the US military made it to the front pages of the world's news websites - but usually way down the front page. Top news in America was the sentencing of policeman Derek Chauvin to 22 and half years for the murder of George Floyd. 

Here, for example, is how the BBC covered the story:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57619755

So no great shakes. The world's stock markets didn't show the slightest wobble, the Pope didn't feel the need to address urbi et orbi from a Vatican balcony the following Sunday. Social media (other than hard-core UFO accounts) didn't explode into a frenzy of speculation.

Mankind took the news in its stride. Most of us just skimmed over the headline with a 'meh.' "UFOs? Something for the weirdos, the conspiracy theorists, the fantasists." The subject is not one that affects people's day-to-day lives - but neither does the knowledge that the earth orbits the sun, (and not the other way around), nor that dinosaurs used to walk the earth, nor that protons are made of two up quarks and a down quark.

But what exactly was the news? 

The US military has now openly admitted that it has recordings of unidentified physical craft that are not of any known human-made origin. And that these recordings, in many cases supported by observations of trained military personnel, go back to at least 2004.

To quote from the report: "Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation." Out of 144 cases investigated, only one was dismissed as a deflating weather balloon. The rest - they don't know.

What the US establishment is saying is this: "It's not our technology. But we also know that it's not China or Russia. Therefore, whatever it is is not a national security threat." 

For most of us, the news came and went, we choose not to know; we choose to remain comfortable with the familiar nostrums of classical Newtonian physics. Which are now starting to resemble the familiar nostrums of organised religions. 

As my brother pointed out the other day, in the 17th and 18th centuries, there existed side by side science, religion - and the occult. The latter being a rag-bag of beliefs in supernatural phenomena not supported by the rationality of science nor by the scriptures and doctrine of religion. Whittled down by the 20th century to oddball groups of spiritualists, Rosicrucians, astrologers, Freemasons, palm-readers and pagans, the occult (from the Latin - 'that which is hidden') has become a catch-all phrase that would include belief in alien visitors from other planets.

And here we are today in a situation where it looks increasingly likely that alien visitors (or at least their craft - they may well be drones) are present on planet Earth. The news has been skilfully defused, packaged, presented in a way that would not induce alarm, anxiety or mass panic in the streets. Detailed disclosure of exactly how much is known about these visitors is still a long way away - maybe generations away. As a species, we are simply not ready to handle the truth. We need to grow up, evolve, rise to a higher plane. Lose the anger, the hate, the barbarism that's still in our species' DNA.

In the meantime, we have lost an authority- science. It cannot explain the technology behind the UAP that the US military have been recording; our comfortable, rational worldview - with us human beings at the centre of it all - has been disrupted. 

How do these craft enter earth's atmosphere, drop from space through the sky into the ocean, fly without means of lift or visible propulsion, perform manoeuvres that would pull human-built craft to pieces? Science can but guess. Electromagnetic drives? Nuclear fusion? Anti-gravity? Worm-holes in space-time? Travellers from other dimensions? Parallel universes? Time travellers? Something to do with applications of quantum physics that we've yet to grasp? 

Science is clueless. Science, familiar and comforting, has suddenly become like the 'woo' that the rational community has been calling studies of supernatural phenomena. The debunkers and sceptics are looking pretty foolish continuing to dismiss recent evidence captured by the US Navy as 'old cameras', 'faulty software' or 'human misidentification'. Science has failed to explain what's going on in scientific terms, and all bets are off. You might as well consult the tarot, channel the departed or have your palm read as listen to a physicist trying desperately to dismiss the phenomena as mental aberrations, flocks of geese or lights of fishing boats reflected off clouds. All bets are on. Again.

Occam's razor has failed us all.

Suddenly any number of theories can be pursued - the occult becomes as relevant as science when it comes to explaining the Universe (except occultists can't build computers or produce RNA-derived vaccines, as scientists do). But in terms of understanding where we are vis-a-vis aliens, a new philosophy is called for that encompasses UAPs into everything we think we know already. An entirely new worldview is called for. A massive shift in our mindset. 

Not only are we not alone in the Universe (this Universe?) but our visitors/neighbours are far more advanced technologically than we are. The science, for which we have depended upon for our progress over the past four centuries, cannot explain how it functions.

Where do we seek answers now? Astrology? Spiritualism? New Age religions? Everything has suddenly become just as valid.

In one sense, there's nothing new here. UFOs have been observed and researched by secret government programmes since the late 1940s; it's time to delve once more into those incidents we read about as youngsters with a fresh perspective - maybe they weren't merely entertainment and modern folk stories and fairy tales - but they were indeed based in a reality that we are only beginning to come to terms with.

Example: the 1952 Washington, D.C. UFO incident.

This time three years ago:
Bristol-fashioned

This time four years ago:
The imminent closure of Marks & Spencer in Warsaw

This time eight years ago:
Along mirror'd canyons

This time ten years ago:
Mad about Marmite 

This time 11 years ago:
Komorowski wins second round of Presidential elections?

This time 12 years ago:
A beautiful summer dusk in Jeziorki

This time 13 years ago:
Classic cars, London and Warsaw