Remember the UFO that one of our fighter jets shot down with a missile? Reports now indicate it was a $12 balloon from Hobby Lobby — while the missile was supposedly worth around $400,000. This seems to me like a summary of the current state of things. It’s Quixote running towards windmills. It’s the hypochondriac class trying to run the country.
There’s been a strange epidemic of objects floating overhead. Some have been reported to be Chinese spy balloons, while some people believe they’re extraterrestrial. The sky isn’t the only place where these objects have been spotted; there was also that iron ball that rolled out of the ocean in Japan.
Now that former president Jimmy Carter is in hospice, I keep thinking about the strange lights he claimed to have seen in the night sky over Georgia in October 1969.
President Carter made it clear on the campaign trail in 1976 that he would prioritize the release of all the government’s UFO-related documents. The bright orb he said he saw in ’69 lingered in his memory so much that he wasn’t shy about swapping UFO stories with Gerald Ford on the debate stage. President Ford took UFO sightings quite seriously when there was a rash of them in his home state of Michigan back in 1966. Ford, who at the time was still a congressman, even called for a congressional investigation into the UFO phenomenon.
Despite Carter echoing Ford’s sentiments, he unfortunately later backpedaled into the same tired lie: UFO documents couldn’t be released thanks to national security concerns.
I would love if the Biden administration were to make good on what Carter once promised in regard to UFO transparency. For instance, I think we’re owed some more information on what the New York Times, in 2017, reported as “retrievals from off-world vehicles not made on this Earth.” I think that’s one of the most alarming sentences I’ve ever come across, yet it’s been more or less discarded into the recesses of the American consciousness.
Clearly, what people have seen in the sky (and the sea) cannot all be wayward balloons or Chinese spies. Something is going on — and I’m inclined to believe we are probably not being visited by creatures not of this Earth.
Our nation is experiencing an existential crisis. We are literally shooting balloons out of the sky with missiles. I’d be naive to think the release of something as abstract as official documents concerning UFOs would be a cure, but I think it could serve as a bipartisan salve to bring people together — and get us talking about ideas like dismantling the military industrial complex and figuring out whether we are alone in this universe.
Maybe there are interdimensional beings stepping in and out of our atmosphere. Or, most likely, the things that appear to be unearthly could just be the governments of this world performing secret experiments in the sky.
Regardless, some transparency from government agencies might bring some much-needed unison. That politics and political gamesmanship have seeped into nearly every possible facet of human life also seems to keep the American mind preoccupied with our divisions.
Some Americans entertain the idea that our government is capable of secretly injecting syphilis into the men at Tuskegee, or asking JFK to bomb our own citizens to spark a war with Cuba. For them, would it be so out of the realm of reason to imagine that our government is also capable of, say, faking an alien invasion to gain power through fear?
The worst horrors always help shape future policies. How many of our most wicked fears were born out of atrocities perpetrated by the American government? I think of this when I think of the way President Carter backpedaled on releasing UFO information when he got into the White House. What are they doing in the sky or below the oceans? And if not them, then who — and why? Also: how many of our current fears are based on our lack of understanding that what we think are monsters are really shadows and balloons?
The nature of our government’s secrecy, especially when it comes to something as existential as whether or not there are aliens visiting our world, does nothing to make anyone feel any closer to the truth. The secrecy and lies become a confirmation bias, and one must always keep that extreme cynicism in check so you don’t dance off the cliff of your own sanity.
Until further notice, we are left to our most beautiful and most dangerous device: the imagination — through which any logic and horror might warp and multiply.
