It certainly stands to reason that the news most likely to unite a nation divided against itself would win so little notice in a year like 2017. Maybe we just don’t want to overcome our differences in fearsome awe of the intergalactic Other, OK? The popular appetite for otherworldly updates is nowhere near its 1970s peak, and the news-consuming public is preoccupied with disturbing events on our own planet.
All of which makes the first year of the Trump era a perfect time to test humanity’s capacity to distract itself from long-shrouded evidence of sentient life on other planets. This year has seen a rare multitude of disclosures, revelations of our governments’ discoveries and investigations. We’re not saying the secret-keeping deep-state feds—and their Alpha Centaurian allies—decided it was now or never, knowing no one would be paying attention this year anyway. But we’re not not saying that either.
1) The Pentagon’s UFO Program
The big one—a recent New York Times story revealing the Pentagon’s $22 million UFO investigation program—was bigger than it seemed. The report, titled “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money,’” makes only glancing reference to what the program actually found and leaves much unanswered. Pentagon officials insist the program closed down in 2012—but the named source who’d resigned only this October, Luis Elizondo, said the program continued and that someone had succeeded him when he resigned. And back before government funding dried up, part of it went to Harry Reid’s billionaire buddy Robert Bigelow for his aerospace company to modify a Las Vegas facility “for the storage of metal alloys and other materials … recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.” Wait, what? And then, to upend your innocent belief in humanity’s galactic supremacy once and for all, there’s this video of Navy fighter pilots face to face with an unidentified flying object.
2) The Lost File of the False Moon
Last January, the CIA declassified millions of files and published them in the agency’s online “Reading Room” with a tagline to tantalize UFO fanatics. A search for the eye-roll-inducing acronym turns up upward of 1,700 documents spanning decades—at least one of which details a “Sighting of Unusual Phenomenon on Horizon Near Iranian/USSR Border.” In this report a pilot flying in Central Asia in the summer of 1966 recalls seeing “a brilliant white sphere approximating the coloration and intensity of full bright moon. There sphere appeared suddenly and at the first sighting was approximately three times the size of a full moon.” It grew to “fill the sky” and faded over the course of four to five minutes, he recorded. The pilot who saw the weird “false moon” effect added that it might have been a gaseous emission from a nearby explosion. But isn’t that also just what the aliens would want us to think?
3) Last Seen Hurtling Through the Air Due West of Santiago…
Also in January, the Chilean navy gave up trying to explain away a fast-moving thing that appeared in the sky over Santiago three years ago. Two pilots filmed it zooming by for 10minutes, whatever “it” was. The Committee of the Study for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena, the Chilean government group that chases evidence of UFOs issued a press release early this year saying that their best scientists—with help from French photo analysts—“determined that was a UAP, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon.” Well, that settles that.
4) What do Tom DeLonge, John Podesta, and Ke$ha have in common?
DeLonge, the frontman of pop-punk group Blink 182 was named UFO hunter of the year by the UFO hunting league Open Minds—mostly because of his leaked email conversations with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, about their common interests in paranormal declassification, meetings with Roswell crash secret-keepers, and Clinton’s plan to release the Roswell files once in office (ah, well). It’s unclear whether Delonge and Ke$ha have compared notes, but the party girl pop star claims to have seen formation of half a dozen or so flying saucers over Joshua Tree: “I look up in the sky and there’s a bunch of spaceships.” And you know it’s a genuine sighting, because, as Ke$ha says, “I think people would be like, ‘She was on acid’ or something. I wasn’t. I was on nothing. I was a totally sober Sally, just a lady in the desert.”
5) Sightings reached an all-time high early this year
It all makes sense: The aliens, knowing Hillary Clinton planned to blow their cover, colluded with the Trump campaign to help guarantee his win. And now that he runs every news cycle, there’s not much risk involved in extraterrestrials’ hovering a little closer to our the surface of our thoroughly distracted planet. That, or they’re just really into Spielberg. And who isn’t? The 40th anniversary of Close Encounters of the Third Kind brought a rollicking UFO convention to Devil’s Tower. And it would have been a little tacky, frankly, of the aliens not to stop by.
