UFOs or not – something is up

As famous capital cities of world-straddling superpowers go, Washington DC is somewhat disappointing. The grandiose urbanism is surely meant to resemble the boulevards of Paris, with the parks of London, but in reality the dreary post-modern/neo-classical bombast makes it looks like Tashkent married to Milton Keynes. A city that is planned to project power actually projects tedious, if reliable, stolidity.

But that, for my purposes, is the thing. Washington DC is nothing if not boring. And pompous. And self-consciously serious. And yet, over the last few years, months, even days, a story has been emerging, from this same ponderous city, which is mind-bustingly crazy, possibly world changing, yet often unnoticed or airily dismissed – perhaps because it is so ‘mad’.

I’m talking about UFOs – or, as the Pentagon in the Washington suburbs would refer to them, UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena). The reason the Pentagon has renamed UFOs is because they feel the term ‘UFO’ has been stigmatised as intrinsically suspicious, labelling anyone that talks about them as a lunatic.

And the Pentagon, and Washington in general, is really keen on talking about UFOs. Here’s a list of senior DC people who’ve been making strange remarks about UFOs/UAPs (in the sense, at the very least, that something inexplicable is haunting our planet).

John Brennan, head of the CIA under Obama, in 2021: ‘Some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact… something that we don’t yet understand, and could involve some type of activity that some might say constitute a different form of life.’

John Ratcliffe, Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, also in 2021:

‘There are a lot more sightings than have been made public. Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain. Movements that are hard to replicate that we don’t have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.’

Former Director of the CIA James Woolsey (asked in 2021 about UFOs): ‘People have reported very curious behaviour by aircraft. And it may be something real that is an extraordinary change, for some unheralded reason. Or it may be a complex set of what is going on in the world of cyber and so forth. I just don’t know. I am not as sceptical as I was a few years ago, to put it mildly.’

Marco Rubio, Republican US Senator for Florida, speaking in 2021. ‘There’s stuff flying in our airspace and we don’t know who it is and it’s not ours. So we should know who it is, especially if it’s an adversary that’s made a technological leap.’

Astronaut (and sixth man on the moon) Edgar Mitchell, who, in 2015, told the Daily Mirror that other military personnel had confided in him that alien spacecraft were responsible for disabling nuclear missiles and for shooting them down over the Pacific Coast.

The list goes on. Bill Nelson, current head of NASA (when directly asked about UFOs in late 2021: ‘Who am I to say that planet Earth is the only location of a life form that is civilized and organised like ours?’ Avril Haines, the current Director of National Intelligence: ‘There’s always the question of “is there something else that we simply do not understand, that might come extra-terrestrially?”’ Chris Mellon, deputy assistant secretary of defense under Bill Clinton: ‘Based on what we know about UAPs, aliens are the BEST explanation.’ The late Harry Reid, one time leader of the Democrats in the Senate: Lockheed Martin has ‘UFO fragments’.

The list of eye-opening statements from important folk is much longer than this, but you get the drift. And it is not just defence bigwigs and senior politicians (in both parties) saying peculiar things. In the last few years the Pentagon has set up special teams to investigate UFOs, Congress has held official hearings on UFOs, the Pentagon has mysteriously and abruptly declassified ‘UFO videos’, and high-profile American media, from the New York Times to the Washington Post to CBS’s 60 Minutes, have discussed the phenomena at length.

US presidents have also got involved. Jimmy Carter is an avowed believer. Bill Clinton sent staff to investigate Area 51 in Nevada (a supposed hotspot of UFO activity and an alleged site of retrieved ‘alien spacecraft’ – of which more in a minute). Perhaps the most striking intervention came from Barack Obama on the Late Late Show with James Corden in 2021. In the middle of the usual banter about ‘little green men’, Obama suddenly stopped smiling and said:

‘What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that… there’s footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are. We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know, I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.’

If you want an extra presidential oddity, think on this: the only recent President who has flat-out denied the possibility of alien UFOs is Donald Trump.