Clearing the Backlog - May 20, 2021

  • How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously
    • Author: Gideon Lewis-Kraus
    • Source: The New Yorker
    • Summary: A relatively non-judgemental article about UFOs and the government's official response to the phenomena.  Initial skepticism was strategic, but denial became reflexive.  Recently there appears to be a shift towards slightly more openness.
    • Quotes:
      • "The following January, the C.I.A. secretly convened an advisory group of experts, led by Howard P. Robertson, a mathematical physicist from Caltech. The “Robertson panel” determined not that we were being visited by U.F.O.s but that we were being inundated with too many U.F.O. reports. This was a real problem: if notices of genuine incursions over U.S. territory could be lost in a maelstrom of kooky hallucination, there could be grave consequences for national security—for instance, Soviet spy planes could operate with impunity. The Cold War made it crucial that the U.S. government be perceived to have full control over its airspace.

        To stem the flood of reports, the panel recommended that “the national security agencies take immediate steps to strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired.” It also suggested that civilian U.F.O. groups be infiltrated and monitored, and enlisted the media in the debunking effort. "
    • Impressions: According to conventional wisdom, any sudden revelation of advanced extraterrestrial life would be extremely disruptive and potentially have disastrous effects on societal stability.  (At least, if popular science fiction is to be believed.)  If there were any possibility of controlling the revelation of such information, one would expect governments to very slowly introduce the possibility of such a phenomenon, likely in a way that was initially indistinguishable from general skepticism.  

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