Return of the Flying... Tic-Tacs?

As someone with a lifelong interest in both science and science fiction, it would be strange if I didn’t have an informed opinion about UFOs. And in fact, I do.

     

It’s changed quite a bit, though, since I was nine years old and convinced that people from faraway planets were visiting Earth in flying saucers and playing funny tricks on its inhabitants – mutilating American cows, having sex with Brazilian farmers and so forth. Actually, that phase didn’t even last into my teens: the science (and science fiction) I was reading taught me that there is a universal speed limit, three million metres per second, that nothing can exceed, and that fact, combined with the sheer size of the Galaxy and the vast distances separating its constituent stars, makes it unlikely verging on impossible that beings from other planets ever have, or ever could, visit this one. Besides, most of the reports of UFOs published in the media (and later, on the internet) were obvious piffle; any scientifically literate person could debunk them with ease.

As for the ‘ufologists’’ claims of US government cover-ups, aliens walking among us in disguise and people being taken for rides in flying hospitals with artificial insemination facilities and investigative-enterology departments, they were clearly the work of people who were quite deranged, or else were looking for deranged people to make money out of. UFOs had become – or maybe always were – part of what I snobbishly refer to as underclass culture. By my early twenties I had pretty much put them out of my mind, though I happily continued to read science-fiction stories full of starships, aliens and even, yes, close encounters of the third kind.

Yet even such a sceptic as I had to acknowledge that a few of the reported encounters with UFOs defied straightforward explanation. The most difficult of these were instances where visual sightings were corroborated by radar traces or other electronic evidence, such as the encounter between a US Air Force RB-47 and one or perhaps two unidentified flying objects over Texas and Mississippi on 17 July 1957. In that encounter, visual sightings by members of the aircraft crew were supported by evidence from radars both on board the plane and on the ground. Other sightings involved multiple witnesses, trained observers and sometimes both. There were enough of these incidents – as well as credible reports from individuals known to me that never reached the media – to indicate that there was something else at work besides a bunch of overactive human imaginations. Yet this handful of credible occurrences were so rare, so bizarre and seemed to have so little in common with one another that it was hard to fit them into any kind of hypothesis. Besides, they were inconsequential, affecting no-one but a few people directly involved with them. It hardly seemed worth spending time and effort to try and make sense of them.

*

That was then. This is now. I remain thoroughly sceptical, when not frankly disbelieving, of most claims of UFO encounters, all claims of personal encounters with aliens and every single theory I have heard or read concerning the origins or causes of such incidents. But I now firmly believe that there is something or someone operating out there that we do not understand and cannot explain.

     

I believe this because the US Navy believes it.

     

We’ve been hearing a lot about UFOs from the Americans recently. We heard that the USN had declassified reports of certain ‘encounters’ and modified its reporting protocols for aircrews and others involved in such incidents to make it easier for them to come forward. We heard that US lawmakers, and finally the President himself, were briefed on things Navy personnel had seen, or detected with electronic surveillance and targeting equipment. The President told us he was sceptical, but then, he probably regards UFOs as his competitors in the battle for eyeballs among members of his trailer-park demographic. In fact, the evidence for the real presence of something out there has never been stronger.

     

Nearly all of it comes from sophisticated electronic defensive and offensive systems on US warships, military aircraft and military bases. Apparently, they keep picking up ‘bogies’ all the time but they’re almost never reported because there’s no proper procedure for doing so and no soldier wants to look like an idiot. But that doesn’t mean the sightings aren’t there.

     

Then there was the Nimitz incident, of which I learnt only recently, although it took place in 2004. A flotilla of warships around the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz was conducting manoeuvres off Santa Catalina Island on the US Pacific coast when the radar officer aboard the ship acting as the ‘eyes’ of the flotilla saw what appeared to be a whole fleet of UFOs heading towards it. After some discussion, a pair of F/A-18 Super Hornets was scrambled and directed towards one of the UFOs. What happened next can be read at the link above.

     

What is remarkable about the incident is that the Navy took it seriously but did not forbid personnel to talk about it. One of the pilots went on the record about what he saw; his wingman corroborated the story, but anonymously. The radar officer, too, has been talking to the media. He claims there was a cover-up, because the radar data on his hard disks were erased later, leaving only the date stamps.

     

Be that as it may, the Navy has been quite open about a more recent spate of incidents, this time off the East rather than the West coast of the USA, involving UFOs and F/A-18s. It has even permitted the public release of three videos showing the UFOs being tracked by Navy aircraft.

So what’s going on? Ghosts in the machine – data artifacts thrown up by the equipment itself? Pilots hallucinating due to sensory overload? Absurdly advanced human technology being tested in secret against the best the United States military can throw at it? Visitors from outer space, or from one of those bizarre but scientifically tenable parallel worlds physicists speculate about? Or some Earthly phenomenon of which we are totally unaware, possibly the work of some unknown intelligence sharing the planet with us? Nobody has a clue. And given how little we know, no sensible person would even hazard an opinion.

But it’s no longer possible to dismiss the phenomenon out of hand.