Commentary: Who’s piloting the UFOs? ( swnewsmedia )

                                               Seashore Trolley Museum in Kennebunkport

The summer of 1990 found my wife and I staying in Rockland, Maine at a hotel overlooking Penobscot Bay. We’d been at a conference in Boston and decided to take a few extra days to explore the Maine coast and Acadia and Mount Desert Island National Parks.

We’d never visited Maine before, and it was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up. Of course, I was just as interested in the Seashore Trolley Museum in Kennebunkport. It is among the oldest and has the largest collection of antiques streetcars in the U.S., including a 1908 vintage Twin City Rapid Transit gate car.

                                                  

                                                   Jhon Diers, the author of the article

The weather was beautiful — crisp, clear and moonless that night as I stepped out on our deck overlooking Penobscot Bay. It was then that I saw a cluster of lights, perhaps 20-30 degrees above the horizon, moving south at a high rate of speed. There was no sound. Airplanes, I thought, but then the cluster broke up and the lights began moving erratically, up and down, reversing directions then accelerating toward the horizon until they vanished. Marcia saw them too. We wondered what they were.

UFOs, “unidentified flying objects,” (aka “unidentified aerial phenomena”) came into our vocabulary after World War II. Two 1947 events — pilot Kenneth Arnold’s reported sighting of UFOs over Mount Rainier in Washington state and the alleged crash of an alien spacecraft at Area 51, a secret government base in Nevada — set off a lot of media ballyhoo. There had been “things” seen in the sky before, some are mentioned in scripture, but interest peaked as sightings and reports grew more common and science fiction accounts of extraterrestrials popularized the possibility of alien encounters. I remember seeing “The Day the Earth Stood Still” in 1950 and “The War of The Worlds” a few years later.

Under public pressure, the U.S. Air Force launched a study of the UFO phenomena, Project Blue Book in 1952. When it closed up shop in 1969 and published its final report, it found no evidence of extraterrestrials or any evidence of a threat to national security. However, it did nothing to quell worldwide sightings from trained observers and military personnel. The public sensed a coverup, especially as reports kept right on coming. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took an interest and secured $22 million to revive the Blue Book study in 2007.

                                  

Writing in the New York Times this month, Reid noted he’d been interested in the phenomena since 1996 and supported further study because “an unofficial taboo regarding the frank discussion of encounters could harm our national security and stymie opportunities for technical advancement.” The Reid money ran out in 2017, but President Trump reauthorized funding after criticism that officials were not being forthcoming.

A report titled “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” will be out sometime this month. It’s already attracted a lot of attention, including a 60 Minutes segment and comments from former President Barack Obama on the CBS Late Late Show.

“What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are,” Obama said.

Will the report reveal anything new? Insiders are mum. There’s speculation it will acknowledge the phenomena, say a few things about what people are seeing, and opine it may be Russian or Chinese spyware, but offer nothing conclusive about aliens or “Close Encounters of The Third Kind.” In brief, it will replay Project Blue Book.

I saw something in the sky over Penobscot Bay that night in 1990. Maybe it was a fleet of alien observer drones. Maybe it was something else. I’m staying agnostic. “Correlation does not imply causation.” Absent a confirmed link such as a landing on the National Mall and an alien news conference, there is no conclusive proof that we are being visited.

We could be. There could be extraterrestrial scholars walking around among us, but if they’re good anthropologists they’ll keep mum, make notes, do their science and go about their business. Studying our worldwide cultural, political and environmental detritus is enough to keep them busy for millennia. They don’t have to invade if they want to take over. We’re already helping them out.

It’s a big universe. I’m a believer in extraterrestrial life and intelligence, and if they’re smarter than we are — and they are — they already understand that timing is everything. They’ll wow us with lights in the sky and inexplicable phenomena and wait. We’ll finish messing things up soon enough.Let’s not spend more money chasing UFOs and things that go bump in the night. This is an opportunity for solid science and astrobiology. We already know there are hundreds of planets circling stars in our galaxy. Some of them may be home to intelligent life. Let’s find out. We could use the help.

Jhon Diers

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