Putin and the UFO Sightings ( WSJ )

 

 

The debate over UAP may herald not alien visitors but destabilizing new weapons systems.

 

Now we know that the UFOs are not secret Russian systems, commented any number of bloggers and analysts, after Russia’s botched invasion of Ukraine failed to produce evidence of advanced capabilities.

We know no such thing. True, the so-called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs, as the U.S. military calls them, likely aren’t Russian. The most credible alleged sightings have been by U.S. military pilots in training missions in airspace reserved for U.S. military training operations. If the objects are real and the product of any government, they’re likely ours.

But such technology would be destabilizingly risky and likely would not be revealed by any power that had it. If the mysterious sightings are what they seem—impossibly speedy, impossibly maneuverable small flying objects—they would immediately upset the nuclear balance. The presumably unmanned systems could be used to destroy nuclear forces quickly and thoroughly on the ground, without resorting to nuclear weapons.

In invading Ukraine, Russia has bitten off a lot of strategic risk. It would bite off a lot more if it revealed transformative military capabilities. China and India would be as deeply alarmed as the U.S. and NATO, likely washing away whatever ambivalence now keeps them quasi-neutral in Russia’s war.

For those who haven’t noticed, the UFO question emerged with new urgency after the Pentagon’s 2017 publication of pilot videos of unexplained encounters. Last year, an unclassified report by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence threw up its hands saying it couldn’t resolve the mystery. In May the Pentagon’s chief spokesman called follow-up House hearings “very important.” Former Obama CIA chief John Brennan told an interviewer that the evidence suggests a “type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”

The DNI report cited 80 cases between 2004 and 2021 in which unexplained aerial phenomena were detected by multiple types of military sensor, including the human eyeball. The ostensible conclusion of our intelligence community: “Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects.”

In a previous column, I suggested why, for space-time reasons, they are unlikely to be alien spacecraft. An alternate view can be found in a new book by ex-banker Mark Gober, who rests his case mainly on the credibility of numerous credentialed people who believe or suspect they’ve seen evidence of alien encounters.

But anyone coming to this debate should also be tweaked by the recent and seemingly unrelated words of Russian dissident Yulia Latynina, who on these pages last week called for a “new arms race,” including “precision weapons that can take out Russia’s nuclear silos—and let Mr. Putin know that [we] aren’t afraid to use them.”

For the U.S., revealing such capabilities would be no less a strategic pickle than it would be for the Kremlin. These weapons, if they exist, would have to be tested somewhere—most likely on an existing testing range.

Between a feature and a bug would be the inevitability of their being observed by trained personnel using military-grade instruments. The DNI report somewhat ironically allows that secret government programs may indeed explain the sightings. Left out is the possibility that the UFO show is being orchestrated to test the waters for revealing such capabilities, or to gaslight U.S. rivals—or maybe being tested aren’t super-maneuverable military drones, but the ability to spoof human eyeballs and sensors into seeing them, which is also consistent with known or suspected U.S. government research interests.

Mass hysteria is still a possibility too, sparked by everyday phenomena whose explanation, if known, would be “boring,” as Sen. Marco Rubio once put it.

The documented military sightings, after all, are a tiny subset of unexplained claims that are always surfacing around the world and have for centuries, so far amounting to nothing. For somebody writing this particular column, a can of worms is the long association of UFOlogy with nuclear-weapons dread. A large and surprisingly developed lore concerns the testimony of U.S. military personnel who profess that alien visitors have used other-worldly technology to deactivate our nuclear weapons. The so-called Rendlesham Forest incident is only the most well-aired of these episodes.

Other nations’ intelligence agencies are certainly paying attention to our UFO debate, if not publicizing their own “conclusions.”

Vladimir Putin, the coldblooded ex-KGB agent, has reasons of his own for occasionally touting Russian superweapons that don’t exist or exist only on the drawing board. His nuclear threats don’t emerge in a vacuum. When the archives are opened, we may find he’s been seeking to counter what he fears are U.S. mind games to put Russia’s government in doubt about the possible existence of unrevealed Pentagon super-capabilities.

Holman W.Jenkins, Jr.

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