Правительство ищет инопланетян и почему они, вероятно, существуют

**This article screams political ablism of the issue and intentional disinformation.**

Also, **the article is in the** ***Entertainment: Books*** section and is discussing a new book from the author «[journalist Garrett Graff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrett_Graff)», book entitled [«*UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There*, out Nov. 14»](https://www.amazon.com/UFO-Inside-Governments-Search-Here_and/dp/1982196777), though, seemingly, the entire article comes from an interview, » …phone conversation with TIME on Oct. 20″

**Article excerpts:**

UFOs have been all over the news recently.

…

**Do you personally think UFOs are real?**
Of course UFOs are real. All a UFO is, is an unidentified flying object. We know that there are things being spotted that we don’t know what they are.
(sigh)

**What are people likely seeing when they think they see a UFO**
The vast majority of all sightings that anyone has ever reported or seen are easily identifiable mistakes, or confusion with known astronomical bodies or known spacecraft or aircraft. A huge percentage of UFO sightings actually turn out to be the planet Venus, sort of an unexpectedly bright object in the sky. A huge percentage of UFO sightings in the 1950s and early 1960s were the U2 spy plane, which was a secret project that was a literal UFO. It was a plane that didn’t look like known planes flying at an altitude that planes weren’t known to fly at, at speeds planes were not known to fly at. A large number of UFO sightings in years since have been other secret spy planes.

The more interesting question is, what are the things that people see that the government truly doesn’t know what they are? That’s a category that probably involves at least four different pie slices. One is meteorological, astronomical, and atmospheric phenomena where we don’t know enough about the underlying science to really understand what people are reporting. And then there’s a second category that is adversarial technology that is being tested against us—Russian drones, Chinese drones, Iranian drones. The third category is just weird stuff that we’re not really paying attention to—like a Chinese spy balloon. And then the fourth category is the most interesting and the weirdest: the category of physics that we don’t yet understand. Almost everything that we’ve learned about physics we’ve learned in the last 100 years, and that there’s a tremendous amount more to learn about the way that the universe fundamentally operates.
(seemingly for the idea of EBE, though it negates that fact for 90% of the paragraph, trying to persuade the audience into believing the phenomena easily explained away, like it being fucking VENUS?! seriously?! in this age, you truly think the reader can’t tell the difference between a stationary star in the sky, and a zooming, or anomalous light? I, potentially, could have accepted the argument of satellite misidentification as UAP, but wtf this is ***literally*** a talking point of the disinformation campaign that was ran/IS being ran by the us government under several operational names)

**When did the American public’s fascination with UFOs begin?**
The modern era of UFOs really began in the summer of 1947 when you saw a wave of sightings of this flying saucer phenomenon across the country. The summer of 1947 really helped launch this broader pop culture fascination with UFOs and flying saucers that gave rise to all sorts of movies from the 1950s onwards.
(so, mass sightings and a publically known downing of a ‘craft’, regardless of it being later identified as a «weather balloon», it is accepted as being an object that was downed and recovered, with its materials being shipped to military research centers)

**Where does the term UFO come from?**
The first sightings focused on this idea of a flying saucer-like object flying through the sky. That, even in the first year or two of popular usage, became widely mocked and joked about. So when the government and the military began to study and think about the phenomenon more seriously in 1948/1949, they began to try to come up with a term that was a little less judgmental and a little more scientific, if you will, and so ended up with this term “unidentified flying objects.” What’s funny is that UFOs in the years and decades since has become just as stigmatized in popular conversation. So when the U.S. military relaunched a serious UFO effort in the 2000s, they renamed it UAP—”unidentified aerial phenomenon”—which was a term that was meant to both capture the idea that they might not be objects that people might be seeing things that are phenomenon, not objects.
(okay, so it started as a term to study flying saucers from a scientific perspective separate from public opinion, but over time the term became what the public used and thus, a new scientific term is needed to get rid of the preattached conceptions and stigma regarding the term UFO’s and its connection to aliens. but then tries to argue that the term is only updated so the public can understand it is *only* phenomenon)

**How much did the Cold War factor into this?**
The story of America’s early fascination with the UFOs is very much a story of early Cold War anxieties. Our initial concern as a government and as a military was actually less that these [UFOs] were aliens coming to earth. The U.S. was building its early rocket program on the backs of all of these captured Nazi rocket scientists, and our fear early on was very much that the Soviets had captured their own set of rocket scientists and were building their own rocket contraptions.
(a valid question, as historical events can only be understood from their respective historical context. though, AGAIN, blatantly dismisses the idea of ufos as anything other than easily explainable, but misidentified occurrences)

**Have you noticed any similarities between what’s driving UFO conspiracy theories over the years and like what’s been driving political conspiracy theories?**
I talk a bunch in the book about Bill Cooper, who is a major UFO conspiracist in the 1980s but then moves into rightwing news and conspiracy circles and becomes one of the defining mentors and inspirations for Alex Jones, the talk radio host. There is a pretty clear line that you can draw from UFO conspiracy theories right to January 6.
(yeah, sure, lets draw a parallel between ‘known’ crazy people, aka conspiracy theorists and jan 6 insurrectionists, and scientific study of ufos, just for good measure. 🤦)

**Was there a certain TV show or movie that did the most to shape popular conceptions of UFOs?**
Certainly The X-Files of the 1990s is a real turning point. What really stands out is this idea that the government is hiding something, this idea that the government knows more about the origins of UFOs or contacts with other civilizations than we are being told. That is a theme that comes through early and strong in The X-Files and has done a lot to shape the public conception of a government conspiracy and cover-up ever since.
(a valid question since the article is *supposed* to be why the us government is searching for aliens, and their likely existence, based upon the book, and thus public perception of the phenomena is critical to understanding, yet dismisses the idea of mistrust of government regarding the issue as something hollywood disseminated into the public, explaining away the mistrust as fabrication and not legitimate)

**Who’s been the most UFO friendly politician?**
The modern era of UFO research would not exist without Senator Harry Reid. A lot of different presidents played roles in the story. Gerald Ford, when he was Minority Leader in the House, actually pushed for the first congressional hearings on UFOs because he represented a district in Michigan that had a spate of sightings in the late 1960s. Bill Clinton pushed to make public some of the government’s knowledge of the events around Roswell and also was a champion for NASA’s efforts to study and uncover life beyond Earth. I don’t think we have seen a president who really embraced this subject or pushed it forward in all of the ways that a president can or could embrace this subject, but this story intersects the White House a lot more often than people think.

**What about aliens?**
The probabilities are, I believe, when you look into the math, incredibly high that there is life elsewhere in the universe. The probabilities are actually still pretty high that there’s probably intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The math gets really challenging about how far away intelligent life probably is from us. Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but it’s too far away for us to ever have either meaningful contact with or to ever have the opportunity to visit? How does that change our understanding of our own place in the universe? Those are much deeper and complex philosophical and spiritual questions. But the math is certainly on the side of the aliens.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, I would argue, is criminally underfunded in terms of spending priorities in the U.S. government. And it’s hard to think of an area where the answers could be more interesting and more profound.
(man, fuck this entire article and it being pushed on so many sites. so, 60% of the pentagon’s budget going to unnamed uap studies is «criminally underfunded». hundreds of billions, just fucking disappeared into the black budget, but yeah it is underfunded, surrrrrrrrrrrre. it even attempts to persuade the reader AGAIN that the math just doesn’t line up for aliens to be on earth, though earlier in the article he explains how our failure in physics is a candidate for ufo origin. how can you argue, «the math doesn’t support it» after arguing, «our understanding of (math)physics is only very recent and broken»?)