UFOs and America’s conspiracy moment

Don't look up. We’re currently seeing a crescendo of stories centered around wild videos of unexplained craft and even stranger accounts from whistleblowers. It seems there is a build-up to something. Whether that’s acknowledging we’re being visited by beings from outside our solar system, our understanding of three-dimensional time and space, or merely a psyop serving as a distraction isn't entirely clear.

For the last 75 years, since UFOs entered the national zeitgeist, much of the discourse has taken place on the fringes. It was a fun group to dabble in. The appeal of seeking hidden knowledge is intoxicating while perusing r/UFOs for the best documentaries and strange theories, watching old "X-files" episodes, and reading about little green men and abductions. I wanted to believe! It was all very low-stakes, one more internet rabbit hole enmeshed in conspiracy accoutrements to waste time.

However, the leaks and stories of the last six years have taken on a decidedly more serious tenor precisely because of the serious people coming forward. It’s no longer the "Ancient Aliens"-level "researchers" who saw everything through a grand conspiratorial lens of off-world contact. And because of this, the entire world of UFOs has taken on a scarier tinge the more real it seems.

President Ronald Reagan on an "Alien Threat" at the United Nations youtu.be

McLuhan's ubiquitous saying about the medium being the message is analogous when discussing UFOs. So much of our conception of extraterrestrials is heavily colored by the last century of film. From Méliès’ 1902 "A Trip to the Moon" through 1950s B movies to the adorable "E.T.," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and "Independence Day," we imagine the Hollywood visuals of these beings. It’s a perfect mimetic vector to discuss uniting humanity against a shared foe as Reagan once did. The entire point of TV, film, and now the internet is to flatten out world differences into one all-consuming and consumption-driven entity. The Borg, to steal a sci-fi trope, the monoculture, the global village, or whatever phrasing you’d prefer.

Are we just seeing lights in the sky and deciphering them through all the movies we’ve consumed? Why do the phenomena so closely mirror the appearance of UFOs in culture and humanity’s tentative steps into space? And how would governments possibly be able to keep something so earth-shattering under wraps?

Military officials go on record

When you dig into the history of UFOs, you find a variety of high-level government officials, astronauts, and pilots who have discussed their experiences. Paul Hellyer, the former defense minister of Canada, went on record in 2013 saying there has been contact with alien civilizations. He even went so far as to say there are treaties between these societies and governments on Earth.

In 2020, Haim Eshed, the former head of Israel's Defense Ministry's space directorate (essentially Israeli NASA), told the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, "There is an agreement between the U.S. government and the aliens. They signed a contract with us to do experiments here."

"The Unidentified Flying Objects have asked not to publish that they are here, humanity is not ready yet," he said. While this is a rather exceptional claim, it’s worth noting that Eshed is the father of the Israeli space program and still enjoys a tremendous level of respect in the Israeli defense establishment.

This doesn’t prove anything, but when sober and respected officials who would know about these encounters go on record, as well as numerous astronauts, including Edgar Mitchell, it’s much harder to dismiss than some rando who says he saw something strange in the sky.

Tic Tac flying saucers in the TikTok age

The current moment of disclosure mania can be traced directly to 2017, when Comm. David Fravor and other Navy pilots came forward to the New York Times with an encounter they experienced. What was different from earlier UFO stories were the videos recorded from their aircraft along with radar data showing strange Tic Tac-shaped ships doing maneuvers seemingly beyond the laws of physics. They came up out of the ocean, rising and then descending 80,000 feet in a second. They would stop in an instant and hover only to disappear.

WATCH: Navy pilot describes encounter with 'Tic Tac' shaped unidentified flying object youtu.be

In 2017 the New York Times ran a story about a peculiar man with a stranger tale named Luis Elizondo. He was the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a clandestine group tasked with investigating UFOs for the Pentagon. He began publishing other declassified military videos of strange encounters with technology seemingly beyond human capabilities. He was interviewed by the Washington Post and went into detail about the origins of these phenomena.

“The bottom line is, up until very recently there were really only three possibilities of what this could be. And the first possibility is that it is some sort of secret U.S. tech that somehow, we have managed to keep secret even from ourselves for a long period of time. The second option is that it is some sort of foreign adversarial technology that has somehow managed to technology leapfrog ahead of our country despite having a fairly robust and comprehensive intelligence apparatus. And of course, the third option is something quite entirely different.

It’s a different paradigm completely. … Is it from here, or is it from out there? We don’t really know. In fact, there’s lots of other options on the table. … It could be from outer space, inner space, or the space in between. As we begin to learn what quantum physics is and we begin to understand our place here on this little planet, we begin to realize that there’s a lot of other options. We judge the universe in five fundamental senses, the ways that we perceive the universe, and that’s touch, taste, hear, smell, et cetera. And if you can’t … use those senses to look at something or measure it, then we really can’t interact with it.”

Spook tales

An intelligence officer, David Grusch, recently came forward with an earth-shattering announcement. He claims defense contractors are in possession of numerous ships and bodies not of human origin. He also cryptically implies they may be inter-dimensional. Confirmation that Grusch is from the above-top secret clandestine world that would have access to this information has provided his claims with a veneer of credibility.

Military whistleblower claims US has UFO retrieval program | Elizabeth Vargas Reports youtu.be

Grusch is following the whistleblower procedures for a government official and declaring that Congress just needs to look into a specific area of our byzantine secrecy programs to discover the truth. Senator Marco Rubio went on record on June 26 that other whistleblowers “in high positions of government” have testified about recovered UFOs.

“There are people that have come forward to share information with our committee over the last couple of years. … I want to be very protective of these people. A lot of these people came to us even before protections were in the law for whistleblowers to come forward,” Rubio told NewsNation.

Project Blue Beam

Silver Screen Collection via Getty Images

It’s worth touching on one of the stranger and credulity-straining conspiracy theories in the UFO oeuvre, Project Blue Beam. Serge Monast was a French-Canadian journalist who published the book "Project Blue Beam (NASA)" in 1994. This book is a smorgasbord of intersecting conspiracy theories whereby NASA, with the help of the U.N., was planning on projecting UFOs into the sky to stage a fake alien invasion.

It becomes a little wonky, but all the electronics in our homes would begin transmitting this message simultaneously worldwide. Monast claimed this event would herald the New World Order with a New Age religion headed by the Antichrist. He died less than two years after publishing, and his readers claimed he was silenced.

People like Monast represent what UFO researchers used to be: eccentrics, who were often very intelligent and obsessive, focused on connecting all of the strands into a Grand Unified Theory of Conspiracy.

His hypothesis does resonate in this sense: Why are governments now openly speaking about disclosure when they were happy to laugh about it only a few years ago?

Two answers spring to mind that are equally thorny. Either we’re on the cusp of finding out we’re not alone in the universe, or this is a giant psyop designed to distract us or control the narrative in some way. It could be a powerful fear-inducing mechanism to challenge tenets of Western religions. What better way to generate global cooperation and control than an outside threat?

You can see our long national obsession with conspiracy theories as the human mind attempting to make sense of an increasingly complex world. When religion ebbs, the idea of no one in control is disconcerting, so we look for authority: aliens, the New World Order, Masons, etc., something to make sense of a world spiraling out of equilibrium.

However, these explanations are no longer adequate to disregard the collective sense of unease we feel about the world. After several years of being gaslit about a global pandemic, along with a myriad of uniquely modern ills, the collective trust in institutions is gone; instead, we’re coasting on the fumes of a society built by considerably more competent men.

Why would anyone trust governments, corporations, and religious institutions when we’ve witnessed decades of incompetence and experienced firsthand the postmodern ethos destroying the civilizational scaffolding? It seems we’re building to some inflection point. Whether that’s aliens, national divorce, or global governance is perhaps beside the point when societal ennui is reaching a fever pitch. I want to believe, but in what?