OPINION:
A former Pentagon official who oversaw its highly secretive Unidentified Flying Object — yes, UFO — program said on CNN to host Erin Burnett that Americans may have been having visitors from afar for quite some time. And that the government has kept it quite on the hush-and-hush.
Oh great, just what we need. With all the government Section 702 secrecy, all the government FISA court curiosities, all the government Russia collusion crap going on — another government secret.
At least this one isn’t sucking up the taxpayer dime — or is it? Anyway, the ex-Pentagon dude seems pretty sincere. So there is that.
“My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone,” said Luis Elizondo, the guy who ran the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program from 2007 to 2012.
Elizondo said the researchers “found a lot,” including “aircraft” that showed “characteristics that are not currently within the US inventory nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of” and that appeared to defy the “laws of aerodynamics.”
There are questions whether the program actually shut down in 2012. The Official Government Statement from the Department of Defense is that it’s been shuttered. But The New York Times said that may not be true — that there are sources tied to the program who say it’s still operative.
His statements come as a former U.S. Navy pilot, Cmdr. David Fravor, told his mother that in the 15th year of his service, he saw a UFO.
“Fravor, the commanding officer of a Navy squadron at the time,” The Washington Post reported, “said he saw a flying object about the size of his plane that looked like a Tic Tac after a break in a routine training mission. The object moved rapidly and unlike any other thing he had ever seen in the air.”
Interesting stuff, yes?
The Pentagon’s program was funded to the tune of $22 million — and get this. It was pushed largely by then-Sen. Harry Reid, who was fueled by his passionately UFO-believing billionaire friend, Robert Bigelow. Bigelow just happened to run a company called Bigelow Aerospace, a space technology outfit that contracts frequently with the government.
“The truth is out there,” Reid just tweeted, in the wake of The New York Times report. “Seriously.”
Yes, and it’s called — quid pro quo. Reid apparently pressed a couple of fellow senators to earmark the $22 million, Bigelow Aerospace received some of the research dollars, and Reid received about $10,000 in campaign donations from Bigelow between 1998 to 2008, Politico reported.
Well and good. But it still doesn’t prove the existence of UFOs, or the sensibility of spending $22 million in taxpayer dollars on the search for them.
“It’s definitely crazy to spend $22 million to research UFOs,” Ryan Alexander, of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said on CNN. “Pilots are always going to see things that they can’t identify, and we should probably look into them. But to identify them as UFOs, to target UFOs to research, that is not the priority we have as a national security matter right now.”
Maybe. Maybe not.
Maybe finding proof of alien life should be the new moon landing mission of the century. After all, it is both arrogant and mind-numbingly limiting to think the entirety of space, of which we know little, contains only earthly humans.
Regardless, there is one irrefutable fact about the whole UFO “do you believe” debate, and it goes like this: Count on the government, whatever it knows, to keep it secret, under wraps, quiet and hidden, until the very last undeniable, red-handed moment.
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