UAP in the USA
A look at the normalization of UFOs in mainstream discourse.
Not so long ago, it seemed like most people would laugh you off as a conspiracy theorist if you espoused the belief that not only is Earth frequently visited by aliens from outer space that fly around our skies in unidentified flying objects (UFOs), but governments all over the world know about these visitors and work to cover up their presence. Over the last few years, however, the concept of governments covering up aliens and UFOs — which have recently been rebranded as unidentified aerial (or anomalous) phenomena (UAP) — has become much more accepted in mainstream discourse.
It appears that this shift in public opinion (at least here in the US) has several causes, including several prominent celebrities openly expressing this sort of belief, as well as contributions from politicians, a billionaire, multiple journalists and whistleblowers, declassified videos, credible eyewitness accounts, and even congressional hearings.
This trend has been ongoing for several years now, with some significant developments occurring within just this year alone. However, it’s important to note that just because the notion of visitors from outer space has shifted from a fringe belief to a widely accepted possibility, that doesn’t mean we have been presented with sufficient evidence to prove it to be a matter of fact.
I personally believe intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, and if that’s the case then it’s entirely possible for Earth to have been visited by them at some point or another. If aliens have visited our planet, then I think it’s reasonable to assume that any governments that have become aware of those visits would work to keep that information a secret for a number of reasons.
I remain skeptical of the recent normalization of this concept, however. Primarily because I highly doubt the US government would release the information that it has recently purely out of a desire to be transparent with the American public. At the same time, I’m unsure of what to make of it all. I’m willing to bet that there are some ulterior motives at play, but as I’ll discuss further, it’s difficult to determine what they could be.
UFOs in Desert Skies
When discussing UFO sightings in the United States and government secrecy on the issue, there are two locations that are likely to come to mind for most people: The mysterious Area 51, and Roswell, New Mexico.
Roswell is the site of an alleged crash of an alien spacecraft that took place back in the late 1940s, and it’s easily one of the most famous UFO stories to ever come out of the United States. The official narrative is that the debris that was found and mistakenly reported to be a UFO was actually from a weather balloon. However, many people still believe that once the US government discovered something extraterrestrial had gone down in the New Mexico desert, it quickly confiscated any debris or biological remains and then planted the weather balloon story as cover.
Area 51 is a US military installation in Nevada that was long rumored to exist but wasn’t officially acknowledged until 2013. It is perceived by many to be the main location the US government uses to keep and study the bodies of extraterrestrials and try to back-engineer alien technology. The official narrative is that it’s simply a military base that the US government has long used to develop and test the latest versions of military aircraft.
The lore of Area 51 persists to this day, however, so much so that back in 2019 a joke event on Facebook encouraging people to “Storm Area 51” led to 2 million people RSVPing (though obviously in continuation of the joke, as attempts to turn it into a real event fell far short of that level of attendance.)
“I posted it…and it was kind of a joke,” Matty Roberts, the creator of the Facebook event, told George Knapp of 8 News Now, a local Las Vegas news outlet, in the first interview he gave after his joke event went viral. Knapp is a relatively well-known name in the UFO community, as he has long reported on the subject.
Roberts went on to tell Knapp that he got the idea to create the event after listening to an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE) after comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan interviewed Bob Lazar, a whistleblower who worked at Area S4, a subset of Area 51, and claims to have been tasked with back-engineering alien technology, and Jeremy Corbell, a documentary filmmaker who had recently made a documentary of Bob Lazar’s story.
Lazar originally came forward with his story in 1989, but his first appearance on JRE in 2019 brought it back into the public consciousness; particularly for people in my generation who were either far too young or not yet born when Lazar first blew the whistle, and had therefore likely never heard about him at all prior to that episode.
His story has remained remarkably consistent during all of that time, but not everyone believes he’s telling the truth. Unfortunately, there isn’t much evidence to back up his claims.
Lazar, Corbell, and Knapp have all been on Rogan’s podcast more than once, and I would encourage anyone who’s interested to go and listen to those episodes.
A Billionaire, a Senator, and a Rockstar
Twenty years after Lazar first took his story public and ten years before he appeared on JRE, an unclassified yet extremely secretive program with the intention of looking into UFOs began in 2009, thanks to efforts made by then-Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) as well as late Senators Daniel Inouye (D-HI) and Ted Stevens (R-AK). The existence of that program, the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which was conducted by the Pentagon, wasn’t confirmed until 2017.
As Politico Magazine reported at the time:
The Pentagon’s AATIP program marked a 21st-century effort to replicate some of the decades of inconclusive research undertaken by the Pentagon in 1950s and 1960s to try to explain thousands of reported sightings of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, by military and civilian pilots and average citizens—particularly an effort known as Project Bluebook that ran from 1947 to 1969 and is still a focus of intense interest for UFO researchers.
Someone who helped influence Reid to start that program was Robert Bigelow, a billionaire who owns Bigelow Aerospace, a space technology company. Reid had been introduced to Bigelow through George Knapp, and had attended meetings of a group Bigelow had started in the 1990s known as the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS). Reid’s attendance remained a secret until he publicly disclosed his involvement with the group to Politico’s Bryan Bender back in 2021.
AATIP went on for several years until, according to the Politico Magazine article cited above, the program supposedly ended in 2012.
As I’ve already alluded to (and this will become even more obvious as this article continues) Joe Rogan is one celebrity who has very publicly expressed his belief in the possibility of life from outer space or some other dimension and he has had various guests on his podcast to discuss that topic specifically. Considering the popularity of his podcast, his doing so has without a doubt helped to bring this belief into the mainstream.
There is another celebrity who has arguably done just as much to transform the concept of UFOs from a fringe belief into a widely recognized possibility, and that is Tom Delonge, a founding member of the pop-punk band Blink 182. Delonge has long expressed his fascination with UFOs, and Blink 182 even has a song entitled “Aliens Exist” (one of my personal favorites).
Delonge left Blink 182 in 2015 (he has since returned) and a year later, it was revealed through leaked emails from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, which were published by Wikileaks, that Delonge had been in contact with John Podesta, a longtime Washington insider who was serving as Clinton’s campaign chairman at the time.
Delonge apparently wanted to set up a meeting with Podesta to discuss UFOs, and he wasn’t the only government official Delonge had reached out to.
In 2017, Delonge formed To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences (TTSA), a research and entertainment company. According to its website, TTSA “creates original content informed by our experiences working with prestigious government agencies and institutions…with the goal of turning the world on to new ideas and new possibilities.”
TTSA even ended up signing an agreement with the US Army in 2019. As Vice reported at the time:
The group, called To the Stars Academy, just signed an agreement with the U.S. Army in which it will help the military study and develop advanced materials for the purposes of developing “active camouflage, beamed energy propulsion, and quantum communication” for use on military vehicles.
There are obvious parallels between NIDS, the group Bigelow started in the mid 90s, and To the Stars Academy, and that doesn’t seem to be a coincidence.
“I have a lot of respect for him [Bigelow]” Delonge told Politico’s Bryan Bender. “He’s a renegade. I love what he’s done. I think he’s just been a tremendous asset in this field of study.”
This all goes to show how efforts made by one influential person to normalize the concept of UFOs can pave a way for other people with similar amounts of influence to do the same. The changes we’ve seen on this front over the last few years appear to be a culmination of many different people making various contributions that all seem to coalesce in one way or another.
Case in point: Delonge and Bigelow have both appeared on Rogan’s podcast, and they each discussed their long-held beliefs in UFOs during their respective episodes.
Military Confirmation
In 2017 and 2018, To the Stars released three videos purportedly showing UAP which were confirmed to be authentic by the US Navy in 2019 and officially released by the Pentagon in 2020.
The first two videos that were released by Delonge’s group have been dubbed “Gimbal” and “Go Fast”, and both videos were taken from US Navy fighter jets from an aircraft carrier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, off the coast of Florida back in 2015.
The third video, which was originally called “FLIR1” but is more commonly known as the “Tic Tac” video, was taken back in 2004 from a Navy fighter jet from an aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, off the coast of the US-Mexico border, between San Diego, California and Ensenada, Mexico.
David Fravor, a retired Navy commander, was a witness to the “Tic Tac” incident, a story he discussed in length when he (along with Jeremy Corbell) appeared on JRE back in late 2019; just a few months after the first episode with Bob Lazar.
Fravor, as well as retired Navy Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich, also appeared on CBS News’ 60 Minutes a couple of years ago.
Another credible witness is Ryan Graves, a Navy fighter pilot who was stationed at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, Virginia, around the same time as the “Gimbal” and “Go Fast” incidents, and claims to have had his own experiences with UAP.
Graves also appeared on Rogan’s podcast back in 2022, in which he hammered home the point that these objects — whatever they are and wherever they’re from — pose a risk to pilots who operate in the areas where they’ve been seen, which is often near US military installations and training grounds. Because of that risk, at least ostensibly, parts of the military have started taking reports of UAP far more seriously.
The Pentagon’s release of those videos came a few months before the creation of a UAP Task Force (UAPTF) within the Department of Defense (DOD), which was announced in August of 2020. Both instances were massive developments for the UFO community, and they would’ve likely gained much more attention from the general public as well had they not taken place during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and the accompanying lockdowns and mandates — not to mention the protests and riots that took place over that summer.
A development that occurred around the same time as many of these others is the creation of the US Space Force (USSF) during the Trump administration in 2019. The USSF doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the US military’s acknowledgement of UAP, but it’s at least adjacent to it.
According to the “History” page on its website, “The establishment of the USSF resulted from widespread recognition that Space was a national security imperative.”
The sentence that follows gives us a glimpse into a potential reason why the US government has suddenly decided to treat UFOs as a real and serious phenomena, and it may have nothing to do with extraterrestrials:
“When combined with the growing threat posed by near-peer competitors in space, it became clear there was a need for a military service focused solely on pursuing superiority in the space domain.”
Intelligence Reports and Congressional Hearings
In 2021, the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force, along with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), released a report detailing what that task force had learned about UAP in the year since it had been created.
Out of the 144 reports of UAP from 2004-2021 that were used in the report, only one was able to be identified with a high level of confidence; the other 143 were still unexplained, at least at the time the report was released.
The report stated that 18 of the UAPs that were investigated had “unusual…movement patterns or flight characteristics.” However, the report concluded that there was no clear evidence to prove the UAPs were extraterrestrial or from a foreign adversary. It also stated that “the UAPTF has 11 reports of documented instances in which pilots reported near misses with UAP” which lends credence to the concerns expressed by Ryan Graves.
Almost a year later, in 2022, a panel within the US House of Representatives held a congressional hearing on UFOs — the first of it’s kind in over 50 years.
As CBS News reported at the time:
A House panel held the first public congressional hearing on unidentified flying objects in more than half a century…with top Pentagon officials saying the number of "unidentified aerial phenomena" (UAP) reported by pilots and service members had grown to about 400.
(…)
The last public congressional hearing on UFOs was held in the 1960s before the disbandment of "Project Blue Book," a U.S. Air Force program that investigated and analyzed reports of UFOs. The project lasted from 1947 to 1969 and was disbanded in part because the objects were found to pose no threat to national security, according to an Air Force fact sheet.
That same year, the Department of Defense announced the creation of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). According to the statement DOD put out when announcing that new office, AARO was created to “synchronize efforts across the Department of Defense, and with other U.S. federal departments and agencies, to detect, identify and attribute objects of interest in, on or near military installations, operating areas, training areas, special use airspace and other areas of interest, and, as necessary, to mitigate any associated threats to safety of operations and national security. This includes anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects.”
This year, the US government made headlines when it shot down three UFOs over the course of one weekend. As far as I’m aware, those objects have yet to be conclusively identified even to this day, but as I wrote at the time, it’s likely that they were nothing more than weather balloons or some other kind of harmless aircraft. In my opinion, the entire ordeal seemed to be just an overreaction to a Chinese “spy balloon” that flew over the continental US a few weeks prior.
UFOs, Balloons, and Cold War Hysteria
However, it was reported that the Chinese government encountered a UFO that same weekend, and the Russian government supposedly shot one down a month before. That eventful February weekend also came a month after the release of the UAP Task Force’s report for 2022, which said there were 171 cases of UAP sightings that were unexplained.
Oddly enough, the US government supposedly shooting down three UFOs wasn’t even the biggest story about the potential of alien life visiting Earth this year.
“A former intelligence official turned whistleblower has given Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General extensive classified information about deeply covert programs that he says possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin. The information, he says, has been illegally withheld from Congress, and he filed a complaint alleging that he suffered illegal retaliation for his confidential disclosures,” The Debrief first reported in June of this year.
The article goes on:
The whistleblower, David Charles Grusch, 36, a decorated former combat officer in Afghanistan, is a veteran of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). He served as the reconnaissance office’s representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force from 2019-2021. From late 2021 to July 2022, he was the NGA’s co-lead for UAP analysis and its representative to the task force.
Shortly after Grusch took his story public, Congress held another hearing on UAP. During that hearing, Grusch made a lot of claims, including that he had become aware of “a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program,” and that he had interviewed people with knowledge of “non-human” aircraft. He even claimed that he had been told of “biologics” being recovered by this secret program.
Ryan Graves and David Fravor also testified during that hearing.
Unlike Bob Lazar, who claims to have physically seen and worked with alien technology, every one of Grusch’s claims rests on second-hand accounts from people who supposedly worked for or had knowledge of the program that he’s blowing the whistle on.
All of the evidence that has been presented by Grusch so far has been anecdotal —someone else's anecdote, no less — which leaves much to be desired for those of us who are slow to trust a former intelligence agent based off of nothing but his word. It’s possible that he’s provided more conclusive evidence to certain individuals cleared to view it, but the public has yet to be shown anything of the sort.
Recently, Joe Rogan once again had George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell on his podcast to discuss Grusch’s story and the claims he made during that hearing, which further illustrates just how often Rogan has used his platform to bring these stories to the public’s attention.
The US House of Representatives isn’t the only political body to recently hold a hearing on UAP and potential extraterrestrial remains, either.
According to The Guardian, Mexican “lawmakers were shown two shriveled bodies with shrunken heads – alongside video footage of ‘unexplained anomalous phenomena’ – by Jaime Maussan, a sports journalist turned UFO enthusiast,” in September of this year.
“Maussan said the remains were more than 1,000 years old and belonged to ‘non-human beings that are not part of our terrestrial evolution’.” However, “Other studies have suggested the mummies, which were found in Nazca, Peru, in 2017, are fraudulent.”
The most recent development when it comes to the US government investigating UFOs is the latest UAP Task Force report which was released earlier this month.
As John Greenwald reported for The Black Vault:
The report offers an in-depth look into UAP cases that span from 31 August 2022 to 30 April 2023, with additional inclusions of reports from earlier periods between 2019-2022 that were previously unmentioned.
During the stated period, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) registered a total of 291 UAP reports. Out of these, 274 were from the aforementioned period, while 17 were from earlier reporting periods that had not been previously submitted.
Greenwald goes on to say that “although none of the UAP sightings have been directly linked to foreign activities, investigations into these cases remain ongoing.”
Mass Indifference
An aspect of the recent normalization of UFOs and extraterrestrial or extradimensional life that I find interesting is how little the general public seems to care.
There are certainly many people who find the concept at least somewhat intriguing — and obviously there are many longtime UFO enthusiasts who likely view the US government’s acknowledgement of this phenomena as a massive step in the right direction — but overall it appears the majority of people are only marginally interested at best.
I mentioned earlier that some of these developments occurred during the height of the Covid pandemic and the protests and riots of 2020, and that certainly helps to explain why those particular developments failed to gain as much attention as they likely would have had they happened a few years prior. However, given that the latest — and arguably, some of the biggest — developments occurred just recently, there has to be more to the mass indifference we’ve seen toward this issue here in the US.
I think an easily identifiable reason for it is most people simply have more pressing issues to worry about, such as:
The threat of a third world war breaking out in the near future;
The poor state of the US economy and the effect that inflation has had on the average American’s purchasing power;
Intensely polarizing culture war issues that are constantly at the forefront of public attention;
An increasingly worsening immigration crisis that most people, regardless of where one stands on the issue, recognize as a problem — one that very little effort has been put into solving;
Rising rates of homelessness, drug overdoses, and crime all across the country.
Another possible reason could be that faith in US institutions has been on a decline for years, so even if the US government’s recent shift toward transparency on UFOs is genuine, many people just don’t believe that it is. Frankly, I can’t fault anyone who feels this way. If we’ve been lied to about this subject — and likely much more — all of this time, why should we believe we’re being told the truth now?
However, much of the information that has come out about UAP from the federal government has come from the military, and according to the latest Gallup poll on this issue, the military is one institution that a majority of Americans still have a relatively high degree of confidence in.
It’s possible that my perception is wrong and that most people actually are fascinated by or excited about the recent normalization of UFOs, but as far as I can tell, most people just seem to shrug it off. People who were already interested in this phenomena probably feel as though they’ve had some of their suspicions or beliefs vindicated, but the average person seems to generally have their attention focused elsewhere.
Reasons for Normalization
When it comes to the question of why there has been such a shift on UFOs, particularly within the US government, I think there are a few plausible answers.
The simplest explanation would be that there is a genuine interest about this issue from certain people within the government, the military specifically, and over time that has caused UFOs to be taken more seriously. For example, if the objects that are being reported pose a real risk to US pilots, then it makes sense that identifying the cause of that risk would become a higher priority to the Navy and the Air Force.
It’s also possible that some of this phenomena could be explained by foreign adversaries developing or otherwise acquiring technology that is currently beyond the US’s capabilities. That possibility provides a massive incentive to seriously investigate UAP.
It could even be that the US government has acquired technology that could explain a majority of UFO sightings — something the UAP Task Force has so far said is not the case, but that in no way means it’s an impossibility. That scenario would still include an incentive to discover whether or not countries like Russia or China have developed similar technology, however, because no matter which country gained this level of technology first, any rival powers would likely discover it eventually and work to create better versions. Such an arms race could easily explain some of this phenomena, as well as the sudden desire to investigate it.
It’s also important to remember that there doesn’t actually need to be any evidence of foreign adversaries gaining superior technology or of extraterrestrial life visiting Earth for the US government to be incentivized to normalize UAP. There could be more nefarious reasons.
The US is currently in a new cold war against both Russia and China, and the Biden administration’s unwavering support for Israel and its onslaught on Gaza has the potential to significantly escalate tensions with Iran. The Biden administration has also recently engaged in provocations against North Korea that have gone largely unnoticed by most people. Those are just a few out of many other examples I could give of the US government escalating tensions throughout the world.
All of that is to say that the US is a very militaristic government that frequently engages in behavior that creates conflict and war. This constant initiation of force necessitates constant improvement and innovation on the means and methods used to do so.
Whether or not the majority of UFO sightings can be attributed to secret US weapons testing (which again is a very real possibility), the conflicts the US government has recently become entangled in may have created an environment in which many people in the US military feel the need to advance its capabilities or to slowly begin unveiling weapons and vehicles that are currently a secret in preparation for larger escalations down the road.
In order to do that without receiving significant backlash from Americans who might not like the idea of their tax dollars being used to fund the development of newer and better ways of killing people to advance the interests of a globe-spanning empire, some sort of propaganda would be required to convince enough people that doing so is in their best interest.
The normalization of UFOs over the last few years could be a form of that propaganda. Whether its a general desire to begin to weaponize space (as the creation of the US Space Force implies) or a desire to ramp up the cold war the US currently finds itself in, exploiting the concept of UFOs and extraterrestrial life could be a somewhat innocuous way to manufacture consent for those agendas.
That isn’t to say that there isn’t a real unexplained phenomena causing much of these UFO sightings, as could very well be the case, just that the US government could be using that real phenomena as cover to advance other interests.
Regardless of whatever other motives the US government has, I think the few I just mentioned are each at least a part of the trend toward normalization we’ve seen recently.
There is another theory on why the US government has seemingly become more transparent about UAP, albeit, a much more conspiratorial one, which is that this is all part of Project Blue Beam.
I briefly summarized parts of that theory and gave some of my thoughts on it in my piece on the three UFOs the US government shot down earlier this year:
One of the more radical theories when it comes to aliens from outer space is that world leaders and other elites intend to stage an alien invasion as a way to usher in a one-world government, which would be sold as a solution to such an existential threat. I don’t doubt that global elites would be willing to attempt something like that if it meant they would profit from it in some way, but I doubt that they’re competent enough to pull it off. However, considering that some people still buy the official narrative when it comes to Covid-19, maybe that level of psyop would rely less on the competency of our elites and more on the gullibility of the masses.
The Mystery Remains
At the end of the day, all of the possible explanations for the normalization of UFOs that I just laid out, regardless of how plausible I may find some of them to be, are merely speculation on phenomena that has long-existed and has always included an element of mystery.
I think it’s very likely that the US government is using interest in UFOs as a way to advance agendas that have already been in the works for some time, but I’m not entirely sure that sufficiently explains the recent transparency we’ve seen on this topic.
It’s not as if the US has struggled to gain support for it’s involvement in the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, or for it’s escalations against China. The usual war propaganda and fear-mongering seems to work well enough, so why would they need to fabricate an entirely different narrative to advance agendas that are already advancing at a worrying pace?
I suppose the answer to that question could be that it’s all actually a way to seed the ground for a future false flag event in which an alien invasion is staged in order to bring about a one-world government, but considering how fractured the relationships between some of the world’s largest powers are right now, I just find it hard to believe that such an immense conspiracy is taking place behind the scenes.
Those who buy into the theory of Project Blue Beam would likely argue that the tensions between the US and Russia (or between any other countries) are superficial and that the elite within each country secretly work together — and to an extent I’m sure that happens more often than many people would think, but likely in far more mundane ways than many conspiracy-minded people would first assume. I’ve yet to see solid evidence that that is the case when it comes to the recent normalization of UFOs, however, and until I do, I can’t say I believe that’s the reason for it. I don’t think something like that is impossible, just that out of all of the possible scenarios, it seems to be the least likely.
Whatever the case may be, there’s no doubt that a shift has taken place in our society, in which much of the US population is now far more open to the idea that some sort of alien beings could be visiting our planet, using technology that we don’t yet understand. That shift is largely the result of years of efforts made by various people from many different occupations and backgrounds — from journalists to politicians to Navy pilots and even to a rockstar and a pothead comedian — all working to destigmatize the concept of UFOs and some of the implications that go along with it.
As I mentioned before, the US public has not been presented with conclusive evidence to prove that extraterrestrial or extradimensional lifeforms have visited Earth; but that doesn’t mean we can rule out the possibility. No matter what motivated the US government to reveal the limited amount of information that it has recently, there could still be some truth to the idea that we’re frequently being visited by otherworldly craft being piloted by beings that are not of this planet, or even this dimension.
Regardless of how true that possibility turns out to be, we shouldn’t put it passed the US government to exploit the concept of UFOs in order to advance interests that it has here in the current moment, however.
An open mind is one thing, naivete is another.
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