We are not going to remember what it was like to live during these years. An epochal earthquake shakes a culture to its core, it exposes the foundations, it remakes who we are and what we value. It jostles and jumbles our memories as well. We will be looking back at these years from a future that we cannot now imagine. The light will be different there, either brighter or darker, none can say. Occasionally we will turn from that light and gaze across the vast chasm riven through history and all our lives by the earthquake, and we will wonder at ourselves, who we were, what we did, what we were thinking. Some of it will be clear enough. Some of it we barely notice even now as it is happening. For other things, it will be mighty tempting to misremember, to reinterpret, and to misrepresent. We do not know who in those years will write the history of these years, but it will be written. It’s a rare thing to be able to record for posterity who said what, what they meant, and what they did, to put it all down before the earthquake but knowing it will come.
The earthquake I mean is in the title of this book. The book is a message in a bottle cast from before the great shock into whatever comes after.
In the here and now, we do not know that our galaxy, or the wider universe, is populated with extraterrestrial life. We do not know that life exists anywhere off of our planet, nor do we know if life evolved into a spacefaring civilization anywhere other than our planet. We do not know that intelligent, advanced beings from beyond the Earth have been visiting us in their spacecraft, represented to us as UFOs. These remain open questions. Some of us have our own beliefs and theories about each of them based on our experiences or our personal and professional backgrounds. Still, the answers all lack a critical mass of evidence that would allow them to become calcified into knowledge, which would then allow them to be manufactured and packaged into historical and scientific fact by the professional class of historians and scientists. The release of that evidence, then transmuting it into accepted common knowledge and fact, is the process of disclosure.
In 2017 people who are proximate to the potential evidence for the third question--the UFO question--became unusually active. Every year since then their activity accelerated, and pulled in more and more similarly agitated people. These are the military personnel who present as evidence their own eyewitness accounts; the Intelligence Community and Pentagon agents crafting elaborate schema for how to capture and interpret UFO evidence; former government employees who are using whistleblower protections to report to Congress what they have seen; elected representatives who are putting UFO transparency provisions into legislation; NASA scientists who are looking for UFOs through Earth-observing satellites and other tools; journalists and everyone else trying to make sense of this abrupt and strange turnabout. Not since the earliest days of the UFO mystery, 1947-1952, has disclosure felt so imminent to those keeping close tabs on the US government’s words and actions. Why this activity began in 2017, 2018, and 2019 is for another book. Our purpose in this yearbook is to record their activity in the year 2023.
What follows is a compilation of public records and public actions of the main drivers of UFO disclosure. This information is presented in three parts: Congress, executive branch agencies, mainstream culture. The contents are derived exclusively from the public record, such as direct quotes, transcripts, and written text. I let these primary sources speak for themselves, sometimes at length. If you already heard these accounts when they were first released, as I did, I encourage you to read them closely, as I discovered some jaw dropping statements and insights that I had missed the first time around. I have condensed important factual information into tables for easy reference. The whole book is designed to be used as a reference and learning tool, like a textbook. If you ever need to look up the case count of UAP in AARO’s database, pull the yearbook off the shelf and turn to Table 2g. One day you may find yourself needing to know how the Senate Armed Services Committee first defined in legislation the dead alien bodies being kept in a Pentagon freezer. Don’t believe me? Go to Table 1c. Other key events of the year, from congressional hearings to panel discussions to news cycles, are chronicled and quoted in full detail.
That said, a fact, a date, or a quote can be misleading if it is stripped of all context, so I will occasionally follow them with my own commentary. These passages are clearly identified as my own thoughts and interpretations, and many of them are essays and articles I wrote during the year as the event was unfolding or just after. The purpose is to illuminate the subtext, to bring unstated or muddled meaning and intentions to the surface for examination. The lines between my inferences and the plain English meaning of what the subject said or did will be direct and logical. And short--I have taken pains not to speculate too far from what is apparent in the public record, and to never project onto a person’s words (or their silences) something that they did not mean. This is not easy work given the human complexity bound up in this topic, but I have done my best to err on the side of the record.
Some of the people quoted in this book know more about UFOs than they are willing to say publicly. We know this because they say so. It does no one any good--it is in fact a distraction--to spray these pages with a buckshot of guesses about what that might be. As our purpose here is to track the progress of disclosure, what a government official says to the public about UFOs is much more relevant and revealing than whatever they are saying behind closed doors. What they are saying on the record is interesting enough. Much of it is downright shocking, especially in 2023.
A disclaimer: I do not have any unnamed sources whispering UFO secrets in my ear. If I did, I would politely advise them to spend less time gossiping with the likes of me and more time trying to figure out how to get their information into the public record. It’s only there where it has any chance of becoming usable knowledge to a public who is going to need it to help keep their balance as the tremors of the coming earthquake begin to rise.
Defining Our Terms
I am allergic to acronyms and jargon, and will deploy them sparingly. I will need some grace on this promise however, since I am writing about a government that names its UAP investigative unit the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO.
Two acronyms for mysterious, unidentified objects are of course unavoidable. My preferred term is UFO, although UAP appears twice as often in this manuscript. I do not use UAP and UFO interchangeably because they are not interchangeable terms. UFO has a commonly accepted, plain English meaning, whereas UAP does not. The meaning of UAP changes from speaker to speaker, and sometimes changes when used by the same speaker in different contexts. It can mean the same thing as UFO, but it is also used to describe generic anomalies that have nothing to do with UFOs. Someone might casually refer to AARO as the Pentagon’s UFO office, but AARO’s director would never say that because AARO operates according to a more expansive and technical definition of UAP. Some members of Congress prefer UAP while others prefer UFO. NASA officials use UAP to mean UFOs but also not-UFOs. It’s confusing. For the purposes of this book, I use UAP contextually. When I am writing about a subject who uses UAP or UFO, I mirror their preferred term and explain what I think they mean by it. When I am writing for myself, I use UFO. UAP is the slipperiest word in this book, but if I’ve done my job well, you will get a handle on its meaning in context.
The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis is the theory that UFO sightings are the result of people witnessing alien spacecraft. The term non-human intelligence came into vogue this year. I’m not splitting hairs over any potential speculative differences between these two terms, especially since we do not know anything about who they might be. Suffice to say, we are talking about intelligent beings who are not human and whose physical craft are present on and around the Earth.
Another acronym you will see is IC/DoD, which stands for the nexus of the US Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense. These two sprawling components of the federal government have different missions, practices, and bureaucratic imperatives. Presumably they also have different relationships with the UFO phenomenon. But they are often spoken about together in these pages because Congress has jointly tasked their leaders with responsibility for the government’s UAP investigation. As such, both the IC and the DoD are responsible for the successful management of AARO to pursue its mission.
Finally, UFO disclosure itself is a complex term. As I said above, disclosure is a process whereby certain information, evidence, and records that had been withheld or are hiding in plain sight become revealed and accepted. We are somewhere amid this process, though it is impossible to pinpoint how far along we’ve come, or how far from the ultimate goal we are. The goal is the point.
The working assumption about disclosure is that eventually enough evidence will accrue, there will be a moment when the puzzle pieces slide together to create a clear picture of a reality that can no longer be denied or ignored. A new awareness will rip through society. The explanation for UFOs--be it the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, or secret human technology, or something stranger still--will become accepted knowledge that must be reckoned with socially, politically, and personally. Awareness of anything can have a long lead time but eventually there is a tipping point, like the transition from being asleep to being awake. This moment of widespread awareness--whether it will play out over minutes and hours, or days and weeks--is what we mean by disclosure as a practical matter. It has not happened yet. In 2023, there were significant efforts to bring it about.
How much and what kind of evidence would be required is anyone’s guess. Every government-led study of UFOs down to the present day has said that most but not all UFO sightings have conventional explanations. Well, all it takes is one UFO to be real and we’re suddenly having an entirely different conversation. Who knows--AARO is already deploying purpose-built sensors into what it calls UAP hotspots, so we may be having that conversation by the time you read this. If even one rivet popped off of a UFO (yeah, I know they don’t seem to have rivets) and it became a verified fact that the rivet had been manufactured off of the planet Earth, that single rivet would set off a chain reaction of revelations. The impacts on society would be innumerable, deep, and entirely unpredictable. For one, we would have to conclude that if there is one verified UFO there is certainly more. It will become exponentially more likely that many of the stories about UFOs that have circulated for more than seventy years--what NASA Administrator Bill Nelson calls UFO folklore--will turn out to be fact as well. Some high-ranking members of Congress have already come to this conclusion, and are trying to force the release of government records that would corroborate those stories going all the way back to the 1947 Roswell crash and the UFO “foo fighter” encounters during World War II.
That little rivet would snag a seam of human history and rip a jagged tear into our future and back through our past. Awareness that there is other intelligent life in the universe, and that it has been visiting us, surveilling us, perhaps for a very long time--it is the kind of revelation that demarcates millennium on our calendars, no less a marker of time than the birth of Christ on the Christian calendar, or the creation of the world on the Jewish calendar. Not only would it place us in a new epoch going forward, everything that has happened since those misty eras of providence would be open to question. We would find ourselves in a different world than the one we thought we’d been living in all this time. We might even become different people. Disclosure is a bigger deal than any of us can imagine--words fail.
The possibilities and perils of this before/after demarcation is the animating factor behind nearly all the activity described in these pages. Leaders in our government and culture, from AARO to NASA to Congress to the media, are preparing for it in their own way. The weight of it affects everyone involved. And if there are elements within our government who wish to forestall disclosure, to withhold evidence that would trigger the tipping point of awareness, that would explain some activity too.
The Disclosure Bind
So put yourself in the shoes of the agents of disclosure, the people right now, last year, this year, who by dint of their job have been tasked to answer the big questions. Are UFOs really extraterrestrial spacecraft? Are the stories true? These are NASA scientists, intelligence agents, leaders in the Pentagon, members of Congress, low level bureaucrats and staffers, the people who are seeking answers to the UFO question in an official capacity, and who are the subjects of this book. Most of them claim--credibly, I emphasize--that they do not know the answer. All of them accept that the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis is a live possibility. All of them feel the extreme burden of responsibility that that possibility, however likely or unlikely it seems to each of them, places squarely on their shoulders.
They are caught in an in-between place, a muddled middle ground between the old official conventional wisdom that UFOs and UFO coverups are the fever dreams of paranoid cranks, and a new stance that says studying UAP is a serious and legitimate line of inquiry. They adopt a posture of just-asking-questions, but they cannot clearly, cogently articulate why they are asking these questions, why now, and just what separates the crank phase of UFO history with this new mainstream phase. They have one foot solidly on the narrow ground of the UAP (technical, abstract, high-minded to the point of being unintelligible thought experiments about unknown unknowns), while their forward foot is on the unstable and expansive ground of the UFO (flying saucers, little green men, and all the paradigm-shattering social implications of their reality). In effect, they are trying to have it both ways, and some of them don’t seem aware of or willing to admit the contradiction. They are caught in what I call the disclosure bind. This is the theme for 2023. It helps explain much of the actions and statements that will be chronicled in the pages below.
Their trouble is they cannot have it both ways. Disclosure is an all-in proposition. Disclosure is the realization that you can’t be a little pregnant. Disclosure is saying I love you first. Disclosure is leaping feet first into a ravine shrouded in fog. It’s hard to do! We have numerous examples of officials in the disclosure bind acting out these semi-comic metaphors. People who are clearly talking about alien spaceships who are in deep denial that their arcane jargon is successfully concealing the UFO. People dropping hints and intimations assiduously avoiding the actual words, hoping they can get someone else to say them first. People sidling so close to the edge, hoping that they might topple in without having to consciously jump.
One of the best artifacts of what someone caught in the disclosure bind looks and sounds like is a video clip of John Brennan, who was CIA Director from 2013 to 2017. In December 2020 he went on a podcast to promote his memoir. The host Tyler Cowen asked about UFOs, and Brennan, with a pained, downturned gaze, said the following: “I think some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”
The language of disclosure does not come easy, and Brennan was out of government when he said them. In 2023, some currently serving government officers and employees began to sound like Brennan in that clip--verbal gymnastics, flailing in the dark, groping for the safe handholds along the ledge.
There are four cross pressures that create the disclosure bind. The forward pressure is that they feel an obligation to get to the truth, either because they have personally decided this, or because they have been volunteered (or dragooned) into this work. These are people who have climbed out on the ledge. The opposing pressure, like headwinds pushing them back, are the many stark consequences that would result from disclosure. Behind that is the necessity to have sufficient, unambiguous evidence to justify those consequences. A lateral pressure has to do with positional power. They feel their position or rank does not make them qualified or authorized to break any major news about aliens. To use a Washington saying, they are careful to avoid statements that would get them out over their skis. Buffeting them from the other direction is the ever-present UFO stigma. The general effect of these four pressures is to hold them in stasis, what can look like hesitation, caginess, or prevarication. They are unwilling to jump off the ledge but unable to scramble back to safety. They are stuck.
Let’s take a brief look at each of these pressures.
First, it’s clear from their statements that the officials tasked with disclosure understand the assignment. They are fully aware that their job is to figure out if UFOs are extraterrestrial craft visiting the Earth. Whenever he’s asked about NASA’s UAP work, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson leads with his personal belief that there are far too many habitable worlds in the universe for there not to be alien civilizations exploring the stars just as humans are starting to do. Anamaria Berea, an astrobiologist on the NASA UAP Study Team, said during a public discussion of the group's work in May 2023, “we hope that within our lifetime, we will be able to answer this big question of whether we are alone or not, and also to better characterize this phenomenon, which is UAPs.” Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the government’s official UAP investigative office, often says that the best thing that could have come out of his work “is to prove that there are aliens.” When he began setting up the office, he had “really wanted to dig in and find truly unknown, anomalous things that we can… go chase.” AARO has not found anything yet--Kirkpatrick personally thinks that the idea that an intelligent alien species “has found Earth and that it has come to Earth and that it has repeatedly crashed in the United States is not very probable”--but its work is ongoing. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer--you cannot get much more senior in Washington--said from the Senate floor this year, “The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena.” Not only that, Schumer stated his belief that the “United States government has gathered a great deal of information about UAPs over many decades but has refused to share it with the American people.” In 2023, he helped put into law some provisions that would change this.
Admitting out loud that the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis is a possibility is a big step, which many officials took for the first time in 2023, as we will see. Admitting that it is probable, or a fact, is a step that is leagues longer. There is a lot of understandable resistance and hesitation--personal, social, institutional--to taking that step. As stated above, disclosure is a big deal that would upend everything. After such an announcement, the public is going to demand--and they will rightly deserve--very detailed answers. Kirkpatrick likes to quote Carl Sagan’s line that “extraordinary claims call for extraordinary evidence.” UFO evidence in the public record fall into three buckets: voluminous eyewitness testimony of UFOs and alien beings; some privately held physical evidence, such as metallic fragments, ground traces, radiation signatures, etc.; eyewitness testimony that suggests entities within the US government have possessed much greater evidence, such as clear video and sensor data, retrieved craft, and retrieved non-human bodies. Arguments about whether this should be enough to spark disclosure are beside the point that they have not sparked disclosure yet. NASA, AARO, Congress, and the media are all saying that they need more. As compelling as the evidentiary record for UFOs are, the full picture is still full of holes. Even careful, rigorous ufologists fall into them from time to time, filling in the gaps with their own incorrect assumptions. Ufology contains many diverse and even conflicting theories about what UFOs are. I can make the case that UFO evidence is ambiguous because the phenomenon is rare, and that our brains have a hard time interpreting them because we do not know anything about them except that they seem to do impossible things. Even Jacques Valle, a longtime student of the UFO phenomenon, and a witness, calls them absurdist. UFO behavior does not make sense because UFOs do not subscribe to human common sense. But officials cannot go to the podium with a lecture on epistemological philosophy, speaking in absurdities and non sequiturs. To jump off the ledge, they are going to need assurances that their data firmly backs up their conclusions.
The third pressure has to do with the person’s interpretation of what is reasonable and allowable for them to say given their position of authority. Imagine an UAP org chart. Who is at the top and who is at the bottom? In his April 2023 Senate hearing, Kirkpatrick said, “In the event sufficient scientific data were ever obtained, that a UAP encounter can only be explained by extraterrestrial origin, we are committed to working with our interagency partners at NASA to appropriately inform U.S. Government’s leadership of its findings.” In other words, NASA would be in the disclosure hot seat for “its” discovery of a genuine UFO. In 2023, NASA officials were more comfortable discussing the alien origins of UAP, whereas IC/DoD officials continued to emphasize the more narrow flight safety aspect of UAP. Congress is more comfortable discussing UFOs and disclosure than anyone in the White House, and even within Congress proximity to power determines how comfortable you are. The most vocal proponents of disclosure and the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis are backbench House members far from real power and authority, many of whom had only been in Washington a few months when they began speaking out (many of whom are also young). Long-serving senators tend to craft more guarded UAP statements.
Within the executive branch, it’s a safe assumption that no officer lower than the president is going to be able to announce to the world that aliens are among us. Anyone who serves as the pleasure of the president is aware that disclosure of any information on any subject requires a policy and a communications strategy that has filtered down through the chain of command. And right now that policy on UAP sounds like this mouthful of marbles from Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks in August 2023: “The UAP mission is not easy, and AARO’s mission [is] to minimize technical and intelligence surprise by synchronizing scientific, intelligence, and operational detection identification, attribution, and mitigation of UAP objects of national security issues… The department takes UAP seriously because UAP are a potential national security threat. They also pose safety risks, and potentially endanger our personnel, our equipment and bases, and the security of our operations. DOD is focusing through AARO to better understand UAP, and improve our capabilities to detect, collect, analyze and eventually resolve UAP to prevent strategic surprise and protect our forces, our operations, and our nation.” Whatever this means, no one is going to hear it and think about aliens.
There is also the unsettling thought that no one has the authority or the qualifications to announce to the world that aliens are among us. Perhaps the officials do not want the responsibilities of fulsomely addressing the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis on their shoulders alone. Everyone has to jump together.
The fourth pressure is the deeply ingrained UFO stigma, which affects everyone to one degree or another. Government officials have said over and again that stigma should no longer apply to anyone reporting or studying UAP, but they have not found their way to repudiating the reason the stigma exists in the first place. When these people talk about stigma, they remind me of a type of gay man I’ve known who proclaims he is a proud gay man but does not have any effeminate traits. He has not truly escaped the stigmas policing gender and sexuality--as every identity group grapples with these internalized prejudices. You will meet many people in these pages--especially the scientists--who don’t want the stigma to apply to UAP studies, but for whom the stigma still seems to be policing their public statements and behaviors because they don’t want anyone to mistake them for one of the UFO cranks of old.
UFOphilia & UFOphobia
The disclosure bind puts people onto a spectrum from the UFOphilic to the UFOphobic.
Philia is a Greek word for love, but I use it here in the same way it is used in biology, such as extremophile, a microorganism with a preference for extreme environments, or thermophile, a microorganism that thrives in high temperatures. The UFOphile is comfortable discussing UFOs, and is less sensitive to stigma. They entertain the possibility of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, though they do not necessarily subscribe to it. They are often not UFO buffs. They have not all read their Jacques Valle, and they can’t quote case files from Project Blue Book. They are comfortable on the disclosure ledge. If and when the time comes to jump, they seem to have made peace with that outcome.
The quintessential quote that captures the posture of a UFOphile is from Representative Andre Carson, Democrat of Indiana. Carson uses the term UAP but he means UFO when he says it. He frequently gives interviews where he speculates about the deep implications of disclosure. In May 2023 Carson said, “Are people ready for some kind of revelation that deals with extraterrestrial life, life that is interdimensional, life that is otherworldly? And so that kind of revelation unearths people’s beliefs, their religious beliefs, their spiritual beliefs that they’ve been taught all their lives. And so, if such a revelation were to present itself, how does it get presented, and can it be done in a way that people are accepting of it?” He had already presented an answer to these questions in a January 2022 interview: “If it is otherworldly we will have internal controls in place to protect us and to engage, in the event that that happens, in a healthy and safe way.” In May 2022 the congressional subcommittee Carson chaired hosted a UAP hearing that he touted this way: “The last time Congress had a hearing on UAPs was half a century ago… the first one in 50 years, since Project Blue Book.” He added, “I hope that it does not take 50 more years for Congress to hold another because transparency is desperately needed.” This is what it sounds like when a government official is ready to leap off the disclosure ledge.
Not everyone who is of the UFOphilic perspective believes in aliens. Representative Eric Burlison, Republican of Missouri, has repeatedly said that he believes UAP sightings are caused by top-secret advanced technology. But he is comfortable talking about that and other extreme possibilities in news interviews and on the House floor. UFOphilia is simply a high comfort level with all aspects and implications of the phenomenon.
The UFOphobic person becomes uncomfortable, bordering on hostile, whenever the topic of UFOs is raised. Here my term is akin to claustrophobia, when a person placed in a confined space has an extreme and visceral negative reaction. The UFOphobe may become offended that they or others are asked to take the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis seriously. They are more susceptible to stigma, and may actively stigmatize the topic. When they discuss UAP they take pains to explain that the anomalies covered by their definition are everything but alien spacecraft. Mike Turner, Republican of Ohio and chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has repeatedly dismissed talk of aliens and UFO coverups as nonsense. He took offense when a journalist asked him about UAP in a Capitol hallway, calling it an “ambush.” He derisively called colleagues interested in the UAP topic the “pro-alien caucus.” UFOphobes tend to have thin skin and they snap back with stigmatizing comments. Others, like Kathleen Hicks quoted above, armor themselves up with impenetrable jargon from which the notion of UFOs simply bounces off. UFOphobes, for whatever reason, do not want to talk about it.
This spectrum is fluid, and it is possible for someone to fall in the middle range where they evince both perspectives. Sometimes people code switch between UFOphilia and UFOphobia depending on the context. When Sean Kirkpatrick gave his first press availability as director of AARO in December 2022 he carefully avoided the words alien or extraterrestrial. Instead he said, “There are things [UAP] that appear to demonstrate interesting flight dynamics… Some of that could be sensor phenomenology. Some of that could be flight dynamics of the platform. Some of that could be just an illusion. There’s lots of different ways that we have to investigate all of those in order to get to that truth.” But the next time we heard from him in a public forum, in the April Senate hearing, he said “extreme theories of extraterrestrials” was one of the potential hypotheses for UAP that AARO was considering. Because of his position as the representative of the IC/DoD charged with investigating UAP, Kirkpatrick would spend the year toggling between both perspectives. We saw NASA officials doing a similar two-step.
Pay attention to how these dispositions map onto the many public statements and actions chronicled in this book. These officials on the ledge are facing the possibility of having to admit something that has long been considered not only impossible but impolitic. Certain facts, circumstances, and mandates have arisen to compel authorities--be they governmental, scientific, or journalistic authorities--to address the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis for UFOs, while the grave implications of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, the slippery nature of UFO evidence, and stigma all compel them to be extremely cautious and guarded about what they say. This bind pushes them toward either UFOphilia or UFOphobia, but just as often has them scrambling in between.
How does one escape the disclosure bind? One way is simply to pull the ripcord and jump, consequences be damned. Representative Tim Burchett, Republican of Tennessee, has described himself and several others in Congress as “true believers,” and he has repeatedly called for the IC/DoD to turn over all of its UFO evidence going back to the Roswell crash. In 2023 Senator Schumer, Democrat of New York, proposed legislation, the UAP Disclosure Act, that would require every government office to turn over any and all UAP records in their possession--be they about UAP, or UFOs, “flying saucers,” and even “biological evidence of living or deceased non-human intelligence”--to the National Archivist, who would then put a process in place to release such records to the public. In Part 1: UFOs in Congress, we will review all of Congress’s UAP-related activities in 2023.
Another way to escape the bind is to amass enough incontrovertible scientific evidence of the phenomenon so that the negative opposition to disclosure falls away. This is the approach of AARO and NASA, and in Part 2: UFOs in the Executive Branch we will examine their efforts and methodologies.
A third approach is to dismiss the premise of disclosure altogether, to argue there is in fact nothing to disclose because UFOs are not real and aliens are not visiting the Earth. In order to make this case in the early-to-mid 21st Century, you need to put forth a theory for why the UFO myth refuses to die, why different iterations of it continue to be trotted out decade after decade. In 2023, some members of the scientific community and the media put forward these theories. In Part 3: UFOs in the Mainstream we will analyze their arguments, as well survey how other mainstream thought leaders responded to the year’s UFO developments.
A Note on Sources
In 2021 I began compiling every public statement and action about UFOs made by members of Congress or currently serving employees of the federal government, which I have posted in an archive on my blog. These include everything from proposed legislation to transcripts of news interviews to social media posts. Some of these nuggets may have made a splash in the moment but will be difficult-to-impossible to unearth from the internet years from now. For this yearbook I have basically just stitched the quotes from 2023 into a cohesive narrative. Since I intend for this to be useful as a research tool, every quote is sourced. The congressional quotes are too numerous to cite properly in these pages, however you can find the exact date and source information in my blog’s archive. Go to www.justinscottsnead.com, and click on the category UFOs | Government Statements & Timelines. For all other quotes and essential facts, I reference the exact source material in the Works Cited section at the end of this book.
My Own View
Anyone writing about UFOs has an obligation to be up front with their readers about their baseline assumptions and biases about the phenomenon because these determine what information you select and how you present it. While I’ve enjoyed a good UFO yarn since childhood, until 2017 I never for a moment believed that the stories were true. That all changed in 2017, as it did for a lot of people, when The New York Times published an article that revealed how the Pentagon was studying UFOs in secret up to the present day, long after we’d been told they had stopped. I got curious and began reading as much of the case histories as I could.
On the whole, I find the case histories credible and persuasive on the grounds that countless witnesses describe strange and impossible things in almost the exact same terms despite the fact they are separated by geography, culture, and decades of time. The case histories are rife with individuals who cannot be said to have been confused by mere lights in the sky, and they consistently describe the same phenomena--in the 1890s and the 2020s and every decade in between. I do not believe that all of these unassociated people could be wrong in exactly the same way.
I believe that Occam’s Razor points to the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis as the most likely explanation. My preference is to think of the aliens as visiting anthropologists akin to scientists studying an uncontacted indigenous tribe in New Guinea or the Amazon, collecting soil samples, taking notes, careful not to interfere but not overly concerned about being spotted. I have no idea how accurate this view may be. Evidence of UFO presence is clear. Evidence of UFO origins and intentions is clear as mud.
Since witness accounts, be they from the 1890s, the 1940s, or the 2010s all seem to me to represent the same phenomenon, I do not believe the theory that UFOs are caused by secret advanced human technology. Our government’s public actions from 2018 through 2023 do not make a lick of sense unless some and perhaps most of UFO lore is true. The theories that try to prove the public and their leaders continuously succumb to mania or are duped by fools, I find unpersuasive and ahistorical.
Why a Yearbook?
At no time in the nearly 80-year history of our government’s relationship with UFOs has the push to finally produce an answer been so broad based, so comprehensively methodical, and so sincere. We seem to be closer to disclosure than we have ever been. This is why I began carefully archiving public statements in early 2021, and why I am compiling this yearbook.
Crack open a yearbook from your school-age days. Scan the faces. Find your square. There are undoubtedly many things you know now that they could not have known then, information and advice that you would love to send back across the years. But they also knew things that we do not, that have been forgotten, that are misremembered. The thrill of victory or defeat at the homecoming game. The score. What was so funny about the jokes in everyone’s favorite movie. The No. 1 song on the radio. The way everyone jumped when the DJ played it at the school dance. The look on the chaperones’ faces. The look on yours. Those were important, formative years, worth remembering. As are these.
--JS
West Orange, New Jersey
February 2024