The European Union needs to adress the UFO issue

Night lights of Europe. Credit: NASA (CC BY 2.0).

Since December 2017, Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) have gone from ridicule to a matter of national security in the USA. In Europe, the silence in mainstream media and politics is universal. 

The magnitude of attention given to the UFO issue in the USA is remarkable compared to Europe. The difference in attention is especially stark in the political domain: no official representative of the European Union has made any comment on the UFO issue. 

So, why the absence of attention on the UFO issue in Europe, and why does it matter?

Before we can explore the questions raised above, we first have to give a crude overview of what has happened with the UFO issue in the USA since 2017. The overview only shows four major events that helped transition the status of UFOs from a fringe topic to a national security issue in the U.S. Congress.

The five nuclear-weapon nations make a joint statement: a UFO connection?

"Nuclear Explosion Made in a Blender" (CC0 1. 0).

On January 3 2022, the leaders of the five nuclear-weapons nations made a joint statement on preventing nuclear war and avoiding arms races. You can read the joint statement here:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/01/03/p5-statement-on-preventing-nuclear-war-and-avoiding-arms-races/

Do the joint statement on preventing nuclear war have anything to do with the recent political attention on the UAP issue? I am mainly referring to the political awareness in the US, and specifically to — as of December 2021, passed as law — the amendment of a UAP office within the Department of Defence by U.S Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. 

High Strangeness and Metaphysics

The False Mirror, 1928 - René Magritte.

[This is a core post in my project to contribute to a "sociology of UFO disclosure". The post is above all an example of how epistemology and the philosophy of science can apply to the UFO issue. - J. T]

Introduction

The idea for this post came from a comment on #ufotwitter. The gist of the comment, or reflection, was something to the effect: How can we study such an elusive and strange phenomenon as UFOs/UAP with the scientific method? My interpretation of the comment is that the person implicitly referred to the high strangeness aspect of the UFO phenomenon (-na). The person wondered how the metaphysical assumptions (for instance, "physicalism") of contemporary science can even take seriously phenomena that seem to contradict our concepts of what is real or not, possible or impossible. (The term "physicalism" is defined in sections 1 and 2 after this introduction).

 I use the term "high strangeness" in J. Allen Hynek´s (1910 - 1986) meaning as a qualitative measure of the plausibility of a UFO sighting (roughly, "the more bizarre and absurd, the more plausible"). But I am using the term high strangeness in a broader sense, including phenomena manifesting at Skinwalker Ranch, Marley Woods, and similar places worldwide. Thus, high strangeness experiences and events can occur independently of a UFO presence (which does not rule out the possibility that high strangeness events (paranormal phenomena) and UFOs are connected).

The ODNI UAP report: lies or truths?

The unclassified ODNI UAP report.

[This is a core post in my project to contribute to a "sociology of UFO disclosure." The post is an example of how sociological methods - here, discourse analysis - can apply to the UFO issue. - J. T]

On Friday, June 25, 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) delivered the report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) or UFOs. The title of the unclassified report is "Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena." A classified report or annex was issued as well, as confirmed by the ODNI to the Black Vault. 

In the following, I will comment on the parts in the unclassified report that I find most intriguing. Those parts are mainly covered under the headline Specific points in the UAP report. But more importantly, I will highlight parts of the report that, in my view, justify criticism. That criticism is mainly found under the headline The Executive Summary: lies or truths?

But before all that, I will in general terms explain why I think the ODNI UAP report (henceforth "the UAP report") is, despite its shortcomings, historical in a positive sense. 

If you are unfamiliar with the "origin" story of the UAP report, you can catch up on my post from June 27, 2020. Furthermore, I highly recommend you to read this detailed analysis of the UAP report by Tim McMillan for the Debrief. For instance, in McMillan's analysis, you can learn more about what method or process the UAP report is based on, namely the "Intelligence Cycle", and how it differs from the traditional scientific method. That is important to keep in mind when studying the language of the UAP report. 

Now to the main two reasons as to why the UAP report is historical.

 General comments on the UAP report

Why do I claim that the unclassified UAP report is historical? Because for the first time in history, as far as I am aware, the U.S. Government (USG) officially confirms: 

• That (some) UAP/UFOs are physical objects — UFOs are real.
• That the USG cannot explain what (some) UAP/UFOs are. 

Now, pause for a while and think about those statements by the USG (I say "the USG" because that is ultimately the authority behind the UAP report). Those statements are an official 180-degree turnaround from the Condon Report, The Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (1969). The Condon Report concluded that "there was no evidence of anything other than commonplace phenomena in the reports and that UFOs did not warrant further investigation." (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Condon-Report). 

The obstacle to greater transparency

M. C. Escher: "Band of Union".

 [This post is one of the core posts in my project to contribute to a "sociology of UFO disclosure." In retrospective, I could have made the post more explicitly micro-sociological: think of, e.g., Erwin Goffman's stigma theory ("guilty secrets") or Robert Merton's concept of "dirty hands" in institutional sociology. With that said, some of the content has aged quite well, e.g., the amnesty proposal.- J. T]

In this post, I will outline what I believe is the greatest obstacle to greater official transparency on the UFO phenomenon. I will also suggest a plausible solution to circumvent the obstacle. 

The obstacle

What is the greatest obstacle to official transparency regarding the UFO issue? My claim is that the most significant barrier is fear in the minds of some high-ranking officials in the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community (IC). My suggestion for a solution is to moderate that fear—I will return to "how" further down.

In the following, let us use common sense and introductory human psychology. First, what is behind these high-ranking officials’ fear? If you are familiar with UFO history, you know that the documented evidence of denial and ridicule of the significance of UFOs/UAP by the U.S. government (USG) is abundant and clear. 

The reason for the high-ranking officials´ fear is that the official stance of denial and ridicule, held over many decades, will be made public.