Here’s Why UFOs Are Back in the News

UFOs are back in the news this week with the release of a long-awaited Pentagon report that was designed to address public interest in the topic.

UFOs (or, rather, UAP, as they’re now known), were injected back into public consciousness last year thanks largely to a former high-ranking intelligence official, David Grusch, who, after quitting his post at a prominent defense agency, went public with a variety of weird claims about aliens and spacecraft. Specifically, Grusch claimed that a highly secretive government program existed that was dedicated to the recovery and reverse-engineering of crashed UFOs.

Grusch’s allegations led to a bonkers Congressional hearing and a legislative push to investigate the issues he had raised. The new report, which was was authored by the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, was ostensibly meant to investigate whether the government had covered up evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Now that the Pentagon’s report is out, it can officially be said that this latest investigation does nothing to prove the existence of aliens—just the opposite, in fact. The report notably states that the “aggregate findings of all [U.S. Government] investigations to date have not found even one case of UAP representing off-world technology.” In other words, whatever the government’s been looking into, it’s definitely not aliens.

The report notes the role of pop culture in perpetuating “a particularly persistent narrative that the USG—or a secretive organization within it—recovered several off-world spacecraft and extraterrestrial biological remains, that it operates a program or programs to reverse engineer the recovered technology, and that it has conspired since the 1940s to keep this effort hidden from the United States Congress and the American public.”

The report seems to imply that what many witnesses thought were extraterrestrial craft were really just some sort of “black ops” defense technology that the government was testing at the time. The report points to numerous historical programs conducted by the government that involved experimentation with new forms of aircraft, including spaceships.

Grusch’s claims have been bolstered by a gaggle of true believers, but have been met with mystified skepticism by Congress and most of the American public. In addition to his allegations about a UFO retrieval program, Grusch has claimed that Mussolini and the Vatican once worked together to recover an alien ship and that UFOs may be evidence of interdimensional beings or time travelers.