This past Sunday, 60 Minutes aired a segment on UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon - a modern term for UFOs). They interviewed Navy pilots who have seen strange craft, and they showed declassified video of those objects. The Pentagon confirmed the videos show craft that they can't identify. Here's a link to the segment:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-military-intelligence-60-minutes-2021-05-16/
Note that there are 3 separate videos on the page. Each is worth watching. I've been asked what my thoughts are, so this blog post is my answer.
Some random thoughts:
It was a really interesting segment. Kudos to the pilots for coming forward, especially considering all the ridicule they faced immediately after their encounter. Government acknowledgement of these things has to start somewhere and this is as good a place as any. Another video was released last weekend; it shows a UAP flying along the ocean surface and diving into the water. I'm hopeful that all of this results in even more evidence being released and that it allows the topic to be discussed openly and intelligently in public.
At the same time, it's frustrating. UAPs/UFOs have been around for at least 70 years. We should be much farther along than this. The government program referenced in the segment, AATIP, was started around 2007 and had a budget of $22 million dollars. That's pocket change. There have got to be much deeper programs within the government (more likely military) with infinitely more money that have been studying this since the beginning. The military isn't stupid; if there's any chance of gaining an advantage by studying these objects and potentially reverse engineering them, they would do it in a heart beat. So the 60 Minutes program is surface-level disclosure. I would bet there's still a deeper level to go. But you have to start somewhere.
Some even stranger thoughts:
The 60 Minutes program focused on pilots who saw something strange flying through the sky. Let's not forget that for decades people have reported encountering occupants of those flying objects, and have communicated with them! If any answers are going to be found to this puzzle, it will most likely be from studying those people and that communication.
I said earlier that UAPs/UFOs have been around for at least 70 years. I think it's more likely they are as old as humanity, given that similar descriptions are found in folklore, fairy tales, myths, and ancient and religious texts. So what are they? It's easy to jump to the conclusion that they're beings from another planet. But every culture that encounters these things interprets them differently, according to their cultural beliefs. It's unlikely that our culture is the one that finally gets it right.
Here's one non-extraterrestrial hypothesis (I think I read this theory in the book The Super Natural): In the far future, humanity hits an evolutionary dead end. So they travel into the past to nudge us down a slightly different evolutionary road. Thus, humanity is evolving both forwards in time and backwards in time.
But here's another idea, one that I really like: Just as fish have no idea what's happening on land, humans have no idea what's happening on some other aspect of the Earth. It might turn out that humans aren't even the most evolved species on the planet, because we haven't realized what "the planet" fully means.
Of course, I might be wrong about everything in this post, so take it all with a grain or two of salt.