Mainstream News Coverage of UFOs Raises Alarming Questions About Disclosure

It’s been a weird couple years for UFO research and speculation. We’re closing out a decade that has heard the drum beat for Disclosure—the long-sought declassifying of government knowledge of extraterrestrial visitations—grow intensely in certain “fringe” circles while the vast majority of mainstream scientists continue to express resolute skepticism. But is that facade slowly cracking? Recently, a series of puzzling and consistent reports began to appear in mainstream news outlets suggesting that our very own government’s employees may be far more interested in—and confused by—UFOs than previously thought.

First, there landed the now well-known December 2017 article in the New York Times about the Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which for the first time featured official government acknowledgment of ongoing Pentagon research into UFOs. This dovetailed with the declassification of a massive trove of hundreds of thousands of CIA documents detailing decades of Cold War-era government research into UFOs—or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), as they are more commonly referred to these days.

Even more researchers have come forward, including billionaire entrepreneur and UFO enthusiast Robert Bigelow, who had received funding from his friend and then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid so that Bigelow’s aerospace research company could investigate UAPs.

In a 60 Minutes interview, Bigelow stated: “There has been and is an existing presence, an ET presence.”

Luis Elizondo, who for years was the man in charge of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, provided further testimony that Big Think called “shocking” and a “historical inflection point in our attitudes regarding UFOs.”

If we rewind back to 2016, we can marvel over the Year of Oumuamua, the name given to “a mysterious, cigar-shaped interstellar object [that] fell through our solar system at an extraordinary speed.” The comet—the first known interstellar object to pass through our solar system—possessed such a confoundingly anomalous shape, size, trajectory and composition that scientists could not rule out its being an artificial extraterrestrial craft being propelled by solar sails.

Now, a newly published New York Times article reveals that, during the years of 2014 and 2015, Navy pilots were documenting daily UFO sightings and encounters. The article features these pilots making their claims on the record, a somewhat unusual feat. The article reads:

“The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.

“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. ‘Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.'”

Many are quick to point out that these sightings could easily be glimpses of man-made (possibly top-secret government technology) drones or other aerial craft. The Washington Post even points out that the New York Times reporters “are not saying that these UFOs are extraterrestrials, but they are trying to destigmatize the reporting of a UFO.”

However, as mainstream articles on UFOs—something that was unthinkable earlier this century—grow increasingly audacious with their claims, it’s worth considering what this trend is building towards. The more we learn about trained Navy pilots observing unidentified craft executing near-impossible maneuvers at hypersonic speeds, it’s worth considering what Disclosure would really look like in our media landscape, in which corporate news often acts as an echo chamber for the State Department.

If the government were trying to come clean about something utterly shocking and revolutionary that they knew was destined to become public knowledge, would they do it all at once or would they do it piecemeal, in a controlled drip over the course of many years—a slow-moving coup, so to speak—using their media levers to control the narrative and manage our reaction?