Tag: UFOs

The UFO Disclosure Trap

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

Government secrecy makes UFO claims impossible to verify—or disprove.

When I lived in Arizona, my next-door neighbor once told me that he had seen a time machine. These types of anecdotes are not uncommon in Arizona, out on the edge of the world. At the time, I was in graduate school for physics at Arizona State, and I presumed my neighbor was either lying or confused. He had seen the time machine, he told me, behind the door of a restricted area of his former employer, a defense contractor in Tucson. I nodded politely and let it slide, much as I would for the claims from our neighborhood Mormon missionaries or the 9/11 Truthers whose stand I passed daily on my walk to the cafeteria.

I was thinking about my old neighbor when I recently came across a clip of Joe Rogan speaking with Dan Farah, the director of a new documentary, The Age of Disclosure. If Farah is to be believed, my neighbor might indeed have seen something behind that door. The Age of Disclosure claims that crashed Unidentified Aerial Phenomena—and, yes, UAPs are just UFOs by another name—have been studied by defense contractors for some eight decades, and that failing to take them seriously poses a risk to national security.

Regular readers will know that UFOs and US government secrecy are both part of my beat here at 3QD, so I grabbed my tinfoil hat and pressed play.

The Age of Disclosure tells a story that, as many critics have noted, is by now pretty familiar, which doesn’t stop it from being pretty crazy. The vibe of the film owes much to conspiracy thrillers like The Parallax View or JFK, with frequent solemn shots of national monuments thrumming to a continuous soundtrack. A good deal of the runtime is filled by montages of dark-suited men saying things like “UAPs are real, they’re here, and they’re not human.” The movie’s poster tagline, “34 Government Insiders Reveal the Truth,” gives a good idea about what it offers: clips of military, intelligence, and congressional officials affirming, on the record and under their own names, that they think UFOs are a real concern. Read more »

Monday, January 25, 2021

Science and “The Phenomenon”

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

There are two main types of people who seek out arguments that contradict their beliefs: those who are not afraid to change their mind, and those cannot imagine themselves doing so. I’m not sure which type I was a few years ago when I watched Out of the Blue, a documentary that billed itself as “the definitive investigation of the UFO phenomenon.” I was living at the time near Phoenix, Arizona, and was vaguely aware of its paranormal enthusiasts, but I wasn’t one of them. I watched the documentary as entertainment, to distract myself while grading papers. (Back then, I was teaching high school science.) When I turned it on, I hadn’t expected to be convinced. I also hadn’t expected Phoenix to play any part in the movie, so I was surprised to learn, in its first extended segment, about the “Phoenix lights,” a mass UFO sighting over Phoenix in 1999, and even more surprised when Fife Symington, Arizona’s governor during the incident, confirmed on camera that he had seen something and, despite his best efforts, hadn’t gotten to the bottom of it.

This was the first time I had ever considered UFOs as a non-fictional possibility, and I went around asking friends and coworkers about it. I only met one person who said she had seen the lights, a laboratory technician from Maricopa who played viola in my chamber music group. I remained interested in the subject, but despite her confirmation I looked no further.

Too bad for me. UFOs have gotten a mainstream boost in the past few years, and seem now to have neared the cusp of respectability. In 2017, the New York Times reported on the existence of ongoing efforts within the US defense department to understand them, and since then the gray lady has continued her UFO coverage apace. In 2019, the New Yorker published an interview with Avi Loeb, the Harvard astronomer who has argued that ‘Oumuamua, an elongated object spotted within our solar system, may be a guided craft, and this month, they reviewed Loeb’s book on the subject.

At the end of 2020, James Fox, the director of Out of the Blue, released a new film titled The Phenomenon. It’s a polished piece of work (“the definitive investigation of the UFO phenomenon” might be a good tagline for it if that one weren’t already taken), and it’s designed to capitalize on the new UFO respectability, of which Fox is but one architect. Yet as a viewer, I’ve changed, and what might have been mind-blowing a few years ago now seems a little propagandistic, though I admittedly continue to be confused. Read more »