History is chock full of stories about flying saucers spotted by characters deemed too “crazy” to be believable when they reported their extraterrestrial experiences. As you can imagine (or maybe even relate to), relaying accounts of strange shapes in the sky or alien abduction don’t tend to go very well.
However, after naval officers consistently began spotting unidentified flying objects in the sky, or, as they referred to it, “unexplained aerial phenomena,” the Navy is finally starting to take these reports a little more seriously.
According to POLITICO, these sightings have been happening on the reg since 2014 and it is just now that the military branch is creating a formal procedure for pilots to report these mysterious encounters.
The decision is in response to “a series of sightings of unknown, highly advanced aircraft intruding on Navy strike groups and other sensitive military formations and facilities,” the service told POLITICO.
Recently, there’s been an uptick in sightings, as often as multiple sightings a month, Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for office of the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, told The Washington Post.
“We want to get to the bottom of this. We need to determine who’s doing it, where it’s coming from and what their intent is,” he told The Post. “We need to try to find ways to prevent it from happening again.”
Former intelligence officials told the Post that it’s about damn time these reports were destigmatized. Many pilots wouldn’t come forward with their information as they feared how it might impact their career. Not that reporting the activity brought about any sort of action anyway.
Even if you don’t believe in aliens and such, logically this is rather a confounding blasé response as, well, SOMEONE OR SOMETHING IS CLEARLY OUT THERE. But, maybe they know something we don’t.
“I don’t believe in safety through ignorance,” Chris Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence and staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told The Post regarding the military’s previous lack of action.
Luckily, the Navy seems to have seen the light (get it?).
“There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years,” the Navy told POLITICO in a statement. “For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.”
While we’re not sure anything will come of the military taking these reports seriously, we stan with The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling in saying: “It may be said with a degree of assurance that not everything that meets the eye is as it appears.”
Amanda Push
