TRUE STORY TUESDAYS: UFO Phenomena
A few weeks ago, I kicked this series off with a review of Northern Lights: A UFO Documentary. Since then, I have been really digging on documentaries. I’ve spent weeks watching and listening to documentary style content on subjects ranging from cryptids and the paranormal to serial killers. I’ve noticed that while ghosts and cryptids may be seen by any number of people at different times, there are several UFO sightings that were corroborated by several witnesses at once. I know that the plural of anecdote isn’t “evidence” but you’ve got to admit that the fact that a ton of people see and report these things at the same time is, at the very least, intriguing. The deeper I dig into the information that is available, the more I begin to think that we aren’t alone.
Before you can really get into the subject of aliens, you need to accept one simple fact: your government lies to you. As an American, I can handle that one pretty easily. Hang on, don’t close out of the article just yet. I’m not gonna go on some ridiculous political rant; just bare with me for a minute and let me give you an example. The second Gulf of Tonkin Incident, the event that lead to the Vietnam war, never happened and a report from the NSA that was declassified in 2005 stated that the report of the first Gulf of Tonkin incident was inaccurate. It was on the strength of the inaccurate report of the first incident and the imaginary second incident that congress ruled to allow Johnson to basically declare war. That’s enough for me to accept that the government might fudge the truth on things like aliens.
Are you with me now? Good. Now we can go on. I’m not going to go too deeply in-depth into anything here; I’m just gonna touch on a few pretty compelling things but I cordially invite you to use these as starting points and take a trip down the rabbit hole with me.
Project Blue Book
Between 1952 and 1969 the US Air Force conducted an intelligence operation called Project Blue Book. This project had the goals of determining if UFO phenomena were a threat to national security and to scientifically analyze data concerning UFOs. I find it interesting that it wasn’t to find out if UFOs were real or were the work of extraterrestrial beings. They wanted to know if they were a threat. Blue Book wasn’t the intelligence operation to study UFO activity, before it came Project Sign and Project Grudge. The final report from Sign said that some UFO sightings represented actual aircraft but there was not enough data to be sure of their origin. Many of the personnel working under Sign believed that UFOs represented alien contact but this was rejected by officers; the project was dissolved and replaced with Grudge. Grudge was pretty much a big ol’ “Fuck you” directed at Project Sign. The record keeping was sloppy and the research was miniscule.
Blue Book’s final report stated that most of the 12,000+ reports were explainable by either flights of then-secret aircrafts like the U-2 and A-12 and misidentification of natural phenomena. There was a percentage of the accounts that remain unexplainable. While the final report Blue Book states that there’s no proof that there’s any advanced technology and that the sightings do not represent a threat, I still find it pretty intriguing that they did these studies. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those dudes know some things they aren’t allowed to talk about.
The Washington, D.C. Incident
On July 19th 1952, just before midnight, an air traffic controller at Washington National Airport saw seven unidentified blips on his radar. There were no registered aircraft in the area and these blips were not following any discernible flight patterns. They were also moving in ways and at speeds that were unlike any aircraft, commercial or military, available at the time. At the same time, people all around the city were seeing what appeared to be balls of light hovering in the sky and then zipping off in random directions at high rates of speed before stopping to hover again. There were so many people calling the authorities to report the sightings that night that the city’s telephone system was overwhelmed.
While this was happening, airmen at the Andrews Air Force Base were also tracking the lights visually as well on radar. Around 3 am, just before two USAF Starfire jets from New Castle AFB in Delaware entered the airspace around D.C., the lights vanished. The USAF jets patrolled the area until they ran low on fuel and had to return to their base. When the jets vacated the airspace, the lights returned. This prompted airmen at Andrews to conclude that the UFOs were monitoring radio communications and acting accordingly.
The Lubbock Lights
On August 25, 1951 a group of Texas Tech professors were standing outside and saw two formations of lights overhead. The first group passed by and as they were discussing it, the second one flew overhead. Each of these formations contained about 20 or 30 lights. Five nights later, Carl Hart, Jr. was laying in bed looking out his window and saw a group of 18-20 lights in a Y formation. He stepped outside and when a second group flew overhead, he snapped some pictures. The Hart Photos are some of the most famous photographs of UFO phenomena in existence.
It is not the Hart Photos but the US government’s explanation of the Lubbock Lights that leads me to believe that these were genuinely something extraterrestrial. Their explanation was that the Lubbock lights were “have been positively identified as a very commonplace and easily explainable natural phenomenon.” They did not, however, elaborate further. That doesn’t just sound like a lie to me but a lazy lie.
Look, I’m not saying that I’m 100% convinced that aliens are doing flyovers and fucking with air traffic controllers. I’m just saying that my curiosity is piqued and it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that aliens are making contact and the government is lying about it. If nothing else, it’s an incredibly interesting thing to dig into.
