RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The last few months have been fertile for a number of speculative theories. A few weeks ago, the assumption that the coronavirus arose by contamination inside a laboratory left the more marginal websites to become a subject for investigation.
The same was true of UFOs, for decades an obsession for scholars of paranormal matters. Now it has become one of the rare topics of convergence among antagonists in American politics- from former Democratic President Barack Obama to ultraconservative Senator Marco Rubio.
“We can’t allow the UFO stigma to prevent us from seriously investigating it. The report is one step in this process, but it won’t be the last,” the Republican legislator said recently.
A version of the report, which has already been reviewed by high-ranking members of President Biden’s administration, is expected to go public before June 25. The document, which will have an appendix with classified information, is expected to offer some certainty after the high expectations raised by the Pentagon investigation.
Pilots who witnessed the flying phenomena west of the Californian city of San Diego, over the San Clemente Islands, described erratic behavior and lights that defied the rules of physics, coming from a pill-shaped object.
According to these statements, the alleged craft had no visible engines or exhaust and was recorded at an altitude of over 9,000 meters, at high speed. One of these objects performed daily flights between the second half of 2014 and March 2015. “It was accelerating like nothing I’ve ever seen,” said in an interview David Fravor, one of the Navy pilots.
According to The New York Times, the document concedes that many of these encounters are difficult to explain. It rules out the possibility that they were objects such as probes or weather balloons because their trajectories did not respect changes in wind speed.
Some sources have told the newspaper that there is concern that these are experiments by rival powers, such as Russia and China, with supersonic technology to evade anti-missile radar.
There is a man behind the current UFO buzz in the United States. His name is Harry Reid and he was the leader of the Democrats in the Senate for 12 years, from 2005 to 2017. Originally from the state of Nevada, for a decade starting in 2007, he was in charge of funding a secret Pentagon project to investigate whether UFO sightings posed a risk to Earth.
The senator became a leading advocate of the need to invest in scientific research into these phenomena, publicly stating that he was “fascinated” by the things he had seen on a visit to legendary Area 51, where findings on alleged extraterrestrial life are kept under the strictest secrecy.
Recently, Reid told The Guardian that Congress should lead investigation efforts. “I don’t think the report is going to tell us much,” the 81-year-old ex-politician said, evidencing a certain distrust of the Pentagon.
This is not the first time that U.S. politics has had extraterrestrial concerns. President Jimmy Carter, convinced he had seen a UFO in the mid-1970s, asked NASA to launch an investigation into the phenomenon.
The space agency declined the Democrat’s suggestion, anticipating that it would likely be too expensive and yield unprofitable results. A few years ago, the Air Force invested millions of dollars in a surveillance program of the skies, with little benefit. Barack Obama was one of the last to join the trend.
“Jokes aside, there are videos and records of objects in the skies which we don’t know exactly what they are,” the former president said recently. Washington is still unable to clarify this doubt. Or doesn’t want to.