by John Oliver tackled the complex, potentially fun subject of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) on Sunday evening – “a difficult subject to talk about”, the Last Week Tonight host said, “as it is usually discussed UFOs in one of two ways” . The first is “wildly speculative”, as the Renaissance painters claimed depicted foreign invaders. And the second way is complete dismissal “with borderline contempt”.
But the topic has returned to serious headlines in recent years thanks to secret UFO files released by the government in 2017, the start of a “cascade of revelations”, Oliver said, including the DoD revealing that 11 he reports on documented cases i. which pilots have had near misses with Unidentified Flight Objects.
“So if it’s a ubiquitous topic and such big questions are being asked, maybe now is a good time – and I can’t believe I’m about to say this – to talk about UFOs: what is known us, what we don’t know, and some of the problems with how we managed to get more information,” explained Oliver.
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He began with a disclaimer: that talking about UFOs does not necessarily mean talking about aliens, but unidentified anomalous phenomena (UNP). “Whether you can believe in aliens or not, when it comes to UFOs, belief doesn’t really come into it,” he said. “Whatever they are, people are looking at them.”
And people have been looking at things in the sky for thousands of years. “For as long as people have been around, they’ve been seeing strange things that they can’t explain,” Oliver said. But the modern obsession with UFOs is the highly publicized sighting of “flying saucers” by a pilot in 1947.
“Since the beginning of our modern obsession with UFOs, it has been believed that our government is keeping something from us,” Oliver explained. “And that mistrust is well deserved. The history of the US government’s study of UFOs has ranged from the disaffected to the actively misleading.” The first “flight save” sparked years of debate about the study of UFOs, with the government commissioning reports from scientists whose investigations proved they didn’t exist.
But the government was “actively covering them up”, said Oliver, “although not necessarily in the ways or for the reasons the History Channel might have you believe”.
Oliver mentioned the famous alleged UFO crash in Roswell in 1947, which the government claimed was a weather balloon, which led to rampant speculation. In 1997, after congressional efforts from New Mexico to elicit more answers, the government admitted that it had lied to cover up that the “weather balloon” was debris from a top-secret US air force research project on its called Mogul, which was designed to detect. Soviet nuclear tests.
“That makes more sense, although it’s hard to take the government’s word for it because they’ve admitted they’ve been lying for 50 years,” Oliver said. “No wonder people are still speculating about Roswell to this day. It’s basically The Boy Who Called Wolf, if the Pentagon is the boy, the Wolf was a 600 foot spy balloon, and the moral of the story is we got up to a lot of stupid shit during the cold war.’”
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Additionally, a CIA study found that manned reconnaissance flights accounted for more than half of UFO sightings from the late 1950s to the 1960s, leading to vague public statements by the military.
In recent years, the Pentagon confirmed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) to study UFOs. “For many, it looked like, finally, after years of bad-faith government inquiries, this could be a real breakthrough,” Oliver said. “But unfortunately, when people looked into that program, they found they had more questions than answers.”
AATIP’s research was largely contracted out to a company owned by hotel budget mogul and Ron DeSantis donor Robert Bigelow, with little tangible results, at least that we know of. “It’s very disappointing,” said Oliver, “because people deserve serious answers to these legitimate questions, especially because it takes courage to even ask them or talk about what you’ve seen.”
The good news, he continued, was that “there seems to be a movement toward a more careful consideration of UFOs.” For example, NASA recently put together a team to examine UAPs, and they offered an hour-long press conference breaking down how one amazing video of an unidentified object, while still unknown, didn’t move nearly as well. fast as it was. NASA asserts that a “rigorous, evidence-based, data-driven scientific framework is essential” to the study of UFOs. “And they’re right about that,” said Oliver. “It’s promising and long overdue to see people approaching this issue sobologically, scientifically and perhaps more importantly, boringly.
“There needs to be room for honest inquiry,” he said, “because science is about gathering small answers that will ultimately help us tackle big questions.”
