The New York Times published a story Thursday night about the likelihood that aliens have visited Earth. The main takeaway? Aliens could be real and the U.S. government has been conducting classified briefings in recent years about things left behind by “off-world vehicles.”
Naturally, the new article appears on the 17th page of today’s paper because everything else here on Earth is fucking bonkers and the existence of aliens barely makes headlines. There is, after all, both a pandemic going on and the frightening rise of a neo-fascist government apparatus helmed by a sociopathic narcissist.
So what does the new article have to say about the possibility of little green men—aside from the ones currently in Portland? A well-funded group inside the Office of Naval Intelligence is actively investigating unexplained encounters between members of the military and unidentified flying objects. And while some of the “materials” recovered by U.S. government sources have turned out to have perfectly innocent explanations, some materials are still a total mystery.
From the Times:
Eric W. Davis, an astrophysicist who worked as a subcontractor and then a consultant for the Pentagon U.F.O. program since 2007, said that, in some cases, examination of the materials had so far failed to determine their source and led him to conclude, “We couldn’t make it ourselves.”
Davis says he’s briefed many people in government, including U.S. Senators:
Mr. Davis, who now works for Aerospace Corporation, a defense contractor, said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
Mr. Davis said he also gave classified briefings on retrievals of unexplained objects to staff members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Oct. 21, 2019, and to staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee two days later.
Former Nevada Senator Harry Reid, who has long championed the cause of exploring UFOs, told the Times that he believes the U.S. government has alien materials in its possession. Perhaps more disturbingly, he also believes that people in the private sector have materials as well.
“After looking into this, I came to the conclusion that there were reports—some were substantive, some not so substantive—that there were actual materials that the government and the private sector had in their possession,” Reid told the Times.
[Update 1:05 PM: The Times has added a correction to its story since Gizmodo first published this piece. It reads in full:
An earlier version of this article inaccurately rendered remarks attributed to Harry Reid, the retired Senate majority leader from Nevada. Mr. Reid said he believed that crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred and that retrieved materials should be studied; he did not say that crashes had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades. An earlier version also misstated the frequency with which the director of national intelligence is supposed to report on unidentified aerial phenomena. It is 180 days after enactment of the intelligence authorization act, not every six months.]
By the end of the article, Reid even notes the possibility of “retrieved craft,” the idea that the U.S. government may have an alien spaceship of some kind in its possession.
The classified nature of government briefings has been the main hurdle to getting information out to the public, according to the Times. But this isn’t the first time that the New York Times has dropped a story about aliens that seemingly confirms their existence. Back in 2017, the Times reported on a secretive Pentagon group that was studying UFO encounters. Dubbed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, the program has been since renamed.
Footage released in the past three years shows some encounters that are very hard to explain. The U.S. Navy has even confirmed that the videos are real.
You can read the full story over at the New York Times.
Are aliens real? No one knows for sure. But if they land on our planet in a very public way we might not have the ability to deal with their shit in 2020.
Not now, aliens, we’ve got some more pressing matters that need our attention. In case you didn’t notice, we’ve got this whole global pandemic thing happening as formerly democratic countries devolve into chaos. Try us again in a couple of years, when people like Donald Trump are hopefully behind bars. We’ll gladly offer him up as a bizarre specimen for your human zoos or whatever else it is you’ve come to do.