Society now deals with UFOs differently. American television journalist George Knapp said when interviewed by 8 News Now Las Vegas, “Already what’s happened is a remarkable change that I never thought I would see in my lifetime. All these years of chasing this crazy mystery uh the congress has admitted it’s a legitimate mystery. It deserves our attention. They called for the UAP task force to be created. They created it. A report was put together by the pentagon the media is interested. They’re covering it.”
The change in how we deal with UFOs is noteworthy and consistent with the theme of this website. Consider the difference in the tone between the following media reports:
| December 2017 |
The New York Times published an article, “2 Navy Airmen and an Object That ‘Accelerated Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen“ |
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| August 2018 |
The New York Times published “A Radar Blip, a Flash of Light: How UFOs ‘Exploded’ Into Public View.” The article is mainly about a 1952 sighting. |
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| July 2020 |
The New York Times published an article titled “No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s UFO Unit Will Make Some Findings Public.” The article quotes Eric W. Davis, an astrophysicist who worked as a subcontractor and then a consultant for the Pentagon UFO program from 2007. Davis said that, in some cases, examination of the materials had so far failed to determine their source, leading him to conclude, “We couldn’t make it ourselves.” |
With those of the twentieth century:
| February 1942 |
The US Office of Air Force History attributed The Battle of Los Angeles to a case of “war nerves” triggered by a lost weather balloon and exacerbated by stray flares and shell bursts from adjoining batteries. |
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| June 1947 |
The US military stated that the crashed object near Roswell, New Mexico, was merely a conventional weather balloon. |
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| July 1952 |
On The Washington, DC UFO Incident, Peter Carlson wrote in the Washington Post in 2002, “As rumours spread, President Truman demanded to know what was flying over his house. Soon the federal government was fighting the UFOs with the most powerful weapons in the Washington arsenal — bureaucracy, obfuscation and gobbledygook. That seemed to work. The UFOs never returned.” |
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| December 1985 | The Rendlesham Forest, UK | |
| November 1989 to April 1990 | The Belgian UFO Wave, where there were many sightings but little investigation. | |
| March 1997 | The Phoenix Lights |
In May 2001, Dr Steven Greer gave a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, featuring 20 retired Air Force officers, Federal Aviation Administration, and intelligence officers. In October 2017, a business venture called To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science was established, with some high-profile individuals from the US intelligence community, including the CIA and Department of Defence. The initiative has yet to achieve the anticipated results, but the fact they were attempted is significant.
Communication by governments and media about UFOs and extra-terrestrials has in the past been minimal. Decision-makers did not know how to respond. They probably hoped that by ignoring sightings, people would forget them. However, the frequency of the UFO phenomenon appears to have increased in modern times. We can speculate as to the reason for this. It may be that there are more people to observe them, or we have the technology to record them, or our use of nuclear weapons has attracted the interest of alien entities. For whatever reason, there are more sightings today than a hundred years ago.