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you to believe In UFOs?mental ing shift in public UFO discourse, is sup- There may not be alien spacecraft, but there is clearly now a faction at you within the national security com-eneral plex that wants Americans to think ounter there might be alien spacecraft, to tinuity give these stories credence rather iences than dismissal, remod- The evidence for this shift ) faerie includes the military’s newfound di, the willingness to disclose weird atmo-to offer spheric encounters. It includes the :ind of establishment of the task force that is or of Grusch was assigned to. It includes ls than the government’s bizarre behavior, netary secretive in an attention-grabbing way, around the military shoot-space- downs of what were presumably nment balloons earlier this year, up two It also includes other examples bilities. of credentialed figures, like Stands cross ford pathology professor Garry dimen- Nolan, who claim they’re being omable handed evidence of extraterrestri-w keep al contact. And it includes the venirs range of strange stories being fed m gov- to writers willing to operate in the ing evi- weird-science zone, out the I am not a personal recipient of covered hints and tidbits—though my DMs )onald are open if you have them — and I have no definite theory of why this 3 mere push is happening. Maybe it’s iscinat- because there really is somethingOut There, and we’re being prepared for the big reveal. Or maybe the dose of Pentagon funding that Harry Reid engineered for studying the paranormal back in 2007 allowed a cluster of UFO enthusiasts to infiltrate the defense establishment. Or maybe there’s always a Deep State network of occult-knowledge believers — think of the Cold War experiments in psychic research—and they’ve just become more media-savvy lately.Or maybe it’s a cynical effort to use unexplained phenomena as an excuse to goose military funding. Or maybe it’s a psy-op to discredit critics of the national security state — to make, say, Tucker Carlson look bad by persuading him to believe in aliens and then doing a debunking.Actual aliens would be more interesting than Deep State cranks or psy-ops. But all these scenarios make for pretty strange stories about how our government operates.So you should be following the UFO beat even if you don’t think aliens are out there — because the truth might be weird enough.ROSS DOUTHAT is a columnist for The New York Times.
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Mon, Jun 12, 2023
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