Don’t Get in a Hurry About the UFO Files

A reminder before anyone gets carried away: unidentified does not mean alien.

The U is doing a lot of work in UAP. It means the analyst on duty couldn’t resolve what was on the screen with the data available. That’s all. The category sweeps in weather balloons, lens flares, ice crystals, mis-IDed satellites, drones, parallax errors, and plenty of cases where the camera itself is the problem. Infrared optics in particular generate strange artifacts. A bright object against a cold sky can do things on a sensor that look nothing like what’s actually in the air. A video from Greece in 2023 reportedly shows an object making “90-degree turns” at about 80 mph. Maybe. Or maybe it’s a small object close to the camera with a moving platform behind it, and the geometry is fooling the operator. That happens constantly.

There’s also the part nobody likes to mention. The U.S. flies things it doesn’t talk about. So do the Chinese and the Russians. Several of the released incidents are from places like Iraq, Syria, the UAE, and Greece — locations where multiple countries operate sensitive aircraft and where troops aren’t briefed on every program in the sky above them. A pilot seeing something he can’t identify over a contested area is not evidence of a visitor from Zeta Reticuli. It’s evidence that compartmented programs work.

Worth noting what the Pentagon itself said. The documents don’t suggest a wide-ranging cover-up of extraterrestrial encounters, and the files show no indication that the U.S. government has had any interaction with beings from other planets or that it has any reason to believe such beings have visited Earth.

Read the files. They’re interesting. Some of the cases are genuinely strange and deserve more work. But strange is where the investigation starts, not where it ends. Most of these will turn out to be sensor quirks, atmospheric optics, or something flying out of Tonopah that we’ll read about in thirty years.

Be patient.