"I want to believe," was the famous subtitle of my favorite television show as a teenager. The X-Files was about two FBI agents who investigated the paranormal, Agent Fox Mulder was the true believer whereas Agent Diana Scully was the skeptical counterpart to the team. The show was a hit and set off a wave of fascination around the UFO phenomena.
Like Agent Mulder, I too, want to believe in the fantastic. But as a prickly jaded reporter, I just can't do it. I'm sorry guys: We're not being visited by aliens.
However, that doesn't mean there isn't something very real happening in our skies.
What we call UFOs, now more often referred to as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAS), is not a label applied to any one specific phenomena, but rather a cluster of them; some easily explainable and others almost impossible to understand at this time.
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What we call UFOs are most likely explained by natural phenomena such as upper atmosphere lightning – some of which was not even photographed until the 1990s – man-made off the shelf drones operated by civilians or foreign adversaries, highly top-secret drones, or maybe manned aircraft flown by friendly and hostile governments alike.
It could be sensors on radar and aircraft cameras malfunctioning and recording false positives of things that are not actually there at all. In still other cases, our sensors might be getting spoofed by some sort of electronic warfare, again yielding false readings.
While America's intelligence community sometimes fails to live up to its mandate of preventing our elected policymakers from being confronted by strategic surprises, it is extremely difficult to imagine that the collective intelligence gathering capabilities of the CIA, NSA, and a dozen other agencies failed to notice a Manhattan Project type endeavor in Russia or China that successfully developed aviation capabilities several generations ahead of what is currently in development.
When it comes to aerial phenomena which break the laws of physics, it seems far more likely that we have a problem with our sensors malfunctioning or being spoofed rather than us seeing something literally out of this world.
What some see as a sphere-shaped UFO sinking into the ocean looks more like a speck of dust on a camera lens to me.
Professor of Astrophysics Adam Frank recently wrote in The New York Times he was not impressed by narratives about UFOs or the so-called evidence for them. As a scientist, he says the eyewitness accounts and video footage does not appear to meet the threshold of what he would consider scientifically valid for basing conclusions on. Eyewitnesses are often unreliable, and the data available is inconclusive.
Like Mr. Frank, I will happily read the U.S. government's report on UFOs when it is released this month, but I am not holding my breath for anything shocking or definitive.
For now, and into the future, UFOs remain something ethereal for all of us to project our internal insecurities and anxieties onto, just like the manic and crusading Fox Mulder.
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Reach Jack Murphy: jack@connectingvets.com or @JackMurphyRGR.