Are You There, Aliens? It’s Me, America. Send Help.

It wasn’t enough to have a pandemic, a revolution, an economic recession, bugs in our strawberries, and murder hornets all in the same year. Or not according to the powers at be, that is, because 2020 also called for aliens and so it’s aliens we shall get. On Friday, the New York Times reported that a Pentagon unit dedicated to researching Unidentified Flying Objects, otherwise known as UFOs, will now make some of its findings available to the public. And, at this point, I would welcome our alien overlords. 

Three months ago, the U.S. Navy declassified videos of UFOs that were previously leaked to the New York Times because, a spokesperson said, they wanted “to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that had been circulating [for the last three years] was real.” Naturally, it appears some people are excited to learn about the possibility of an alien invasion because maybe they can help us escape this dystopian hell.

The released footage sparked renewed interest from UFO enthusiasts and researchers, as well as government officials who are more concerned that the “unexplained aerial phenomena” could actually represent an advanced technological threat from foreign governments. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio expressed concern over the unidentified aircraft, and pointed to China or Russia. He told the Times, “Maybe there is a completely, sort of, boring explanation for it. But we need to find out.”

Personally, I think it’s aliens, and so does former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who said he believes “that crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred.” Luis Elizondo, the previous director of the program, which began operations under the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2007, also thinks that “objects of undetermined origin have crashed on Earth” and materials from those crashes have been retrieved for study. 

Now that the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force is public facing, it will report some of its findings to the public every six months. Eric W. Davis, an astrophysicist who previously worked as a consultant for the Pentagon’s UFO program said he gave a briefing about these “off-world vehicles” that were definitely not made on this planet to the Defense Department as recently as March (interesting timing, no?). 

Officials with the task force haven’t confirmed what kind of information would be made public, but some believe that making bits of the findings public would be good, especially information pertaining to the discovery of new physical materials. 

Maybe we will finally find out what’s going on at Area 51. But probably not. This is America, after all, and the U.S. government is more likely to colonize Mars than actually be honest about whether or not there are already aliens here on earth. Though, maybe one day we will all be surprised when the aliens who secretly live among us rise to power and remove every last corrupt politician from office. Alas, we can dream.