Congress talks UAP: Unashamedly Attractive Populism
Here’s a date for your diaries, particularly if you’re interested in men (or indeed women) that are little and green: 25 June 2021 is the date set by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for the US Director of National Intelligence and the Pentagon to have provided an unclassified report on “unidentified aerial phenomena”.
There was a time, of course, when UAPs were less fashionably called “UFOs”, but the change in nomenclature appears to be proof that the US government is now taking matters seriously; “aerial”, perhaps, because “flying” implies too much agency; “phenomena” because we cannot be entirely sure that “object” expresses the degree to which these entities might or might not be based in the material world. The only bit that remains the same is that they are still “unidentified” and that is how they are likely to remain even after the intelligence officials reveal all at the end of next month.
What has been identified, rather, is the political capital to be made from this odd niche of the intelligence committee’s broad remit. The push to get to the bottom of years of UAP activity is being led by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and that, itself, throws up all manner of strange phenomena. This is the same Rubio, remember, who has been sceptical about the dangers of COVID-19 and who has called a proposed commission to investigate the events of 6 January “a partisan joke”. This is also the Rubio cynically pulled along by Trumpism, fearing his presidential ambitions would be ruined if he got too close, yet not as ruined as if he strayed too far.
For Rubio, however, the UAP threat appears to offer him a chance to talk about something other than the politics that have divided America for the past four years. This is more cultural populism than political popularism, a chance to strike a bipartisan note ahead of a possible bid for the presidency in 2024. It has already afforded Rubio ample TV airtime. “Some of my colleagues are very interested in this topic and some kind of giggle when you bring it up,” he said recently on 60 Minutes, “but I don’t think we can allow the stigma to keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question.”
It’s understandable if that fundamental question is proving effective. If atheism fills the gap left by the distinct lack of cockpit footage of angels flying over the Atlantic coast, scepticism around UAPs is made much harder by the sheer quantity of photographic evidence available of shapes moving in ways that make them a mystery. This is not even a matter of belief or no belief. This is a problem for science to solve, even if it makes some scientists queasy.
If politicians don’t share that disgust, neither does the media which has been energised by the news. It has been helped by the fact that people have started to talk about these rare experiences which, it turns out, aren’t as rare as we first thought. In the words of one pilot, he and his colleagues training off the Atlantic coast saw these objects “every day for at least a couple of years”.
So, what should we make of them? One is tempted to quote Christopher Hitchens who advised the contrarian to “beware the irrational, however seductive” but here the irrational would be to dismiss these episodes as nonsense. Whatever the politics around the Senate Intelligence Committee’s motives, there’s little about this that is overtly irrational so long as it is bound by what we can see. “I believe in evidence,” wrote Asimov. “I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”
Simply in terms of national security, this inquiry is far from ridiculous. It’s quite reasonable to ask why the US military’s most expensive imaging equipment has been tricked or spoofed into tracking these objects. Why would aircrews admired for their ability to perceive their surroundings in even the most extreme circumstance believe that they were witnessing events they could not begin to explain?
Answers might not come soon but simply posing the questions is a healthy step forward. Denying the evidence of cameras, radar systems, and even experienced pilots was always the irrational response since it presumed to know something about the very thing for which we had only complete ignorance. It lacked humility too. And that is the overwhelming sense that this enquiry brings with it. It’s sometimes good to acknowledge what we don’t know and, even as we wonder what might be up there, be reminded about what’s down here.