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Recently, the US military sent out a press release containing years- (and sometimes decades-) old, previously released UFO footage and admitting to be totally stumped by the phenomena. This made greater waves in the press than in previous years, when the British and Canadian governments did the same. It shouldn’t have.
The problem with this press release is obvious, to those of us who have even a passing familiarity with the history of the UFO phenomenon. Project Sign, the US Air Force project to investigate UFOs, ran from the Kenneth Arnold sighting in 1947 to the beginning of Project Grudge in 1949, and during Sign, UFO investigations were being done in a serious manner — with the expected results: a lot of these reports were mysterious & not really consistent with either man-made craft or known natural phenomena. Project Grudge was a policy shift: everything needed to be explained away. Although Grudge didn’t last long, this policy shift did: all future official releases of UFO information to the press by the US military continued a policy that apparent UFOs are misidentifications of natural phenomena (the “swamp gas defense” or the “venus defense”) until the recent PR release, wherein the policy shifted back to its 1949 state. Notably, the official explanations here not only reject the (highly popular) nuts-and-bolts extraterrestrial craft hypothesis, but they also reject both unknown human-generated and unknown natural phenomena.
What is upsetting to students of the UFO phenomenon about this press release — and we have no reason to believe…
