What if I told you the UFOs were about China?
The great American sceptic Michael Shermer once said, before you decide something is out of this world, it is first necessary to check if it is of this world.
A quick backgrounder.
The US Department of Defence over the past year or so has declassified a handful of videos in which some object or craft appears. Plenty of explanations have been offered by people at least two standard deviations smarter than me and none of them include the words “alien” or “wow.” Even the Pentagon doesn’t say anything about aliens. Instead, it lumps them together as “UAPs” (unidentified aerial phenomena) rather than UFOs, which is annoying.
If you follow the First Law of Politics – “never believe anything until it has been officially denied” – then the UFO videos are the converse of this law and should be rejected out of hand.
But the most important epistemic skill in the modern world is knowing when to trust power. One way to do this is to understand the constraints on power. Things like mountains, oil reserves, population size, weather patterns, etc. Every king is locked into a set of actions they must do and things they must not do, if they want to retain power (which all regimes do).
So, when you see a news story about UFOs, start from first principles: what does the author wish to be true?
As I’ve explained in previous columns, the Pentagon and the media are part of the same system: the civil service. Pentagon staff belong to the formal civil service, while CNN belongs to the extended civil service (which includes universities, NGOs and multinational corporations. Basically, any institution that benefits from power leaking from the government). You will also notice that the Pentagon’s domestic civil service rival (the State Department) has been suspiciously quiet about the UFO videos.
Washington is not a single beast. It consists of at least two major factions: DoD (red) and State (blue). The political parties roughly align with both factions. So, when State and DoD agree, you can take that to the bank. But when they disagree on something, just know that one faction has decided the other is getting too big for its boots in Washington.
The US entry into WWII is a good example of the generals and diplomats aligning on the strategy of ensuring Europe did not unite under one European power. Washington is still wiping the blood off its fangs today. On the other hand, Iraq is an example of the two factions agreeing on strategy but disagreeing on which should receive the power dividends.
The Pentagon’s amazing three-week invasion of Iraq gave it a boost of political capital back in Washington. State then decided to appoint a diplomat named Paul Bremmer to oversee the post-combat clean up, and he promptly disbanded the Iraqi army. The predictable guerrilla war turned the famous victory into a decade-long counterinsurgency which tarnished the prestige of the Pentagon, and that gave State a bit more room to manoeuvre in Washington.
It’s sick, I know, but no empire wants to fight civil wars on their own soil, if they can help it. Much safer to do them in some godforsaken country no one really cares about.
So, if State and DoD agree about the UFO videos, what else are they on the same page about?
The answer is simple. Everyone in Washington regardless of faction or political party is aligned on a single question: how can the US keep its China relationship competitive, but not adversarial? This problem is pass/fail. If Washington screws this up, the year 2100 will look quite different.
Another key factor is that this isn’t the first time UFOs have been in the media. During the Cold War, pretty much everyone in Washington (aside from a powerful minority of ideological elites who saw the USSR as an offshore experiment of American socialism) was aligned on the strategy that the Soviets were an existential threat.
Most UFO sightings in the US started happening after WWII. This is an important historical marker because we now know the Americans captured a bunch of German scientists who then built the NASA programme. The US also captured secret Nazi weapons, one of which may have been the rumoured “bell” weapon – some kind of zero-point energy or anti-gravity flying machine.
This is all speculative since no one is sure the “bell” ever existed. But if you’re asking why we still have to fly around in jets, it may be because the Americans were nowhere near as smart as the Germans and, after a handful of years testing the “bell,” it simply stopped working and they mothballed it. That would also explain the crash-landings observed by farmers in the 50s, some of whom reported “tall blonde men” walking out of the craft. Your guess is as good as mine.
But what’s not speculative is that by the time WWII ended, Washington knew the USSR would be a major geopolitical problem. This feeling was compounded when US intelligence lost access to the Venona intercepts and went “dark.” The Americans could no longer listen to Soviet communications and had to deploy the infamous U2 flights to photograph things instead.
The U2 was just one of many high-tech experimental weapons projects the Soviets were trying to learn about. In 2021, it’s pretty well known that Soviet spies were much better at their jobs than American spies (again, some elites saw the USSR as an American experiment anyway), and they had penetrated most the US military and its intelligence agencies.
Suspecting they were compromised, US spy chiefs likely pondered ways to convince the Soviets that America was more powerful than Moscow thought. If I put myself in the shoes of these spy chiefs, I think all those UFO reports in the 50s were very useful.
It wouldn’t take much effort to encourage media reporting or seed the CIA’s own disinformation about UFOs into newspapers. Roswell and Area 51 were a great mix of the unknown and the sexy, which always helps to sell papers and advertising. But UFOs would also make the Soviets suspicious that the US still had amazing technology it didn’t know about. They would think twice about military action in case the US really did have some secret technology.
Oxford University professor Robert Service also believes the Cold War ended precisely because the Soviets were compelled to spend more and more money in R&D to keep pace with the US and its famous “Star Wars” programme. Meanwhile, aside from a few imagery satellites, stealth aircraft and computers, the US didn’t have anything very impressive at all. But the Soviets could never be sure.
After the USSR collapsed, the flow of media reports in the 90s and 2000s about UFOs continued rising, but mainly due to obviously fake images, pop-culture movies and “lights” that turned out to be aircraft. It’s almost like the aliens disappeared. But the smartphone also appeared in the 2000s, so a reasonable person would think there would be far more UFO sightings. But considering the billions of pictures taken each day, there’re next to zero UFO snapshots on Instagram. Strange.
Then suddenly, the Pentagon is “declassifying” fresh UFO sightings. Totally weird, right? Did the aliens come back? I want to believe.
But the Occam’s Razor answer is that the US is fighting a new Cold War-esque power: China. And since the Americans are confident China has penetrated its intelligence agencies just like the Soviets did, they worry China may know everything about US weapons.
So, what should US spy chiefs do? They reach for the filing cabinet, dust off the Cold War playbook and think, hey, why not give this another go? Can’t hurt.
And now we have UFOs in the headlines. Sorry, “UAPs.”
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