Why we love the unexplained
The government just released an crap ton (and yes, I consider that an official unit of measurement when dealing with the U.S. government) of formerly classified documents related to unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) or as the rest of us normies call them…UFOs. It’s a lot of information to digest and I’ve only made it through the first five files. It’s been interesting reading for sure (spoiler alert…so far no open admission of alien bodies or hidden UFOs under Wright Patterson Air Force Base…but I’ll keep looking).
Reading through these files and following the social media chatter (of which there is a lot on X where the predominance of UFO commentary tends to reside) I can’t help but find a bit of enjoyment in the entire process. We as a species have always been fascinated with what we can’t completely explain or understand, and if we are honest with ourselves we like our environment to have a bit of mystery to it. Countless times in my life I have gazed up at the night sky wondering if someone or something was gazing back at me from some far away planet. I did this as a child in the back of my dad’s Crown Vic on long car rides to Indiana and Nebraska…wishing that I could experience something amazing like Richard Dreyfuss did in one of my all time favorite films Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I also performed this same exercise while deployed and stationed all over the world to some austere locations where the remoteness makes you feel as if you live on different world from Earth.
For some of us who have always felt a sense of loneliness or like what I try to explain is as a feeling of being alone the idea of a universe packed with different life and mystery is appealing and at times comforting (although I’ve always been terrified of Alien Greys).
Our need for mystery is engrained in us as a human race. It is seen in the ancient myths of our ancestors long gone. We can identify it in folklore, ghost stories, and tales of monsters lurking in the dark. The unexplained is not a modern phenomenon. However, with the advances in science over the years and as you can clearly see in the recent files the changes in geopolitics our version of the unexplained evolved from stories of Gods and Demons to UFOs and aliens.
It is easy to dismiss these files and people who have claimed to experience the unexplained as kooks, weirdos, or charlatans seeking attention…and some of them are. But one this is for certain from the files and also from my own time as an investigative journalist who has met with many experiencers…people have experienced and continue to witness things they can’t explain, and the government and military can’t always explain it either. Am I saying there has been a government conspiracy to hide the existence of extraterrestrial life and that perhaps some dark seedy aspect of our government has been in cahoots with a council of aliens intent on enslaving the human race and harvesting our bodies for galactic fuel? No. But people don’t believe in conspiracies in a vacuum. The government lies - a lot. It overclassifies information, it participates in societal and informational manipulation, and in general is just not very trustworthy.
This creates uncertainty in the minds of a population, and that leads to possibilities. The possibility that perhaps there are aliens who have visited our world and continue to visit. Maybe the military has retrieved exotic space material and used it to create weapons and aircraft. It could be that there is a cabal of highly nefarious government actors deciding who gets to live and who gets mashed into a gross paste that is then synthesized into galactic fuel for the Flip-Flop-Goopty-Doos from Planet Cargone (although I highly doubt it, I’ve worked in government a long time and we aren’t that sophisticated).
Hell I don’t know. What I do know is that the unexplained makes for great fiction writing and is often the inspiration between my short stories and definitely my upcoming book, No Rest from the Wicked releasing this Fall.
So I say, keep your eyes to the skies, believe in the unbelievable…but don’t hold your breath for any great revelations from the U.S. government.
