In Plainfield last month, residents there took to social media after a series of lights were seen in formation flying quickly across the evening sky. A debate ensued in the little central Vermont town that the lights were UFOs; others suggested fighter jets flying in formation to Burlington; others pointed to satellites.
It’s not difficult on a clear night to see satellites or the International Space Station making the rounds above the globe.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has more than 3,000 satellites orbiting planet Earth. One version of the SpaceX — Starlink — regularly causes confusion and is mistaken for a UFO (or as they have been renamed UAP, unidentified aerial phenomena) as they are made up of a string of evenly spaced devices that, when light reflects off them, appear as a formation of objects speeding across the night sky.
We are not saying that’s what the folks in Plainfield saw. One witness said the objects he saw were changing direction very quickly — something a satellite cannot do during its orbit.
Vermont native Garrett Graff has a new book out — “UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government’s Search for Alien Life Here … and Out There.” Graff is well-known as a journalist who does his research. His book “Watergate: A New History” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history this year.
“UFO” is a fascinating read in that it shows — time and again — how poorly we act when we do not understand something. Graff walks us through theory about the odds of there being other life in the universe, and the odds that they have evolved enough to visit Earth.
But that is not the premise of the book. Graff is not the expert. So he lets the experts tell the story of UFOs (mostly in North America) through the lens of science and policy. We meet some of the most intriguing minds of our time, and how the monitoring of the skies was a consistent challenge — in perception, through funding, and across egos.
Using declassified documents and media accounts (mostly newspapers) going back decades — some of them within a few years of the discovery of flight — to chronicle how we (as spectators, the military, and the government) try to understand things up there.
Graff reveals the mysteries of bureaucracy and mass communication as much as he looks at high-profile incidents that, in many cases, are breathtaking in their unbelievability. And yet there were so many witnesses with nothing to gain.
Then there is the historical evolution of flight, the creation (and testing) of the atomic bomb, the space race, and now the rampant placement of satellites in the sky. Through that very linear evolution of our species, there are seemingly correlations to sightings, whether that is public interest in UFOs or more reports of sightings. All of it has created a stigma that is mocking and conspiratorial.
He does not go far into scientific theory except to repeatedly have his sources point out that much of the fundamental debate over UFOs/UAPs centers on the fact we do not understand the technology or science behind what we are seeing around us.
Just this week, a news release came across our email promoting a book by an Air Force veteran that hypothesizes “these craft may not be extraterrestrial at all, that they are actually time travelers from the future. These UFOs and UAPs may be us, disappearing in and out of this moment in time to another in the Earth’s future.”
While that sounds like science fiction, the bottom line is: We can’t rule anything out. We just don’t know.
By using documents, interviews and reviewing journals and papers (the research for this book must have been astounding in its scope), Graff presents facts that keep the UFO/UAP discussion grounded. Critics of both books and science have voiced their appreciation that Graff does not presuppose or thrust one theory over another. It is simply an informative chronology of the behind the scenes of one of the biggest mysteries plaguing humankind.
From the promotional material Simon & Schuster has online, “For as long as we have looked to the skies, the question of whether life on Earth is the only life to exist has been at the core of the human experience, driving scientific debate and discovery, shaping spiritual belief, and prompting existential thought across borders and generations. And yet, the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence has been largely seen as a joke, banished to the realm of fantasy and conspiracy. Now, for the first time, the full story of our national obsession with UFOs — and the covert, decades-long search by scientists, the United States military, and the CIA for proof of alien life — is told (by Graff) in a deeply reported and researched history.”
The news release refers to our search for answers as “an extraordinary quest.”
In 2021, a Gallup poll found four in 10 Americans now think some UFOs that people have spotted have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies. That was up from a third saying so two years ago. Half, however, believe all such sightings can be explained by human activity or natural phenomena, while an additional 9% are unsure.
Graff has expertly shown us that UFOs are not a secret; they are a mystery.
