Are UFOs for real? Why everyone is talking about them much more seriously now

: In 2007, United States senator Harry Reid expressed his curiosity into multiple UFO reports coming from the armed forces. The Pentagon subsequently investigated these, and set up the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF).

The task force is now due to release its report in June 2021, and this has prompted a flurry of media coverage and public discourse about UFOs.

​The discourse has been further accelerated since the publication of a comprehensive history of sightings, investigations, perceptions, and insider comments by The New Yorker, written by writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus.

​While the interest in the upcoming report has prompted comments from even high ranking US government officials, experts have pointed out that unidentified flying objects (UFOs) don’t necessarily mean alien flying objects.

Also read: Are aliens visiting us? US military seems to think so

​Why a task force?

In The New Yorker report, titled ‘How the Pentagon started taking UFOs seriously’, Lewis-Kraus outlines the chronology behind UFO sightings by experts, how they were investigated, the concerns they prompted, and what drove public commentary in the direction that it did. ​

It describes how the overwhelming number of UFO sightings during the Cold War was leading to the impression that the US was not in complete control of its airspace. Additionally, there was also a fear that real incursions like Soviet spy planes over the US territory could be lost in the frenzied attribution of so many things to UFOs.

So, to cut down on UFO reports, the CIA infiltrated and monitored citizen UFO groups, removed the special investigative status UFOs had, and put out messaging to delegitimise the discussions around them.

Lewis-Kraus goes on to explain that a large majority of cases were subsequently explainable as stealth military technology or weather experiments or just astronomical phenomena, but there remained a number of sightings that couldn’t be explained. These were especially concerning, as the sightings were made by military or aviation experts or sincere citizens than UFO buffs.

Some researchers were able to narrow down several of those sightings further to Cold War anxiety and ambivalence about technology, but a number of genuinely inexplicable ones still remained — specifically those sighted by professional observers like commercial or air force pilots and a large number of eyewitnesses.

​These cases have made news as and when they occurred, including ones involving high profile lawsuits and court orders. However, stories about UFOs fade away quickly from the media landscape.

The emerging interest in UFOs is at least partially attributed to pop culture cycles, where there is a cyclical generational fascination with similar topics that ultimately come to nothing and fizzle out of public discourse.

​But the work of investigative journalists like Leslie Kean, as outlined in the report mentioned above, led to a steadily rising interest in unexplained aerial phenomena among mainstream news readers and the upper echelons of lawmakers in the US. Her book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, was praised by physicist Michio Kaku as the “gold standard for UFO research.”