All Hype, No Aliens

T here’s enormous media pressure to publish whenever anything “alien” comes out. Yet the best explanation of the phenomena is never aliens. The first tranche of Defense Department videos released today offer up looks at strange lights in the sky across the world, but they contain no credible evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Digging into the releases, I find no evidence of space invaders but plenty of highly obvious lens flare, bad lighting, and color-correction flaws. There are no crash-recovery details, reverse-engineering data, biological autopsy reports, or official analyses concluding anything beyond “unidentified.” After such immense hype, the released photos show little.

Also released were 162 declassified PDF files, mostly from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that are mostly eyewitness sighting reports of “flying discs” or unidentified objects alongside internal FBI memos, teletypes, and correspondence. Among these are a few fringe “contactee” letters that offer anecdotal tales of Martian telepathy or philosophical messages that read like the unsubstantiated citizen tips the FBI has fielded for decades.

The heavy pre-release hype promising historic revelations has, so far, delivered little more than scanned paperwork that fuels public curiosity and has not provided the substantive breakthrough many expected. FBI Director Kash Patel and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth continue to emphasize that this is raw, unfiltered material for the public to review with no government spin or conclusions offered. But the X-Files, this is not.

Probably the most interesting of the releases were transcripts and photographs from the Apollo 12 and 17 lunar landings of unidentified strange bright sparks near the moon. While fascinating, it is a stretch to paint these sparks, which are likely orbiter debris, as evidence of extraterrestrials.

Future tranches are promised every few weeks. But so far, the only things being provided are a lot of eyewitness testimony from the 1950s, astronaut-captured pictures of objects that are probably ice or debris, and grainy videos of dots flying around. Nothing here is conclusive, and all photos of events have possible explanations that don’t necessarily involve aliens. In an era where 91 percent of Americans carry a high-definition camera almost all the time in the form of their smartphone, we should demand higher standards of evidence for such an extraordinary claim as extraterrestrial contact.

Even UFO believers like Representative Tim Burchett (R., Tenn.) are downplaying the first release, moving the goalposts by writing on X after the recent release that “the 1st drop will be big but in comparison to what is coming they will be a drop in the bucket. I would say ‘Holy Crap’ is coming.”

“The initial files are murky images that show what could be anything,” wrote the New York Times on the Department of Defense’s Friday release. This is a nearly perfect summary of the entire history of the UFO phenomenon. UFO believers have claimed “disclosure,” government declassification of secret contact with extraterrestrial aliens, will occur any day now . . . for literally decades. The first major UFO book pushing “disclosure” was retired Marine Corps Major Donald E. Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucers Are Real, which was first published in 1950. This book established the key themes of the genre — that alien crafts are real and far beyond human technology and this information is suppressed by the U.S. government to avoid public panic.

That may have been a valid potential argument in 1950, but UFO books have been making identical claims with freshly declassified “proof” on this theme over the decades with such “speculative non-fiction” being a theme of the genre, with every deadline of every major prediction they make — such as alien abductees winning class-action suits against the government for withholding critical information — uneventfully passing.

As I wrote when the U.S. Navy released a high-quality video of what many interpreted as an alien spaceship (but which was almost certainly a goose): “If it flies like a duck, is the size of a duck, and quacks like a duck . . . it probably isn’t an alien spaceship or ultra-advanced drone from a foreign power. But headlines such as ‘U.S. Navy Pilot Spots UFO’ generate more clicks than ‘Pilot Sees Goose on Infrared Camera.’”

The military also may wish to let the media frenzy continue to obscure U.S. secrets. The U.S. government has a long track record of using alleged aliens as an explanation for programs it would rather not disclose — and to request budget expansions. In the 1950s and ’60s, the Air Force and CIA often intentionally called sightings of highly secret U-2 spy planes “UFOs” to hide the true nature of the aircraft as the planes’ original silver paint reflected sunlight, giving them an otherworldly, fiery appearance. A CIA official who worked on spy plane projects later attributed over half of all UFO reports in the period to the U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird projects.

Even if clear and undeniable evidence showed craft flying in ways we couldn’t understand, Occam’s Razor would point to secret human technology, not space aliens. It seems that some things never change, like the human fascination with UFOs — and the weakness of the evidence that the unidentified objects are anything more alien than geese.