Our Future in Space (with No UFOS)

A Conversation that Timidly Goes Where We’ve All Been Before

Given a chance to expand the discussion about the reality of UFOs, The Washington Post’s David Ignatius opts for banality.

The question that came to mind Wednesday night watching the National Cathedral’s Ignatius Forum on ‘Our Future in Space,’ a symposium that had promised some serious E.T. talk, was what the absolute fuck was that?

Granted, mine may be a minority opinion. As the masked audience started making their way out of the building while an organist played The Throne Room and End Title music from the first Star Wars, I checked #UFOTwitter and saw several people whose views I respect praising the event.

Perhaps this was a failing, on my part, of having elevated expectations. The stage was set for what could have been an extraordinary, historic moment in the national conversation about UFOs and extraterrestrial life.

And to be fair, there were some interesting exchanges and moments. If you didn’t see actor William “Captain Kirk” Shatner a couple weeks ago describe his Jeff Bezos-sponsored space flight, the billionaire was there to talk about that frankly deeply moving moment.

Also on deck were two scientists, British physicist and theologian David Wilkinson and Harvard astronomer and Galileo Project founder Avi Loeb (who contributes to Trail of the Saucers). The latter ably knocked humans down from their anthropomorphic pedestal and was, more than the rest of the guests, far more open to the possibility of E.T. out there.

But even Wilkinson barely acknowledged the phenomenon about which literally hundreds of mainstream news reports have been published in just the last year. Asked by a moderator if he thought Earth is being visited, he replied, “I don’t think so.” Bezos also said as much.

To those who may accuse me of engaging in wishful thinking about what might have been, I would point out that Wilkinson authored a book entitled Science, religion and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence; Loeb wrote an entire book, on the heels of a peer-reviewed scientific paper, about what he believes was a huge, actual extraterrestrial something flying past our planet just a few years ago.

Wishful thinking? I don’t think so.

The stage at the Washington National Cathedral, an architectural wonder that took most of the 20th century to build, was set against a much vaster stage, one stretching from the skies over the Atlantic Ocean to both the Pentagon, Congress and the cyberscape where our mass media live — from prestigious journalistic outlets to the land of podcasts and blogs, where both professional and citizen journalists try to unravel an anomaly that finally has the official imprimatur of the U.S. Government.

Let’s set up the latter stage so as to better appreciate the staggering banality of what played out on the smaller one.

The Big Stage

With regard to the UFO phenomenon, we live in what might be called a “new normal.” For several years now, the U.S. Government has been on the record as insisting that UFOs are “real.”

Which is to say, once all the light tricks and misidentified balloons, drones, experimental aircraft, swamp gas, etc. have been meticulously and methodically ruled out, it is clear that human beings are still encountering aircraft that are 1) vastly superior to anything current technology permits, 2) are intelligently controlled, and 3) so inexplicably weird (and to many witnesses, genuinely unsettling) that even the most conservative skeptics — even Mick West, of all people— have grudgingly acknowledged that at least some of them could be extraterrestrial.

And it only takes one, by the way, for everything you think you “know” to be wrong…

That new normal was ushered in by The New York Times reporting in 2017, where we learned the Pentagon was quietly taking UFOs very seriously. Now, fast-forward to 2021. More recently, we’ve seen:

1. A parade of current and former high-level federal officials implying, with varying degrees of specificity and seriousness, that UAPs represent a non-human intelligence. Rep. Adam Schiff, former Presidents Clinton and Obama, two former CIA directors, John Brennan and James Woolsey. Throw in former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, the Pentagon’s former UFO guy, Luis Elizondo, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon, and Sen. Marco Rubio. Even Sen. Mitt Romney on CNN this year unambiguously ruled out all possible prosaic explanations, indicating that he, a national security hawk, is not worried about them!
2. Serious reporting in major mainstream outlets, including CBS’s 60 Minutes, in which U.S. Navy pilots have described bizarre encounters with UFOs during training exercises at sea.
3. The preliminary assessment of UAPs released in June by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which included E.T. as a possibility for at least some of the 144 UFO cases the Pentagon spent years investigating.
4. Military officials going on the record about encounters with UFOs at U.S. nuclear facilities and military bases.
5. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s proposed legislation that would establish a permanent office to investigate UAPs and report findings to the public.
6. Independent efforts such as Skyfort and Loeb’s Galileo Project to search for, collect and share scientific information about UAP.
7. The Elizondo and Mellon Show: Two respected, serious former intelligence officers who have (notwithstanding their NDAs) talked so candidly about what they know about UAPs that there is little doubt both are convinced that humanity is being engaged by a non-human intelligent other — and that it’s time for the rest of us to get serious about it and start asking the right questions.
8. An internationally known and widely respected investigative reporter, Ross Coulthart — who was previously agnostic about UFOs — writes a book about the subject and is now something of an ambassador in his field. His message to fellow journalists: There is a story here.

In other words, something is happening. There’s way too much smoke here for there not to be a huge fucking fire somewhere.

In the ufology community, and among an increasing number of mainstream journalists, an important conversation about UFOs is happening. It’s a conversation that ranges from small but intriguing details — a government document alleging UFOs similar to ‘Tic Tacs’ in the 1950s and an encounter by a Navy crewman with a saucer emerging from the ocean directly beneath him while suspended from helicopter— to more profound questions about human history, the role of religion, and even the fabric of reality.

Meanwhile, on the Small Stage…

And now let us turn to the average American who is intrigued enough about safe, “mainstream” space stuff to have watched the discussion last night — a person, presumably, who probably knows little about UFOs and gives them little to zero thought.

This person who watched moderator David Ignatius (who does not appear to have ever expressed an iota of interest in the UFO phenomenon) lob softballs at NASA’s Nelson and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines for half an hour Wednesday night would not have learned about any of that.

One could have learned more about the UFO phenomenon by listening to even ten minutes of the remarkable conversations astronaut Terry Virts had earlier this year with Mellon and Elizondo on his Down to Earth podcast — hardly a bastion of UFO woo.

At the National Cathedral, not so much. Given everything that’s going on, this year’s Ignatius Forum achieved the dubious distinction of hosting a discussion that was Seinfeldian in character — a conversation about nothing.

A Lost Opportunity

Okay, so maybe it’s not fair to say that a UFO virgin watching the Ignatius Forum wouldn’t have learned about “any” of the developments described above. It is true that they would have learned about the DNI’s UAP report, because Ignatius asked Haines about it.

That unremarkable exchange lasted all of four and a half minutes.

Ignatius did inquire about the UAP preliminary assessment, which revealed that in the very brief window of time under consideration, there remain 143 UFO cases that have not been solved. In a follow-up— the closest Ignatius came to asking anything remotely interesting — he asked Haines:

“How would we know if we were being observed”?

Haines gave a non-committal non-answer and wrapped up by taking refuge in the claim that NASA’s Nelson would have a better shot at solving that mystery than she would.

Really? Please.

I’m not going to waste time going back to check, but it’s entirely possible that more time was spent over the two-hour discussion referencing Star Trek than time spent substantively discussing the implications of Navy pilots repeatedly encountering anomalous craft that Elizondo told UK’s GQ Magazine this week have left some of them with radiation burns.

‘Our Future in Space’? What we needed was some honest talk about our present in the troposphere.

An extraordinary, history-changing, mind-blowing news story that stands to upend everything we think we know about everything is hemorrhaging from the cracks of two of our major institutions — government and the mass media. Everyone on the stage Wednesday night knows it. How can they not?

For some inexplicable reason or reasons one can only guess at, the most extraordinary aspects of the UFO phenomenon were ignored. This was a chance to bring the general public along, to acclimate people to the genuine, mind-bending weirdness that is in plain view for those who care to look.

Which would have been the responsible thing to do and the right time to do it, because if the last few months are any sign, it’s only going to get weirder.

And they blew it.

Trail of the Saucers, published by Bryce Zabel and Stellar Productions, focuses on UFO/UAP news, history, culture, and analysis. Here are other related articles from our archive …