Everybody knows that UFOs aren’t real. The Air Force’s Project Blue Book determined the sad truth decades ago, even if the short-lived TV series based upon it (Project U.F.O.) ended most episodes with a hint that there might actually be someone… or some thing… out there.
Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), on the other hand, are a completely different matter. For the uninitiated, UAPs are UFOs with a new name because someone somewhere in Washington had to leave their personal stamp on something everybody already thought they understood.
Everybody knows what a UFO is, but a UAP requires some explaining, complete with a reference to a government report nobody ever read:
Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) means (A) airborne objects that are not immediately identifiable; (B) transmedium objects or devices; (C) and submerged objects or devices that are not immediately identifiable and that display behavior or performance characteristics suggesting that the objects or devices may be related to the objects or devices described in subparagraph (A) or (B). (Per the NDAA FY23 Section 1673(d)(8))
UAPs have become a Very Big Deal in recent years, now that the government has declassified several aerial videos of various unidentified flying objects — yeah, I hate “UAP” — flying in ways we earthlings just don’t know how to make things fly. Or at least not until we finish retro-engineering those crashed UFO parts hidden away at Area 51.
Washington being Washington, there has to be an office for everything, and every office must have all the excitement of a mandatory-attendance retirement dinner for the Second Assistant to the Deputy Director of the Deluth Field Office for the Interior Department’s Agency for the Protection of Super 8 Movies of Barns.
This brings us to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and its new website that conveniently doubles as a surprisingly effective treatment for insomnia.
“Our team of experts is leading the U.S. government’s efforts to address Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) using a rigorous scientific framework and a data-driven approach,” AARO director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick promises right at the top of the homepage. Because nothing generates interest — not even when it comes to reporting possible space aliens flying among us — than a Director’s Message topping a website that appears to have been designed entirely by Microsoft’s Clippy.
The next section outlines AARO’s mission to “Minimize technical and intelligence surprise by synchronizing scientific, intelligence, and operational detection identification, attribution, and mitigation of unidentified anomalous phenomena in the vicinity of national security areas.”
I was about to continue along these lines and share what it says in the “Vision” section, but then I remembered that I want you to read the article and not faceplant, snoring, on your keyboard.
The major reason for launching the website is to give people a place to report their UFO — fine, UAP — sightings. But the submission page is “Coming Soon.”
It’s my sincere hope that AARO is staffed by weirdos like myself who spent their childhoods looking up at the sky and wondering — hoping, really — if there’s anyone else out there. And how they might be completely different from us, and in what shocking ways they might be all too like us. But if the new office is staffed by dreamers with heads full of E.T. wonder, you’d never know it.
“I want to believe,” as Fox Mulder’s office poster declared on “The X Files,” but big government sucks the fun and the wonder out of almost everything. The drab existence of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office makes a childhood dream look like just another tax-sucking government program that will never end — and never deliver those aliens, either.
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