Even if you don’t “want to believe,” it is time to prepare for it.
Throughout most of human history, those believing in UFOs were considered crackpots and never quite taken seriously. In recent years, though, attitudes have started to change — likely due to mounting evidence of unresolved mysteries and credible voices stepping forward to share their experiences and demand answers.
With UFO hearings on Capitol Hill and the recent alarm over unexplained drone sightings in the Northeast, something has shifted in American society.
At the heart of the mainstreaming of UFOs is journalist Ralph Blumenthal, who retired from his 45-year career with the New York Times back in 2009. When journalist Leslie Kean approached him with a lead, he jumped back into the fray to collaborate on a story that would shift the nature of UFO discourse.
A Pentagon official named Luis Elizondo was threatening to resign in frustration and go public with information regarding a secretive working group within the Pentagon that had been set up to investigate UFOs.
“At the time, the Pentagon was not officially in the UFO business,” recounts Blumenthal. “No one knew that they were studying UFOs, so it was quite a revelation.”
Blumenthal reached out to New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet about the subject and, to his surprise, got the green light to run with the story. The result was a blockbuster, front-page story published in December 2017, specifically delving into the Pentagon’s “mysterious UFO program.”
“It was the first time a mainstream publication was really interested in UFOs, and it played a huge role in making it respectable,” says Blumenthal. “Until then, the subject was considered fringy. We did follow-up stories on pilots who had experience with UFOs, stories on near misses and even touched on the recovery of crashed UFOs and the materials that have been recovered.”
Eventually, UFOs were renamed UAPs — unidentified anomalous phenomena — since the sightings weren’t just airborne but coming from the ocean as well.
A blizzard of government working groups boasting an alphabet soup of acronyms like AARO (All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office) has come to light since then and it is now apparent that, despite decades of denials, the U.S. government has been studying the phenomena for years. Blumenthal points out that “all the important information is classified, so there was only so far we could go with our reporting.”
Despite the seismic shift in attitude, so much remains beyond our understanding. With the government acknowledging that there are crafts in the skies and emerging from the seas that they don’t understand — and can’t credibly attribute to human technology — it’s time for both the public and private sectors to take steps in preparing for scenarios that could potentially disrupt daily life.
Hellbound and Down 