Media coverage surrounding unidentified flying objects, or what the government refers to as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAPs, has become increasingly bisected in recent months. The division centers on those who find a historic and continuing U.S. government cover-up of alien vehicles behind every door and those who suggest all UFOs can be categorized with conventional explanations.
On one side are the proliferators of clickbait-laden claims, which rely on sources and methods of an often weak nature. And while those pursuing this approach do sometimes, sometimes even often, provide original reporting on new UFO concerns, sensationalism is bleeding into too much media reporting. This impulse to sensationalism is easy to understand, of course. After all, it generates attention and web traffic but also opens up pathways to very lucrative opportunities. Opportunities such as getting a Netflix show or starring on programs such as the History Channel’s long-running The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch.
The second side comes from reporting such as that of the two Wall Street Journal reports in June, which portrayed even the very strangest of UFO cases either as products of government disinformation efforts designed to hide highly classified military programs or as products of confused or disingenuous officials. We must accept that there is credibility to this reporting.....
It’s also true, as first reported by the Washington Examiner in 2023, that Department of Defense analysis of UFOs has sometimes skewed toward the extraordinary at the neglect of less extraordinary explanations, such as Chinese military intelligence drones. Still, secret U.S. or foreign aircraft cannot explain the full gamut of UFO reports defined by literally thousands of credible witnesses and sensor systems since the late 1940s. It should also be recognized that the aforementioned classified platforms rely upon engineering that, even if highly advanced, still conforms to at least open-source conceptual theories of engineering (pulse detonation engines, for example).