On Sunday, over Memorial Day weekend, the New York Times released a story about Navy pilots encountering unidentified flying objects, a.k.a UFOs, a.k.a. possible alien spaceships visiting Earth from outer space. Wow! Seems like that would be very big news, right?
Wrong.
In what I can only imagine was an absolutely devastating blow to the allegedly visiting extraterrestrials, who presumably expected their arrival to be greeted with a little more fanfare, the public’s general reaction to the paper of record reporting on military UFO sightings was to shrug and go back to enjoying their three-day weekend. To add salt, or its extraterrestrial equivalent, to the alien wound, on Monday morning, #aliens wasn’t even one of the top trending Twitter terms in the U.S. Instead, they were overshadowed by tweets about MacKenzie Bezos, the iPod Touch, and #NationalHamburgerDay. Ouch.
According to Sunday’s report, U.S. Navy pilots reported seeing strange objects in the sky over the East Coast almost daily between the summer of 2014 and March 2015. Initially, many of the pilots suspected the objects might be part of a highly classified drone-testing program, but in late 2014, one pilot reported a near collision with an object that flew past his cockpit, and looked like “a sphere encasing a cube.”
Experts were careful to note that there are many non-alien explanations for these unexplained sightings. Still, this isn’t the first major report on UFOs in recent years. In December 2017, the Times published a story about the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which shut down in 2012, and described “sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift.” In 2018, a UFO research group shared a declassified Pentagon video which supposedly showed a U.S. Navy aircraft encountering a UFO. And later that year, a paper published by Harvard scientists described a cigar-shaped space object called “Oumuamua,” which they said may be “a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.”
Surely, the aliens must have thought to themselves, all of that must have been enough to get the attention of the soft-brained denziens of Earth.
Yet, in a move sure to cement us as the resident fuckboi of the Virgo Supercluster of galaxies, Earth got the alien’s message, and then proceeded to leave them on read indefinitely.
What will it take for the aliens to get our attention? Maybe they could go hang out with another planet and try to make us jealous, or post scantily clad pictures of themselves, or send a cute messenger, like Stitch or E.T. Or maybe, they should just try getting a hold of us when we’re not distracted by the activities of a three-day weekend, and we can finally respond appropriately: “lol sorry, just seeing this!”