4 Big U.F.O. Questions for the White House

One obstacle to figuring out why, exactly, parts of the American government have developed a strange fascination with “unidentified aerial phenomena” and “nonhuman intelligence” — in lay terms, U.F.O.s and aliens — is the journalistic embarrassment that attends asking directly about the subject. Unless they’re all-in and unencumbered by respectability, it’s hard for reporters to treat this as a pressing matter, an issue where they can legitimately (as opposed to winkingly) demand answers the way they would on Iran strikes or immigration policy or even the Jeffrey Epstein affair.

But look what a few direct questions can accomplish. Last week a YouTuber and podcast host named Brian Tyler Cohen asked Barack Obama about aliens, and the former president indicated that they exist while disavowing any personal knowledge of extraterrestrial secrets. This led to a subsequent clarification from Obama that he just meant that aliens are probably out there somewhere. (It’s a big universe!)

But the dominoes were set in motion. At a White House news conference, Karoline Leavitt was asked about online rumors that Donald Trump has an aliens speech ready to go (she denied knowledge). Then Peter Doocy of Fox News asked Trump himself about the Obama alien comments, yielding a weird claim that the former president had revealed classified information and then, via social media, a Trumpian pledge to declassify everything related to “these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.”

I would bet against this supposed disclosure delivering more than a lot of heavily redacted teases. But now that the press corps has warmed to the subject, it’s worth setting out the reality-based questions that a declassification effort could help us resolve and that administration officials can be reasonably pressed about.

First, does the United States military possess more classified aerial footage like the videos from U.S. Navy jets that this newspaper published in 2017, setting in motion the current age of heightened interest in strange vessels over skies and seas? If so, how much more? Is the government more persuaded today than in the past by the attempted debunkings and optical-illusion explanations of these mysteries? Or is there still a widely held view that they offer evidence of “technologies that we don’t have and frankly that we are not capable of defending against,” as the former director of national intelligence and current C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, put it in a 2021 interview?

Second, why has the national security state produced a steady supply of would-be whistle-blowers who claim to have encountered some sort of hidden “legacy program” dedicated to contact with nonhuman intelligence? Are these figures liars? Are they self-deceived, perhaps through some kind of misunderstanding of normal classified programs? Is this all just circulation of rumors associated with the former Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, and his creation of a clandestine U.F.O.-studying group inside the Pentagon? Is it possible that some permanent government disinformation apparatus exists to encourage false U.F.O.-related beliefs in government officials? And if so, is it part of a continuing effort to deceive the public as well?

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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook

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