Do We Unite Against Alien Threats or Ignore Them to Avoid Mockery?

by Chris Reed               March 21, 2018                 (sandiegouniontribune.com)

• In 1985, Ronald Reagan was so stirred by the notion that an extraterrestrial invasion would overshadow national differences that he brought it up in a meeting with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. In a 1987 speech to the United Nations, Reagan said, “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” To his detractors, this was evidence of how out of touch Reagan was with reality.

• The fact is that the presence of advanced UFO craft in our skies has become our reality. It is time that we moved past the giggle factor and the institutionalized ridicule, take the existence of UFOs seriously, and begin to investigate their reasons for being here.

In 1987, in a unifying speech to the United Nations, President Ronald Reagan delivered an address without any precedent before or since. “Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize the common bond,” Reagan told diplomats from all over the planet. “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”

This was far from the first time Reagan made such a reference. As chronicled in The New York Times, Lou Cannon — perhaps Reagan’s most acclaimed biographer — had learned that the 40th president …
… was so stirred by the notion that extraterrestrial invasion would trump national differences that he floated the scenario upon meeting Mikhail Gorbachev at Geneva in 1985. This departure from script flummoxed Reagan’s staff — not to mention the Soviet general secretary. Mr. Cannon writes that, well acquainted with what he called the president’s interest in “little green men,” Colin L. Powell, at the time the national security adviser, was convinced that the proposal had been inspired by “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

Whether inspired by the 1951 science-fiction film or not, this triggered ridicule of Reagan that has endured for decades. In a 1991 review of one of Cannon’s Reagan biographies, Sidney Blumenthal — then still a journalist, not yet a cut-throat Clinton operative — cited this and other stories showing Reagan finding inspiration in movies as evidence of his ignorance and lack of intelligence. In 2013, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow called Reagan’s U.N. comments “one of the truly weirdest things” he had ever said.

In December, Harvard’s Nathan J. Robinson — editor of Current Events magazine — offered a different take: Reagan’s U.N. speech is exactly correct. It’s a refreshing departure from the usual nationalist rhetoric to hear a president talking about the common bonds that unite humanity, and the cosmic insignificance of all our intraspecies conflicts.

One week after Robinson’s essay appeared, a staggering scoop appeared in The New York Times that indirectly offered another theory of how individuals might react to evidence of the existence of aliens — not with alacrity or with terror but with fear they’d be mocked if they shared the news with a skeptical world.

The scoop, citing hard evidence that had been declassified by the Pentagon — not the Weekly World News, InfoWars or one of the many other sources that traffic in wild conspiracy theories — detailed the experiences of U.S. military pilots who encountered what the Times reported as a fleet of rotating aircraft “surrounded by some kind of glowing aura traveling at high speed” off the coast of San Diego in 2004. Instead of treating this experience as an epochal close encounter, the pilots and their superiors didn’t much want to talk about it. Here’s why, according to the Times:
The sightings were not often reported up the military’s chain of command, [Nevada Sen. Harry] Reid said, because service members were afraid they would be laughed at or stigmatized.

A March 9 commentary in the Washington Post by Christopher Mellon, deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, added to this hard-to-fathom big picture: The [San Diego] videos, along with observations by pilots and radar operators, appear to provide evidence of the existence of aircraft far superior to anything possessed by the United States or its allies. Defense Department officials who analyze the relevant intelligence confirm more than a dozen such incidents off the East Coast alone since 2015. In another recent case, the Air Force launched F-15 fighters last October in a failed attempt to intercept an unidentified high-speed aircraft looping over the Pacific Northwest.

A third declassified video … reveals a previously undisclosed Navy encounter that occurred off the East Coast in 2015.

Mellon, who works for a research company that wants these reports thoroughly investigated, expressed bafflement that these stories could circulate in the upper reaches of the U.S. government without triggering national security concerns that such advanced technology might be a threat to the U.S. He called on authorities to “set aside taboos regarding ‘UFOs’ and instead listen to our pilots and radar operators.”

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