Some years ago, at Malman Air Force Base in the Dakotas, a strange circular "craft" hovered over the entrance gate, frightening the guards posted there. They called the officer in charge of the anti-missile field, a Lieutenant Colonel named Salas. At the same time, Salas was informed that about twenty of his ABMs had shut down simultaneously, although the circuits were independent and contained built-in redundancies. The object zipped away and power to the missiles was restored.
Salas reported the incident and was debriefed and told that he could say nothing about what had happened. Later, when the relevant documents were declassified, Salas managed to obtain copies. The conclusion of the Air Force was that there was no threat to national security. Salas comments to the interviewer: "If shutting down twenty ABMs isn't a threat to national security, I don't know what is." That's just one of many similar incidents described in this rather thorough documentary. There are simply too many to be easily dismissed. They must be taken seriously. At least it relieves us of the necessity of calling an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel in charge of launching ABMs a liar or a lunatic. Instead, we deny what happened and rid our consciousness of it.
The human mind is a curious organ. It searches desperately for simple answers when faced with puzzles. If you ask most people which city is farther west -- Los Angeles or Bakersfield, you generally get the wrong answer, even from Californians. The shape and coastline of the state are irregular. But the mind simplifies the state's contours into a straight rectangle, north and south, with right angles. In this model, Los Angeles, on the coast, must be farther west than Bakersfield, which is in the lower center of the rectangle. Only Los Angeles is not farther west.
The same dynamics of oversimplification seem to be at work in interpreting the UFO phenomena. "They're all hoaxes or misidentified aircraft." The fact is that most of them are -- about 95% of sightings can be explained away as mundane events. It's the remaining 5% that are troublesome. What interests me, as a behavioral scientist, as much as anything else is the extent to which humans are willing to bend their perceptions and the interpretations of them in order to preserve a kind of mental homeostasis. The famous Rendelsham sightings in England have been dismissed as flashing lighthouse beams seen through a forest. Fine, except that two or three US Air Force investigators were able to walk around the object, touching it, describing it in their notebooks. and commenting about it in their tape recorders.
UFOs are a complicated question mark in our scientific lore. The film deals pretty even-handedly with the issue. The nearest civilization must be so far away that even traveling at the speed of light, it would take hundreds of years for them to reach earth. But that objection is what scientists call "theory dependent." It's true only if Einstein's general theory of relativity is entirely true and subject to no modifications. That's what people thought about Newtonian physics until Einstein came along and upset THAT applecart. Newton and his pals had explained everything. There was nothing left to learn. The expert commentators still hold with Einstein but they're bright guys and allow the possibility of space being warped to such an extent that it might be possible to jump quickly from one place and time to another.
Scientists are usually careful about making unwarranted assumptions. These physicists and engineers mainly avoid doing so. But the casual observers constantly use the words "craft" and "space ship" and "flying saucer" to describe what they've seen. As a sort of scientist myself, I wouldn't go that far. I wouldn't even call them "objects." I'd use the word "things" because we don't know that they're solid; we don't know they're from out space either -- maybe they're some new form of matter, like plasma. Maybe they're thought impulses in the mind of God. Nobody knows.
The least that can be said about the film is that it fascinates, and for good reason. There is no doubt any longer that something is up, and we have absolutely no idea of what that "something" is.
