It's been a helluva a century so far, huh? With a brief eight-year hiatus, during which Republicans got ever worse, it has been an unrelentingly awful reality, with the last four years being nearly unbearable. It’s better with the former guy gone, but it’s still pretty awful. Republicans have no bottom. They have seemingly just one intention right now: make life as hellish as possible for the rest of the world.
In view of that: Bring on the UFOs. Bring on the aliens. Bring on the magic of breaking the bounds of this earth, at least in our minds, and trying to imagine something else. I'm ready for a different narrative, for something that literally takes us off of this planet to consider another realm. That it has Harry Reid in it—well, that helps, too.
I should say at the outset that I am the least imaginative person that I know. I am utterly incapable of suspending disbelief. I'm the person watching the movie or TV show with you that can't help unraveling the stray threads of narratives that don't lie smooth, the one who notices all the lapses in continuity. So it's a sign of how badly my brain needs an escape after four years of Trump and more than a year of lockdown that I look at these stories and think, "Sure."
Anyway, back to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He writes, "I’m from a tiny town about 50 miles south of Las Vegas called Searchlight, in the high desert, with a population today of about 300." I'm from a tiny town. Well, not even from the town, but from the unincorporated community of Corral, Idaho, then home to half-a-dozen or so families in a 20-mile or so radius. But this:
The night sky at a mile high with civilization miles away was never black. It was too lit up with wonders to be black. And up there, somewhere, wasn't it conceivable that there was something else? I've never really been able to grasp the concept of infinity (that imagination deficit, again) but the odds that we’d be the only inhabitants in that infinity have just never made sense. But that's not fanciful, it's logical.
Anyway, Reid writes about when he was Senate majority leader in 2007, and "worked with Senators Ted Stevens, a Republican from Alaska, and Daniel Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii, to secure $22 million in funding for what would become known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program." That program no longer exists, but has helped lead to the government report that's going to be released soon at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He cautions, and I guess we have to accept it, that "It’s unclear whether the U.F.O.s we have encountered could have been built by foreign adversaries, whether our pilots’ visual perception during some encounters was somehow distorted, or whether we truly have credible evidence of extraterrestrial visitations. There may be other, as yet unknown explanations for some of these strange sightings."
Those sightings have been getting a lot of coverage lately, probably because it's as much escapism for other reporters as it is for me. But also because the upcoming report has military personnel talking about the fact that they see a lot of these unidentified aerial phenomena—A. Lot. Former Navy pilot Lt. Ryan Graves said: "Every day. Every day for at least a couple years."
He sees a "security risk," likely international spying from the air, possibly from Russia or China. "I would say, you know, the highest probability is it's a threat observation program." That's no fun. But that is also how the military—which is compiling this report because they're the ones who keep seeing them—is going to approach this. That means that there's going to be a lot of classified information on this upcoming report that won't be shared publicly. That can't be because of national security. But it does give us something else to think about—something that the Republicans haven't ruined yet.
In the meantime, here’s what Harry Reid says: "Let me be clear: I have never intended to prove that life beyond Earth exists. But if science proves that it does, I have no problem with that. Because the more I learn, the more I realize that there's still so much I don't know."
In view of that: Bring on the UFOs. Bring on the aliens. Bring on the magic of breaking the bounds of this earth, at least in our minds, and trying to imagine something else. I'm ready for a different narrative, for something that literally takes us off of this planet to consider another realm. That it has Harry Reid in it—well, that helps, too.
I should say at the outset that I am the least imaginative person that I know. I am utterly incapable of suspending disbelief. I'm the person watching the movie or TV show with you that can't help unraveling the stray threads of narratives that don't lie smooth, the one who notices all the lapses in continuity. So it's a sign of how badly my brain needs an escape after four years of Trump and more than a year of lockdown that I look at these stories and think, "Sure."
Anyway, back to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He writes, "I’m from a tiny town about 50 miles south of Las Vegas called Searchlight, in the high desert, with a population today of about 300." I'm from a tiny town. Well, not even from the town, but from the unincorporated community of Corral, Idaho, then home to half-a-dozen or so families in a 20-mile or so radius. But this:
The night sky at a mile high with civilization miles away was never black. It was too lit up with wonders to be black. And up there, somewhere, wasn't it conceivable that there was something else? I've never really been able to grasp the concept of infinity (that imagination deficit, again) but the odds that we’d be the only inhabitants in that infinity have just never made sense. But that's not fanciful, it's logical.
Anyway, Reid writes about when he was Senate majority leader in 2007, and "worked with Senators Ted Stevens, a Republican from Alaska, and Daniel Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii, to secure $22 million in funding for what would become known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program." That program no longer exists, but has helped lead to the government report that's going to be released soon at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He cautions, and I guess we have to accept it, that "It’s unclear whether the U.F.O.s we have encountered could have been built by foreign adversaries, whether our pilots’ visual perception during some encounters was somehow distorted, or whether we truly have credible evidence of extraterrestrial visitations. There may be other, as yet unknown explanations for some of these strange sightings."
Those sightings have been getting a lot of coverage lately, probably because it's as much escapism for other reporters as it is for me. But also because the upcoming report has military personnel talking about the fact that they see a lot of these unidentified aerial phenomena—A. Lot. Former Navy pilot Lt. Ryan Graves said: "Every day. Every day for at least a couple years."
He sees a "security risk," likely international spying from the air, possibly from Russia or China. "I would say, you know, the highest probability is it's a threat observation program." That's no fun. But that is also how the military—which is compiling this report because they're the ones who keep seeing them—is going to approach this. That means that there's going to be a lot of classified information on this upcoming report that won't be shared publicly. That can't be because of national security. But it does give us something else to think about—something that the Republicans haven't ruined yet.
In the meantime, here’s what Harry Reid says: "Let me be clear: I have never intended to prove that life beyond Earth exists. But if science proves that it does, I have no problem with that. Because the more I learn, the more I realize that there's still so much I don't know."