UFOs Are Having a Moment

But don’t expect last week’s official document dump to usher in a new age of patient, sober investigation.

Defense Department images of unidentified objects captured during the 1972 Apollo 17 mission. Photo: U.s. Department Of Defense/Handout/Reuters

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UFOs now have a government website. President Trump announced Friday the release of a tranche of government files related to sightings of UFOs, or UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena), as they’ve been called for the past decade or so.

Such information has typically been hard to come by. You had to get most of it from dodgy books, hearsay at UFO conventions or portentous narrations of dubious veracity on TV shows like “In Search of . . .” Now, those interested can click here. “Have Fun and Enjoy!” the president urged.

The Trump administration is promoting this as a victory for “transparency,” which it is, in a way. But if the American people deserve transparency here, then the administration seems to believe they should get it good and hard. The new site contains many documents, some from the 1940s. Allegedly, more are coming.

Maybe that’s when the real bombshells will arrive. The most dramatic revelations so far involve UFO sightings reported by Apollo program astronauts. It’s certainly interesting that Buzz Aldrin saw a “fairly bright light source” while aboard Apollo 11, or that an Apollo 17 astronaut described a spectacle “like the Fourth of July” outside a spacecraft window. But we’re a long way from definitive proof of intelligent life beyond this planet.

It is definitive proof, however, that UFOs are having a moment. President Trump’s disclosure seemed to emerge after former President Obama said that aliens are real but aren’t in Area 51—later clarifying that he was speculating. Vice President JD Vance is a self-professed obsessive.

Public interest in UFOs surges periodically. They’ve always been great fodder for speculation and fiction. They’ve even gotten past presidents interested. As a Michigan congressman, Gerald Ford investigated some sightings, one of which occurred in Hillsdale, Mich., 60 years ago this past March. As Georgia’s governor, Jimmy Carter reported a UFO sighting.

Yet true obsession was consigned to the fringes. “Coast to Coast AM,” a long-running late-night radio program, functions as a kind of therapy session and community for people who believe things nobody else does. These are the kind of people who show up at a community center on a weekday evening to meet with their local UFO investigation group.

My own interest in UFOs would’ve once marked me as an oddball. Maybe it still does. But there are now a lot of oddballs. Leading podcasters like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson can’t get enough of this stuff. Huge portions of the lineups for cable TV networks and streamers claim some ambiguous “they” aren’t telling you the truth about UFOs. These programs respond to—and generate—real demand.

Why? Watergate and revelations of CIA activities like Mk-Ultra—a wild spy program that involved, among other things, administering LSD to people against their will—made some Americans more receptive to the idea that the government was hiding things. Subsequent institutional failures further spread mistrust. The internet allows weirdos to do “their own research,” find each other and impose their own bizarre order on a chaotic world. Some of these constructed realities become powerful enough to bleed into the one we supposedly share.

The conspiratorial character of American politics has ebbed and flowed over the decades. But we’re definitely at another peak. And it has made mainstream American discourse worse. Elaborate theories about who is “really” in charge offer up easy scapegoats. Such theories deny individual agency and provide ready made us-vs.-them narratives. And they make genuine communication across dissenting views impossible.

In the past, the U.S. government has played games with information about UFOs to obfuscate the stuff it actually doesn’t want us to know about, as Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. has long argued. The same could be happening now.

I support sober, patient investigations into UFO (or UAP) sightings. The results of such investigations would almost certainly disappoint many. But as long as the fringe and the mainstream are merged, don’t expect such wide-scale sobriety anytime soon. Not on this planet, anyway.

Mr. Butler is deputy editor of Free Expression.