The hypothesis of alien ships will not have lasted long, but it will have made noise. Monday, February 13, when asked about the possibility that the unidentified flying objects (UFOs) destroyed over the United States and Canada were sent by extraterrestrials, the commander of the American aerospace forces, General Glen VanHerck, explained “having ruled out nothing at this stage”. Three days later, the White House and intelligence agencies backtracked and declared that “the most plausible explanation [serait] that they are mere airships related to commercial operations or benign purposes”.
Too late. Since the beginning of the week, ufologists (UFO specialists) from all over the planet have been racing. The optimists rejoice at the possible formalization of a “meeting of the third type”, while the most conspiratorial denounce a smoke-out, either to hide the “real” extraterrestrials, or to divert the attention of the general public from pseudo-scandals, such as the effects of vaccines against Covid-19 or the Epstein affair.
It is true that the evocation of the ufological thesis in full crisis with Beijing could surprise. Yet, historically, UFOs and international espionage often go hand in hand.
Roswell and the first spy balloons
The first flying saucer rumors emerged in 1947, against a backdrop of the nascent Cold War, and it was no coincidence that they immediately alarmed the American army. This one was “worried that these objects are secret Soviet weapons”, relates in 1997 Gerald K. Haines, CIA internal historian. The army ultimately attributed the testimonies to a mixture of collective hallucinations, hoaxes and visual misunderstandings.
The CIA estimates that the flights of its Lockheed U-2 aircraft were responsible for half of the UFO reports collected in the late 1950s and the 1960s
If ufology has been able to develop so much in the United States, it is also because of the numerous and inadmissible American programs of spy devices. Thus, the CIA estimates that the flights of its Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance plane were responsible for half of the UFO testimonies collected in the late 1950s and in the 1960s, others being linked to the plane. stealth F-117 Nighthawk, before its existence was revealed to the general public, in the mid-1980s. Even more ironic is the case of the legendary little gray man of Roswell, an urban legend born at the dawn of the 1980s, based on strange debris found in 1947 in New Mexico. A 1994 report reveals that they were in fact part of Project Mogul, a secret spy balloon program designed to monitor the nuclear activities of the USSR.
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