What's the Deal with U.F.O.s?

"When I was growing up, I watched a lot of sci-fi movies about aliens that come to Earth. The extraterrestrials in popular culture, however, always looked so familiar that I found them far-fetched. What are the chances that E.T., the Predator, or ALF would develop arms and legs, a humanlike face, and opposable thumbs? Perhaps as a result, I associated alien life more with fantasy than with science, and I never gave much thought to what a visit would really look like."

"But my attitude started to change in 2020, when I read Liu Cixin's " The Three-Body Problem " and its two sequels. In Liu's books, creatures called Trisolarans send a scouting mission of supercomputers to spy on and subtly disrupt human affairs. Although Trisolarans could do seemingly impossible things, such as program protons, Liu's rigor got me thinking about aliens from a scientific perspective. Suddenly, I could imagine a sophisticated civilization coming into contact with humanity, perhaps in ways that we don't immediately understand."

"In the so-called GOFAST video, recorded off the coast of Florida in 2015, a Navy pilot with an infrared camera follows an object zooming above the water and asks, over the radio, "What the fuck is that?" Another clip, deemed GIMBAL-"Look at that thing, dude"-showed a similar shape above some clouds. A third video, known as FLIR, was taken in 2004 from an aircraft in California."

Early exposure to anthropomorphic science-fiction shaped skepticism about alien appearances. Reading Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem reframed possibilities, presenting alien strategies like sending supercomputer scouts and manipulating physics. That perspective encouraged thinking about extraterrestrial contact scientifically and about nonobvious modes of influence. Government attention shifted in 2021 when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report on unidentified anomalous phenomena. Publicly released Navy videos—GOFAST, GIMBAL, and FLIR—showed fast, maneuvering objects including a Tic Tac–shaped contact observed off coasts and over clouds. Military whistle-blowers alleged greater knowledge within government than publicly acknowledged.

Read at The New Yorker