I am not impressed. That is often the reaction I have to hyped reports of alleged evidence for strange phenomena. They never turn out to be truly impressive or exciting. The recently released Pentagon UFO videos are no different.

The backstory is that it was recently revealed that the Pentagon funded the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program for five years with a total of $22 million. The program officially ended in 2012 but apparently its members continued to investigate interesting reports off the books. The former director of this program, Luis Elizondo, pushed to have some of the evidence they uncovered made public, resulting in the release of the video.

Elizondo is a believer. He is quoted as saying:

“I think this is a national security imperative,” Elizondo said. “We have clear things that we do not understand how they work, operating in areas that we can’t control.”

Does all of this add up to the likely conclusion that we are being visited by advanced aliens? I’m doubtful.

First, the existence of the program itself is not even suggestive that we are being visited by aliens. This is a common theme in the UFO community – interpreting typical government secrecy as hiding proof of aliens. The fact is the government does engage in secret programs and tries to cover their tracks. The Roswell incident, for example, was an airforce coverup – of a secret program to spy on Soviet nuclear testing. Area 51 does exist – to test secret spy planes and similarly classified tech.

The Pentagon studies “anomalous aerospace threats” because they may relate to Russian technology or threats from other countries. Some weird sightings may also represent natural phenomena that might threaten aviation. At the very least such a program will help us identify apparent anomalies better so that when we do encounter novel foreign technology we will be better able to recognize it.

In other words – even without aliens visiting the Earth there are plenty of reasons for our military and intelligence organizations to be interested in studying apparent anomalous aerospace phenomena. The mere existence of such programs does not prove or even suggest that the government has secret knowledge of alien visitors.

What about these new videos? They are the UFO equivalent of blobsquatch. Believers describe the incident in more dramatic terms:

Chris Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence who is now involved with To the Stars, recently described the features that made the craft in the Nimitz incident so unusual.

“It is white, oblong, some 40 feet long and perhaps 12 feet thick … The pilots are astonished to see the object suddenly reorient itself toward the approaching F/A-18. In a series of discreet tumbling maneuvers that seem to defy the laws of physics, the object takes a position directly behind the approaching F/A-18. The pilots capture gun camera footage and infrared imagery of the object. They are outmatched by a technology they’ve never seen.”

This is not an objective interpretation but rather one filtered through the assumption that the phenomena was a craft. As regular readers should know, believing is seeing – how we perceive our senses is massive influenced by our beliefs and assumptions.

In reality, determining how big and therefore fast an object is requires knowledge of how distant it is. If the perception of distance is off, then interpretations of size and speed will be similarly off. So a small, slow, and near object may appear to be a large, fast and distant object, but that is just an optical illusion.

The pilots also report seeing the object “break the laws of physics.” That is always a red flag for me. If you think something is breaking the laws of physics, then there is likely an error in perception.

I have no idea ultimately what caused this encounter. We simply don’t have enough information. It is probably something truly unusual, given that it was selected out of numerous encounters as being the most interesting. But weird and unusual stuff happens without it being aliens. Possibilities include instrument failure, and unusual natural phenomenon, or secret foreign technology.

The objective evidence we are left with, mainly the videos, is simply unimpressive. We see a glowing blob in the middle of the field without any features that can be used to truly judge what it is, or even how big or far away it is. It could be an artifact as far as we can tell from the video.

I would like to see a technical analysis of the original video. This may shed more light on what it is, and I predict any more detailed information will move us in the direction of a prosaic explanation. I am always completely open to the idea that it is an alien spacecraft – but I need more than a blob and a confused eyewitness report.

I also find it telling that Elizondo pushed to have what he felt was the most compelling evidence in the hands of the government made public, and this is the best they had. Unless there is an even more secret government program to study UFOs, this apparently is the best evidence years of research has revealed. If Elizondo were aware of smoking gun evidence it seems he would have said so or pushed to have that made public.

But of course if you think there is a conspiracy to cover it all up, everything that happens or doesn’t happen is just part of the conspiracy. You can just imagine that the conspiracy goes one level deeper – Elizondo is a false flag operative made to make it appear that the government does not have smoking gun evidence. Sure.

As I said, I am willing to be convinced. If the aliens are benign, I would even love to be convinced. Show me the evidence. But all we are getting is extremely low grade evidence and a lot of wishful thinking.