Space aliens are everywhere! Oh, wait

UFOs have reportedly landed on earth. Again. Picture: iStock

Space creatures from beyond the moon have reportedly arrived on Earth. Apparently they’re everywhere. Like Russians in Monaco. The question is, are they loveable and benign like ET or are they bite your face off monsters like Alien?

If you listen to the conspiracists, they’ll tell you the Pentagon knows all about UFOs but has withheld it from POTUS and the Congress, preferring to exploit the “non-human technology” for the Green Machine, the vast US military-industrial complex who are all in on it.

UFOs are now more commonly called UAPs – unidentified aerial phenomena. Sometimes the A in aerial is replaced with the A in anomalous. Unidentified anomalous phenomena – that’s how NASA refers to them.

Since the Chinese balloons were shot down over North America in February, there have been a flurry of sightings.

I decided to take a look at one UAP sighting in particular where, according to reports, multiple witnesses saw two US Air Force F-16s engage in a dogfight with a UAP on June 3 this year.

If nothing else it provided an interesting lesson in how dubious stories find their way into mainstream media, gaining legitimacy as they move up the chain.

The story ultimately appeared on The Hill’s video channel, known as Rising. The Hill is a left-leaning news organisation and Rising is its attempt to draw a younger audience into its fold. Its YouTube channel has more than a million subscribers.

Rising put up an unquestioning video story of reports of the dogfight in the skies over Bad Axe, a city of 3000 people in Huron County, Michigan. The UAP was described as a silver disc that “easily outmanoeuvred” the F-16s.

Rising relied heavily on a report from the Huron Daily Tribune in Bad Axe, whose associate editor, Mark Birdsall did the groundwork. Birdsall provided quotes from a number of witnesses in and around Bad Axe, many of whom used the newspaper’s Facebook page to provide their own accounts.

Some saw the F-16s firing flares but no UAP. Many saw nothing. No jet fighters, no flying saucers. Nada. One witness opined that the UAP, might have been a mylar balloon purchased at the local dollar store.

The most prominent witness (and the only one quoted in the Rising report) was Christopher Bilbrey of Ubly, a town about 15 clicks south of Bad Axe. Bilbrey said he was with his wife and two co-workers moving his camper when he saw two fighter aircraft. As the military jets circled the sky overhead, he spotted a white/metallic disc that he said was difficult to see because of sunlight reflecting off the object.

Bilbrey said the object seemed to be hiding from the jets by flying in front of the sun.

“The UAP was extremely fast,” Bilbrey said in a witness statement. “It was capable of overtaking and outmanoeuvring the fighter jets with extreme ease. It would overtake a jet, stop suddenly and seemed to turn toward the incoming jet (sic) like spin in their direction without moving.”

Damn those crafty aliens.

Bilbrey said the UAP took off over Lake Michigan and shortly afterwards, the F-16s departed in the opposite direction.

He added that he attempted to take video of the incident on his phone but glare and the altitude of the planes made it difficult.

Just missed it. What a shame.

The account was supported by Bilbrey’s wife but of his two co-workers not a word has been forthcoming.

In fact, Bilbrey’s account published in the Huron Daily Tribune, was taken from a report Bilbrey made to the National UFO Reporting Center.

In other words, the account has leap frogged from a slightly kooky website, to a local newspaper and into the arms of The Hill where the words of one witness received priority over others.

The National UFO Reporting Center is just one of a number of indie reporting groups in the US including the largest, MUFON – the Mutual UFO Network.

The Centre Director at the National UFO Reporting Centre is Peter Davenport. He has held the position since 1994 and in that time, claims to have experienced multiple UAP sightings.

This is from Davenport’s online bio:

“Peter has had an active interest in the UFO phenomenon from his early boyhood. He experienced his first UFO sighting over the St. Louis municipal airport in the summer of 1954, and he investigated his first UFO case during the summer of 1965 in Exeter, New Hampshire. He has also been witness to several subsequent anomalous events, possibly UFO related, including a dramatic sighting over Baja California in February 1990, and several night-time sightings over Washington State during 1992.”

Readers might have noticed the word several used, well, several times in the bio. Call me crazy, but if I had experienced multiple UFO/UAP sightings, I’d recall a specific number.

MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network is a larger group with 4000 active members in 43 countries. It was founded in 1969.

Both the National UFO Reporting Centre and MUFON claim to have receive about 1000 sightings a month in recent times.

The thought does occur that they have both been around for half a century or more and over that time, nothing much more than vague sightings has happened. Flying saucers have not landed. Death rays have not appeared in the skies incinerating the populace. If aliens are here it seems they are keeping to themselves.

One has to be a little sceptical because the majority of the world’s UAP sightings are in North America. In the US, Canada and in places like Bad Axe, Michigan. Eastern Michigan is bound to be lovely at this time of year but why are they up to their bicuspids in UAP sightings while in eastern Australia, I haven’t seen a single one?

What’s wrong with us, aliens? What’s wrong with Australia? We’ve got some of the best beaches in the world. We’ve got the footy. Kylie Minogue. Come on down.

I can’t let MUFON go without a mention of a 2018 Newsweek article, citing evidence of “anti-immigrant, anti-trans, and anti-Muslim sentiments” among MUFON officials, including MUFON donor and noted fruitcake, Judy Zebra ‘JZ’ Knight and former MUFON State Director for Pennsylvania, John Ventre, both of whom have publicly expressed racist and/or anti-Semitic views, and are described in the article as “high-tier Inner Circle donors to MUFON”.

JZ Knight claims she routinely communicates with aliens. Well, not just any old aliens, but a warrior alien named Aramtha from some distant planet or other.

Ventre was a below the ballot candidate in the 2018 Republican primary in the Pennsylvania gubernatorial race in 2018. He received a low single digital vote.

We can expect to hear more of alien visits to planet Earth in the foreseeable future.

The Canadian government’s top scientist has launched a study into UAP and will report to the Canadian parliament in 2024.

And now there is a highly credentialled whistleblower, David Charles Grusch. Grusch has claimed the Pentagon has possession of more than half a dozen alien vehicles but when prodded, hasn’t provided much by way of detail so far.

Grusch, 36, is a decorated former combat officer in Afghanistan, is a veteran of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). He served as the reconnaissance office’s representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force from 2019-2021.

There have been other whistleblowers, most notably Luis Elizondo, a former US military intelligence officer who went public claiming not just that the Green Machine got its hands on some high tech alien kit but that alien critters have been dissected on stainless steel slabs just like they wanted to in ET.

When asked for a bit more information, Elizondo routinely invokes his security oath.

We can be forgiven for being cynical about the rise of UAP sightings. In the absence of further details, this looks a whole lot like a psy-op in the making, an elaborate conspiracy designed to drag people in cult-like to create further distrust of government and its institutions, referred to bleakly as the deep state.

At times like these it’s worth remembering that we have enormous radio telescopes around the globe pinging to all corners of the known universe, to measure radio waves and thus signs of advanced civilisations. To date, nothing. Not a blip or an electronic fart has come down the line.

Maybe these aliens don’t have the radio on. They’ve probably got their own mix tapes. You know, for the long trip. Or maybe they don’t have radio and just leapfrogged straight from books to television?

It’s all a deep, dark conspiracy, of course. But if the Bad Axe sighting is anything to go by, news reporting even from seemingly reputable media companies, will publish UAP click bait unquestioningly.

And thus, another conspiracy theory is born.