I was astounded when the US government announced its intention to release a report detailed UFO encounters, often witnessed by US military personnel, with the warning that many of them are unexplained. I immediately read How the US Started Taking UFOs Seriously in the New Yorker, which led me to download the Kindle version of UFOs by Leslie Kean, of which I’ve read about half.

“Read” may be overstating a bit. The concept of UFOs was so thoroughly debunked in the last half of the 20th century that I have it firmly consigned to the part of my brain that stores other things I consider cockamamie, such as reincarnation and the Q-Anon conspiracy. I skimmed the article and I am stutter-reading the book, as my incredulity keeps rising up to ask, Are you really reading this? Each time I remind myself that the US military believes these things are real, then I wonder, But does it really? Maybe I dreamed that! Then I go to nyt.com to confirm that this is an actual event, and I think, NYT has been scammed before…

It’s just so hard to believe.

Piling on, my younger son and I decided to view The Phenomenon, a recent documentary on this topic. Some of the encounters from the book were there, encounters which involve disk-, cigar-, or delta-shaped craft that fly silently, erratically, and swiftly, seem to be able to temporarily disable electronics from a distance, and sometimes interact with observers by following them or flashing lights. But I had not yet read, or perhaps skimmed over, the accounts of encounters with the occupants of these craft, straight out of central casting with childlike bodies, proportionately large heads, and large, slanted eyes. Pride of place goes to a school in Zimbabwe, where in 1994 sixty-two children aged 6 to 12 experienced an alien emerge from a landed craft and engage them telepathically.

As you may imagine, plenty of reports refer to this incident as mass hysteria.

On the other hand, there is some very dope technology on display here, and now that it is acknowledged as real, I expect our corporate overlords to waste no time in getting it into our hands and heads. Amazon can replace those throbbing Smart-car-sized drones crushing our garden gnomes with our now-pulverized deliverables with silent disks that appear, gently alight, deliver, then disappear, almost instantly. Anyone bothered by a boom box or public cell conversation can zap the offending device with a field that makes it inoperable until out of range. We’ll stop wishing for jet packs and ignore electric vehicles once we have silent, collision-avoiding, flying craft that hit speeds of 2000 mph.

I do worry about the telepathic communication though. Imagine what Facebook would do with a direct line into your head? Someone should start developing the anti-telepathy helmet right away.

I’m trying to believe, really I am!