WHAT’S THE STORY?

NO self-respecting alien arriving on this planet from outer space in an Unidentified Flying Object would go anywhere other than Scotland, of course, but for some reason the Americans think that UFOs are their own phenomena.

Later this week, and certainly before the end of this month, a colossal report into the years of UFO sightings in the US – and those spottings made elsewhere by US military – will be released by the Pentagon.

The question is will it land with a dull thud or will the report publish evidence that UFOs are real and that there are aliens out there?

WHO KNOWS WHAT?

THE report has been kept ultra top secret but last week politicians on the House Intelligence Committee received a hush-hush briefing which allowed them to see the report in the confines of the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, in Washington DC.

The compilers of the report, drawn from America’s top military and intelligence echelons, might as well have taken out a front page advert in the New York Times, and funnily enough it was the Times which led the news with its revelation that the report contains 120 incidents which can’t be explained by current US technology.

So that has been more than enough to cause a huge amount of speculation across the internet that the Pentagon report is going to reveal that UFOs are real.

The National:

WHAT MIGHT THE REPORT SAY?

IT all depends on whether the UFOs that have been sighted are of extra-terrestrial origin or not.

It has been widely reported that the Pentagon report says there is no evidence of aliens being involved at all, but the theory of ET visiting Earth cannot be ruled out.

What is more credible is the supposition that the US’s military has been subjected to observation by technology belonging to another country, or, as one UFOlogist put it, something put up there by the private sector as a piece of military-industrial espionage. The report apparently examines in detail the leaked footage of US Navy pilots encountering UFOs, which moved and accelerated in ways that were not thought to be possible for the technology of the time.

THEY REALLY ARE OUT THERE, AREN’T THEY?

THERE is life, Jim, but not as know it, somewhere out in the vastness of space.

The sheer numbers of stars with planets in Earth-like orbit around them make it very probable that sentient life exists elsewhere.

The problem for that life is how to get here – and why would they want to do so? The distances are so great that even if travelling faster than the speed of light was possible – no one has yet proven how it could be done – the ways of achieving such travel are beyond comprehension. And while Albert Einstein and physicist Nathan Rosen used the former’s Theory of General Relativity to consider the idea of shortcuts through space and time known as wormholes, no evidence for them has ever been found.

So no, there may well be UFOs in the Pentagon report, but they are not piloted by aliens.

WHAT DID THE FORMER PRESIDENT SAY?

NO, not him, though Donald Trump did back the study, but Barack Obama, no less.

Last month on The Late Late Show, Obama stated there was no evidence of any Area 51 type centre for UFO studies, and no lab with alien specimens and spaceships. He did say this, however: “But what is true, and I’m actually being serious here, there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.

“We can’t explain how they move, their trajectory, they did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is. But I have nothing to report to you today.”

In an opinion poll in the US last month, 35% of those surveyed said the UFOs were “aircraft from another world” against 42% who believed the UFOs were built by humans.

HAVE WE SEEN ANY OVER SCOTLAND?

SOME 33 claims of UFO sightings over Scotland were made to alien investigation groups in 2020. Back in 1979, forester Robert Taylor claimed aliens had tried to pull him aboard a flying dome at Dechmont, West Lothian. It remains officially unsolved.