I’ve watched the accompanying video five times now. I don’t know what’s more unnerving—the way whatever that thing is moves, or how gobsmacked two highly trained Navy fighter pilots are at how it moves. Over the weekend, and under the by-lines of two reporters with Pulitzer Prizes hanging on their walls, The New York Times ran the damnedest piece about the U.S. government’s secret program to determine if there are space aliens hereabouts, and what the hell we should do about it if there are. Pro Tip: There very well might be, if the Times report is accurate, and there isn't anything we can do about it at the moment.

The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012. But its backers say that, while the Pentagon ended funding for the effort at that time, the program remains in existence. For the past five years, they say, officials with the program have continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department duties.

The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space. On CBS’s “60 Minutes” in May, Mr. Bigelow said he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that U.F.O.s have visited Earth.

Look, somebody has to be worried about this stuff.

Harry Reid in 2015 Getty Images

Mr. Reid, who retired from Congress this year, said he was proud of the program. “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going,” Mr. Reid said in a recent interview in Nevada. “I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.” Two other former senators and top members of a defense spending subcommittee — Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, and Daniel K. Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat — also supported the program. Mr. Stevens died in 2010, and Mr. Inouye in 2012. While not addressing the merits of the program, Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at M.I.T., cautioned that not knowing the origin of an object does not mean that it is from another planet or galaxy. “When people claim to observe truly unusual phenomena, sometimes it’s worth investigating seriously,” she said. But, she added, “what people sometimes don’t get about science is that we often have phenomena that remain unexplained.”

The funding for the program, according to the NYT, dried up in 2012. Thanks, Obama.

The serious policy issue raised here is an issue of excessive government secrecy and institutional scientific paranoia, a combination of which seems to have driven the program’s director, one Luis Eilzondo, out of government service this past October.

If we’re going to spend money studying this stuff, it seems, we should be relatively open about it and willing to stand the gaff from skeptics within and without the scientific community.

And then there’s this part, in the NYT, under the byline of respected journalists who’ve been honored at the highest level by their profession.

Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes. In addition, researchers spoke to military service members who had reported sightings of strange aircraft…A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered. Mr. Reid’s request for the special designation was denied.

So, they have this…stuff, and they don’t know what it is, and they don’t know how it works, and they can’t say whence it came. If there was a Peak 2017 news story, this is it.

And, to think, people still laugh at…The Most Awesome Man On Television.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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