By Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer and Republican Sen. Mike Rounds are filing legislation demanding that the federal government reveal the files on what it knows about unidentified anomalous phenomena. The government has refused to declassify much of the information while admitting that such files exist.
What is in these files is significant in two ways. First and obviously, the presence of alien warships – if they are there and if they are warships – represents a potential threat to all of Earth. This is not a trivial matter. Second and obviously transcendently important, I am writing a book on the geopolitics of space. The core actors are human nations, whose roots are on Earth and who are likely to use space as a new battleground. If the dog men of Andromeda have us in their sights, I must rewrite the book and move up the deadline for submission. However farfetched the threat of an invasion from space may seem, the continual insistence by the Pentagon and the CIA that they have discovered nothing of concern fuels fear. If there is nothing to fear out there, then why not release the files?
There are plausible and good reasons for withholding this information. Suspicions about what were then called UFOs began around the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War. By the mid-1950s, the U.S. and the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons. Both also had land systems for detecting missile launches, and it was essential that these capabilities remain secret. The other side could not know the other’s methods and effectiveness. If these same technologies detected UFOs, then revealing that information could compromise national defense.