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Even if you don’t “want to believe,” it is time to prepare for it.
Throughout most of human history, those believing in UFOs were considered crackpots and never quite taken seriously. In recent years, though, attitudes have started to change — likely due to mounting evidence of unresolved mysteries and credible voices stepping forward to share their experiences and demand answers.
With UFO hearings on Capitol Hill and the recent alarm over unexplained drone sightings in the Northeast, something has shifted in American society.
At the heart of the mainstreaming of UFOs is journalist Ralph Blumenthal, who retired from his 45-year career with the New York Times back in 2009. When journalist Leslie Kean approached him with a lead, he jumped back into the fray to collaborate on a story that would shift the nature of UFO discourse.
A Pentagon official named Luis Elizondo was threatening to resign in frustration and go public with information regarding a secretive working group within the Pentagon that had been set up to investigate UFOs.
“At the time, the Pentagon was not officially in the UFO business,” recounts Blumenthal. “No one knew that they were studying UFOs, so it was quite a revelation.”
Blumenthal reached out to New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet about the subject and, to his surprise, got the green light to run with the story. The result was a blockbuster, front-page story published in December 2017, specifically delving into the Pentagon’s “mysterious UFO program.”
“It was the first time a mainstream publication was really interested in UFOs, and it played a huge role in making it respectable,” says Blumenthal. “Until then, the subject was considered fringy. We did follow-up stories on pilots who had experience with UFOs, stories on near misses and even touched on the recovery of crashed UFOs and the materials that have been recovered.”
Eventually, UFOs were renamed UAPs — unidentified anomalous phenomena — since the sightings weren’t just airborne but coming from the ocean as well.
A blizzard of government working groups boasting an alphabet soup of acronyms like AARO (All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office) has come to light since then and it is now apparent that, despite decades of denials, the U.S. government has been studying the phenomena for years. Blumenthal points out that “all the important information is classified, so there was only so far we could go with our reporting.”
Despite the seismic shift in attitude, so much remains beyond our understanding. With the government acknowledging that there are crafts in the skies and emerging from the seas that they don’t understand — and can’t credibly attribute to human technology — it’s time for both the public and private sectors to take steps in preparing for scenarios that could potentially disrupt daily life.
Here is where we step in: in the corporate security world, we advise clients on what is referred to as business continuity planning. The idea is simple: help businesses prepare for low-likelihood but high-impact events like terrorist attacks or natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes. We develop plans on how to continue to operate in the face of hugely disruptive events that might otherwise cripple or even destroy operations.
Given the stronger evidence suggesting we may not be alone in the universe — and could even be visited by extraterrestrials — it seems prudent for key sectors of society to consider planning for such possibilities.
The recent drone mystery over New Jersey is a good example. So far, there has been no credible explanation for the sightings witnessed over the East Coast. The government’s failure to communicate effectively has fueled rumors and speculation to fill the void. It’s not hard to envision a scenario where panic reaches a critical, and dangerous, mass.
The government should have a clear communication plan in effect in cases of this sort. Police forces should be given accurate information pertaining to the objects seen in the sky: Are they part of regular air traffic or some kind of government test? Stonewalling both the public and essential agencies could create hysteria and panic, leading to a plethora of dangerous repercussions.
America’s well-armed populace should probably be receiving instructions to not fire at objects in the sky (it would be great to avoid an intergalactic war). In light of the possibility of electronic communication breaking down in some sort of anomalous event, police officials should have ways to communicate with the population at large through different means.
In short: If the government is taking this seriously enough to carefully study the issue, those responsible for public safety should have some basic plans in place to keep order — at least better than what we have seen happen in New Jersey in recent months.
Businesses should be planning as well. Sure, the mere thought of an enormous alien craft hovering over a major American city, or even descending and making contact with us, overshadows the needs of businesses — but we have no idea how such contact would play out.
Chief security officers, many of whom manage private aircraft, report being asked questions about this subject and admit that they have no answers. The aviation community specifically has been at the heart of the matter for years now, with commercial, civilian and military pilots reporting on encounters with unexplainable objects. Yet there has been a history of discouraging the reporting of UAPs, never mind working on actual emergency plans.
Establishing simple protocols related to safety and communications isn’t impossible and would make a lot of sense. There is so much that we don’t know about UAPs — but we also know so much more than we did a decade ago. Why not make use of that information and establish basic plans to keep everyone safe and informed?
Jeremy Hurewitz is the author of “Sell Like a Spy” and the head of Interfor Academy, a speakers and training bureau composed of senior members of the security and intelligence communities.