The Atlantic

The UFO Trap

Whenever UFOs make the news, standards of skepticism start to slip.
Source: Illustration by Erik Carter

UFOs can be fun. See: the official sign on the road near Area 51, which dubs it the Extraterrestrial Highway. UFOs can be weird. See: E.T. phoning home with a MacGyvered communication device. But UFOs are also a national-security story, a government-contracting story, a conspiracy-culture story, and a technoscientific story. They are a human story.

This month, the director of national intelligence, in consultation with the secretary of defense, is supposed to submit a report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP, the polite acronym for UFOs) to two congressional committees. This government report, the kind of tedious document most people usually ignore, has fanned UFO fervor—you can find it behind a glossy New Yorker cover, between the tick-ticks of 60 Minutes, among the pages of The New York Times and Politico. Also: everywhere else.

If this spike in UFO interest plays out like previous ones, as journalists tackle what people usually perceive as

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