Remarkably Bright Creatures: A Novel by Shelby Van Pelt - 7

For reasons not entirely understood, the need for a question to have an answer is often greater than the need for the answer to be verifiably true. This neurologically mysterious feature of the human mind goes way back, typically referencing deities to account for all that was not understood at the time. Polytheism may represent the pinnacle of this exercise, where different gods accounted for each mystery, each inexplicable natural phenomenon, and each precipice of ignorance.

The great Alexandrian polymath Claudius Ptolemy, in awe of the mysterious motions of planets on the sky, penned in the margins of his greatest work, Almagest (AD 150):

When I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavens bodies, I no longer touch earth with my feet, I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.

He didn’t fully understand what the planets were doing. That would require another 1,500 years. But Ptolemy was sure Zeus was on top of the situation.

By the eighteenth century we understood planetary orbits, thanks to the sequential efforts of Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton, which basically canceled Zeus. But writing in 1717 and 1718, for the second edition of his seminal classic, Opticks , 1 Newton would wonder how the solar system can remain stable with everybody tugging on everybody, everywhere, all the time, via their mutual gravitational attraction:

Blind Fate could never make all the Planets move one and the same way in Orbs concentrick, some inconsiderable Irregularities excepted which may have risen from the mutual Actions of Comets and Planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase, till this System wants a Reformation.

That “Reformation,” invoked at the limits of Newton’s understanding of the planetary motions, referenced the hand of God.

We would later understand the stability of the solar system through the work of French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace in the early nineteenth century. He developed a branch of calculus called “perturbation theory,” which allowed a full analysis and understanding of how the flying circus of planets, moons, and comets can remain in stable orbits around the Sun. The almighty, omnipotent God of the Bible was no longer necessary to make things right. Laplace is rumored to have told Emperor Napoleon, upon being called out for ignoring God’s handiwork in his calculations, “Sir, I had no need for that hypothesis.”

What happened there has played out for millennia. It’s what philosophers call the “God of the gaps.” When you are ignorant of the answer, and so is everyone else, you assign the cause to God. After you’ve figured out the answer, God shifts to other frontiers where science has yet to tread.

Today, in many cases, “God of the gaps” has morphed to “Alien of the gaps.” Or to add some assonance, how about “Aliens of our ignorance.” The abbreviation “UFO” uses “Unidentified” as its first word, preceding “Flying Object.” A perfectly sensible way to ID something you don’t understand or can’t identify. But one cannot overemphasize a simple truth: Just because you don’t know what you’re looking at does not mean you know what you’re looking at . Of course, the question-loving skeptic must always retain an open mind, but not so open that your brains spill out, losing all ability to analyze the evidence before you.

Failure to heed this advice leads to newspaper headlines declaring “UFOs are Real,” 2 which, on face value, make no sense at all. The abbreviation UFO has become synonymous with visiting Aliens from outer space, which, if so, should then require we call these things IFOs, for “Identified Flying Objects.”

In modern science, we are generally comfortable staring into the unknown. That’s what attracts us to the frontier. The persistent media declaration in the face of new discoveries that scientists must “go back to the drawing board” misses the fact that active research scientists are always at the drawing board. But somehow, there’s nothing less comforting to the public than a scientist, when confronted with a mystery, who says “I dunno.” “Your guess is as good as mine!” Or “We’re clueless on that one.” Slightly more fulfilling responses might include “We’ve got top people working on that” or “We have several hypotheses that might explain things.” Perhaps the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke said it best: 3

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart

and try to love the questions themselves.

Conspiracy thinking is another mysterious force that operates on the otherwise logical human mind. It sits adjacent to the “I’ve gotta have an answer now” camp of thinking. What all conspiracy theories have in common is a gap between their acquired data and an unearned conclusion about what’s actually going on. This naturally lands conspiracy theorists in places where they must ignore conflicting data (known as confirmation bias) and then just make shit up to cross the data gap in ways that serve their foregone conclusion. In the simplest example, you are certain the UFO is an Alien flying saucer, but all you have is a fuzzy image of lights in the sky. You have insufficient data to justify your conclusion, but that doesn’t matter to you. The US government declares it’s a weather balloon. But that claim is inconsistent with what you are sure is the truth. So, you conclude that the real information is being withheld from you and the government has engaged in a conspiratorial cover-up.

Let the record show that more than two hundred weather balloons are lifted to the stratosphere every day in the United States. 4 That’s more than seventy thousand per year, far exceeding the number of UFO sightings reported to the Washington State–based National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC). 5 But it may account for the preponderance of spherical UFOs reported worldwide, greatly exceeding the iconic saucer of decades ago. Here’s the latest cumulative tally of shapes, from more than 100,000 reports, compiled by NUFORC:

ORB             29%

TRIANGLE        20%

OTHER           10%

FIREBALL        10%

DISK / SAUCER   9%

EGG             8%

CIGAR           6%

CHANGING       4%

RECTANGLE      3%

DIAMOND        2%

Frankly, orbs as UFOs are much less interesting than any other shape on that list, perhaps because they’re the easiest to account for.

If you need to speak with someone after seeing a UFO, the Ohio-based Mutual UFO Network, abbreviated MUFON, is dedicated to supporting observers. On their website, 6 you can click on “R EPORT A UFO” or even “R EPORT AN A BDUCTION OR N ON – HUMAN C ONTACT .” So whether or not you think you saw actual Aliens, they are eager to hear and log your story.

One can’t fully explore the UFO phenomenon without also inquiring whether sightings occur equally around the world. We presume Aliens would have no specific reason to favor one country or another. Yet that’s not what we see. UFO sightings occur overwhelmingly in English-speaking countries—by more than a factor of twenty-five—as meticulously compiled from decades ago up to the current moment by NUFORC. 7

Lots of ways to account for these findings:

One of those is the right account. Perhaps No. 4. But the stark contrast of UFO sightings on a world map remains curious and in desperate need of a confirmed explanation. As for account No. 5, collective delusions are a real thing when prompted by strong, shared beliefs, and can create a feedback loop of mimicry and heightened suggestibility. 8 Examples abound, but two deserve special mention. In 2023, at the Dallas Zoo, a clouded leopard named Nova escaped its enclosure and went missing for several hours. Intense media coverage of the incident prompted nearby residents to be on the lookout, which spawned countless reports from people claiming to see the escaped leopard in the streets and in their backyards. Zoo officials would ultimately discover the leopard, near its enclosure, having never left the grounds. 9

And in 1994, in the small town of Ruwa, Zimbabwe, more than sixty elementary school children corroborated a story, in front of each other, that a silver craft had landed in their playground during recess. On board were life-forms in black suits with big eyes and small noses. The children drew with crayons what they saw. This close encounter happened while all the adults were inside the school during a morning break.

How many child eyewitnesses equal one adult eyewitness? How many adult eyewitnesses equal one actual Alien?

The famous Area 51 is a top secret United States Air Force facility within the Nevada Test and Training Range. Located eighty-three miles from Las Vegas, in Lincoln County, it has an average population density of 0.4 people per square mile. 10 The place has all the trappings of a secret government installation, where they would surely collect crashed and captured flying saucers along with dead or living Alien bodies. Being a secret facility, Area 51 fills an easy gap in everybody’s data, en route to your certain conclusions. Presumably, however, the Aliens land in places all around the country and around the globe. It would be odd if only secret government officials knew about those landings, with no bystanders and other curious onlookers to capture video of screaming Aliens getting hauled away in trucks destined for Area 51.

The film Close Encounters of the Third Kind portrayed a massive government cover-up that culminated in organized human contact with intelligent Aliens. The great meeting of the Alien Mother Ship took place not in Lincoln County, Nevada, but in a place damn near as empty of residents—Crook County, Wyoming, population density: 2.7 people per square mile. Easy to evacuate when you’re doing secret stuff. One peeve I had was that the government knew the Aliens were arriving via flying saucer. Yet the arrival zone was framed with runway lights. Flying saucers don’t need runways. A big illuminated bull’s-eye, maybe. Runway lights, no.

The original movie poster was explicit about the ranking of evidence in reports of Alien sightings…

C LOSE E NCOUNTER OF THE F IRST K IND :

Sighting of a UFO

C LOSE E NCOUNTER OF THE S ECOND K IND :

Physical Evidence

C LOSE E NCOUNTER OF THE T HIRD K IND :

Contact

Notice that, according to the poster, the simple sighting of a UFO does not constitute evidence. As any scientist would declare, physical evidence is the gold standard and not eyewitness testimony. Psychologists and scientists have known forever about the susceptibility of eyewitness testimony to all manner of bias, traceable to your mental state, your prior expectations, your desires, your imagination, and even the pressure of peers and authorities. Other sources of bias include your religion, your politics, and your culture. Your academic pedigree is irrelevant. Your military rank is irrelevant. So too is whether you are a truth-telling member in good standing of your community.

Of course, one needn’t be skeptical of eyewitness accounts to ordinary events or phenomena. If I misplace my car keys and you tell me you saw them on the bench, I have no good reason to grill you on the accuracy of your claim. Worst case, you saw somebody else’s car keys and not mine. Or they’re my keys, though not my car keys. A grown, mature person is not going to mistake keys for a beer can. But if you instead see something extraordinary, then, as a scientist, I need extraordinary evidence to support it. In every case I can think of, that means you hand me evidence that didn’t filter through your brain, such as an object of Alien manufacture. Or better yet, bring forth the Alien itself. Not that eyewitness accounts have no value. At best, they call attention to phenomena that deserve much more attention.

In the 1950s and 1960s, many flying saucers were photographed along roadsides. These images were quite special, considering that back then only two kinds of people carried cameras: journalists and tourists. And some of us were photographed only once per year, while posing for our official school photo.

Roadside flying saucers became less common as the auto industry began to abandon hubcaps as wheel decoration. Mere coincidence? Along bumpy roads, especially where potholes lurked, a car was almost guaranteed to drop a hubcap without the driver noticing. Most were affixed to the wheel by friction, with no nuts or bolts. They were heavy, but throwable like Frisbees, and you could photograph them flying through the air. Yup, hubcaps made excellent faked evidence of flying saucers.

Also, the less familiar you are with atmospheric and sky phenomena, the more likely you will see something you don’t understand. That’s to be expected. But unfamiliarity with sky phenomena is not synonymous with Alien activity. The worldwide community of amateur astronomers, who observe the sky more than any other demographic in society, hardly ever spot UFOs. Why? Amateur astronomers typically own their own telescopes and they know, at all times, what the Sun, Moon, stars, and planets are doing on the sky. They further wield a keen understanding of weather patterns, which directly affect their viewing conditions. While you might want to avoid amateur attorneys and amateur neurosurgeons, the badge of amateur, when applied to astronomers, is an honor, not an insult.

Consider the behavior of planet Venus in twilight skies. This sister planet to our own, with similar size and surface gravity, is otherwise shrouded in thick white clouds, so it reflects sunlight brightly back into space. And because it orbits closer to the Sun than we do, it cannot wander far from the Sun in the sky, offering stunning appearances in twilight either after sunset or before sunrise. Venus at its brightest is twenty-four times brighter than the brightest star in the night sky. So if you recite that rhyme:

Star light, star bright,

First star I see tonight,

I wish I may, I wish I might,

Have this wish I wish tonight

… and your wishes have not been coming true, it’s because all these years you’ve been wishing on a planet.

When low in the sky, Venus can also take on the characteristic red-orange-yellow colors of sunset, giving the illusion of active, changing lights. Venus is variously mistaken (by the uninitiated) for the North Star, itself the forty-ninth brightest star in the night sky, airplane landing lights, and, all too frequently, a UFO. If an airplane looks like it should be coming in for a landing, and it just hovers in place, you’ve got a UFO to report. The annals of UFO chasers is rich with futile accounts of veteran police officers chasing UFOs in their squad cars. 11 In one case, the UFO was darting left and right in the sky, with the officers discovering only later that they were chasing Venus along a stretch of road that curved back and forth.

Venus was capable of even more mischief on July 11, 1991, when a total solar eclipse crossed Mexico City and was witnessed by millions of residents. In what bordered on a collective delusion, when the sky went dark, just before, during, and just after the seven minutes of totality, Venus became strikingly visible in the sky, thirty-five degrees away from the eclipsed Sun. Other nighttime regulars were visible too, including Mars, Jupiter, and Regulus, the brightest star in the constellation Leo. Surprising everyone but amateur and professional astronomers, live video captured audible waves of people pointing and declaring there were UFOs in the sky. 12 The groupthink was strong. Some even cited a fulfilled prophesy of the Mayans, that a UFO would arrive at such a time.

Evening noctilucent clouds are a personal favorite. Unlike ordinary clouds, these remain luminous deep into twilight because they live so high in the sky that while the Sun has set for you on your horizon, it has not yet set for the cloud, whose horizon sits much farther away, imbuing it with an eerie sunset glow against your darkening skies. A shoo-in every time for a UFO sighting, and evidence, by the way, that Earth is round.

Additionally, any twilight rocket launch is guaranteed to ascend high enough, en route to orbit, for its rocket plume to remain in sunlight while you and your skies are steeped in darkness. Note that these two phenomena are visible only during twilight. Launch plumes or high-altitude clouds late at night, when the Sun has set for them both, would go unilluminated, and therefore unnoticed by UFO enthusiasts.

Perhaps the coolest UFOs are orographic clouds. These are formed atop mountains by warm, moist air currents that ascend along their sides. As the air cools in the higher elevations, its moisture content condenses into clouds that form and position themselves above the highest point of the mountain like a hat. Often these clouds are large and cylindrical. They can form at any time of day. But when they form during twilight, as with noctilucent clouds, they sit high in the sky and see the Sun set much later than for you at the base of the mountain or at sea level.

This leaves them illuminated by the vibrant red-orange-yellow sunset colors against a darkening sky. Under these special conditions, the orographic cloud looks just like a self-luminous Alien Mother Ship, responsible for countless UFO calls to local police departments.

To the amateur astronomer, these are all examples of IFOs.

Most of NASA’s photographic imagery of the Martian surface sits in the public domain. Mars is a rock-strewn desert with a terrain that shifts constantly due to surface dust storms, creating no end of dynamic features, accented by shadows. In 1975, NASA sent two planetary probes to Mars: a lander, Viking 1 , and an orbiter, Viking 2 , both arriving a year later. The orbiter took extensive, low-resolution pictures of the surface, including one from the Cydonia region, which revealed a shadowy, but obvious, large-scale face sticking out of the Martian surface. This was not just any old face—not a canine or feline or avian or piscine or porcine or equine or reptilian face. It was a simian human face. As you might expect, the image triggered extraordinary Alien interest back on Earth, where enthusiasm ran high. But at this point we might ask the question: “Why should Aliens from another planet look at all human when most life on Earth, with whom we share common DNA, doesn’t look human at all?”

Another good question is: “What looks like a human face, no matter the angle of the Sun?” Answer: “A human face.” What we must do is return to the region when the Sun is at a different angle to the Martian surface and observe whether it still looks like a human face. NASA did just that in 1998 with a ten-times-higher-resolution camera on board the Mars Global Surveyor probe. 13 The face went away, although two depressions in the outcrop offered what would be eye sockets for shadows to land.

The visual fixation with faces is a form of pareidolia, which afflicts us all. So blame our genetics and not our wishful thinking. Within images of random shapes and forms, we rapidly identify what looks familiar to us, especially human faces. The famous inkblot Rorschach test I in psychology is an exercise in pareidolia. Furthermore, we commonly imbue these forms with meaning, intent, and even providence. That’s how you get Aliens on Mars, Jesus on tortillas, and my emotional banana slice on Twitter:

The fallibility of the human sensory system is why the fist-clenched courtroom battle cry of “I need a witness!” is particularly terrifying to anyone who seeks objective truths in the world. Even Leonardo da Vinci knew five centuries ago that: The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions. 14 Another curious fact of being human: we’re much more compelled by impassioned anecdotal testimony than by bar graphs and statistics that may contain the same or even conflicting information. That’s why TV commercials use human beings and not charts to get you to believe what the advertiser wants.

Scientists are human too. But the enterprise enjoys built-in error-checking mechanisms, enshrined in the scientific method, to ferret out and diminish the influence of biases on our research. Think of it as a noble act of self-awareness en route to understanding how the universe works. We do this without “proof” of what’s true. That term has precise meaning in mathematics and in logic, but not in science. In science we seek compelling evidence that’s also repeatable. We then see how it fits into our ongoing hypotheses and theories. After that, we move on to other unsolved questions in need of our attention, all the while doing what we can to keep our biases at bay.

Since scientists don’t actually run around proving things, we are not susceptible to the repeated claim that you can’t prove a negative. Can we prove there are no Aliens living at the bottom of the ocean? No. Especially since less than half the ocean bottom is mapped with high resolution. In fact, we know more about the surfaces of both the Moon and Mars than about our own ocean bottom. Want evidence of that? In 2005 the nuclear submarine USS San Francisco collided with an uncharted sea mountain. 15 But we can offer observations that make an Alien presence there highly unlikely. If intelligent Aliens lurk in our oceans, then they hang out exclusively in all the places we’ve yet to map. And they’ve never revealed themselves in the era of photography to any of the fifty thousand cargo ships, tankers, ferries, fishing vessels, and cruise liners afloat every day. 16 This does not “prove” the Aliens aren’t there, but it renders the question much less interesting.

In a simpler, land example, I can’t prove that a cave has no bear unless I go inside. But I can perform simple experiments that make the likelihood so low as to render the question uninteresting. For example, I could smooth the soil outside the cave door. Bears are big and heavy and leave paw prints wherever they walk. If weeks go by and the soil remains undisturbed, I’m betting we have no bear. Not proof. Just strong evidence against the hypothesis.

Beginning in July 2023, many UFO fans in the United States, but especially the press, were mesmerized by one after another earnest testimonies by whistleblowing ex-military and -intelligence officers under sworn oath in the US Congress. To reduce the historical giggle factor, and to be more inclusive of what people report, the government rebranded UFOs as UAPs, for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. After being treated to fuzzy videos of mysterious objects in the sky and over the ocean, some obtained by navy pilots in restricted military airspace, this congressional Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs was told of “nonhuman biologics” and other evidence of Aliens gathered from crash sites being held in undisclosed locations under lock and key, requiring high-security clearance that even members of Congress could not obtain. Clearly, US government agencies were secretly masterminding a cover-up, withholding all evidence from the public and the press.

A year earlier, in July 2022, the Pentagon had established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), 17 whose task is to collate, document, and analyze UAP reports from land, sea, air, and space, supplied by government agencies that include the CIA, FBI, NASA, FAA, and all branches of the Department of Defense. The objective was to identify and mitigate potential threats that UAPs may pose to national security. Though expanded, this goal was not fundamentally different from a half dozen previous government programs that trace back to 1948. These efforts to characterize and risk-assess unidentified phenomena were hatched after the Roswell, New Mexico, incident got memorialized in the local newspaper with the headline “RAAF [Roswell Army Air Field] Captures a Flying Saucer.” The most famous of these programs was Project Blue Book, run by the US Air Force from 1952 to 1969, and disbanded after twenty-one years of no conclusive evidence of Aliens and no value to the scientific community. 18

This no-conclusive-evidence posture continued into the Barack Obama presidency (2008–2016), when his administration issued the following statement:

The U.S. Government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race.… In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.

If it’s all a cover-up, then of course the President would be in on it. But what would motivate a cover-up? Two reasons are commonly offered: (1) we’re secretly trying to reverse-engineer Alien ships and weapons to secure a militaristic and geopolitical advantage in the world; and (2) if we really knew the truth, we couldn’t handle it.

As for the first account, it’s easy to be impressed with the pace of scientific and technological growth after the second World War—especially after the Roswell saucer crash in July 1947. Coincidentally, three months later, Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager would first break the sound barrier. A decade after that we have lasers and orbiting satellites. And a decade after that we’re traveling to the Moon. All surely enabled by reverse-engineering captured Alien hardware. But there’s another explanation. If you think that way, you may be a modern-day Erich von Däniken. He denies the intellect of ancient peoples, crediting Aliens with their achievements. You’re denying the exponential progress of modern science and technology, and prefer to credit Aliens for that too. As explored elsewhere, 19 the exponential growth of anything is hard for the human mind to comprehend. Yet it’s happening all the time, all around us, driven in the US by actively funded research programs in science and technology, all prompted by the 1945 White House document: Science, the Endless Frontier; a report to the President on a program for postwar scientific research , authored by Truman’s science advisor Vannevar Bush. Among other shifts in American priorities, that report birthed the National Science Foundation in 1950.

As for the second account for why there’s a cover-up, it’s getting harder and harder to make that claim. In the old days, reports were primarily from regular people sharing firsthand Alien sightings from their backyards or on country roads—in the face of official government denials with nary an insider in the mix. That’s a recipe for a cover-up if there ever was one. But since then, countless insiders from multiple branches of government have come forth with firsthand knowledge of Alien cover-ups. Note, however, that if you make a documentary using an exclusive lineup of government insiders who claim that the US Government is secretly interacting with Aliens, that kinda means it’s no longer a secret. Just saying. More importantly, the excitable public seems to be handling the information just fine. What’s left to cover up? By the time anybody actually brings forth an Alien from the locked shed out back, the event may be anticlimactic.

Yet the documentaries continue.

In the heavily marketed 2025 documentary The Age of Disclosure , dozens of high-ranking military and government officials, including US presidents, senators, and members of the House of Representatives parade in front of the camera to testify what they’ve heard, what they know, and what they’ve seen regarding not only UAPs but also crashed and recovered Alien spacecraft and technologies. We are further reminded of a sentence from a speech President Ronald Reagan delivered to the United Nations in 1987:

I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.

He’s not wrong. During the UAP congressional hearings of 2023, 2024, and 2025, we had not seen that much bipartisan cooperation toward a unified goal since… nobody remembers when. Common enemies, real or perceived, tend to accomplish just that.

What distinguishes The Age of Disclosure from other documentaries in the genre is its emphasis on credible testimony more than on the display of fuzzy images and video records of UAPs. No rural farmers commenting on what hovered over their crops on the back forty. No revelers reporting on what they saw in the sky upon exiting their local bar at 2 a.m. Nobody wearing a tinfoil hat.

I know what you’re thinking: the testimonies must be true, because everyone interviewed was calm, reasonable, reliable, believable, impassioned, and high-ranking. Indeed, the most compelling accounts were from those who claimed to have interacted directly with captured Aliens and their technology. Some even declared they were biologically harmed by their close encounters. Maybe everyone was telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—not just what they believed to be true but what is actually true. Yet at no time during the nearly two-hour documentary was an actual Alien or actual Alien technology presented.

In science, there’s no such thing as a credible claim or a credible witness, only credible evidence. (Remember Percival Lowell claiming that Mars had canals?) Imagine a full-length documentary on whether elephants exist, and they spend the whole time interviewing honest people who have seen elephants—in circuses and on safaris. These testimonies come from expert animal trainers and wildlife conservationists. Imagine further that each testimony was compelling and heartfelt, given under oath and via polygraph. One problem: the documentary never shows an actual elephant. Seems to me, if the filmmakers had a real elephant to display, then they would do so. When? In the first five minutes. No sworn testimonies needed. Just add rolling end credits and your documentary is ten minutes long.

Let’s verify with Hollywood royalty, just to make sure. As of 2026, the full portfolio of Steven Spielberg Alien movies includes Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), II E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), War of the Worlds (2005), and Disclosure Day (2026). In each story, the visiting Aliens ultimately reveal themselves—because filmmakers know that’s a cool thing to show—and after that, nobody needs to rely on word-of-mouth to establish the existence of Aliens. If we invoked these same standards of evidence for documentaries, only one documentary would be necessary—the first one.

What, might you ask, does all this look like to a skeptical scientist? No, we can’t prove a negative, but we can pose questions that force a reassessment of claims. Consider a top ten list of rational perspectives, often ignored or overlooked by Alien enthusiasts, but this list goes to eleven.

Three may keep a Secret, if two of them are dead. 23

Lastly,

Sometimes you just have to use common sense. In early 2024 a spate of nighttime UFO sightings occurred over northern and central New Jersey. Consider two reasons why most UFO sightings are at night: (1) Their lights are more readily seen against a dark sky and, (2) it’s dark out, so it’s harder for you to positively identify what you’re looking at. Reports came in fast and furious, attracting the attention of major news outlets and lawmakers. Some of the objects were ID’d as airplanes, coming in and out of New Jersey’s two airports in the region: Newark Liberty International and Teterboro, which accommodates mostly private aviation. Other sightings were ID’d as nighttime drones flown by enthusiasts—a marketplace that’s rising through $5 billion annual sales worldwide. 24 But then there’s the subset of sightings for which nobody had a good explanation. The Pentagon declared they were not a threat, while simultaneously saying they can’t identify them. That happens to be a discomfiting pair of facts: you don’t know what they are, but you otherwise know they are safe. Which left open the “Aliens of our ignorance” fallback answer. I was asked by CNN to comment on these sightings. When prompted, I told them that, being an Earthling, I cannot claim to know or understand the motives of Aliens. But if I were an Alien, northern New Jersey would not be the first place on Earth I’d think to visit. No disrespect to Jersey people, but I think they know I’m right.