The Pentagon Declassified 160 UFO Files, and Staying Up to Read Them Made Me Laugh Out of Anger

What the heck? The US government declassified UFO files???

Last night, I opened X wanting to watch some cool videos, but this news just blew up.

Even the Xinhua News Agency's official account posted about it at midnight...

As the saying goes, the fewer the words, the bigger the deal. This is huge!

As a veteran fan of "UFO Exploration" since childhood, I immediately gave up on sleep, got up, turned on my computer, downloaded the files, and started reviewing them one by one.

But the more I read, the more absurd it felt...

Let's talk about the event itself first. To fulfill a campaign promise, the President had the Pentagon set up a UFO page on its official website.

That fine print on the first line of the homepage is quite eye-catching.

Then below, it lists the 160 files released this time, claiming more will be declassified later.

The homepage also features a few black-and-white photos; at first glance, they look legit, like high-def UFO portraits.

But if you try to restore them, you'll realize... this is way too shoddy.

Although the officials stated these are just reconstructions made by the FBI based on witnesses' memories.

But we're in the AI era now; at least put some effort into the reconstructions...

In fact, the vast majority of the declassified files this time are pretty much like this.

Either they are oral accounts from the witnesses themselves, or various blurry photos that look like they were taken with a potato camera...

For example, that widely circulated octagonal star object was mistaken by many as an "Ophanim" (a type of angel).

But many aviation experts pointed out that this is actually just a projection of a fighter jet component...

There's another one, also mistaken for a Seraphim. What's next, EVA? Are the Angels coming next?

You ask why angels look like this? Well, angels in the original Bible actually looked like this.

But in reality, these images are all AI-generated; some even still have the Gemini watermark on them.

As a result, many netizens directly turned them into memes, pasting Digimon onto them.

"Guess who I am?"

But that's still somewhat understandable.

Even more outrageous is that some UFO enthusiasts used AI to generate a black-and-white video of the US military dissecting an alien, then claimed it was from the 160 files this time.

They really thought no one would check the original documents, huh?

Of course, the most thunderous part is:

Someone used the video template from these files and put the YMCA dance in it...

Alright, jokes aside, is there anything truly interesting in this release?

Yes, bro, there is.

For example, a few photos taken during the Apollo 17 moon landing, claiming that a few blue objects appeared in the footage.

There's also an astronaut's audio recording mentioning seeing "flying particles."

But for film cameras of that era, under the high radiation of space, it's completely normal to have lens flares and noise on the film.

The only relatively special one is a footage captured by a pilot: a very small flying craft performing an insanely thunderous maneuver below a helicopter.

Many people say this is unlikely to be anything from Earth, and that only a water drop could execute such a maneuver.

But let's not forget our FPV drone racers...

To be honest, many people are interested in flying saucers; quite a few, like me, have loved reading "The World's Unsolved Mysteries" since childhood.

But when it comes to who cares about this the most, it has to be the Americans. Therefore, in almost every presidential election, someone uses "revealing the UFO truth" as a selling point to win votes. That's why Trump pushed for the declassification of these files this time.

But for the US government, this is definitely not the first time.

The Pentagon's AARO office, responsible for this release, was actually established during the Biden administration under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and made headlines a few times. Now it's being packaged as a first-day achievement of the new administration, which is standard American political practice.

Moreover, NASA and the CIA have previously published similar files. The Biden administration even held several UFO hearings, which almost became a recurring show by the end... Many of the files released this time are duplicates of previous ones.

In addition, there's a detail many people overlooked: the official term has never been UFO, but UAP.

Because as early as the 1940s, when people called these things "flying saucers," the authorities corrected them, saying the proper term was UFO—Unidentified Flying Object. This included balloons, airships, experimental weapons, etc., not just flying saucers.

Later, when the public equated UFO with flying saucers, the officials simply changed it again to UAP—Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.

But the important thing is:

To this day, there is no substantial evidence to prove their existence.

These hearings and declassified files are really just packaging everything related to UAPs together, with a massive amount of it being oral accounts from witnesses.

It's like when you go back to your hometown and throw a firecracker into a dog's bowl, and it happens to be seen by a weird old man from the next village, who then tells the FBI he witnessed "a rapidly ascending disc-shaped metallic flying object."

Then this oral account gets written into a file, categorized under UAP, until one day it's declassified and released for netizens to mock.

So seeing this, you'll definitely ask: So you're saying there are no flying saucers, no aliens at all?

I wouldn't put it that way. On the contrary, if they aren't aliens, does that mean paying attention to these things is pointless?

Actually, I think the most worthwhile thing to study about UFOs might be why humans always mistake certain things for visitors from outer space.

Let me put it this way. First of all, unidentified flying objects, flying saucers, and aliens were not the same thing at the very beginning. They didn't even appear in the same time period.

As early as the 1890s, Americans reported sighting mysterious flying objects. What were they? Without exception, they were all airships. (After all, people hadn't seen airplanes yet; the only things flying in the sky besides birds were airships.)

By the 1940s, WWII pilots also reported them frequently, but their first reaction was that they were new Nazi weapons. Because that era was indeed the birth of missiles.

The real turning point came after WWII. The Manhattan Project made ordinary people realize for the first time that the government could secretly conduct high-tech experiments they couldn't comprehend at all.

Then, in 1947, someone reported sighting a crescent-shaped aircraft. Interestingly, the witness at the time said they moved like saucers skipping on water, and the media derived the term "flying saucer" from his analogy. Then, the public imagined a disc-shaped appearance based on this term.

In other words, the visual image of the flying saucer was imagined by everyone from the very beginning.

But up to this point, flying saucers hadn't been linked to aliens yet.

It wasn't until 1952, when a quack named George Adamski stepped up, claiming he had actually seen aliens, and that the aliens wanted humanity to abandon nuclear weapons and beware of nuclear war. This happened exactly when the Soviet Union was test-detonating nukes and the US was building its nuclear deterrence.

A collective panic birthed a collective hallucination.

Later on, in the 1960s, as the anti-war movement, psychedelic drug culture, and spiritual movements fully unfolded, narratives of "being abducted by aliens" began to emerge, gradually forming the alien culture we see today.

From airships to flying saucers to aliens, every step of this process took place in the United States.

This is why the vast majority of alien sightings and abductions on Earth have happened in the US...

In reality, the things people see have never appeared out of thin air; they are closely related to the cultural soil of the person involved.

The core narrative of American sightings is flying saucers and aliens. Before China's reform and opening up, there were hardly any such sightings; even if similar experiences existed, they were mostly legends of gods and spirits. Even now, the UFO incidents with higher discussion among Chinese folks are about dragons, immortals passing heavenly tribulations, and the Qinling grand array...

To give another example, it's said online that Chinese kids born in the 80s and 90s all saw floating little airplanes, but these little airplanes almost uniformly looked like J-7 fighter jets.

By that time, the US military already had the F-22, yet alien technology was only at the J-7 level? So alien tech levels precisely matched the covers of "Aviation Knowledge" magazines?

In cognitive psychology, there's a concept called schema, where schema drives perception.

This means we often don't see something first and then interpret it; rather, our cultural genes participate in cognition from the very beginning.

Your cultural subconscious chooses the script of interpretation for you before you even have time to think.

In other words, what you see is never purely objective from the start. Even the same physiological phenomenon can grow completely different narrative shells in different cultures.

For example, with the same sleep paralysis, Americans report "being abducted by aliens," Chinese people report "ghost pressing on the bed," and Newfoundlanders say "fairies sitting on the chest."

On the other hand, historically speaking, the narrative shells of these phenomena have kept changing, but the core has never changed.

Every culture produces similar narratives during periods of anxiety, and the imagery depends on the imagination of that era. In the Middle Ages, it was angels and demons; during the Industrial Revolution, it was mysterious airships; in the Space Age, it was flying saucers and aliens.

Psychologist Carl Jung proposed in 1958 that flying saucers act as a modern mandala, and their mass appearance during the Cold War reflects the collective unconscious's deep desire for salvation and order.

When people are trapped in mundane reality and the heavy pressures of life, they instinctively hope that something will drop from the sky to break this farce of a world.

To put it bluntly, we need a grand variable from light-years away to offset the triviality and nihilism right in front of us.

For thousands of years, the name of this savior has changed again and again. It could be the Messiah who redeems the world, the Purple Star descending to earth, or alien visitors possessing a higher civilization.

Rationally, we are capable of disenchanting all of these, but as long as humans still feel anxiety and loneliness, they will always don new disguises and descend again.

Perhaps there is nothing in those highly blurred photos; perhaps the only things visiting Earth have always been the silent radiation from the depths of the universe.

But as long as we remain unresigned to this world, we will, time and time again, ponder like the first ape to look up at the stars, and ask the vast cosmos like an exiled poet:

"At the dawn of ancient times, who passed down the Way?

Before heaven and earth were formed, how was it examined?"

Source: Chaping XPIN