Now retired from the military, Roberts is unmoved by the debunkers. He was stationed on the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt when fighter jets recorded the infamous “Gimbal” and “Go Fast” videos of unexplained objects off the Florida coast during 2015, which went a long way to prompting the Pentagon’s UFO report. That is not my position.” He added: “You are lost in space when it comes to this subject, my friend – all of you.”Īfter I got off on the wrong foot with Strieber, though, he did come back and introduce me to highly decorated former US navy cryptologist Matthew Roberts. I was turned into ‘alien abductee Whitley Strieber’ by the media. The whole point of my work is to describe what happened to me and attempt to understand what it was. In a subsequent email, he wrote: “I don’t know if I was abducted by aliens or not. I discovered just how sensitive when author Whitley Strieber, who some claim was abducted by non-humans in 1985, terminated our call after learning that I had not read his books. Still, the topic of alien encounters remains sensitive. “Feeling like your unexplained experience is a result of an alien abduction just seems more exciting and more important than a natural explanation.” That feeling of specialness plays an important role in these stories.

“I can imagine being a protagonist in an alien-abduction story seems pretty meaningful, like a meaningful achievement, an accomplishment,” Abeyta says. When I asked him what he preferred the truth to be – a real encounter or merely a vivid dream – the young man said he would prefer it to be true because that would mean he was “special”. The man, who did not want to be named, described an ambiguous close encounter that took place during his sleep. I tell Abeyta about an interview I carried out with a young man in Florida. “People have a need to feel like their lives are meaningful, and these beliefs might suggest that there’s something bigger out there there’s something more important going on,” Abeyta says Abeyta explains that belief in aliens is akin to religiosity: unfounded beliefs in unfalsifiable ideas, which require a leap of faith.

Fast forward to 1961, when Barney and Betty Hill told the world’s first alien abduction story.Īndrew Abeyta, professor of psychology at Rutgers University, co-authored We Are Not Alone, a study into why some of us want to believe in aliens. Conspiracy theorists confused the balloon for a UFO the US government did a lousy job debunking those claims, and they quickly captured the public’s imagination.

If the US military has been quietly and seriously investigating UFOs (or, as the Pentagon would have it, UAPs) since 2007, and if the Pentagon’s official report cannot rule out the existence of extraterrestrials, is it time we looked again at claims of close encounters and the people who have made them? The US government says some UFOs pose 'a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to US national security'Įnthusiasm for UFOs and ETs has permeated popular culture ever since a US air force balloon crashed near Roswell in 1947. It’s that “other” bin that has arrested the attention of stargazers and conspiracy theorists. The report offered five typically mundane possible explanations for the UFOs and, crucially, one catch-all “other” bin. The unclassified version of the report (there was also a classified version seen only by US lawmakers) found “no clear indications that there is any non-terrestrial explanation” for the sightings.

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