The glowing aura of an impossible elsewhere

Abstract

This past December, amid the increasingly unnerving cacophony of presidential tweets taunting North Korea with nuclear fire and fury—a couple of weeks after Donald Trump called Kim Jong-un “Little Rocket Man” and a couple of weeks before he bragged about the size of his nuclear “button”—the New York Times ran an emphatically italicized headline: Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program. Tapping into an anxious zeitgeist, underscoring the tender vulnerability of planet Earth, hinting at unknowable threats posed by alien surveillance and the excitement of magically superior technologies, the story circulated in all the mainstream news outlets. It included a video clip showing an unidentifiable thing moving swiftly and oddly through space, accompanied by unseen pilots marveling at its strangeness.