John Oliver on UFOs: ‘There needs to be room for honest inquiry’

John Oliver took on the tricky, potentially fun topic of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) on Sunday evening – a “difficult subject to talk about”, the Last Week Tonight host noted, “because UFOs tend to get discussed in one of two ways”. The first is “wildly speculative”, such as claiming Renaissance painters depicted alien invaders. And the second way is outright dismissal “with borderline contempt”.

But the topic has been back in serious headlines in recent years thanks to secret UFO files released by the government in 2017, the beginning of “a cascade of revelations”, said Oliver, including the DoD revealing that it had 11 reports of documented instances in which pilots had near misses with Unidentified Flying Objects.

“So if a subject is this ubiquitous with such major questions being asked, now might be a good time to – and I cannot believe I’m about to say this – talk about UFOs: what we know, what we don’t know, and some of the problems with how we’ve gone about finding out more,” Oliver explained.

He started with a disclaimer: that talking about UFOs doesn’t necessarily mean talking about aliens, just unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). “While you can believe aliens exist or not, when it comes to UFOs, belief doesn’t really come into it,” he said. “Whatever they are, people are seeing them.”

And people have been seeing things in the sky for millennia. “For as long as people have been around, they’ve been seeing weird things they can’t explain,” Oliver noted. But the modern obsession with UFOs dates to a highly publicized sighting of “flying saucers” by a pilot in 1947.

“From the very beginning of our modern obsession with UFOs, there’s been a belief that our government is keeping something from us,” Oliver explained. “And that mistrust has been well-earned. The history of the US government’s study of UFOs is one ranging from the unsatisfying to the actively misleading.” The first “flying saucer sighting” prompted years of ridicule about the study of UFOs, with the government commissioning reports from scientists who entered investigations already convinced of their non-existence.

Yet the government “actively engaged in cover-ups about them”, said Oliver, “though not necessarily in the ways or for the reasons that the History Channel might have you believe”.

Oliver cited the famous alleged UFO crash in Roswell in 1947, which the government claimed was a weather balloon, leading to rampant speculation. In 1997, after efforts by a congressman from New Mexico to yield more answers, the government admitted that it lied to conceal that the “weather balloon” was actually debris from a top-secret US army air force research project called Mogul, designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests.

“That does make more sense, though it is hard to take the government’s word for it given that they just admitted they’d been lying for 50 years,” said Oliver. “It’s frankly no wonder that people still speculate about Roswell to this day. It’s basically the Boy Who Cried Wolf, if the boy was the Pentagon, the Wolf was a 600ft spy balloon, and the moral of the story is ‘we got up to a lot of stupid shit during the cold war.’”

Furthermore, a CIA study found that more than half of the UFO sightings from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights, leading to obfuscating public statements by the military.

In recent years, the Pentagon confirmed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) to study UFOs. “For many, it seemed like finally, after years of dead-end, bad-faith government inquiries, this could be a genuine breakthrough,” said Oliver. “But unfortunately, when people looked into that program, they found themselves coming away with more questions than answers.”

AATIP research was largely contracted out to a company owned by the budget hotel mogul and Ron DeSantis donor Robert Bigelow, with few tangible results, at least that we know of. “It’s really disappointing,” said Oliver, “because people deserve serious answers to these legitimate questions, especially as it takes courage to even ask them or talk about what you might have seen.”

The good news, he continued, was that “there does seem to be a movement toward more careful consideration of UFOs.” For example, Nasa recently assembled a team to examine UAPs, and offered an hours-long press conference breaking down how one sensational video of an unidentified object was, though still unidentified, not moving nearly as fast as it appeared. Nasa asserts that a “rigorous, evidence-based, data-driven scientific framework is essential” to studying UFOs. “And they are right about that,” said Oliver. “It is both promising and long overdue to see people approaching this issue soberly, scientifically and perhaps most importantly, boringly.

“There needs to be room for honest inquiry,” he concluded, “because science is all about collecting small answers that eventually help us address big questions.”