I believe something could rewrite everything we thought we knew about history, religion, technology, physics and even reality itself.

Bold claim, I know.

I don’t think it’s deliberately being ignored because people are aware of it and want to downplay it. On the contrary, most people think of this thing as make-believe, as a fairy tale with no connection to everyone’s shared reality. So everyone ignores it because it’s a subject they think they can ignore.

But I don’t think this thing will disappear any time soon. So what am I talking about?

Unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

This might seem like a strange topic to bring up, especially in the midst of the tangle of looming crises that threaten to upend our very way of life on this pale blue dot. We’re dealing with potentially catastrophic climate change, threats to democracy and media freedoms, rampant capitalism, creeping fascism, exorbitant inequality; the list goes on. Surely, a fake subject that was dreamt up by overzealous sci-fi enthusiasts, that has no connection to the reality we’re all living in, is the last thing that we need. Right?

Well, it turns out that there’s a lot more to this subject than first meets the eye.

The first thing I ought to do is convince sceptical readers that this is something to take seriously, to begin with. I myself was one such sceptic. Before last year, if anyone had ever so much as mentioned those three little letters together in the same sentence, I would have rolled my eyes and told the speaker to kindly leave the room.

But not anymore.

Consider the words of retired US army colonel Karl Nell during the annual SALT conference, which is a global investment conference, on May 21 this year: “Non-human intelligence exists. Non-human intelligence has been interacting with humanity. This interaction is not new and has been ongoing and there are unelected people in the [US] government that are aware of that.” When asked how confident he was in the veracity of these statements, he stated unequivocally that “there’s zero doubt”.

Or, perhaps, consider the words of US Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, who corroborated Nell’s statement by saying: “My colleague, Karl Nell, said with 100 per cent certainty that the world is being visited by higher level, non-human intelligence (NHI). I know he is correct with complete certainty.”

It turns out that there’s a lot more to this subject than first meets the eye

Before we scrutinise the merit of these statements, we must pause and realise that the very fact that these high-ranking officials are even making such strange claims is notable in and of itself. What could possibly possess them to do such a thing?

It gets stranger.

During his talk, Nell referenced Haim Eshed, the former Israeli space security chief who went on record to state: “The Unidentified Flying Objects have asked not to publish that they are here, humanity is not ready yet. There is an agreement between the US government and the aliens. They signed a contract with us to do experiments here. They have been waiting until today for humanity to develop and reach a stage where we will understand, in general, what space and spaceships are.”

If it wasn’t for the seriousness of the positions of all these individuals, then this would have been an easy topic to dismiss. But they are not. These are highly ranked professionals within some of the most serious institutions in the world. Why are they spouting fairy tales?

Let’s give one more recent example.

David Grusch is a former intelligence official and United States Air Force officer. Grusch testified in a congressional hearing in the US House of Representatives in 2023 that several discussions he had during the course of his employment convinced him that the federal government of the United States of America has “non-human” spaceships and their “dead pilots”. Alongside the physical evidence, the government was running a secret UFO “retrieval and reverse-engineering programme”.

Besides Grusch, David Fravor, a retired navy commander, and Ryan Graves, a navy pilot, also testified at the same congressional hearing. Here’s just one of the claims they made:

Questioner: “Once again, just either describe or note that aircraft being witnessed are essentially outside the scope of anything that we know of today, in the technology we have today.”

Fravor: “Yeah, I concur with that. We have nothing that can stop in midair and go the other direction nor do we have anything that can, like in our situation, come down from space, hang out for three hours and go back up.”

Ryan Graves: “Yes, the objects that are being seen by commercial pilots are performing manoeuvres that are unexplainable due to our current understanding of our technology and our capabilities as a country and that applies for the military as well.”

What I have presented so far has merely scratched the surface. Unfortunately, because of people’s dismissive attitudes towards this phenomenon, they are unlikely to look deeper into it for fear of wasting their time. I can assure you that this is no mere waste of time.

I very likely haven’t convinced you of the importance of this topic with this brief article alone but that’s fine, since that was never my aim.

All I wanted was to put this subject on the table and start a conversation, even if it results in pure mockery.

Arthur Schopenhauer, a German philosopher, once wrote that “all truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second, it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident”.

I’m merely introducing this subject to the first stage.

Andrew Izzo Clarke is a junior associate at a local law firm with a bachelor’s degree in law from the University of Southampton and a joint bachelor’s degree in philosophy and anthropology from the University of Malta.