Good magicians use misdirection, inviting the audience to look one place while the “magic” is being done right in front of their eyes. I can’t help but associate such sleight of hand with the recently released report by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) into unidentified aerial phenomena.
After a year of study, the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that there just isn’t enough evidence to make any judgments about unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), the term we are now supposed to use instead of unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Now you see ’em, now you don’t. It makes me think of Keyser Soze from “The Usual Suspects,” who explained that “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.”
Despite examining 144 reports of UAPs between 2004 and 2021, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force concluded that “the limited amount of high quality reporting ... hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP.”