Aliens probably exist, but they haven’t visited us

The military types who recently testified before a congressional hearing about their close encounters with UFOs were not the usual suspects associated with such reports. Retired naval commander David Fravor said that he, his weapons service officer and their counterparts in another jet had seen a mysterious ‘Tic-Tac’ shaped ‘object’ while both planes were flying off San Diego in 2004. Speaking to a House of Representatives Oversight subcommittee at the end of last month, he detailed how the object’s dramatic manoeuvres – caught on video by the next flight crew to take off – were beyond the capabilities of the known.

Similar objects had, Fravor said, been picked up by advanced radar on ships in his group over the previous two weeks. In his testimony, Ryan Graves, a former fighter pilot, described many more such sightings of ‘unidentified objects’ (including ‘dark grey or black cubes inside of a clear sphere’), which were, he claimed, relatively common and ‘grossly underreported’.