The Sky Is Not Empty

There is a video, watched now by millions and released, without much fanfare and without dispute as to its authenticity, by the United States Navy. In it a small oblong object hovers low over the ocean while experienced fighter pilots, whose startled voices you can hear, try and fail to make sense of what their instruments are showing them. Something is there. It has no wings, no rotor, no visible means of lift or propulsion, and it does not move the way the things we build move. The pilots are not cranks or dreamers. They are among the most rigorously trained observers a society produces, and they are as baffled as you would be.

For most of the last century, the subject that video belongs to was a byword for foolishness, filed with little green men and supermarket tabloids, and any serious person who took an open interest in it paid with their reputation. That stigma is itself worth noting, because it is a clean specimen of a pattern this book has tracked from the first burned library onward: a whole category of reported human experience ruled out of bounds not because it had been carefully investigated and found empty, but because investigating it at all had been made socially unaffordable. What has changed, and changed only in the last few years, is that the institutions themselves stopped ruling it out. In 2017 a major newspaper revealed that the United States government had quietly been studying these phenomena after all. In 2021 its intelligence community published an assessment of a hundred and forty-four incidents reported by its own military and could confidently explain away exactly one of them. New official offices were built to gather the reports; other governments, France and Chile and Japan and Brazil among them, acknowledged programs of their own; and lawmakers coined a careful, stigma-free phrase, unidentified anomalous phenomena, precisely so that serious people could discuss the subject without the reflexive giggle.

Here I must be more careful than anywhere else in this book, because no subject is a stronger magnet for the leap from a real mystery to an unearned certainty. So let me separate the two with all the discipline these pages have tried to model. What is real, and now officially conceded, is this: a genuine residue of these reports, made by credible observers and sometimes captured by several instruments at once, radar and infrared and the human eye all agreeing, has not been explained, and the objects in that residue are sometimes described doing things, extreme acceleration, no visible propulsion, passage between air and water, that we do not know how to do and would not know how to fake across every sensor simultaneously. That is not nothing. It is, honestly, an open scientific problem. What is not licensed by that residue is the leap so many are desperate to make: that the unexplained is therefore alien, or interdimensional, or a hidden human craft, or a visitor of any kind. Unexplained means unexplained. The honest position, and the one this book holds, is that there is a real phenomenon, that a fraction of it genuinely resists our present understanding, and that we do not know what it is, which is a very different and far more disciplined sentence than the one that says we know what it is and it is being kept from us.

And there is a further reason this frontier belongs in a book like this one, past the matter of the sky. A strand of the phenomenon refuses to sit tidily in the category of nuts-and-bolts machinery and tangles instead with reports of altered states, of anomalous perception, of the observer somehow bound up in the thing observed, which drops it, uncomfortably, into the very same unsolved knot the quantum physicists and the consciousness researchers are also caught in: the relationship between mind and world, watcher and watched, that this book keeps arriving at from every direction and cannot yet untie. I flag the connection and go no further with it, because further is exactly where the evidence stops and the wishing starts. We will face the knot itself before the end. For now it is enough, and it is more than a decade ago it would have been, to say plainly what no serious institution would then have said aloud: that the sky is not fully explained, and that grown, careful people are at last allowed to look.