UFO WTF

I hate to break my long blogging silence with criticism of the media and my family on this lovely late-summer day (temps in the low 70s in mid-morning, thank you whatever gods may be) but sheesh and double sheesh. I was at a family dinner and people start up about UFOs. These are not stupid people in raw IQ terms, but if they've won any prizes lately for critical thinking, logic, or skepticism I haven't been informed. The subject of UFOs came up, and to be perfectly frank, I take two letter grades off my estimate of a person's intellect if I hear any references made to this subject. I can't take seriously the idea that vehicles from other solar systems are flitting around the earth like fireflies and have done so for thousands of years, generally avoiding contact but somehow we manage to see them occasionally, to what I suppose must be their embarrassed surprise, the way you might accidentally barge in on an undressed person when you're staying with friends at a beach house. Presumably they don't want to talk to us, right? Because they would if they could, right? (Well, except the one time when they landed and helped the Egyptians build the pyramids. The Egyptians didn't mention it because they wanted the credit for building the pyramids themselves.) And yet these creatures who have the technology to cross the vast distances of interstellar space in vehicles that are regularly described as behaving in ways that are unrestricted by Newtonian physics are nevertheless bumblers who get spotted by us all the time. Saw you, space boy! Ha ha ha ha ha!!!!! You're it!

Let's just say this does not, to me, add up. And yet my own mother was nattering on about how the British government released documents about an encounter with a UFO that Churchill ordered covered up. This was all over the news. Well folks, I checked it out. What the documents reveal, if they reveal anything at all, is this:

A letter claiming Winston Churchill ordered a 50 year cover-up of a wartime encounter
between a UFO and a RAF bomber over the English coastline in the later stages of The
Second World War was investigated by MoD in 1999. No written record of the incident
was found; papers can be found at DEFE 24/2013 (p205-209, p273-77)

I further found the letter was from a son of a pilot or something. People write letters and make claims about all kinds of fun stuff all the time. How did the media play it? Here's one fairly typical example: Headline: UFO files: Winston Churchill 'feared panic' over Second World War RAF incident. Subhead: Winston Churchill was accused of ordering a cover-up of a Second World War encounter between a UFO and a RAF bomber because he feared public "panic" and loss of faith in religion, newly released secret files disclose.

I wish I could joke about this, but to be honest, it's not really very funny. It's the media equivalent of Chinese food products that are poisonous. Buyers shouldn't have to beware quite that much. My mom now believes that Churchill covered up a UFO incident. The conversation moved on from UFOs to the Big Bang theory—I should mention that none of my family, including and especially me, has any background in physics—and I'd like to tell you what was said but suddenly, on this bright and sunny day, I'm feeling very depressed.