In the first House subcommittee meeting in half a century on what the military terms “unidentified aerial phenomena,” but which are more commonly known as “UFOs,” the U. S. Defense Department attempted to remove the stigma of reporting sightings of possible alien craft. According to a Gizmodo report, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie today stated that pilots have reported over 400 UFO sightings since the Pentagon confirmed that several infamous leaked Navy pilot videos were actual footage of spacecraft that could not be explained by current human technology.
And it may or may not be a coincidence that this so quickly follows the BBC’s announcement of Ncuti Gatwa’s casting as Doctor Who, the alien Time Lord who has spent the past sixty years defending mankind from hundreds of alien invasions of the Earth in general, and the city of London and its outlying suburbs in particular.
With the BBC’s assurance that the Doctor will continue to work defending Earth from alien invasions, now seems to be a propitious time for the U.S. government to acknowledge the possibility of alien visitors and encourage citizens to report sightings. While previous UFO sightings were brushed off by authorities as the work of crackpots, lunatics, or drunk hillbillies, Moultrie announced the change of policy by saying, “Our goal is to eliminate the stigma by bringing our operators and mission personnel into a standardized data gathering process.” Which, translated from bureaucrat language, means, “If you report UFOs now we promise not to call you crazy.”
While the Doctor is mostly known to work with the British government, having been instrumental in both helping and proving the undoing of Prime Minister Harriet Jones, he has also historically embraced international cooperation, having attached himself to the United Nations’ Intelligence Taskforce in 1970 in a full-time scientific advisor role.
While mankind may be decades or even several lifetimes away from confirmed contact with Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, Zygons, Tivolians, Kandymen, Vorgs, Sunmakers, or whatever the Abzorbaloff was supposed to be, the U.S. government is clearly banking on the presence of Gatwa’s youthful Doctor to keep them all at bay.