In a move that has sent shockwaves through the gin-and-tonic set at the Ministry of Defence, the United States government has declassified four videos of Unidentified Flying Objects, prompting Her Majesty’s intelligence services to set down their cucumber sandwiches and have a bloody good look. Yes, you heard that correctly. The Yanks have finally admitted what every drunk in a pub garden has known for decades: there are things in the sky that don’t give a toss about FAA regulations.
The footage, released by the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, shows objects zipping about with the sort of nonchalant disregard for physics that would make a quantum physicist weep into his gruel. One clip, allegedly taken off the coast of California, depicts a spherical craft doing barrel rolls that would make a Red Arrows pilot blush. Another, from the Middle East, shows a triangular object hovering like a particularly menacing paperweight. British intelligence, ever eager to prove it’s not just about deciphering the French menu at the G7 summit, has announced a review. “We take these sightings very seriously,” a spokesperson said, probably while adjusting his monocle. “If there are extraterrestrial visitors, we want to be the first to offer them a cup of tea and ask if they prefer their abductions with or without milk.”
Now, let us not pretend this is about national security. This is about the sheer, unadulterated hilarity of the British establishment trying to process the fact that there might be little green men with better technology than BAE Systems. The review, inevitably codenamed something like Project Folly or Operation Pavement Pizza, will be led by a man in a tweed jacket who still thinks the X-Files was a documentary. They will analyse the videos frame by frame, produce a report as thick as a London phonebook, and conclude that the objects were probably weather balloons or seagulls on acid.
The real question, the one that keeps me up at night as I drain my third mini-bottle of Bombay Sapphire at Heathrow, is this: what if they’re not aliens? What if these are Russian drones or Chinese surveillance gizmos? That would be far more terrifying. Because then the MoD would actually have to do something. They’d have to invest in anti-UAV lasers, or training programmes for the RAF to shoot down things that don’t obey Bernoulli’s principle. Easier to blame little green men than admit we’ve been outmanoeuvred by Vlad the Bad Hair Day.
But I digress. Let us revel in the absurdity. The Americans, the ones who put a man on the moon and then promptly forgot how to get back, have declassified videos that look like they were shot on a potato from 1997. And we, the nation that invented the hovercraft and the bouncing bomb, are going to “review” them. This is pure, unadulterated satire. It’s as if the universe is a stand-up comedian and the punchline is the British civil service.
So pour yourself a stiff one, dear reader. The truth is out there, and it’s currently being filed under “Miscellaneous Anomalies” in a whitehall basement. I, for one, welcome our new overlords if only to see the look on the Prime Minister’s face when he has to shake a tentacle. Up the aliens. And pass the gin.
