By Muna Al-Fuzai
year does not seem promising so far for the inhabitants of Planet Earth. January sparked global military disputes, and with February, the world came in confrontation with a new virus that infects humans. The coronavirus has several names, but no one seems to be able to determine its source or the fate of humans.
I think it may remain a puzzle for a long time until its genetic code is completely deciphered and a vaccine is found. So we are now in the phase of coping with the virus and dealing with infections as they happen. The situation is bad for the world economy and the lives of millions of people.
But humans are great in adapting. A new topic has appeared and it is indeed a juicy one for many people including children. It's about UFOs - unidentified flying objects. When we were kids, we used to watch old series about UFOs, and many of us believed that they were just a myth of entertainment. But there are assurances this time that perhaps what we thought was a subject of humor is a matter of concern to humans.
On Monday, the Pentagon released three declassified videos that show US navy pilots encountering unidentified flying objects. The three videos show what the pilots saw during training flights in 2004 and 2015. Two of the videos were published by the New York Times in 2017. The Pentagon says the videos depict "unexplained aerial phenomena that remain characterized as 'unidentified'".
The Pentagon said it released the footage to "to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos", a statement on the Department of Defense website said. The publications have sparked renewed interest in what the US military has learned from the videos and whether they are evidence of UFOs.
This phenomenon has occupied the world over the past decades. The latest news also attracted the attention of the world and all people, confirming that what we believed was a myth could be a reality and that explanations were incomplete. The release of the videos by the Pentagon adds to the legitimacy of the videos and will provoke speculations that humans have recently interacted with extraterrestrials.
Public reaction to the videos was varied. Hundreds of people have spoken about seeing flying saucers hurtling through the sky very quickly, but none of them have specified what these dishes were. There were others who claimed to be kidnapped by aliens and returned to Earth, something that many people did not believe, but perhaps what they said was the truth! Or maybe there is a battle in space and we are just a small planet, as we have often seen in many movies.
Also, many of us remember movies and stories about what has been called Area 51 - the secret US military facility. But how many of these stories can and should be taken as fact and possibly a future threat? Former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada tweeted about the three videos, saying the footage "only scratches the surface of research and materials available".
The excitement of the mysterious UFOs created various waves of confusion and controversy among the people, maybe because right now we are on a different warfront and we are not completely done with it yet. I personally think that we only know very little of what is really going on on other planets, and UFOs maybe are not a total fiction.
Stay home and stay healthy.
muna@kuwaittimes.net