As we’ve been covering the various stories relating to the recent release of videos by our military, showing strange aircraft (spacecraft?) in our military airspace, there’s been one repeating theme. Most of the people speculating on the origin of these craft seemed to generally be from the military or the “ufo community.” Where have the more mainstream scientists been in this debate? At least one of them stepped up to the plate recently to weigh in with a surprising take.

Professor Michio Kaku of CUNY, the theoretical physicist who shows up on virtually every show about outer space on the Science Channel, Discovery and others, spoke at the Ufology World Congress in Spain recently. He addressed the question of the recent videos and what implications they might have for us. After previously treating the UFO topic as something more fanciful, Kaku seems to have really had a change of heart and declared that we’ve reached “a turning point.” (Yahoo News)

Even if not smoking-gun proof, the declassified videos — bolstered by confirmation of multiple sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles during 2014 and 2015, including at least one near-collision — are giving ufology new weight. “We’ve reached a turning point,” Kaku said. “It used to be that believers had to prove that these objects were from an intelligent race in outer space. Now the burden of proof is on the government to prove they’re not from intelligent beings in outer space.”

The possibility that they are vehicles from other planetary civilizations, Kaku told Yahoo, “now has to be put on the table.”

That’s a pretty hot take right there. “The burden of proof is on the government” to prove that these vehicles didn’t come from outer space.

By the way, that linked article at Yahoo is quite lengthy and has a ton of background information on the various players in this topic right now. If you’re interested, but not really up to speed on the government material, the To The Stars Academy and all the rest, it’s definitely worth a read.

But is Professor Kaku right? Have we really reached “a turning point” in the discussion of possible extraterrestrial intelligence and anomalous craft visiting our planet? I’m not quite there yet, but the discussion has certainly been expanding into the mainstream media a lot more, rather than just the dark halls of ufology websites and dens of conspiracy theories. (Confession time. Those are places I hang out anyway.)

I have a couple of issues with the stance that Kaku is taking, though I’m still very excited about the information that’s been coming out. First of all, stating that the burden of proof is now on the government to prove something relies on the rather dubious assumption that the government actually knows the answer. After all, one of the reasons they came clean with the Navy videos was that the pilots and their commanders were concerned and wanted a more thorough investigation done. Congress even demanded (and received) a briefing on the subject, so it doesn’t sound like they knew about it either. It’s entirely possible that the government doesn’t have a clue who built those things. Of course, if that’s the case, then who did?

I suppose it’s still conceivable (barely) that some super-secret group in the Defense Department cooked this up and just didn’t tell anyone else… even our own military. Or perhaps the Russians or the Chinese. But if you go back and watch my interview with Quantum Physicist Deep Prasad you’ll see there’s a problem with that theory. The amount of energy required to essentially defy gravity as at least one type of these UAPs have been observed doing, would probably require smashing two black holes together. If anyone was producing that kind of energy anywhere on the planet, somebody should have noticed.

Still, I’m heartened to see more people, including mainstream scientists, looking into these questions and expanding the discussion. It just feels as if we might finally be on the verge of learning something new and truly remarkable. And it’s something that could change the entire course of history and the future of humanity. Well… unless it turns out that the aliens are here to eat us and steal our planet. That would kind of suck.