As we discussed last month, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has released a bill which, if passed, would direct the Pentagon to get their act together on the UFOs our military has been chasing around in our airspace and issue a report on what’s going on and make it available to the public. The acting head of that committee is Florida Senator Marco Rubio, so he’s been receiving a lot of predictable media attention on this subject. From everything I’ve seen, Rubio has been taking the question in an admirably serious fashion and not ducking away from opportunities to comment. One of those cropped up this week, when he was interviewed by investigative journalist Jim DeFade for CBS Miami.

DeFade didn’t pull any punches, directly asking the Senator of he thought there were actually aliens in our galaxy and if we might not be alone. Rubio keeps a serious tone, discussing the possibility of a threat to national security as represented by these strange craft. But he then goes on to offer a rather startling opinion as to their origin. While not directly invoking the word “aliens,” he says that if it’s “something outside this planet,” that might be better than finding out that the Chinese or the Russians have gotten a huge leap on us in the technology race. (Washington Examiner)

“Look, here’s the interesting thing for me about all this and the reason why I think it’s an important topic, OK? We have things flying over our military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises, and we don’t know what it is, and it isn’t ours. So, that’s a legitimate question to ask,” Rubio said in a Thursday interview with Jim DeFede of CBS4 News in Miami. “I would say that, frankly, that if it’s something outside this planet, that might actually be better than the fact that we’ve seen some technological leap on behalf of the Chinese or the Russians or some other adversary that allows them to conduct this sort of activity.”

Rubio added: “But the bottom line is: If there are things flying over your military bases and you don’t know what they are because they’re not yours, and they exhibit, potentially, technologies that you don’t have at your own disposal, that to me is a national security risk and one that we should be looking into.”

Here’s the video clip from the interview because it’s always better to hear the person saying it themselves and judge for yourself how seriously they’re taking the subject. It’s only a couple of minutes long.

I don’t want to hang the Senator out to dry here or imply that he said something that he didn’t. Jim DeFede was clearly trying to draw Rubio into saying that he thought it could be extraterrestrials and he hit him with a broadside question. “What’s your gut?” he asked. “Are we alone in the universe, or is there something else out there?”

Rubio wasn’t taking the bait, at least not entirely. He told DeFade that he doesn’t have a gut reaction “because it’s a phenomenon,” Rubio said. “It’s unexplained. I just want to know what it is, and if we can’t determine what it is, then that’s a fact point that we need to take into account. I wouldn’t venture to speculate beyond that.”

Nick Pope, also known as “the real Fox Mulder” (who I interviewed here previously on a related topic), responded to Rubio’s comments. When asking whether it would be preferable for the UFOs to be coming from another planet rather than Russia or China, Nick said it’s definitely time to have that debate.

While @marcorubio rightly characterizes UAP incursions as a national security issue, his bombshell statement that something from "outside this planet" might be better than this being Chinese or Russian technology is more debatable. But it's time to *have* that debate! #UFO #UFOs https://t.co/pxPp7ZOuno

— Nick Pope (@nickpopemod) July 18, 2020

I agree with Nick. It’s definitely time to have that debate and for it to reach to the highest levels of government and between nations. We need answers, assuming that finding them is even possible. So since this is pretty much a binary choice, let’s consider the possibilities. Would you rather the Tic Tacs turn out to be the property of extraterrestrials visiting our Earth or something cooked up by the Russians, the Chinese, or even our own tech? (Rubio didn’t consider the third option, saying flatly that it’s not ours. But if it was something from a deep enough, black budget Special Access Program (SAP) he might not know about it.)

Well, the argument against wanting it to be aliens is that means that we are sharing our space with beings that are so vastly technologically superior to us that we’re not even on the level of the Indigenous South Americans watching the Spanish Ships approaching the shore for the first time and wondering who or what they are. And that situation didn’t end well for the natives as you’ll recall. But at the same time, these things have been flying around for a long time. They’ve been with us at least since the Nimitz encounters of 2004, but probably much longer. If you get a chance, check out the first episode of season two of Unidentified on the History Channel. They interview American fighter pilots who reported seeing identical things in their airspace during the Vietnam war. If they were going to attack us, they could have done it long ago and there probably wasn’t squat we could do about it.

But if these things turn out to be the property of the Russians or the Chinese, that means somebody has made a massive leap ahead of us in the technology race. As Rubio suggests, that’s not an ideal situation to be in either. But if the Russians had this sort of technology for all this time, probably back to the fifties or sixties, wouldn’t they have used it to end the cold war conclusively in their favor? And if it’s our own gear, why haven’t we broken it out yet and dominated our adversaries? Also, if we have anti-gravity technology, why are we still burning fossil fuels to get around?

This one isn’t really even a coin toss for me. If I have to pick one possibility, I’m going with aliens. (As if most of you couldn’t have already guessed.) The problem is, I still rather doubt we have our hands on any of this tech and we may never get it because the visitors (if that’s who they are) have apparently shown zero interest in talking to us. Anyway, just as a closing item to pique your interest, here’s a segment from that History Channel show I mentioned with the Vietnam pilot who saw what for all the world fits the description of a Tic Tac.