Here we go again! Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story headlined, “U.F.O. Files Released by U.S. Shed Light on What the Government Knows.” The Department of War released the first set of 162 documents out of “millions of records, including some that exist only on paper”— all of which are apparently being reviewed for declassification by someone who must be consuming near-fatal amounts of caffeine.

According to the official announcement, the government was providing “maximum transparency” by dumping over 160 files dating back 80 years. This first set included FBI case files, intelligence reports, and videos from military platforms worldwide.

Naturally, the internet went wild. People were expecting high-definition, 4K footage of little green men shaking hands with the President. They were expecting blueprints for hyperdrive engines. They were expecting, at the very least, a clear photograph of an alien spacecraft.

But we got what more of what we always get: grainy, flickering, jumpy shots of blurry dots flapping around like gnats on the camera lens.

It is difficult to explain this consistent blurriness. We live in an era where a teenager on TikTok can accidentally film a crystal-clear, slow-motion, high-definition video of themselves falling off a hoverboard. We have satellites that can read the expiration date on a discarded Yoplait container from low Earth orbit. We have Ring cams with better resolution than the Hubble Space Telescope.

Yet, somehow, whenever a multi-million-dollar, state-of-the-art military aircraft encounters a highly advanced extraterrestrial vessel, the resulting video looks like it was filmed through a jar of Vaseline by a person suffering from severe hiccups.

One of the newly released videos, for example, purports to show an “eight-pointed star” streaking across the sky in 2013. The footage, shot using an infrared sensor, shows a blob that looks less like an interstellar cruiser and more like a lint ball stuck to a microscope. The official description notes that it has “arms of alternating length,” which is exactly how I would describe a squished Daddy Longlegs.

Another file includes a “composite sketch” with an “FBI Lab rendered graphic overlay” depicting a metallic object hovering over a field. Translated from bureaucratese: “We had a guy draw a picture of what somebody said they saw, and then we put a fancy border on it.”

There is also a transcript from the Apollo 17 astronauts describing “very bright particles or fragments” tumbling past their window, which they said looked like the Fourth of July. The official caption noted that a preliminary analysis suggests it could be a “physical object.” Thank goodness for the experts. Without their ‘preliminary analysis,’ we might have assumed the astronauts were just hallucinating space confetti.

The pro-alien and no-alien camps were having a pretty crazy day. Sean Kirkpatrick, a physicist who used to lead the Pentagon’s anomaly resolution office, tried to burst the bubble. He stated that there is no bombshell evidence of aliens in these files. He explained that many of these viral videos of speedy, pill-shaped objects are actually just “the thermal bloom of jet engines” captured by infrared cameras.

In other words, the military is chasing its own exhaust fumes. Which is fine so far as it goes. They have to chase something. But then, why are the fume videos being collected into classified files? It’s a rare federal program that concludes “we didn’t actually need to investigate this.”

True believers insisted that the government is still covering up the real evidence. They pointed out that, if aliens can master faster-than-light travel and anti-gravity propulsion, they can certainly invent a cloaking device that makes them look exactly like a blurry dot on a Navy pilot’s targeting screen.

Personally, I am starting to think that the aliens are doing this on purpose. They’re gaslighting us. If you were a highly advanced inter-dimensional being visiting a planet where the dominant species spends its time arguing about “kings” on the internet and eating deep-fried Oreos at state fairs, would you want to be seen clearly? Of course not. You would keep your distance, fly erratically, and make sure you always look like a smudge.

While we may not yet have the definitive proof we were hoping for, we do have 162 new files to analyze, debate, and turn into profitable YouTube discussion videos. And who knows? Maybe the next batch of declassified files will finally contain the smoking gun. There are still millions of pages to go.

Until then, the only aliens we can see clearly are the ones in front of the cameras, screaming “MAGA rigged the system” while losing 26-7 in Alabama. Maybe Fox Mulder was right — the truth is out there. He just had the wrong ‘there.’