The Pentagon’s task force is currently investigating over 800 alleged sightings. In early November it launched an online form allowing past and present federal employees to share knowledge of any government programmes related to UFOs. Unidentified flying objects soar across our skies all the time – what’s up for debate is exactly what we’ll find once they’re identified. The task force’s annual report, released in October, said that “most” of the sightings it is investigating will “likely” have “ordinary” explanations.
Green’s letter writing campaign is based on his belief that we are closer to disclosure than ever before. Others agree, and are making active plans to prepare. Earlier this year, Brit John Priestland set up uNHIdden, an organisation that hopes to prepare people mentally for contact with non-human intelligence (NHI). “We have no particular insights or information about the existence (or otherwise) of extraterrestrials,” his website says, but, “We are ready to help develop strategies to support anyone who is worried or anxious about developments in this area.”
This sense of offering support and community is what keeps Ellis and his colleagues at UFO identified going. Sure, disclosure would be nice, but it’s not necessarily the aim. Instead it seems to be as much about finding what’s here on earth more than what is lurking in space. “People are very traumatised by their experiences,” says Pearce. “Whether they’re true or not, they’re true to them.” Jessica, the tinfoil-hat competition winner, has long felt the need to be secretive about what she saw that night in Africa. “You can’t really tell people you’ve had this experience,” she says, “One of the things I’ve got from today is it’s just nice hearing from other people.”
While UFO Identified charges £20 for an annual website membership, only 30 people have currently subscribed, meaning the trio regularly pay for the group’s coffee and hot dogs out of their own pocket. When asked why they pour so much time and energy into their interest, Pearce says: “We like talking to people and hearing their stories.” Hyslop adds: “And it helps people, it does help them.”
Ellis has seen first-hand how people “suffer in silence” before blossoming in his meetings, like the older man who sat wordlessly in meetings for months until one day he shared his experience of witnessing a UFO as a boy. “His mother had told him not to ever talk about what he’d seen as a child,” Hyslop says, “And it weighed heavily on him.”
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When Lisa was five years old her mother called her to the window of their Salford home to look at an unusual triangle in the sky. Years later, as a teenager in the ‘80s, she gave a presentation to her English class about UFOs. “I got laughed out of the classroom,” she tells me now, “I remember one lad in particular laughing his head off at me.” But ever since that day she has been waiting for something to show her that we are not alone. And so, in 2019, she says, she asked the universe to show her something, and it responded with blue spheres dropping out of the sky in a line.
The experience made Lisa “giddy”, and although she told anyone and everyone what she saw, she was greeted with sceptical eye-rolls. When she had another sighting, she struggled to get her partner to get out of bed to look, and by the time he got to the window it had disappeared. When she found UFO Identified on Facebook she was initially too nervous to attend a meeting because she suffers from depression and anxiety. But after a year, she built up the courage to go and tell her story. “It’s life-changing, that group,” Lisa says, “I feel like I’ve got friends, I’ve never had a lot of friends.”
Lisa has spent her life with people not believing her or laughing at what she has seen. If she could talk to the teenager whose English class presentation was laughed at, she would speak to that girl kindly: “I’d say: ‘Don’t give up hope, there’s people out there that will listen. You’re not going to be alone forever.’”