Media coverage surrounding unidentified flying objects, or what the government refers to as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAPs, has become increasingly bisected in recent months. The division centers on those who find a historic and continuing U.S. government cover-up of alien vehicles behind every door and those who suggest all UFOs can be categorized with conventional explanations.

The truth almost certainly lies somewhere in the middle.

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On one side are the proliferators of clickbait-laden claims, which rely on sources and methods of an often weak nature. And while those pursuing this approach do sometimes, sometimes even often, provide original reporting on new UFO concerns, sensationalism is bleeding into too much media reporting. This impulse to sensationalism is easy to understand, of course. After all, it generates attention and web traffic but also opens up pathways to very lucrative opportunities. Opportunities such as getting a Netflix show or starring on programs such as the History Channel’s long-running The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch.

The second side comes from reporting such as that of the two Wall Street Journal reports in June, which portrayed even the very strangest of UFO cases either as products of government disinformation efforts designed to hide highly classified military programs or as products of confused or disingenuous officials. We must accept that there is credibility to this reporting.

For a start, the use of “UFOs” as a distracting shield for highly classified U.S. government and military programs is an enduring one. The Washington Examiner understands from three former military and government officials that the U.S. government has, over the past 15 years, made undisclosed breakthroughs in avionics and subsea technologies that have been integrated into new stealth and propulsion systems. These systems involve a relatively small number of variably ranged and variably deployed platforms with various mission sets. It makes sense that the government wants to hide these programs behind the excuse of “UFOs” and to shut down congressional investigations into the more exotic/truly strange UFO reports, in fear that the classified programs will leak.

It’s also true, as first reported by the Washington Examiner in 2023, that Department of Defense analysis of UFOs has sometimes skewed toward the extraordinary at the neglect of less extraordinary explanations, such as Chinese military intelligence drones. Still, secret U.S. or foreign aircraft cannot explain the full gamut of UFO reports defined by literally thousands of credible witnesses and sensor systems since the late 1940s. It should also be recognized that the aforementioned classified platforms rely upon engineering that, even if highly advanced, still conforms to at least open-source conceptual theories of engineering (pulse detonation engines, for example).

Consider the Wall Street Journal’s reference to a secret U.S. electromagnetic pulse system as an explanation for a famous and seemingly extraordinary 1967 UFO incident at a nuclear weapons facility in Montana. Perhaps this EMP system is exactly what military witnesses saw that day. One complication, however, is that the EMP system does not appear to have been operational in 1967. John Greenewald, a leading journalist on national security-related Freedom of Information Act requests, outlined this and other notable points on X.

Moreover, there is compelling, if circumstantial, evidence to suggest some connection between exotic UFOs and nuclear weapons/power sources. The historic record is clear, with strange incidents repeatedly reported at U.S. nuclear laboratories in the late 1940s, and even at uranium mines in 1952 in Africa. The Washington Examiner has also been told by multiple military sources, and a number of former senior intelligence officials, that reports of exotic UFOs appear to have an outsize focus on U.S. nuclear forces and systems. This includes numerous sonar incidents involving the Navy’s ballistic missile submarine fleet, for example. It also bears noting that there are credible reports of nuclear forces in the former Soviet Union having their own unexplained experiences with UFOs. Robert Hastings’s compelling history, UFOs and Nukes, documents this historic record.

The basic point here is that even if the United States, China, or Russia secretly possessed extraordinary new technology in 2025, it is highly unlikely that any of these nations, or an Elon Musk forebear, did so in 1948, 1958, or 1968. And that all of the many thousands of reports from those decades are the product of delusion, deception, or misidentification. Again, there are highly credible witness reports and contemporaneous sensor returns from these decades suggesting a technology in advance of the most capable U.S. aircraft (including spy aircraft) in use today. Considering this possibility of the extraordinary, then, it’s also clear that assessments from the Pentagon’s UFO branch, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, have sometimes failed to conform to intelligence community analytic standards. Indeed, as the Washington Examiner first reported, one incident in AARO’s latest report was listed as unexplained but actually involved a small drone.

Many strange-seeming UFOs are weather phenomena, misidentified aircraft, balloons, satellites, drones, foreign or domestic spy aircraft, astronomical bodies, or the products of overexcited imaginations, or of highly unreliable whistleblowers such as Bob Lazar. Even highly advanced radar systems sometimes deliver confused returns when targeting slow or variably moving targets such as balloons, for example. As I see it, this leaves us with one or a combination of three options to categorize all UFOs fully.

The first possibility is that, at least since the late 1940s, small groups of highly trained military personnel and, in the same incidents, advanced sensor systems have been deceived in perception and data/sensor return by an advanced foreign military capability that remains unidentified. We should note here that the U.S. military and China’s People’s Liberation Army have invested significant sums in so-called “ghosting” capabilities designed to distract enemy forces in war. But it is very difficult to believe that apparently more capable, multidomain level capabilities (including human perception, for example) were being employed 70 years ago.

The second possibility is that a nation or nations have mastered highly advanced aviation technology and have been covertly employing that technology since the late 1940s. Again, considering the performance characteristics recorded in the most compelling of UFO cases, this seems highly improbable. For one, it would allow a nation to exert absolute strategic dominance over every other nation either by scaling the production of these capabilities into a significant battle force or employing strategic dominance/deterrence by applying these capabilities in limited scenarios of high political import.

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The third possibility, and in my view by far the most likely, is that while the vast majority of UFOs have prosaic explanations, a very small percentage of UFOs represent intelligently controlled machines not operated by a nation or corporation. This supposition is supported by the absence of later identified classified military aircraft with extraordinary capabilities, and by the many thousands of credible military witnesses and witness-contemporaneous sensor recordings. This very small proportion of UFOs is likely to be “alien” in the broadest sense of some kind of extraterrestrial, extra/inter-dimensional/extra-temporal/”other” intelligence. Again, however, this constitutes a very small percentage of UFOs. The majority of UFOs have prosaic explanations, even where video and sensor data often suggest something out of this world.

In turn, we should hope for more journalistic coverage of this probable possibility alongside skepticism of sensationalism.