by Adrian Soler, The Unz Review:
I was pleasantly surprised by the engagement and number of comments on my previous article. Aside from comments about the article’s length, its general stupidity, and its sad lack of antisemitism, many commenters argued that the UFO phenomenon is essentially a product of American culture, American military anxiety, and American institutional processes. The evidence, on this reading, originates in American airspace, accumulates in American archives, and achieves significance only through the peculiar machinery of American disclosure — congressional hearings, whistleblower statutes, inspector general complaints, a litigious press. Strip away the American institutional scaffolding and what remains, the argument goes, is thin: grainy photographs, credulous witnesses, and a mythology that feeds on itself.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
The objection deserves a serious answer, because it contains a partial truth. The American evidentiary record is the richest available. The 2017 New York Times disclosure, the Pentagon video confirmations, the Grusch congressional testimony–represent a specific kind of institutional aperture that exists in few other democracies and in none of the authoritarian states that constitute the other major military powers. If the secrecy architecture is real, it is most permeable in Washington.
But permeability of disclosure is not the same thing as singularity of phenomenon. What the international record shows, examined without the assumption that America is the story’s center, is something considerably more unsettling: the same events, the same performance characteristics, the same institutional responses — investigation, documentation, public minimization, selective classification — recurring across wildly different political systems, military cultures, and historical periods. The phenomenon did not begin in 1947. It did not confine itself to American airspace. And the states that encountered it did not uniformly dismiss it. Several investigated it with greater methodological seriousness than the United States.
No one told me UFO disclosure was going to be kind of hot. https://t.co/Ox0ZidDXmX
— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) March 21, 2026
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Foo Fighters
The earliest systematic military encounters on record predate Roswell by years — and predate the commonly cited 1944 dates by several more. Graeme Rendall’s archival work in UFOs Before Roswell (2021), drawing on RAF squadron war diaries, USAAF mission logs, and declassified intelligence reports, establishes that RAF aircrew were generating formal reports of anomalous aerial phenomena from 1940 onward, years before the 415th Night Fighter Squadron coined the term that stuck. Beginning in late 1944, the volume of reports from Allied night fighter pilots flying over the Rhine Valley intensified sharply — glowing spheres, orange fireballs, objects moving in formation with their aircraft before accelerating away without warning. Intelligence officer Captain Fred Ringwald observed a row of eight to ten orange lights moving in formation east of Strasbourg; pilot Edward Schlueter turned to engage, only to have the lights vanish. Radar registered nothing.
