6.06.2025

The one that intrigues me most concerns unidentified aerial vehicles or whatever acronym they're using these days hanging around facilities that use nuclear energy. Especially missile sites. Loads of credible servicefolk in the US and the former USSR where it was considered normal to drill holes in the ground and fill 'em with long range fissile weapons have reported for decades on what's apparently a pretty common deal: flying saucers hovering around the site and sometimes shutting off the power to the facility while they take a look around. You know how those crazy bastards like to horse around up there. And there are sightings of floaty drone things whenever there's a nuclear spill - there were quite a few around Fukushima, and when the fighting in Europe gets alarmingly close to any of the power plants there's an uptick as well. I like this one because I can spin it to offer hope. Specifically, that there are ETs watching over us who refuse to let us use the most disastrous weapons ever developed, and when you consider there hasn't been a significant mishap or a single battlefield deployment since Nagasaki, it's nice to imagine that deterrence is out of our hands. I'm not sure I buy that humans have enough restraint to keep us from disaster. You can see the aliens' motivation here too: if nukes are powerful enough to blast dimension holes in spacetime and change the name of a pair of children's book authors, they may have a vested interest in us keeping our hands to ourselves. So it's a cynical kind of hope, and it strays into faith in the unknown. I'm aware of that. It's also harmless in that it doesn't have any material effect on how I interact with the world. Just helps me imagine things might not be as scary as they often seem.