On the 8th of May 2026, the Pentagon released 162 declassified files on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena as part of the Trump administration's PURSUE programme — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. The White House called it historic. Pete Hegseth called the files material that had "long fueled justified speculation." The American people were invited, in the president's own words on Truth Social, to decide for themselves "WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON."
What was actually released were 162 files of things the government could not itself explain — unresolved cases, shared precisely because they remain unresolved. The genuinely sensitive material — resolved cases, classified programmes, black budget research — stayed locked. After seventy years of institutional silence, managed confusion was repackaged as historic transparency. The Department of War is now running UAP disclosure. That framing alone should tell you everything you need to know about the nature of what is being offered.
This article is not about what those files contain. It is about the mechanism that made seventy years of silence possible in the first place: the systematic, functional, and structurally necessary use of ridicule as an instrument of epistemic control. To understand that mechanism we need to go back further than any UAP incident. We need to go to a prison cell in Fascist Italy, and to a question that has nothing to do with flying objects at all.
Antonio Gramsci, writing from a prison cell in the 1930s after being jailed by Mussolini’s government, gave us the theoretical vocabulary that makes sense of what we are about to describe.[1] Gramsci was trying to understand something that puzzled Marxist thinkers of his generation: why did the working class so often consent to arrangements that were manifestly against their interests? Why did oppression not always produce resistance? His answer was the concept of hegemony — the idea that ruling classes maintain power not primarily through coercion but through the construction of consent. They do this by controlling the institutions through which knowledge is produced, validated, and distributed: universities, newspapers, professional associations, religious bodies, scientific academies. These institutions do not need to issue orders. They shape what questions are taken seriously, what conclusions are publishable, what concerns are legitimate, and what ideas mark their holder as a crank. Louis Althusser formalised this insight in 1970, naming these institutions Ideological State Apparatuses — mechanisms through which the boundaries of acceptable thought are policed not by police, but by the social consequences of transgression.[2]
The key insight for our purposes is this: ridicule is not a social accident. It is a technology. When an idea is met not with counter-argument but with laughter, eye-rolling, career consequences and institutional exclusion, that response is performing a function. It is drawing a line. It is telling everyone within earshot — especially those with most to lose — that certain questions are not asked by serious people. The enforcement is social, not legal. No one is arrested for believing in UAPs. They are simply made to understand, through a thousand small signals, that belief will cost them. That is precisely how hegemony works. And in the case of UAPs, that mechanism has operated with remarkable consistency across decades, institutions and national contexts.
It is one thing to assert this theoretically. It is another to demonstrate it empirically. A 2023 peer-reviewed study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications by Yingling, Yingling and Bell did exactly that.[3] The researchers surveyed 1,460 faculty members across 144 major US research universities spanning 14 academic disciplines. The findings constitute the most direct empirical confirmation of the UAP taboo in the scholarly literature. Nearly one in five respondents reported having personally observed something in the sky they could not identify. Fewer than one percent had conducted any UAP-related research. And — the number that should stop you cold — twenty-eight percent said they might vote against a colleague’s tenure case for pursuing UAP research, even when they personally believed the topic warranted serious scientific investigation.
Read that number again. More than one in four academics would actively obstruct the career of a colleague for studying something they themselves believe deserves study. This is not scepticism. Scepticism is an intellectual position. This is something else: the conscious enforcement of a social boundary, performed even by those who privately reject it. Thomas Kuhn observed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that scientific communities suppress anomalous questions not because those questions are unanswerable, but because they fall outside the paradigm the community has collectively invested in defending.[4] A UAP investigation that yielded results incompatible with current physics, or with the assumption of human uniqueness, would not merely produce new knowledge. It would invalidate entire research programmes, funding structures and careers built on existing assumptions. The taboo protects not just comfort but capital. It is institutional self-preservation dressed as intellectual rigour.
The most structurally sophisticated account of why this taboo exists comes from Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall in their 2008 paper “Sovereignty and the UFO,” published in Political Theory.[5] Wendt and Duvall are not making a claim about what UAPs are. They are making a claim about why states and institutions behave as if the question must not be asked. Their argument begins with a deceptively simple observation: modern sovereignty is anthropocentric. Every institution of modern governance — the state, international law, the scientific establishment, the university — is constituted entirely by reference to human beings. Human beings are the subjects of states. Human beings sign treaties. Human beings peer-review papers. The entire architecture of modern rule rests on the assumption that human beings are the only politically relevant actors in the world.
A genuine non-human intelligence — one with the capability to operate in our airspace, to evade our most advanced tracking systems, to pursue our military vessels — does not merely present a physical challenge. It presents an ontological one. The state cannot acknowledge such an entity without immediately confronting questions it has no framework to answer: Who negotiates with it? What law governs it? Who is responsible for protecting citizens from it, or on its behalf? The moment the state takes the UAP question seriously, it is implicitly admitting that its foundational claim — to be the ultimate authority over the territory and the beings within it — may be false. The taboo, therefore, is not irrational. It is structurally necessary. Ridicule is the cheapest and most efficient way to prevent the question from being asked long enough for those structural implications to become visible.
What makes this argument particularly arresting is a 2024 follow-up study by Michael Murphy in the journal Alternatives, which demonstrated that the paper about the taboo has itself been subject to the taboo.[6] Murphy conducted a scientometric analysis of how “Sovereignty and the UFO” has been cited across fifteen years of IR scholarship. The findings: the paper is frequently referenced but rarely engaged. Scholars cite it as a curiosity, a theoretical eccentricity, a footnote — but almost never build on it, challenge it directly, or treat it as a serious contribution to the field it addresses. The taboo reproduces itself in citation practices. You can acknowledge the paper that names the mechanism without actually confronting what the mechanism implies. Hegemony is remarkably economical.
There is a tendency to think of the UAP taboo as something imposed from above — a government programme of suppression, a coordinated institutional policy. The Gramscian analysis suggests something more insidious: the taboo is largely self-enforcing, maintained by the very people it constrains, because those people have internalised the costs of transgression. Dwight Eisenhower identified the structural conditions for exactly this outcome in his farewell address of January 17th, 1961 — a speech remembered almost exclusively for its warning about the military-industrial complex, while its second warning goes almost unquoted.[7] “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present,” Eisenhower said. “Public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” He described “task forces of scientists” replacing solitary inquiry, and government contracts substituting for intellectual curiosity. What Eisenhower was describing, in the language of a centrist Republican general, was the precise mechanism that Gramsci had theorised from a Marxist prison cell two decades earlier: a class of funded intellectuals whose material interests are tied to the maintenance of the existing epistemic order, and who will therefore police that order not because they are ordered to but because their careers depend on it.
The contemporary case study for this dynamic is Avi Loeb. Loeb is a former chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies, and one of the most credentialed scientists working on questions adjacent to UAP research. In 2025, he published a paper on arXiv proposing a testable hypothesis about anomalous characteristics observed in the interstellar object 3I/Atlas.[8] He did not claim it was alien technology. He proposed the hypothesis was worth testing. The institutional response from Jason Wright, director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center — a man whose entire professional existence is predicated on the search for non-human intelligence — mixed technical objection with explicit behaviour policing, noting that the community stays silent on such questions because it fears “splash damage” to the broader field.[9] Consider the full absurdity of that position: the institution dedicated to finding alien life is discouraging the investigation of a potentially anomalous interstellar object because it might make the field look bad. The taboo has metastasised so completely that it now operates inside the very institutions whose stated purpose is to challenge it. Loeb survives this treatment because he has accumulated enough institutional capital — Harvard, the National Academies, decades of credentialed output — to absorb the reputational cost. Everyone below that threshold quietly complies. That is how hegemony functions at scale: the exceptional individual who can afford to transgress is tolerated as proof of the system’s openness, while the rule of silence is enforced on everyone else.
The preceding sections have been largely theoretical. The following is not. Before examining recent incidents, a necessary note on the word “drone.” In contemporary usage, “drone” has become the functional equivalent of “swamp gas” or “weather balloon” — a term that acknowledges something was present while foreclosing any implication about what it actually was. When the underlying incident reports are read carefully and without the framing imposed by official communications, the label consistently strains credulity. Consider Langley Air Force Base, December 2023. Langley is home to F-22 stealth fighters and sits within one of the most heavily monitored airspaces in the world. For more than two weeks, objects overflew the installation repeatedly, varying in size and configuration, evading all identification attempts. NASA deployed a WB-57F high-altitude research aircraft to investigate. F-16s flew combat air patrols. Nighttime training was suspended. The NORAD commander testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the volume of incursions had exceeded anything he had anticipated in his entire military career.[10] The eventual institutional response was to procure nets large enough to cover 42 aircraft shelters. The most technologically advanced air force in human history, confronted with unidentified objects overflying its most sensitive installation, responded by ordering camouflage netting and offering no further explanation to the public. The objects were called drones. Their origin was never identified. The matter was considered closed.
This is not a new template. On the night of March 13, 1997, between 10,000 and 20,000 witnesses across Arizona, Nevada and northern Mexico reported anomalous objects traversing the sky — a silent, structured V-formation so large that witnesses described it blocking out the stars as it passed, observed consistently across a geographical corridor of roughly 300 miles.[11] The official response came three months later: a press conference at which Arizona Governor Fife Symington produced a staff member in an alien costume and informed reporters they were being “entirely too serious.” Phoenix City Councilwoman Frances Barwood, the only elected official who publicly demanded a formal investigation into what tens of thousands of her constituents had reported, subsequently lost her government position.[12] The Air Force attributed the sightings to military flares and aircraft formations — an explanation that addressed only the later of two distinct events that night, leaving the earlier formation, the one witnessed across 300 miles, completely unaccounted for. The operational records were later destroyed per retention rules. A decade after his press conference performance, Symington admitted publicly that he had personally witnessed the object, that as a former Air Force officer he had never seen anything remotely like it, and that he had stayed silent specifically to prevent public panic. The governor performed ridicule before the cameras while privately convinced of what he saw. An official lost her career for asking for an investigation. The records were destroyed. What remains is a template.
New Jersey, 2024, follows that template with uncomfortable precision. From mid-November through December — over six weeks — thousands of witnesses reported aerial objects across New Jersey and neighbouring states, operating near military bases, nuclear facilities, reservoirs and civilian infrastructure.[13] A swarm pursued a US Coast Guard Motor Lifeboat in behaviour the reporting Congressman described as “close pursuit” — “not just suspicious but provocative.”[14] The objects arrived from the open ocean in organised groups, flew without navigation lights, and evaded every identification attempt. President Biden declared there was nothing nefarious in the sky. The FAA imposed no-fly zones backed by the threat of deadly force the following day. A TSA internal document had already debunked several specific incidents the day before those restrictions were imposed — and was released only months later via FOIA request.[15] What distinguishes New Jersey from Phoenix is not scale but seniority of dissent. Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence with oversight of all 18 US intelligence agencies, stated publicly in August 2025 that she still had unanswered questions, that it was not just New Jersey but was happening across the country, and that she had heard the public official line — the unmistakable implication being that the official line did not satisfy her own assessment of the evidence.[16] The Trump administration closed the matter by press release. The person at the apex of the entire US intelligence architecture was overruled by a statement. What connects Phoenix 1997 to Langley 2023 to New Jersey 2024 is a method, not a conspiracy. Mass witness testimony is absorbed, partially labelled, administratively closed, and the residue that does not fit is left to dissolve in the news cycle. The word “drone” does not explain objects that evade F-22s, pursue Coast Guard vessels from the open ocean, and are witnessed simultaneously by tens of thousands of people across hundreds of miles. What it reliably does is end the conversation before the implications can surface.
The mechanisms described above are often framed as American pathologies. They are not. In November 2023, India’s IAF Eastern Command scrambled Rafale jets over Imphal airport after an unidentified aerial object shut down flight operations for three hours. Nothing was found. No public follow-up report was released.[17] In June 2018, a round glowing object observed over the Prime Minister’s Lok Kalyan Marg residence triggered a full lockdown involving the IAF, Intelligence Bureau, NSG, CISF, SPG and Air Traffic Control. The object disappeared. The investigation was dropped with no public conclusion.[18] In Ladakh, between September and November 2012, ITBP units filed over 100 reports of luminous objects to Delhi headquarters and the PMO. The objects were visible to the naked eye, non-metallic, radar-invisible, and capable of manoeuvres that caused a reconnaissance drone dispatched to investigate to lose them entirely.[19] These are not rumours. These are documented incidents involving India’s most sensitive institutions — its nuclear-capable air force, its Prime Minister’s security apparatus, its border intelligence corps — generating reports that reached the highest levels of government and were met with silence.
India scrambles jets. India locks down the Prime Minister’s residence. India files reports to the PMO. And then, consistently, nothing. No policy framework is established. No investigation architecture is created. No public acknowledgment is made. The difference between the Indian case and the American one is not that the ridicule regime operates differently here. It is that India has not yet reached the point where even managed disclosure is considered a useful political tool. The American state releases 162 files of things it cannot explain and calls it transparency. The Indian state does not release anything at all. Both positions serve the same function: the question is not answered, the public is not informed, and the institutional apparatus that would be required to take the phenomenon seriously is never built. In the Indian context this has a specific name: strategic ambiguity by default rather than by design. It is not a calculated policy of non-disclosure. It is the absence of any policy at all — which, in practice, produces identical results.
Return now to PURSUE. One hundred and sixty-two files. Unresolved cases, shared because they are unresolved. The resolved cases stay locked. The black budget stays locked. The apparatus that spent seventy years constructing the taboo now presents itself as the instrument of its dissolution, and expects gratitude for the gesture. The temptation, especially for those who have followed this subject for years, is to read this as progress. It is not. Or rather, it is not the kind of progress that matters. The PURSUE release is a managed release, which means it is managed. What is shared has been decided by the same security-industrial infrastructure that decided, for seven decades, that nothing should be shared at all. The framing of what is shared — unresolved cases, phenomena the government cannot explain — is itself a framing choice. It presents the state as a fellow puzzled observer rather than as an institution with a long history of active concealment. That is a narrative, not a disclosure.
Gramsci distinguished between the war of manoeuvre — direct confrontation with state power, attempted seizure of its institutions — and the war of position, the slower, more patient work of building counter-hegemonic infrastructure in civil society. The war of position is won not by taking the state but by delegitimising its claim to be the sole producer of valid knowledge. Congressional hearings are not counter-hegemony. NASA reports are not counter-hegemony. PURSUE is not counter-hegemony. They are concessions made under pressure, designed to absorb and neutralise that pressure while leaving the underlying structure intact. Real counter-hegemonic work looks different: it is the independent researcher whose findings cannot be defunded, the open-source data network whose conclusions cannot be classified, the civilian witness archive whose testimony cannot be destroyed per retention schedules, the public interest publication that refuses to wait for clearance before asking the question.
The ITBP jawan who filed a report that went nowhere, the IAF pilot who found nothing and was given no framework to understand why, the NASA panelist whose name the agency was too afraid to speak aloud, the Phoenix councilwoman who lost her position for asking a question her constituents deserved answered: none of them are the beneficiaries of the PURSUE portal. The portal is not for them. The counter-hegemonic work that matters is the work of building the epistemic infrastructure through which their testimony can be taken seriously, preserved, analysed and acted upon — not because the state has granted permission, but because the public has decided it does not need permission to ask what is in its own sky. That is what this publication exists to contribute to. And it begins by naming, clearly and without apology, the mechanism that has prevented that question from being asked for seventy years.