With the recent admission by the United States Department of Defense that remarkable videos captured by US Navy F-18s purporting to show UAVs—Unidentified Aerial Vehicles, the modern term for UFOs—are genuine, we’re going to devote several columns to putting this subject in context. You may be surprised to learn that the modern UFO is just a sci-fi veneer on a very old phenomenon.

It’s not extraterrestrial, it’s interdimensional.

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Humans have wondered about the stars since forever. That’s understandable; they’re beautiful and mysterious, as out of reach as mountain peaks. And perhaps for the same reasons, the earliest speculation about the stars revolved around gods, not extraterrestrials.