Though the current project started as a series of posts charting my grief journey after the death of my mother, I am no longer actively grieving. Now, the blog charts a conversation in living, mainly whatever I want it to be. This is an activity that goes well with the theme of this blog (updated 2018). The Sense of Doubt blog is dedicated to my motto: EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY. I promote questioning everything because just when I think I know something is concrete, I find out that it’s not.
Hey, Mom! The Explanation.
Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #4199 - My Parents' 68th Wedding Anniversary
I went hunting for older pictures of my parents and came across the one above from Lori's birthday, and I liked it.
Then, I found this one below.
I took this picture, obviously, I cut off the top of Dad's head. My Mom was very pregnant here. Since we moved into this house just before she gave birth, it's obvious that it's not long before Lori was born.
I feel it's important to acknowledge my parents' wedding anniversary every year, even though they are both deceased.
Usually I make this a HEY MOM post, but this year I did not.
Below I have reprinted the previous anniversary posts.
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1252 (SoD #3833) - My Parents' 67th Wedding Anniversary
Hi Mom, It's your wedding anniversary again, and the first for which neither of you are alive.
Dad died last year in August 28th at 1:40 p.m. just a little under two weeks after your 66th wedding anniversary. Last year's post also reprints many wedding anniversary posts from past year's.
Posts like this are mainly for me, Mom, and I know you get that.
I just like looking at the pictures and thinking about what might have been.
Some may find it "unhealthy" to keep posting about a wedding anniversary that can now no longer be celebrated by those who were in the wedding.
But does that really matter?
With the date of Dad's death coming up and the one year anniversary, I am more focused on him and both parents than I have been in past years.
Referring to it as an "anniversary" seems like the wrong word, given that anniversaries are usually associated with celebrations and not acknowledgement of a sad event.
And perhaps there are always "WHAT IFs" with deaths. What if you had not contracted the bacterial meningitis, Mom? What if you did but we caught it earlier? What if Dad had not contracted cancer in his mouth? What if Dad had not comedown with Covid-19?
What if I had made it back to Michigan last year before Dad was unconscious?
But this post is about what was always a happy day for you and Dad, right Mom?
And after having to ask when you two got married almost every year, I have a system now. I was pretty sure I always remembered that it was 1958 but often had doubt.
Four years is easier to remember. Add four years to my age for the number of years of your marriage.
Technically, the marriage ended in 2015, when you died, Mom. But I know Dad kept acknowledging the wedding anniversary every year. I am not sure if he did last year as he was in hospice, though not yet in the nursing home area, still in his apartment, twelve days before he died.
He was off social media and email and the phone. Though I did speak to him a few times, when I had the nurses literally put the phone to his ear. I don't know if he was even aware last of your wedding anniversary on the 16th. I hope he was.
I know you get it, Mom. You get the grief because of how you grieved your mother since she died when you were 19 years old. You were sad when your dad died but not nearly as sad. I saw you cry about your mother for years and years, all the years.
I wish you were here so we could talk about it, though in the last fifteen years or your life, just bringing up your Mom was likely to make you cry.
There's no wrong way to grieve. There only right ways.
So, I was unloading the dishwasher and cleaning up the kitchen to make the coffee, which is something I do every night, and I was putting all the things where they should be, and if I found something out of place, I moved it.
I got this tendency from you, Mom.
Then, I was getting the things out for bed time: my water and CBD gummy, dog treats, books I take upstairs every night (my Kindle and Tao te Ching), and I realized that this is just like both of you. This setting out things for bed time is EXACTLY what Dad did every night for 15 years of caring for you, Mom.
But often you, Mom, would set out all your things for your day the night before, just as I often do.
Probably lots of people share these compunctions and organizational systems, but they are dear to me because they have been gained from you, Mom, and from Dad.
And so, I dedicate this song and this post to you and Dad, Mom, on the date of your 66th wedding anniversary.
In this case, "Parents" is a proper noun for MY parents, and so it conforms to the rule for proper nouns which is just an apostrophe after the "s" unlike a common noun.
However, it also fits the rule for a plural as My Parents are two people, and so the word is plural.
Much like the dogs' treats, this is my Parents' 66th wedding anniversary.
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." — Friedrich Nietzsche
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1181 (SoD 1641) - 61st Wedding Anniversary - Marjorie and Robert Tower
Hi Mom,
Special Friday edition of HEY MOM. No Throwback yesterday, technically, but this is a Throwback, right?
Here's a collection of content from previous August 16th and my parents wedding anniversary.
I have to remember that their years married is +4 my age or just remember that they were married in 1958.
As I look back on my posts, I think I made an early error in the "days ago" tally, and so it may be off by one. I think the error occurred in the first month in which I just calculated days ago by subtracting four (the Fourth of July) from the current date. Since then, I have just kept track. However, I started the HEY MOM FEATURE two days after you died, Mom, so the current HEY MOM count while I was doing daily HEY MOMs should always be two under the days ago. Looking back through my archive (randomly chose #508), it appears that I corrected the discrepancy. Thus, I suspect that my days ago count is accurate.
Hey, guess what? There's a days ago calculator. My count is right on!
The total number of days between Saturday, July 4th, 2015 and Friday, August 16th, 2019 is 1,504 days.
This is equal to 4 years, 1 month, and 12 days.
This does not include the end date, so it's accurate if you're measuring your age in days, or the total days between the start and end date. But if you want the duration of an event that includes both the starting date and the ending date, then it would actually be 1,505 days.
If you're counting workdays or weekends, there are 1,074 weekdays and 430 weekend days.
If you include the end date of Aug 16, 2019 which is a Friday, then there would be 1,075 weekdays and 430 weekend days including both the starting Saturday and the ending Friday.
1,504 days is equal to 214 weeks and 6 days.
The total time span from 2015-07-04 to 2019-08-16 is 36,096 hours.
I can only imagine what your marriage would have been like had you lived Mom. I think you would have made it to 70 years. Hard to imagine as I creep up on just 10 years.
The 57th wedding anniversary came around just 43 days after your death, Mom.
Here's all of that post and then some of last year's, from 2018.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ - Days ago = 1504 days ago - Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1908.16 - 10:10
Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.
I miss you so very much, Mom.
Talk to you soon, Mom.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ - Days ago = 2966 days ago - Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2308.16 - 10:10 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Reflect and connect. Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom. I miss you so very much, Mom.
Talk to you soon, Mom.
- Days ago = 3332 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2408.16 - 10:10
NEW (written 1708.27 and 1907.04) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom. Dropped "Talk to you tomorrow, Mom" in the sign off on 1907.04. Should have done it sooner as this feature is no longer daily.
Reflect and connect. Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom. I miss you so very much, Mom. Talk to you soon, Mom. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ - Days ago: MOM = 3698 days ago & DAD = 352 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2508.16 - 10:10
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2608.16 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 4063 days ago & DAD = 717 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
However, NOTHING compares to the Root Beer Stand dogs in Kalamazoo.
Maybe I should just work on making my own...
A Coney Island hot dog is a grilled or steamed frankfurter in a soft bun, smothered in a savory, beanless beef meat sauce, then topped with yellow mustard and freshly diced raw onions. Despite the name, it is a regional staple of the American Midwest—most famously in Detroit, Michigan. [1, 2]
History and Culture
Immigrant Origins: Created in the early 20th century by Greek and Macedonian immigrants who passed through New York's Coney Island and named their new Midwestern creations after it.
Detroit Rivalry: Southeast Michigan became the epicenter of the dish, anchored by a legendary, decades-old sibling rivalry on Lafayette Boulevard between American Coney Island and Lafayette Coney Island .
Atmosphere: Classic coney shops are known for their fast-paced, no-frills counter service, retro signage, and bustling, crowded dining rooms. [5, 6]
Anatomy and Preparation
The Sausage: Typically an all-beef or beef-and-pork Vienna style frankfurter, often featuring a natural sheep or lamb casing that gives it a distinct "snap" when bitten.
The Bun: A soft, lightly steamed white bun that holds the warm ingredients together without becoming overly soggy.
The Sauce: A finely minced, soupy, and mildly spiced beef-heart or ground-beef chili sauce flavored with chili powder, cumin, and garlic.
The Finish: Layered strictly with a bold line of yellow mustard and a generous handful of raw white onions. [1]
Chili, mustard, onions. Say this ingredient trio without context, and like a call and response, the Detroiters in the room will reply with a resounding chant: "Coney!"
The coney dog, Detroit’s signature hot dog and arguably the city’s national dish, is set apart from the classic American hot dog by those distinguishing toppings. The dog is ladled with rich beef chili, mildly flavored with notes of cumin and garlic, sprinkled with crisp, diced white onions and finished with a scribble of pungent yellow mustard.
As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, we’re reflecting on the dishes that typify American culture. Hot dogs, we’ve found, are undeniably the quintessential, all-American food.
Hot dogs were “invented” in the U.S. when German sausages were served in buns. They’re a staple of baseball games, the all-American pastime — what would a Tigers game be without a hot dog? And they are truly democratic: nearly anyone can afford to enjoy them.
But even more, hot dogs are American because of their adaptability, reflecting the ingenuity and diversity that gives our country such a rich culinary tapestry.
The coney was brought to Detroit in the early 1900s by way of Greek migrants who passed through Coney Island, a historic neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, best known for its amusement park of the same name. It’s a manifestation of the American dream, founded by immigrants influenced by the touchpoints along the journey to Michigan, their chosen home in this country.
Regional hot dog toppings — from the chili, mustard and onion trio on the coney to celery salt on the Chicago dog to jalapenos on the Sonoran hot dog in the Southwest — tell distinct stories of place.
Learn more about the coney’s contribution to the United States of hot dogs.
What is a coney dog?
According to the Detroit Historical Society, though the Greek immigrants who developed the recipe for the coney assumed the name of Brooklyn’s Coney Island, the coney is vastly different from the simple franks in buns sold at the amusement park. Detroit coneys start with a beef dog in a natural skin casing tucked into a soft, steamed bun. That cumin-flavored chili is distinct, made with fine ground beef. Some recipes tout a blend that includes beef heart, the offal offering a mealy texture — and by now, you know the ingredients that follow. No coney is complete without mustard and onions.
The first Coney Island restaurant, the no-frills, diner-style eateries where coneys are now served throughout metro Detroit, was Todoroff’s Original Coney Island in Jackson, Michigan. Macedonian immigrant George Todoroff opened the restaurant in 1914, and pioneered the hot dog variety we know today. More than a century later, Joe Grimm, co-author of the book “Coney Detroit,” wrote that metro Detroit was home to about 500 Coney Islands
3 Classic restaurants to try a coney dog.
American Coney Island
Just three years after the opening of Todoroff’s, Constantine "Gust" Keros brought the first Coney Island to Detroit. American Coney Island would become a hotspot for coney dogs in downtown Detroit and has remained as such in the same location operated by the Keros family for just shy of 100 years. The Keros family would later open Kerby’s Koney Island, which has grown to include 15 locations across Macomb, Oakland and Wayne counties, and family cousins would open Leo’s Coney Island, now with dozens of locations throughout the state. Details: 114 W. Lafayette, Detroit. 313-961-7758, americanconeyisland.com.
Lafayette Coney Island
Also in the Keros family tree is Lafayette Coney Island. Lore has it that William “Bill” Keros operated American Coney Island alongside his brother, Gust, until a dispute led them to part ways. Bill would eventually open Lafayette Coney Island right next door, leaving customers to fuel a familial rivalry and debate over which location slings the better coney. The debate lives on to date. Details: 118 W. Lafayette, Detroit. 313-964-8198, lafayetteconeyisland.club.
National Coney Island
Another family-run chain, National Coney Island opened the doors of its first location at Macomb Mall in Roseville in 1965. The diner started with the iconic coney dog, of course, but eventually innovated a new dish that would become its signature: the hani. The sandwich layers fried chicken, lettuce, tomatoes, cheese and a mayonnaise sauce between slices of pita, and like the coney, is another example of a Greek spin on an American classic. Details: Visit nationalconeyisland.com for locations.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2608.15 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 4062 days ago & DAD = 716 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #4197 - Taking UAPs Seriously - Pentagon releases UFO Files
I cried watching the ending of Disclosure Day.
What moved me to tears was the culmination of what I had dreamed of for so long, a dream shared by many people, including, obviously, Steven Speilberg.
There's good progress in verifying what so many believe to be true but real disclosure -- EVIDENCE -- for all is still a dream.
Here's a really good time article and then another from CBS.
America Is Finally Taking Extraterrestrials Seriously
Jeffrey Kluger
There was nothing much happening in Jerome and Benno Leuer's yard in Hamel, Minn. on August 11, 1948. It was noontime in the thick of summer and the boys, 10 and 8, were idly playing when, as they later described it, something overhead caught their eyes. They looked up and their jaws dropped.
Roughly 12 ft. up in the air was a dull gray, circular object, about 1 ft. thick and 2 ft. in diameter, slowly descending between them. They stood transfixed as the object settled onto the ground, making a clattering sound like metal hitting metal. The object rested there a moment, and then began emitting a high-pitched whistle that, to the boys, sounded like a teakettle. It spun in place once, then shot 20 ft. into the air, hovered for a moment, and ascended to 30 ft., maneuvering around tree branches and telephone wires in its path. Finally, it jetted out of sight.
Jerome and Benno ran inside and told their parents what they had seen. Their father notified the only authority he could think of: R.R. Sheridan, the local postmaster. Sheridan, in turn, called the FBI field office in St. Paul. To the family's surprise, the bureau sent an agent. He interviewed the boys and inspected the yard.
"The spot where the alleged 'flying saucer' had landed was approximately 2 ft. in diameter and appeared as though a heavy object had landed there or had touched down," read the statement in the official report. "The ground was dented and protruding rocks had been leveled."
The boys grew up and moved on. Nothing came of their mysterious sighting, but the government preserved the report all the same, filing it away in a cache of documents it had already begun keeping, of both civilian and military accounts of flying, hovering, blinking objects that appeared in the skies, skittering about, sometimes touching down, and then vanishing back the way they came, just as Jerome's and Benno's object had. For 78 years, the boys' story—and hundreds of others like it—had languished in storage. Until May 8, 2026, when President Donald Trump began a serial release of four tranches of more than 450 official reports going back to the middle of the last century, ordering that they be posted on a Department of Defense website and made available for public perusal.
After decades of secrecy, stigma, and sometimes silliness—like the conspiratorial tales about recovered spacecraft and alien remains at a place known as Area 51 in Nevada—the government has at long last begun taking things seriously. What used to be called UFOs and now go by the more decorous handle of UAPs—or unidentified anomalous phenomena—are being given the full investigatory treatment.
Congressional hearings into the origins of the sightings were held in 2022 and 2023. In 2022, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was established "to detect, identify and attribute objects of interest." In December 2023, then President Joe Biden signed into law the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act, requiring the collection, review, and public disclosure of all sightings and encounters.
On June 12, capturing the global hunger for answers to the UAP mystery, director Steven Spielberg—who has long had a sort of seismographic sense of the popular mood—released his latest film, Disclosure Day, in which a government cover-up of extraterrestrial visitations is exposed. The movie grossed $94 million worldwide on its opening weekend alone. At about the same time, the White House established the UAP Science Advisory Council, a body led by Harvard astrophysicist and cosmologist Avi Loeb to study the national-security risks posed by UAPs.
"I was tasked to create a panel for the White House, AARO, the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and related agencies, so that all of these organizations are in contact [about UAPs]," says Loeb. "It's clear, based on much better sensors that we have, that there are objects the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon do not, cannot figure out."
It's not just for the government, academia, and Hollywood to do that figuring. Last year, the nonprofit Disclosure Foundation, led by former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon, was launched with the aim of encouraging the release of UAP reports, promoting scientific investigation of sightings, supporting whistle-blowers, and formulating policy related to UAPs. On June 25 of this year the group convened a Capitol Hill forum in the Kennedy Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building.
The daylong event featured political figures including Representatives Eric Burlison (Republican, Missouri), Anna Paulina Luna (Republican, Florida), André Carson (Democrat, Indiana), and Suhas Subramanyam (Democrat, Virginia), and Senator Mike Rounds (Republican, South Dakota). Loeb was present, as were other well-lettered experts discussing the technological, national-security, economic, psychological, and even religious implications of UAPs. The speakers acknowledged that in some respects they were there at their peril, since publicly discussing flying saucers still carries reputational risk.
"You're black, you're Muslim, you represent a district in Indiana," Carson said of himself, "and now you want to talk about UAPs?"
But it's a measure of the growing public interest in the phenomena and the mounting evidence that something is out there that more and more serious people are willing to take that risk. Even former President Barack Obama weighed in on the topic. In a February interview, Obama was asked if extra-terrestrial life exists, and he responded, "They're real," hastening to add, "But I haven't seen them. They're not being kept at Area 51. There's no underground facility—unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the President of the United States."
In an open hearing before the House Intelligence Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee on May 17, 2022, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray shared this video of a U.S. naval jet encounter with an unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP). The object's path was fleeting, but a cockpit camera captured it before it vanished. The left-hand image includes a portion of the jet's canopy. —U.S. Department of War (DOW)—The appearance of U.S. DOW visual information does not imply or constitute DOW endorsement.
Obama added that he based his belief in the likelihood of extraterrestrial beings in part on the fact that "statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there's life out there." That's a point a lot of believers make, especially since NASA's Kepler Space Telescope and other space-based and Earth-based observatories have discovered thousands of exoplanets—or planets orbiting other stars—leading astronomers to conclude that virtually every one of the trillions of stars in the sky has at least one world circling it.
As with all things in a loud, messy, pluralistic democracy, public opinion plays a role here too—and Americans are clearly ready for action. According to a poll conducted by the Disclosure Foundation just weeks before the Capitol Hill forum, 84% of respondents want more information from the government on UAPs, 69% believe UAPs are real, 59% support hearings and transparency laws, and just 21% trust the federal government to be telling the complete truth. The responses are bipartisan. A statistically meaningless 1% separates the whopping 89% of Republicans and 88% of Democrats who say they want more information on UAPs.
"You could be a single-issue candidate running in the U.S.," says Jordan Flowers, the Disclosure Foundation's executive director. "That single issue could be [UAP] transparency, and you could get elected just based on that."
Unlike other single issues like taxation, immigration, or climate, which unfold indefinitely over decades, UAP transparency has a fixed end point. The government will tell all it knows, the sightings will be investigated, and their origins will be determined to be terrestrial—highly advanced military or other assets—or, epochally, extraterrestrial.
"My null hypothesis would be that these are human-made objects being operated by adversarial nations, near strategic assets of the U.S.," says Loeb. And if they're not? If they do come from ... elsewhere? "That will be the biggest discovery ever made by humanity."
A Question of Security
The U.S. Senate doesn't lend out the Kennedy Caucus Room to just anybody. Opened in 1909, the room is a prepossessing place, with carved marble walls measuring 74 ft. long, 54 ft. wide, and 35 ft. high—climbing to an ornate ceiling decorated with gilded rosettes and acanthus leaves. The doors of the room open onto the Russell Building's vaulted, marble rotunda, which rises three stories high.
The caucus room has seen a lot of history: it was the site of hearings on the sinking of the Titanic, the Teapot Dome scandal, Pearl Harbor, the Vietnam War, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and more. Both John and Robert Kennedy announced their presidential runs there. It was thus no small thing that the Disclosure Foundation was cleared to use the space to hold its June 25 summit. The 300-plus people in attendance took the event exceedingly seriously. Despite the once flaky, fringey, fantastical topic under discussion, the vibe was clearly not Burning Man, Comic Con, or South by Southwest. One attendee was decked out in a T-shirt featuring a bug-eyed alien playing electric guitar, but for everyone else in the room, business attire was the order of the day.
"Today, experts that rarely occupy the same room—physicists, historians, economists, intelligence professionals, educators, journalists, and policymakers—are gathered here in this room," said Mellon in his opening remarks, "to discuss a subject that was, until very recently, untouchable."
Of all of the panels that appeared throughout the day, it was a morning session on the security and defense implications of UAPs that had the most gravity. The panelists discussed the repeated sightings of UAPs both by naval pilots and personnel at military bases, raising concern about the permeability of armed American airspace. If the objects' origins were indeed found to be extraterrestrial, the technology of the alien species far eclipses any flying machines human beings have ever developed. If they are terrestrial—built and flown by rival nations—they signal an arms race that we are already losing.
Retired naval Lieutenant Ryan Graves had his first encounter with UAPs off the East Coast of the U.S. 14 years ago and more in the two years that followed. "We came back from a deployment in 2012 and began to upgrade our radar systems," he told TIME, "and we immediately saw objects in our working area that we were not expecting. There were usually anywhere between three and six objects within the airspace off the coast of Virginia Beach. Sometimes [they were] completely stationary at very high winds, sometimes flying at 250 to 350 knots [288 to 402 m.p.h.]."
The objects, Graves said, were 5 to 15 ft. in diameter, and appeared to be a gray or black cube inside a clear sphere. They gave off no exhaust and flew in such a way—diving and soaring and suddenly changing direction—that any human passenger would be subject to potentially deadly g-forces. Sometimes they flew so close to the Navy jets that the pilots were required to file hazard reports so that other planes operating in the vicinity could be warned.
"They would be outside doing these behaviors all day," Graves says. "It might appear that these objects are using magical physics we don't understand." As part of the pilots' routine rotation, they later shifted their operations to the waters off Jacksonville, Fla. They got no peace there either. The UAPs, says Graves, "were either already down there or they had followed us down, because we had over a dozen incidents."
The naval flyers' Virginia and Florida encounters are by no means the only experience the military has had with UAPs. One of the most compelling is the so-called Tic Tac incident, which occurred off the coast of California in 2004. During an otherwise routine deployment that year, radar personnel repeatedly noticed the reflection of a skittering airborne object they could not explain—looping and diving, climbing and then dropping from an altitude of 80,000 ft. to 20,000 ft. To crack the mystery, a team of flyers was scrambled into the sky. Once aloft, they discovered what they estimated to be a 45-ft.-long flying machine that bore a striking resemblance to a Tic Tac breath mint.
"All four of us looked down and saw a Tic Tac object moving very abruptly over the water," said pilot David Fravor in a 2023 appearance before a congressional committee. "There were no rotors, no rotor wash, or any sign of visible control surfaces like wings. As we pulled nose onto the object within about a half-mile of it, it rapidly accelerated and disappeared." Cockpit video preserved the encounter.
Military assets on the ground have been harassed too. For 17 straight nights in December 2024, Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va. was swarmed by objects that appeared overhead 45 minutes after sundown and repeatedly flew over the base. According to one eyewitness—former astronaut Scott Kelly, who in 2022 was tapped to serve on a NASA UAP study team—the objects appeared to be 20 ft. long, flying at an altitude of 3,000 to 4,000 ft., at a speed of 100 m.p.h. The incursions became serious enough that Langley canceled nighttime training flights and moved its F-22 jets to another air base.
More dramatic was a reported sighting by six federal law-enforcement officers in October 2023, near what the official memorandum described as "a sensitive national security site in the western United States." For two consecutive days, just at dusk, the witnesses reported observing "a luminous 'mother orb' appear[ing] to produce smaller red orbs, one after another, multiple times over a period of several hours. The 'red orbs' reportedly persisted for several seconds before disappearing."
On April 19, 2023, Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), shared a video that depicts an apparent silver, orblike object crossing a video sensor's field of view. Kirkpatrick said the "metallic orbs" are the most common type of UAP and are reported from "all over the world." —U.S. Department of War (DOW)—The appearance of U.S. DOW visual information does not imply or constitute DOW endorsement.
"It is clear that we have lost control of our airspace. Full stop," says Flowers. "Whether this is some form of human intelligence, or whether it's something else, I am not creative enough to say."
"Many of these things are certainly not drones," says Luis Elizondo, a former intelligence officer with the government's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). "They are advanced technology from somewhere. If you're scrambling jets off Langley, you've got a problem."
Not everyone is persuaded by the reports. "Great claims require great evidence," says Jon Kosloski, director of AARO, "and the evidence just isn't there yet." Kelly does not minimize the security risk posed by rogue objects but does not think they have to have an exotic origin. "In science, eyewitness testimony is kind of opinion; it's not data," he says. "I have never seen anything that couldn't be explained."
Kelly points to a sighting he made during his days as a military pilot when he was flying a Tomcat jet off the coast of Virginia. In the midst of the maneuvers, the pilot in the back seat of the plane suddenly announced, "We just passed something. It looks like a UFO."
"What?" Kelly asked.
"Yeah, maybe it was like an alien spaceship or something. It looked really weird."
Kelly banked the jet around in the opposite direction, looking for an object through his wind screen, and indeed saw it in the distance, though it wasn't showing up on radar. He drew closer and closer until he was on an intercept course, and the bogey at last resolved itself.
"It was Bart Simpson," Kelly says. "It was a balloon."
Are We Ready For Extraterrestrial Disclosure?
If UAPs are ever confirmed to have an extraterrestrial origin it will represent what Carlos Eire, professor of history and religious studies at Yale University and a speaker at the Disclosure Forum, calls a "rupture" in human civilization.
"A rupture is something after which nothing is the same," he says. "It's similar to the rupture that occurred for the natives of North and South America when Europeans showed up."
Clinical psychologist Jennice Vilhauer, a member of the advisory boards of both Loeb's UAP Council and the Disclosure Foundation, spoke at the June 25 event, and her words were sobering. "If this news were to come out tomorrow," she says, "we're entirely unprepared."
An emotional contagion like panic is always possible, but Vilhauer does not think most people would react that way even to such paradigm-shifting news as nonhuman intelligence. "There are certain communities that would look at this through a catastrophic lens, like an end-times event," she says. "But I don't see this being something that would spread across the entire population."
That doesn't mean that there would not be a psychic impact. A lot, she says, would depend on whether alien life was perceived as either benevolent, indifferent, or hostile. Even a microbe could be hostile if it posed a risk of infection—a peril about which humans have always been mindful. During the first three moon-landing missions, returning astronauts were required to spend three weeks in medical quarantine against the chance that they picked up alien germs—a practical impossibility since no microorganisms could survive on the dry, airless moon.
An artist's conception of the fast-moving interstellar comet Oumuamua, which has been discussed as a possible UAP. —ESO/M. Kornmesser
Also playing a role would be the question of what Vilhauer calls personal relevance—whether the news of nonhuman life affected any one person directly. The greatest emotional reaction would occur in people who perceive a high threat level and high personal relevance; the least effect would be in people who see low threat and low personal relevance. "Disclosure alone would be a huge, unprecedented event," Vilhauer says. "Those two things together—personal relevance and threat—could create a really negative response."
Mental health will not be the only thing that's affected by UAP disclosure; spiritual health will be too. As long ago as the 1970s, divinity scholars established the concept of exotheology—a branch of Christian thought that includes the possibility of life in the cosmos. That can come in handy now. Eire believes that the three leading monotheistic religions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—will have the most work to do coming to terms with nonhuman intelligence. That's because all three of them share the idea that there is one God, and that he created everything including human beings. Our species, we like to think, is his crowning creation—a belief that will be harder to hold onto if a cosmic species comes along that's better, smarter, fitter than us. "The book of Genesis, which is shared in different ways by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, poses this very troubling story about human origins," says Eire.
Christianity, Eire believes, will have a special hurdle to overcome in adjusting to the idea of off-Earth life because of its teaching that God became human. On the other hand, all three mono-theistic religions do have some practice with the idea of intelligent, nonhuman life. "Jews, Christians, and Muslims accept as a given that human beings are not alone in God's creation," says Eire. "There have always been angels."
Questions about UAPs and the life-forms that may or may not have sent them our way may turn in part on faith, but they also turn on physics. While exobiologists continue to explore the possibility of microbial life on Mars and on ocean moons like Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's Enceladus, it is well accepted that our solar system has just one world with advanced, intelligent life, and that's ours. That means looking for exceptional beings farther afield.
The closest star system to Earth is Proxima Centauri, a tidy 4.25 light-years—or 25 trillion miles—distant. Getting from there to here would in theory take at least 4.25 years, and only if you're traveling at the speed of light—which Albert Einstein long ago proved can't be done. Other star systems lie thousands and billions of light-years away, meaning that traveling the trans-Earth distance could take almost as long as the age of the universe itself.
Still, plenty of academics don't rule out the possibility of alien visitors from the stars. "I would put the estimate of the chances that we've been visited—and I would define that as an exploration through our solar system, leading to them being aware that Earth has life and civilization—at maybe something like 50%," says Jack Singal, professor of physics at the University of Richmond. He puts the odds that any of the claimed UFO or UAP sightings over the past century have actually been one of those visitations at a much lower 5%. "I think there's just enough mundane explanations for these things," he says.
Jonathan Miller, a program engineer for MIT's department of mechanical engineering and the director of an academic program called Confronting Unknowns, which explores the question of UAPs, does not go as far as Singal, but he is open to the possibility that other civilizations are not as constrained by Einsteinian physics as we think they'd be. "There are the physics of traveling from point A to point B," he says. "But there may be alternative ways to sort of bridge that gap. There's probably an iceberg of possibilities [to explain UAPs] below the waterline."
Some of those explanations may be straightforward—at least compared with extraterrestrials. If it's possible that some rival power has developed advanced technology that can perform the acrobatics the UAPs do, it's equally possible that the U.S. has as well and that witnesses are simply observing domestic hardware. The military is nothing if not secretive, and all of this work could be done in the dark—much the way the Manhattan Project, which developed the world's first nuclear weapons, operated silently, invisibly, from June 1942 to August 1947.
It's possible too that there is something even more prosaic than earthly or alien space technology at play. Miller speaks admiringly of the "mark one eyeballs of a well-trained pilot" as perhaps the most reliable sensor system on any plane—better than radar, infrared, or motion sensors. But those eyeballs can be fooled—especially given the thermal, chemical, and physical complexity of the atmosphere in which the UAPs are being seen and reported.
"The atmosphere is a crazy place," says Singal. "You can see double, triple rainbows. You can go to some Arctic regions and see the sun appear several times at several different angles in the sky. You can have tornadoes that pick up and throw a car or impale a cow on a tree. Could it make a black triangle move across the sky for 10 seconds? I would say it could."
"You get a lot of reports from naval officers, more so than from the Air Force," says Kelly. "That's because the Navy flies over water and it's an environment that is very subject to optical illusions."
Witnesses, of course, swear by the evidence of their eyes, and sightings like those of Graves and his fellow pilots, which involved large objects moving at close proximity between two naval jets, are hard to dismiss as just the hallucinatory interplay of light and air.
"We came within 50 ft. of the lead aircraft," says Graves. "I think some of what we were seeing were true UAPs. What I mean by that is that these were true airborne assets that were physical in nature, that were exhibiting capabilities beyond our state of the art."
The community of people who believe accounts like these and want to get to the bottom of them is growing. In addition to chairing the UAP Science Advisory Council, Loeb is co-directing the Harvard-based Galileo Project, which scans the skies looking for hints of extraterrestrial technology. Galileo relies on three Earth-based telescopes—in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Nevada—using infrared, visible, and radio sensors to track moving objects that seem to deviate from the performance of earthly technology. In 2018, Loeb and his colleague Shmuel Bialy, then a post-doctorate researcher, made headlines with a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, in which they entertained the idea that the cigar-shaped interstellar comet Oumuamua "may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization."
In 2017, the object flew into our solar system, whipped around the sun like a comet, and flew back out. On that departing leg of the journey, it accelerated when it should have been slowing down due to the gravitational pull of the sun. That suggested some propulsion system was at work. It is possible, Loeb and Bialy wrote, that the object is "floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment."
Other astronomers dismiss that idea, arguing that Oumuamua was pushed either by solar wind, the storm of charged particles forever streaming from the sun, or by solar radiation pressure, the gentle force imparted by electromagnetic energy when it contacts an object. The object has since soared back into deep space, taking the possibility of any answers with it.
Congress is staying on the UAP case—in its own dilatory way. In 2024, lawmakers took up the UAP Transparency Act, which would mandate declassification of all documents related to UAPs. The bill has not yet become law, and its potential impact has been partly mooted by the White House going ahead and releasing the four tranches of documents on its own.
For now, UAPs remain a riddle. They may be real, they may be illusion, they may simply be artifacts of human desire—something we see because we want to see them. A universe with other life-forms, after all, is a lot less lonely than one in which we are the only world with lights in the windows. The eyewitnesses, of course, would differ—knowing what they saw, believing what they saw, and remaining, in some cases, transformed by what they saw. In time—if the proof is found, if biological intelligence is discovered in the void—we may all be transformed the same way.
Pentagon releases new set of UFO files: "Unlike anything I had seen"
Stefan Becket
Updated
Washington — The Pentagon on Friday released a new batch of files related to UFOs, also known as unidentified anomalous phenomena, including one report from a military aviator who said a mysterious object was "unlike anything I had seen" in 28 years of service.
Friday's release includes a total of 40 files — 14 documents, 19 videos, four audio files and three images. The files come from a variety of agencies: the Pentagon, NASA, CIA, FBI and Energy Department.
The Pentagon posted the new files on its UFO website, which houses the material that has been released under an executive order that President Trump signed earlier this year.
What's in the new UFO files?
The disclosure is similar to past releases — a mix of mostly unredacted historical documents and videos with other files detailing more recent events.
One notable file from the Energy Department details an intrusion by an unidentified object into the airspace over a nuclear weapons facility known as Pantex near Amarillo, Texas, in September 2015. The document includes the account of two officers who chased the object as the nuclear facility was placed on lockdown.
"Although they were unable to catch up to the object, they stopped their vehicle and got out. Once outside, they noted that the object did not make any sound. Furthermore, the [officers] stated that they were unable to identify any type of propulsion system on the object while using binoculars to assess the object," the report said. "After viewing it for 1-2 minutes, the object then continued north offsite."
About half the files are dated from 2010 or later, with videos showing infrared footage captured by military cameras. The grainy images show unexplained objects and encounters from around the world, including over the western Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic and the Middle East.
One of those incidents occurred over the Atlantic in 2020. The files include footage of an object that "was a darker, maroonish color, approximately 12-15ft in height," according to an accompanying report by a Navy crew member, which is heavily redacted.
"Structurally, it appeared as a large, somewhat deformed balloon, but we were unable to verify that as we passed at the merge," the weapons systems officer wrote, followed by two redacted lines. "We then proceeded back to the ship, landing uneventfully."
The report is known as a "range fouler debrief," which the Pentagon described as "a standardized reporting form the U.S. Navy uses to record the circumstances surrounding an unauthorized intrusion into controlled airspace during active military operations or training."
Another debrief documented an object that an aviator saw in 2019 over the Eastern U.S., along with four other personnel.
"I noticed an object with flight characteristics unlike anything I had seen in my 28 years of performing for the [Air Force] and Navy," the aviator wrote. "A small object was below us and appeared to be traveling in a straight line opposite our direction at high speed. I tracked it for ~10-15 seconds before we turned on the recorder to provide the attached video. When I zoomed in to try and achieve more resolution, the object's speed took out of my FOV and I was unable to reacquire, even at a lower zoom. Upon analysis after the flight, the object appeared to be rectangular. Others with equal or more experience were also unsure as to what this object might be."
The video of the incident shows what appears to be an object traveling at high speed:
The most recent events described in the fourth batch of files came in 2025 near China, under the military's Indo-Pacific Command. One video shows a military sensor tracking "an area of contrast resembling a six-pointed star" over the Yellow Sea. Another seems to track an object over the East China Sea for several minutes.
The historical records include the transcript of a 1949 conference in Los Alamos, New Mexico, of top physicists and scientists, including those who worked on the Manhattan Project. The conference attendees tried and failed to explain "green fireballs" that had been spotted over the nuclear lab. One theory held that they were meteors entering the atmosphere, but a prominent astronomer noted that "nothing like this … has ever been observed in the case of meteorite drops."
The Pentagon said Friday's release is not the last disclosure under the president's executive order. "The Department of War and our agency partners are actively working on the next release of UAP files," spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2608.14 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 4061 days ago & DAD = 715 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
