The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has played an interesting part in affecting the shift in elite attitudes on both subjects. Last year, Congress mandated a report on the state of U.S. government knowledge about unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), which is the Defense Department’s way of saying UFOs. That report came out in June, and what was noteworthy about it was that it pretty much admitted that there were multiple candidate explanations for UFOs. Some of them were mundane, some of them were … less mundane. Basically, the ODNI admitted that it knew what it did not know, and pledged to gather more data. As I noted at the time, “the stigmatization of [reporting] UAP incidents has been dramatically reduced.”
Last Friday, the ODNI issued an unclassified summary of its assessment of the origins of covid-19. It was even shorter than its UFO assessment. Mostly, the assessment simply reifies the current lack of consensus. Anyone looking for clarity will not find it in the sentence, “After examining all available intelligence reporting and other information, though, the [intelligence community] remains divided on the most likely origin of covid-19.” Four intelligence agencies lean toward the natural origins story, one agency thinks it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and three other agencies could not even form an internal consensus. Most of these assessments were made with low confidence.
That said, there are important areas of consensus that rule a few things out. The ODNI summary says flat out that “the virus was not developed as a biological weapon” and that “China’s officials did not have foreknowledge of the virus before the initial outbreak of covid-19 emerged.” Given some of the former president’s more wild accusations levied against China, this seems noteworthy. So it would seem that, as with UFOs, the ODNI report rules out a few of the ultra-hawkish theories but cannot reach a consensus about much else.
The key difference between the two reports is more disturbing, however. On UAP, the intelligence community has pledged to systematize further data collection. On the origins of covid-19, the intelligence assessment is much more bleak: “China’s cooperation most likely would be needed to reach a conclusive assessment of the origins of covid-19. Beijing, however, continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information and blame other countries, including the United States. These actions reflect, in part, China’s government’s own uncertainty about where an investigation could lead as well as its frustration the international community is using the issue to exert political pressure on China.”
This conclusion is doubly disturbing. Obviously, without China’s cooperation, we may never know the answer about the origins of covid-19. The intransigence of the Chinese government reveals something even more discouraging, however. Chinese officials are not stupid; they are undoubtedly aware that stonewalling the investigation of covid-19′s origins harms perceptions of them in the United States. Their decision to remain unbending, however, shows that they are more concerned with what an investigation could yield than any hardening of U.S. attitudes.
As strange as it sounds, five years from now the United States government is likely to know more about UFOs than the origins of covid-19.