Can Congress pry our government's UFO 'X-Files' open? The truth is still out there

At last, in the swampy heat of late-summer Washington, Congress appears to have stumbled across an issue on which both of our contentious political parties find remarkable agreement: UFOs.

Or, as the Defense Department prefers to call them these days, “UAPs,” or “unidentified anomalous phenomena.” It used to stand for “unidentified aerial phenomena,” but defense officials changed the term to include “submerged and trans-medium objects.” NASA and other agencies soon followed suit.

Just try to keep up. The clunky label is intended to identify anything that might be coming at us “in space, in the air, on land, in the sea or under the sea” that can’t be identified but might pose a threat to U.S. military operations and facilities, according to a DOD explainer.

As a lifelong science nerd and science fiction junkie, my love of flying saucer movies began with the likes of “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” a 1951 classic in which a wise alien named Klaatu, played by Michael Rennie, visits Washington with his robot, Gort, to offer earthlings some help as they begin to stumble into the new scientific age of the 1950s. Unfortunately, fearful leaders give Klaatu the worst sort of welcome: They shoot him.