In An Age Of Social Media, Will We Finally Make Contact?

Unidentified flying objects are becoming more ubiquitous in this day of cell phones and social media. So, will there be a wider acceptance of extraterrestrials or will these be dismissed entirely?

- Josh Sims

An expletive uttered by a passenger captured the tenor of the moment: A Singapore Airlines flight was descending into Zurich one morning this past January when a mysterious white object, it’s alleged, zipped across the aircraft’s flight path. Other passengers are said to have panicked, and were calmed by the pilot, who steered the airliner to landing without hitch. Footage was subsequently shared on social media, too grainy to be conclusive. Predictably Singapore Airlines, approached for comment, remains silent on the issue. [As of publication, the footage titled, ‘singapore airlines collision with ufo’ uploaded by Mystery Nights channel on YouTube can still be seen; although the provenance of it has yet to be determined.]

That’s almost standard procedure. Back in 2017 an anonymous Singaporean fighter pilot claimed that he flew one of four F15s scrambled by air command after an anomaly kept appearing and disappearing on its radar. He claimed they intercepted an orb, before finally losing it in clouds. And that he was subsequently sworn to secrecy.

“Of course, we get a lot of junk reports, hoaxes and faked videos, and the development of drones doesn’t help,” says Robert Spearing, who covers the Singapore and Hong Kong region for MUFON, the non-profit Mutual UFO Network, with 400 field investigators and 4,000 members, the world’s largest UFO organisation, to which the fighter pilot submitted a report. “But for a long time pilots couldn’t talk about these things without risking their careers. But the climate is changing, and more pilots are coming forward now.”