Japan convenes special group to tackle UFO security concerns

A special government group has been formed in Japan to study the threat from UFOs. Are extraterrestrials causing sleepless nights for the Japanese?

On 6 June, the media reported that Japanese lawmakers were creating a group to investigate the security threat UFOs pose. The bipartisan group, which includes over 80 members, including former defence ministers, aims to enhance the capabilities for detecting and analysing unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), more commonly known as UFOs.

It's not about little green men abducting people for experiments and slaughtering cows. UFO (unidentified flying object) encompasses more severe issues than curious aliens. Japan wants to take reports of "extraordinary" phenomena seriously. Not to meet E.T., but because they might indicate the presence of advanced spying technologies.

Recently, Chinese social media circulated a video showing a docked Japanese helicopter destroyer. To the embarrassment of Japan's Ministry of Defence, it was recorded by a drone intruding on the military facility. Last year, the Ministry stated they "strongly assume" that the surveillance balloons sent by China were also unidentified flying objects observed in recent years in the Japanese sky.

In the context of "close encounters of the third kind" with UFOs, it's worth knowing that most astrophysicists and astrobiologists agree that the size and properties of the universe suggest that Earth is not the only planet where life has developed. However, the same size and physical nature of the universe might mean that technologies enabling inter-civilization contact have not, are not, and will not be able to arise.

Another reason we might never meet "extraterrestrials" is time. If we imagine the time of the universe's existence as 24 hours, humans have only spent the last four seconds in it so far. It's easy on this scale to imagine civilizations "missing" each other in time.