UFOs in the news

What a strange time to be alive. I really think the world keeps getting "weirder" as I get older and I am not sure if that is just how every person sees things as they age, or if our stretch of time really is the strangest time to be alive so far. 

It started in 2017 with the NYT article about UFOs (archive.today link).

I read the article, reviewed the videos, and checked out the UFOs chatter on Reddit.

Why? Well, several years ago, I saw an extremely bright green meteor that had a lot of nickle in it streak low across the sky and off to the horizon when I was out in the yard with my dog. It was low enough that I heard it sizzle (https://earthsky.org/space/whoosh-can-you-hear-meteors-streak-past/).

This really freaked me out. It lit the area up like the day. It was "otherworldly". I became obsessed with understanding what I had seen. Over the course of time, I eventually found out this was a fairly common meteorite burning up and the nickle caused the green flame. The sizzle is totally normal as well. While I was trying to figure that out, I learned a lot about UFO sightings and the pop culture around UFOs. This just comes up when you search for "glowing green orb that sizzled".

Once I found the true explanation, I stopped looking and forgot about all this sort of thing. Then 2017 comes along with the article and videos and I thought "I wonder what r/UFOs is saying about this". And I was in the rabbit hole.

I would like to just not think about this at all but it keeps coming back up in the news. Lately, even Chuck Shumer is in on it, putting forward an amendment to a military spending bill that reads like science fiction: https://www.democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/schumer-rounds-introduce-new-legislation-to-declassify-government-records-related-to-unidentified-anomalous-phenomena-and-ufos_modeled-after-jfk-assassination-records-collection-act--as-an-amendment-to-ndaa

At this point in time, we have government discussing it, mainstream media covering it, scientific experts holding conferences on it, and more and more people who "want to believe". Where is it all going?

Either this is a mass delusion which has reached the highest levels of government (and, let's be honest, that happened with Qanon) or its a real thing in our world. 

I don't have enough data to know for sure but I'm keeping an eye on it and wondering if we have merged so much with virtual reality, in the intellectual sense, that it could be affecting our connection to base reality. As we lose our visceral grounding, our consensus reality becomes more aligned with what is online. If that is made up, so is our consensus reality but we make decisions based on this shared framework. 

Are we too close to this merging to see it objectively?