A reader pointed me to one of the stranger articles to ever grace the pages of the Wall Street Journal last night. Holman W. Jenkins Jr. is a member of the WSJ’s editorial board who reports on business and financial matters. But the subject he weighed in on yesterday had little to do with those matters. The title was, “The UFO Crowd Wants an Alien Invasion for Christmas.” The even more curious subtitle reads, “The Pentagon discovers it’s not the flying saucers but their admirers who may be the real security threat.”

Being someone who reports on the Pentagon’s UFO office on a regular basis, I could resist taking a look to see what this was all about. It appears that Mr. Jenkins was upset about an email he received from a reader named Lex Fridman. Fridman apparently sent an insulting note criticizing a recent column that Jenkins had published, also on the subject of UFOs. It quickly became obvious that the WSJ editor is very much a skeptic (to put it mildly) when it comes to the idea that some UFOs may be of nonhuman or extraterrestrial origin. After recounting his contact with Fridman, Jenkins goes into some of the history of the Pentagon’s UFO office (ARRO) before launching into an attack on UFO “believers” in general and Lue Elizondo in particular.

The government has perhaps made a discovery: The most disturbing idea embraced by the UFO cheerleaders isn’t that life exists elsewhere in the universe—which seems likely—or that they may visit us. It’s that aliens are a Jesus stand-in. They are our saviors. They and their civilizations are full of beneficent understanding and sympathy for humanity.

The U.S. defense sector has been strangely rife with such thinking for decades, producing a number of incidents in which personnel claimed aliens fiddled with or deactivated our nuclear weapons, presumably in loco parentis. A self-proclaimed Pentagon whistleblower and History Channel host, Luis Elizondo, whose mastery of media gullibility has been a major inflator of the UFO bubble, is naturally a pusher of this theme…

Let me quickly say, given interstellar distances, my view is that we’ll be extinct by the time any “Others” learn about our existence. But humanity shouldn’t look to space aliens for its salvation. With that, I wish my readers, including all the Lex Fridmans in the audience, a merry Christmas.

The email altercation mentioned above was spurred by Jenkins’ recent column, “The UFO Bubble Goes Pop.” Already a skeptic, Mr. Jenkins was clearly influenced by a widely panned New York Times article from Julian Barnes. Barnes claimed that an upcoming, long-delayed report from AARO to Congress would dismiss the idea of the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), blaming nearly all sightings on drones, balloons, or airborne trash. Jenkins’ personal belief, as noted in the excerpt above, is that the vast gulf between the stars is too great to transit, and if any aliens do ever discover our world, mankind will have long since gone extinct.

Just as with the rest of us, Holman Jenkins is welcome to his own opinions and most of us have no way of proving him wrong. If anyone deep inside the government or the military-industrial complex actually does know the full truth behind the UFOs, they’re not bringing that information out for public consumption… at least not yet. I have no idea who, if anyone, is inside of those craft. And I say that as someone who has seen five of them myself over the past two years. Maybe the government has made some staggering breakthroughs in physics without letting us know, allowing the tic tacs, triangles, and orbs to do things that shouldn’t be possible. Or maybe it was China or Russia. (Though if it’s Russia, that alien technology must be pretty crappy if Ukraine is kicking their butts.)

Or maybe it really is aliens from elsewhere. We just don’t know yet, but I’m not writing off the idea. When Jenkins speaks of the vastness of space being too great to cross, I agree that it’s too great for us to cross, at least for now. But if there’s a civilization out there that had a million-year head start on us, who knows what they might have cooked up?

As far as the aliens being “Jesus stand-ins” who are here to bathe us in love and light, I’m as skeptical as Jenkins. But that doesn’t mean that I necessarily believe that they’re here to launch an invasion, either. If that’s what they’ve been planning, what are they waiting for? It’s not like we could defeat them. (With apologies to Will Smith.) If the ETH turns out to be the answer, why couldn’t they just be scientists exploring a green world full of life? They might view us as being little more than marginally clever monkeys and have no interest in either helping or conquering us. As for me, I’ll leave it as an open question and maintain it as a possible marvel yet to be revealed.