When the US government passed the coronavirus relief package in January, an obscure committee amendment within it put a duty on the Pentagon to publish a report on UFO sightings within 180 days.
 
The motivation for this is spectacularly unclear but time is almost up. The unclassified report must be published by the start of June, and yesterday the former US national intelligence director John Ratcliffe said the findings would be “difficult to explain”.
 
Talking to Fox news, he claimed there were “a lot more sightings than have been made public”, including unknown items that had been travelling at speeds that “exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom”. 
 
Conspiracy theorists worldwide will unite in their delight that so much new content is coming their way, but they’re not the only ones invested.
 
News on earth has been rather heavy of late and I can’t help thinking that’s maybe why so many governments are turning their attention to space.
 
Yesterday, it was Britain’s turn. A near £7bn commitment to “research, development and experimentation” in space was one of the centrepiece announcements of the Ministry of Defence’s new paper – Defence in a Competitive Age.
 
The strategy is the military contribution to Downing Street’s wider integrated review of defence, security and foreign policy. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has said it will turn hollow forces into credible ones.  
 
It’s an £188bn plan that will see old tanks, warships and aircrafts retired and personnel numbers cut by 10,000 by 2025. It’s also a plan that points to some of our greatest weaknesses.
 
Billions will go to securing our “digital backbone”, investing in our surface and submarine fleet to protect an increasingly vital network of subsea cables, and the creation of a new surveillance satellite constellation.
 
Going through the details Wallace talked of technological proxies and proliferation. He said we needed to keep “adapting to the threat” and “protect new domains”.
 
Is this the biggest hint yet that the wars of the future will be set in space? Maybe so. But as the British Army contracts to levels smaller than the reserve force of the US Air Force, it’s right to question its continuing fitness to deal with more mundane threats back here on earth. Get that wrong and this review may well be branded a waste of space.