On a grey Tuesday afternoon in Whitehall, the news rippled through the corridors of power like an electric current. The US government had released a long-awaited report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, and for once, the description was not couched in bureaucratic weasel-words. It spoke of orbs. Orbs swarming in all directions. The language was almost poetic: metallic spheres, translucent globes, objects moving without discernible means of propulsion. It was the kind of language you might find in a sci-fi novel, not an official Pentagon document.
I stood outside the Ministry of Defence, watching the small crowd of journalists and curious passers-by gather. A young man in a hoodie held up a phone, live-streaming to a handful of followers. ‘They’ve finally admitted it,’ he said, his voice trembling with a mix of fear and exhilaration. ‘They’re not weather balloons.’
The report, titled ‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: A Comprehensive Assessment’, was a far cry from the terse, redacted statements of yesteryear. It detailed 144 sightings between 2004 and 2021, most of which remain unexplained. The orbs, in particular, were described as ‘clusters of objects moving in formation’ and ‘exhibiting flight characteristics beyond known human technology’. British defence analysts, long frustrated by the lack of transatlantic transparency, seized on the report with a hunger that bordered on desperate. ‘We need to know if there is a threat, or if we are simply being playful with,’ said Dr Alistair Finch, a former intelligence officer turned independent researcher. ‘The public deserves answers.’
On the street, the reaction was more visceral. A cab driver named Terry told me he’d seen something unusual over the M25 last year. ‘Just a light, moving faster than anything I’ve ever seen. I thought it was a drone, but then it stopped dead. In mid-air. My passenger, he saw it too. We didn’t speak about it. What do you say?’
That’s the human cost of this story. For decades, people have been seeing strange things in the sky and keeping quiet, afraid of ridicule or professional damage. Now, with a US government report that uses the word ‘orb’ without irony, the cultural shift is palpable. The stigma is lifting. We are no longer in the realm of tabloid sensationalism; we are in the realm of serious national security discourse.
But what does this mean for the everyday Briton? For the mother in Milton Keynes who looked up and saw a triangle of lights? For the farmer in Herefordshire who found a circle in his field, and said nothing? It means that the conversation has changed. It means that denial is no longer a credible position. It means that we must grapple with the possibility that we are not alone, or at least that we are not in control of our own skies.
The British response has been cautious but emphatic. Defence analysts are calling for a formal joint taskforce with the US and NATO. The Ministry of Defence, which disbanded its own UFO unit in 2009, is reportedly scrambling to reassess its posture. ‘We cannot afford to be complacent,’ a senior MOD source told me on condition of anonymity. ‘The orbs are real. The question is, what are they?’
As I walked away from the MOD, the evening lights of London flickered on. A plane from Heathrow arced overhead, its navigation lights blinking in the dusk. I wondered how many of those lights were planes, and how many were something else. The orbs, it seems, have swarmed into our collective consciousness. And they are not going away.
