Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.

A private company called Enigma runs an app where strangers submit UFO reports. The company announced this week that strangers have now submitted 9,000 of them, off the coasts of the United States, underwater. The data has been independently verified by no one. Its loudest amplifiers are a retired Navy admiral whose post-government career consists of advocating for UAP “disclosure” and a sitting US congressman who has built consecutive House terms on claims he cannot prove. The Daily Star ran it because it’s what they do.

An Unidentified Blurry Object that may or may not be underwater. (Department of War)

Tim Burchett, the Tennessee Republican, says extraterrestrials operate “five or six” submerged bases off the US coast. He has not been to the bases. His sources have not been to the bases. No photograph, sonar trace, structural diagram, or recovered fragment of any of the bases has been produced. Burchett has nonetheless made public comments about alien bases, because either he’s a fool or a con man. 

Retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, formerly of NOAA, calls the underwater objects “world-changing.” It is a phrase he uses often. He has used it on podcasts, in op-eds, on speaking tours, and especially while serving on the advisory boards of companies that benefit when world-changing UAP rhetoric expands the federal disclosure budget. No objects have ever been photographed in usable resolution or recovered. 

There is a grift here: a retired official monetizes a credential. A congressman monetizes a committee seat. An app monetizes the credulous. A tabloid monetizes the app, the congressman, and the admiral. Tim from Pensacola taps ‘Submit’, the app aggregates the tap, the admiral cites the aggregate, the congressman cites the admiral, the tabloid cites the congressman, and Tim from Pensacola reads the tabloid and taps ‘Submit’ again. None of this needs aliens to exist. The aliens are the part the model could most easily do without. And does.