Japan forms special team to probe potential UFO threats

On June 6, the media reported that Japanese lawmakers are creating a group to investigate the security threat UFOs pose. The bipartisan group, which includes over 80 members, including former defense ministers, aims to enhance the capabilities for detecting and analyzing unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), more commonly known as UFOs.

It's not about little green men abducting people for experiments and slaughtering cows. UFO (unidentified flying object) encompasses more severe issues than curious aliens. Japan wants to take reports of "extraordinary" phenomena seriously. Not to meet E.T., but because they might indicate the presence of advanced spying technologies.

Recently, Chinese social media circulated a video showing a docked Japanese helicopter destroyer. To the embarrassment of Japan's Ministry of Defense, it was recorded by a drone intruding on the military facility. Last year, the Ministry stated it "strongly assumes" that unidentified flying objects observed in recent years in the Japanese sky were also surveillance balloons sent by China.

In the context of "close encounters of the third kind" with UFOs, it's worth knowing that most astrophysicists and astrobiologists agree that the size and properties of the universe suggest that Earth is not the only planet where life has developed. However, the same size and physical nature of the universe might mean that technologies enabling inter-civilization contact have not, are not, and will not be able to arise.

Another reason we might never meet "extraterrestrials" is time. If we imagine the universe's existence as 24 hours, humans have only spent the last four seconds in it so far. It's easy on this scale to imagine civilizations "missing" each other in time.