The next frontier: Washington grapples with its latest space oddity

Isaac Asimov famously declared that he didn’t believe in "flying saucers." Asimov countered that he believed in "evidence" and "observation.""I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there’s evidence for it," Asimov said."The wilder and more ridiculous something is however, the firmer and more solid the evidence should be."The Trump administration released another batch of UFO files recently.
This is part of making good on a promise to release videos and documents related to UAP, unidentified aerial phenomena.Bipartisan lawmakers pressed President Donald Trump to make good on this promise back in March.
This release is the second group of material publicized by the government.And what’s in it?NEW UFO FILES REVEAL STARTLING REPORTSIf there's one subject on the Hill that's equal parts touchy and bizarre, it's UFOs.(Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images)A space oddity.
Some 57 years in the making."They thought it was something, you know, penetrating the spacecraft, if you know what I mean," said Apollo 12 Command Module 12 pilot about what he and his colleagues saw in outer space in late 1969.That’s one snippet of audio which is now public.The baffled astronauts tried to unravel a cosmic conundrum when they spotted weird beams of light bouncing around their spacecraft more than half a century ago."The streaks I saw were ones that I saw on the horizontal," said Apollo 12 Lunar Module Pilot Alan Bean.
"The horizontal streaks were always a little bit above the center."PENTAGON DECLASSIFIES APOLLO 12 AUDIO OF ASTRONAUTS DESCRIBING UNEXPLAINED 'STREAKS OF LIGHT' IN SPACEThese were clips of audiotape the government recently dumped.Tales from tape never heard before about what some of humankind’s first space explorers experienced and observed when they slipped the surly bonds of Earth.The president pledged to publicize as much unexplained material as possible."It's been in the minds of people for a long time," said President Trump in...