U.S. government registers "aliens.gov" domain, which is pretty good as distractions go

Interestingly (per 404) this is one of those rare actions by the Trump White House where you can go “This is all Barack Obama’s fault” without seeming like a total crank: Obama kicked off a fresh wave of “Does the government actually know about aliens?” fervor a few weeks ago when he made a joke about it to interviewer Brian Tyler Cohen, causing Trump to ramble his way, a few days later, toward saying, hey, why not declassify some of our UFO files for people to look at? (After all, scattershot, occasionally improperly redacted releases of files on the JFK assassination and Jeffrey Epstein have been a good way to get attention off Trump himself over the last few months, while also playing to the current administration’s conspiracy-minded-unless-that-conspiracy-is-about-Trump-for-some-reason base.) With the domain registered, it’s easy to imagine the government doing a similar dump of files to fill up our brains so that we stop worrying about ICE raids, or the Strait Of Hormuz, or what food prices are going to look like six months from now, and instead focus on life from other worlds, and what possible reason they might have for involving themselves in our messy business at this point.

(We’ll also note—with apologies to Tom DeLonge and Steven Spielberg—that this file dump will hopefully remind people that a lot of the info the government has held on to about unexplained flying phenomena over the years was reportedly created by the Pentagon itself, either to trick the Russians during the Cold War, or as part of what’s been described as an elaborate hazing ritual for the Pentagon’s own staff.)