Every once in a while,Last Week Tonightwill do a hard 180 that gives you a bit of whiplash. This week, the satire news show put aside its more common themes of politics and how America isbasically destroying itselfto focus on… UFOs. No, it’s notthe History Channel, it’s HBO. Interestingly enough, the episode approached the subject pretty much the way you’d expectJohn Oliverto do it: with a dose of humor and trying to find a common ground between skepticism and theories that are actually verifiable.
In order to do that,Last Week Tonightwent all the way back to the late seventies, a time when the United States was governed byJimmy Carter. During an interview,the former Presidentblatantly revealed he witnessed some UFO sightings along with a large group of people. This was just to underscore the fact that, for many years,UFOs have been spotted by all kinds of peoplefor a very long time. And since this is hard to verify, it’s pretty easy to get lost in what’s real, what’s speculation and what is just blatant conspiracy theory.
So, before delving into the nitty-gritty of it,Last Week Tonightmade it a point of clarifying thatUFO sightings are not necessarily related to aliens. That’s why some people prefer the term UAP — unidentified aerial phenomenon — which sounds the same but opens the possibilities to the sightings being something that can have a logical explanation. Like all the way back in 1947, when a famed UAP crashhappened in Roswell, New Mexicoand for five decades the U.S. pretended they didn’t know what it was before finally revealing that it was actually debris from a top-secret project code-named “Mogul.” And back in the 40s, nothing looked like the project’s balloons — so there was plenty of room for speculation.
UFOs: The Real, The Imaginary and The Venus of It All
Last Week Tonightalso makes the case that, in some situations, it’s more comfortable for the government tolabel some events as top-secret testsrather than admitting that they don’t know what the heck people are seeing in the sky, simply because this fuels their illusion of control. At the same time, we can’t ignore thatsome things are just beyond comprehension, and sometimes all we can do is speculate — or find out that we’re only seeing Venus in the sky.
This shift in gears forLast Week Tonight’s main segment is probably the show’s way to give viewers a breather. Not only becausethe episodes' themes are often hard to digest, but also because this is Election Year, and soon it will become pretty daunting to follow the news — not to mention thatthe Trump trial might end up getting a full coverageat the show at some point.
You can watch the full main segment below:
Last Week Tonight With John Oliver
Former Daily Show host and correspondent John Oliver brings his persona to this weekly news satire program.
