Top Secret? Pfffftt...more like Pop Secret...

They might as well have Saran Wrapped
it. Does the Air Force not own a tarp?

It's things like these (this, aaaand this) that shake my otherwise unswerving belief in the government's ability to keep the truth about aliens from us. The first story is from a few days ago and is about the alien starship the Air Force was brazenly towing through Washington D.C. on a flatbed. Yeah, they covered it in plastic, but like covering your kid's new bike in wrapping paper and sticking it under the Christmas tree, there's no disguising the fact that it looks like the wise cracking UFO from Flight of the Navigator.

You know, like a $813 million
car...that kills people...

According to the Air Force, the craft is actually a top secret unmanned military drone called an X-47B being delivered to a nearby military base for testing. It's so top secret it even has it's own goddamned wikipedia page. You'd think that they'd want to keep their new hardware under wraps but since secret flying kill-bots are all the rage now, I suppose guess they wanted to show it off a little. I mean, if you just bought a fancy new car, you'd drive it around the block, right?

Anyway, the second story is about the similarly named X-37B landing in California. The X-37B, according to its equally secret wikipedia page is an unmanned space drone and has spent the last year or so doing secret space things like spying on China (shhh, don't tell them) and testing new technology (apparently not stealth technology).

Above: A woman tests out America's latest stealth
technology as part of Operation: No Peaking

Eat your heart out Cold War-era CIA.

Look, I am all for the openness and transparency. I mean the Cold War's over, let's cut the James Bond shit and act like grown ups. That said, I still kind of want to know why it's so hard to keep these things quiet. Sure, everyone with a camera phone and Instagram has better spy equipment at their disposal than every espionage agency before 1990, but it helps if you don't drive your classified spy plane around in broad daylight. Every time things like this slip out it's like there's one fewer dark corner in which to hide the Roswell ship. 

I'd like at least to be able to believe we have the truth about aliens locked up somewhere. But if the government can't even land their secret space shuttle without it showing up on the internet five minutes later how are we supposed to cling to the hope they've got a warehouse full of Greys or a Stargate or something? 

Above: This scene isn't bullshit because aliens and UFOs are preposterous,
it's bullshit because the government sucks at keeping things quiet.