The Galactic Federation Goes to the Movies
In December 2020, Brigadier General (ret.) Haim Eshed, the father of Israel’s space programme and former head of the Defence Ministry’s space directorate for nearly thirty years, told Yediot Aharonot that governments in Washington and Jerusalem had been in contact with a “Galactic Federation” of extraterrestrials. The aliens, he said, had signed agreements with both countries, maintained a joint base under the surface of Mars, and counselled against disclosure on the grounds that humanity was not ready.
The world laughed, mostly. Eshed, now in his nineties, retreated from public life. Then the world changed.
In May 2026, the Trump administration launched PURSUE, the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, and began declassifying nearly two hundred files on unidentified anomalous phenomena stretching back to 1944. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said the goal was “maximum transparency.” A third batch followed in June. Congressional hearings had already forced whistleblowers into the open. The UAP Disclosure Act of 2025 was winding its way through committee. The laughter had stopped.
Two months later, on 7 July, Hollywood released Black Box, a horror film about Vero Airlines Flight 298 from New Orleans to Seattle. The passengers experience catastrophic electronic failures, mysterious illness, and then encounter alien forces at thirty thousand feet. The timing is more interesting than the film.
Eshed’s version of alien contact was fundamentally reassuring. His aliens were diplomats who signed contracts and ran a bureaucracy sophisticated enough to have a policy on premature disclosure. Black Box offers the opposite. Its aliens are not interested in collaboration. There is no consent. There is only a metal tube at altitude, failing systems, and passengers discovering that whatever is out there does not have their interests at heart. Where Eshed imagined a relationship, Black Box imagines a predator.
The film is fiction. But it lands at a moment when the disclosure debate has shifted from whether governments know anything to what exactly they are withholding. And Israel sits at a peculiar intersection of that debate. Eshed was not a crank from the internet. He was a three time recipient of the Israel Defence Prize, the highest defence honour the state bestows, and the reasons for those awards remain classified. When such a man says he has information about extraterrestrial contact, it is not possible to dismiss him on credentials alone. No government has answered the obvious follow up questions.
What Israel has answered, with decades of institutional practice, is how a state should behave when airborne threats are real rather than speculative. El Al remains the only commercial airline in the world with an integrated missile defence system on its aircraft. Every international El Al flight carries armed undercover agents among the passengers. The cockpits use double door interlock systems. Reinforced steel separates the cabin from the cargo hold. The airline’s entire security architecture was built after the 1968 hijacking of Flight 426 and hardened through decades of sustained threat. Most of El Al’s pilots are former Israeli Air Force. The airline does not hope for the best. It plans for the worst and then adds another layer.
Black Box is a film about what happens when almost none of those precautions exist. Vero Airlines Flight 298 is an ordinary American domestic service. There is a federal air marshal on board, but she is overwhelmed before the threat is even understood. There are no layered defences, no hardened protocols adequate to the situation. When catastrophe arrives, one armed officer is a single point of failure, not a security architecture. The Israeli viewer watches this and recognises the premise immediately: it is the nightmare of the undefended aircraft, the scenario that El Al’s entire institutional culture was designed to prevent.
El Al was designed to counter hijackers and missiles, not tentacled entities from beyond the atmosphere. But the underlying logic is transferable. Threats that seem improbable are not the same as threats that are impossible. States that take security seriously plan for the improbable. States that do not end up as horror films.
Israel now occupies both sides of the alien contact narrative simultaneously. It has the most senior official ever to claim cooperative extraterrestrial relations, and the most militarised aviation security of any commercial carrier on earth. It has Eshed’s benign federation and El Al’s permanent war footing. It has the handshake and the holster.
The Galactic Federation, if it exists, apparently wanted humanity to wait until it was ready. Two hundred declassified files and a creature feature about tentacles at thirty thousand feet suggest that the wait, for better or worse, may be over.