Created Friday 14 February 2020

See also: Aviation | Space

Ray Fuschetti, Malcolm Johnson and Aaron Strader - August 12, 2022

A Harvard University professor believes a meteorite that crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 2014 may be made of a material that one would expect to be in their favorite sci-fi movie. Avi Loeb — the longest serving chair of Harvard Universities Department of astronomy — is convinced that this object may be alien technology or a meteorite of unprecedented material strength. None of this is possible to confirm without physically studying the object, so the professor has planned an expedition to retrieve it that will cost over a million dollars in funding from private donors.

“This would be the first time that humans put their hands on the material that makes an object that came from another star.”

While the data now confirms that the object is of interstellar origin — the path to confirming this wasn’t immediate. Using data from government censors primarily used for national security as part of our missile defense system, Loeb and his student studied multiple meteors to see if any stood out.

“I found the catalog that the government compiled of meteorites that were detected by government sensors that our missile warning system. I asked my student to check if any of the meteors, the fastest moving meteors, could have arrived to Earth from outside the solar system,” he explained.

https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/harvard-professor-believes-alien-tech-could-have-crashed-into-the-pacific-ocean-and-he-wants-to-find-it/2805992/

Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday May 09, 2023 08:30PM

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Motherboard article:

Now, frustrated with a lack of transparency and trust around official accounts of UFO phenomena, a team of developers has decided to take matters into their own hands with an open source citizen science project called Sky360, which aims to blanket the earth in affordable monitoring stations to watch the skies 24/7, and even plans to use AI and machine learning to spot anomalous behavior. Unlike earlier 20th century efforts such as inventors proposing “geomagnetic detectors” to discover nearby UFOs, or more recent software like the short-lived UFO ID project, Sky360 hopes that it can establish a network of autonomously operating surveillance units to gather real-time data of our skies. Citizen-led UFO research is not new. Organizations like MUFON, founded in 1969, have long investigated sightings, while amateur groups like the American Flying Saucer Investigating Committee of Columbus even ran statistical analysis on sightings in the 1960s (finding that most of them happened on Wednesdays). However, Sky360 believes that the level of interest and the technology have now both reached an inflection point, where citizen researchers can actually generate large-scale actionable data for analysis all on their own.

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/23/05/09/2228208/ufo-hunters-built-an-open-source-ai-system-to-scan-the-skies

The public's fascination with UFOs can be largely attributed to typical human perceptual and social processes, rather than celestial phenomena.

Barry Markovsky, The Conversation - 17 July 2023

Most of us still call them UFOs – unidentified flying objects. NASA recently adopted the term “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAP. Either way, every few years popular claims resurface that these things are not of our world, or that the U.S. government has some stored away.

I’m a sociologist who focuses on the interplay between individuals and groups, especially concerning shared beliefs and misconceptions. As for why UFOs and their alleged occupants enthrall the public, I’ve found that normal human perceptual and social processes explain UFO buzz as much as anything up in the sky.

https://gizmodo.com/why-people-tend-to-believe-ufos-are-aliens-1850648023

July 26th, 2023 - Gerhard

I know this an unconventional thing to do, but I was thinking that if you’re monitoring us, you probably have access to our internet. Meaning, that if you do exist on or around Earth you have a very low percentage chance to read this letter. Very low, but some.

Welcome to Earth, a beautiful planet full of life, creativity, and diversity. In the vastness of the universe, we are excited by the opportunity to extend our greetings and share our experiences with you.

If you made contact with us before you’ve likely been in touch with our religious leaders and government officials. These individuals do have a significant roles in our societies, but they’re not the ideal type of humans that should be representing the human race.

We humans are incredibly varied in our thoughts, beliefs, and experiences, largely influenced by our cultural backgrounds and geographical locations. It’s this very diversity and our ability to adapt that makes is unique. From our perspective at least.

http://fuckthatshit.co.za/dear-aliens/

The journalist, who recently showcased some extraordinary “evidence” to Mexican lawmakers, has made prior claims of extraterrestrial life.

Passant Rabie - 14 September 2023

The internet is buzzing with images of tiny mummified bodies with three fingers and an elongated head, the alleged corpses of extraterrestrial life. A congressional hearing held in Mexico on UFOs is the latest to join a string of recent headlines on aliens, but are we any closer to finding out the truth of whether we are alone in the universe?

During Mexico’s first congressional event on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) on Tuesday, journalist and UFO conspiracy nut Jaime Maussan presented lawmakers with what he claims to be two ancient corpses of non-human origins.

https://gizmodo.com/alien-corpses-mexico-congress-uap-ufo-pseudoscience-1850837814

Chris Impey - September 15, 2023 1.36pm EDT

NASA’s independent study team released its highly anticipated report on UFOs on Sept. 14, 2023.

In part to move beyond the stigma often attached to UFOs, where military pilots fear ridicule or job sanctions if they report them, UFOs are now characterized by the U.S. government as UAPs, or unidentified anomalous phenomena.

Bottom line: The study team found no evidence that reported UAP observations are extraterrestrial.

I’m a professor of astronomy who has written extensively on astrobiology and the scientists who search for life in the universe. I have long been skeptical of the claim that UFOs represent visits by aliens to Earth.

https://theconversation.com/nasa-report-finds-no-evidence-that-ufos-are-extraterrestrial-213528

With such a vast Universe and raw ingredients that seem to be everywhere, could it really be possible that humanity is truly alone?

October 6, 2023 - Ethan Siegel

The Universe, as we understand it today, is a vast expanse of space littered with stars, galaxies, and very likely planets, for as far as our instruments can probe. Beyond that, there’s likely a much greater amount of “Universe” out there that’s unobservable to us, and an inflationary multiverse in which our entire Universe is embedded. Yet, even though our scientific efforts have revealed an enormous number of details about the Universe we inhabit (and perhaps even beyond), we have yet to find another inhabited world out there with even simple, microbial life, much less life that’s complex and differentiated, or even intelligent and technologically advanced. The question of just how “alone” we are in the Universe remains unanswered.

And it’s this question — perhaps the biggest existential question of all — that Ronald Rainge wants to know the answer to, asking:

“With a universe large beyond comprehension, and theories of multiverses, could this really be the only planet with high level intelligent life?”

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/earth-only-planet-intelligent-life/

The James Webb Space Telescope may help us find the answer.

Elise Cutts, Knowable Magazine - 10/12/2023, 10:15 AM

In June, astronomers reported a disappointing discovery: The James Webb Space Telescope failed to find a thick atmosphere around the rocky planet TRAPPIST-1 C, an exoplanet in one of the most tantalizing planetary systems in the search for alien life.

The finding follows similar news regarding neighboring planet TRAPPIST-1 B, another planet in the TRAPPIST-1 system. Its dim, red star hosts seven rocky worlds, a few of which are in the habitable zone—at a distance from their star at which liquid water could exist on their surfaces and otherworldly life might thrive.

What it would take to detect that life, if it exists, isn’t a new question. But thanks to the JWST, it’s finally becoming a practical one. In the next few years, the telescope could glimpse the atmospheres of several promising planets orbiting distant stars. Hidden away in the chemistry of those atmospheres may be the first hints of life beyond our solar system. This presents a sticky problem: What qualifies as a true chemical signature of life?

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/10/what-would-signal-life-on-another-planet/

Posted by BeauHD on Wednesday February 07, 2024 02:00AM

Last June, Harvard professor Avi Loeb said he may have found fragments of alien technology from a meteor that landed in the waters off of Papua, New Guinea in 2014. “Since then, several researchers unrelated to the expedition have pushed back on his analysis,” reports Boston Public Radio. “One October 2023 paper deemed the spherules were made by human-produced coal ash.” Now, Loeb has published new findings that he claims debunk that theory.

“What we did is compare 55 elements from the periodic table in coal ash to those special spherules that we found,” Loeb said. “And it's clearly very different.” From the report:

He said his work follows the scientific method: collecting materials, analyzing them and following the evidence. “It's not based on opinions,” Loeb said. “And, of course, if you're not part of this scientific process and you are jealous of the attention that it gets, then you can raise a lot of criticism.” When asked how he deals with that criticism, he said that, “by now, my skin turned into titanium.” […]

https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/02/07/0118222/harvard-astronomy-professor-thinks-he-has-new-evidence-of-alien-spacecraft

Posted by msmash on Friday March 08, 2024 09:20AM

An anonymous reader shares a report:

In the 1960s, secret test flights of advanced government spy planes generated U.F.O. sightings. More recently, government and commercial drones, new kinds of satellites and errant weather balloons have led to a renaissance in unusual observations. But, according to a new report, none of these sightings were of alien spacecraft. The new congressionally mandated Pentagon report found no evidence that the government was covering up knowledge of extraterrestrial technology and said there was no evidence that any U.F.O. sightings represented alien visitation to Earth.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/03/08/1714210/pentagon-review-finds-no-evidence-of-alien-cover-up

Defense department releases report calling deluge of reports and claims about government reverse-engineering tech ‘inaccurate’

Maya Yang - Fri 8 Mar 2024 16.03 EST

The US is not secretly hiding alien technology or extraterrestrial beings from the public, according to a defense department report.

On Friday, the Pentagon published the findings of an investigation conducted by the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), a government office established in 2022 to detect and, as necessary, mitigate threats including “anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects”.

Addressing pop culture beliefs surrounding alien technology and extraterrestrial beings, the report said: “A consistent theme in popular culture involves a particularly persistent narrative that the [US government] … recovered several off-world spacecraft and extraterrestrial biological remains, that it operates a program or programs to reverse-engineer the recovered technology, and that it has conspired since the 1940s to keep this effort hidden from the United States congress and the American public.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/08/pentagon-ufo-report-hiding-aliens

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday March 09, 2024 09:34PM

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Guardian:

The U.S. is not secretly hiding alien technology or extraterrestrial beings from the public, according to a defense department report.

On Friday, the Pentagon 'published the findings of an investigation conducted by the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), a government office established in 2022 to detect and, as necessary, mitigate threats including “anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects”….

AARO investigators, which were “granted full access to all pertinent sensitive [U.S. government] programs”, reviewed all official government investigatory efforts since 1945. Investigators also researched classified and unclassified archives, conducted approximately 30 interviews, and collaborated with intelligence community and defense department officials responsible for controlled and special access program oversight, the report revealed.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/03/09/0637244/new-us-defense-department-report-finds-no-evidence-of-alien-technology

An adjustment to the famous Drake Equation could radically refine estimates of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy.

George Dvorsky - 29 May 2024

Astronomer Frank Drake formulated his influential equation in 1961 to estimate the number of civilizations in the Milky Way capable of communicating with us. Our understanding of planetary science has changed a lot since then, leading a team of scientists to propose a pair of important adjustments that produce an answer that could explain the Great Silence.

Despite its popularity and intuitiveness, the Drake Equation has faced criticism over the years for its broad assumptions and ambiguous parameters; it often results in an overly optimistic estimate for the value of N—the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which we might be able to communicate. This tends to feed a conundrum known as the Fermi Paradox: If intelligent life is common, why haven’t we found any evidence of it? New research published in Scientific Reports offers a potential fix via the addition of two new factors.

https://gizmodo.com/drake-equation-update-fermi-paradox-intelligent-life-1851503974

Are scientists speculating, or is there a scientific consensus here?

Peter Vickers, Henry Taylor, and Sean McMahon, The Conversation – Jan 15, 2025 7:44 AM

News stories about the likely existence of extraterrestrial life, and our chances of detecting it, tend to be positive. We are often told that we might discover it any time now. Finding life beyond Earth is “only a matter of time,” we were told in September 2023. “We are close” was a headline from September 2024.

It’s easy to see why. Headlines such as “We’re probably not close” or “Nobody knows” aren’t very clickable. But what does the relevant community of experts actually think when considered as a whole? Are optimistic predictions common or rare? Is there even a consensus? In our new paper, published in Nature Astronomy, we’ve found out.

During February to June 2024, we carried out four surveys regarding the likely existence of basic, complex, and intelligent extraterrestrial life. We sent emails to astrobiologists (scientists who study extraterrestrial life), as well as to scientists in other areas, including biologists and physicists.

In total, 521 astrobiologists responded, and we received 534 non-astrobiologist responses. The results reveal that 86.6 percent of the surveyed astrobiologists responded either “agree” or “strongly agree” that it’s likely that extraterrestrial life (of at least a basic kind) exists somewhere in the universe.

Less than 2 percent disagreed, with 12 percent staying neutral. So, based on this, we might say that there’s a solid consensus that extraterrestrial life, of some form, exists somewhere out there.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/01/is-humanity-alone-in-the-universe-what-scientists-really-think/

A challenge facing alien hunters is discerning natural from artificial signals, but new research suggests we're better equipped than we thought.

George Dvorsky - 24 October 2023

An encouraging new study has found that the interference from exoplanets—planets that orbit stars outside our solar system—has been overestimated in searches for extraterrestrial signals.

The results from the study, released last week in The Astronomical Journal, mean that scientists can concentrate on finer frequency shifts, markedly improving the potential effectiveness of campaigns to sniff out alien technosignatures, namely radio signals.

https://gizmodo.com/alien-signals-exoplanets-space-seti-technology-1850953407

The generous gift will significantly advance the SETI Institute’s quest to detect intelligence beyond Earth.

George Dvorsky - 14 November 2023 11:10AM

The SETI Institute, a leading non-profit in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has received a transformative $200 million gift from the estate of Franklin Antonio, a long-time supporter who passed away last year.

The recent $200 million gift from Franklin Antonio’s estate, announced last week, will likely serve as a game-changer for the SETI Institute. Antonio was a big supporter of the Institute’s work for more than 12 years, and his donation is expected to further enable ongoing scientific efforts—while allowing for entirely new ones—in the search for intelligent life beyond our world.

Franklin Antonio was a co-founder and chief scientist of Qualcomm, a leading company in wireless telecommunications research and development. Antonio, a prolific inventor holding hundreds of patents, died on May 13, 2022, at the age of 67.

https://gizmodo.com/seti-institute-200-million-donation-antonio-qualcomm-1851020096

Civilizations detectable at galactic distances could harness all of a star's energy output, boffins say

Brandon Vigliarolo - Thu 29 Aug 2024 23:59 UTC

Looking for life in the Milky Way is so 20th century - today's alien-hunters are going intergalactic to look for signs of alien intelligence.

Radio astronomer Chenoa Tremblay of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute and astrophysicist Steven Tingay of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research did just that and published their findings this week. Their work, the pair wrote, is the “first low-frequency [between 98 and 128 MHz, in this case] extragalactic technosignature search.”

Spoiler alert: they didn't spot any signs of hyper-advanced alien civilization lurking in one of the 1,317 far, far, away galaxies they surveyed.

The pair didn’t search for ET with radio waves, because at intergalactic distances radio signals would be so faint as to be indistinguishable from background noise.

“We are not so much looking for communication in this case, like we are for things within our Galaxy, but for signs that advanced civilizations are manipulating their environments on a very large scale,” Tremblay told The Register in an emailed statement. “This is more focused on mega structures or large energy use devices which would require a connection of multiple stars or harnessing the energy of a single star.”

https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/seti_intergalactic_search_alien/

Posted by BeauHD on Saturday July 08, 2023 12:00AM

Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he may have found fragments of alien technology from a meteor that landed in the waters off of Papua, New Guinea in 2014. CBS News reports:

Loeb and his team just brought the materials back to Harvard for analysis. The U.S. Space Command confirmed with almost near certainty, 99.999%, that the material came from another solar system. The government gave Loeb a 10 km (6.2 mile) radius of where it may have landed. “That is where the fireball took place, and the government detected it from the Department of Defense. It's a very big area, the size of Boston, so we wanted to pin it down,” said Loeb. “We figured the distance of the fireball based off the time delay between the arrival of blast wave, the boom of explosion, and the light that arrived quickly.”

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/23/07/07/2144212/harvard-professor-believes-hes-found-fragments-of-alien-technology

Ex-UAP analyst reckons he was harassed for telling Congress

Brandon Vigliarolo - Wed 7 Jun 2023 19:30 UTC

A former US intelligence official turned whistleblower says the government has been secretly recovering what appear to be alien craft and technology for decades.

The reason David Charles Grusch is coming forward now, according to an interview with The Debrief, is that the multiple covert unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs aka UFOs) and their findings have been illegally withheld from Congress, and his attempts to hand the information over to elected officials resulted in retaliation.

The US government has been ramping up its investigations of UFO recordings for a while now, with the Pentagon admitting last year it had a list of more than 400 unexplained potential UAP encounters it was still investigating. Late in 2022 NASA stood up a 16-expert panel to investigate UFO sightings, with that group concluding only a few encounters defied explanations.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/07/us_alien_tech_/

A former intelligence officer allegedly leaked classified info to Congress, and now House Republicans are hoping to lead a hearing on the matter.

Kevin Hurler - 9 June 2023

Following unconfirmed claims from a former intelligence officer—who says the U.S. government captured a crashed spaceship of non-human origin—the House Oversight Committee is now planning a hearing to investigate the issue further.

According to ABC News, the committee is in the early stages of planning this meeting after the Pentagon called the whistleblower’s claims unsubstantiated. Republican Representatives Tim Burchett from Tennessee and Anna Paulina Luna from Florida will lead the investigation, as Luna confirmed on Twitter.

“In addition to recent claims by a whistleblower, reports continue to surface regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena,” an Oversight Committee spokesperson told ABC. “The House Oversight Committee is following these UAP reports and is in the early stages of planning a hearing.”

https://gizmodo.com/whistleblower-alleged-ufo-leak-piques-congress-curiosit-1850522802

Posted by BeauHD on Friday June 09, 2023 03:00AM

The House of Representatives in the United States plans to hold a hearing to investigate claims made by a whistleblower former intelligence official, David Grusch, that the US government possesses “intact and partially intact” alien vehicles. The Guardian reports:

“There will be oversight of that,” Comer told NewsNation. “We plan on having a hearing.” Comer said he had heard about Grusch's claims, but added: “I don't know anything about it.” The timing of the hearing is not yet determined, but a source familiar with the matter said a date is expected to be announced in the next few weeks. Tim Burchett and Anna Paulina Luna, Republican members of Congress from Florida and Tennessee, respectively, will lead the oversight committee investigation.

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/23/06/09/0313251/house-of-representatives-to-hold-hearing-on-whistleblowers-ufo-claims

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday June 11, 2023 07:34PM

A New York Times columnist considers alternate reasons for the upcoming House hearings with a whistleblower former intelligence official, David Grusch, who claims the US government possesses “intact and partially intact” alien vehicles:

This whistle-blower's mere existence is evidence of a fascinating shift in public U.F.O. discourse. There may not be alien spacecraft, but there is clearly now a faction within the national security complex that wants Americans to think there might be alien spacecraft, to give these stories credence rather than dismissal.

The evidence for this shift includes the military's newfound willingness to disclose weird atmospheric encounters. It includes the establishment of the task force that Grusch was assigned to… It also includes other examples of credentialed figures, like the Stanford pathology professor Garry Nolan, who claim they're being handed evidence of extraterrestrial contact. And it includes the range of strange stories being fed to writers willing to operate in the weird-science zone…

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/23/06/12/0048211/does-the-us-government-want-you-to-believe-in-ufos

Nomaan Merchant, AP - July 26, 2023 at 4:04 p.m. EDT

WASHINGTON — The U.S. is concealing a longstanding program that retrieves and reverse engineers unidentified flying objects, a former Air Force intelligence officer testified Wednesday to Congress. The Pentagon has denied his claims.

Retired Maj. David Grusch’s highly anticipated testimony before a House Oversight subcommittee was Congress’ latest foray into the world of UAPs — or “unidentified aerial phenomena,” which is the official term the U.S. government uses instead of UFOs. While the study of mysterious aircraft or objects often evokes talk of aliens and “little green men,” Democrats and Republicans in recent years have pushed for more research as a national security matter due to concerns that sightings observed by pilots may be tied to U.S. adversaries.

Grusch said he was asked in 2019 by the head of a government task force on UAPs to identify all highly classified programs relating to the task force’s mission. At the time, Grusch was detailed to the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that operates U.S. spy satellites.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/26/ufos-uaps-congress-whistleblower-spy-aliens/01081d9a-2bce-11ee-a948-a5b8a9b62d84_story.html

Men in Black snatched Little Green Men's spacecraft, allegedly

Katyanna Quach - Thu 27 Jul 2023 01:13 UTC

The US government has recovered alien spacecraft and bodies from crash landings on Earth, and is keeping the whole thing covered up, Congress was told on Wednesday.

Ryan Graves, a former F-18 pilot who served in the US Navy for over a decade, retired US Navy commander David Fravor, and David Grusch, an intelligence officer who worked in the US Air Force and at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, all swore they personally witnessed or have firsthand knowledge of extraordinary UFOs, or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) as they are now officially called.

At a hearing held by the US House Committee on Oversight and Accountability on Wednesday, the trio warned these UAPs presented a national security threat, and that the government is concealing important knowledge from lawmakers and the public.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/27/congress_ufo_hearings/

Despite the growing number of UFO/UAP whistleblowers, leaders the military and intelligence community are fighting greater disclosure

Michael Shellenberger, Andrew Mohar, and Phoebe Smith - Sep 25, 2023

In August, shortly after US government UFO whistleblower David Grusch gave testimony to Congress about crashed spacecraft and alien “biologics,” many observers wondered how much credence to put in his testimony. After all, Grusch is just a single individual. The other two individuals who testified before Congress were former Navy pilots who said they had no evidence of a government program to retrieve and reverse-engineer spacecraft of exotic and apparently nonhuman origin.

But at least 30 other whistleblowers working for the federal government or government contractors have given testimony, or a “protected disclosure,” to the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General (IC IG), the Defense Department Inspector General (DOD IG), or to Congress over the last several months, according to multiple sources interviewed by Public.

When told that whistleblowers had come forward to share information similar to that shared by Grusch with Congress, Mick West, a prominent skeptic of UFOs, said, “It'd be very interesting. You know, more people saying the same thing independently makes it more likely to be true.”

https://public.substack.com/p/dozens-of-government-ufo-whistleblowers

Posted by msmash on Friday February 14, 2020 01:25PM

Newly leaked documents show that the Department of Defense funded a study concerning UFOs, contradicting recent statements by the Pentagon. From a report:

In 2017, The New York Times revealed the existence of $22 million dollar UFO investigation program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. A twist came two months ago, however, when Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough told John Greenewald – curator of the Black Vault, the largest civilian archive of declassified government documents – that AATIP had nothing to do with UFOs. Greenewald also wrote that the Pentagon told him that another program, the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program or AAWSAP, was the name of the contract that the government gave out to produce reports under AATIP. In a new Popular Mechanics article, journalist Tim McMillan acquired documents from Bigelow Aerospace's exotic science division, Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, or BAASS, indicating that the organization did explore strange phenomena under the auspices of the AATIP program.

One BAASS report, leaked to McMillan by an unnamed source, previously appeared on a list of products produced under the AATIP contract “for DIA to publish” that was obtained via FOIA laws. The report was cited incorrectly on that list, but Popular Mechanics tracked down its author, who confirmed its authenticity. The report investigated “exotic” propulsion via injuries sustained by people who experienced “exposure to anomalous vehicles.” The text mentions UFOs several times. “What can not be overly emphasized, is that when one looks at the literature of anomalous cases, including UFO claims from the most reliable sources, the extent and degree of acute high but not necessarily chronic low-level injuries are consistent across patients who are injured, compared to witnesses in the far-field, who are not,” the report states. Notably, the report's author – Christopher “Kit” Green – told Popular Mechanics that he was not contracted by BAASS except to produce this report and that it provides zero evidence for extraterrestrial or non-human technologies.

Further reading: Navy Confirms It Has a Secret Classified Video of an Infamous UFO Incident, Says Releasing It Would Threaten National Security.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/02/14/1925208/inside-the-pentagons-secret-ufo-program

By Tim McMillan - Feb 14, 2020

The government can’t keep its story straight about its involvement with UFO research. After a yearlong investigation, we bust open the files, break through the noise, and reveal the definitive, staggering truth.

As I sit in a small cafe in the shadow of the ancient Roman gates in Trier, Germany, talking to a person whose credibility seems beyond reproach, but who will only agree to talk to me if provide absolute assurances of anonymity, I can’t help but feel like I’m trapped in a Dan Brown novel. The Da Vinci Code, however, never dealt with unidentified flying objects.

“Was it about UFOs? Of course,” this person whispers with a grin of melodrama.

After almost a year of investigating the U.S. government’s interest in UFOs, what they’ve just said should neither be shocking, nor revelatory. Unbeknownst to them, they’ve only further confirmed what over a dozen other people with backgrounds inside the government and the now-defunct Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) have already admitted to me.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a30916275/government-secret-ufo-program-investigation/

Bombshell: The government’s once-clandestine UFO program will reveal findings on unexplained materials and crashes.

By Andrew Daniels - Jul 26, 2020

Update 7/26: We've updated this story to include official comments provided by the Pentagon to Popular Mechanics, as well as a clarification of Senator Harry Reid's original comments in the New York Times report.

For years, the U.S. government has repeatedly changed its tune regarding its official involvement with UFO research.

As recently as February, a Pentagon spokesperson told Popular Mechanics that, while a government program did investigate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and other unexplained aerial phenomena for some time last decade, funding dried up in 2012. But when Popular Mechanics thoroughly investigated the covert program, multiple sources said it’s still ongoing to this day.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a33413777/pentagon-ufo-program-materials-vehicles/

Posted by BeauHD on Saturday July 25, 2020 12:00AM

According to The New York Times, a secretive task force called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force is expected to release new and alarming findings that may involve vehicles made of materials not of this plant. From the report:

Despite Pentagon statements that it disbanded a once-covert program to investigate unidentified flying objects, the effort remains underway – renamed and tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence, where officials continue to study mystifying encounters between military pilots and unidentified aerial vehicles. Pentagon officials will not discuss the program, which is not classified but deals with classified matters. Yet it appeared last month in a Senate committee report outlining spending on the nation's intelligence agencies for the coming year. The report said the program, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, was “to standardize collection and reporting” on sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles, and was to report at least some of its findings to the public every six months. While retired officials involved with the effort – including Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader – hope the program will seek evidence of vehicles from other worlds, its main focus is on discovering whether another nation, especially any potential adversary, is using breakout aviation technology that could threaten the United States.

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/20/07/24/2213215/pentagons-ufo-unit-will-make-some-findings-public

When it comes to cases involving unidentified flying objects, few are as well documented or involve as many people as what occurred at Loring in 1975.

By Brett Tingley - August 27, 2020

Despite the newfound attention the topic of unexplained incursions into airspace over sensitive locales across the United States is receiving, these types of bizarre incidents are not necessarily new. One of the most puzzling accounts of such an event, or series of events, occurred during the depths of the Cold War.

Over a series of nights in 1975, Loring Air Force Base in Maine was invaded by mysterious craft originating from Canadian airspace. At the time, the base was home to B-52 bombers and KC-135 tankers and was tasked with the nuclear alert mission. The Loring AFB incidents are extremely well documented, both in terms of personal testimonials and declassified CIA and National Military Command Center (NMCC) documents. What also made the events so interesting was just how many people were involved or knew about the potential threat and the reaction to it. It was truly a community-scale ordeal that even made its way into the national press. Considering we are talking about a base that housed nuclear weapons and a delivery system for those weapons, the bombers and tankers they rely on, the concern regarding the strange incursions was extreme, to say the least.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/35674/the-bizarre-mystery-of-unexplained-aerial-incursions-over-loring-air-force-base

Ed Mazza, Overnight Editor, HuffPost - October 12, 2020

Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the U.S. government has been hiding key details about UFOs for years.

“Why the federal government all these years has covered up, put brake pads on everything, stopped it, I think it’s very, very bad for our country,” Reid said in the new documentary “The Phenomenon” from director James Fox.

“Are you saying that there’s some evidence that still hasn’t seen the light of day?” asked Fox.

“I’m saying most of it hasn’t seen the light of day,” Reid replied.

https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/harry-reid-ufo-coverup-090047705.html

‘It was going from like 50,000 feet to 100 feet in like seconds, which is not possible’

Colin Drury - Friday 20 December 2019 11:34

A US fighter pilot whose plane filmed the famous – and still unexplained – “tic tac” UFO footage has spoken for the first time about his close encounter.

Chad Underwood broke 15 years of silence on the subject, describing the object he recorded over the Pacific Ocean as “not behaving within the normal laws of physics”.

He said: “It was going from like 50,000 feet to 100 feet in like seconds, which is not possible.”

The tic tac – so-called because of its rounded shape and white colour – was caught on video as the US Navy attempted to identify a series of objects spotted on radar flying off America’s west coast in November 2004.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/ufo-tic-tac-flying-saucer-chad-underwoord-dave-fravor-a9254671.html

The more we learn about the bizarre inventions Dr. Salvatore Pais patented on behalf of the Navy, the more questions we have.

By Brett Tingley - December 16, 2020

The War Zone continues to dig into the bizarre U.S. Navy patents authored by enigmatic inventor Dr. Salvatore Pais and the seemingly unusual circumstances of their approval by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As part of our investigation, we recently obtained a tranche of internal emails from Naval Air Systems Command, or NAVAIR, which appear to have been sent between Pais and personnel in different NAVAIR offices. While the Navy's exotic energy production patents remain as mysterious as ever, these emails add to the backstory surrounding the inventions of Salvatore Pais and suggest that the patents went through a more rigorous internal evaluation process than was previously known. The emails also seem to indicate that the research program that emanated from the patents did in fact result in an experimental demonstration of some sort.

Last year, the publication of several unusual patents assigned to the U.S. Navy raised eyebrows due to the seemingly radical and unconventional claims found within them. These patents included bizarre technologies such as a “high temperature superconductor,” a “high frequency gravitational wave generator,” a force field-like “electromagnetic field generator,” a “plasma compression fusion device,” and a hybrid aerospace/underwater craft featuring an “inertial mass reduction device.” They truly sound like the stuff of science fiction and seem to describe the theoretical building blocks of a craft with UFO-like performance.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37134/emails-show-navys-ufo-patents-went-through-significant-internal-review-resulted-in-a-demo

4 Jan 2021 - Military.com | By Oriana Pawlyk

As part of the newly passed COVID-19 relief legislation, lawmakers are demanding answers from U.S. intelligence agencies and the Defense Department on the potential existence of UFOs and other unidentified aerial phenomena.

The $2.3 trillion omnibus appropriations legislation passed last month includes the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal 2021, which provides more resources toward investigation gathering and “strengthening open source intelligence” collection among the agencies, according to a release from Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who introduced the bill in June. The Senate passed the legislation in July.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/01/04/pentagon-has-6-months-disclose-what-it-knows-about-ufos.html

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN - Updated 1826 GMT (0226 HKT) January 10, 2021

(CNN)When President Donald Trump signed the $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief and government funding bill into law in December, so began the 180-day countdown for US intelligence agencies to tell Congress what they know about UFOs.

No, really.

The director of National Intelligence and the secretary of defense have a little less than six months now to provide the congressional intelligence and armed services committees with an unclassified report about “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

It's a stipulation that was tucked into the “committee comment” section of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, which was contained in the massive spending bill.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/10/us/ufo-report-emergency-relief-bill-trnd/index.html

By John Greenewald on January 7, 2021

Below you will find a collection of CIA related UFO records. The Black Vault’s connection to the CIA in getting some of these UFO documents released goes back to 1996.

Originally, the CIA would only release about 1,000 pages that had been previously disclosed after a FOIA court case in the 1980s. They never addressed the records that were dated in the years after the case.

The Black Vault spent years fighting for them, and many were released in the late 1990s. However, over time, the CIA made a CD-ROM collection of UFO documents, which encompassed the original records, along with the ones that took years to fight for.

https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/ufos-the-central-intelligence-agency-cia-collection/

NSA

The documents listed on this page were located in response to the numerous requests received by NSA on the subject of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO). In 1980, NSA was involved in Civil Action No. 80-1562, “Citizens Against Unidentified Flying Objects Secrecy v. National Security Agency”. Documents related to that litigation are marked with “*”. “XXXXX” has been inserted in a title if a portion of the title has been deleted prior to release. To select a document click on the document title, and wait for the PDF version to be downloaded to your local viewer. Approximate file sizes are given after each selection for user convenience.

https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/ufo/

Is that The X-Files theme we hear?

Richard Currie - Wed 13 Jan 2021 / 12:30 UTC

Everyone needs a hobby, and for one John Greenewald Jr that's archiving declassified US government documents on his website, The Black Vault, which has this week published what the CIA claims is everything it has on UFOs.

Though Greenewald is quick to point out there's no way of verifying that assertion, the collection is exhaustive with 2,780 hand-scanned pages of sighting reports, anecdotes, and musings from all over the world in wildly varying levels of detail and quality.

Introducing the data dump, Greenewald said that the battle to get his mitts on the documents dates back to 1996.

“Originally, the CIA would only release about 1,000 pages that had been previously disclosed after a [Freedom of Information Act] court case in the 1980s. They never addressed the records that were dated in the years after the case,” he wrote.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/13/ufo_records_declassified/

The Navy spent three years and considerable sums of money testing the “Pais Effect” and may have transferred the program to another agency.

By Brett Tingley - January 26, 2021

In our continuing investigation into the bizarre inventions of Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais, an enigmatic aerospace engineer who works for the U.S. Navy, The War Zone has just obtained a wide range of documents detailing experiments that the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD) conducted to test the core concepts and technologies underlying his seemingly out of this world “UFO patents.” These same patents were vouched for by the head of the Navy's aerospace research enterprise who cited Chinese advances in similar technologies as one of the reasons why the Navy was filing them.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/38937/navy-ufo-patent-documents-talk-of-spacetime-modification-weapon-detail-experimental-testing

The Naval Air Warfare Center has finally given a statement to The War Zone about the patents and experiments of Dr. Salvatore Pais.

By Brett Tingley - February 1, 2021

After reporting on the bizarre saga of the Navy's “UFO” patents by Dr. Salvatore Pais for over a year and a half, The War Zone has finally gotten an on-the-record comment from the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division, or NAWCAD, about the scientist's seemingly out-of-this-world work and the service's equally strange outright support of it.

As we reported in our last piece, the science and technology branches of the Naval Aviation Enterprise and NAWCAD took the theories of Dr. Pais seriously enough not just to vouch for them at the highest levels to patent examiners, asserting Chinese advances in similar areas of research and that they were 'operable' in nature, but to also subsequently invest a significant amount of money and time into researching the so-called “Pais Effect.” This is a theoretical concept for generating high-intensity electromagnetic fields that could supposedly lead to hypothetical breakthroughs in power generation and advanced propulsion. Specifically, the Navy has now responded to inquiries related to the new documentation we uncovered in our most recent report that shows hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on Pais's High Energy Electromagnetic Field Generator (HEEMFG) experiments, along with other details related to it.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39012/the-navy-finally-speaks-up-about-its-bizarre-ufo-patent-experiments

Jennings Brown - 12/19/19 11:30AM

In 2004, Navy Pilot Chad Underwood was on a flight-training exercise near the California coast when he spotted and filmed an unidentified flying object with an infrared gun-camera pod. The video of the 40-foot-long oblong mass traveling about 138 miles per hour—now known as the “Tic Tac”—was released in a 2017 New York Times report about the Pentagon’s UFO research program, reigniting public fascination with mysteries in the skies.

On Wednesday, New York magazine published the first interview with Underwood, who spotted the strange object after his then-commanding officer Dave Fravor told him he had seen something on his earlier flight, and after the USS Princeton had captured something on its radar.

https://gizmodo.com/navy-pilot-who-filmed-ufo-describes-moment-it-stopped-b-1840532119

US military pilots and satellites have recorded ‘a lot more’ UFO sightings than have been made public, John Ratcliffe says

Tom McCarthy - Mon 22 Mar 2021 09.43 EDT

US military pilots and satellites have recorded “a lot more” sightings of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, than have been made public, Donald Trump’s former intelligence director John Ratcliffe said.

Asked on Fox News about a forthcoming government report on “unidentified aerial phenomena”, Ratcliffe said the report would document previously unknown sightings from “all over the world”.

“Frankly, there are a lot more sightings than have been made public,” he said.

“Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have been seen by navy or air force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don’t have the technology for.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/22/us-government-ufo-report-sightings

Tom McKay - 4 May 2021 6:30PM

The military UFO plot has, somehow, thickened yet again: The Inspector General of the Department of Defense is itself investigating the Pentagon’s program to investigate reports of unidentified aerial phenomena.

The top investigatory and oversight watchdog at the Pentagon announced the “subject evaluation” in a light-on-details letter that clarified its scope is to “determine the extent to which the DoD has taken actions regarding Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP).” The letter also stated that the Inspector General plans to perform the evaluation at the “Offices of the Secretary of Defense, Military Services, Combatant Commands, Combat Support Agencies, Defense Agencies, and the Military Criminal Investigative Organizations,” as well as others that may turn up during the investigation. The investigation is slated for May 2021, meaning it has either already begun or will soon.

https://gizmodo.com/the-pentagons-inspector-general-is-investigating-the-pe-1846824002

Robin Hanson - May 5, 2021 3:15 pm

Sometimes I pride myself on my taking an intellectual strategy of tackling neglected important questions. However, one indicator of a topic being neglected is that it seems low status; people who discuss it are ridiculed, and their intellectual ability doubted. Thus my strategy risks lowering my status.

To protect against this risk, I can set a policy of only tackling topics that seem to have a substantial synergy with my skills and prior topics. Which seems a valid policy, even if not entirely honest. For a long time this protected me against UFOs as aliens, one of the most ridiculed topics ever. But then I started to study loud very distant aliens, and the topic of alien UFOs became more relevant.

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/05/ufos-say-govt-competence-is-either-surprisingly-high-or-surprisingly-low.html

Bill Whitaker reports on the regular sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, that have spurred a report due to Congress next month.

2021 May 16 - Correspondent Bill Whitaker

We have tackled many strange stories on 60 Minutes, but perhaps none like this. It's the story of the U.S. government's grudging acknowledgment of unidentified aerial phenomena— UAP—more commonly known as UFOs. After decades of public denial the Pentagon now admits there's something out there, and the U.S. Senate wants to know what it is. The intelligence committee has ordered the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense to deliver a report on the mysterious sightings by next month.

Bill Whitaker: So what you are telling me is that UFOs, unidentified flying objects, are real?

Lue Elizondo: Bill, I think we're beyond that already. The government has already stated for the record that they're real. I'm not telling you that. The United States government is telling you that.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-military-intelligence-60-minutes-2021-05-16/

Andrew Follett - May 21, 2021 6:30 AM

The videos disclosed so far all have obvious potential terrestrial explanations.

Political figures ranging from Barack Obama to Tucker Carlson all seem to think UFOs may pose a serious threat to national security, but likely explanations for recent UFO sightings are far less out-of-this-world.

A remarkable number of news outlets are running stories about the expected release of the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force report to the Senate next month. A recent 60 Minutes piece claimed UFOs were spotted in restricted U.S. airspace “every day for at least a couple years.”

When asked about UFOs on CBS’s The Late Late Show on Monday, former president Barack Obama admitted he had looked into the subject while in office. “We can’t explain how [UFOs] move, their trajectory,” he claimed. “They did not have an easily explainable pattern.” Democrats are modestly more likely than Republicans to believe in UFOs, but belief in them is a bipartisan phenomenon.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/calm-down-everyone-the-ufos-arent-aliens/

Posted by msmash on Friday May 28, 2021 11:46AM

The Canadian astronaut, who commanded the International Space Station and recorded the famous microgravity rendition of David Bowie's Space Oddity, on Sunday spit some fire at true believers who see a link between UFOs or UAPs (for “unidentified aerial phenomena” in the newish military parlance) and some sort of alien intelligence. From a report:

“Obviously, I've seen countless things in the sky that I don't understand,” Chris Hadfield, a former pilot for the Royal Canadian Air Force, said during a CBC Radio call-in show.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/21/05/28/1837240/astronaut-chris-hadfield-calls-alien-ufo-hype-foolishness

The vast majority of examined incidents were not caused by U.S. advanced technology programs, the forthcoming report concludes. So what’s going on?

Leonard David on June 8, 2021

For more than a decade, the U.S. Department of Defense has been quietly cataloging and investigating scores of bizarre encounters—most from the U.S. Navy—of ships and fighter jets tangling with, or being tailgated by, unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Beginning in 2017, videos and eyewitness accounts of these weird sightings found their way into public view, ultimately spurring Congress to demand that the Pentagon produce a report summarizing all that the U.S. government knows about so-called unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP (an alternate term with considerably less stigma than the much maligned “UFOs”).

Produced under the auspices of a Pentagon group called the UAP Task Force, an unclassified version of the report is expected to be released later this month. Upon establishing the task force, the DOD released an accompanying statement explaining the justifications for its existence: “The safety of our personnel and the security of our operations are of paramount concern. The Department of Defense and the military departments take any incursions by unauthorized aircraft into our training ranges or designated airspace very seriously and examine each report. This includes examinations of incursions that are initially reported as UAP when the observer cannot immediately identify what he or she is observing.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-weigh-in-on-pentagon-ufo-report/

If some UAP turn out to be extraterrestrial technology, they could be dropping sensors for a subsequent craft to tune into. What if ‘Oumuamua is such a craft?

Avi Loeb - June 22, 2021

A colleague of mine once noted that every morning there is a long line of customers stretching out from a famous Parisian bakery into the street. “I wish someone would wait for my scientific papers with as much anticipation as Parisians eagerly stand by for their baguettes,” he said.

There is one exception to this wish, however. It involves fresh scientific evidence that we are not be the only intelligent species in the cosmos.

Recently, there have been two sources for such evidence.

First, the interstellar object discovered in 2017, ‘Oumuamua, was inferred to have a flat shape and seemed to be pushed away from the sun as if it were a lightsail. This “pancake” was tumbling once every eight hours and originated from the rare state of the local standard of rest—which averages over the motions of all the stars in the vicinity of the sun.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-possible-link-between-oumuamua-and-unidentified-aerial-phenomena/

Steve Gorman, Pavithra George, Will Dunham - June 24, 2021 5:52 PM PDT

WASHINGTON, June 24 (Reuters) - The U.S. government, once openly dismissive of UFO sightings that for decades sparked the popular imagination, is poised to issue an expansive account of what it calls “unidentified aerial phenomena,” based heavily on observations by American military pilots.

The U.S. intelligence community, in conjunction with the Pentagon, is due in the coming days to submit a report to Congress on the subject. The Pentagon in recent years has released or confirmed the authenticity of video from naval aviators showing enigmatic aircraft exhibiting speed and maneuverability exceeding known aviation technologies.

In the lead-up to its forthcoming report, Defense Department officials have made clear they take the issue seriously while sidestepping questions about any potential extraterrestrial origins. The report marks a turning point for the U.S. military after decades of deflecting, debunking and discrediting observations of unidentified flying objects and “flying saucers.”

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-government-prepares-issue-landmark-report-ufos-2021-06-24/

By Shane Harris and Missy Ryan - June 25, 2021 at 2:34 p.m. PDT

The U.S. government was unable to determine whether more than 140 unidentified flying objects, many of them reported by Navy aviators, were atmospheric events playing tricks on sensors or crafts piloted by foreign adversaries, or whether the objects were extraterrestrial in origin, according to a long-anticipated report released Friday by the nation’s top intelligence official.

The report finds no evidence that the objects, characterized as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, were the handiwork of alien beings. But in almost all of the 144 cases that a team of government experts examined, a lack of data stymied their efforts to say definitively what they were.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/ufo-report/2021/06/25/ba323b20-d52c-11eb-ae54-515e2f63d37d_story.html

US Governement - 25 June 2021 13:00

https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/press-releases-2021/item/2223-UAP

In June 2020, the existence of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force was confirmed, and now we know what it's been up to… kinda.

Rhett Jones - 6/25/21 4:54PM

The truth is finally out here. On Friday, the Pentagon released its highly anticipated report summarizing previously classified information about the military’s research into UFOs—or as it prefers to call them, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). What bombshell revelations does the report contain? Well, it’s only nine pages long, so you should just read it.

Last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed the existence of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, a division of the Office of Naval Intelligence that’s tasked with standardizing the “collection and reporting on unidentified aerial phenomenon, any links they have to adversarial foreign governments, and the threat they pose to U.S. military assets and installations.”

https://gizmodo.com/read-the-pentagons-big-declassified-ufo-report-right-he-1847175792

Posted by BeauHD on Wednesday March 23, 2022 08:30PM

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard:

Last June, the Department of Defense released a long-awaited and much-hyped document called “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” detailing the government's knowledge of UFOs and its programs trying to detect and catalog them. Many UFOlogists hoped that the “UFO report” would be a watershed moment in the field, showing that the government was taking UFOs seriously and, perhaps, explaining what the government thought they were. Unfortunately, the nine-page report was pretty underwhelming; for the most part it revealed things we already knew, and read primarily like a plea from the DoD for more funding. Tantalizingly, we were told that members of Congress received a classified briefing with more information that would likely never be released to the public.

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/22/03/23/2112255/activist-publishes-redacted-version-of-classified-military-ufo-report

1,500 pages of UFO related research were just declassified as part of a FOIA request.

Brandon Specktor - 5 April 2022

Encounters with UFOs have reportedly left Americans suffering from radiation burns, brain and nervous system damage, and even “unaccounted for pregnancy,” according to a massive database of U.S. government reports recently made public through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

The database of documents includes more than 1,500 pages of UFO-related material from the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) — a secretive U.S Department of Defense program that ran from 2007 to 2012. Despite never being classified as secret or top secret, the AATIP only became known to the public in 2017, when former program director Luis Elizondo resigned from the Pentagon and released several now-infamous videos of an unidentified aircraft moving in seemingly impossible ways to the media.

Shortly after the AATIP's existence was revealed, the U.S. outpost of the British Tabloid The Sun filed a FOIA request for any and all documents related to the program. Four years later — on April 5, 2022 — the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) honored the request by releasing more 1,574 pages of material to The Sun.

https://www.livescience.com/ufo-report-human-biological-injuries

The Air Force offered the pilot's widow conflicting explanations.

Darryn King - Jan 7, 2020

The night an Air Force jet mysteriously disappeared over Lake Superior—November 23, 1953—was a stormy one.

Near the U.S.-Canadian border, U.S. Air Defense Command noticed a blip on the radar where it shouldn’t have been: an unidentified object in restricted air space over Lake Superior, not far from Soo Locks, the Great Lakes’ most vital commercial gateway. An F-89C Scorpion jet, from Truax Air Force Base in Madison, Wisconsin, took off from nearby Kinross AFB to investigate, with two crew members on board. First Lieutenant Felix Moncla—who had clocked 811 flying hours, including 121 in a similar aircraft—took the pilot’s seat, while Second Lieutenant Robert Wilson was observing radar.

The men would not return from their intercept mission.

https://www.history.com/news/ufo-fighter-jet-disappears-over-lake-superior-kinross-incident

Posted by msmash on Tuesday May 10, 2022 07:02AM

A House subcommittee is scheduled to hold next week the first open congressional hearing on unidentified aerial vehicles in more than half a century, with testimony from two top defense intelligence officials. From a report:

The hearing comes after the release last June of a report requested by Congress on “unidentified aerial phenomena.” The nine-page “Preliminary Assessment” from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence focused on 144 incidents dating back to 2004 and was able to explain only one. The report declined to draw inferences, saying that the available reporting was “largely inconclusive” and noting that limited and inconsistent data created a challenge in evaluating the phenomena. But it said most of the phenomena reported “do represent physical objects.” The assessment concluded that the objects were not secret U.S. technology and that “we currently lack data to indicate any UAP are part of a foreign collection program or indicative of a major technological advancement by a potential adversary.”

https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/05/10/141239/house-panel-to-hold-public-hearing-on-unexplained-aerial-sightings

The hearing comes after the Pentagon report on unidentified aerial phenomena was released last June.

Passant Rabie - 10 May 2022

UFO sightings are no longer restricted to grainy YouTube videos or alien conspiracy subreddits. A House panel will hold the first congressional hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) in over 50 years to follow up with a Pentagon report that was released last June on U.S. military sightings of unidentifiable flying vehicles.

The hearing, scheduled for May 17, will be held by the House Intelligence Committee’s subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation and will include the testimony of two top defense intelligence officials, the New York Times reports.

https://gizmodo.com/ufos-alien-conspiracy-unidentified-aerial-phenomena-1848905326

'We're open to all hypotheses, we're open to any conclusions' says official

Thomas Claburn - Tue 17 May 2022 21:07 UTC

A US House of Representatives subcommittee on Tuesday heard from Pentagon officials on reports of and investigations into unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) – a category that encompasses unidentified flying objects (UFO) and saves room for optical illusions, lens flare, smudges in photos, and other possibilities like meteorological events.

The US military has researched UFOs in the past through initiatives like Project Blue Book (1947-1969), and the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) (2007-2012).

Following a New York Times report in 2017 about the shutdown of the classified $22m AATIP program, public pressure and Congressional interest led the Office of the Director of National Intelligence last June to release a preliminary report on UAP [PDF] dating back to 2004.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/17/us_house_ufa/

Taylor Hatmaker - 4:23 PM PDT May 17, 2022

An unusual hearing in Congress posed unusual questions to government officials Tuesday, marking the first congressional hearing on UFOs — now called UAPs or “unidentified aerial phenomena” — in half a century.

The House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation held the question and answer session, hosting two Pentagon officials in a rare public discussion of one of the most controversial, conspiracy-prone subjects that intersects with the federal government.

“UAPs are unexplained; it’s true,” Indiana representative Andre Carson, the subcommittee’s chair, observed in his opening remarks. “But they are real. They need to be investigated, and many threats they pose need to be mitigated.”

https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/17/ufo-uap-hearing-pentagon/

Posted by msmash on Tuesday May 17, 2022 11:15AM Two senior U.S. defense intelligence officials said on Tuesday the Pentagon is committed to determining the origins of what it calls “unidentified aerial phenomena” – commonly termed UFOs – but acknowledged many remain beyond the government's ability to explain. From a report:

The two officials, Ronald Moultrie and Scott Bray, appeared before a House of Representatives intelligence subcommittee for the first public U.S. congressional hearing on the subject in a half century. It came 11 months after a government report documented more than 140 cases of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, that U.S. military pilots had observed since 2004. Bray, deputy director of naval intelligence, said the number of UAPs officially cataloged by a newly formed Pentagon task force has grown to 400 cases. Both officials chose their words carefully in describing the task force's work, including the question of possible extraterrestrial origins, which Bray said defense and intelligence analysts had not ruled out. Bray did say that “we have no material, we have detected no emanations, within the UAP task force that would suggest it is anything non-terrestrial in origin.”

https://science.slashdot.org/story/22/05/17/1815237/us-officials-say-pentagon-committed-to-understanding-ufo-origins

The government has vowed to bring the conversation around odd aircraft to light after several videos captured by Navy pilots leaked online.

Passant Rabie - 17 May 2022 1:50PM

Since the release of a Pentagon report on unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) last year, the number of reports by Navy pilots of mysterious, odd aircraft sightings has grown to approximately 400, top Pentagon officials revealed at the first public hearing on UAP held in nearly 50 years.

The hearing was held on Tuesday, and the two officials testified before a House subcommittee regarding the work that is currently being done to investigate U.S. military sightings of unidentifiable flying objects. UAPs are more commonly referred to as UFOs, and typically involve a flying object that maneuvers in ways that seemingly defy the laws of physics. As a result, sightings of these aircraft have largely been categorized as alien conspiracy or science-fiction. However, the government has vowed to bring the conversation around UAPs to light after several videos captured by Navy pilots leaked online.

https://gizmodo.com/ufo-uap-unidentified-objects-aliens-hearing-1848936948

Posted by msmash on Thursday June 09, 2022 11:09AM

NASA is putting a team together to study unidentified aerial phenomena, popularly known as UFOs, the US space agency said Thursday. From a report:

The team will gather data on “events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena – from a scientific perspective,” the agency said. NASA said it was interested in UAPs from a security and safety perspective. There was no evidence UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin, NASA added. The study is expected to take nine months. “NASA believes that the tools of scientific discovery are powerful and apply here also,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. “We have access to a broad range of observations of Earth from space – and that is the lifeblood of scientific inquiry. We have the tools and team who can help us improve our understanding of the unknown. That's the very definition of what science is. That's what we do.”

https://science.slashdot.org/story/22/06/09/189218/nasa-creates-team-to-study-ufos

The space agency’s announcement comes on the heels of some inconclusive UFO hearings before Congress.

Isaac Schultz - 9 June 2022

NASA will commission a team of scientists to begin investigating unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) this fall, the agency announced today.

UAPs are simply unidentified flying objects (UFOs) with less of a little-green-alien connotation about them. And that’s reasonable, because things labeled UFOs may not be flying objects at all, but instead optical illusions, image artifacts, or something else. Whatever UAPs are, they’ve been in the news lately, as U.S. House Intelligence Committee held several hearings about the phenomena that failed to reach any concrete conclusions. The hearings resurfaced some of the rare (but spell-binding) videos of UAPs, which were declassified by the Pentagon over the last few years, as well as some previously unreleased footage.

https://gizmodo.com/nasa-study-ufos-unidentified-aerial-phenomena-1849041509

Stefanie Waldek - 4:19 PM PDT•June 9, 2022

NASA has announced the formation of a study team dedicated to UFOs—or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), as they’ve been rebranded to shed some of their tin-foil-hat stigma. But don’t expect some sort of “X-Files” team seeking to prove the existence of extraterrestrials.

Starting this fall, the study will have researchers identify what UAP data already exists, determine how best to collect UAP data moving forward, and develop methods to study the nature of UAPs, for both scientific and aerospace defense reasons. The team will be led by astrophysicist David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation in New York City, alongside Daniel Evans, the assistant deputy associate administrator for research at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/09/nasa-assembles-a-ufo-research-team-to-study-unidentified-aerial-phenomena/

Critics dumbfounded by reality TV star Travis Taylor's position as “chief scientist”

29 Jun 2022 5:00 PM - Keith Kloor

When the U.S. government released a much-anticipated report on UFOs a year ago, many were perplexed that it couldn’t explain 143 of the 144 sightings it examined. (In the single closed case, the report concluded the mystery object was a large, deflating balloon.) “Where are the aliens?” cracked one headline.

The truth was still out there. So was any sense of who had conducted the analysis, because the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which released the study, provided no details about who had investigated the cases. Last week, however, a former Department of Defense (DOD) astrophysicist and reality TV personality named Travis Taylor asserted that he was the ‘chief scientist’ for the congressionally mandated study.

https://www.science.org/content/article/pentagon-ufo-study-led-researcher-who-believes-supernatural#.YsBXmQjyu2A.twitter

io9 debuts the trailer for filmmaker James Fox's latest, which visits Brazil to learn more about an alleged alien encounter.

Cheryl Eddy - 3 August 2022 11:00AM

Two years ago, io9 premiered the trailer for The Phenomenon, a UFO documentary built around the “unavoidable fact” that aliens are real. Now filmmaker James Fox is back with a follow-up that explores that anti-skeptical thesis through a more international lens, delving into “the Roswell of Brazil.” It’s called Moment of Contact, and io9 is once again excited to premiere the trailer.

https://gizmodo.com/ufo-aliens-documentary-moment-of-contact-trailer-debut-1849360069

Julian E. Barnes - Fri, October 28, 2022 at 5:44 AM

WASHINGTON — Government officials believe that surveillance operations by foreign powers and weather balloons or other airborne clutter explain most recent incidents of unidentified aerial phenomenon — government-speak for UFOs — as well as many episodes in past years.

The sightings have puzzled the Pentagon and intelligence agencies for years, fueling theories about visiting space aliens and spying by a hostile nation using advanced technology. But government officials say many of the incidents have far more ordinary explanations.

Intelligence agencies are set to deliver a classified document to Congress by Monday updating a report made public last year that said nearly all of the incidents remain unexplained. The original document looked at 144 incidents between 2004 and 2021 that were reported by U.S. government sources, mostly American military personnel.

https://news.yahoo.com/many-military-ufo-reports-just-124417602.html

Posted by msmash on Friday October 28, 2022 07:52AM

Government officials believe that surveillance operations by foreign powers and weather balloons or other airborne clutter explain most recent incidents of unidentified aerial phenomenon – government-speak for U.F.O.s – as well as many episodes in past years. From a report:

The sightings have puzzled the Pentagon and intelligence agencies for years, fueling theories about visiting space aliens and spying by a hostile nation using advanced technology. But government officials say many of the incidents have far more ordinary explanations. Intelligence agencies are set to deliver a classified document to Congress by Monday updating a report made public last year that said nearly all of the incidents remain unexplained. The original document looked at 144 incidents between 2004 and 2021 that were reported by U.S. government sources, mostly American military personnel.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/10/28/1453212/many-military-ufo-reports-are-just-foreign-spying-or-airborne-trash

Ryan Graves, Opinion Contributor - 02/05/23 8:00 AM ET

As a former U.S. Navy F/A-18 fighter pilot who witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) on a regular basis, let me be clear. The U.S. government, former presidents, members of Congress of both political parties and directors of national intelligence are trying to tell the American public the same uncomfortable truth I shared: Objects demonstrating extreme capabilities routinely fly over our military facilities and training ranges. We don’t know what they are, and we are unable to mitigate their presence.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) last week published its second ever report on UAP activity. While the unclassified version is brief, its findings are sobering. Over the past year, the government has collected hundreds of new reports of enigmatic objects from military pilots and sensor systems that cannot be identified and “represent a hazard to flight safety.” The report also preserves last year’s review of the 26-year reporting period that some UAP may represent advanced technology, noting “unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3843075-as-a-us-navy-fighter-pilot-i-witnessed-unidentified-anomalous-phenomena-uap-congress-must-reveal-the-truth-to-the-american-people/

Posted by BeauHD on Monday February 06, 2023 07:30PM

Ryan Graves, former Lt. U.S. Navy and F/A-18F pilot who was the first active-duty fighter pilot to come forward publicly about regular sightings of UAP, says more data is needed about unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). “We should encourage pilots and other witnesses to come forward and keep the pressure on Congress to prioritize UAP as a matter of national security,” writes Graves in an opinion piece for The Hill. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from his report:

As a former U.S. Navy F/A-18 fighter pilot who witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) on a regular basis, let me be clear. The U.S. government, former presidents, members of Congress of both political parties and directors of national intelligence are trying to tell the American public the same uncomfortable truth I shared: Objects demonstrating extreme capabilities routinely fly over our military facilities and training ranges. We don't know what they are, and we are unable to mitigate their presence. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) last week published its second ever report on UAP activity. While the unclassified version is brief, its findings are sobering. Over the past year, the government has collected hundreds of new reports of enigmatic objects from military pilots and sensor systems that cannot be identified and “represent a hazard to flight safety.” The report also preserves last year's review of the 26-year reporting period that some UAP may represent advanced technology, noting “unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities.”

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/23/02/07/009212/first-us-navy-pilot-to-publicly-report-uaps-says-congress-must-reveal-the-truth-to-the-american-people

After an intelligence briefing on the recent spate of shot down unidentified objects, Senators expressed confusion and concern about a lack of information.

Nikki Main - 16 February 2023

Four unidentified flying objects have made their way across North American airspace since the end of January, and were subsequently shot down. While the first object was identified as a Chinese-owned surveillance balloon, U.S. lawmakers say they are no closer to discovering the truth behind the other three.

China claimed the first balloon discovered flying into Montana was a weather sensory device that had flown off course, but the debris recovered after it was shot down told a different story. The FBI found the balloon did indeed have weather surveillance equipment, albeit of low quality, but noted that the balloon’s path had taken it directly over military installations.

https://gizmodo.com/ufo-sightings-us-senate-balloon-china-security-1850121948

Marik von Rennenkampff, Opinion Contributor - 06/27/23 7:30 AM ET

Asked June 26 about allegations of secret UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering programs, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) made several stunning statements.

In an exclusive interview, Rubio told NewsNation Washington correspondent Joe Khalil that multiple individuals with “very high clearances and high positions within our government” “have come forward to share” “first-hand” UFO-related claims “beyond the realm of what [the Senate Intelligence Committee] has ever dealt with.”

Rubio’s comments provide context for a bipartisan provision adopted unanimously by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which would immediately halt funding for any secret government or contractor efforts to retrieve and reverse-engineer craft of “non-earth” or “exotic” origin.

This extraordinary language added to the Senate version of the Intelligence authorization bill mirrors and adds significant credibility to a whistleblower’s recent, stunning allegations that a clandestine, decades-long effort to recover, analyze and exploit objects of “non-human” origin has been operating illegally without congressional oversight.

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4067865-congress-doubles-down-on-explosive-claims-of-illegal-ufo-retrieval-programs/

Posted by BeauHD on Wednesday June 28, 2023 06:00AM

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill:

Asked June 26 about allegations of secret UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering programs, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) made several stunning statements. In an exclusive interview, Rubio told NewsNation Washington correspondent Joe Khalil that multiple individuals with “very high clearances and high positions within our government” “have come forward to share” “first-hand” UFO-related claims “beyond the realm of what [the Senate Intelligence Committee] has ever dealt with.”

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/23/06/27/2243226/congress-doubles-down-on-explosive-claims-of-illegal-ufo-retrieval-programs

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday July 02, 2023 12:34PM

Monday U.S. Senator Marco Rubio said government workers with high security clearances had made UFO-related claims, leading to a bill's provision to halt any reverse-engineering of alien crafts. News stories at the time noted “allegations of secret UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering programs” by former intelligence official turned whistleblower, David Grusch, a story which Vanity Fair traced to a “little-known” site called The Debrief.

But that article's authors have some serious journalistic experience. Ralph Blumenthal spent more than 45 years on staff at The New York Times. Leslie Kean is an investigative science journalist known for her writing on UFOs. In 2017 they teamed up with a New York Times Pentagon correspondent for an “explosive 2017 UFO report,” writes the Atlantic, “in which the journalists revealed a defunct secret Pentagon program — initially funded at the request of former Senate majority leader Harry Reid — to investigate 'unidentified flying objects.'”

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/23/07/02/1922237/why-major-newspapers-didnt-publish-ufo-retrieval-story

In an exclusive interview, a top official denied evidence of alien spacecraft.

Devin Dwyer, Tommy Brooksbank, and Jon Schlosberg - July 20, 2023, 2:03 AM

The scientist and military intelligence officer leading the Pentagon's task force for unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) – which the public calls UFOs – says being caught off guard by “intelligent or extraterrestrial technical surprise” remains a top concern as investigators analyze more than 800 cases of mysterious sightings reported by U.S. military personnel dating back decades.

“Data and science has to guide where you go, and we will follow the data,” Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick said last month, in an exclusive first interview after his appointment to the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO.

Congress established the office last year to coordinate efforts across federal agencies to “detect, identify and attribute” mysterious objects of interest in the air, in outer space and underwater, with special focus on mitigating potential threats to military operations and national security.

“The most common misconception is that [the possible phenomena] are all the same thing and they're all extraterrestrial, and neither of those are true,” Kirkpatrick said.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/extraterrestrial-technical-supremacy-top-concern-pentagon-ufo-investigator/story?id=101218299

MARCIA DUNN - Updated 3:16 PM PDT, September 14, 2023

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA said Thursday that the study of UFOs will require new scientific techniques, including advanced satellites as well as a shift in how unidentified flying objects are perceived.

The space agency released the findings after a yearlong study into UFOs.

In its 33-page report, an independent team commissioned by NASA cautioned that the negative perception surrounding UFOs poses an obstacle to collecting data. But officials said NASA’s involvement should help reduce the stigma around what it calls UAPs, or unidentified anomalous phenomena.

“We want to shift the conversation about UAPs from sensationalism to science,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said. He promised an open and transparent approach.

https://apnews.com/article/nasa-ufos-inidentified-flying-objects-8b477a5ed6a42f99bb13a4518368ce9a

Interest in UFOs surged last year amidst claims of a government coverup. A new Pentagon report doesn't add much clarity.

Lucas Ropek - 8 March 2024

UFOs are back in the news this week with the release of a long-awaited Pentagon report that was designed to address public interest in the topic.

UFOs (or, rather, UAP, as they’re now known), were injected back into public consciousness last year thanks largely to a former high-ranking intelligence official, David Grusch, who, after quitting his post at a prominent defense agency, went public with a variety of weird claims about aliens and spacecraft. Specifically, Grusch claimed that a highly secretive government program existed that was dedicated to the recovery and reverse-engineering of crashed UFOs.

Grusch’s allegations led to a bonkers Congressional hearing and a legislative push to investigate the issues he had raised. The new report, which was was authored by the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, was ostensibly meant to investigate whether the government had covered up evidence of extraterrestrial life.

https://gizmodo.com/pentagon-ufo-report-alien-cover-up-grusch-aaro-1851321160

Opinion by Peter Bergen and Erik German - Updated 1:27 PM EST, Fri March 8, 2024

A former Pentagon official — driven, he says, by his duty to the truth — goes public with an explosive allegation. Facing a scrum of TV cameras and members of Congress, this official claims that the US government has been keeping crashed alien spaceships under wraps for decades.

It sounds like a pitch for a Hollywood movie. But last year, Americans saw it happen on the news. The former Pentagon official, David Grusch, had been an Air Force intelligence officer. He told a congressional committee that he’d learned of a decades-long Pentagon program focused on “crash retrieval and reverse engineering” of UFOs from other planets. Grusch also said that remains found at the spacecraft crash sites were “non-human biologics.”

That’s right. Crashed alien spacecraft and dead extraterrestrials, right there in the Congressional Record. If it wasn’t the wildest thing ever broadcasted on C-SPAN, it must’ve been close. Someone should look into this, right?

It turns out that someone already had. In 2022, the Pentagon tapped a veteran scientist and intelligence officer named Sean Kirkpatrick to set up a new office tasked with investigating UFO sightings by the US military. Named the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office by the US Department of Defense, Kirkpatrick told us his team dug into UFO cases and interviewed US service members who said they had knowledge about encounters with UFOs.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/26/opinions/ufos-actual-truth-bergen-german/index.html

Posted by EditorDavid on Monday March 11, 2024 04:34AM

CNN's national security analyst interviewed a U.S. intelligence officer who worked on the newly-released Defense report debunking UFO sightings — physicist Sean Kirkpatrick. He tells CNN “about two to five percent” of UFO reports are “truly anomalous.”

But CNN adds that “he thinks explanations for that small percentage will most likely be found right here on Earth…”

This is how Kirkpatrick and his team explain the Roswell incident, which plays a prominent role in UFO lore. That's because, in 1947, a U.S. military news release stated that a flying saucer had crashed near Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico. A day later, the Army retracted the story and said the crashed object was a weather balloon. Newspapers ran the initial saucer headline, followed up with the official debunking, and interest in the case largely died down. Until 1980, that is, when a pair of UFO researchers published a book alleging that alien bodies had been recovered from the Roswell wreckage and that the U.S. government had covered up the evidence.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/03/09/194239/us-intelligence-officer-explains-roswell-ufo-sightings

A new law could force the government to share what it knows about those strange lights in the sky.

Lucas Ropek - 21 May 2024

It’s very possible we’ll know more about UFOs soon. Due to a stipulation inside the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, the federal government is now required to share any and all internal reports on the subject of unidentified flying objects with the National Archives, which will then (eventually) share those reports with the public.

The law in question would create an ‘‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection” that would ostensibly include any and all historical records that exist about the UFO subject. According to the National Archives, the new law requires that, by October 20, 2024, “each federal agency review, identify, and organize each Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) record in its custody for disclosure to the public and transmission to the National Archives.”

Those records are defined, quite broadly, as any and all copies of “Government, Government-provided, or Government-funded records relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, and non-human intelligence (or equivalent subjects by any other name with the specific and sole exclusion of temporarily non-attributed objects).” Relevantly, agencies must also turn over a host of metadata about each document, including the date that it was created, the agency and/or office that created it, and the security classification it falls under, among other data points.

https://gizmodo.com/we-may-know-a-whole-lot-more-about-ufos-soon-1851489546

From Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon, Americans are seeing weird lights in the sky. But which state gets the most action?

Lucas Ropek - August 30, 2024

UFOs are big these days. Congress has been talking about them. The New York Times has been talking about them. And, as should be expected, lunatics online have been talking about them. The reason everybody is talking about them is that they seem to be everywhere. From sea to shining sea, Americans are seeing weird lights in the sky. But which state has the most sightings?

To help answer this vital question, Newsweek has pulled together a U.S. map showing all of our nation’s UFO-related hot spots. The map is based on data provided by the National UFO Reporting Center, a longstanding non-profit based in Washington state that has been collecting and analyzing data on UFO sightings for decades. The Center says its “primary function over the past five decades has been to receive, record, and to the greatest degree possible, corroborate and document reports from individuals who have been witness to unusual, possibly UFO-related events.” According to its data, there have been as many as 133,717 reported UFO sightings in the U.S. since 1995.

So which state gets the most action? The winner is (drum roll): California!

https://gizmodo.com/these-states-have-the-most-ufo-sightings-2000493512

The disturbing series of events during the summer of 2019 resulted in an investigation that made its way to the highest echelons of the Navy.

By Adam Kehoe and Marc Cecotti - March 23, 2021

In July of 2019, a truly bizarre series of events unfolded around California’s Channel Islands. Over a number of days, groups of unidentified aircraft, which the U.S. Navy simply refers to as ‘drones’ or 'UAVs,' pursued that service's vessels, prompting a high-level investigation.

During the evening encounters, as many as six aircraft were reported swarming around the ships at once. The drones were described as flying for prolonged periods in low-visibility conditions, and performing brazen maneuvers over the Navy warships near a sensitive military training range less than 100 miles off Los Angeles. The ensuing investigation included elements of the Navy, Coast Guard, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The incidents received major attention, including from the Chief of Naval Operations—the apex of the Navy's chain of command.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39913/multiple-destroyers-were-swarmed-by-mysterious-drones-off-california-over-numerous-nights

Tom McKay - 14 April 2021 3:20PM

The Pentagon has officially verified that night-vision video circulating of unidentified, triangular aerial craft swarming around the Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Russell in 2019 is real, as first reported last week by Mystery Wire.

Earlier this month, the Navy acknowledged that it was completely baffled by an incident in 2019 when a group of warships observed a cluster of strange aircraft—the likeliest explanation being drones, though they flew for far longer than typical civilian units. The Navy said it had no firm theory as to who operated them. That’s despite an extensive investigation that involved Naval personnel ranging from onboard intelligence teams to senior officers as well as civilian agencies like the FBI.

https://gizmodo.com/navy-acknowledges-weird-footage-of-unidentified-objects-1846684702

PETER DOCKRILL - 14 APRIL 2021

A series of newly surfaced images and videos of unidentified flying objects filmed by the US Navy have now been confirmed as authentic by the Pentagon.

While many in the public generally refer to such mysterious sightings as UFOs, the more modern term used in defense circles is 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomena' (UAPs) – and they're something the intelligence community takes very seriously.

While UFOs are a stigmatized topic – associated with conspiracy theories and intertwined with pop culture – the fact remains that UAPs, sometimes also called Anomalous Aerial Vehicles (AAVs), are nonetheless very real, representing documented sightings of phenomena that neither the military nor scientific observers can easily identify.

https://www.sciencealert.com/pentagon-confirms-pyramid-shaped-ufo-video-footage-is-authentic

Unless by aliens you mean Russians

Katyanna Quach - Fri 16 Apr 2021 / 21:41 UTC

Photos and videos taken by US Navy officers of strange-shaped aircraft streaming across our skies a couple of years ago have been officially labelled as unidentified flying objects by Uncle Sam.

The first clip, filmed in night-vision, features a cone-shaped object blinking in the sky across an eerie green sky. In a second incident, pilots captured a device that rotated as it flew, and in the third image an object hovered in front, CNN reported.

Sue Gough, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon, referred to those objects as being shaped like a “sphere,” or “acorn“ and called the last one a “metallic blimp.” All the footage was taken by the Navy, and Gough confirmed the content was being investigated by the US government's Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force, a special unit focused on probing UFOs, which is led by the Navy and was created in August.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/16/us_pentagon_ufo/

by: George Knapp, Matt Adams, Duncan Phenix

Posted: May 27, 2021 / 12:09 PM PDT / Updated: May 27, 2021 / 06:40 PM PDT

MYSTERY WIRE — Filmmaker Jeremy Corbell has released a new video showing unidentified objects being monitored by Navy personnel on board the USS Omaha on July, 2019.

This new video was recorded during the same event seen in earlier Navy video Corbell released that showed an unidentified sphere disappearing into the Pacific Ocean.

Over a period of hours, crew members on the USS Omaha, which is located in the center of the radar screen seen in the video, monitored the approach of the unknown objects. There were as many as 14 objects on the screen at one point, all around the ship. On the Omaha, two different radar systems watched the objects and estimated their speed.

https://www.mysterywire.com/ufo/ufos-swarm-uss-omaha/

August 12, 2022 - Dr David Clarke

Read the full story of how I found the most famous UFO photo in the world in my exclusive story published by The Daily Mail here. And follow the breaking story over on UAPMedia UK.

After thirty years immersed in the world of UFOlogy I had grown cynical after viewing hundreds of unconvincing photographs and films.

But when retired RAF officer Craig Lindsay showed me the only surviving print of the Calvine UFO photo he had kept safe for more than three decades I knew I was looking at something exceptional. The ‘best’ image from the six UFO photographs taken at Calvine in Scotland at approx 9pm on Saturday 4 August 1990 (with permission of Sheffield Hallam University/Craig Lindsay)

My quest for the truth behind this photograph began back in 2009 when I was curating the release of thousands of once secret MoD UFO documents at The National Archives.

One of the files contained a poor-quality photocopied drawing of a UFO with a Harrier beside it, produced by the RAF’s photographic experts in 1990.

https://drdavidclarke.co.uk/2022/08/12/the-calvine-ufo-revealed/

Most were blurred, grainy and out-of-focus shots of what could have been frisbees, streetlamps or even seagulls.

by Gary Leff on February 23, 2021

Deep Black Horizon posted an air traffic control broadcast from American Airlines flight AA2292 on Sunday.

The aircraft was flying from Cincinnati to Phoenix and at 1:19 p.m. Central time, while over the northeast corner of New Mexico at around 37,000 feet, reportedly radioed Albuquerque Center.

https://viewfromthewing.com/american-airlines-pilot-reported-ufo-contact-over-new-mexico-on-sunday/

The event, and the pilot's reaction to it, are remarkably similar to one that occurred in the same general area a few years ago.

By Tyler Rogoway - February 21, 2021

American Airlines Flight 2292, an Airbus A320 flying between Cincinnati and Phoenix on February 21st, 2021, had a bizarre close encounter with what its crew described as a “long cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile” moving extremely fast over the top of their aircraft as it cruised along at 36,000 feet and 400 knots. The incident occurred over the remote northeast corner of New Mexico, to the west of the tiny town of Des Moines.

Steve Douglass, an experienced radio interceptor and the proprietor of Deep Black Horizon, told The War Zone that he was recording from his arsenal of scanners when he heard the strange transmission. The War Zone has reviewed over an hour of audio that Douglass has provided to us from before and after the strange radio call. We are working to authenticate it from the FAA and get further information and comment from the agency on the event. We have also reached out to American Airlines for any additional details they can provide.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39367/airbus-encountered-unidentified-fast-moving-cylindrical-object-over-new-mexico

Lucas Ropek - Friday 26 February 2021 9:00PM

Multiple authorities have confirmed that commercial airline pilots recently saw, well, something, hurtling through America’s southwestern skies.

The lowdown is this: American Airlines Flight 2292 was passing over Clayton, N.M., on Sunday, traveling at 36,000 feet en route to Phoenix from Cincinnati, when the crew witnessed a “long, cylindrical” object. The object shot over the top of the plane, traveling at a very high rate of speed, then disappeared.

https://gizmodo.com/federal-authorities-confirm-sighting-of-yet-another-ufo-1846367951

Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday September 13, 2022 08:30PM

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard:

Ukraine's airspace has been busy this year – that's the nature of war. But scientists in the country are looking to the skies and seeing something they didn't expect: An inordinate number of UFOs, according to a new preprint paper published (PDF) by Kyiv's Main Astronomical Observatory in coordination with the country's National Academy of Science. The paper does not specifically address the war, but in the United States, the Pentagon has long hinted, speculated, and warned that some UFOs could be advanced technology from foreign militaries, specifically China and Russia (though it hasn't really given any evidence this is actually the case). The Ukraine paper is particularly notable because it not only shows that science has continued to occur during the war, but also explains that there have been a lot of sightings. “We see them everywhere,” the research said. “We observe a significant number of objects whose nature is not clear.”

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/22/09/13/2350241/ukraines-astronomers-say-there-are-tons-of-ufos-over-kyiv

While it isn't clear if the two are related, our investigation into the sightings has revealed that the home to Skunk Works has experienced a very concerning rash of drone incursions.

Joseph Trevithick, Howard Altman - Aug 19, 2024 11:20 PM EDT

The U.S. Air Force’s Plant 42 in California, America’s premier hub for advanced aerospace development work, especially highly classified military programs, has seen a wave of mysterious drone incursions in recent months. The incidents have now become serious enough to prompt the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to impose new, if temporary flight restrictions around the sprawling high-security facility. The Air Force acknowledged these incidents in response to our questions about purported sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in the area which became viral on social media over the weekend and that local law enforcement appears to have received no reports about.

Palmdale Regional Airport shares the runways with Plant 42, which is home to Lockheed Martin’s famed Skunk Works advanced projects division, as well as similar arms of both Northrop Grumman and Boeing. NASA also has a flight testing center there. As a prime example of the work that goes on at Plant 42, it is where Northrop Grumman has been building the U.S. Air Force’s new B-21 Raider stealth bombers. America’s most sensitive and ‘bleeding edge’ aerospace weaponry emerges from this facility, so security at the installation, which is located in a relatively urban area, is taken very seriously.

https://www.twz.com/air/palmdale-ufo-scare-leads-to-revelations-about-mystery-drone-incursions-over-secretive-plant-42

Posted by BeauHD on Friday July 14, 2023 03:00AM

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is proposing legislation to create a commission with the power to declassify government documents related to UFOs and extraterrestrial matters. The New York Times reports:

The measure offers the possibility of pushing back against the conspiracy theories that surround discussions of U.F.O.s and fears that the government is hiding critical information from the public. The legislation, which Mr. Schumer will introduce as an amendment to the annual defense policy bill, has bipartisan support, including that of Senator Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, and Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, who has championed legislation that has forced the government to release a series of reports on unidentified phenomena. Support in the House is also likely. On Wednesday, the chamber included a narrower measure (PDF) in its version of the annual defense bill that would push the Pentagon to release documents about unidentified aerial phenomena.

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/23/07/14/0118246/bipartisan-measure-aims-to-force-release-of-ufo-records

Members of Congress will 'explore firsthand accounts of unidentified anomalous phenomena.'

Kris Holt - July 25, 2023 12:45 PM

A Congressional subcommittee is set to hold a hearing into UFOs, which are also referred to as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). The panel will hear “firsthand accounts” of UAP and “assess the federal government’s transparency and accountability” regarding possible threats to national security. You'll be able to watch the hearing below on July 26th at 10AM ET.

The hearing — conducted by the Subcommittee on National Security, the Border and Foreign Affairs — will also focus on drives for legislation to “bring transparency to UAPs.” The subcommittee wants to force the federal government to provide US residents with “information about potential risks to public safety and national security” as well. According to Rep. Tim Burchett, “The Pentagon and Washington bureaucrats have kept this information hidden for decades and we’re finally going to shed some light on it.”

https://www.engadget.com/how-to-watch-this-weeks-congressional-ufo-hearing-164546251.html

Whistleblower David Grusch claims ‘non-human’ beings found as issue of alien life receives highest-profile airing before US Congress

Adam Gabbatt - Wed 26 Jul 2023 14.07 EDT

The US government conducted a “multi-decade” program which collected, and attempted to reverse-engineer, crashed UFOs, a former American intelligence official told a remarkable congressional hearing on Wednesday.

David Grusch, who led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP) within a US Department of Defense agency until 2023, told the House oversight committee in Washington that “non-human” beings had been found, as the issue of alien life received its highest-profile airing to date.

The hearing was prompted by claims from Grusch in June that the government was secretly harboring alien space craft. On Wednesday, Grusch repeated some of those claims – although not all – under oath.

“I was informed, in the course of my official duties, of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program, to which I was denied access,” Grusch told the committee.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/26/ufo-hearing-congress-evidence-david-grusch

The truth is out there…

26 July 2023 - Brandon Livesay

We're finishing up our live coverage of today's hearing at Congress into UAPs.

Listening to first-hand accounts from former members of the US military and intelligence community has been compelling, but also frustrating.

The witnesses claimed to have more knowledge, but were unwilling or unable to share it in a “public setting”.

What we did hear will likely raise more questions from lawmakers, who are particularly interested in government transparency and national security.

Our writers today have been Kayla Epstein and Madeline Halpert, and the page was edited by Marianna Brady and Brandon Livesay.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-66307705

GOP Oversight - 26 July 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ7Dw-739VY

Posted by msmash on Wednesday July 26, 2023 10:31AM

The U.S. is concealing a longstanding program that retrieves and reverse engineers unidentified flying objects, a former Air Force intelligence officer testified Wednesday to Congress. The Pentagon has denied his claims. Associated Press:

Retired Maj. David Grusch's highly anticipated testimony before a House Oversight subcommittee was Congress' latest foray into the world of UAPs – or “unidentified aerial phenomena,” which is the official term the U.S. government uses instead of UFOs. While the study of mysterious aircraft or objects often evokes talk of aliens and “little green men,” Democrats and Republicans in recent years have pushed for more research as a national security matter due to concerns that sightings observed by pilots may be tied to U.S. adversaries.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/07/26/1731219/whistleblower-tells-congress-the-us-is-concealing-multi-decade-program-that-captures-ufos

NewsNation - 26 July 2023

Lawmakers are hearing witness testimony after a whistleblower claimed the U.S. is covering up a secret UFO program

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkEnx2REz7U

Léonie Chao-Fong - Wed 26 Jul 2023 13.54 EDT

12.14 EDT Grusch says 'non-human biologics’ found at alleged crash sites

David Grusch says he knows of “multiple colleagues” who were physically injured by UAP activity and by people within the US federal government. Asked to go into detail, Grusch says he “can’t get into the specifics”.

Asked if any bodies of pilots were recovered from any crashed crafts, Grusch replies:

As I’ve stated publicly already in my NewsNation [interview] biologics came with some of these recoveries.

Were they human or non human biologics, he is asked. Grusch responds:

Non-human, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2023/jul/26/ufo-hearing-congress-david-grusch-whistleblower-live-updates

Taylor Hatmaker - 26 July 2023

A year after the first Congressional hearing on UFOs in 50 years, a House subcommittee revisited some enduring questions around a topic that once would have been laughed off.

The hearing, held Wednesday by the House Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, explored a range of issues related to the baffling realm of unexplained things that humans have observed flying around — now more commonly called UAPs or “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

It’s worth noting here that unidentified is far from synonymous with extraterrestrial. While some claims may trend in that direction, these phenomena are just what they sound like: unidentifiable. Proposed explanations range from the mundane — airborne trash, rogue drones, sensor malfunctions, visual distortions — to the outlandish, like super secret advanced U.S. military technology, sophisticated tech from U.S. adversaries, and, yes, alien spacecraft.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/26/congress-dives-into-ufos-in-a-hearing-featuring-eyewitness-testimony/

Wednesday's UFO hearing went decidedly off the rails, spinning out into Twilight Zone territory.

Lucas Ropek - 26 July 2023

Is the government hiding alien bodies in a vault under the Pentagon? Have Americans been killed to protect our weirdest extraterrestrial secrets? Nothing was off the table at Congress’s much anticipated hearing on UFOs Wednesday, making for quite the show. The House Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs convened what was at turns a bizarre, funny, and occasionally boring get-together to discuss recent UFO-related allegations made by former members of the government.

The narrative painted by these supposed whistleblowers is one in which not only are we not alone in the universe, but highly advanced alien spacecraft (recently re-dubbed UAPs—or unidentified aerial phenomenon) keep slamming into our cornfields, thus causing all sorts of trouble for the American government. Still, if you’re on the skeptical side, Wednesday’s hearing probably sounded less like something that should be entered into the Library of Congress and more like the pages of a good issue of the National Inquirer. With that in mind, here’s some of what we’ve “learned.”

https://gizmodo.com/david-grusch-ufos-aliens-uaps-congress-house-hearing-1850678642

Posted by msmash on Thursday July 27, 2023 07:40AM

An hours-long discussion on Capitol Hill captured the intensifying public interest in the unexplained and how authorities investigate such reports. From a report:

A small group of House lawmakers called Wednesday for greater transparency in the government's reporting on encounters with unidentified phenomena, in an unusual congressional hearing featuring the testimony of UFO witnesses. But the hearing, which one freshman Democrat remarked was the most bipartisan discussion he'd seen in his seven months on Capitol Hill, oscillated between statements of concern about the potential national security threat posed by unknown objects flying close to U.S. military aircraft and more extreme allusions to government conspiracies to hide the existence of alien lifeforms. Convened by a House Oversight subcommittee, the hours-long discussion captured the intensifying public interest in the unexplained and what federal authorities are doing to document and investigate such reports.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/23/07/27/1437204/ufo-reports-demand-greater-transparency-lawmakers-say

Bill Chappell - Updated Wednesday, November 13, 2024 4:40 PM EST

Is intelligent alien life darting around in space — and even in the skies above us here on Earth? Has the U.S. government been covering up unexplained phenomena, and using secret extraterrestrial discoveries to boost its own technology?

Those are among the questions members of Congress discussed Wednesday in a joint hearing by subcommittees of the House Oversight Committee. Its title: “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth.”

The Pentagon issued a report in March (https://text.npr.org/2024/03/08/1237100622/pentagon-ufo-report-no-evidence-alien-technology) saying that it has found no evidence of extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Four experts testified in Wednesday's public hearing. You can watch the proceeding here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT2iWKZr0qA).

https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5189426

Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday November 12, 2024 11:00PM

Longtime Slashdot reader thephydes writes:

The hearing will go ahead on November 13 at 11:30 ET (16:30 GMT). Apparently, it will “further pull back the curtain on secret UAP research programs conducted by the U.S. government, and undisclosed findings they have yielded,” according to a House statement. It's driven by two republicans, Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.), who say: “Americans deserve to understand what the government has learned about UAP sightings, and the nature of any potential threats these phenomena pose. We can only ensure that understanding by providing consistent, systemic transparency. We look forward to hearing from expert witnesses on ways to shed more light and bring greater accountability to this issue.”

“Expert witnesses in the hearing will include Luis Elizondo, a decorated former counterintelligence officer who has claimed for years that the U.S. government is hiding knowledge of UAP, including materials recovered from crashed flying saucers,” reports Space.com. “The House hearing will also include Tim Gallaudet, a retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral who observed unidentified submersible objects, arguing that 'these underwater anomalies jeopardize US maritime security.'”

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/24/11/13/0010214/congress-to-hold-another-ufouap-hearing

Posted by BeauHD on Wednesday November 13, 2024 11:00PM

During a public joint hearing today titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” four experts testified that the U.S. is running secret UAP programs, including crash retrieval and reverse-engineering programs for advanced nonhuman technology. Although the Pentagon maintains there's no evidence of alien spacecraft, witnesses like Luis Elizondo and Michael Gold argue that UAPs represent an intelligence enigma and call for open, stigma-free study to address potential security concerns and unknown scientific possibilities. NPR reports:

Tim Gallaudet, retired rear admiral, U.S. Navy; CEO of Ocean STL Consulting, LLC

“Confirmation that UAPs are interacting with humanity came for me in January 2015,” Gallaudet said in his written testimony (PDF). He describes being part of a pre-deployment naval exercise off the U.S. East Coast that culminated in the famous “Go Fast” video, in which a Navy F/A-18 jet's sensors recorded “an unidentified object exhibiting flight and structural characteristics unlike anything in our arsenal.” He was among a group of commanders involved in the exercise who received an email containing the video, which was sent by the operations officer of Fleet Forces Command, Gallaudet said. “The very next day, the email disappeared from my account and those of the other recipients without explanation,” he said.

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/24/11/14/0543247/experts-testify-us-is-running-secret-uap-programs

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday July 23, 2022 12:34PM

This week America's Department of Defense “created an office to track unidentified objects in space and air, [and] under water,” reports Space.com, “or even those that appear to travel between these domains.”

UFOs, or as they are now known, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) have been receiving newfound levels of government scrutiny not seen in decades. Multiple hearings and classified briefings have taken place in the halls of the U.S. Congress in recent months, and many lawmakers have expressed concern that America's airspace may not be as safe as we think due to the many sightings of unidentified objects military aviators and other armed forces personnel have reported.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/07/23/0440216/americas-defense-department-creates-a-new-office-for-tracking-and-analyzing-ufos

Posted by BeauHD on Wednesday August 24, 2022 12:00AM

After years of revelations about strange lights in the sky, first hand reports from Navy pilots about UFOs, and governmental investigations, Congress seems to have admitted something startling in print: it doesn't believe all UFOs are “man-made.” Motherboard reports:

Buried deep in a report that's an addendum to the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, a budget that governs America's clandestine services, Congress made two startling claims. The first is that “cross-domain transmedium threats to the United States national security are expanding exponentially.” The second is that it wants to distinguish between UFOs that are human in origin and those that are not: “Temporary nonattributed objects, or those that are positively identified as man-made after analysis, will be passed to appropriate offices and should not be considered under the definition as unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena,” the document states.

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/22/08/23/2131212/congress-admits-ufos-not-man-made-says-threats-increasing-exponentially

Trying to make sense of a subject rife with nonsense

Superb Owl - Sep 3, 2022

The discussion around Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)—what used to be known as UFOs—has reentered the zeitgeist over the last few years, with high profile stories in The New York Times and 60 Minutes. But mainstream journalism typically leaves the topic at “more questions than answers,” while the internet is full of matter-of-fact bullshit. This leads reasonable people to simply avoid the subject.

If the UAP story has any substance, it’s important to engage with it. Even mundane explanations may have profound implications for geopolitics, warfare, and aerospace technology. So let’s explore what exactly we know, how we know it, and how confident we can be.

https://superbowl.substack.com/p/uap-evidence-summary-skepticism-and

Posted by BeauHD on Friday September 09, 2022 08:30PM

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard:

The U.S. Navy says that releasing any additional UFO videos would “harm national security” and told a government transparency website that all of the government's UFO videos are classified information. In a Freedom of Information Act request response, the Navy told government transparency site The Black Vault that any public dissemination of new UFO videos “will harm national security as it may provide adversaries valuable information regarding Department of Defense/Navy operations, vulnerabilities, and/or capabilities. No portions of the videos can be segregated for release.”

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/22/09/09/2227221/navy-says-all-ufo-videos-classified-releasing-them-will-harm-national-security

Posted by BeauHD on Friday December 16, 2022 11:00PM

A new Pentagon office set up to track reports of unidentified flying objects has received “several hundreds” of new reports, but no evidence so far of alien life, the agency's leadership told reporters Friday. The Associated Press reports:

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was set up in July and is responsible for not only tracking unidentified objects in the sky, but also underwater or in space – or potentially an object that has the ability to move from one domain to the next. The office was established following more than a year of attention on unidentified flying objects that military pilots have observed but have sometimes been reluctant to report due to fear of stigma.

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/22/12/16/2347256/pentagon-has-received-several-hundreds-of-new-ufo-reports

Posted by msmash on Friday January 13, 2023 09:20AM

The U.S. intelligence community says that the number of UFO reports involving U.S. military personnel is increasing, “enabling a greater awareness of the airspace and increased opportunity to resolve” what is actually being reported. From a report:

Roughly half of the new incidents reported in the report had terrestrial explanations, the report said. The increase in reporting is being partially attributed to the continuing effort to destigmatize the reporting of such incidents and focusing on the potential safety risks they could pose to U.S. personnel. The report released Thursday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that since its first June 2021 unclassified report on what are now called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), it is now aware of 510 such reports.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/01/13/128241/new-ufo-report-shows-hundreds-more-incidents-than-previously-thought

Posted by BeauHD on Saturday April 15, 2023 12:00AM

The official in charge of a secretive Pentagon effort to investigate unexplained aerial incursions has co-authored an academic paper that presents an out-of-this-world theory: Recent objects could actually be alien probes from a mothership sent to study Earth. Politico reports:

In a draft paper dated March 7 (PDF), Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and Harvard professor Avi Loeb teamed up to write that the objects, which appear to defy all physics, could be “probes” from an extraterrestrial “parent craft.” It's unusual for government officials, especially those involved in the nascent effort to collect intelligence on recent sightings, to discuss the possibility of extraterrestrial life, although top agency officials don't rule it out when asked. After Loeb posted it online, the paper gained notoriety from a post on Military Times and has also circulated among science-focused news outlets.

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/23/04/14/2157223/pentagon-official-floats-a-theory-for-unexplained-sightings-alien-motherships

Has found no evidence of alien tech or objects that defy the known laws of physics

Katyanna Quach - Fri 21 Apr 2023 00:06 UTC

The Pentagon's recently-established All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) - set up to investigate unidentified flying objects - has not found any evidence of aliens in its analysis, its director has said.

At hearings (one open and one closed) held by the Senate Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities this week, Sean Kirkpatrick said most sightings of UFOs are not as strange as they first appear. They are often balloons, unmanned aerial systems, or aircraft, and look odd due to natural phenomena.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/21/dod_no_ufos/

Posted by BeauHD on Friday April 21, 2023 12:00AM

The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which was created last year to investigate unidentified flying objects (UFOs), said on Wednesday that they have not found any evidence of aliens in its analysis. The office within the Secretary of Defense is, however, tracking more than 650 potential cases of so-called “unidentified aerial phenomena” – up from the 350 reports referenced in an unclassified intelligence report released earlier this year. Half of them are considered “especially interesting and anomalous.” The Register reports:

At hearings (one open and one closed) held by the Senate Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities this week, Sean Kirkpatrick said most sightings of UFOs are not as strange as they first appear. They are often balloons, unmanned aerial systems, or aircraft, and look odd due to natural phenomena. “I want to underscore that only a very small percentage of [unidentified anomalous phenomena] (UAP) reports display signatures that could reasonably be described as anomalous,” he said during this opening testimony at the hearing.

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/23/04/21/0025214/pentagon-shoots-down-ufo-rumors-but-says-650-cases-are-still-pending

Marik von Rennenkampff, opinion contributor - 06/02/23 7:00 AM ET

At a historic NASA briefing on UFOs — “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (UAP) in government parlance — a key Defense Department official made a striking disclosure. Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, director of a new UAP analysis office, stated that U.S. military personnel are observing “metallic orbs” “all over the world.”

An image, along with two brief videos of such objects are now publicly available.

According to Kirkpatrick, spherical objects account for the largest proportion — nearly half — of all UAP reports received by his office. Critically, some of these objects are capable of “very interesting apparent maneuvers.”

To be sure, rigorous scientific analysis may ultimately identify a prosaic explanation for such observations. In the meantime, however, such “metallic orbs” are prima facie evidence of extraordinary technology. After all, how would spheres, lacking wings or apparent forms of propulsion, execute “maneuvers” of any kind?

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4030026-us-military-has-been-observing-metallic-orbs-making-extraordinary-maneuvers/

Whistleblower former intelligence official says government posseses ‘intact and partially intact’ craft of non-human origin

Adam Gabbatt - Tue 6 Jun 2023 16.42 EDT

The US has been urged to disclose evidence of UFOs after a whistleblower former intelligence official said the government has possession of “intact and partially intact” alien vehicles.

The former intelligence official David Grusch, who led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP) within a US Department of Defense agency, has alleged that the US has craft of non-human origin.

Information on these vehicles is being illegally withheld from Congress, Grusch told the Debrief. Grusch said when he turned over classified information about the vehicles to Congress he suffered retaliation from government officials. He left the government in April after a 14-year career in US intelligence.

Jonathan Grey, a current US intelligence official at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (Nasic), confirmed the existence of “exotic materials” to the Debrief, adding: “We are not alone.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/whistleblower-ufo-alien-tech-spacecraft

• Air Force veteran David Grusch claims the government is covering up UFOs
• Grusch claims he has seen evidence of a secret crash retrieval program
• He alleges the U.S. has even retrieved bodies from other species

Brian Entin - Updated: Jun 6, 2023 / 01:40 PM CDT

(NewsNation) — An Air Force veteran and former member of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency is coming forward with information on what he claims are extraterrestrial craft recovered and kept secret by the U.S. government.

Blurry videos of unidentified flying objects have long been a staple of those looking for evidence that stories of UFOs may not be conspiracy theories. In recent years, the government has taken a more vocal role in investigating such sightings, with Congress forming an official U.S. government “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” task force, recently renamed to the “All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office,” or AARO.

At the same time, NASA and other government agencies have repeatedly said there is no credible evidence of extraterrestrial activity on Earth, attributing most sightings to natural phenomena or human-made objects.

https://www.newsnationnow.com/space/military-whistleblowe-us-ufo-retrieval-program/

God bless whoever is reading all of the submissions.

Maxwell Zeff - November 1, 2023

The Pentagon’s UFO investigation unit wants anyone who has been employed by the United States to report first-hand knowledge of government projects related to alien activity on their new website, according to Vice Wednesday. A submission form on the unit’s website allows former government employees to report UFO sightings dating back to 1945, said Director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick at an off-camera press conference on Halloween.

“I’d also like to take this opportunity to strongly encourage any current or former U.S. government employees, military or civilian, or contractors who believe that they have firsthand knowledge of a U.S. government UAP program or activity to please come forward using this new secure reporting mechanism,” said Kirkpatrick. “We want to hear from you.”

Any government employee with direct knowledge of US government programs or activities is encouraged to report an incident to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. UFO reports, or ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ (UAP) as they’re now referred to by the Pentagon, will inform AARO’s investigation into the history of alleged U.S. government programs involving aliens. The Pentagon must give a final report on these findings to Congress by next June.

https://gizmodo.com/pentagon-wants-reports-ufo-sightings-from-veterans-1850981391

Online form isn't for just anyone, so stow your crackpot theories for now

Brandon Vigliarolo - Thu 2 Nov 2023 18:45 UTC

The Pentagon's UFO hunters have set up an online form to collect first-hand information about secret US government programs involving unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) published the form this week, but it isn't just for anyone to fill out. The team is looking for reports from current and former US government employees, service members, or contractors with knowledge of any UAP programs going back to 1945 - making this more of a historical survey than a fresh method of capturing contemporary close encounters.

“These reports will be used to inform AARO's congressionally directed Historical Record Report and investigations into alleged US government UAP programs, due to Congress in June of 2024,” AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick said in a Halloween press briefing.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/pentagon_ufo_reporting_form/

Sean Kirkpatrick, the first director of the all-domain anomaly resolution office, blames ‘core group’ of government workers

Richard Luscombe - Sat 27 Jan 2024 08.00 EST

Conspiracy theorists working for and within the US government are perpetuating myths about UFOs that millions of taxpayer dollars are then spent looking into, a “self-licking ice cream cone”, according to the Pentagon’s former chief investigator of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).

Sean Kirkpatrick made the claim in a podcast this week after stepping down last month as the first director of the defense department’s all-domain anomaly resolution office (Aaro). It was set up in 2022 to collate military reports of UAP sightings and to be more transparent about what the government knows. Scott Bray, deputy director of naval intelligence, plays a video of unidentified aerial phenomena during a House intelligence committee hearing in May 2022.

Aaro’s first comprehensive historical record report, which has been submitted to Congress and is set for publication later this year, contains no evidence of the existence of alien life, or any government cover-up, Kirkpatrick says.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/27/sean-kirkpatrick-pentagon-ufo-conspiracy-theory-myths

“The DoD has no overarching UAP policy,” a report says.

Matt Berg - 01/25/2024 02:58 PM EST

The Defense Department’s effort to identify UFOs is “uncoordinated” and could have overlooked threats to the United States, according to an unclassified version of a report from the Pentagon’s internal watchdog released Thursday.

In the report, originally released last August but containing classified sections, the DOD’s inspector general reviewed the department’s policies and procedures for detecting, reporting and analyzing UFO reports that have flooded the department in recent years.

After an investigation, the IG found that the Defense Department doesn’t have a “coordinated approach,” has developed varying processes for collecting and analyzing UFO reports, and has largely excluded regional military commands — which are responsible for detecting and deterring threats against the United States — in developing policies.

“We determined that the DoD has no overarching UAP policy and, as a result, it lacks assurance that national security and flight safety threats to the United States from UAP have been identified and mitigated,” the report said, using the acronym for unidentified anomalous phenomena, which is how the government refers to UFOs.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/25/internal-watchdog-pentagon-ufo-tracking-00137890

Marik von Rennenkampff, Opinion Contributor - 05/01/24 7:00 AM ET

Congress held a historic hearing on UFOs last July. The hearing, which featured testimony from two former Navy fighter pilots and a former senior intelligence officer, garnered a notable amount of attention and interest not seen on Capitol Hill in years.

In one remarkable exchange, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) described how his office received a “protected disclosure” from Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, regarding a January 2023 UFO incident over the Gulf of Mexico. After being stonewalled by the Air Force, he delivered a tense, on-base reminder to the military about “how authorities flow in the United States of America.” The Air Force relented, permitting Gaetz to review sensor data gathered during the encounter.

According to Gaetz, fighter pilots tracked four unknown objects flying in a “clear diamond formation.” Notably, the incident occurred on a training range typically conspicuously free of any airborne clutter.

Still imagery indicated that one of the objects demonstrated capabilities that Gaetz, who has served on the House Armed Services Committee for nearly a decade, was “not able to attach to any human capability, either from the United States or from any of our adversaries.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4632952-the-pentagon-is-lying-about-ufos/

Posted by BeauHD on Saturday August 17, 2024 03:00AM

In his new memoir, Imminent, former senior intelligence official Luis Elizondo claims that a supersecret program has been retrieving technology and biological remains of nonhuman origin for decades, warning that these phenomena could pose a serious national security threat or even an existential threat to humanity. The New York Times reports:

Luis Elizondo made headlines in 2017 when he resigned as a senior intelligence official running a shadowy Pentagon program investigating U.F.O.s and publicly denounced the excessive secrecy, lack of resources and internal opposition that he said were thwarting the effort. Elizondo's disclosures at the time created a sensation. They were buttressed by explosive videos and testimony from Navy pilots who had encountered unexplained aerial phenomena, and led to congressional inquiries, legislation and a 2023 House hearing in which a former U.S. intelligence official testified that the federal government has retrieved crashed objects of nonhuman origin.

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/24/08/17/0349202/an-insiders-perspective-into-the-pentagons-ufo-hunt

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday November 16, 2024 06:34PM

“The Pentagon's latest report on UFOs has revealed hundreds of new reports of unidentified and unexplained aerial phenomena,” reports the Associated Press, “but no indications suggesting an extraterrestrial origin.

“The review includes hundreds of cases of misidentified balloons, birds and satellites as well as some that defy easy explanation, such as a near-miss between a commercial airliner and a mysterious object off the coast of New York.”

Federal efforts to study and identify UAPs have focused on potential threats to national security or air safety and not their science fiction aspects. Officials at the Pentagon office created in 2022 to track UAPs, known as the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, have said there's no indication any of the cases they looked into have unearthly origins. “It is important to underscore that, to date, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology,” the authors of the report wrote… Reporting witnesses included commercial and military pilots as well as ground-based observers. Investigators found explanations for nearly 300 of the incidents. In many cases, the unknown objects were found to be balloons, birds, aircraft, drones or satellites. According to the report, Elon Musk's Starlink satellite system is one increasingly common source as people mistake chains of satellites for UFOs. Hundreds of other cases remain unexplained, though the report's authors stressed that is often because there isn't enough information to draw firm conclusions.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/11/17/0020242/new-pentagon-report-on-ufos-hundreds-of-new-incidents-no-evidence-of-aliens

Mick West - Sep 17, 2019

Several media reports are making much of recent statements from Joseph Gradisher, the spokesperson for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, as relayed by John Greenewald of TheBlackVault.com. Before I get into that, let's recap what I think are the most reasonable hypotheses for the three videos in questions:

Flir1 (also called Nimitz, or TicTac) is a fuzzy blob in the distance. It does not move (although it jumps around when the camera changes zoom settings or does a gimbal lock correction). There's what looks like a final “zipping away at high speed” at the end of the video, but it's actually just the camera no-longer tracking the object, combined with a change in zoom that gives the illusion of speed. See: https://www.metabunk.org/2004-uss-nimitz-tic-tac-ufo-flir-footage-flir1.t9190/

Gimbal is a saucer-shaped infrared glare. It rotates because the camera is rotating to counter gimbal lock. We can prove this because there are other light patterns in the sky that rotate at the same time the glare rotates. The video is consistent with a jet engine several miles away. it does not have any sudden acceleration. See: https://www.metabunk.org/nyt-gimbal-video-of-u-s-navy-jet-encounter-with-unknown-object.t9333/

Go Fast is what looks like a cool object moving rapidly across the surface of the ocean. However, the angles and range on the screen allow us to triangulate the position and speed of the object. It turns out it's actually moving quite slowly (under 50 knots) and is quite high (13,000 feet). It does not accelerate at all. In fact, it most closely resembles a balloon, or possibly even a large gliding bird. See: https://www.metabunk.org/go-fast-footage-from-tom-delonges-to-the-stars-academy-bird-balloon.t9569/

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/are-the-navy-ufos-real-or-just-in-the-low-information-zone-the-liz.10921/

A GREMLIN system is first being used to establish baseline data of aerial activity around a sensitive site so that anomalies can be better spotted in the future.

Howard Altman - Updated 15 November 2024

The Pentagon provided new details today about how its deployable, readily reconfigurable suite of sensors called GREMLIN works to help set the stage for figuring out what unidentified objects in our skies are and are not, if they appear at all.

In its annual report released on Thursday, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) shared a graphic that gives us our best look yet at what its GREMLIN system is. It was developed by Georgia Tech Research Institute specifically to help gather data about so-called unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs. That’s the DoD’s new parlance for what used to be called UFOs.

When AARO last discussed GREMLIN back in March, the office said the system was designed to provide “hyperspectral surveillance to try to capture these incidents.” However, no details were given about what kind of sensors were being used to capture data across different areas of the electromagnetic spectrum simultaneously.

Now deployed, GREMLIN includes 2D and 3D radars, long-range electro-optical/infrared sensors, GPS, satellite communications, aircraft tracking systems and radio frequency spectrum monitoring. It all feeds into a central node where the data can be fused to get a better sense of what’s out there. The system is something of an integrated air defense apparatus ‘in a box,’ allowing for multiple sensor types and open-source data to be captured on single targets within its view.

https://www.twz.com/air/militarys-recently-deployed-ufo-hunting-aerial-surveillance-system-detailed-in-report

Posted by BeauHD on Saturday September 02, 2023 12:00AM

The U.S. Department of Defense has launched a website collecting publicly available, declassified information on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs). “For now, the general public will be able to read through the posted information,” reports CNET. “Soon, US government employees, contractors, and service members with knowledge of US programs can report their own sightings, and later, others will be able to submit reports.” From the report:

“This website will provide information, including photos and videos, on resolved UAP cases as they are declassified and approved for public release,” the department said in a release posted on Thursday. “The website's other content includes reporting trends and a frequently asked questions section as well as links to official reports, transcripts, press releases, and other resources that the public may find useful, such as applicable statutes and aircraft, balloon and satellite tracking sites.”

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/23/09/02/0017225/pentagons-new-ufo-website-lets-you-explore-declassified-sightings-info

The truth is out there and 16 people have been tasked to find it

Laura Dobberstein - Mon 24 Oct 2022 06:32 UTC

NASA has announced the names of 16 individuals who will be a part of its unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) research group that begins work today.

The study into UAP, which NASA defines as sky-based events that cannot be attributed to aircraft or natural phenomena, will take around nine months to complete.

While most people would know these entities as UFOs, US government officials have preferred the acronym UAP in recent years.

Regardless of what they are called, NASA said the team studying them includes “some of the world's leading scientists, data and artificial intelligence practitioners,” and “aerospace safety experts.”

These include NASA alums like Mike Gold and former astronaut Scott Kelly; an individual from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA); academics from University of Delaware and George Mason University, the University of Rhode Island (URI), University of California, San Diego, and other institutions; Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) affiliates; an oceanographer; CEOs; and freelance journalist and former ballerina with a doctorate in genetics, Nadia Drake.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/24/nasa_names_ufo_hunting_team/

The truth is out there.

Mat Smith - October 26, 2022 7:15 AM NASA previously announced that it would create a panel to study “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP), aka UFOs — while saying it doesn't believe they're “extraterrestrial in origin.” (Sure, NASA.)

Now, the space agency has unveiled the 16-member panel that will focus on these unclassified sightings, chaired by David Spergel, former head of astrophysics at Princeton University. Other members include Anamaria Berea, a research affiliate at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Life) Institute in California; retired NASA astronaut and test pilot Scott Kelly; and astrophysicists, science journalists and more.

https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-nasa-reveals-ufo-investigation-panel-111531764.html

Amid ambiguity and poor data, “We don't know exactly what we're looking for.”

Benj Edwards - 6/1/2023, 2:08 PM

On Wednesday, members of the NASA advisory board tasked with studying unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) held its first public meeting, debuting its plan for how it would proceed with a report it is scheduled to write this year. Among many topics discussed, several of its members (and NASA officials) stressed that they were not specifically undertaking a hunt for aliens.

“I want to emphasize this loud and proud that there is absolutely no convincing evidence for extraterrestrial life associated with UAPs,” said Dan Evans, the assistant deputy associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Evans is responsible for orchestrating the study on UAP.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/06/nasa-panel-no-convincing-evidence-for-extraterrestrial-life-connected-with-uaps/

We need better data! If only everyone could carry a high-quality camera and apps to share pics…

Katyanna Quach - Thu 1 Jun 2023 04:14 UTC

Video Experts leading NASA's study on unidentified anomalous phenomena – what we now call UFOs – have studied 800 unclassified events recorded over 27 years, and found that only two to five percent of cases are truly unexplainable.

The panel, formed last year, is made up of 16 people ranging from scientists and biz execs to federal employees and a former astronaut. They've been studying reports of UFO sightings over the past seven months.

In the panel's first public hearing, held on Wednesday, David Spergel, a retired astrophysics professor of Princeton University, called for the need to collect better data to study and understand UAP.

“Right now there's a very limited number of high quality observations and data curation of UAP,” he said in his opening remarks.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/01/nasa_ufo_panel/

Another government report concludes we've never encountered aliens. So why do so many people still believe it?

Lucas Ropek - 19 March 2024

Earlier this month, the Defense Department released a long-awaited report designed to address renewed public interest in unidentified flying objects. UFOs—or, UAP, as they’ve recently been rebranded—have been back in the news a lot lately, thanks largely to a few true believers who think the government has been hiding evidence of extraterrestrials.

The most influential of those true believers is a former high-ranking intelligence official, David Grusch, who left his job at the Pentagon to spread the word about what he says is a “decades-long” conspiracy within parts of the federal government to hide evidence of UFOs. Specifically, Grusch has claimed that the government had a secret UFO retrieval program that was dedicated to recovering and back-engineering “off-world” ships. Grusch has appeared on countless talk shows to discuss his claims and appeared before Congress last summer.

https://gizmodo.com/another-ufo-report-is-a-bust-so-why-do-so-many-people-1851331674

Sean Kirkpatrick has faced threats for his work – and a new report concluding no evidence UAPs represented extraterrestrial tech has sent ufology into a tailspin

Daniel Lavelle - Fri 22 Mar 2024 05.00 EDT

Sean Kirkpatrick doesn’t seem too thrilled to be chatting with me about UFOs. Since taking over the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in 2022 – government-speak for UFO hunting – Kirkpatrick has received violent threats, social-media smear campaigns, and even had to call the FBI after a UFO fanatic showed up at his home.

“I’ve had people threaten my wife and daughter, and try to break into our online accounts – far more than I ever had as the deputy director of intelligence [of US Strategic Command],” Kirkpatrick says. “I didn’t have China and Russia trying to get on me as much as these people are.”

So, after 18 months in the job, Kirkpatrick called it quits last December. Then, last week, AARO published the first part of a report he had worked on that concluded there was no evidence “that any USG [US government] investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP [unidentified aerial phenomenon] represented extraterrestrial technology”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/22/ufologists-sean-kirkpatrick-pentagon-report-uaps

May 20, 2022 11:25 AM / Updated in May 20, 2022 01:49 PM

The US Congress is holding a hearing on unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and its impacts on national security. Here, the hearing had a wide repercussion as it coincided with the anniversary of the so-called “Night of the UFOs in Brazil”.

For some time, the UFOs collection is the most visited in the National Archive of Brazil and UFOs were also the most frequent subject on information requests made to the Brazilian Government after Law 12,527, Brazil's Freedom of Information Act (LAI), was enacted in May of 2012.

Immediately after the law went into effect, the public authorities faced a rush for information about UFOs, with 37 requests for access to information about the matter, leading the Brazilian Air Force to transfer most of its documents on UFOs to the National Archive.

The first request for access to information about UFOs was made the day after LAI came into effect, on 17/05/2012, ten years ago. It was a request asking for access to all documents on UFOs. The answer was that the documents were already being transferred to the National Archive.

https://www.gov.br/en/government-of-brazil/latest-news/2022/official-ufo-night-in-brazil

An astronautical engineering expert runs through the unanswered questions from the US government's UFO report.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-57698819