The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
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Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
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UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
06-09-2024
Secret behind ‘best ever’ UFO sighting revealed
Secret behind ‘best ever’ UFO sighting revealed
An ex- defence intelligence officer has revealed the secret behind the massive, diamond-shaped vehicle in the “world’s best” UFO photo.
Henry Holloway and The Sun
Previously suppressed documents have revealed the secret behind the world’s most famous UFO photo.
Picture: Supplied
A former defence intelligence officer has revealed the secret behind the “world’s best” UFO photo, claiming the massive, diamond-shaped vehicle captured in the image was a top secret US aircraft.
The incredible image, known as “The Calvine Photograph”, shows a huge angular shape hovering over the landscape with a Harrier fighter jet visible in the distance.
It was taken near its namesake, Calvine, a tiny town in central Scotland. The picture was for decades considered a modern myth until it was finally rediscovered and released to the public in August 2022.
The photo — which appeared exactly as had been described by those who had seen it — was found in the hands of a former RAF press officer by a team led by academic and journalist David Clarke.
But while the photo, often has hailed as the “best ever UFO photo”, was found, the mystery still remains. What exactly was the object in the picture, and who took it?
Now, Dr Clarke has told The Sunwhat his years-long investigation into the UFO has uncovered.
The legendary Calvine Photograph showing a UFO and a warplane has been revealed after 30 years
‘Strongest theory’ on secret behind Calvine photograph
Dr Clarke revealed to The Sun that his team has its strongest lead on the photograph to date. They believe the object may have been a piece of top secret and experimental US technology.
This is based on the testimony of a former UK Defence Intelligence officer who revealed, unprompted, that he was tasked with investigating the incident at Calvine.
The defence official, whose credentials were verified by Dr Clarke and his team, explained the UFO was believed to have been a “target designation companion” for F-117 Nighthawk stealth bombers.
The so-called “Calvine Vehicle” was understood to have been unmanned, very large and equipped with a high tech ground-mapping laser.
It was estimated to be between 100ft and 130ft long (30-40m) according to photo analysis by Sheffield Hallam University.
However, it’s not immediately clear the exact nature of the vehicle.
The official, who declined to be named, said it was a “one-in-a-million” chance that the craft was caught on camera — and even flew to Scotland and interviewed the two men who took the original photograph back in August 1990.
He added there was “a hell of a stink” in Washington over the snaps when they were passed up the chain of command and the Americans “went ballistic”.
The “Calvine Vehicle” is understood to have been deployed from the US facility at RAF Machrihanish.
It was spotted and photographed just two days after Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait, sparking the first Gulf War.
RAF Machrihanish is a highly isolated base on the tip of Kintyre peninsula, has a 10,000ft long runway, and was an emergency landing site for the space shuttle.
In the 1960s, the base was titled Naval Aviation Weapons Facility Machrihanish, designed to store “classified weapons”. US forces moved out of the base in 1995.
Redacted documents appearing to remove two "Black Project" vehicles from the UK's report into UFOs
Photos from the Black Project section were also removed
Calvine Photograph linked to numerous other UFO sightings
Numerous reports from the period have RAF Machrihanish at centre of various odd occurrences, such as high speed radar blips and “unusual ear-splitting jet noises” heard in the area.
Dr Clarke revealed it was this intelligence official’s testimony that reignited his interest in the case and triggered his investigation that led to the rediscovery of the photo.
“I was not expecting [the officer] to mention it and I had not intended to ask him about it,” Dr Clarke told The Sun.
“The photographs and sighting weren’t on my list of questions.
“I had arranged to speak to him about the time he spent investigating UFOs for British military intelligence and I simply asked ‘was there any particular incident or sighting that stuck in your mind as being inexplicable or out of the ordinary’ and he just said ‘yes’.”
Dr Clarke went on: “He said it was a one in a million chance. When he dropped this out I was stunned.
“It was obvious he was talking about the Calvine images.”
The officer also alleged the Calvine Vehicle was likely linked to the so-called Belgian UFO Wave from November 1989 to April 1990.
Many witnesses reported seeing a large triangular or diamond shaped object flying at low altitude. Two F-16 fighter aircraft were even dispatched to intercept one of the shapes.
Some claimed to have witnessed the shapes firing “lasers” at the ground, which would appear to match up with the account from the source of Calvine Vehicle being a target finding tool.
MoD documents show how they wanted to respond to the photo back in 1990
Declassified defence report provides yet more clues
Dr Clarke uncovered yet more compelling circumstantial evidence contained with a declassified version of Ministry of Defence’s 463-page, four volume UFO report “Condign”.
Within the report is a section talking about Western “black projects” — which includes the SR-71 stealth fighter, a Mach 3 recon plane that was originally top secret before being made public by the US.
Alongside this section are two heavily redacted sections and two redacted photos.
The MoD has declined to release the unredacted version of the report, stating it was “accidentally destroyed”.
The black projects are discussed in relation to UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) events — a term now commonly used in Washington amid the latest spate of UFO sightings in the US.
“I am confident those images are photographs of a still-top secret US reconnaissance aircraft, possibly the one photographed in Scotland,” Dr Clarke told The Sun.
Meanwhile, the investigators obtained a redacted document which makes mention of a D-notice — an official request to media outlets not to publish a story due to national security concerns.
It also makes reference to “the remaining ASTRA/AURORA” photos. The Aurora was a long rumoured hypersonic US spy plane which is also claimed to have been spotted around the UK in the 90s.
Declassified documents which appear to confirm the MoD cracking down on sightings of secret US tech
US patents filed several years after the Calvine incident have an interesting similarity to the object seen in Scotland
Matthew Illsley, another investigator working with Dr Clarke, told The Sun: “Of course, we don’t know if this was related to Calvine or to some other event.
“But it does lend credence to the idea that secret photos, D-notices and black project aircraft that no one publicly knows about or officially admits to do in fact exist.”
Further fuelling the idea the Calvine Vehicle may have been a piece of experimental US tech is a patent filed by aerospace engine Salvatore Cezar Pais.
Mr Pais, who currently works for the US Space Force, has filed a number of a patents while working for the US Department of the Navy for highly experimental and often almost sci-fi aircraft and propulsion systems.
One of his many granted patents shows a diamond shaped aircraft apparently propelled by microwaves.
His patents are not just works of fancy. The chief technology officer of the US Naval Aviation Enterprise James Sheey once wrote to the US Patent Office in support of Mr Pais’ work and insisting “China is already investing significantly in this area”.
Kevin Russell's name appears on the back of the UFO photo. Dr Clark is trying to track him down.
History of the Calvine Photograph
The Calvine Photo was snapped near its namesake Calvine, a small town in central Scotland.
It is claimed two men stumbled across the jaw dropping scene while hiking or hunting, witnessing the large metallic object as fighter jets made passes in the distance before it shot off into the sky, never to be seen again.
Luckily, they seemed to capture the moment on camera, snapping six photographs of the diamond shaped craft with a fighter plane in the background.
The photos were then were given to the Scotland’s Daily Record newspaper who in turn passed them to the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
For unknown reasons the story was never published and the photos vanished into the black hole of Whitehall, and so began the modern myth of the “Calvine Photograph”.
Five of the other photos taken that night remain lost, one of which reportedly shows the two men posing with the shape in the background.
It is understood the aircraft in the background at Harrier jump jets, which were used by both the US and UK.
Photo analysis undertaken by senior lecturer Andrew Robinson at Sheffield Hallam University indicated the photo was unaltered.
In an extensive 11-page study, he concluded that if the object is a fake, it would had to have had to be hoax staged in front of the camera.
“The image shows no evidence of negative or print based manipulation and all visible signs suggest this is a genuine photograph of the scene before the camera,” Mr Robinson wrote.
Dr David Clarke, right, tracked down former RAF press officer Craig Lindsay.
Picture: UAP Media UK
Researchers call for final piece of the puzzle
Dr Clarke believes his team is very close to solving the mystery, but they need a few final clues.
“I think we are as close as it is possible for anyone to be,” he told The Sun.
“But as my source said, the authorities have been ‘very clever’ with this one and have gone to great lengths to ensure the truth is, annoyingly, still out there.
“They claim to have no records on the photographs other than the sparse papers released in 2009.
“This is patent nonsense as the photographs were, I am told by another intelligence source, classified secret and were the subject of a meeting held in Washington DC in 1992 attended by US and British intelligence.
“I am confident there is a substantial file on the case that contains both copy negatives and detailed analysis of the images.”
He went on: “Given the secrecy that surrounds the story it is no surprise that the photographer and his friend have ‘disappeared’.
“I feel sure they will be aware of the most recent publicity surrounding the photographs but, for whatever reason, continue to prefer to say nothing.
“If the photos are a ‘spoof’ or a hoax, as many have claimed, this seems a strange state of affairs.
“At the very least the photographer owns copyright on the images and deserves to be properly acknowledged as their creator.”
Dr Clarke said he was releasing the bombshell account as his team continues to search for the photographer who took the famous photo. They are urging anyone with information about the man named “Kevin Russell”, whose name appears handwritten on the back of the original print of the photo, to come forward.
Dr Clarke hopes Kevin is the final piece of the puzzle.
The biggest UFO revelation happened in 2022. A mysterious UFO photo from the Calvine incident, which was set to be released on January 1, 2072, was somehow found and released by UAP Media UK. The 1990 Calvine UFO incident is one of the most discussed cases in the UAP community. After 34 years, the colleague of the two British photographers who witnessed and captured this historic UFO photo has finally come forward with an even more bizarre story.
There are many videos and photographs of UFOs on the Internet, and some of them have credibility. However, there is one photograph sent to the UK defense ministry, the MoD, which is considered to be the most spectacular UFO photo, although somehow, it has disappeared. The photograph contains a 100-foot diamond-shaped flying saucer hovering over a village named Calvine in the Scottish Highlands. The photo was taken in 1990.
Vinnie Adams of the UAP Media UK disclosed that his team not only found the original print of the Calvine “UFO,” taken directly from the negatives, but also the original envelope which was sent from the Scottish Daily Record to Craig Lindsay, who was the MOD Press Officer that dealt with the case at the time.
Retired RAF Press Officer Craig Lindsay and Dr. David Clarke. Credit: VINNIE ADAMS
Mail Online has covered the new addition to the Calvine incident. Dr David Clarke, a research fellow and lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University writes that retired chef Richard Grieve, who at the time of the incident was 21, spoke about that mysterious night in 1990 for the first time in 34 years. The story goes like this: (Source)
On a dark, stormy night in Pitlochry, Scotland, a group of young chefs took a break outside their hotel kitchen. Normally, they joked and shared drinks, but this night was different. Two chefs were talking excitedly about seeing a huge, diamond-shaped object hovering silently in the sky while hiking in Calvine a few nights earlier. They took photos and showed them to a newspaper.
As they discussed their experience, a dark car arrived, and two men in black suits emerged, calling the two chefs by name. The rest of the group was ordered to get back inside. The chefs were taken for a private talk.
The following morning, different chefs were on duty. Richard remembered the two chefs being very shaken after the meeting with the men who claimed to be from the Royal Navy. Following the encounter, the chefs felt they were being followed, their behavior changed dramatically, and they eventually left their jobs. Richard never saw them again. One of the chefs hinted that whatever they saw involved Americans.
Dr. David Clarke writes that for over 15 years, he has been deeply intrigued by the “Calvine Incident” and the mystery surrounding the photographs taken by two chefs on that night. His search for the truth has led him from the Highlands of Scotland to the secretive depths of the US Pentagon. Dr. Clarke first discovered the story in 2009 when the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) disbanded its UFO desk and released thousands of files. Among these files, he found the heavily redacted Calvine file, which contained a poor photocopy of the chefs’ photograph.
After years of continued investigation with other experts, Dr. Clarke finally found the original photo at the home of Craig Lindsay, a retired RAF press officer. Lindsay had kept the photo hidden on a bookshelf for 32 years. When Dr. Clarke contacted him in 2022, Lindsay, then in his 80s, revealed he had been waiting for someone to ask about the photo for more than 30 years.
The original Calvine photograph, showing the diamond-shaped craft and a Harrier aircraft in what appears to be close proximity. credit: VINNIE ADAMS From UAP Media UK
In 2022, this Calvine UFO photo was published by the Daily Mail. Dr. Clarke has been flooded with emails from UFO enthusiasts wanting more information and sharing their theories about the object in the photo. Some believe it is an alien spacecraft that was intercepted by Royal Air Force (RAF) jets. Others think that it might be a secret U.S. military project involving advanced technology, like the Hopeless Diamond or Aurora, which is known for its stealth capabilities.
Some skeptics think the photo could be a hoax. Despite all this interest, Dr. Clarke has not been able to contact the two men who had taken the photo. Richard Grieve, who worked at a hotel in Pitlochry where those men were chefs in 1990, mentioned that they seemed to have disappeared.
The name “Kevin Russell” was written on the back of the photo print. The Daily Record newspaper sent the photo to Lindsay. Lindsay then faxed the photo to the Ministry of Defense (MoD) and tried to contact the photographer using the phone number provided by the newspaper. However, there was no luck finding any further information about them.
The chefs who took the photo reported seeing a military Harrier jet flying below the UFO, and another jet circling it. They also said the UFO shot up into the sky without making any noise. Lindsay summarized this account and sent it to the MoD, who told him to let their London office handle it.
Dr. Clarke and a film crew have been looking for Kevin Russell, the photographer of a controversial photo, for 18 months. They found 140 people named Kevin Russell, but none admitted to taking the photo. It is possible the name is fake, or the real photographer is still too scared to come forward.
Richard Grieve believes they were genuinely frightened and would not have made up the story. After developing the photos, one chef took a bus to Glasgow to deliver them to the Daily Record newspaper. Soon after, a mysterious dark car appeared. One chef hinted to Richard that “it was the Americans,” suggesting U.S. involvement. The Ministry of Defence refuses to release information about the photos, saying the negatives were returned to the newspaper and all other records were sent to The National Archives or destroyed.
The MoD file mentions that analysis of one of the missing images revealed a second jet in the distance, making a hoax even less likely. The images underwent at least three separate analyses by UK and US government agencies. A 1990 briefing for Defence Minister Ken Carlisle concluded that the jet in the photo was likely a Harrier, even though no Harriers were known to be flying in Scotland that evening. The experts could not definitively identify the diamond-shaped object.
Despite preparing for a story, the Daily Record never published the photos. Malcolm Speed, a former news editor at the paper, recalls seeing the photos and being surprised they were not published, especially after being told by the picture editor, Andy Allan, that the RAF said they were fakes. Andy Allan, who passed away in 2007, could not provide his account, leaving Malcolm Speed to wonder if Andy was misled by the RAF.
Richard Grieve who is now 55 describes the mysterious night of 1990. Image via Dail Mail
Dr. Clarke noted the sighting’s date, August 4, 1990, coincided with the early stages of the Gulf War. The US military was mobilizing many resources, including the F117A stealth fighter, which had been in development for years and resembled the object photographed in Scotland. The US government has since admitted to flying prototype aircraft that looked like UFOs, including triangle-shaped ones capable of hovering. The Calvine UFO might have been one of these prototypes.
The US Department of Defence’s All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) recently released a report stating that many UFO sightings were actually misidentified highly sensitive national security programs. The report refers to a 1990s sighting near a US military facility, possibly Area 51, where experimental aircraft were tested. This sighting had characteristics matching those of a secret platform being tested at the time.
Dr. Clarke suggests that what the chefs saw over Calvine might have been one of these secret American prototype aircraft.
According to a 30-year rule in the UK, the MoD was supposed to release the secret UFO dossier on January 1, 2021, but the UK government banned the release for another 50 years. This secret file is said to contain the infamous UFO photo from the Calvine incident. Now, it is set to be released on January 1, 2072.
UAP Media UK has been working hard to bring a serious resource to British media outlets on the discussion of UFOs. One of the members of this project, Vinnie Adams had been working with Dr. Clarke and a small team of researchers on the Calvine case from 1990 in Scotland.
In May 2022, Dr. Clarke interviewed Craig in Scotland and was shown the original print. In June, Craig agreed to donate the photograph to the Sheffield Hallam University Archives, handing it to Dr. Clarke and Vinnie Adams. The image now resides in its new home at the Sheffield Hallam University folklore archives.
Authenticity of Calvine UFO Photo
Andrew Robinson, a senior lecturer in Photography at Sheffield Hallam University claims the authenticity of the 1990 Scottish highlands UFO photo. In his detailed analysis, he found the image showing no evidence of negative or print-based manipulation, and all visible signs suggest this is a genuine photograph of the scene before the camera. (Source)
Robinson concluded in his study:
1. The photograph is a color print from XP-1 or XP-2 chromogenic Black and White C41 film printed on a standard;
2. It is not possible to identify the object in the center of the frame. However, the evidence present suggests that this object was in front of the camera in the position shown when the photograph was captured;
3. Thus it follows that this is either a genuine unidentified flying object in the sky OR that any construction or manipulation used to create this effect occurred in front of the camera and not in the capturing of the scene on film nor in the subsequent processing and printing of the image;
4. The results of this analysis are consistent with, and support the claimed heritage of the print.
Alien Visitation Claims Are Widespread Societal Problem, Researcher Says
Alien Visitation Claims Are Widespread Societal Problem, Researcher Says
Around a fifth of U.K. citizens believe Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials, and an estimated 7% believe that they have seen a UFO. The figures are even higher in the U.S. — and rising. The number of people who believe UFO sightings offer likely proof of alien life increased from 20% in 1996 to 34% in 2022. Some 24% of Americans say they’ve seen a UFO. In his new paper in the Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, Dr. Tony Milligan of King’s College London argues that the belief in alien visitors is no longer a quirk, but a widespread societal problem.
The idea that aliens may have visited our planet is becoming increasingly popular.
Image credit: Fernando Ribas.
The belief is now rising to the extent that politicians, at least in the U.S., feel they have to respond.
The disclosure of information about claimed UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) from the Pentagon has got a lot of bi-partisan attention in the country.
Much of it plays upon familiar anti-elite tropes that both parties have been ready to use, such as the idea that the military and a secretive cabal of private commercial interests are keeping the deep truth about alien visitation hidden.
That truth is believed to involve sightings, abductions and reverse-engineered alien technology.
Belief in a cover-up is even higher than belief in alien visitation. In 2019, a Gallop poll found that a staggering 68% of Americans believed that the US government knows more about UFOs than it is telling.
This political trend has been decades in the making. Jimmy Carter promised document disclosure during his presidential campaign in 1976, several years after his own reported UFO sighting. Like so many other sightings, the simplest explanation is that he saw Venus.
Hillary Clinton also suggested she wanted to ‘open Pentagon files as much as I can’ during her presidential campaign against Donald Trump.
Trump suggested he’d need to ‘think about’ whether it was possible to declassify the so-called Roswell documentation.
Former president Bill Clinton claimed to have sent his chief of staff, John Podesta, down to Area 51, a highly classified US Air Force facility, just in case any of the rumors about alien technology at the site were true. It is worth nothing that Podesta is a long-time enthusiast for all things to do with UFOs.
The most prominent current advocate of document disclosure is the Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer.
His stripped back 2023 UAP disclosure bill for revealing some UAP records was co-sponsored by three Republican senators.
Pentagon disclosure finally began during the early stages of Joe Biden’s term of office, but so far there has been nothing to see. Nothing looks like an encounter. Nothing looks close.
Still, the background noise does not go away.
This artist’s impression shows the first interstellar asteroid — 1I/2017 U1 (’Oumuamua).
Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO.
Problems for Society
All this is ultimately encouraging conspiracy theories, which could undermine trust in democratic institutions.
There have been humorous calls to storm Area 51.
And after the storming of the Capitol in 2021, this now looks like an increasingly dangerous possibility.
Too much background noise about UFOs and UAPs can also get in the way of legitimate science communication about the possibility of finding microbial extraterrestrial life.
Astrobiology, the science dealing with such matters, has a far less effective publicity machine than UFOlogy.
History, a YouTube channel part owned by Disney, regularly delivers shows about ‘ancient aliens.’ The show is now in its 20th season and the channel has 13.8 million subscribers.
The NASA astrobiology channel has a hard won 20,000 subscribers. Actual science finds itself badly outnumbered by entertainment repackaged as factual.
Alien visitation narratives have also repeatedly tried to hijack and overwrite the history and mythology of indigenous people.
The first steps in this direction go back to Alexander Kazantsev’s science fiction tale Explosion: The Story of a Hypothesis (1946). It presents the 1908 Tunguska meteorite impact event as a Nagasaki-like explosion of an alien spacecraft engine.
In Kazantsev’s tale, a single giant black female survivor has been left stranded, equipped with special healing powers. This led to her adoption as a shaman by the indigenous Evenki people.
NASA and the space science community do support efforts such as the Native Skywatchers initiative set up by the indigenous Ojibwe and Lakota communities to ensure the survival of storytelling about the stars. There is a real and extensive network of indigenous scholarship about these matters.
But UFOlogists promise a far higher profile for indigenous history in return for the mashing together of genuine indigenous stories about life arriving from the skies with fictional tales about UFOs, repackaged as suppressed history.
The modern alien visitation narrative has not, after all, emerged out of indigenous communities. Quite the opposite.
It emerged in part as a way for conspiracy-minded thinkers in a Europe torn apart by racism to ‘explain’ how complex urban civilizations in places like South America could have existed prior to European settlement.
Squeezed through a new age filter of 1960s counterculture, the narrative was flipped to value indigenous people as having once possessed advanced technology.
Once upon a time, according to this view, every indigenous civilization was Wakanda, a fictional country appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics.
If all of this stayed in its own box, as entertaining fiction, then matters would be fine. But it doesn’t, and they aren’t. Visitation narratives tend to overwrite indigenous storytelling about sky and ground.
This is a problem for everyone, not just indigenous peoples struggling to continue authentic traditions. It threatens our grasp of the past. When it comes to insight into our remote ancestors, the remnants of prehistoric storytelling are few and precious, such as within indigenous storytelling about the stars.
Take the tales of the Pleiades, which date back in standard forms to at least 50,000 years ago.
This may be why these tales in particular are heavily targeted by alien visitation enthusiasts, some of whom even claim to be Pleiadeans.
No surprises, Pleiadeans do not look like the Lakota or Ojibwe, but are strikingly blond, blue-eyed and Nordic.
It is increasingly clear that belief in alien visitation is no longer just a fun speculation, but something that has real and damaging consequences.
Tony Milligan. 2024. Equivocal encounters: alien visitation claims as a societal problem. In Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union: IAUS (387). Cambridge University Press
Author: Tony Milligan, a research fellow at King’s College London.
According to findings in a recent study, UFO witnesses may not be prone to misperceptions or related cognitive factors but instead may possess specific personality traits that increase their likelihood of encountering such phenomena.
Clinical Psychologist Dr. Daniel Stubbings from Cardiff Metropolitan University and his team found there are numerous factors that contribute to an individual thinking they witnessed what the U.S. Department of Defense now calls unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).
Their study, published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, examines the big five personality traits: extraversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, along with schizotypy traits (behaviors that resemble schizophrenia), to help determine if UAP experiencers could be distinguished from those who had not reported seeing a UAP.
The Big Five Personality Traits: What Are They?
In the 1970s, two research teams—one led by Paul Costa and Robert R. McCrae of the National Institutes of Health and the other by Warren Norman and Lewis Goldberg of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Oregon—found that most human character traits can be explained by five dimensions. Surveys of thousands of individuals uncovered these mostly distinct traits:
Neuroticism:Emotional stability; individuals with high scores are characterized by anxiety, inhibition, moodiness, and lower self-assurance.
Extroversion:Encompasses cheerfulness, initiative, and communicativeness.
Openness: Fond of innovation and displays of creativity.
Agreeableness:Dictates how they interact with others. Other traits include being friendly, empathetic, and warm.
Conscientiousness:Gauges a person’s level of organization. Individuals with high scores are motivated, disciplined, and trustworthy.
The Findings
Dr. Stubbings’ experiment involved 206 participants, including 103 who said they had witnessed or self-reported seeing a UAP. The team analyzed personality traits to see how participants naturally grouped together.
The study consisted of three groups. Group one had average traits, whereas the second group, designated the Neurotic/Schizotypy group, was high on neuroticism and schizotypy traits. The last controlled group, labelled O-ACE, was found to have high openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion but low neuroticism and schizotypy traits.
“These were the groups that ‘emerged’ out of the data analysis,” Dr. Stubbings told The Debrief. “The latent profile analysis demonstrated these three patterns of personality profiles. Prior research looked at correlation and regression (predictive patterns) but not a latent (underlying) profile.”
“This was a new finding,” Stubbings told The Debrief.
The study concluded that the third group, O-ACE, was more likely to see UAPs. Over the years, stigma and stereotypes have helped create narratives that people who see UAPs are more than likely emotionally reactive; in other words, they may display neurotic behavior and are prone to perceptual and cognitive abnormalities.
However, the recent data does not appear to support this narrative. Instead, Dr. Stubbings and his coauthors state in their paper that the “descriptive UAP accounts by the general public were similar to the descriptions provided by military witnesses.”
Stubbings, when asked why people with high conscientiousness see UFOs, said it is difficult to answer such a question based on the current data in-hand.
“Our data indicates that there is a small statistical relationship, but further research should explore why that relationship exists,” Stubings told The Debrief. “But my guess is that people who are high in conscientiousness might be more willing to admit to themselves that they have seen something and believe it is the right thing to do to admit it.”
However, Stubbings notes that conscientiousness alone is probably not everything in this equation, but instead, combinations of other variables—specifically low scores in Neuroticism and higher scores in Openness, also contribute.
“We need further research to explore the nuances of these personality factors in the emergence of both belief and experience.”
Dr. Stubbings also noted that “only 28 percent of participants reported their sightings anywhere, and 14 percent used a UFO reporting organization, which suggests that events are vastly underreported.” His paper also suggested that stigma and a lack of proper reporting avenues were the main obstacles impacting their willingness to report their sightings.
Dr. Stubbings initiated his research by referencing an older academic paper on UAPs published in the Applied Cognitive Psychology Journal in 2011, which found that certain personality factors were predictors of an individual’s belief in UFOs.
“This is relevant to the UFO topic more broadly because what people perceive and recall tends to be in line with their beliefs,” Stubbings told The Debrief. “If beliefs can be predicted by personality factors, then it supports the notion that it is a particular kind of person who is more prone to belief in UAPs, and in turn, they end up seeing and recalling what they believe to be true.”
“In other words, people see UAP not because they are there but because of the conviction of their beliefs, which are influenced by their personality dispositions.
“So the idea was born to change the dependent variable of ‘belief’ to ‘have you had a sighting.’ Those who believe in UFOs/UAP might not have the same characteristics [as] those that report to have seen what they believe to be a UAP.”
Fundamentally, Stubbings says that in addition to understanding the kinds of personality traits and psychological drivers that may contribute to a person’s likelihood of observing and reporting UAP, scientists need to be engaging in dialogue about the assessment, diagnosis, formulation, and treatment of mental health distress in individuals who claim to have observed UAP or even had direct contact with purported NHI.
“This topic is one of the most fascinating areas,” Stubbings told The Debrief, “and I believe other scientists from around the world need to help address this mystery.”
Stubbings and his colleagues Sophie Ali and Alexander Wong’s new paper, “Who Sees UFOs? The Relationship Between Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Sightings And Personality Factors,” appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration.
In our twenty-fourth episode of Unsolved Canadian Mysteries, Kenton de Jong and Dylan Fairman discuss Edwin Fuhr’s close encounter of the second kind, which occurred on Septemeber 1st, 1974.
Edwin Fuhr was a farmer near Langenburg, Saskatchewan and was out one morning harvesting his canola, when he rode his swather up a small hill on his property. From this vantage point, he saw five strange metallic objects in a semi-circle-like shape, all hovering silently near a slough. He approached the objects on foot, noticing their dimensions, the speed in which they were rotating, and any feelings of uneasiness he felt near them,
He then returned to his swather and waited until eventually the objects flew up and away from him, blasting him with steam.
He would return home to tell his family what he saw, only to discover time had passed. After lunch, we went out to the spot with his father to show him where the objects were hovering. It was around this time that Edwin’s wife told his sister, and his sister told her husband and her husband called the RCMP.
It was after this moment that Edwin’s life changed, a mass of humanity descended upon his farm.
What did Edwin see that day in 1974? Was it alien in origin? Was it a secret military aircraft? And did he really get a call from Neil Armstrong? Listen to the podcast and find out!
A top UFO debunker has revealed the bizarre case that still puzzles him to this day.
Scores of people, including military experts, have recorded eerie videos appearing to show UAPs - unidentified aerial phenomena - over the years and often seek answers by posting them online.
Mick West, of Sacramento, California, uses a range of tools to help explain these mysteries - but has been stumped by one Navy video of a UFO that was leaked by The New York Times.
The footage released in 2017 had been taken by a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot two years earlier and appears to show a UFO following the jet from the USS Theodore Roosevelt after the object had been detected by radar off the East Coast.
In the infrared cockpit video, the incredible high-speed object seemingly breaks the laws of physics - with the two pilots heard debating whether or not it was a drone.
Mick West, of Sacramento, California, uses several tools to debunk random flying objects, including FlightAware, Flight Radar 24, and Invisor. But his biggest help is Sitrec that integrates flight data, video, and satellite imagery
One case that piqued West's interest is footage taken by Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot Ryan Graves. West wants to review the original video files himself to better understand their data
Combing over the footage, West, who often relies on data surrounding the video to debunk recorded events, investigated the clip and tried to work out the rotation of the camera and the glare on the lens. Still, he was left with no answers.
West is now hoping to gain access to the original radar data instead of the analysis the government released so he can recreate the phenomenon - and rule out any reasonable explanations.
As part of his approach, West uses multiple tools including FlightAware, Flight Radar 24 and Invisor, an app that gives information on video, audio, and photos such as resolutions and the date they were taken.
But his biggest resource is Sitrec - a tool he designed himself that stands for 'situation recreation' - which integrates flight data, video and satellite imagery to paint a full picture, he told Popular Mechanics.
'You have to be very careful about what you're looking at...for me, that's the very first step in investigating a case,' West, who has investigated around 1,000 UFO cases, told the outlet.
Last month, the former video game programmer spotted a white, elongated object from a plane window while he was flying to Pasadena and took a quick video of it.
'It’s not an intuitive thing, and if you don’t delve too deeply into it, [you’ll be wrong],' said West, who programmed Tony Hawk's Pro Series games
'It can be very difficult to figure out…but you have no choice,' he added (Pictured: Sitrec)
He thought was just another airplane - a conclusion he would be right about - but he found himself needing to investigate the matter personally, he told Popular Mechanics.
When he got to his hotel room, he used Photoshop to closely look at the image and downloaded the GPS routes from his flight and a few others in the area from FlightAware.com.
In order for West to find an answer, he has to look at simultaneous events and see how they all fit into the bigger picture.
His plane wasn't the only in the air, so he had to look at other flight paths, as well as weather phenomenon and satellite data.
He also looks closely at the video angle, In his case, he knew the video he took was several thousand feet above ground and the object was below him.
He used Flight Aware 24 to configure where other nearby planes were so he could 'figure out what’s actually in the air at a particular time,' he told Popular Mechanics.
West then zoomed in on his own flight and found the exact location of his plane when he took the video.
'I knew I was sitting on the right side of the plane,' he told the outlet.
The map showed him a 'likely contender' - a plane that had taken off from LA's Van Nuys Airport.
'That matches what we see in the video,' he told Popular Mechanics.
He then used Sitrec - which an unidentified organization paid him to develop and make publicly accessible - to point the camera from his plane directly down onto where the other plane was traveling.
'I set the camera to point from my plane to the other two. One of them matched exactly. It was a small Cessna,' he told the outlet. 'This confirms that this was the plane I was actually looking at.'
One Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UPA) - the term that took over for UFO in 2023 - that piqued West's interest appeared in footage the Chilean Navy caught of a black blob leaving streaks behind it in 2014, he told Popular Mechanics.
The Chilean military investigated the footage for roughly two years and boldly determined it to be aliens.
He determined the black blob seen by Chilean authorities was just a plane that had just departed from Santiago Airport, and the reason it appeared black in the footage their Navy had captured was because it was taken on a thermal camera and the plane was hotter than the surrounding area
However, West, thanks to Sitrec, came to a more reasonable conclusion and documented his investigation on YouTube.
He determined the black blob to be a plane that had just departed from Santiago Airport. He claimed the reason it appeared black in the footage captured by the Navy was because it was taken on a thermal camera and the plane was hotter than the surrounding area.
'It’s not an intuitive thing, and if you don’t delve too deeply into it, [you’ll be wrong],' West, who programmed Tony Hawk's Pro Series games, told the outlet.
As for the streaks the Navy recorded, he explained that these were just the airplane's engines leaving contrails.
West claimed that the Chilean Navy also got the flight path wrong.
'They thought they were looking at an object that was moving left to right.
'In fact, what they were looking at was this plane, just departed from Santiago Airport that had looped around to gain height over the mountains,' he said.
Using his program, he was able to successfully simulate the plane's movements by accounting for the camera angle and matched it to flight records.
West thinks his video game programming days helped condition him for the life of debunking UFOs as he spent 'an inordinate amount of time on this trivial little thing, this one intractable little bug that is just causing this problem' during his former profession.
West thinks his video game programming days helped condition him for the life of debunking UFOs as he spent 'an inordinate amount of time on this trivial little thing, this one intractable little bug that is just causing this problem' during his former profession
UFO sightings over America's nuclear arsenal appeared to shift their interest from the making of the bombs to silos and bomber bases as the Cold War arms race grew (above)
'It can be very difficult to figure out… but you have no choice,' he told Popular Mechanics.
He finds debunking claims of alien sightings has the same rigor as programming a game and tied with his fascination with conspiracy theories, it ignited his passion for investigating UAP.
However, other experts remain convinced that UFO activity is real and seemingly has some connection to nuclear sites.
The former head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, Lue Elizondo, agreed that there 'seems to be a lot of correlation' between UFO appearances and nuclear sites.
And independent researcher Robert Hastings, who has been working toward full government disclosure of UAP activity, said in 2010, 'Declassified US government documents and witness testimony from former or retired US military personnel confirm beyond any doubt the reality of ongoing UFO incursions at nuclear weapons sites.'
Now, new research — in the form of three studies helmed by a retired US Air Force staff sergeant, Larry Hancock, and a data analyst affiliate with Harvard's UFO-hunting Galileo Project, Ian Porritt — shows that not only has there been unusual activity around nuclear weapons and facilities, it has shifted over the years.
At first seemingly interested in the production of nuclear weapons, UFO sightings later sprang up around silos and bomber bases.
'You would see this interest at silos when they were being installed before 'the activity would drop off,' Porritt previously told the DailyMail.com.
Eerily similar to these encounters are the instances of UAPs following fighter jets that were disclosed by the UAP Task Force, including a 'giant Tic Tac' UFO witnessed by Navy veteran fighter pilot Commander David Fravor in 2004.
Fravor's fellow co-pilot Chad Underwood witnessed the 'perfectly white' wingless oblong captured by his cockpit's in-flight video.
According to findings in a recent study, UFO witnesses may not be prone to misperceptions or related cognitive factors but instead may possess specific personality traits that increase their likelihood of encountering such phenomena.
Clinical Psychologist Dr. Daniel Stubbings from Cardiff Metropolitan University and his team found there are numerous factors that contribute to an individual thinking they witnessed what the U.S. Department of Defense now calls unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).
Their study, published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, examines the big five personality traits: extraversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, along with schizotypy traits (behaviors that resemble schizophrenia), to help determine if UAP experiencers could be distinguished from those who had not reported seeing a UAP.
The Big Five Personality Traits: What Are They?
In the 1970s, two research teams—one led by Paul Costa and Robert R. McCrae of the National Institutes of Health and the other by Warren Norman and Lewis Goldberg of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Oregon—found that most human character traits can be explained by five dimensions. Surveys of thousands of individuals uncovered these mostly distinct traits:
Neuroticism: Emotional stability; individuals with high scores are characterized by anxiety, inhibition, moodiness, and lower self-assurance.
Extroversion: Encompasses cheerfulness, initiative, and communicativeness.
Openness: Fond of innovation and displays of creativity.
Agreeableness: Dictates how they interact with others. Other traits include being friendly, empathetic, and warm.
Conscientiousness: Gauges a person’s level of organization. Individuals with high scores are motivated, disciplined, and trustworthy.
The Findings
Dr. Stubbings’ experiment involved 206 participants, including 103 who said they had witnessed or self-reported seeing a UAP. The team analyzed personality traits to see how participants naturally grouped together.
The study consisted of three groups. Group one had average traits, whereas the second group, designated the Neurotic/Schizotypy group, was high on neuroticism and schizotypy traits. The last controlled group, labelled O-ACE, was found to have high openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion but low neuroticism and schizotypy traits.
“These were the groups that ‘emerged’ out of the data analysis,” Dr. Stubbings told The Debrief. “The latent profile analysis demonstrated these three patterns of personality profiles. Prior research looked at correlation and regression (predictive patterns) but not a latent (underlying) profile.”
“This was a new finding,” Stubbings told The Debrief.
The study concluded that the third group, O-ACE, was more likely to see UAPs. Over the years, stigma and stereotypes have helped create narratives that people who see UAPs are more than likely emotionally reactive; in other words, they may display neurotic behavior and are prone to perceptual and cognitive abnormalities.
However, the recent data does not appear to support this narrative. Instead, Dr. Stubbings and his coauthors state in their paper that the “descriptive UAP accounts by the general public were similar to the descriptions provided by military witnesses.”
Stubbings, when asked why people with high conscientiousness see UFOs, said it is difficult to answer such a question based on the current data in-hand.
“Our data indicates that there is a small statistical relationship, but further research should explore why that relationship exists,” Stubings told The Debrief. “But my guess is that people who are high in conscientiousness might be more willing to admit to themselves that they have seen something and believe it is the right thing to do to admit it.”
However, Stubbings notes that conscientiousness alone is probably not everything in this equation, but instead, combinations of other variables—specifically low scores in Neuroticism and higher scores in Openness, also contribute.
“We need further research to explore the nuances of these personality factors in the emergence of both belief and experience.”
Dr. Stubbings also noted that “only 28 percent of participants reported their sightings anywhere, and 14 percent used a UFO reporting organization, which suggests that events are vastly underreported.” His paper also suggested that stigma and a lack of proper reporting avenues were the main obstacles impacting their willingness to report their sightings.
Dr. Stubbings initiated his research by referencing an older academic paper on UAPs published in the Applied Cognitive Psychology Journal in 2011, which found that certain personality factors were predictors of an individual’s belief in UFOs.
“This is relevant to the UFO topic more broadly because what people perceive and recall tends to be in line with their beliefs,” Stubbings told The Debrief. “If beliefs can be predicted by personality factors, then it supports the notion that it is a particular kind of person who is more prone to belief in UAPs, and in turn, they end up seeing and recalling what they believe to be true.”
“In other words, people see UAP not because they are there but because of the conviction of their beliefs, which are influenced by their personality dispositions.
“So the idea was born to change the dependent variable of ‘belief’ to ‘have you had a sighting.’ Those who believe in UFOs/UAP might not have the same characteristics [as] those that report to have seen what they believe to be a UAP.”
Fundamentally, Stubbings says that in addition to understanding the kinds of personality traits and psychological drivers that may contribute to a person’s likelihood of observing and reporting UAP, scientists need to be engaging in dialogue about the assessment, diagnosis, formulation, and treatment of mental health distress in individuals who claim to have observed UAP or even had direct contact with purported NHI.
“This topic is one of the most fascinating areas,” Stubbings told The Debrief, “and I believe other scientists from around the world need to help address this mystery.”
Stubbings and his colleagues Sophie Ali and Alexander Wong’s new paper, “Who Sees UFOs? The Relationship Between Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Sightings And Personality Factors,” appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration.
'There was no denying it': Retired fighter pilot and mother-of-three who saw Tic-Tac UFOs in 2004 says Navy crew kept quiet due to fears of being labeled 'kooky'
'There was no denying it': Retired fighter pilot and mother-of-three who saw Tic-Tac UFOs in 2004 says Navy crew kept quiet due to fears of being labeled 'kooky'
Alex Dietrich, 41, was on patrol near San Diego in 2004 when she saw a Tic Tac-shaped UFO appear flying at pace and erratically
When her Navy commander went into for a closer look, the object began mimicking its movements and then disappeared
The mother of three and former Lt. Cmdr. says she feels a 'duty and obligation' to speak out about what she saw
She says other pilots were fearful of speaking about UFOs as they would be dismissed for being 'kooky'
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is to release its report about unidentified aerial phenomena sightings by military personnel next month
A former fighter pilot who saw Tic Tac-shaped UFOs in 2004 says her Navy colleagues stayed quiet for fear of being labeled 'kooky'.
Mother-of-three Alex Dietrich, 41, says she feels a 'duty' to speak up about her close encounter with unidentified aerial phenomena because she sees it as a vital matter of national security.
Dietrich appeared on a recent 60 Minutes special on unexplained aerial phenomena and also speaks regularly to House and Senate enquiries into UFOs, and says military pilots fear the stigma of being associated with UFOs.
'I do feel a duty and obligation,' the former Lt. Cmdr. told the Washington Post when asked why she was open to talking about her experiences, unlike many of her former colleagues.
'I was in a taxpayer-funded aircraft, doing my job as a military officer,' she told the Post.
'Citizens have questions. It's not classified. If I can share or help give a reasonable response, I will.'
The Director of National Intelligence and other agencies is due to release a highly-anticipated report on UFOs to Congress next month.
Former fighter pilot Alex Dietrich, 41, was on patrol near San Diego in 2004 when she saw a Tic Tac-shaped UFO appear flying at pace and erratically
When her Navy commander Dave Fravor went into for a closer look, the object began mimicking its movements and then disappeared
Dietrich was one of six Super Hornet pilots who saw the object, but says many fear being labeled 'kooky' for speaking out about what they saw
Last April, the infamous 'Tic Tac' incident was one of three videos released by the Pentagon which showed footage of 'unexplained aerial phenomena' taken by US Navy pilots.
At least six pilots, including Dietrich, encountered the mysterious object as it flew at speed over the Pacific near Mexico on November 14, 2004. The way it moved has led to speculation that it was a UFO and it has become a key piece of evidence for those who believe in extraterrestrials.
Recalling that day, Dietrich says she had recently got her stripes as a fighter pilot and was on a regular training flight in her Super Hornet with the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group when she noticed an unfamiliar object flying at speed and erratically.
A video of the encounter, verified by the Pentagon as authentic, showed the astonished reactions of the pilots as they watch the objects fly at great speed and with sudden changes in direction.
Her commanding officer Dave Fravor told Dietrich to stay back while he went closer to investigate. The object began to mimic his movements, and then flew off and disappeared.
These unidentified vehicles were reported to have descended 80,000 feet in less than a second.
Seconds later, he said, it reappeared on the the USS Princeton's radar 60 miles away.
Dietrich tweeted recently: 'Some days your boss asks you to swab the deck. Some days he asks you to keep high cover while he spars with a UFO.'
While recounting the incident to 60 Minutes, Dietrich said other fighter pilots had struggled with how much to reveal to the public about what they had seen.
'Over beers we've said, 'Hey man, if I saw this solo, I don't know that I would have come back and said anything,'' Dietrich said during the interview.
'Because it sounds so crazy when I say it.'
Now a tutor George Washington University and the US Naval Academy, Dietrich told 60 Minutes: 'I felt the vulnerability of not having anything to defend ourselves. And then I felt confused when it disappeared.'
Dietrich told the Washington Post that people had got in contact over the years with her wanting to know more about what she had seen.
'I just was an eyewitness to something in the course of my normal duties . . . that somehow makes me a portal.'
Dietrich says she had recently got her stripes as a fighter pilot and was on a regular training flight in her Super Hornet with the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group when she noticed an unfamiliar object flying at speed and erratically on November 14 2004
'Over beers we've said, 'Hey man, if I saw this solo, I don't know that I would have come back and said anything,'' Dietrich said during the interview. 'Because it sounds so crazy when I say it'
'Some days your boss asks you to swab the deck. Some days he asks you to keep high cover while he spars with a UFO' she tweeted recently
Why are people suddenly interested, Dietrich wondered in a tweet after the 60 Minutes special aired
The mother of three now teaches at the US Naval Academy and George Washington University
In an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo, Sean Cahil - a retired US Navy Chief Master-at-Arms on the USS Princeton (pictured) - spoke about the sighting of a UFO that has become known as the 'Tic-Tac', because of its shape
Marco Rubio says many lawmakers in Congress 'giggle' when the topic of UFOs comes up, but that the national security threat needed to be taken seriously
Ahead of next month's blockbuster intelligence report to Congress on military sightings of UFOs, retired Navy officers have been warning of the dire threat the mystery objects could pose.
'The technology that we witnessed with the Tic Tac was something we would not have been able to defend our forces against at the time,' Sean Cahil - a retired US Navy Chief Master-at-Arms - told CNN's Chris Cuomo of one recently-released video.
'What we saw in the Tic Tac is the five observables. [These] indicate a technology that outstrips our arsenal by at least 100 to 1000 years at the moment.'
Footage released recently week confirmed as real by the Pentagon appeared to show a UFO buzz a United States stealth ship near San Diego before diving under the water.
Commenting on the video, an ex-navy officer said that the technology on display is 100 to 1000 years ahead of that possessed by the United States.
'What we're seeing are a number of distinct and different things,' he said.
'Sometimes we're seeing a 50-foot object that can travel at hypersonic speeds and seemingly go into orbit or come down from altitudes of potentially above 100,000 feet.'
He added that the social stigma around reporting such events has for a long time kept witnesses of such phenomena quiet.
The Department of Defense's watchdog is also expected to examine how the Pentagon has handled UFO reports, with a source telling CNN earlier this month that there will be more enquiries announced in the near future.
The Pentagon released three short videos from infrared cameras In April 2020 that appeared to show flying objects moving quickly, after the veracity of the videos had been acknowledged in September 2019 ahead of their official release.
It came as Senator Marco Rubio warned that UFOs pose a serious threat to national security and can no longer be laughed off by lawmakers.
'Some of my colleagues are very interested in this topic and some kinda, you know, giggle when you bring it up. But I don't think we can allow the stigma to keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question.'
Rubio said the possibility that drones or aircraft from a rival military power - or from another civilization - were entering US airspace without permission should be getting more attention and resources.
'I want us to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously,' Rubio told 60 Minutes.
'Tic Tac' UFO: US Navy pilot made visual contact with the object on November 14, 2004
At least six Super Hornet pilots made visual or instrument contact with the UFO on November 14, 2004.
The encounters, which are documented in numerous interviews with first-hand witnesses, remain a mystery, and the object's incredible speed and movements have led to speculation that it was extraterrestrial in origin.
The original FLIR video from the USS Nimitz encounters leaked online as early as 2007.
Witnesses say that clips of the video had been circulated widely on the Navy's intranet - used to communicate between ships in the carrier group - and an unknown sailor in the group likely first leaked it.
The USS Nimitz, a US Navy aircraft carrier, was at the center of a bizarre UFO sighting saga in 2004.
The clip became one of the most-touted pieces of evidence in the UFO community when the Pentagon confirmed its authenticity in 2017.
In January, Chad Underwood, the former Navy aviator who shot the famous leaked video clip, broke his silence in an interview with New York Magazine.
He said the oblong, wingless 'Tic Tac' shaped object was spotted off the coast of Mexico over the Pacific.
He also revealed that for about two weeks, the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Princeton, part of Carrier Strike Group 11, had been tracking mysterious aircraft intermittently on an advanced AN/SPY-1B passive radar.
The radar contacts were so inexplicable that the system was even shut down and restarted to to check for bugs - but operators continued to track the unknown aircraft.
Then on November 14, Commander David Fravor says he was flying in an F/A-18F Super Hornet when he made visual contact with the object, which seemed to dive below the water, resurface, and speed out of sight when he tried to approach it.
As Fravor landed on the deck of the Nimitz, Underwood was just gearing up to take off on his own training run.
Fravor told Underwood about the bizarre encounter, and urged Underwood to keep his eyes open.
He recalls how he suddenly saw a blip on his radar before tracking it on his FLIR camera.
'The thing that stood out to me the most was how erratic it was behaving,' Underwood told the magazine.
'And what I mean by 'erratic' is that its changes in altitude, air speed, and aspect were just unlike things that I've ever encountered before flying against other air targets.'
Underwood said the object wasn't obeying the laws of physics and dropped from 50,000 feet altitude to 100 feet in seconds, which he says, 'isn't possible'. He added that he saw no signs of an engine heat plume or any sign of propulsion.
The pilot refuses to speculate as to whether the object is an alien spacecraft or not, however.
'That's not my job. But I saw something. And it was also seen, via eyeballs, by both my commanding officer, Dave Fravor, and the Marine Corps Hornet squadron commanding officer who was out there as well.'
Two Navy officers told DailyMail.com that masses of high-quality radar, sonar and other data of the strange craft were sent to a Naval base on shore – as they accuse the government of a cover up after the Pentagon claimed the data is nowhere to be found.
A source who investigated the incident for the Department of Defense told DailyMail.com that they were briefed about sonar data from a nearby submarine that tracked the UFOs moving at more than 460 mph underwater during the shocking November 2004 encounter.
Ahead of the 20th anniversary of the storied 'Nimitz Incident', their revelations add a new, intriguing dimension to the most prominent UFO case in recent history.
On November 14 2004, Top Gun fighter pilot David Fravor was flying a training exercise off the coast of San Diego when he was re-routed to investigate a strange object spotted on radar by warships protecting his aircraft carrier the USS Nimitz.
Witnesses to an infamous 2004 Tic-Tac UFO incident have given shocking new information about the infamous incident to DailyMail.com. They include Kevin Day who was Senior Chief Operations Specialist aboard the USS Princeton at the time
Sean Cahill was a Chief Master-At-Arms on the Princeton, and from its deck he says he saw lights in the sky matching the movements of the objects Day saw on his radar
What he found was a roughly 40ft white object with no windows or wings, shaped like a Tic-Tac, flitting about above the sea that was roiling below it, disturbed by something large submerged beneath the surface.
Commander Fravor told Congress last year that as he circled the object, it turned to mirror his movements, then shot off past him at thousands of miles per hour, somehow stopping a second later at a secret pre-designated rendezvous point 60 miles away, that only he and a handful of Navy staff on his ship were given ahead of their training exercise.
Kevin Day was Senior Chief Operations Specialist aboard the USS Princeton at the time, in charge of monitoring the skies with radar to protect the Nimitz.
He told DailyMail.com that in the 10 days prior to the incident, he saw similar objects on his radar, behaving inexplicably.
F-18 pilot Lieutenant Chad Underwood
Day said groups of about 10 objects were repeatedly detected 80,000ft above them, where the Earth's atmosphere becomes space, dropping down to 20,000ft in less than a second, then following the ships by flying through the air at a relatively leisurely 115mph, before zooming off towards Guadalupe Island off the coast of Mexico where they seemed to disappear under the sea.
'They originated from sub-earth orbit. They came in groups of five to 10 at a time. If you added up all the groups, it was about 100 contacts,' Day said.
'The very first group had 10 objects. They sat right around 80,000ft or so, off the east coast of Catalina Island. They just sat there for a time.
'Then they would drop down as a group, instantly, down to between 20,000 and 28,000ft off the coast of Catalina Island, about 10 miles east of it.
'The really weird thing was, a single object would leave that group and travel very slowly right over the top of us, at between 20-28,000ft at about 100 knots, which was really slow.
'It would just track above us, and then the next one would depart, and the next one,' he added. 'All the groups did that.
'All 100 of them, to the best of my knowledge, disappeared in the same spot in the sky. And that spot was about 60 miles north of an island off the coast of Mexico called Guadalupe Island.
'Everyone was looking at me like, what is this? And I didn't have good answers.
'We agreed just to track and report. Of course we made our intentions known to the admiral on the Nimitz.'
The 'Tic-Tac' UFOs disappeared from sight about 60 miles north of Guadalupe Island off the coast of Mexico, according to witnesses who spoke with DailyMail.com
A screenshot from the video of a Navy pilot tracking the space craft over the Pacific. US military personnel in California believe they saw UFOs off the coast on November 14, 2004
The story has become one of the strongest examples of other-worldly craft routinely encountered by the military in US airspace.
But the story gets stranger from there.
DailyMail.com can reveal that unknown objects were also allegedly recorded zooming around underwater during the incident.
A senior sonar officer on board the USS Princeton at the time told comrades that while Day was seeing objects dropping from space and Fravor was dogfighting with the 'Tic-Tac', his team were picking up sonar returns for objects in the water.
This shocking revelation marks a new element to the infamous story, 20 years after it occurred.
Sean Cahill was a Chief Master-At-Arms on the Princeton at the time of the sighting
Sean Cahill was a Chief Master-At-Arms on the Princeton, and from its deck he says he saw lights in the sky matching the movements of the objects Day saw on his radar.
He says a senior sonar officer on the Princeton later told him about the underwater data.
'I was shopping at the local Navy commissary about a mile from my house. I bumped into a former shipmate who worked in the sonar department and was active during the exercise.
'He said that they were practically all around us. He goes, 'Man, we were tracking things underwater, just as much as they were tracking them in the air during that exercise.'
The top sonar tech, who asked not to be named, did not dispute the story when contacted by DailyMail.com, but declined to elaborate.
A source who worked as a senior official in defense intelligence told DailyMail.com that they investigated the incident several years later, and were briefed on sonar data recorded by a US submarine in the area of the Nimitz carrier strike group.
The source said that the sub's sonar caught the UFOs traveling at more than 400 knots, or 460 mph, through the water in the vicinity of the ships.
Day said that the ships in the group built a three-dimensional picture from combining their sophisticated radar and sonar, and that all the data was combined and sent to a Naval base in San Diego.
'We shared all the combat information, put it on a data link and sent it back to the beach. So anybody who was interested in these things, they could see our data,' he said.
'There's underwater stations called SOSUS. And we also have towed array. So we have those three sonar devices going off for each ship. All the ships are feeding the composite picture. So we have a really good three-dimensional picture underneath the water.'
Sean Cahill was a Chief Master-At-Arms on the Princeton at the time of the TIc-Tac UFO sighting, and from its deck he says he saw lights in the sky matching the movements of the objects Day saw on his radar
Warships guarding the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz as well as a submarine in the area spotted a sttrange object on radar in the Pacific in November 2004
Cahill has spoken openly about the 2004 UFO sighting before – including during a 2001 appearance on Fox News
He said these records would routinely be kept for decades.
But the Pentagon official charged with investigating UFO incidents claimed that he couldn't find any data on the Nimitz incident.
'My opinion is that one is going to remain unresolved because there is no data. There is no radar data,' Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the recently-retired head of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), said in a March 2024 interview.
'I think the Tic-Tac is so far back in time, there's no data. We went and looked for all of it.
I asked around for it.'
The seminal case was also glossed over in a historical report released by AARO, the Pentagon's UFO investigation office, on March 6 2024.
Cahill and Day say Kirkpatrick is wrong, and could even be deliberately trying to hide the truth.
'Those things are available for decades of the most mundane events that happened and everyday operations, they should be there for all these all the vessels that were there. But they're all missing,' said Cahill.
'It seems like purposeful obfuscation to me. It seems like a dereliction of duty for them not to investigate what is the most famous, well-documented case of UAP activity that we have, with the most amount of witnesses, the most amount of assets placed on it. And it's public now.
'They completely ignored it.'
'I think he should give all his money back that he took in salary,' Day said.
They said Kirkpatrick should have also had access to high fidelity radar and satellite data from the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC) that could have picked up the Tic-Tac and other UFOs tracked by the warships in November 2004.
Others on the ship at the time say that tapes with data of the incident were erased and taken by mysterious visitors in flight suits.
Petty Officer Gary Voorhis told engineering news site Popular Mechanics in 2019: 'These two guys show up on a helicopter, which wasn't uncommon, but shortly after they arrived, maybe 20 minutes, I was told by my chain of command to turn over all the data recordings for the AEGIS [radar] system.
'They even told me to erase everything that's in the shop—even the blank tapes.'
The men were spotted returning with 'a bunch of bags', another witness on the ship, Leading Petty Officer Ryan Weigelt, told Popular Mechanics.
Reports of objects moving rapidly and in inexplicable ways underwater – as they allegedly were around the Nimitz in 2004 – are less well-known frontier in the UFO topic.
But they are increasingly coming under scrutiny, and now even have their own name: Unidentified Submerged Objects, or USOs.
Retired Navy Commander David Fravor testifies before a House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing about UFOs in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC in 2023
UFO expert and author Richard Dolan is set to release a book on the topic this year called The History of USOs: The True Story of Anomalous Craft in Earth's Bodies of Water.
It documents more than 600 cases, including extraordinary incidents of objects picked up by submarine radar moving faster than torpedoes and executing impossible right-angle turns, hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean.
'For every one of these USO stories, there's probably close to 100 you don't know. It's often sheer luck that they come out,' Dolan told DailyMail.com.
'One of the shocking things that I've seen in my last two years of USO research, is the number of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers encountering objects that were actually able to disable them for certain periods of time. I have at least 10.
'If you're the US Navy, I can't think of anything more important to you than your fleet of aircraft carriers,' he added. 'Anything that's going to shut down those aircraft carriers is going to be of supreme importance.
'Ronald Moultrie [former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security] spoke to the Senate a couple of years ago, saying we're confident that if we encounter these UAP we can identify and, if necessary, mitigate them.
'That's such a joke on every level. We know full well that this is a major problem, and they're not mitigating anything.'
Since retiring from government, former Rear Admiral and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration administrator Tim Gallaudet has revealed that he was briefed on similar incidents of submarines picking up UFOs on sonar moving at rapid speeds underwater.
In a statement to DailyMail.com, Gallaudet cautioned that he has not spoken with any of the sonar operators involved in the 2004 tic tac incident, but added that in general: ‘We have to investigate undersea and transmedium UAP in the same way we do other UAP to get a more complete understanding of the phenomenon.’
On July 8, 2023, one of the greatest UFO stories was told by Ross Coulthart to Project Unity host Jay Anderson. The investigative journalist claimed that there is ahuge UFO in the possession of the United States that could not be moved, and he knows the location of the craft. Coulthart clarified that the immovable craft is not in the US.
In the interview, Coulthart discussed the potential implications of the new US Senate intelligence bill. He referenced Douglas Dean Johnson’s writings about the bill, which purportedly mandate holders of non-earth origin or exotic UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) material to make it accessible to the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) within six months.
Anderson raised concerns that this six-month window might offer enough time for those holding such materials to hide or conceal them. Coulthart acknowledged the possibility but suggested that certain UAP materials could be so large that relocating them is not feasible. He mentioned the existence of a building constructed over such a massive object in a foreign country, which might sound implausible to some.
This revelation left the UFO community curious about the place where the craft might be situated. Interestingly, the late former CIA pilot John Lear previously mentioned the existence of buried crafts too massive to move. In 2018, Lear posted on Facebook, recounting the enigmatic tale of a massive buried UFO near Garrison, Utah. This peculiar incident became a topic of discussion at a UFO conference in Las Vegas, piquing Lear’s curiosity.
The incident dates back to 1953 when a large UFO, measuring between 150 to 200 feet in diameter, crashed near Garrison, Utah. Lear explained that the UFO was so large that even the United States Air Force Security Forces’ “Blue Berets” could not relocate it. Consequently, a decision was made to bury the UFO on the spot. Lear wrote that a team of hundreds of soldiers dug the ground and managed to bury the craft 50 feet below ground level. (Earthfile source)
“While all of the digging to bury the saucer was going on, they also dug a tunnel from the saucer several hundred feet to the south, where they built 2 or 3 houses. The houses were constructed to appear about 75 years old, using old, weathered wood, nails, window frames, and roofing. The only hint that these houses might not be so old were the brand-new padlocks on the doors.
I don’t recall the exact description of the interior, except for a door leading to a stairwell that connected to the tunnel leading to the craft. Everything I’m telling you is from my recollection of the report, likely written by the person who accessed the buildings. My memory isn’t perfect. One of the houses contained a logbook in which visitors from various organizations like Air Force, Navy, Army, and others would inscribe their names.”
Lear and his associates intended to visit Garrison to witness this buried craft. They planned to use a helicopter, a fuel truck, and specialized equipment to explore underground. However, the trip never materialized for reasons unknown. Lear maintained his belief that the craft remains in place. He even shared Google Earth images indicating the potential location. He marked the houses on the images, but they no longer appear on Google Earth.
“About 300 yards east from this claim, there was an alleged Spanish treasure location. This treasure spot had been discovered by an individual from the Phoenix area with access to Spanish treasure maps, and this location was marked on one of the maps.
In a pile of rocks, there was a precisely square cutout approximately 10 inches wide and 16 inches deep. The bottom seemed like concrete. I had the underground radar team scan the area and found only a few potential returns. The area is now in an ACEC (Area of Critical Environmental Concern). Nevertheless, we were all set to convene for the Garrison expedition in 2 weeks, but somehow it never took off.”
Lear even provided the coordinates of the location: Latitude 38 degrees 37 minutes 40 seconds North, Longitude 113 degrees 40 minutes 40 seconds West. This further deepens the mystery, leaving people intrigued about the truth surrounding the buried UFO near Garrison, Utah.
Moreover, there is alleged John Lear’s statement on the alien presence, posted to Paranet on December 29, 1987. Here are the paragraphs published by UFOmind.com discussing the buried craft: [this page was first archived on January 31, 1997]
“Moore is also in possession of more Aquarius documents a few pages of which leaked out several years ago and detailed the supersecret NSA project which had been denied by them until just recently. In a letter to Senator John Glenn NSA’s Director of Policy Julia B. Wetzel wrote, “Apparently there is or was an Air Force project by that name Aquarius) which dealt with UFO’s. Coincidentally, there is also an NSA project by that name.”
NSA’s project Aquarius deals specifically with the ‘communications with aliens’ (the EBE’s). Within the Aquarius program was project ‘Snowbird’ a project to test fly A recovered alien aircraft at Groom Lake, Nevada. This project continues today at that location. In the words of an individual who works at Groom Lake ‘our people are much better at taking things apart than they are at putting them back together’. Another saw a saucer being trucked into the Nevada Test Site in March of 1988. Still another informant witnessed a saucer being buried at that location (for God knows whatever reason) during the second week of August 1988.”
There is another version of this statement: (Source)
“Germany may have recovered a flying saucer as early as 1939. General James H. Doolittle went to Sweden in 1946 to inspect a flying saucer that had crashed there in Spitzbergen…
In July of 1952, a panicked government watched helplessly as squadron of “flying saucers” flew over Washington, D.C., and buzzed the White House, the Capitol Building, and the Pentagon. It took all the imagination and intimidation the government could muster to force that incident out of the memory of the public.
Thousands of sightings occurred during the Korean war and several more saucers were retrieved by the Air Force. Some were stored at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, some were stored at Air Force bases near the location of the crash sight.
One saucer was so enormous and the logistic problems in transportation so enormous that it was buried at the crash sight and remains there today. The stories are legendary on transporting crashed saucers over long distances, moving only at night, purchasing complete farms, slashing through forests, blocking major highways, sometimes driving 2 and 3 lo-boys in tandem with an extraterrestrial load a hundred feet in diameter.”
These include nuclear tests taking place in the area, unstable gravitational field lines or powerful radars being tested around Kingman to combat foreign aircraft.
At the research center at the Mohave Museum of History and Arts right off Route 66, there's a section dedicated to the UFO crash. Some redacted government documents allegedly detail the crash from those who were there.
Fritz Werner is a name that kept coming up, who Dennett now knowns him to be Arthur Stansel. Werner was a pseudonym Stansel reportedly used when he talked about what happened in Kingman.
The reports claim they saw a UFO measuring 14 feet high and 30 feet in diameter upon arrival. It was made out of an unfamiliar metal that was plunged about 20 inches into the ground but was not damaged from the impact.
The workers conducted their studies on the aircraft. When they piled back on the bus, the document claims an Air Force Colonel who was heading up the operation made them take an oath to keep the mission a secret.
Around two decades later, Stansel signed an affidavit reportedly confirming what he saw. Fifty years after that, claims began circulating that investigators didn't just investigate the crash but took it.
A US Department of Defense contractor's tantalizing encounter with a giant, glowing UFO has sparked 10 years of research and two patents inspired by his encounter.
Three witnesses, including that Pentagon engineer, report that they captured electronic evidence of a 'barbell' UFO, half the length of a football field, that glowed an eerie 'indigo' blue.
The craft, they said, flew silently over an old logging road in southwestern Ontario, Canada, on August 28, 2013, near where the trio had camped for a hunting trip.
DailyMail.com spoke with the case's first investigators, who shared electronic data from the contractor's attempt to film the object — showing 'white noise' pulses in the video that recur in one-second loops identical to strobing light from the UFO itself.
Three witnesses, including a Pentagon engineering contractor, report capturing electronic evidence of a 170-ft long 'barbell' UFO that glowed an eerie 'indigo' blue. Above a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) 3D render of the UFO, made by the Pentagon contractor witness himself
'The captured data of the event,' the witness reported, 'may be the first real physical proof of not just a craft flying, but that it flies by virtue of an incredibly complex and [...] powerful spinning electromagnetic propulsion system.'
'Is there another 'barbell' case we've investigated like this?' that engineer, UFO investigator Robert Powell, told DailyMail.com of this rare case. 'No, it's the only one.'
Powell told DailyMail.com that UFO cases with this shape are so rare that only about '50 to 60 cases' exist 'throughout history.'
Powell, whose new book on UFOs has garnered praise from former Defense Department intelligence official Chris Mellon, personally visited the contractor's lab and worked with him on analyzing the eerie interference on his UFO video.
'He gave me a tour of the defense facility,' Powell said, who vetted the source's identity and biographical claims.
'There was a heavy duty commercial 3D printer in the lab and there were offices with three or four engineers that worked there beside him in that his building,' he noted.
The August 28, 2013 'barbell' UFO encounter itself, these witnesses said, began at around 9:40pm as they were returning to civilization from a black bear hunting expedition, a practice that is legal when done in season in Canada.
The defense contractor witness was seated in the back of Dodge 4x4 truck, with the two other witnesses in the front seat, as reported to Powell and his co-investigator, retired former police detective Phil Leech.
'We were roughly four-and-a-half or five miles from the main road, when I noted something over my shoulder,' continued the defense contractor, who wishes to remain anonymous to preserve his Defense Department business contacts.
'The very first thing that was intense was just how bright this thing was,' he noted.
'It was spectacular. Having been involved with optical systems in the past, we're talking about a vehicle that looked like a stadium lighting scenario — it was brilliant.'
The witness described 'an indigo plasma that covered most of the craft,' which was bone-shaped or barbell-shaped and extended about 170-feet long, 60-feet wide and 20-feet tall, as it flew slowly just over the tree-line above this old logging road.
The case was investigated by UFO researcher Robert Powell (above) - the same nanotech engineer whose analysis of a mass UFO sighting witnessed by over 300 people in Texas became a centerpiece to Netflix's Steven Spielberg-produced UFO docuseries 'Encounters'
'The craft rotated slowly around its center while emitting an electrical-spark-like shower, always opposite of the direction of travel,' the defense contractor stated, 'but without a specific origin point.'
The witness said he first attempted to film the UFO with two devices that he had on him, a Motorola cellphone and a Sony HD camera.
But both devices behaved has if they were caught in 'a boot sequence,' failing to stay on while the craft was nearby, about 400 feet, leaving the witness to view the UFO more closely through the scope of his rifle.
Up close, he told investigators, 'The lights that it emitted were not incoherent light,' meaning not the diffuse 'soft light' like that from a light bulb, but more like laser light.
The lay person's terms, he described the light as like 'tens of thousands of small lit particles, best described as those that occur during a fountain-type firework.'
But, more technically, the contractor described it as 'coherent' light: 'It was salty to my eyes. It was just as if I was looking into a laser that had been passed through a diffraction grating or something of that nature.'
Witnesses described 'an indigo plasma that covered most of the craft,' which was barbell-shaped and extended about 170-ft long, 60-ft wide and 20-ft tall, as it flew slowly over the tree-line Above a CAD 3D render of the UFO showing the UFO on the logging road in Ontario
About the logging road in southwestern Ontario where the 'barbell' UFO was spotted in 2013
'Both the other witnesses were extremely worked up about this,' the defense contractor said in a video taped interview. 'In fact, one of them said [...] "Just shoot it!" like he wanted me to actually shoot a rifle round into this thing.'
The UFO moved in its slow rotating motion for approximately six or seven minutes, eventually allowing the defense contractor witness to film the event with his Sony HD camera, which yielded only static despite working before and after the event.
The sighting ended with 'a similar lit craft' emerging on the horizon and both UFOs zipping off a 'at incredible speed.'
The moment left just visual static and the witnesses' astonished voices on their tape.
'I flew up to meet the guy,' Powell told the DailyMail.com, 'because it was just such an unusual case. I wanted to verify the reality of it. It was more of a personal thing.'
When Powell toured the defense contractor's engineering business, he worked with him to test his Sony footage via an oscilloscope — a device that tracks changes in electrical voltages, frequency, and other specs to troubleshoot electronics.
'The time I spent with him on the oscilloscope was probably 20 or 30 minutes,' Powell said.
'The first thing we looked at were the black bears that they had shot, mostly because we wanted to see a baseline on the oscilloscope, what the camera looks like just under normal operation,' he noted.
'Then we looked at it when it was all basically noise in terms of video,' Powell said, 'here's some signals on the oscilloscope that repeat.'
Powell toured the defense contractor witness's engineering business and worked with him to test his Sony footage via an oscilloscope - a device that tracks changes in voltages, frequency, distortion and other electrical behavior (picture from that test above)
As provisionally concluded in Powell and Leech's report on the UFO case, produced in 2015 and 2016 for the civilian group the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), the oscilloscope 'post process of the video' matched the rhythm of the UFOs light show (testing shown above)
This oscilloscope processing of the video revealed that the 'interference' matched the rhythm of the UFO's light show, according to Powell and Leech's report on the UFO case, conducted for the civilian group the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON),
What looked just like 'white noise' on the video tape actually showed 'a perfect pulsation function,' according to their report.
This hidden 'perfect' pulse revealed by the scope was 'timed to the revolution of the lights' on the UFO and repeated at the same speed 'roughly 1-second intervals.'
According to the defense contractor witness, the pattern was what would be expected if the 'indigo' plasma outside the UFO was behaving like a very large version of an normal alternating current (A/C) motor.
Such a giant A/C motor would produce a magnetic field around it that could disrupt nearby electronics in a similar way.
'I believe this to be a poly phasing of two immense high frequency A/C fields polarized differently,' as the defense contractor put it.
'A white noise screen with a perfect pulsation function,' according to their report's appendix, 'is timed to the revolution of the lights from the [UFO's two] disks at roughly 1-second intervals.' Above, 11 cycles of the repeating one-second pulse as pulled from the video noise
Above, a close up on one of the repeating pulses, showing harmonic resonance. The researchers hope that this 'harmonic hash' will provide more clues on the UFOs propulsion system in the near future
'A more in-depth report is being generated for continued studies of this apparent "electronic signature,"' the defense contractor witness noted.
But Powell and Leech added that interesting progress has already been made: 'The witness has two patents that resulted from information derived from the event.'
Based on the defense contractor's own experience producing plasmas at a much smaller scale than the indigo plasma that he said enveloped the giant craft, he was able to calculate a ballpark figure for the energy required to produce this field — which he suspects is the UFO's propulsion system.
Calculated that the the craft had an approximate surface area of 3.1 million square inches, as he wrote to Powell and Leech, 'a minimum of 160MW (160 million watts)' of power would be needed to surround the craft in plasma.
'This amount of power is 33 percent of the 478 million-watt nuclear power plant in Fort Calhoun, Nebraska,' he said, but packed into an object a fraction of that size.
'Unquestionably this craft was the highest power density vehicle I have ever even imagined,' at least according to the defense contractor witness.
Powell is sympathetic to view of skeptics who have noted that that while the case is 'a great story [...] without proof it's still anecdotal.'
The UFO investigator told DailyMail.com that he is still is in contact with the witness and 'prodding him every once a while about getting a raw copy of the video.'
A Texascity which has seen a huge spike in UFO sightings is hoping a new app can help identify the phenomena.
The skies of Austin are increasingly lit up by unexplained sightings, partly thanks to Elon Musk's Starlink.
The network of 6,000 satellites were launched by his SpaceX company to try and bring internet to remote areas.
As a result there has been a rise in the number of suspected UFO sightings, although experts acknowledge not all can be explained by billionaire's project.
'With Starlink and other phenomenon up there in the night sky, you see more and more stuff that that you can't explain right away,' Michael Endl, a professor of astronomy and physics at Austin Community College told KXAN.
A Texas city which has seen a huge spike in UFO sightings is hoping a new app can help identify the phenomena
Now the Enigma Labs app is attempting to try and gather more data on UFO sightings in order to classify them better.
The app asks users to upload photo of the object, description and location data which is then sent to the government.
The company examines the reports and rules out objects which have a clear explanation such as Starlink.
'One of the things that we've heard from the Pentagon and from NASA is that a lot of the issue with this topic is there's not enough data. So that's exactly what we're trying to do is gather more data,' Alejandro Rojas, a UFO researcher with the app said.
'Once you can't rule things out, that's when you have something anomalous that either deserves more research, or can point you in a direction.'
Among the unexplained phenomena submitted through the app was a 'small, cylindrical' UFO seen 'zig-zagging' above the Austin skies on July 28, 2023.
The skies of Austin are increasingly lit up by unexplained sightings, partly thanks to Elon Musk 's Starlink
The Enigma Labs app is attempting to try and gather more data on UFO sightings in order to classify them better
Another stargazer gave an account of a strange object spotted in December.
'I can't remember who saw it first, but we noticed this object directly above us. It felt distinctly weightless, spherical, and kind of amorphous,' the account reads.
'The texture was almost like a static TV, kind of gaseous, and grayish black except for a BRIGHT red glow that would flash along one edge, then another, then emanate from the bottom of the object.
.'Tt was definitely at or above cloud level and was visible until it was way off in the distance, never changing its speed to my perception. We have no idea what this was - not balloons because it was too far and cutting against the wind, definitely not a plane, definitely not a consumer drone.'
One curious incident during the solar eclipse saw a black object float past the sun during the cosmic event.
'We were on a boat waiting for the solar eclipse to happen,' the poster explained.
The app asks users to upload photo of the object, description and location data which is then sent to the government
Starlink is a network of 6,000 satellites were launched by SpaceX to try and bring internet to remote areas
'Ten minutes before totality I see this object through my camera fly by on the screen, didn't think much of it at the moment until I reviewed the footage a few days later.'
But UFO-skeptic Robert Shaeffer has his doubts about the usefulness of the app.
'Since we know that the vast majority of reported UFO sightings are readily explained, and hence of no scientific value, this app encourages the reporting and sharing of low-quality UFO sightings, thus muddying the waters,' he said.
'It promotes the idea that seeing a UFO is something that the average person can expect to experience, but even if you don't see anything, send us a photo of the sky, anyway!'
In 1992, “multiple witnesses” in California reported that more than 200 disk-shaped objects soundlessly exited Santa Monica Bay waters, hovered for a moment, and then sped away into the sky. Six years later, U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer Charles Howard wrote an account of an apparent underwater anomaly. “My ship was visiting Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, when I saw three strange, big white lights in the water,” he said in the History Channel show UFO Files. They were “10 or 20 feet on each side with a rounded shape,” according to Howard’s written account.
Claims of such Unidentified Submerged Objects, or USOs, have intrigued UFO enthusiasts for decades. Based on eyewitness reports, some of the objects have even seemed to traverse the boundary between air and water, traveling at shocking speeds of hundreds of miles per hour.
A small group of UFO devotees, including government security and military officials, have believed for years that the U.S. should be seriously looking into potentially threatening anomalies in bodies of water, as well on land and in the air. In a bipartisan effort, that group ultimately helped convince the U.S. government to legislate a name change for the term it uses to refer to UFOs today—from “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” to “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,” reflecting lobbyists’ concerns about underwater threats.
The slight name change may appear to be a simple case of semantics, but it proves the Pentagon sees underwater UFOs as a legitimate concern.
The Department of Defense has made it clear that it doesn’t assume UAPs necessarily indicate extraterrestrial activity. In fact, these phenomena have so far proven to have mundane explanations. These include human-made technology like drones and weather balloons, Starlink satellites, or atmospheric events such as lenticular cloud formations.
The Government’s Name Game
A shift in how the government handled UFO reports first came to a head in the 2010s. Pressure from legislators, as well as public interest in the government’s disclosure of classified UFO reports, started changing defense culture. For instance, after decades of shielding information on sightings from the public, the military now encourages service members to report unexplained phenomena. Today, Navy pilots report odd incidents in the interest of national defense, such as the 2019 sighting by a Navy warship that seemed to link UFOs and USOs.
In 2021, the Department of Defense created the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, a program within the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence meant to “standardize collection and reporting” of UFO sightings. Aiming to integrate knowledge and efforts across the Pentagon and other government agencies, the Office of the Secretary of Defense established the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) soon afterward. By law, every federal agency must “review, identify, and organize each Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) record in its custody for disclosure to the public and transmission to the National Archives.”
Prior to the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act—which authorizes funding levels for the U.S. military and other defense priorities—UAP originally stood for only aerial objects. Now, it includes underwater and trans-medium phenomena. It’s why AARO was so named, to investigate “All-domain” anomalies. But, before the legal name change, AARO was already considering objects over and in the water—so it was a little confusing to keep calling them all “aerial.”
In 2022, the terminology to describe unexplained incidents officially switched from “aerial” to “anomalous.” Congress enacted the name change that December. At the time, Ronald Moultrie, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security told a roundtable of AARO:
“You may have caught that I just said unidentified anomalous phenomena, whereas in the past the department has used the term unidentified aerial phenomena. This new terminology expands the scope of UAP to include submerged and trans-medium objects. Unidentified phenomena in all domains, whether in the air, ground, sea or space, pose potential threats to personnel security and operations security, and they require our urgent attention.”
This legal change traces back to pressures from UFO enthusiasts who believed submerged and trans-medium objects, which seem to fly between air and sea, should be included in the government’s potential threat evaluation. These proponents include U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, Ph.D., who published a report on the potential maritime threat of USOs, and Luis Alizondo, who once ran the government’s secret Pentagon unit, the 2007–12 Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. A dearth of data about USOs and UAPs is “unsettling,” because they “jeopardize US maritime security, which is already weakened by our relative ignorance about the global ocean,” Rear Admiral Gallaudet wrote in his report. In addition, this is an opportunity to expand maritime science and meet the security and scientific challenges of the future, he added.
The Hunt For Solid Evidence
Yet, evidence of submerged objects is murky at best, says UAP investigator Mick West. There is “vastly less evidence than for flying objects,” he explains in an email. “You can’t see very far underwater, so there’s no video or photos. There are only stories about anomalous sonar returns and occasional sightings that might as well be of sea monsters.”
The Puerto Rico “Aguadilla” incident of 2013 also influenced USO and trans-medium enthusiasts, West says. However, they base their claim largely on one video of the incident, which when analyzed turns out to have “a perfectly reasonable explanation of two wedding lanterns and parallax illusions,” West says.
Based on the angle of the camera, positioned on a moving airplane, and consequently its changing line of sight on the flying objects, the viewer sees the objects streaking rapidly over the ocean, apparently diving in, and then emerging again. West’s analysis confirms a theory first proposed by Rubén Lianza, the head of the Argentinian Air Force’s UAP investigation committee.
The objects were wedding lanterns that originated at a nearby hotel and floated on the wind. Lianza confirmed the hotel typically released lanterns that were consistent with the video. The thermal camera (which reads heat) made it appear that the objects merged with the ocean because when the lantern’s flames were hidden, they were about the same temperature as the water they floated over. At the same time, the lanterns seemed to emerge from the water when the flame was visible again.
New trans-medium and submerged UAP reports could crop up in the future. The government will only be able to take reports of strange underwater lights or objects flying out of the water seriously, says West, if the sightings come with enough solid evidence to follow up with a solid analysis.
For millennia, humans have seen inexplicable things in the sky. Some have been beautiful, some have been terrifying, and some — like auroras and solar eclipses before they were understood scientifically — have been both. Today’s aircraft, balloons, drones, satellites and more only increase the chances of spotting something confounding overhead.
In the United States, unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, came into the national spotlight in the late 1940s and early ’50s. A series of incidents, including a supposedly crashed alien spaceship near Roswell, N.M., generated something of an American obsession. The Roswell UFO turned out to be part of a classified program, the remnants of a balloon monitoring the atmosphere for signs of clandestine Russian nuclear tests. But it and other reported sightings prompted the U.S. government to launch various projects and panels to investigate such claims, as Science News reported in 1966 (SN: 10/22/66), as well as kicking off hobby groups and conspiracy theories.
In the decades since, UFOs have often come to be dismissed by scientists as the province of wackos and thus unworthy of study. The term UFO has a smirk factor to it, says Iain Boyd, an aerospace engineer at the University of Colorado Boulder and director of the school’s Center for National Security Initiatives.
But government agencies and officials are trying to change that attitude. Among the biggest concerns is that the stigma associated with reporting a sighting has the side effect of stifling reports from pilots or citizens who might have valuable information about potential threats in U.S. air space — such as the Chinese spy balloon that traversed North America and made headlines last year.
“If there’s something interfering with flights, people or cargo, that’s a problem,” Boyd says.
To help reduce the stigma, many serious investigators now refer to UFOs as “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAPs, coined by the U.S. Department of Defense in 2022. “The term UAP brings science to the issue,” Boyd says. It also rightly broadens the view to include natural atmospheric phenomena as well as things outside the atmosphere, such as satellites and particularly bright planets such as Venus.
An independent team of experts (shown meeting in 2023) suggested NASA help fill in gaps in collecting UAP data.Joel Kowsky/NASA
Investigators of all types have a lot of questions about UAPs that they believe deserve serious scientific scrutiny: Which UAPs are something real and which are merely artifacts of the sensors that detect them? If real, which may be a threat to aviation? A threat to national security? Do they point to some unknown natural phenomena?
Answers may be forthcoming. In June 2022, NASA announced an independent study to determine how the agency could lend its scientific expertise to the study of UAPs. Meanwhile, military and commercial pilots have felt more comfortable making reports and even providing videos taken during close encounters. Some of those reports were discussed as part of congressional hearings in 2022 and 2023, which were covered widely by the media and in part focused on more government transparency (SN: 5/19/22). Those were the first open hearings since the mid-1960s.
Americans for Safe Aerospace, an advocacy organization with a focus on UAPs, supports legislation that would help provide a way for pilots to confidentially report potential sightings to the government.
And government agencies increasingly recognize publicly that strange phenomena in the skies are worthy of attention — whether the phenomena are signs of aliens or not. In 2022, the Pentagon established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office to serve as a clearinghouse for government reports of UAPs and for analysts determining if UAPs pose threats. The National UFO Reporting Center, a nonprofit established in 1974, and other organizations continue to collate reports from the public.
By bringing UAPs into the realm of science, the hope is to make the unexplained explainable.
Where do UAP sightings occur?
Since its founding, the National UFO Reporting Center has kept a database of UAP sightings, including past and recent incidents reported through its telephone hotline, the mail and online. The database includes almost 123,000 sightings in the United States from June 1930 through June 2022. It’s a trove of data that few if any peer-reviewed scientific studies have used, says Richard Medina, a geographer at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
For a study reported in 2023, Medina and colleagues scoured the database to see if they could identify which factors, if any, might affect the number of sightings in a particular area. They focused on the almost 99,000 reports, or about 80 percent of the total, that came from the continental United States from 2001 through 2020. They stuck to the continental United States because tree cover was a factor they were studying, and detailed maps of forested land aren’t available for Alaska’s interior.
First, the researchers calculated the number of UAP sightings that occurred in each county in the Lower 48 states for the 20-year period. Then, they tried to correlate the number of sightings per 10,000 people that lived in each county with environmental factors.
In their sights
An analysis of nearly 99,000 reported UAP sightings pinpointed U.S. counties with a particularly high number of reports per 10,000 people (reddish counties), a low number of reports (blues) and an average number (white). One factor that appears to boost the number of UAP sightings is proximity to an airport or military installation, a hint that aircraft may account for many UAPs.
R.M. Medina, S.C. Brewer and S.M. Kirkpatrick/Scientific Reports 2023 (CC BY 4.0)
As expected, UAP sightings weren’t as frequent in counties with a lot of tree cover and large amounts of nighttime light pollution, the researchers reported in Scientific Reports. Average cloud cover didn’t seem to affect the number of sightings one way or another — but maybe that’s because the team looked at average cloud cover over the course of the year, not the amount of cloud cover at the time of the sighting, Medina suggests.
What did boost the number of sightings substantially was proximity to airports or military installations. Although this analysis doesn’t specifically say that many UAPs in such areas can be attributed to aircraft associated with those facilities, the data are suggestive, Medina notes. At such sites, aircraft are likely to be closer to the ground and more visible than at other places, he adds.
And many of those aircraft could have been classified or experimental craft, according to a report issued earlier this year by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. After undertaking an analysis of reports made to or by the government since 1945, that office found that many sightings could be attributed to never-before-seen craft such as rockets, drones or aircraft incorporating stealth technologies. The analysis found no evidence that any UAPs were signs of extraterrestrials and no evidence that the U.S. government ever had access to alien technology.
A second report, with new analyses focused on more recent sightings, will be released later this year.
What are UAPs?
The task of pinning down the sources of UAPs has become easier thanks to the ever-growing analytical prowess of computers and advanced visualization tools. “What used to take months of analysis before can now be done in just a few minutes,” says Mick West, a retired software engineer in Sacramento, Calif., who runs the website Metabunk.org, where people can post and discuss UAPs and other unusual phenomena.
Take, for instance, an enigmatic sighting of lights in the sky over the Great Plains one night early in 2023. Video of the UAP taken by a commercial pilot in flight caused a stir when it was posted online soon after the sighting, West says.
Whoever posted the video didn’t include specifics about the sighting, other than to say it was taken somewhere over the central United States on a particular date. A pattern of lights on the ground, which turned out to be warning lights atop turbines in a large wind farm, helped investigators on Metabunk locate the plane as somewhere in western Oklahoma.
Certain details about the sighting, such as flashes of lightning on the distant horizon, wouldn’t have occurred on the supposed date of the video, West notes. Using public meteorological databases about the times, dates and locations where lightning strikes occur, the Metabunk crew figured out the video actually had been taken a few days earlier than reported. The date, in turn, helped the group figure out which flight the video was taken from.
Not an alien
In 2023, a commercial airline pilot took a video of a UAP (white arrows, top left), which was posted to the website Metabunk.org. Using the pattern of lights on the ground, Metabunk sleuths determined the UAP was filmed above Oklahoma. Further investigation revealed the date of the flight and flight path (yellow line, right). Computer simulations of the sky helped pinpoint Starlink internet satellites as the source of the mystery lights (bottom left).
Mick West
Then, knowing the date, time and precise coordinates, West and collaborators used computer simulations to re-create what the sky would have looked like in the direction where the UAP was seen. The mystery lights were actually a cluster of Starlink satellites reflecting sunlight from below the horizon as they swooped across the sky. With the first batch launched in 2019, Starlink satellites now circle Earth in the thousands, providing internet service for locales worldwide (SN: 3/12/20). Their movements and patterns in the sky “are still a mystery to some pilots,” West says.
West suggests that people are often too quick to jump from “I saw some lights in the sky” to “Aliens!” With so many possibilities for what UAPs might be — optical illusions, meteorological phenomena and aviation-related sightings, plus more — the experience generally turns out to be more mundane than observers imagine, West says.
“We’re not really looking for aliens,” he explains. “We’re looking to explain what people are seeing.”
The study of UAPs needs more and better data
Good data are key to deciphering UAPs, but they’re often in short supply. Although many reports by pilots include images taken by onboard sensors or with handheld video cameras, those instruments often aren’t sophisticated enough to capture the necessary details. The same is true for sightings reported from the ground, where the specifics of a presumed object’s direction and speed as well as general environmental conditions are often lacking.
By contrast, NASA has a wealth of data from satellites that monitor Earth. Though they don’t have the resolution to spot relatively small objects the size of most UAPs, the satellites are poised to play a supporting role, says astrophysicist Thomas Zurbuchen. Now at ETH Zurich, he’s a former associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA satellites could be key in providing details on any environmental conditions that may coincide with UAPs, according to the NASA team’s report, released in September 2023. Data collected by commercial satellites can play a similar role.
Gathering and analyzing data is a good way to address what UAPs are, Zurbuchen says. “We should be excited about things we don’t understand, whether they’re natural phenomena, balloons or other things,” he says. “We currently don’t understand what’s flying in our airspace, not to the level that’s needed.”
Boyd also emphasizes the need for better data. The sensors typically used on planes today “weren’t designed to detect UAPs, and the signals that we do pick up are sometimes hard to interpret,” he says. Yet getting the right data may prove challenging and expensive. Integrating new types of sensors into the already-complicated electronic systems of military and commercial aircraft would be something of a “needle-in-a-haystack type of endeavor,” Boyd says. “There are more than 100,000 flights per day; how many have actually seen anything?”
Explained anomalous phenomena
Although many UAPs remain puzzling, experts have identified some common sources. Saucer-shaped lenticular clouds, birds in flight, thermal fluctuations in the atmosphere and other natural phenomena explain some sightings, as do celestial objects like Venus. And while no alien technology has been linked to UAPs, human tech has, including weather balloons, satellites, drones, airborne trash and military aircraft. Last year, a particularly spooky spiral in the sky over northwestern Canada turned out to be vapor from unspent fuel released from a SpaceX rocket.
Lenticular clouds
FIONA MCALLISTER PHOTOGRAPHY / Getty Images
Birds in flight
Diana Robinson Photography/Getty Images
Venus in the sky
noriakimasumoto/Getty Images
Weather balloon
NASA
SatellitesSpacex
Vapor from unspent fuel released from a SpaceX rocket
Todd Salat
Perhaps ground-based instruments are the way to go. Several research teams are developing suites of instruments that can observe a broad range of characteristics and be deployed to sites where UAPs are frequently seen. Some of these packages could be ready to deploy late this year.
Wes Watters, a planetary scientist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, is on one team now developing such instrument packages. The observatories are intended to “determine whether there are measurable phenomena in or near Earth’s atmosphere that can be confidently classified as scientific anomalies,” he and colleagues proposed in the March 2023 Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation. Or, in simpler terms, “to figure out what’s normal versus what’s not normal,” he explains.
Designing such observatories is complicated by the fact that not all UAPs are the same. But previous fieldwork, as well as the observations made by people during UAP sightings, is a rich source of information about what measurements could be useful, Watters says. Besides sensors for detecting and characterizing a UAP itself, instrument packages will collect weather data, which could help researchers interpret the other measurements.
Watters and colleagues are developing three styles of instrument packages as part of the Galileo Project. Led by Harvard University astronomer Avi Loeb, the project seeks to bring the search for signs of extraterrestrial technologies into mainstream scientific research.
The most elaborate instrument package will sport arrays of wide-field cameras for targeting aerial objects and triangulating their positions; narrow-field cameras for tracking objects across the sky; radio antennas and receivers; microphones that can detect sound across a wide range of wavelengths; and computers that can integrate, process and analyze data. These weather-resistant systems will function autonomously 24/7 and be deployed at sites with electrical power and internet connectivity.
These observatories will likely cost around $250,000 each and be deployed to at least three sites for up to five years.
A second, more portable option will be designed for rapid deployment for up to two weeks to sites that don’t have access to electrical power or internet. Each costing about $25,000, these simpler packages will be monitored daily, with data recorded and then processed later and elsewhere. The instruments won’t necessarily be weatherized, restricting their operation to mild-weather locales.
The third, simplest and least expensive package will host low-end, consumer-grade sensors and instruments, Watters says. They’ll be easy to maintain, monitor the sky within a radius of five kilometers and operate continuously for up to a year, relying on solar and battery power if need be. Groups of these packages can be networked together to cover a broad region. Each package will probably cost about $2,500.
With these sorts of instrument packages — and open minds, Watters suggests — researchers are bound to make new discoveries. “It’s impossible to make sense of these phenomena until we collect the right kinds of data,” he says.
In their 2023 report, Watters and colleagues noted that though several teams are developing or using instrument packages, none have yet reported detection of UAPs in peer-reviewed papers. The Galileo Project, including Watters’ team’s research, is funded by private donations, including a recently received $575,000 grant to establish and monitor a ground-based observatory somewhere in the Pittsburgh area.
The goal is not to explain away UAPs, Watters says. Instead, he notes, “we’re about identifying and characterizing what they are or might be.”
The most common and yet interesting question that many people ask is: Are we alone in this universe? The answer has taken a great turn from “Maybe yes” to “Maybe no” in the past few years. There is a long list of credible personalities who never denied the presence of non-human intelligent life among us. Moreover, a few of them are certain that aliens are on Earth. American billionaire Robert Bigelow said something shocking about aliens in November 2017.
According to Robert Bigelow, famous in the aerospace industry for the manufacture of inflatable modules such as those tested out at the International Space Station, there are extraterrestrial beings living among humans. He said that he is “absolutely convinced” aliens live among humans on Earth. During the interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes, reporter Lara Logan asked Bigelow if he believes in aliens. He replied: “I’m absolutely convinced. That’s all there is to it.” He further said: “There has been and is an existing presence, an ET presence.”
He continued: “I spent millions and millions and millions – I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.” “You don’t have to go anywhere” to find aliens and they are here right in front of people. Bigelow had his own close encounters but declined to go into detail.
When award-winning journalist George Knapp asked his comment on this interview, he said: “There are different ways to go at this. So one is from a hardware standpoint. The other one is from the presence standpoint, ET presence. And, you know, a lot of people say, well, whether they’re, you know, that they can be among the population, whether they’re hybrids, or there’s some other kind of, really look alike, you know, kind of thing. But so, so you can look at it in different kinds of ways. And, and so, I know of a really good high quality researcher who has fantastic academic credentials and background. And he would be predisposed to the latter, saying that, yeah, it could be among us, you know, but he’s probably on the more extreme, he’s definitely on the more extreme. Others would say, well, we’re safe in saying that there’s hardware, you know, so that’s among us, and hardware kind of context.” (Source)
Skinwalker Ranch, a property located in northeastern Utah has been the subject of alleged paranormal activity, including UFO sightings and other strange occurrences. The ranch gained notoriety in the 1990s when it was purchased by Mr. Bigelow, who funded a number of studies of the phenomena reported at the ranch.
However, the specifics of what has been reported at the ranch and the credibility of those reports have been the subject of much debate and skepticism. Some people believe that the ranch is a hotspot for extraterrestrial activity, while others believe that the reports of strange occurrences at the ranch are the result of hoaxes or misidentifications of natural phenomena.
Bryant “Dragon” Arnold (Chief Security Officer on Skinwalker Ranch), Casey Smith, Erik Bard and Kaleb Bench, from left, check the radiation in a sinkhole pit on Skinwalker Ranch, in a moment from History’s series “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch.” Image via The Salt Lake Tribune
Following his interview with Mr. Bigelow, Knapp then asked if the entities at Skinwalker Ranch would be investigated through the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (which he founded in 2020 after his wife passed away). Besides, he wondered that if they are among us, can they also be considered alien? Bigelow said: “Well, if you if you follow the literature and pay attention to a lot of other kinds of sources, they absolutely are.”
Further, Mr. Bigelow shared his personal experiences and losses that prompted his interest in life after death, as well as UFOs. He talked about possible links between consciousness research and UFOs. He also talked about the risks of trying to establish communications with the unknown.
“That’s been mainly what I’ve been doing except for the skinwalker ranch thing for 20 years as the space world has been huge in my life to pursue the legitimate parochial kind of you know using fire engines rockets to get you there. We didn’t expect anything like this to happen and so there this is different. This is the holy grail and is different than the second holy grail. If the second one is ‘Beings’ (E.T.), then the first one: Is there any part of your consciousness that survives your bodily death? That’s a big deal. That’s a huge story. That’s gigantic.”
“Be a little careful about what you wish for. So on the face of it, communication sounds great and that by the way has been tried forever ever since the oracle of Delphi. I mean you can go back thousands of years and that’s been attempted. So It’s not now you know the last 100 years through electronics and using some kind of electrical apparatus to try to have some kind of communications. And you know communication can be at all different kinds of levels. There might be communication that just causes you an awareness.”
Then Knapp asked him what triggered his curiosity about UFOs, possibly it was after Bob Lazar’s story came out. Mr. Bigelow replied that he was already into UFO research. He was looking at UFO stories worldwide to understand what they actually were.
In 1992, he started the Bigelow Foundation with Bob Lazar, who worked on reverse-engineering recovered extraterrestrial craft at Area-51. Mr. Bigelow also backed Dr. John E. Mack, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard who wrote two popular books about his work with people who told him they had been abducted by aliens, and Budd Hopkins, an artist who became an abduction investigator and also wrote popular books.
Mr. Bigelow’s investigative team, headed by Colm Kelleher, the institute’s scientific administrator and biochemist, documented their own paranormal events, according to a 2005 book “Hunt for the Skinwalker,” by Dr. Kelleher and Mr. Knapp.
Mr. Bigelow said he saw “interdimensional” forces at play through portals at certain paranormal hot spots like Skinwalker. But he also said he had frequently visited the ranch without experiencing the kind of chilling events others reported, as if some intelligence were selecting the people to act upon. “I slept like a log every single night,” he said. And no human was physically harmed, but he said he and other visitors often carried strange things home, like a sulfurous stink in a certain part of his house. His wife felt the presence of a faceless creature pressing down on her side of bed. (Source)
Bigelow amassed his fortune through the hotel chain Budget Suites of America and used this money to fund his UFO study. In an interview with The Associated Press, he said that UFOs are “under our noses” and wondered why news organizations had not extensively covered UFO sightings.
In 2008, Mr. Bigelow secretly created BAASS (Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies) to study the UFO mystery and related phenomena. The public did not know that he had signed a contract with the Defense Intelligence Agency to do an investigation under the AAWSAP program.
His political influence has been strong when it comes to UFO study. He once convinced his friend and then-Democratic U.S. Sen. Harry Reid to allocate $22 million to the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which investigated UFO reports from 2007 to 2012. The majority of the funds were sent to Bigelow’s company to investigate, and the allocation was not made public until a 2017 New York Times investigation. The Pentagon stated that the program was terminated in 2012, although Reid later stated that he had no remorse about the expenditure.
Later, he and his team hired dozens of investigators, scientists, and support staff to work on putting together a huge database of original investigations and UFO files from other countries. The now-famous 2004 Tic Tac encounter off the coast of Southern California was one of the cases that BAASS looked into.
A report published Thursday claims a UFO was spotted in the skies above President Joe Biden while he flew into LAX on Air Force One on October 10.
A video sharedon social media in December apparently shows a silvery white object flying extremely close to Air Force One as Biden landed in LAX for a fundraiser back in October, according to the Daily Mail. The outlet published several still photographs of the object, which whizzes past the President
The clip was taken by airplane enthusiasts Joshua and Peter Solorzano, who filmed the orb going over at around 10:18am local time while live-streaming on their YouTube channel. The first flies over around the 1:26 mark, and then comes back two more times at 4:38 and 6:58.
Many users noted its resemblance to a UFO which flew over the Middle East in 2022. Footage of the event was released by the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution office. A report noted the orb had “characteristics and behaviors consistent with other ‘metallic orb’ observations in the region,” but gave little indication to what they actually were.
Despite the Pentagon’s interest in UFOs, apparently no Men in Black showed up to hassle the Solorzano brothers for the footage.
Another witness, Chris Cullari, apparently saw the object around 12:30pm on the same day while in Culver City, according to Daily Mail. A Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) helicopter circled near the object, Cullari said, and he shared photos with the Daily Mail.
So either this thing is real … or the government wants you to think it is because of all the negative press they’ve been getting about UFO/UAP disclosure in 2023. After a year of promises to reveal the truth about what we know, our lawmakers decided that actually, we don’t get to know what UFOs really are, according to their data and research. If the people who really control our government want us to know something, we’ll know it. But otherwise, we will always be left in the dark.
Once again, the timing on this latest UFO appearance feels a little too convenient. But that’s just my opinion.
Academic involvement in the study of unidentified anomalous phenomena(UAP) is helping to progress the once-taboo subject beyond the realm of speculation, according to a group of humanities scholars who are now pushing for deeper involvement from professionals across a diverse range of disciplines.
The study of UAP, once largely avoided by the academic community, has recently seen the entry of a growing number of scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Further bolstered by the United States Department of Defense’s renewed engagement in UAP investigations, studies of aerial mysteries have recently seen a pronounced increase in serious academic inquiry, driven by the desire to understand the implications of reported incidents and their impact across various disciplines.
Now, the Society for UAP Studies, a nonprofit 501 (c)(3) organization that aims to unite academics and professionals who, according to its website, “are committed to advancing the study of the UAP through rigorous scholarly engagement,” will be hosting an online summer symposium that will address how professionals can help advance our understanding of these perplexing phenomena.
“The purpose of this is to organize a broad array of academic fields, perspectives, and discourses that are in various ways concerned with understanding—more deeply and more rigorously—the subject of UAP,” said Dr. Michael Cifone, a professor of philosophy and founder of the Society for UAP Studies, who also serves as its CEO and editor of its official publication, Limina -The Journal of UAP Studies.
According to Cifone, one of the society’s goals is to encourage interdisciplinary dialog between humanists and scientists who approach the UAP phenomenon in different ways and unite researchers on what he calls “the more metatheoretical questions of how to study the phenomenon.”
Despite the recent focus on scientific and military engagement with UAP, Cifone told The Debrief that the phenomenon presents challenges that also impact the humanities and political science, as well as the inquiries of historians, anthropologists, and professionals in a variety of other disciplines.
“With an event like this, we have an opportunity for more involvement from the humanities,” Cifone said, which he believes will provide an opportunity to learn ways those who work in this academic area can contribute to our growing knowledge of the topic.
Dr. Christian Peters, Managing Director at Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS) and a member of the Society’s board of advisors, says another of the challenges of bringing the humanities more deeply into investigations of UAP involves not only identifying and characterizing UAP, but also to a degree the discipline’s own past challenges with self-identification.
“The thing with us in the social sciences is we haven’t really decided whether we belong to the humanities or to the sciences,” Peters said. “We’re kind of a mixed breed.”
Peters told The Debrief that many of the current processes and approaches being applied in the study of UAP are shaped by the contexts of military and scientific institutions, which are driven by various ambitions and interests that, according to Peters, highlight the influence of social sciences in understanding what is considered truth and reality.
“We do have something in the social sciences, which is called social constructivism that relates to the fact that basically everything that is dealing with realities and truths and ambitions is socially constructed,” Peters said. “There are a lot of arguments going on looking at the current processes about concepts like disclosure, which has become some sort of a ‘signal word’ for the discussion that takes place at the moment.”
“But you can look at disclosure from a more distant political theory perspective,” Peters told The Debrief, “and looking at that as being the play between the unveiling and the hiding in modern and in ancient statehood.”
“There’s a lot that needs to be said about these processes,” he added. In line with these perspectives, Peters will coordinate a workshop for the Society’s summer event with historian Greg Eghigian, which examines the UAP issue from the perspectives of history, political science, and political theory.
“There is a big movement going on with serious people working in different fields,” Peters told The Debrief. “I don’t think we’re going to find an interdisciplinary approach, but we will start to facilitate the discussion that needs to take place.”
Along with interdisciplinary dialogue, Eghigian told The Debrief that another aim of the Society’s event involves another of the subject’s most enduring problems.
“Speculation about UAP is often unmoored from any empirically sound and self-critical research,” Eghigian said. “The conference seeks to address this shortcoming by placing multidisciplinary scholarship about the subject center stage.”
Along with Peters and Eghigian’s workshop, several others that address various approaches toward studying UAP will be featured, including a session that focuses on the application of citizen science.
“The UAP Citizen Science Workshop is bringing together scientists from the UAP field and surveying the available resources and best practices for citizen science in general,” said Dan Williams, who coordinates the Society’s official Citizen Science Working Group.
Williams, who will lead the workshop, says such resources include SciStarter, Zooniverse, the NASA Citizen Science Seed Funding Program, commercial satellite Earth Observation imagery and analytics, ground-based instrumentation, smartphone apps, and self-supervised machine learning, or what he calls “needle-in-a-haystack” technologies.
“We hope the workshop participants can then author a paper on best practices and identify several citizen science projects of general interest. We have several members from the recent National Science Foundation’s ASTRO-ACCEL-sponsored UAP workshop participating, and we hope our workshop also advances their goal of forming a UAP citizen science working group,” Williams told The Debrief.
“The study of UAP deals with incomplete, inaccurate, and even at times deceptive information,” said Joshua Pierson, D.S.S., a career investigator who is also an advisor to the Society for UAP Studies. “The beauty of having a conference and an organization that focuses on bringing the social sciences and the humanities to bear is really where we start being able to assess what is inaccurate and incomplete,” Pierson said.
“Except now, instead of taking a practitioner’s approach, we have people who can think deeply on the subject to help inform some of the best models and methods to approach the information that we get on UAP,” Pierson told The Debrief.
Pierson says that in addition to applying the best models and research methods, a collective aim of academic groups like the Society for UAP Studies is also to define the phenomena more accurately. However, along with framing the phenomenon in academic terms, part of the aim of studying UAP from a humanities perspective also involves recognizing how people relate to UAP experiences and what overall impact the subject has on individuals, as well as at the societal level.
“UAP have profound effects on the lives of those who witness them, and they also stimulate important questions about the nature of knowledge itself and the limitations of ourselves as knowers,” said Dr. Kim Engels, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Molloy University who is also on the Society’s Advisory Board. “Our conference is offering a space for philosophers and theologians to weigh in on these important dimensions of the UAP conversation.”
“One of the most important things I think the humanities supplies—at least the philosophy of science, my own tradition—is a sort of critical perspective on the ways in which people have come to interpret and study UAP,” Professor Cifone told The Debrief.
“I think we’re at an interesting moment here in terms of the science of UAP. There’s a kind of a turning point right here that I think we’re witnessing, and a science is forming out of a history of kind of abortive and failed attempts to bring to bear some kind of systematic scientific engagement with the question,” Cifone said.
If Cifone is correct, and the efforts by organizations like his, as well as those currently being undertaken by other academic groups and government agencies, are pointing to the emergence of a new area of study in the sciences, then groups like the Society may be some of the best-equipped to help guide the process.
“You know, there’s this in-between space that I think the humanities is really good at negotiating,” Cifone told The Debrief, adding that academics like those who will participate in the Society’s forthcoming conference could be particularly well suited to help the scientific community navigate the various challenges presented by such a complex field of study.
“This is, I think, where humanists can bring the scientists together,” Cifone said, “to discuss that kind of a difficult aspect to the phenomenon.”
The Society for UAP Studies will hold its online Summer Conference 2024, titled “Varieties and Trajectories of Contemporary UAP Studies,” from August 16 to August 18, 2024. Registration details and other information about the event can be found on the Society’s website.
A thought-provoking interview has recently been conducted between Project Unity host Jay Anderson and the U.S. Congressman Andy Ogles. The discussion focused on the implications of complete UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) disclosure. Anderson asked serious questions to Rep. Ogles about UFOs, revealing that the release of extraterrestrial technology could potentially disrupt the world economy and energy sector.
Rep. Andy Ogles spoke about the difficulty in gathering information due to the compartmentalization of special access projects, emphasizing the need for a methodical and persistent approach to uncover the truth. In the interview, he expressed his concern about UAPs operating in both military and commercial airspace, raising questions about the potential national security threats. He said, “I’m not going to assume I know what it may or may not be. What I do know is there’s a national security issue here.”
He considers various possibilities, including the involvement of experimental aircraft, joint ventures, or foreign adversaries. He emphasizes the importance of avoiding predetermined conclusions and encourages an open-minded investigation to determine the true nature of the UAP phenomenon.
When asked about his personal understanding of UAPs, Rep. Ogles talks about the hope that it might be advanced technology possessed by the United States. He says, “My hope would be… some new technology that we possess… puts us that next generation above our adversaries.” However, he acknowledges the mysterious aspects of UAPs, saying they seem to “defy physics.”
Rep. Ogles then considers the energy implications of the advanced propulsion technology displayed by UAPs. He wonders about the amount of energy needed for such rapid movements and how it could impact the energy sector.
He says, “That being said, these UAPs seem to defy physics. They seem to have some sort of propulsion technology that’s unknown to man as we understand it. So, what does that do to the energy sector? If there’s a new way of thinking about the amount of energy it takes to take a craft that’s hovering and suddenly it’s going Mach one in a matter of seconds – the human body can’t sustain that as we understand it, right? So that craft would have to have next-level technology to protect tissue, if you will, or it’s an unmanned type of craft. Again, there are just a lot of questions that have to be probed. But, if there is this propulsion technology out there and this energy capability out there, not only are we in a renaissance when it comes to aircraft, but we’re in a renaissance in terms of propulsion and energy production consumption. So, again, huge implications across the economic scale, both domestically and internationally.”
He mentions his inquiries in committee about the DOE (Department of Energy), suggesting it could be an ideal place to house top-secret technologies. He says, “If you’re going to house a top-secret Next Level technology, what better place to have it and house it than… nuclear facilities.”
“Everybody knows about Area 51. It’s a testing area… You’ve got this super top-secret, super secure facility that, again, would be ideal to have and to house some new technology, emerging technology that we want to fully master for ourselves and quite frankly control. Because again, as you look at that next generation of warfare, it’s not just tanks and planes. It’s drones. It’s unmanned aircraft. It’s economic. There’s a lot that’s about to happen as we go forward as a superpower and our competitive edge on the global stage.”
Later in the interview, Jay Anderson brings up Congressman Burchett’s positive impression of David Grusch’s testimony during classified briefings. Rep. Ogles says that credible sources have vouched for Grusch’s reliability. He suggests believing what Grusch said, thinking about it carefully, and not trying to say it is wrong without some good proof. Ogles says it is important to keep an open mind, focus on getting answers, and not to try finding faults without good reasons.
Rep. Ogles explains that it does not require unanimous congressional support but rather the speaker’s will to initiate action. He emphasizes the bipartisan interest in addressing the issue and expresses the need for a select committee to ensure transparency and accountability in the investigation. He, along with Congressman Burchett, acknowledges the likelihood of a multi-decade cover-up or compartmentalization due to the secretive nature of special access programs (SAPs) and classified information related to national security.
When asked about evidence suggesting reverse engineering or more exotic propositions, Rep. Ogles mentions the classification of such information and the need for careful consideration. He discusses questions about the origin of technology, whether it is our own creation or recovered from elsewhere, and the potential for reverse engineering.
Stephen Bassett, the only registered lobbyist of Washington and founder of Paradigm Research Group, shares the same UFO disclosure concerns that will pose serious implications for the world’s economy.
The PRG researchers claim they have known the reasons why the US authorities were hiding information about UFOs. According to them, disclosing UFO data would lead to the collapse of the entire world economy. Bassett added that all so-called “flying saucers” do not use oil, gasoline, gas, or coal. “They have a different energy system. Without a doubt, a much more complex and deep system based on anti-gravity,” he said.
“Some programs have been removed from the jurisdiction of the White House and Congress and are working somewhere very, very deep, in a ‘hidden mode,'” the researcher emphasized. “I assure you, when the head of state finally officially admits this fact and presents evidence, people will start to worry and want to know more.” But even if the economy stops developing in the current way, it will have new opportunities, Bassett believes.
During an interview with uInterview, he said that UFOs are not unidentified flying objects, as the acronym suggests, but rather alternative energy and propulsion devices. The technology behind UFOs was heavily studied by a team headed by Dr. Vannevar Bush in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and by 1954, they had developed what is known as “gravity control” and “zero-point energy.”
[Editor’s note] In January 2015, former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell sent an email to Podesta, asking him to have an urgent meeting to discuss Disclosure and Zero Point Energy (ZPE). He was concerned about the peace in space. Mitchell wrote: “My Catholic colleague Terri Mansfield will be there too, to bring us up to date on the Vatican’s awareness of ETI. Another colleague is working on a new Space Treaty, citing involvement with Russia and China. However, with Russia’s extreme interference in Ukraine, I believe we must pursue another route for peace in space and ZPE on Earth.” (Click here to read the full article)
However, Dr. Greer stated that the secrecy surrounding this technology went off the rails and became deeply entrenched in compartmented intelligence operations, even causing President Eisenhower to become frustrated with being denied information on the projects.
“The problem became to be, and this is what President Eisenhower warned us about, the secrecy became so enmeshed and compartmented in intelligence operations, that even he as president lost control over it,” Dr. Greer said.
He further stated: “One of our military witnesses, he was a young man working at the White House – which I’m looking at from my place here in Washington, he told us, Mr. Lubkin, who is an attorney, said that Eisenhower was very frustrated that he was being denied information on the projects controlling this issue. So the secrecy went off the rails into these unacknowledged special access projects.”
The disclosure of UFOs would mean the end of oil, gas, coal, and public utilities, as the technology would completely transform the world. Those with trillions of dollars invested in these industries would not be enthused about this possibility. This is the reason for the secrecy, and it has been maintained for 70 years, according to Dr. Greer.
ON A CLEAR, SUNNY DAY IN JULY, Mick West, a former video game programmer, was flying from his home in Sacramento, California, down to Pasadena. From the aircraft, he spied a small, white, elongated object that seemed to be passing over the mountains. Intrigued, he took a short video with his phone. Though he assumed the anomaly was just another airplane, West just couldn’t help himself; he needed to investigate.
When he got to his hotel room, West did what he so often does: a bit of digital sleuthing. First, he uploaded the raw footage to Photoshop to drill down into the image until it resembled a mosaic of zoomed-in pixels. “You have to be very careful about what you’re looking at … for me, that’s the very first step in investigating a case,” he explains. He also downloaded the GPS routes of his plane and a few nearby ones from FlightAware.com, a real-time worldwide flight tracker.
West is a longtime UFO debunker. Retired from the gaming industry in the early 2000s, he’s dealt with about 1,000 UFO cases over nearly a decade, ultimately completing a deeper analysis of about 100 on a pro-bono basis. He examines scoops from official and leaked government reports, sightings trending on social media, emails people send to him, and anomalies posted on popular UFO databases like Enigma and MUFON. He’s even appeared on a History Channel show, The Proof Is Out There, as a forensic video analyst.
He’s found that most skyward curiosities have a logical explanation. No aliens required.
And yet, reports of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs)—a term the U.S. government’s National Defense Authorization Act of 2023 established to replace the term “UFO”—are on the rise, according to data from the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, established in 2022. West believes in using logic and common sense while investigating such claims. That means following the clues and cross-referencing them with simultaneous events such as flights, weather phenomena like saucer-shaped lenticular clouds, ground camera images, and satellite data from companies like Starlink.
That may not necessarily lead to thrilling discoveries of alien encounters, but for West, chipping away at the puzzle to reveal the truth is enormously satisfying.
WEST USES A THOUGHTFUL, methodical process every time he investigates a UAP. His investigation of the white mystery object spotted during his flight to Southern California is the perfect example.
First, he pulled data from the original video. To do so, West used programs like Invisor, an app that displays and compares technical information about video, audio, and photo files. “You drag in the video and you get all this information, things like the original date it was recorded, the resolution, the frame rates … sometimes you get location as well,” he explains, sharing his screen via Zoom, displaying a long column of dozens of datasets.
Understanding the physical perspective of the camera shot is crucial, too. Since West’s video was taken from an airplane, he consulted the free online tool FlightRadar24. A green and brown map depicting U.S. physical features popped up, dotted with dozens of tiny yellow airplane symbols. “You can figure out what’s actually in the air at a particular time,” West explains.
Mick West
Mick West demonstrates using FlightRadar24, an online tool that allows you to track every flight path and its historical data. This aids in recreating an encounter with a UAP.
When he zoomed in on his own flight, West could see exactly where his plane was at the particular time he spotted the mysterious, white airborne object, as well as the positions of every other plane nearby. So, he connected the dots. “I knew I was sitting on the right side of the plane,” he says, moving his cursor over another nearby plane, “so this is a likely contender.” He could see that the plane had taken off from Los Angeles’ Van Nuys Airport shortly before his video and that it was ascending. “That matches what we see in the video,” he says.
Then, West turned to a tool he designed himself, called Sitrec. An organization that prefers to remain anonymous paid West to continue developing the app and to help make it freely and publicly available on his website, Metabunk.org, a hub for UAP news, forum discussions, and debunking resources. West simply dragged and dropped his video into Sitrec—a “situation recreation” tool which integrates flight data and video from any source—and used satellite imagery to recreate situations.
“I set the camera to point from my plane to the other two. One of them matched exactly. It was a small Cessna,” he says. “This confirms that this was the plane I was actually looking at.”
WEST USED TO CODE FORTony Hawk’s Pro Series™ skater video games, a billion-dollar franchise. He likes to joke that it was his “baptism by fire,” because he would sometimes “spend an inordinate amount of time on this trivial little thing, this one intractable little bug that is just causing this problem. It can be very difficult to figure out … but you have no choice.”
It’s this passion and rigor that ignited his first foray into UAP investigations. That, and a fascination with conspiracy theories.
It all began with the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory that claims airplane vapor trails secretly contain chemical or biological agents meant to control people. To debunk that far-fetched idea, West launched the website ContrailScience.com. Eventually, he started debunking other conspiracy theories including those about 9/11, Earth being flat, and finally UFO alien sightings.
The most important element of maintaining accuracy is to hold on to reasonable—albeit mundane—explanations. “This is a big, big issue in UFO investigations. Instead of trying to eliminate something, you just move possibilities up and down the list,” West explains. Perhaps the list of possibilities for a UAP includes a bird, a weather balloon, an alien spaceship, a hallucination, or a camera glitch. “Which one’s the most important one? The most likely one,” West says. “If you eliminate something, you’ve thrown it away, and you might never get it back.”
That’s what happened during a UAP investigation in Chile—one that would permanently cement West’s interest in UAPs.
In 2014, the Chilean Navy caught video footage of overlapping mysterious black blobs leaving black streaks behind them. Chile’s military studied the recording for two years, but ruled out several different possibilities, leaving behind only the tantalizing chance of aliens. On Metabunk, you can watch West’s analysis of the recording. He discovered that the thermal camera responsible for the footage made the blobs appear hot. In reality, they were just hotter than the surrounding sky that day. Likewise, the streaks were also warmer than the surrounding sky. It’s the same effect as looking through a regular camera at an object with a very bright background, West says—the object appears black.
“It’s not an intuitive thing, and if you don’t delve too deeply into it, [you’ll be wrong,]” he says. In fact, after removing the radiating heat effects around the object, the shape of a regular airplane emerges. The blobs were the four engines of an airplane, and the streaks its contrails.
Mick West
A screenshot from Mick West’s free online Sitrec tool showing the Chilean Navy UAP video, with a flight path analysis and additional information about the November 11, 2014 incident on the left-hand side of the screen.
Another aspect the original investigation got wrong was the blob’s flight path. The footage originated from a helicopter and seemed to indicate a UAP over a nearby bay. “They thought they were looking at an object that was moving left to right, here,” says West, pointing out the flight track path on the video via Sitrec. “In fact, what they were looking at was this plane, just departed from San Diego Airport.” As the plane looped around to gain height over the nearby mountains, it banked in such a way that it appeared to be over the bay and so—apparently—didn’t match any flight records. West was able to simulate the blob’s actual movements by accounting for the camera angle and the relative movement of the blob, and overlaid it successfully with official flight records, matching the paths.
DESPITE HIS DEDICATION, West does have a few unsolved cases on his list. Sometimes, there’s just not enough information to draw a conclusion. For example, in 2017, TheNew York Timespublished a video that appeared to depict a flying saucer. West deeply investigated it, checking out how the camera could have been moving, how the UFO could have matched the rotation of the camera, and how there could’ve been a glare in the camera lens. But the analysis took West a long time, and the case is still puzzling. Ideally, West needs the original radar data instead of the analysis the government actually released. The original would have allowed him to recreate the scenario in three dimensions.
“In most cases, what you really want is to have two videos from two different angles. Multiple sensor data is kind of the gold standard,” he explains.
Now that the National Defense Authorization Act requires the government to declassify many UAP documents, West hopes he can get his hands on more original evidence. So far, it’s been a slog, and until there’s fuller disclosure of past UAPs, some of those cases will likely remain open.
Not all of West’s investigations take place on a computer, though. Sometimes he needs to do a little detective work on the side. Once, when somebody reported to him that they’d seen mysterious lights in the sky, West followed his hunch that they might be searchlights and called the local town. He was right: a tree farm in the suspicious location had just installed attention-grabbing searchlights.
Even though West has solved many UAP analysis requests over the years, his conclusions—so far, always mundane—can be unwelcome. People want to believe extraterrestrial aliens are making contact with us. And in the rush to find answers, even other investigators often jump to the wrong conclusions, he says.
There’s also this fact: “The people who are into UFO investigations are so interested because they’re looking for something extraordinary,” West says. “I’m just looking to find out what something actually is, whether it’s extraordinary or not. I don’t have a preference.”
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
!['It’s not an intuitive thing, and if you don’t delve too deeply into it, [you’ll be wrong],' said West, who programmed Tony Hawk's Pro Series games](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/08/07/20/88233633-13715847-image-a-48_1723060752103.jpg)
!['A white noise screen with a perfect pulsation function,' according to their report's appendix, 'is timed to the revolution of the lights from the [UFO's two] disks at roughly 1-second intervals.' Above, 11 cycles of the repeating one-second pulse as pulled from the video noise](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/06/12/12/85996637-13514283-image-a-6_1718192107384.jpg)
'One of the things that we've heard from the Pentagon and from NASA is that a lot of the issue with this topic is there's not enough data. So that's exactly what we're trying to do is gather more data,' Alejandro Rojas, a UFO researcher with the app said.
'Once you can't rule things out, that's when you have something anomalous that either deserves more research, or can point you in a direction.'
Among the unexplained phenomena submitted through the app was a 'small, cylindrical' UFO seen 'zig-zagging' above the Austin skies on July 28, 2023.
The skies of Austin are increasingly lit up by unexplained sightings, partly thanks to Elon Musk 's Starlink
The Enigma Labs app is attempting to try and gather more data on UFO sightings in order to classify them better
Another stargazer gave an account of a strange object spotted in December.
'I can't remember who saw it first, but we noticed this object directly above us. It felt distinctly weightless, spherical, and kind of amorphous,' the account reads.
'The texture was almost like a static TV, kind of gaseous, and grayish black except for a BRIGHT red glow that would flash along one edge, then another, then emanate from the bottom of the object.
.'Tt was definitely at or above cloud level and was visible until it was way off in the distance, never changing its speed to my perception. We have no idea what this was - not balloons because it was too far and cutting against the wind, definitely not a plane, definitely not a consumer drone.'
One curious incident during the solar eclipse saw a black object float past the sun during the cosmic event.
'We were on a boat waiting for the solar eclipse to happen,' the poster explained.
The app asks users to upload photo of the object, description and location data which is then sent to the government
Starlink is a network of 6,000 satellites were launched by SpaceX to try and bring internet to remote areas
'Ten minutes before totality I see this object through my camera fly by on the screen, didn't think much of it at the moment until I reviewed the footage a few days later.'
But UFO-skeptic Robert Shaeffer has his doubts about the usefulness of the app.
'Since we know that the vast majority of reported UFO sightings are readily explained, and hence of no scientific value, this app encourages the reporting and sharing of low-quality UFO sightings, thus muddying the waters,' he said.
'It promotes the idea that seeing a UFO is something that the average person can expect to experience, but even if you don't see anything, send us a photo of the sky, anyway!'