In 1948, shortly after the “Flying Saucer” craze had erupted over the Americas, a new kind of aerial apparition began to be frequently reported: the so-called “green fireballs.”

Among the most notable sightings had been one occurring over New Mexico in late 1948, reports of which were logged by the crew aboard both military and civilian aircraft operating on the night of December 5. Both groups of observers likened the object to “a huge green meteor.”

The December 5 incident had not been the first time that bright fireballs lit up the night sky over America. In February of the same year, a brilliant flash of night occurring in the night sky over Kansas had been announced as the result of a meteor by Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, then director of the Institute of Meteorites at the University of New Mexico. Later that summer, reports of a huge green fireball observed over Oregon also made headlines, after a bright meteor was observed by many Oregonians on the night of June 28, which disappeared over the ocean.

However, the objects that were being seen over the southeast in December appeared to behave differently from typical meteors, a fact noted by LaPaz in a letter he sent to the U.S. Air Force on December 20. The following month, a concerning new possibility had been raised in official circles: The Director of Army Intelligence from Fourth Army Headquarters in Texas had suggested that the strange fireballs could be the “result of radiological warfare experiments by a foreign power,” and deemed this possibility to be “of such great importance, especially as they are occurring in the vicinity of sensitive installations,” that a scientific board should be established to investigate the matter.

The U.S. Air Force had already become concerned about the presence of unusual flying objects operating over America, following a rash of reports of the alleged objects in the weeks following a landmark sighting by pilot Kenneth Arnold over Mount Ranier, Washington. The sightings helped initiate the formation of Project Sign, the first Air Force investigation into the possible source of the objects. In February 1949, a conference was held at Los Alamos which Project Sign investigators attended, along with several scientists and other military personnel, with the objective of assessing the fireball sightings, although the conference led to no conclusions about what their source might have been. The following December saw the establishment of Project Twinkle, which involved plans for systematic efforts to observe and photograph the mysterious green objects, although the operation never saw full implementation, and was discontinued after just two years in operation.

However, the sightings had not completely subsided, and on January 22, 1953, an article in the Santa Fe New Mexican featured the latest theories of Dr. LaPaz, which still involved the possibility that Russian technology could be to blame.

“A fireball expert said today Russia may be scouting the United States and other parts world with strange new guided missiles,” the article stated. “Dr. Lincoln LaPaz said a good many shreds of evidence point to green fireballs sighted throughout the world being a type of missile—possibly of Soviet make.”

Although the mysterious green fireballs are commonly associated with the early years of UFOs, there have been some notable incidents throughout the ensuing decades that appear to describe similar phenomena.

On the night of November 17, 1995, the crew aboard Lufthansa Flight 405 and that of British Airways 226 each observed a brightly lit, greenish object as it flew past them while flying over Long Island, New York. Several of the observers described it as resembling a green projectile, which they estimated to be flying at an altitude approximately 3000 feet above them and to their left. Following the incident, Peter Davenport of the National UFO Reporting Center compiled additional information about the incident, and also obtained a transcript of the communications between air traffic controllers and the pilots who observed it. Strangely, the transcripts revealed that the object had apparently managed to evade detection by radar at the Air Route Traffic Control Center at nearby Nashua, New Hampshire, despite being observed by multiple witnesses on the night in question.

Is it possible that the sightings of green fireballs from over the years represent nothing more than the occasional peculiar behavior of meteorites as they burn through our atmosphere? Even Dr. LaPaz seemed to think otherwise based on his assessments of the sightings from the late 1940s, although his attribution of the phenomena to prospective Russian technologies seems to fall flat—much like the modern attribution of UAP observed since 2004 to Russia or China, an unlikely conclusion that many nonetheless appear to maintain.

Although prosaic explanations may exist for the green fireballs, their source still remains undetermined, leaving them as one of the many peculiar and colorful footnotes in the broader history of the longstanding UFO mystery.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

Over the years, controversial claims have been made about a highly-classified facility located in Wiltshire, England:  the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense’s Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL). It is better known as Porton Down. Over the years, claims have been made about a connection between Porton Down and UFOs. Before we get to the matter of UFOs, let’s first take a look at Porton Down. Dr. Robert M. Wood’s book, Alien Viruses states: “Although work at Porton Down had originally begun in March 1916, it was not until 1940 that the installation became the central hub of British interest in biological warfare. Following the start of the Second World War, a highly secret and independent group – the Biology Department, Porton – was established by the War Cabinet, with a mandate to investigate the reality of biological warfare and to develop a means of retaliation in the event that biological warfare was utilized against the United Kingdom. By 1946, the name of the wartime group had become the Microbiological Research Department. A decade later, the biological warfare research of Porton Down’s staff had become solely defensive in nature; and in 1957 it was re-named the Microbiological Research Establishment.”

The BBC say: “Porton Down was set up in 1916. It was a center designed to test chemical and biological weapons. Nerve gases such as Sarin and CS gas were tested on volunteer servicemen. Servicemen were offered around £2 and three days leave as an incentive to take part in tests. Very few servicemen knew what they were volunteering for and some were even told it was research into the cure for the common cold. In 1953 it is alleged that serviceman Ronald Maddison died after taking part in a Sarin gas experiment. In 1962, one of Porton Down’s own scientists, Geoffrey Bacon died of the plague. Since the end of WWII, 20,000 people have taken part in experiments at Porton Down.”

Now, let’s get to the UFO angle of Porton Down. It was in January 2001 that the then-retired – and now late – British Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Hill-Norton, decided to get into the Rendlesham Forest controversy – without doubt the most famous “UFO” event in the U.K. Having had an interest in UFOs for decades, he used his considerable clout to try and figure out what occurred in 1980. It was hardly an easy task for Hill-Norton to achieve. Of specific interest to Hill-Norton were the claims of a Rendlesham  connection to the activities of the Porton Down staff. He wanted to know “whether personnel from Porton Down visited Rendlesham Forest or the area surrounding RAF Watton in December 1980 or January 1981; and whether they are aware of any tests carried out in either of those two areas aimed at assessing any nuclear, biological or chemical hazard.” As time progressed, more and more data surfaced and suggested that the “UFO landing” was really a sophisticated hologram-driven experiment designed to determine the extent to which the military personnel in the forest could have their minds meddled. “Mind-control, in other words.

Berwyn Mountains

Of course, most people in Ufology don’t want to hear one of their most famous cases destroyed. Too bad. Now, let’s jump back to 1974. Andy Roberts states in his book UFO Down!: “In 1958 Gavin Gibbons wrote a children’s science-fiction novel By Space Ship to the Moon,which featured a UFO landing on Moel Sych in the Berwyn Mountains of North Wales. Sixteen years later, in a surreal case of life imitating art, those very same mountains would again be the focus for a story involving a downed UFO. But this time, some said, the story was for real.” Indeed, there have been claims for years of a crashed UFO on the mountains. Not only that, in 1996 an anonymous soldier came forward, claiming to know that the remains of dead aliens were held at Porton Down. Of course, this has not been confirmed. But, we do have the fascinating story of a man named Robert Bolton.”

I first interviewed Bolton by phone, and then met him in person, in Norwich, England, in 2000. He told me: “I spent thirty years in the Royal Air Force as an aircraft engineer. I had various postings, including at Akrotiri in Cyprus, RAF Honnington, and at RAF Valley in North Wales from 1971 to 1974. My wife and her family came from Corwen. At the time that the thing on the Berwyns happened, they lived up on the side of the mountain and her mom still lives there to this day. Corwen is part of the Berwyn range. From where their house is, if you walk up the path that goes behind the houses up and onto the top of the mountains, you’re talking perhaps a mile and a quarter away from where it all occurred; so it’s not very far away at all.

“She still remembers what happened on the night of 23 January. She said to me when I spoke to her about it just recently: ‘I saw aircraft and heard aircraft shot down during the Blitz and it was like an aircraft coming down, but the sound was louder, bigger, heavier that anything you could imagine to do with an aircraft.’ They didn’t know what it was. They heard the noise first of all and ran out into the road. They weren’t the only ones: all their neighbors ran out as well. It got louder and louder and louder and they couldn’t see anything in the sky but then they felt the impact where the houses shook and she had things fall off the mantle-piece in the house.

“It was my wife’s dad, who told me the story about bodies being found on the mountain. His name was Harold Smith. But everyone called him Mick. He had a full-time job with Vauxhall at Elsmere Port; he was a local councilor and was also a part-time Sub-Fire Officer at Corwen. One day we got talking and got on to the subject of UFOs and he said to me: ‘Oh, well, you obviously don’t know about the incident up on the Berwyn Mountains.’ “I first heard the story from him around 1976. At that time he only told me that bodies had been brought down from the mountain and didn’t say anything more. Nothing about who brought them down or where they were taken. But from 1979 to 1982 I was posted to Germany and Mick and my wife’s mother came out to stay for a month and it was here that he told us a lot more.

“I remember that the information that he told us had apparently come from another person in the North Wales Fire Service whose son was in the Army. But it’s not surprising that he would have been told: Mick was a well-respected man and knew people throughout the North Wales Fire Service including at Bala and Wrexham. Mick told me that while the police weren’t involved, the Army was – heavily. I can’t give you an exact date when they visited and he told us this, but it was definitely between 1979 and 1982. He said that there were definitely [trucks] from Porton Down at the scene; that there was a lozenge-shaped object on the mountainside; and that bodies were taken off the mountain and driven to Porton. And to this day, his wife can also confirm that Mick told her the story about Porton Down and bodies too – either in the late 1970s or the early 1980s [italics mine].”

Robert signed off: “I do remember Mick saying that when he had first told me this story in 1976, he didn’t know that it was the Army who had taken the bodies off the mountain and he didn’t know at the time that they’d been taken to Porton Down. So he must have learned that between 1976 and when he came to see us in Germany.” Dead aliens at Porton Down? A Rendlesham Forest connection to Porton Down? All we have right now are rumors. Maybe, things are destined to stay like that. On the other hand, though, just perhaps something incredible might one day surface.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

It is hard to get a lock on the true beginning of the UFO craze in the United States, but there are some old standbys. The Kenneth Arnold sighting of 1947 often crops up, as of course does the supposed UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico that same year. These are the cases that launched the UFO phenomena into the mainstream consciousness And started the whole “flying saucer” fad, but there have been sightings and incidents going back well beyond these commonly held milestones. Indeed, the earlier UFO reports from America predate Arnold or Roswell by quite a good margin, and have served to carve out their own bizarre corner of the UFO landscape.

In 1628, the English Puritan settlers of the New World established the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was the second major settlement in New England following the Plymouth Colony. A very important figure at the time was a lawyer named John Winthrop, who was in charge of a huge wave of settlers coming to America, and he would serve as the governor of the colony for 12 years starting from 1629. Winthrop would also be the founder of various other communities along Massachusetts Bay and the Charles River, and was also known as an authoritarian and religiously conservative leader, known to be against pure democracy, once calling it “the meanest and worst of all forms of government.” Despite this, he was still a well-respected leader and politician who has made his mark upon the early history of the United States, with some of his writings serving to influence politicians to this day, but a lesser-known aspect of the man is that he also wrote some pretty weird stuff in his journals, including what is thought to be among the very first UFO accounts in the New World.

John Winthrop

Tucked away between the pages of various mundane accounts of colonial life is a very curious entry dated March 1, 1639, in which Winthrop writes of a very bizarre and outlandish  incident involving a man named James Everell, who he describes as a “discreet, sober man.” According to Winthrop, Everell had been rowing with two other men up a section of the Muddy River, about two miles from the village of Charlestown, when they saw a “great light in the sky,” which seemed to dart about back and forth.

When it stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square; when it ran, it was contracted into the figure of a swine: it ran as swift as an arrow towards Charlton [Charlestown], and so up and down about two or three hours ran as swift as an arrow, darting back and forth between them and the village of Charlestown, about two miles away. They were come down in their lighter about a mile, and, when it was over, they found themselves carried quite back against the tide to the place they came from. Diverse other credible persons saw the same light, after, about the same place.

The men claimed that after the sighting they had inexplicably found themselves transported about one mile upstream, with no idea or memory of how they had gotten there, nor any sense of the time that had passed. This is an odd detail, as it would mark this incident as not only the first report of a UFO in America, but also the first account of missing time and possibly even the first of alien abduction. One of the explanations at the time was that the men had merely seen illumination from a light phenomenon springing from swamp gas, called ignis fatuus, caused by the combustion of gas from decomposed organic matter. Others thought it was just a misidentified meteorite, and one skeptic was a man named James Savage, who added his own footnote to the sighting in a published version of Winthrop’s journal in 1839, saying:

This account of an ignis fatuus [pale light over marshy ground] may easily be believed on testimony less respectable than that which was adduced. Some operation of the devil, or other power beyond the customary agents of nature, was probably imagined by the relaters and hearers of that age, and the wonder of being carried a mile against the tide became important corroboration of the imagination. Perhaps they were wafted [carry lightly], during the two- or three-hours’ astonishment, for so moderate a distance, by the wind; but, if this suggestion be rejected, we might suppose, that the eddy, flowing always, in our rivers, contrary to the tide in the channel, rather than the meteor, carried their lighter back.

In the end, neither swamp gas nor meteorites really seem to adequately explain what the men reported as written in Winthrop’s journal, and considering that it is only mentioned in one entry and happened so long ago, we will probably never know for sure. Interestingly, this isn’t even the only weird such account to be found within Winthrop’s journal. Five years later there is another entry dated January 18, 1644, which makes mention of a light rising from the water that was witnessed by several boatmen near Boston. This light was apparently “in form like a man,” and “went at a small distance to the town, and so to the south point, and there vanished away.” A few weeks after this yet another journal entry mentions another strange report from Boston Harbor, in which Winthrop writes:

A light like the moon arose about the N.E. point in Boston, and met the former at Nottles Island, and there they closed in one, and then parted, and closed and parted diverse times, and so went over the hill in the island and vanished. Sometimes they shot out flames and sometimes sparkles. This was about eight of the clock in the evening, and was seen by many. About the same time, a voice was heard upon the water between Boston and Dorchester, calling out in a most dreadful manner, ‘Boy! Boy! Come away! Come away!’; and it suddenly shifted from one place to another a great distance, about 20 times. It was heard by diverse godly persons. About 14 days after, the same voice in the same dreadful manner was heard by others on the other side of the town towards Nottles Island.

Winthrop would muse that the voice heard was perhaps from the ghost of a sailor who had died several moths prior to the UFO sighting when his ship had exploded when gunpowder had accidentally been ignited. Whatever the case may be, it is a pretty bizarre report, and it is hard to know what might be going on here. Once again, it only appears in one entry and is never brought up again, leaving it firmly and forever in the realm of speculation. It is all quite the strange case and series of events, and we are left to try and make sense of it all. Was any of this real, and is so what was it? Or was this just a gag thrown into an important historical figure’s journal. And if so, why? It is all certainly a bizarre historical oddity, which has definite repercussions on the UFO discussion and which many are not aware even exist at all.

In recent days, it was reported that the Navy’s UAP Task Force has concluded that no evidence it has examined related to unidentified aerial phenomena points to evidence of extraterrestrial spacecraft, according to a recent New York Times article that cited American intelligence officials who had been briefed on the report’s findings.

Notably, Julian Barnes and NYT Pentagon correspondent Helene Cooper reported that despite finding no conclusive links to alien spacecraft, senior officials said that the task force “still cannot explain the unusual movements that have mystified scientists and the military,” and that many of the unusual aerial objects observed by Navy pilots and other members of the armed forces could not be attributed to technologies currently in use by the United States.

The report does not rule out the possibility that some of the 120 incidents the UAP Task Force examined could be linked to technologies developed by Russia or China, and notably, “could not definitively rule out theories that the phenomena observed by military pilots might be alien spacecraft.”

The idea that some unidentified aerial phenomena might represent a form of exotic technology has been with us for decades, at the very least. Despite the fact that, to date, no conclusive evidence in support of this possibility has surfaced, the current assessments of the UAP Task Force recently conveyed to the New York Times are by no means the first time that the U.S. military has left open the possibility that some phenomena observed by our military could have otherworldly origins.

(Credit: Unsplash)

The controversy surrounding the origin of these objects coincided with the U.S. Air Force’s earliest inquiries into what had been first called “flying saucers,” following a June 1947 sighting of a group of objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier, Washington by pilot Kenneth Arnold.

These sighting reports and the concern that they generated resulted in numerous programs and studies, which began with Projects Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book, in addition to other reports and investigations aimed at assessing whether there was anything to be made of the claims of unidentified flying objects (or UFOs, as Blue Book’s first director Edward Ruppelt dubbed them).

Project Sign began at the end of 1947 and concluded the following year with an “Estimate of the Situation” that determined UFOs could not be attributed to US or Soviet technologies, advising the Pentagon that the objects may be of extraterrestrial origin. This conclusion would appear to be the first time that a branch of the U.S. military has considered whether UFOs might have extraterrestrial origins. However, the explanation was deemed unacceptable, resulting in the end of Project Sign, and the launch of the appropriately named Project Grudge in late 1948. It was dissolved too, like its predecessor, in 1951 making way for Project Blue Book, which would continue for most of the next two decades. During the 1950s and 60s, the USAF gathered countless reports on UFOs, and several notable reports and studies were conducted during this period, which included the famous Project Blue Book Special Report 14. However, the Blue Book era ended with Edward U. Condon’s Colorado University UFO project, which argued that there was no scientific merit to UFO studies (despite being unable to discount every UFO case in the Blue Book files).

“On the basis of present knowledge,” the Condon Committee’s report stated, “the least likely explanation of UFOs is the hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitations by intelligent beings.”

While the Air Force disclosed much of the information that it gathered about UFOs (with a few notable exceptions), it would be decades before the American public would begin to learn to what extent U.S. intelligence agencies like the CIA and the FBI had also taken interest in UFOs, albeit more quietly.

“In the middle 60s… the FBI responded to a simple request for information that the FBI is not and has never been involved with [UFOs],” says Bruce Maccabee, Ph.D., an optical physicist and researcher who spent decades studying UFO reports and appealing to agencies like the FBI and CIA for information on the subject. “Which, of course, is a lie, but as far as they were concerned it didn’t make any difference; they weren’t going to go public saying anything anyway, so that’s a pretty good clue that they’d want to cover it up.”

“As far as the CIA is concerned,” Maccabee says, “the CIA decided to do an investigation of Project Blue Book people, to see how the situation on Flying Saucers was. And this happened just after [Chief Major General John] Samford’s press conference in July of 1952, which is sort of a novel thing to contemplate.”

Government agencies investigating other government agencies, and all in an effort to try and understand what—if anything—to make out of UFOs, is indeed a novel concept.

(Credit: Unsplash)

“CIA closely monitored the Air Force effort, aware of the mounting number of sightings and increasingly concerned that UFOs might pose a potential security threat,” wrote CIA historian Gerald K. Haines in his article “CIA’s role in the study of UFOs, 1947–90: A die‐hard issue,” published in Volume 14 of the CIA’s in-house publication, Intelligence and National Security, Volume 14, 1999. However, Haines’ study also stated that “while Agency concern over UFOs was substantial until the early 1950s, CIA has since paid only limited and peripheral attention to the phenomena.”

What accounts for the waning interest of the intelligence community? As Haines noted in his historical overview, early on it seemed that the CIA’s interest in UFOs had been significant:

“Because of the tense Cold War situation and increased Soviet capabilities, the CIA Study Group saw serious national security concerns in the flying saucer situation. The group believed that the Soviets could use UFO reports to touch off mass hysteria and panic in the United States. The group also believed that the Soviets might use UFO sightings to overload the US air warning system so that it could not distinguish real targets from phantom UFOs. H. Marshall Chadwell, Assistant Director of OSI, added that he considered the problem of such importance that it should be brought to the attention of the National Security Council, in order that a communitywide coordinated effort towards it solution may be initiated.”

This would change, however, notably with the publication of a Robertson Panel study on UFOs assembled by and named after H.P. Robertson, a physicist with the California Institute of Technology in January 1953. “The Robertson panel’s conclusions were strikingly similar to those of the earlier Air Force project reports on SIGN and GRUDGE and to those of the CIA’s own OSI Study Group,” Haines writes. “All investigative groups found that UFO reports indicated no direct threat to national security and no evidence of visits by extraterrestrials.”

Luis Alvarez, one of the Robertson Panel participants

(Public Domain).

The Robertson Panel’s conclusions decades ago were remarkably similar to the current assessments expected to be delivered by the UAP Task Force in its forthcoming report. They essentially found no evidence of a threat posed by unidentified flying objects, and nothing conclusive that could link them to visits by extraterrestrials. However, such intentionally ambiguous results from studies conducted over the years often do little to satisfy public interest, and function more like a Rorschach test: those who want UFOs to be extraterrestrial visitors see that the possibility hasn’t been ruled out, while skeptics averse to the idea remind them that there is still no good evidence.

There’s nothing new under the sun, or so the saying goes. Hence, rather than making actual progress on the UFO issue, it appears that most of the same old assessments and presumptions that have remained with us for decades about this phenomenon are what endure today. We’re still left wondering, in the end, what they are, and even if they are, with very little advancement in our knowledge about these mystifying appearances of unusual aerial objects throughout time.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

In advance of a highly anticipated U.S. government report on UAP soon to be released, everyone is either talking about UFOs or being asked about them.

One of the many who has been approached for an opinion on the subject in recent days had been Texas A&M University astronomer Nick Suntzeff, who was asked about the possibility as to whether UFOs might represent visitors from other planets that have been monitoring the Earth for decades, or perhaps even centuries.

Suntzeff, an astronomer whose previous work in Chile has contributed to our understanding of other cosmic mysteries the likes of dark matter, said that he “can’t rule out we have visitors from other planets,” although he adds that we would require more evidence before such conclusions may be drawn.

Texas A&M University Professor Nick Suntzeff

(Wikimedia Commons CC 3.0).

“We need a clear photo,” he says, adding that even with what may be deemed “good” sighting reports, observers often aren’t aware of the distance the object was at the time of the sighting, along with any kinds of nearby objects that can help one gauge the size of the UFO in question.

“I have seen lots of weird things in the sky,” Suntzeff says. “Very weird things — but I can always explain them.”

Citing the work of physicist Enrico Fermi and his famous paradox, Suntzeff asked, “if there is intelligent life, why don’t we see it with our telescopes, or see evidence here on Earth of visitations? Astronomers are always looking for life elsewhere in the universe.”

As Suntzeff correctly points out, astronomers are always looking for life in the universe, and if UFOs do eventually end up being proven to be a visitation to Earth by extraterrestrials, the question will nonetheless remain as to why we would find evidence of them right here at home, under our proverbial noses, and yet we have such a hard time finding evidence alien life further out in the cosmos at their presumed point of origin.

Fermi recognized, as his famous paradox illustrates, that there appears to be a statistical likelihood that alien life exists. Our Milky Way alone is home to billions of stars very much like our Sun, many of which would very likely have planets like Earth in orbit around them. Many would have to be older than our Sun, too, which might leave open the possibility that any aliens residing on planets orbiting those stars could be older than us, and thereby more advanced. Fermi also recognized that with our interest in space travel, these other civilizations would probably have similar interests if they are anything like us. Therefore, if they possess such similar drives to explore the cosmos, and are more technologically advanced than we are, perhaps they have already developed the technology they would need to travel to places like Earth.

Physicist Enrico Fermi

(Public Domain).

In Fermi’s mind, even at the current slow pace of space travel that humans possess, the entire universe could be traversed in a few millions of years. This brings us to the notion that aliens from single points of origins very well could have populated other parts of the universe, even if doing so required several successive generations of space travelers who would establish outposts along the way, gradually expanding beyond their own planetary system, and traveling further and further from home in search of other habitable planets and, eventually, maybe even intelligent life like themselves.

Thus, Fermi concluded, based on such likelihoods, Earth should have been visited by extraterrestrials themselves, or humans should have at least found evidence of their probes. Hence, the great paradox: where are all the aliens?

Considering this paradox, it is interesting how seldom it is that astronomers and other scientists are willing to entertain the possibility that some UFO observations might represent such possible visitations, or at least the kinds of probes Fermi envisioned that might have been sent by extraterrestrials. Yet the general attitude expressed by scientists today when it comes to UFOs—even when the data on such purported incidents is being supplied by our government—amounts to a resounding “meh.”

One of the primary arguments that scientists have raised in recent days against the possibility of UFOs having an extraterrestrial origin has to do with a simple question: why would they even be interested in us in the first place?

“If the UFOs are interested in our military, that’s actually an argument against them being visitors from another star system,” argues astronomer Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute. “Instead, it suggests Russian aircraft, Chinese drones, or something else terrestrial — hardware we could understand.” Notably, a recent New York Times article which presented reporting based on information from government officials who had been briefed on the findings of the forthcoming UAP Task Force’s report said that technologies from China or Russia have not been ruled out, but that in truth, neither has the potential of some UFOs having a more exotic source. While each of these possibilities remains, the forthcoming report’s findings appear to convey that there is no evidence that conclusively supports either source of origin at the current time.

“Difficulties of interstellar travel aside, it seems to me to be inconceivable that an advanced species would find us interesting enough to visit, but not interesting enough to contact,” says Don Lincoln, a senior scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. “And, if they wanted to avoid contact, they’re not being very stealthy about it.”

Both Lincoln and Shostak’s remarks are interesting, especially because they present so many presumptions about how extraterrestrial life might behave. Obviously, neither of them has had direct interactions with any extraterrestrials themselves; how could they know, therefore, what aliens might be like, or what their focus or objectives would be when visiting Earth? Yet each of them appears to fundamentally rely on the presumption that extraterrestrials simply wouldn’t find Earth very interesting, and hence would have no reason for visiting. Shostak doesn’t think that our military’s operations would be anything that would concern extraterrestrials; Lincoln more explicitly states that if they don’t intend to make contact, then he thinks aliens wouldn’t likely have other reasons to find us interesting enough to visit.

To Lincoln’s point about UFOs doing such a poor job “being very stealthy about it,” it seems that if they exist, they’ve done a good enough job that many (if not most) scientists still refuse to acknowledge them.

We simply don’t know what kinds of ideas or philosophies might guide the actions of any presumed extraterrestrial intelligence. Although scientists frequently assert reasons why UFOs are unlikely to represent such extraterrestrial visits, these arguments can often be very easily falsified, and shown to be based on expectations they have formed that draw from the only experiences they have had with any kind of intelligent life: humans. Even when scientists attempt to point out our human tendency to anthropomorphize our ideas about aliens, they are seldom able to resist the lure of doing so themselves, whether they even realize it or not.

In truth, maybe UFOs–whatever their origins might ultimately prove to be–are doing a better job keeping a low cover than scientists even realize. That would especially seem to be the case when it comes to those in the scientific community who continue to argue against their existence.

A video is making the rounds of an interview with a Russian admiral who was the last Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy from 1985 to 1991. While the video appears to be a few years old, its content is relevant today – the commander discusses encounters between UFOs and a Soviet submarine in 1945 and a US Navy sub in 1947, and those UFOs appeared to be capable of traveling underwater as well as in the air. Even more interesting, he claims the subs were attempting to explore underwater caves off the coast of Antarctica. Will the Pentagon report have anything about this? Will the current Russian military? Anyone? Bueller?

“A squadron of Soviet submarines in 1945, and then a US Navy one in 1947, were severely attacked by flying saucers while trying to gain access to underground caves in Antarctica.”

Former Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy Vladimir Chernavin

(credit: http://kremlin.ru/news/19816)

The video (watch it here) opens with that big announcement. According to the site Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, it is an interview conducted by journalist Khaled Al-Rushd for RT Arabic with Vladimir Nikolayevich Chernavin, a former officer of the Soviet Navy, its last Commander-in-Chief the only Commander-in-Chief of the Commonwealth of Independent States Navy from 1991 to 1992. He commanded the November class submarine K-21 in 1959, later commanded the submarine flotillas of the Northern Fleet and was awarded a title of the Hero of the Soviet Union before retiring 1992. Chernavin is currently chairman of the Soviet submariners association. Does he sound like someone who would know about UFOs and USOs?

“I remembered an interview I had with the commander of the Soviet naval forces, Vladimir Chernavin. He also told us about flying objects that were diving under water and at high speed coming out of its depths.”

The video is in Russian with English subtitles. It appears to be a recent production by Khaled Al-Rushd where he reminisces about that previous interview with Chernavin and was prompted by Al-Rushd first remembering a quote from US Naval Admiral Richard Byrd about “flying saucers” in which he said, “It is quite possible that these UFOs, whether man-made or of alien origin, come from several underwater bases, including the possible underwater bases in Antarctica, off the coast of California and off the coast of Puerto Rico.” When asked about this, Chernavin dropped this bombshell:

“There have been hundreds of such reports. I saw this phenomenon, including when I was captain of the submarine during our time in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, I clearly saw a flying object over one of our Soviet positions appearing in various forms, but mainly in the form of a round hat.”

“It was especially glowing, this light was changing, but the dish was moving at a tremendous speed, then it would stay hovering in one place and disappear immediately to appear in another place, and then dive into the water and disappear from view, and after a while it came out of the water but in another way, we were watching like this phenomena, as I saw it, the extraordinary phenomena cannot be ignored.”

Does this sound familiar? Chernadin’s next comment hits even closer to home … to the Pentagon report and the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

“A committee of this kind was formed. Especially since it was formed, I knew that the Americans had such a committee as well, and the decision was taken to collect and analyze this information in the military field for the first time from my side.”

Did you see that?

Whoa! Chernavin claims Soviet sailors were the first to report seeing UFOs, the first to see them in mass numbers, the first to follow them and to have an “operational directive” to monitor them – with the approval of the Minister of Defense. He claimed the system of monitoring and recording UFO dta “must be signed by the Commander in Chief personally. He recounts an encounter by a nuclear submarine and an escort fleet in the Pacific with “a disk-shaped object with a diameter of about 70 meters” – an encounter Chernavin assured Al-Rushd was documented. He concludes with this warning:

“This was a very serious problem. The decision had to be taken carefully and with balance, and this problem still exists today.”

Indeed, it does. Are we waiting for the wrong report?

While those interested in UFOs in the U.S. continue to wait for the Pentagon UAP report — which leaks and briefings have already prepped the public for disappointment, an X-Files-style ‘lone gunman’ in Brazil took matters into his own hands and obtained secret documents from the Brazilian concerning multiple UFO encounters in 2008 that included humanoid aliens and a military investigation. The UFO researcher released the documents a few months ago and recently translated them into English. The report is far from disappointing.

“On 11-19-2008, around 10 pm, Ms. Renata Veloso saw an object descend at high speed from the sky like a lightning bolt. It was moments before the Brazil and Portugal game, when we were getting ready to watch the game. She called me and given the insistence I walked to the window and saw a huge luminous object (hexagon) accompanied by two other smaller spherical ones that rotated under its orbit. When he approached the Nossa Senhora Aparecida church, the streetlamp lights in the Bela Vista neighborhoods went out block by block. One of the smaller objects was silver and the other was red, like red hot iron (it changed color). After a time of observation of the object’s maneuvers; I called 190 and was answered by Cpl. Barbosa. I determined that a vehicle composed by the Military personnel Cpl. Rabelo, LCpl. Francisco and LCpl. Balbino was sent to the site (Avenida Bela VistaNalongo).”

On Twitter, UFO researcher Rony Vernet released the report (pdf format here) made by Eisenhower Guerck Austríaco, a Brazilian military police of Minas Gerais State (PM-MG) officer, to his superiors concerning “Phenomenon observed in the sky of the city of Claudio, and pursuit of two strange beings seen in the city’s cane fields.” According to the report, he directed military personnel to the area, where they also witnessed the UFOs, as did another civilian woman, bringing the total number of witnesses to six.

“On November 19th and 20th we had an experience, together with several other Military personnel and people we met and interviewed about lights that flew over the city, and also about small “humanoid” beings that were chased by the Mitsubishi 13533 vehicle around 12 mph between the planted canes. These seen humanoids seemed to slip through the reeds. In all the actions of this Officer, several armed Military personnel followed the phenomenon at different times, in one of these moments, we were in 03 vehicles. A lady from Formiguinha Village, when she opened the door of her house, have seen small beings in her backyard and also saw an object colored incandescent iron standing in the air behind eucalyptus trees at about 2,600 ft, pointing to this Officer’s beret as the shape of the seen object. Objects flew at an incalculable speed and stopped as if there were no limits to physics, they just stopped suddenly. Objects curved at angles of ninety degrees or less, shifted forward, and returned backward.”

The second incident with the alien humanoids occurred the following day. The military personnel reported the streetlights going out or exploding as the UFOs hovered or exited at a high speed with no sound. They estimated the UFO to be the size of a pickup truck. The humanoid aliens were described as “luminous beings” that moved without touching the ground and had no feet, fingers, eyes or noses — just arms, legs and an “oval head.” Interestingly, “although they were luminous, they didn’t illuminate.” The police officers reported that they tried to photograph the humanoids, but …

“The humanoids were very bright, we didn’t see eyes, and they didn’t show up on the camera. Sgt Waldir Araújo Silva tried everything to photograph those “beings” but they didn’t appear, even with the lens zoom, only the fireflies appeared.”

Whatever affected their cameras also seemed to affect them – they complained of “headaches, body aches and fear,” and reporting officer Austríaco said his arm was too weak to reach for his gun. While they all saw the same things – a lake, the humanoids taking something from the ground as if they were scientists acquiring samples – the witnesses said they had a feeling of not being sure if it was real. that was confirmed the following day when they returned to the exact spot and the lake was gone. Nonetheless, the officers continued their investigation and found other witnesses. While there were no photos, they did have some evidence of the encounter.

“Several people report experiences identical to those of us Military personnel and we are going to interview these people. Some narrate hot air entering the house. The vehicles are with electrical problems. Mitsubhi doesn’t work, the Military who saw and had more contact seem distressed, we are all psychologically or physically different, more tired, sleepy, there are reports of people who felt levitating.”

The report lists the names of eleven military and civilian witnesses. Searches have not uncovered any additional reports besides the one translated by Rony Vernet. Since it occurred in 2008, tracking them down might be difficult, and they may not wish to talk – remember, this report has been kept secret for 13 years.

UFOs, aliens, fatigue, electrical problems, missing time, secret files, a ‘lone gunman’ … this incident is worth of its own X-Files episode. Sadly, the X-Files TV show is no more, but the determination and frustration of UFO investigators like Scully and Mulder lives on in people like Rony Vernet.

With a June 25 deadline, the Pentagon has just one more week to release its report on unidentified aerial phenomena, but the U.S. House Intelligence Committee received a detailed briefing on June 16 by Navy and FBI Personnel, and many of the members expressed concern – not only that it doesn’t reveal enough but also but that there is a real unease about things that can’t be explained. Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee told a TMZ reporter before the briefing that “Clearly, something’s going on that we can’t handle.” Specifically:

“It has to be something that is out of our galaxy, it just has to be if it in fact is real.

“I think Roswell was covered up.”

Burchett also referenced what he said (and many agree with) were UFO references in the bible, particularly in the book of Ezekiel. Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the committee chairman, said in The New York Post that the briefing was “interesting” and he “did learn things that were certainly new to me,” but wouldn’t give any details. Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois said was glad the “stigma is gone” from UFO discussions and “the fact that they are taking this sort of thing seriously for the first time, I think, is important.” If one needs more proof this briefing was considered important, look no further than the fact it was held inside a SCIF, or “sensitive compartmented information facility.”

“Everyone who’s paid enough attention to it understands they need to take it seriously. But once you go beyond that circle, you get people who are understandably resistant because of the tinfoil hat stigma. If [these objects] had the flag of Russia on the side, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Every one of these would be reported; everyone would be on top of it.”

Burchett said there was no way the UAPs seen by Navy personnel were Russian, as did former deputy defense secretary David Norquist, who set up a task force in 2020 to investigate UAPs but was not part of the briefing. He told CNN the “tinfoil hat” skeptics may have prevented more from being revealed. Which side is President Biden on? Burchett told TMZ he didn’t think Biden brought it up with Vladimir Putin in their summit in Geneva – which coincidentally occurred at about the same time as the briefing.

Don’t drag me into this!

“If the Russians had UFO technology, I mean, they would own us right now, they used to say that they’ve heard people talk about how the Nazis had it in the second world war that they did, they would have won. That is ridiculous.”

A discussion of who owns UFOs between two world leaders is “ridiculous”? No wonder Burchett thinks they’re from “out of our galaxy.”

If there’s one positive takeaway from the briefing, it’s that there really is a Pentagon report on UAPs and all signs indicate it wall be released soon. Congress members are concerned. The suspense is becoming unbearable. Let’s hope these are signs it will be worth the wait.