Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 13 YEARS AND 2 MONTH.
ON 06/08/2024 MORE THAN 2.161.100
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
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.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
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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!!!
Een interessant adres?
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 In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
14-09-2024
The Pentagon’s New UAP Report is Seriously Flawed - part 3
The Pentagon’s New UAP Report is Seriously Flawed - part 3
“Insufficient Data” Does Not Mean “Identified” – It Means Insufficient to Identify a UAP Positively
How often is “insufficient data” actually a result of insufficient investigation? Sweeping investigatory failures under the carpet was a routine practice of AARO’s forerunner, the USAF Project Blue Book of the 1950s-60s. Blue Book’s standard trick as exposed by its own chief scientific consultant, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, was to make it appear the Air Force had disposed of 90-95% of its UFO caseload not with actual data, but by flooding its case files with 60% or more Insufficient Data cases and casually applying convenient but implausible and unsupported explanations. The Air Force has released or leaked to the press bogus UFO “explanations” such as stars that were not visible, moon-as-UFO when the moon had not even risen yet, the pilot was “possibly drunk,” etc (See Clark, “Debunking,” UFO Encyclopedia, 2018, pp. 379-400).
This happened time and time again, often leaving witnesses embarrassed or understandably angry. So much so that in one case in 1966, Rep. Gerald Ford blasted the Air Force and sought Congressional hearings after sightings by police of fast high-flying objects in the Dexter, Michigan, area were dismissed by the Air Force as “swamp gas.” A mismatch between proffered Air Force explanations and the data submitted by witnesses was a recurring issue.
It appears that some 60% of Blue Book’s cases were in reality Insufficient Data (not just Blue Book’s understated 20% category labeled “Insufficient Data”) – because there was simply not enough info to go beyond guessing at “possible” or “probable” explanations to achieve certainty. The remaining 40% of Sufficient Data cases broke down into approximately 10%—30%, identified—unidentified. The unidentified were therefore a surprising 70-75% Unexplained Unknowns in the total Sufficient Data cases (30/40 = 75%, all numbers here are rounded).
As indicated above, Blue Book went further and tried to conceal this statistical shell game by carving out a much smaller 20% category they called “Insufficient Data” – a misdirect that obscured the fact that Blue Book did not sufficiently investigate the other 40% of the total cases and that the total Insufficient Data should have been stated as about 60%. These Possible/Probables were treated as fully explained IFOs instead of as Insufficient-Data. (See Hynek UFO Report, 1977, p. 259, etc.)
AARO Tries to Gloss Over Sensor Tracking of UAP
AARO tries to brush aside sensor tracking of UAP on the flimsy grounds of sensor “aberrations” and “artifacts” (AAROR p. 12; media reports call them “glitches”; previous AARO reports call them sensor “errors”). This is untenable if multiple sensors track the same UAP, like infrared and radar such as in the ATFLIR sensor pod videos by the Navy F/A-18s that most everyone concerned with the UAP issue has seen by now (probably at least 50 million video views to date).
In fact, AARO seems to ignore its own data showing they have reduced the problem of “Ambiguous Sensor Contact” with UAP in its caseload from 23% to 9% from April to November 2023 – it’s on AARO’s website but not mentioned in AARO’s report. (The earlier AARO annual report did show a 5% Ambiguous Sensor Contact figure as of Aug. 2022 based mostly on the Navy UAP Task Force’s work, before the April 2023 worsening increase under AARO to 23%.)
That 9% “Ambiguous Sensor Contact” figure means the other 91% of AARO’s current case files of sensor trackings of UAP are good data and are not “ambiguous.” This would appear to undermine attempts at downplaying or dismissing sensor trackings of UAP as must be due to some sort of speculative sensor “artifacts.” Cases involving multiple sensors can overcome sensor error so that any sensor that has an error is corrected by the other sensors that do not. Sensors operating at different frequencies on different bands of the electromagnetic spectrum will not all be fooled by electronic spoofing at the same time.
AARO withholds its multiple-sensor case numbers – unlike its predecessor UAP Task Force that reported it had 56% of all cases as multiple-sensor cases including two or more sensors tracking the same UAP at the same time by “radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation” (UAPTF June 2021, pp. 3-4). No wonder UAPTF had 99.3% Unexplained cases – good data and no terrestrial explanations.
AARO then complains about the lack of data regarding “speed, altitude, and size of reported UAP” (AAROR, p. 27), even though many of its cases have measurement data from multiple sensors (e.g., radar-infrared-optical F/A-18 cases). The complaint harkens back to Air Force Project Blue Book’s similarly unsupported complaint over the alleged lack of measured “speed, altitude, size” data on UFOs (The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, the ex-Blue Book Chief Ruppelt’s 1956 book, pp. 116-7, 149, 201, 212, 224, etc.). Meanwhile, Blue Book buried any mention of tracking data resident in Blue Book files from missile tracking cameras, radar-visual cases, and from an Army UAP tracking network specially set up around the top secret “Site B” nuclear weapons stockpile depot at Killeen Base, Camp Hood, Texas (see section, below, with sample chart illustrating some of the Army UAP tracking).
In AARO’s boasted “thorough” and “complete” reporting of past UAP investigations (AAROR p. 12), there is no mention of the existence of the AF’s special AF-Army-Navy/Marine multiple-sensor UFO tracking networks set up at multiple sites in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War in 1968-70. Declassified military histories reveal over 500 “UFO” trackings on radar, optical, laser-ranging, nightscope, telescope, and infrared sensor systems, with 99% Unexplained (Declassified military histories: “Sensor Networks to Track UFOs in the Vietnam War,” UFO Encyclopedia, 2018, pp. 1050-1054).
AARO’s highly selective treatment of the Condon Report also from the AF’s UFO contract study at the University of Colorado, managed to studiously avoid the widely reported criticism that the Condon Report’s negative conclusions were contradicted by the embarrassing unmentioned fact that 34% of its own UAP cases remained Unexplained after investigation – as numerous scientists have pointed out in criticism of the Condon Report’s anti-UFO conclusions. (Someone in effect slipped up and put an easy list of the “Sightings, Unexplained” in the back Index of the published Condon Report, in 1969, where about 26 such Unexplained cases are listed, in addition to listing another 4 radar cases, 1 airglow photometer case, 3 numbered cases missed, and an uncertain number–about two–of the 14 unexplained Prairie Network-confirmed cases not overlapping with the preceding, totaling some 36 out of a grand total of about 106, or about 34%. Different tallies of the obfuscated Condon Report case numbers come up with slightly different numbers. See for example: W. Smith, Journal of UFO Studies, CUFOS, 1996). AARO fails to mention that 14 of the Condon study’s Unexplained UFO cases were backed up by photos taken by the astronomical meteor-tracking cameras of the Smithsonian’s Prairie Network system, an unprecedented scientific development.
There is also no mention of Dr. Condon’s obvious, non-scientific bias, which may have been the reason he was selected by the Air Force to chair the eponymous Commission. In late January 1967, while the Condon Committee’s investigation was ongoing, Dr. Condon tipped his hand, telling an audience at a lecture that UFOs are “nonsense” but “I’m not supposed to reach that conclusion for another year.” Once again, serious issues well-known to any UAP researcher are not included in the AARO report.
Likewise, AARO seems unaware of the new Over the Horizon – Forward Scatter (OTH-FS) radars turned over to NORAD for operational duty in March 1968 which immediately began tracking UAP. This was revealed in the House Science & Astronautics UFO Symposium hearings on July 29, 1968, and published, but despite being open source history it never made it into AARO’s “complete” and “thorough” history (“NORAD” in Clark, UFO Encyclopedia, 2018, p. 811b).
No Mention of the Scientist Sightings of UAP or Instrumentation Cases
No mention is made by AARO that many scientists, including government scientists, astronomers, physicists, and others have personally seen UFOs, some obtaining instrument data and photos. AARO never mentions unclassified instrument tracking of UAP in the Blue Book files and other Air Force declassified records (AARO can’t claim that released sensor data is “classified”).
No mention that 14 Unexplained UFO cases in the hostile Air Force University of Colorado “scientific study of UFOs” were photographed and confirmed by the Smithsonian Prairie Network scientific meteor-tracking cameras (another 6 caught on meteor cameras were IFOs). The Colorado study tried to bury it in its infamous Condon Report, but it’s identifiable if one looks at and studies the summary data table with skewed and misleading definitions.
It appears AARO didn’t look. Another scientist UAP instrument detection by airglow scanning photometer is also an Unexplained UFO in the Condon Report, which concealed the fact that an embarrassing 34% of its cases ended up Unexplained (as mentioned above).
The Air Force set up UAP tracking networks in South Vietnam with multiple sensor systems during the war in 1968-70, as revealed in many declassified military histories (mentioned before). But AARO seems ignorant of it.
Army UAP Tracking Network Record AARO Missed Finding in the Blue Book Files, March 6-8, 1949 (Site B Nuclear Weapons Stockpile, Killeen Base, Camp Hood, Texas). Later cases included triangulations of speed, size, and altitude data on UAP.
Does AARO Admit Some “Non-Empirical” Evidence of Extraterrestrials?
AARO’s two key conclusions, as presented at the top of its report’s Executive Summary, state:
AARO found no evidence that any USG investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology.
…
AARO has found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology.
(AAROR Exec Summary p. 7, underlining added.)
If there is not a blanket AARO denial saying “no evidence” of extraterrestrial UAP sightings, but only a more limited, qualified denial stating “no empirical evidence” (physical evidence) of reverse-engineering extraterrestrial tech, then what non-empirical evidence does AARO have? Empirical means physical evidence and reality of objects and events, not human records of such, which records are presumably non-empirical evidence.
Is this an innocent ambiguity or an inadvertent admission that AARO hasnon-empirical evidence, such as documentary records or witness testimony, of reverse-engineering efforts on recovered extraterrestrial technology?
Interestingly, AARO claims to have “conducted approximately 30 interviews” of “approximately 30 people” (pp. 6, 11), and quite specifically “As of September 17, 2023, AARO interviewed approximately 30 individuals” who claimed knowledge of hidden government extraterrestrial technology and evidence (AAROR, p. 28). Don’t they know exactly how many people they interviewed, was it 30 or not?
AARO is quick to stress that “It is important to note that none of the interviewees had firsthand knowledge of these programs” (p. 9).
But this seems to be contradicted later when AARO explains that “Priority is given to those interviewees who claimed first-hand knowledge… Interviewees relaying second or third-hand knowledge are lower in priority, but AARO has and will continue to schedule interviews with them, nonetheless.” (AAROR, p. 28) AARO thus makes it seem they are reluctant to “continue to schedule interviews” with “secondhand or thirdhand” witnesses because they are so occupied with high-priority firsthand witnesses.
AARO Fails to Define What Evidence it Would Accept for Extraterrestrial UAP
AARO also fails to define what evidence is required to establish extraterrestrial intelligence visiting Earth. Would multiple sensors tracking an object from high altitude or space that stops and starts with accelerations of >1000 g’s be at least a starting definition of evidence for non-human or extraterrestrial intelligence? (See Robert Powell/SCU critique of AAROR.) Likewise, AARO complains more broadly that it needs “Sufficient Data” in UAP cases, then never explains exactly what is considered “sufficient” (AARO Cons Report Oct 2023, p. 8).
Does it require direct communication with extraterrestrial intelligence to satisfy AARO’s unstated but seemingly shifting definition of “evidence” (see below)? What if the ETs simply refuse to communicate; do we just pretend to ignore them until they do? Is that a responsible operational defense posture or intelligence collection and analysis policy?
What radio signals have been received from UAP in the reports AARO has collected? AARO’s briefing slides to Congress and on its website state that it has cases of UAP-transmitted radio signals in the 1-3 and 8-12 GHz frequency bands (completely separate and different from UAP radar beams at 1-8 GHz, also listed). This has been briefed to Congress and listed in AARO Reporting Trends slides of “Typically-Reported UAP Characteristics” – but is never mentioned in the AARO Report.
Are these UAP Radio Signals a communication? What analysis of these signals has been undertaken? Has Congress been informed of the findings? The AARO Report also ignores a long history back to 1950 of UAP transmitting radio signals and radar beams and even replying to IFF (Identification, Friend or Foe) interrogation signals transmitted to the UAP by ground-based US radar stations (see “UFO IFF” and “NORAD National Alert” articles in Clark’s UFO Encyclopedia, 2018, pp. 814-824, 1155-6).
Does extraterrestrial evidence require beyond-terrestrial technological capabilities (the “extra” in “extraterrestrial”)? Does sensor data suffice or must physical samples be obtained? What about AARO’s October 2023 Consolidated Annual UAP Report which mentions “some cases” of UAP with “high-speed travel and unusual maneuverability” (p.2), and “very small percentage” with “high-speed travel and unusual morphologies” (p. 8), none of which are mentioned in AARO’s current historical report (unless it’s in the classified version).
The earlier UAP Task Force reported that 15% of its reports were of “unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics” including “demonstrating UAP acceleration or a degree of signature management” (the latter meaning the UAP’s apparent use of electromagnetic signature reduction as a means of “camouflage” for purposes of lowering detectability, effectively a form of stealth) in mid-flight. Taken together, these terms evidently convey, at minimum, the UAP’s ability to “remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion” (UAPTF June 2021, p. 5).
In October 2023 the AARO then-director Sean Kirkpatrick told CNN that about 2% to 4% of his cases were “truly anomalous” – possibly referring to his just-released report’s reference to “unknown morphologies” (meaning “unknown shapes”) and “interesting signatures” not otherwise defined in the report.
These are tantalizing and provocative admissions by AARO and its predecessor, but what do they mean in terms of meeting AARO’s unspoken requirements for “evidence”?
AARO’s report displays a constant shifting of ill-defined goalposts for what it deems to be “evidence,” etc. First, there is plain “evidence” then “empirical evidence,” then there is “convincing evidence” (is “empirical evidence” not quite “convincing”?). AARO refers to “verifiable information” as if to contrast it with “empirical evidence” (AAROR, p. 35) thus raising the question, is “empirical evidence” not empirically “verifiable information” by itself? And AARO speaks of “actionable data” as conveniently undefined and not distinguished from other types of data or “evidence.” And beyond that, there are “actionable, researchable data.”
The common denominator in these shifting vague pseudo-definitions of what is required for UAP evidence is that they seem intended to ensure genuine anomalies are minimized in favor of prosaic explanations, no matter how implausible.
Nothing by AARO on the Government “Stigma” Put on the UAP Subject; No Discussion, No History, Despite its Critical Importance
AARO does not even mention the word “stigma” anywhere in this report, except buried in a passing reference to the UAP Task Force helping “destigmatize” reporting of UAP though not the subject of UAP (AAROR, p. 24).
This is despite the historical importance of the “stigma” deliberately attached to the UFO subject by the US government – principally by the Air Force – that is widely cited by the media and witnesses testifying before Congress. The critical importance of stigma and the problems it has created in hampering and crippling UAP research and investigation are undeniable.
As AARO’s predecessor UAP Task Force stated in its “Preliminary Report to Congress” submitted in June of 2021 (p. 4):
“Narratives from aviators in the operational community and analysts from the military and IC describe disparagement associated with observing UAP, reporting it, or attempting to discuss it with colleagues…. [T]hese stigmas have … reputational risk [that] may keep many observers silent, complicating scientific pursuit of the [UAP] topic.”
The “stigma” attached to the UFO topic as applied by the government appears to have included abuses that AARO was legally required to investigate in its Historical Report – but did not. Specifically, the Historical Report was required to:
“(ii) include a compilation and itemization of the key historical record of the involvement of the intelligence community with unidentified anomalous phenomena [UAP], including— …
“(III) any efforts to obfuscate, manipulate public opinion, hide, or otherwise provide incorrect unclassified or classified information about unidentified anomalous phenomena [UAP] or related activities.” [NDAA FY23 Sec. 6802(j)(1)(B); 50 U.S. Code § 3373(j)(1)(B)]
As mentioned above, AARO failed to compile, itemize, and report on US intelligence agency abuses of UAP witnesses and others. The one tiny item dismissive of vague public perceptions of the Air Force’s UFO “debunker” abuse (AAROR, p. 38) does not document its long history as was required by law in NDAA FY23 and 50 U.S. Code § 3373 cited above.
AARO made no effort to compile the history of the Intelligence Community’s efforts to “obfuscate” or “hide” UAP information through excessive secrecy, as noted before.
Air Force Intelligence “efforts to … obfuscate [and] manipulate public opinion” on UFOs since the 1950s are primarily what caused the harsh stigma attached to the entire UFO subject in society. But this anti-UFO stigma is not investigated or historically documented by AARO – or even mentioned – contrary to its legal obligation.
This is despite the public admission by former USAF OSI officer Richard Doty that his official assignments included spying on US civilian UAP researchers and breaking into a private home, spreading disinformation about UAP, misinforming two US Senators, and spreading fake UFO documents including some so-called “MJ-12” documents that turned out to be a hoax (Doty radio interview Feb. 27, 2005; see Rojas, “Open Letter,” posting May 6, 2014, OpenMinds). Much more evidence could be cited of similar stigma-inducing covert government actions besides the public debunking and shaming of innocent UAP witnesses and civilian investigators (see “Debunking and Debunkery,” Clark, UFO Encyclopedia, 2018, pp. 379-400).
AARO’s Non-Disclosure of Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs)
The AARO report states that it asked DoD and IC organizations to review their files for any NDAs related to UAP and none were reported (AAROR, pp. 7, 30). Had AARO actually reviewed AFOSI NDAs themselves, rather than delegating the task, they might have reached a different conclusion.
For example, I was informed by a former member of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Investigation Program (AATIP / AAWSAP) that when he requested the opportunity to interview the two F-16 pilots involved in the famous Stephenville, TX, 2008 UAP case, both pilots replied that they could not discuss the matter because they had signed USAF NDAs. It ought to be possible to run this to the ground either by contacting the pilots or searching AFOSI records.
In another instance, a former USAF Air Traffic controller told me she and her colleagues signed OSI NDAs after reporting a black triangular UAP hovering over a nuclear weapons storage facility at Barksdale AFB. Subsequently, AFOSI officers asked them to sign NDAs, explaining that they had seen a highly classified US weapons system they were not cleared for (the secret weapons program ruse again). The witnesses assumed that was a cover story, as they could not imagine a test aircraft being sent to hover over a nuclear weapons storage facility, but they felt compelled to sign the NDAs for fear of retaliation if they did not. This case also suggests that in searching for pertinent USAF NDAs, it may be necessary to review NDAs of the type alleging uncleared military personnel had been exposed to US advanced technology programs outside their clearance level or access authorization and not merely search for some sort of “UAP NDA.”
In the Bentwaters, Rendlesham Forest, UK, case in December 1980-January 1981, there are indications that secondary witnesses and civilian investigators were pressured to sign secrecy agreements (see Col. Charles Halt’s 2016 book, pp, 400, 439).
Is AARO a Science Project or an Intelligence Organization?
Why is AARO, a component of the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense (DoD), suddenly changing the rules of the game and importing purely academic, scientific standards for the interpretation of intelligence data? Is it because this allows the government to ignore important and valid but inconvenient information?
ARO claims its “methodology applies both the scientific method and intelligence analysis tradecraft” (AAROR, p. 6). But it seems the scientific methodology is set off against the intelligence methodology to discredit any observation of UAP that exceeds present-day scientific understanding, on the tacit grounds that observations by military personnel on this issue, and seemingly this issue alone, are not credible. Meanwhile, the intelligence tradecraft that would investigate a foreign adversary’s possible futuristic development of science seems to be shunted aside. Thus AARO uses a limited academic form of today’s science to deny as “not credible” the observed and measured UAP performance that may represent an advanced technology, possibly extraterrestrial, although we know 21st century science will inevitably be followed by a 31st century science. Neither the law enforcement nor intelligence communities have the luxury of limiting themselves to dismissing human reporting in favor of purely scientific standards of evidence.
It sometimes feels as though AARO is approaching the old unscientific Air Force Project Blue Book policy, long ago exposed by Blue Book scientific consultant Dr. Hynek, of declaring “It Can’t Be: Therefore it Isn’t” when dealing with tough unexplainable UFO cases (The Hynek UFO Report, 1977, ch. 3).
Hence, AARO’s Dr. Kirkpatrick claims there is no “credible” information of craft demonstrating capabilities that defy our current scientific understanding: “AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics” (DoD News Briefing, Apr. 19, 2023). This, despite the testimony of Navy squadron Cmdr. Dave Fravor and his colleagues were involved in the Nimitz incident, backed by dramatic radar-infrared-electro-optical data recordings. AARO does not even mention the Nimitz case or its investigation anywhere in its “complete”, “thorough”, and “accurate” Historical UAP Report.
Cmdr. Fravor and his wingman and their crew all saw and reported the same wingless white “Tic Tac” shaped craft in conditions of ideal visibility and their accounts of its mind-boggling capabilities were corroborated by radar operators serving on two different platforms
Later that day another F/A-18 witnessed and filmed the UAP, yet it seems as if AARO is denying this undeniable event, suggesting it did not even happen just because it exceeds today’s academic scientific understanding. Multiple accounts by all three pilots and their weapons systems operators, and multiple radar operators and technicians agree that craft they observed demonstrated almost-instantaneous high g acceleration; achieved hypersonic speed without a sonic boom; showed no evidence of friction or plasma or obvious propulsion, despite the extreme velocities it achieved (estimated peak 90,000 mph in 12 miles going from 0 to 90,000 mph to 0, all in 0.78 seconds, at 5,000 g’s acceleration). The estimated 47-foot wingless white “Tic Tac” shaped craft also thus seemed to survive g forces far greater than any aircraft, rocket, or missile of that size built by man. The tough Navy squadron commander of the Black Aces could not find a terrestrial explanation for what he and his colleagues observed and he has made that clear in sworn testimony to Congress. Is this not relevant?
What aspect of this case should be thrown out as “not credible” and why? Why are we even bothering to ask pilots to report UAP if we do not deem them credible? Why is this case not viewed as compelling, albeit not absolutely conclusive, evidence of the presence in Earth’s atmosphere of vehicles that are so far advanced we cannot understand or replicate their performance? What evidence would AARO accept – and is AARO going to employ an unspoken rule of today’s academic science that does not see a science of tomorrow, and therefore arbitrarily says it must not have happened, because we don’t understand what was reported?
Aside from not liking the implications, is there any reason to doubt the fully consistent account of so many accomplished aviators and sailors operating with high-tech sensors? Our military could not function as effectively as it does if its personnel were not competent and reliable. When assessing the UAP issue, senior policymakers deserve candid views of intelligence and military personnel, not views limited by unrealistically high scientific standards imported from Academia. After all, AARO is a joint IC/DoD operation, not a science project.
Conclusion
As documented above, AARO has not complied with statutory orders from Congress for a detailed history of UAP sightings as recorded in USG’s historical records, instead providing a limited history of flawed US Government investigations of UAP.
There was no examination of the impact of “stigma” on the UFO subject, witnesses, and persons interested in it, aggressively implemented by the Air Force and supported by the AF-instigated CIA Robertson Panel, despite the legal requirement for AARO to document the history of intelligence agency manipulation of public opinion and other abuses.
Yet, as AARO itself acknowledged in its first report to Congress the “stigma” surrounding this topic has been a central problem in terms of getting government personnel or scientists to report or study UAP. (AARO Jan. 2023, p. 2) To summarize:
The AARO report is beset with basic errors of fact and science (for instance, despite AARO insinuations, Apollo moon landings cannot be seen by the naked eye from Earth, Manhattan Project buildings cannot fly in the air as UFOs, etc.).
The report makes unsupported claims about secret government projects causing civilian UAP sightings while ignoring the military’s own sightings of UAP that the military knew were not our own.
AARO never defines what evidence they would accept for extraterrestrial visitation or even UAP existence, to help avoid repeating past failures of UAP investigations. It seems AARO’s unstated definition of “evidence” is a fluid goalpost.
There are massive gaps in AARO’s review of important US government documents, records, and programs, and patterns of excessive UAP secrecy. The report focuses on prior government UAP investigations without even acknowledging they were more of an effort to delegitimize the topic than investigate it.
The powerful effects of the stigma that resulted are never discussed, despite universal recognition of the primary role stigma has played in preventing objective government or scientific UAP research. By failing to do so, this AARO report is more likely to reinforce this dangerous and dysfunctional stigma rather than mitigate it.
As skeptic journalist Tyler Rogoway said, and bears repeating (emphasis added): “The gross inaction and the stigma surrounding Unexplained Aerial Phenomena as a whole has led to what appears to be the paralyzation of the systems designed to protect us and our most critical military technologies, pointing to a massive failure in U.S. military intelligence.”
Finally, AARO has unaccountably imported the limited approaches to evidence used in academia that are not an appropriate basis for intelligence assessments of national security issues. Why ask pilots to report UAP if we are going to then discard these reports because they do not meet some strict but narrow-visioned academic and scientific standards? Why is it that the human mind and intellect can contribute to intelligence assessments of any other topic but UAP?
What about future scientific developments and the scientifically unpredictable intentions of foreign adversaries? In sum, this limited approach to analysis, uniquely applied to the subject of UAP within the Intelligence Community, deprives policymakers of judgments based on information that is important, valid and compelling, even if it is not at present scientifically conclusive.
I hope this report will help Congress, the press, and the public understand just how far short AARO’s historical UAP report is from being “thorough”, “accurate” and “complete.” I also hope AARO will find some of these observations helpful in preparing Volume 2. There is no reason this taxpayer-funded organization cannot be more clear, transparent, and accurate regarding its UAP analysis and reporting.
Acknowledgments: This article was only possible due to the diligent research and extraordinary contributions of quite a few UAP experts and researchers, who shall remain nameless here but who freely contributed their time and expertise. Their astute analysis and expertise form the backbone of this article. It took substantial effort on their part, but I know they will be satisfied if this helps Congress and the public understand how much work remains to be done to create a “complete” and “accurate” history of UAP and the US government.
Christopher Mellon spent nearly 20 years in the U.S. Intelligence Community, including serving as the Minority Staff Director of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. He actively participates in Harvard’s Galileo Project and, in his free time, works to raise awareness regarding the UAP issue and its implications for national security. Follow him online at his official website and on X: @ChrisKMellon.
Editor’s Note: This article was updated on April 15, 2024, with additions to further illustrate the issues presented by AARO’s claim that U-2 reconnaissance aircraft could account for numerous early UAP observations, further commentary regarding incorrect details in AARO’s report involving the CIA Special Group that convened in the 1950s, and the inclusion of an additional table and commentary regarding the U.S. Air Force IFO cases provided to the CIA’s Robertson Panel.
Note: The author does not necessarily endorse every point expressed in the resources linked below.
Robert Powell/SCU (Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies), “AARO Report: Flawed, Unresponsive, Clueless, and Knavish,” March 9, 2024, X/Twitter (See below):
AARO Claims Early Spy Planes Caused UAP Reports – Yet Can’t Cite a Single Report
There is not a single known sighting of a U-2 reconnaissance plane reported as a UAP or extraterrestrial spaceship by some “unknowing” outside civilian supposedly dazzled by classified “new technology.” Nothing in the Blue Book files (except a few obscure, unproven possible exceptions not even close to ET descriptions and not by bedazzled outside non-government civilians). No one in AARO and before can even cite a date for one such purported U-2 sighted and reported as a UAP spaceship, let alone the implausible notion that U-2s accounted for “more than half ” of all UAP reports.
Under the U-2 Aquatone “secret project” entry, AARO claims “More than half of the UFO reports investigated in the 1950s and 1960s were assessed to be U.S. reconnaissance flights” and “that UFO reports would spike when the U-2 was in flight” (AAROR, p. 41).
More than “half” would mean conservatively over 5,000 U-2s mistakenly misidentified as UFOs or alien spacecraft! No such “spikes” in numbers of purported U-2 “UFO” sightings were reported either, let alone even a single sighting. A few possible isolated exceptions might lurk in the Blue Book files, though examples so far fall flat: One sighting of a possible “USAF” recon plane but not called a “U-2” (U-2s were CIA anyway, not USAF) by an AF fighter pilot was not described in any way as that of an extraordinary or extraterrestrial spacecraft. Another report several years later by a government atomic energy meteorologist also did not depict anything alien or extraterrestrial or even amazingly high-performance. Neither case was confirmed by any U-2 flight records by Blue Book’s (non)investigation. Even granting those two would still leave 4,998+ more purported UAP sightings of misidentified “U-2s” still left to be found in the Blue Book files. Where might they be AARO?
Are we to believe over 5,000 of the 10,000 UFO reports then in Air Force Blue Book files were U-2s? That should be easy to find in the Blue Book files if that was the case. (Were there ever that many U-2s anyway, flying say, daily, instead of just one every few months? U-2 historical flight schedules have been released, nothing supports AARO’s claims.)
If so, they should be able to come up with at least one U-2 “UFO” misidentification out of the purported 5,000+ U-2 “UFO” reports, one sighting by date. The earliest unfounded AF-planted rumor of a U-2 “UFO” can be documented in 1964 (see below) but in all this time since they can’t at least find one U-2 “UFO”? (An undated hearsay claim that U-2s could sometimes be seen at sunset is not a “misidentification” – no one said it was an alien spaceship or UFO or the like – and it is not a UAP report that was made by anybody to any official agency, not even to Project Blue Book which has nothing on file about that.)
In fact, it is on record that Air Force Project Blue Book Chief Capt. (later Lt Col) Hector Quintanilla first planted the whole false notion of a U-2 “UFO” sighting on Blue Book’s chief scientific consultant Dr. J. Allen Hynek and his then-grad student assistant Jacques Vallee on January 16, 1964, when he visited Chicago and briefed them (see Vallee’s published diaries for 1957-1969, p. 101). Quintanilla claimed a U-2 was sighted and “It was reported as a UFO” in 1951, purportedly observed as the U-2 was “on its way to the Soviet Union” – when in fact the U-2 had not even been invented yet in 1951 let alone flown yet (invented and designed in 1953, first flown in 1955, none flown to the Soviet Union until 1956, as anyone can look up).
In tracing the origins of this phony story, it was later in 1964 when the Air Force Foreign Technology Division (FTD), which ran Project Blue Book, planted this bogus U-2 spy plane “UFO” nonsense on the CIA (where one CIA reconnaissance official, James Cunningham, admitted FTD/Blue Book was in frequent contact with them). Air Force FTD apparently tried to suggest to the CIA that the secret U-2 flights accounted for many UAP sightings and, because of the need for secrecy, the public could not be told the U-2 explanation. CIA may have run with it because it boosted the importance and prestige of their U-2 in the aftermath of the humiliating CIA Bay of Pigs disaster – and by about this time, the mind-boggling story was embellished that “more than half” of all UAP reports were due to the U-2, not even weather balloons, Venus, or swamp gas, Blue Book’s usual attempted explanations?
(Knowing how Blue Book and its chief operated back then, from civilian researchers combing through 130,000 pages of Blue Book files and studying badly botched cases, it is very possible that on one date Blue Book happened to receive, say, five supposed “UFO” reports of which, say, three they thought mightbe of a giant Skyhook balloon, possibly from a classified high-altitude reconnaissance project of some sort. Then someone heard this but got their wires crossed and told someone else down the line of the classic hearsay chain that they thought it was three sightings of a reconnaissance spy “project,” maybe “like” a U-2 spy plane, thus confusing balloons with aircraft, and from there the myth was born. Over “half” – or three out of the five “UFO” reports that day – would have been a balloon; maybe a spy balloon, maybe not, involving perhaps nothing more than a sighting of an ordinary large weather or research balloon. But the “half” statistic for one day would be misheard and massively embellished as half of all 10,000 UAP reports for the decade and beyond. This is sheer speculation but based on the very real, typically careless way Blue Book operated. We may never know the full story.)
AARO Seems Unaware that Air Force Consultant Hynek Laid Foundations of UAP Scientific Investigation
Air Force Project Blue Book’s dirty little secret was that Insufficient Data often really just meant Insufficient Investigation which, if admitted, of course would reflect badly on Blue Book’s performance. Thus the usual tendency in Blue Book’s self-serving strategy was to blame the witness for any failings in investigating their own sighting – as if the witness is expected to be a top-notch PhD scientist. When the typically non-PhD witness failed to provide unequivocal PhD-level data, Blue Book would often triumphantly dismiss the case and claim it as one of their purported “successes.”
Civilian witnesses rarely even claim what they saw was a “UFO” or use the term “UFO,” much less an “alien spacecraft” (most will not even have heard the new term UAP). Most witnesses simply felt a civic duty to notify authorities about a “light” or “object” that was puzzling to them (as Blue Book consultant Hynek would say). That is the objective scientific approach which witnesses weren’t given credit for – reporting what they saw, not presuming to make PhD-level scientific interpretations or judgments of what it was. Military witnesses especially would grasp that the matter might have possible national security or scientific implications. It was inappropriate for the Air Force to insult the intelligence and goodwill of these citizens by dismissing their reports with improbable explanations that often made the witness look foolish. This high-handed and dismissive approach naturally had the effect of reinforcing the stigma and deterring others from coming forward.
The Air Force’s longtime scientific consultant on UAP, Astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek, taught that the “UFO” label not be given to a report until after a scientific investigation determines that it has no conventional IFO (Identified Flying Object) or other explanation. But because there is no recognized term for the initial report, the “UFO” label (and now “UAP”) is applied right at the outset for simplicity, and a seemingly redundant qualifier has to be added for cases that pass the Hynek Scientific UFO Screening process to be a “real” UFO, such as the redundant “Unidentified UFO” (Unidentified Unidentified-Flying-Object) or “UFO Unknown.” The process is not followed logically or consistently and the Hynek Screening is treated almost as an afterthought if at all. These issues are not discussed in the AARO report. Most civilian research groups’ UAP reports appear to be “Insufficient Data” mainly because they do not have the resources to investigate them all and so no Hynek Screening is applied.
AARO’s historical account barely mentions the leading role Dr. Hynek played in researching UAP for the Air Force and attempting to implement a meaningful investigative methodology. In the lone paragraph in the section on “Perceived Deception,” Dr. Hynek is referred to merely as an investigator, not as the Air Force’s chief scientific consultant on UAP. Also, the first sentence of the paragraph only refers to public suspicions of “recovered alien craft” and “extraterrestrial beings,” not the government’s overall handling of the UAP issue. It then merely mentions that the Air Force expected him to serve as a “debunker” in a sentence that also briefly mentions that Captain Ruppelt said he was expected to “explain away every report” and align press stories with the Air Force’s public position. Yet in its discussion of Project Blue Book, AARO simply states that the Air Force “determined” that there was “there was no threat to national security, no evidence of extraterrestrial vehicles and “..no evidence submitted to, or discovered by, the USAF that sightings represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of present day scientific knowledge.” These conclusions are boldly stated as though there was nothing irregular or controversial about these conclusions. The same is true of AAROs account of the highly controversial Condon report (further details below).
Among other things, Hynek blew the whistle on the Air Force and its Project Blue Book for the “insufficient data” trick, forthrightly insisting that insufficient data cases, including the sneaky “possible/probable” IFO categories, are neither IFO nor proper UFO cases and must be excluded from statistical scorecards as they are insufficient in data (The Hynek UFO Report, 1977, p. 259). The same principle applies to modern UAP cases (“UAP” merely being the new label for UFO). Among other things, AARO should be required to clarify the distinction between Insufficient Data reports and “Insufficient Investigation” (more on Insufficient Data in sections below).
AARO also doesn’t seem to know about Hynek’s classic subdivision of UFO cases into Close Encounters (of three kinds or more), Daylight Discs, Nocturnal Lights, and Radar-Visual cases. AARO’s “complete” history of UAP investigations by the US government seems incomplete without it. There was even a Spielberg movie involving Hynek’s work, called Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
AARO also makes no mention of probably the greatest scientific investigator of UAP of all time, atmospheric physicist Dr James E. McDonald of the University of Arizona. McDonald’s name, along with Hynek’s, is all over the Blue Book records that AARO brags about “completely” reviewing (though AARO seems to have overlooked half of Blue Book’s records).
The prestigious author and scientist Dr. Jacques Vallee was a colleague of Dr. Hynek’s who lived through this period and could have helped AARO enormously, but he was not contacted. Nor was he contacted for comment by the New York Times, Washington Post, or other outlets after AARO’s historical report was released. AARO also does not seem to follow Dr. Hynek’s and Dr. Vallee’s UAP scientific methodology established in the 1960s.
Alleged “40-Year Gap” in Official Investigations of UAP is Due to AARO’s Failure to Properly Document their History from 1969-2009 – Not Even a Mention of the Pivotal 2004 Nimitz Case
The allegedly “complete”, “thorough”, and “accurate” AARO historical report (p. 12) wrongly claims there is “about a 40-year gap in UAP investigation programs since the termination of Project BLUE BOOK in 1969 [sic]”– in other words a 40-year alleged “gap” from 1969 to 2009 (p. 10). (Actually, Blue Book terminated in January 1970, not 1969, another historical error by AARO.)
In reality, the only “40-year gap” is in AARO’s failure to record the history, not a 40-year gap in the existence of US Government investigations and reports of UAP from 1969 to 2009. Somehow AARO managed to slip around the 2004 USS Nimitz incidents, and others that are widespread public knowledge and were investigated by the military (hence AARO can’t use the “it’s classified” excuse to withhold).
AARO certainly knows about the 2004 Nimitz UAP incidents, which were the primary events that led to the current sea change in attitude to UFOs and UAP, leading to the establishment of AARO itself. AARO just inexplicably and unbelievably chooses not to mention the Nimitz anywhere in its Historical Report.
There are numerous USG investigations of UAP easily documented in declassified records, and many published during that purported “40-year gap.” These are only a few representative examples – one can hardly match the AARO manpower of 40+ personnel and multi-million-dollar budget to do the research AARO should have done in the first place.
During the Fall 1973 UAP wave, there were several US military investigations of UAP. These included those conducted by the Navy and Coast Guard involving an underwater UFO or USO (Unidentified Submarine or Submerged Object) near the location of the highly publicized alleged UFO abduction case a month earlier at Pascagoula, Mississippi. Coast Guard personnel sighted the underwater UAP and Navy oceanographer Dr. and Lt Cdr (later RADM) Craig Dorman investigated. (UPI dispatch, Nov. 8, 1973, etc.) This is close to an important recent UAP sighting that occurred over the Gulf of Mexico, which came to Congress’ attention only as a result of a “protected disclosure.” Even then, all but one member of Congress visiting the base for the express purpose of a briefing on this case was denied access to the aircraft’s sensor data.
In October-November 1975 there was a wave of Northern Tier UAP incidents at restricted areas of military bases at Loring AFB, Maine, Malmstrom AFB and Wurtsmith AFB, Michigan, Minot AFB, North Dakota, etc., which were investigated by the Air Force and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), as documented in declassified and FOIA-released electronic teletype messages (so the “it’s classified” excuse again can’t be used). Entire open-source books have been written about this (e.g., the Fawcett & Greenwood classic, Clear Intent, 1984).
A key intelligence focal point of investigations on the Northern Tier incident messages was the teletype address “AFINZ,” which turned out to be the Aerospace Intelligence Division of the Air Force Intelligence Service at the Pentagon (not Dayton, Ohio, by the way).
Likewise, NORAD Intelligence and NORAD J3 Aerospace Operations Division and predecessors have been involved with directing UAP investigations throughout the years in the alleged “40-year gap” and from before, back to the 1950s-1960s Blue Book years, and right up to the present (see “NORAD” in Clark, UFO Encyclopedia, 2018, pp. 801-824).
Also, a former Director of USAF Intelligence informed me that in the 1980’s the Air Force undertook a classified UAP collection program in the vicinity of Area 51 in an attempt to ascertain the origin of UAP violating the famous base’s restricted airspace. How come that program was not uncovered by AARO? How many other secret USAF programs related to UAP were not uncovered? Where are those UAP reports and how many others are there from other locations?
There is also no mention by AARO of the successor to Air Force Project Blue Book’s parent organization FTD (Foreign Technology Division), now called NASIC, National Air & Space Intelligence Center. Since NASIC is the Defense Dept.’s primary and central agency for intelligence on air and space threats, NASIC obviously must be involved with UAP today and its UFO / UAP history should be traceable back to FTD / Blue Book in the 1960s.
But AARO does not breathe a word about either the Foreign Technology Division FTD or NASIC in its “complete” and “thorough” history of UAP investigations (even though AAROR mentions the subject of “foreign technology” and “foreign technological threats”, pp. 15, 27).
In 1976 US-equipped Iranian jets chased UAP over Iran, with one UAP reportedly disabling the onboard radar, avionics, and the air-to-air intercept missile of an F-4. This is a famous case, with declassified official US DIA documentation released (so again the “it’s classified” excuse can’t be used), so it seems incomprehensible that AARO would not know about it.
In fact, AARO seems to be unaware of what it wrote in its own report because the “40-year gap” in government UAP investigations from 1969 to 2009 it claimed on Page 10 seems to be contradicted on Page 30, by AARO’s own admission that a nuclear weapons depot UAP case occurred in 1977 (apparently at Loring AFB, Maine) and obviously would have been investigated, and is currently taken seriously by AARO.
AARO also contradicts itself on the purported “40-year gap” in UAP investigations on Pages 21-22 where it reports that the famous Roswell incident was under various Air Force, GAO, Congressional, White House, and other investigations from 1992 to 2001 right in the middle of the alleged “gap” of 1969-2009.
(The claim on AAROR Page 40 that the Roswell incident, as “assessed” by AARO, was due to crash debris of a lost Project Mogul intelligence balloon appears to be another significant factual error by AARO since the alleged Mogul balloon launch on June 4, 1947, had been canceled according to Mogul project scientist records and the balloon equipment cannibalized for a later launch that never got lost but was followed and recovered.)
In 1980 the USAF nuclear weapons storage depot at RAF Bentwaters, England, was probed by a UAP with laser-like beams according to documents and the deputy base commander Col. Charles Halt, who was a personal eyewitness and led the field investigation team. Entire books have been openly published on the highly publicized so-called Rendlesham Forest case including by Col Halt himself. But AARO seems mystifyingly oblivious to the 1980 incidents, instead pushing its narrative of a purported “40-year gap” in UAP investigations from 1969 to 2009.
Also, the report’s claims regarding the lack of impact of AAWSAP and AATIP are clearly belied by their investigation of the Nimitz case, which proved so critical to helping change the views of Congress and the American people regarding UAP.
AARO’s Laundry List of Mostly Irrelevant and Actually Non-Secret “Secret” Projects
AARO tries to dismiss much of the UAP phenomenon with an implausibly expansive secret-project laundry list, including some projects like the Apollo moon landings, which were never secret in the first place.
As noted above, AARO claims that many “UAP sightings were the result of misidentifications of new technologies that observers would have understandably reported as UFOs. Observers unknowingly witnessed and reported as UFOs classified and sensitive programs that AARO assesses most likely were the cause of many UAP reports” (smoothed quote correcting AARO grammar errors etc.: See AAROR, p. 39).
Then AARO lists the Apollo program as one of 28 alleged examples (pp. 40-45). (See previous comments on Apollo.)
In none of these 28 supposed secret classified programs does AARO cite a single UAP report by date or location (the claims regarding early U-2 spy planes are unsupported by evidence, see above).
Besides the surprising and unsubstantiated AARO claim that the first US satellite in 1958, the open and public Explorer 1, somehow caused UAP sightings, there are the bizarre listings of purported “UAP sighting misidentifications” of secret spy satellites belonging to these programs:
CIA TK/CORONA
Navy TATTLETALE / GRAB
Navy POPPY
NRO’s GAMBIT
NRO’s HEXAGON
but again AARO does not cite an example of a single UAP sighting reported by people misidentifying any of these spy satellites as UAP. So why are they even listed?
Similarly, AARO lists as causing UAP sightings the various stealth and drone aircraft of:
HAVE BLUE / F-117
B-2 Bomber
GNAT 750 drones
Predator drones
Reaper drones
Yet again, AARO fails to cite an example of a single UAP sighting reported by people misidentifying any of these aircraft and drones as UAP. There are surely some valid examples, but to assert that these programs were a primary source of UAP sightings is unwarranted. Civilian UAP sightings come from all areas of the US, rural, suburban, and urban, not just in the vicinity of US military ranges and bases.
The remaining “secret” projects on AARO’s list are too tedious to go over and include the highly publicized – not “classified and sensitive” – Mercury and Gemini programs that put the first US astronauts into space, and like the Apollo moon landings never caused reported UAP sightings of their space capsules.
AARO makes a point of ostentatiously exposing and knocking down easy strawman claims throughout the report, such as going back to the Blue Book era on the sensational alleged “Navy jet” (no one saw this jet) shooting off a one-pound “metal piece” (no such metal) of a UFO (no one saw) over the Washington, DC, area in July 1952. (AAROR, pp. 20, 26; the one-pound magnesium orthosilicate stone actually found was a rare type of aubrite-enstatite magnesium meteorite, although AARO did not do the research to figure that out.)
Another easy strawman that AARO revels in demolishing is the infamous and long discredited “MJ-12” documents evidently hoaxed by Air Force’s own Office of Special Investigations personnel in the 1980s and 1990s (that Air Force role not mentioned by AARO of course) which appears to be an unlawful covert effort to manipulate US citizens and US public opinion.
Without mentioning the MJ-12 reference in the so-called “1961 Special National Intelligence Estimate” (one of several MJ-12 docs), which would have been a clear tipoff, AARO goes through a showy display of ticking off point after point how badly the document was faked:
AARO found that “the document lacked IC [Intelligence Community] tradecraft standards” and had “significant inconsistencies with SNIE’s … of the [1961] time period,” including “incorrect formatting, inconsistent branding, lack of a dissemination block and coordination language, loose narrative style, convoluted logic, imprecise and casual language, and … [strangely] superficial treatment of globally significant [1961] issues” had it really been written in 1961 instead of being faked in the 1990s. (See AAROR, p. 31, plus added MJ-12 hoax background here not mentioned by AARO.) Does this suggest poor USAF OSI tradecraft?
AARO’s Strained Effort to Deny Early Internal CIA Conclusions of Extraterrestrial UFOs
The AAROR’s representation of CIA involvement seems strained and contrived. Because this is one of only two official government conclusions of extraterrestrial origin of UFOs that AARO claims to find (and then dispute and reject), they go to some effort to try to invent something to explain away and wiggle out from CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence director Dr. H. Marshall Chadwell’s obvious and logically deducible extraterrestrial conclusion, given to CIA Director Gen. Walter B. Smith by classified memo on December 2, 1952 (see quote farther down, right out of AAROR, p. 17).
A third governmental extraterrestrial conclusion completely overlooked by AARO – by Air Force Intelligence, namely the intelligent UFO motions study by Major Dewey Fournet and presented to the CIA Robertson Panel – was missed by AARO despite its widespread reporting in declassified CIA documents and published UAP literature (see “Robertson Panel,” in Clark, UFO Encyclopedia, 2018, p. 1015).
AARO can only speculate that it is just “possible” Chadwell meant only “Soviet” (a 6-letter word Chadwell could easily have written if he meant that and easy for Chadwell’s secretary Mary Jane Carder to have typed). But Soviet threats were the CIA’s job to track, so why leave that word out? “Possible” means it does not rise to the level of “probable” or “certain” and therefore the opposite alternative (ET) of the “possible” (Soviet) is what is very probably true.
In other words, even AARO has to tacitly admit that it is likely CIA scientist Chadwell did mean extraterrestrial.
In case there is any doubt, Chadwell and his deputy Ralph Clark both confirmed in published interviews many years ago that they, the CIA OSI, did briefly conclude that UFOs were extraterrestrial but that the Robertson Panel effectively “overturned” Chadwell’s conclusions (as he put it). They did not know the Air Force had planted on the CIA a stack of Explained IFO cases disguised as the “Best” Unexplained UFO cases (see Table below) so that the CIA Robertson Panel of scientists naturally would find them all explained and thus not even close to being considered extraterrestrial, but worthy of “debunking” to the public instead (see Clark, UFO Encyclopedia, 2018, p. 1013a.)
As quoted by AARO (p. 17), Dr. Chadwell told the CIA Director he was convinced that “something was going on that must have immediate attention,” and that “sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and traveling at high speeds in the vicinity of major U.S. defense installations are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles.” In other words, not Natural, not known (human) Terrestrial aerial vehicles, so what does that obviously leave but Extraterrestrial? Clearly, these were not classified US aircraft programs.
AARO’s handling of the CIA Special Study Group of (August) 1952 is perhaps the most error-ridden in the entire AARO Report (pp. 16-17), as it appears just about everything is completely wrong, even the dates and the names of CIA personnel and Group members, and omission of bombshell facts. AAROR implies that the Group continued from summer until December 1952 when in fact it was in operation less than one month in order to brief the CIA Director on August 20, 1952.
This was so that the CIA Director in turn could brief the President on UAP on August 22, 1952, a fact of stunning importance. It was the President who ordered the CIA investigation of the Air Force mishandling of UAP in the first place on July 28 after two weekends of worldwide bad publicity showing the Air Force unable to control the skies from invading UAP flying over Washington, DC, Air Force jets unable to stop the UAP — a highly relevant and dramatic fact utterly omitted by AARO. (See “Robertson Panel,” UFO Encyclopedia, 2018.)
AARO is flat wrong not only about the date of the CIA Special Study Group but even gets the names of all the CIA personnel wrong. Omitting all mention of the President and the CIA Director, AARO insinuates the Group was created solely on the initiative of the CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence (DDI) Robert Amory Jr. but got the name or person wrong since in 1952 the DDI was Loftus E. Becker (Amory became DDI in 1953). Contrary to AARO, this Special Study Group on UAP was not formed and tasked under the Physics & Electronics Division of the CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) but under the secretive OSI Operations Staff.
The Physics & Electronics Division’s USAF Maj. A. Ray Gordon was not the “lead” or any part of the Ops Staff’s Special Study Group. In fact, it was only two weeks after the Special Study Group was already in operation and had visited Blue Book, that the P&E Division was clued in on the subject and Maj. Gordon was first assigned by P&E Division to be the point person or “project officer” on UAP within the Division — hence the apparent source of AARO’s confusion of the two separate OSI groups dealing with UAP.
The Robertson Panel Minutes clearly identify the Group as consisting of “Strong, Eng, Durant” (not Maj. Gordon) two of whom have been interviewed by researchers over the years and who confirmed the obvious facts also found of course in declassified CIA documents AARO missed — the Group was formed within the OSI Operations Staff headed by Brig.Gen. Philip G. Strong, USMCR.
Somehow AARO managed to entirely miss the CIA Special Group’s finding that the Air Force UAP intelligence effort at Project Blue Book was a complete failure. The Group’s expert in the intelligence process, Ransom L. Eng, as part of the Group, personally visited Blue Book and its parent organization ATIC at Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, Ohio. Eng found that the Air Force’s Project Blue Book UAP effort failed all 4 stages of the intelligence process — Failed at Intelligence Collection, Failed at Analysis, Failed at Production, Failed at Dissemination.
The Special Study Group and Eng told CIA Director Walter B. Smith, Gen., USA, on August 20, 1952, at a CIA-wide briefing, that the “entire Air Force” had a “world-wide reporting system and [jet] interception program” against UAP but which generates a “flood of reports on unidentified flying objects” that comes to an inadequate “small group” with “low level of support … on a minimal basis” of only 5 personnel at Blue Book who clearly could not deal with the huge volume of UAP reports. The UAP reports were made from a 10-question report form that was “inadequate even for the limited case-history approach.” That’s the Intelligence Collection failure.
Then Eng said the all-important Analysis phase was of “extremely limited scope” where the Air Force used a laborious one-by-one “individual case” or “case history” system of handling, using no computer punch cards or “other standard method of processing data” to speed the process of explaining and identifying the Explained (or IFO) cases and the Unexplained cases. But once that was done, Eng pointed out the Air Force did no trend studies, no pattern analysis nor any other of “a number accepted research techniques … in any effort to gain a sound understanding of these phenomena.”
But Eng noted ominously that Blue Book had “laboriously” plotted the Unexplained UAP cases by hand on a map and the “plots show a high incidence of reported [UAP] cases near atomic installations and Strategic Air Command [SAC] bases” but Blue Book tried to downplay it. The Air Force failed to mention to the CIA Group that the new incoming Air Force Director of Intelligence Maj. Gen. John Samford himself was shown the Unexplained UAP map in December 1951 displaying UAP concentrated around nuclear bases and SAC bases. Gen. Samford was so disturbed he ordered a major investigation of the mapped UAP nuclear/SAC concentrations using computers at the AF’s Battelle Memorial Institute contractor codenamed Project Stork (which AARO botched as to its name, wrongly calling it “Project BEAR”). Here was a potential national security threat from UAP and the Air Force was misleading the CIA about it.
Eng concluded that the Air Force failed the Analysis phase and thus all phases of the intelligence process by failing to carry out the essential “well planned and properly guided research program” to solve the mystery of what the UAPs were and help prevent any national security threat. Once Blue Book failed with Analysis it automatically failed with subsequent Production of reports of failed analysis and Dissemination of those reports of failed analysis to intelligence consumers and policymakers, thus total failure on all 4 phases of the intelligence cycle. (The CIA team was never told by the Air Force that the AF ran a more competent UAP intelligence analysis and investigation operation at its Directorate of Intelligence at the Pentagon, not at Dayton, and that Blue Book in Dayton was being reduced from an intelligence activity to a mere Public Relations front over the next six months, by orders of Gen. Samford, AF Director of Intelligence at the Pentagon, on July 28, 1952.)
Eng and the Special Group thus urged the establishment by the CIA of a major ongoing, permanent scientific UAP research program conducted by MIT at its Project Lincoln radar air defense laboratory, which the CIA continued to work towards — until the AF derailed CIA with the now-infamous Robertson Panel. The AF forced the rush-to-judgment, hurried merely 4-day Panel of scientists on the CIA OSI in the weeks leading up to January 1953, which OSI repeatedly tried to stop, stall, and postpone, but got overruled via AF pressure on the CIA Director. The AF even manipulated the evidence by falsely submitting Explained IFO cases dressed up as Best Unexplained cases so they would fall apart in front of the Panel. None of this salient history was mentioned by AARO (see “Robertson Panel,” UFO Encyclopedia, 2018).
Surprisingly, Most AARO Cases are Unexplained, 62% as of Aug. 30, 2022
It appears that the latest AARO figures for unexplained UAP cases work out to 62%, as of August 30, 2022, since the current AARO historical report of February 2024 gives no figures.
These statistics are actually a worse failure to “resolve” UAP than the debunking “scientific” Air Force Condon Report study which tried to hide its approximately 34% Unexplained rate (see later below), and much much worse than AARO’s forerunner AF Project Blue Book whose final numbers in 1970 were 6% Unidentified, which the AF considered a success in “getting rid” of the UFO (as AF chief Blue Book scientist consultant Hynek put it).
AARO’s 2022 Annual Report reported 510 total UAP cases, of which 171 of the 366 new post-Task Force cases were “uncharacterized and unattributed” (p. 5). This seems to be a brand new name for “unidentified” (see the UAP Reporting Directive May 2023 para. 3.B.6) though the Annual Report tries to suggest it is a more preliminary “initial” category than either “positively resolved” or “unidentified.” Unfortunately, it does not define these terms in the AARO Report.
However, AARO’s UAP Reporting Directive of May 2023 belies their effort to minimize this new “unattributed” category label, by defining in paragraph 3.B.6 that “UAP ATTRIBUTION is the assessed natural or artificial source of the phenomenon and includes solar, weather, tidal events; US government, scientific, industry, and private activities; and foreign (allied or adversary) government, scientific, industry, and private activities.” That seems to indicate that “attribution” is not some “initial” cursory impression but a thorough “assessment,” hence like the identification process that would lead to “identified” or “unidentified.”
The AARO Annual Report seems to conveniently fail to mention that when these new 171 unidentified UAP reports are added to the previous UAP Task Force’s 143 unidentified, the grand total of 314 unidentified out of 510 represents a formidable 62% unexplained/unidentified.
AARO makes no mention at all of this statistic of 62% unexplained. The reader would be required to know the AARO predecessor’s UAP Task Force stats, add the numbers, and do the calculations of percentage – which almost no one will even realize needs to be done.
AARO admits its January 2023 Annual report (for 2022) had revealed that “some” of the (171) unidentified UAP “demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities.” (AAROR p. 26, omits the “171” number given in the AARO Jan 2023 report, p. 5, and neither report says how many were “some.”)
This is the core element of any basic definition of a truly Unexplained UFO or UAP: unusual flight characteristics/performance along with unconventional shape (the definition can be traced as far back as Air Force UFO reporting directives in 1948-49). AARO does not single this out for much attention nor give exact statistics.
The 2024 AARO report avoids all mention of its predecessor UAP Task Force’s remarkable pro-UAP statistics of 99.3% Unidentified, including at least 56% involving multiple sensor systems which would eliminate sensor errors and conventional IFO explanations (stats all omitted in AAROR p. 24).
No AARO mention is made of either the 99.3% unidentified or the succeeding 62% unidentified number, the latest exact percentage (by calculation) deducible from exact AARO case numbers (see next section trying to numerically pin down AARO’s subsequent vague “majority” wording). The total caseload percentage of unexplained does not seem to be dropping much further if at all, given that AARO continues in 2023 and 2024 to repeatedly use the same vague “majority” term for the explained case fraction, conveniently without numbers. Presumably, if it had dropped significantly AARO would likely have highlighted this or at least set the record straight.
Disentangling AARO’s Obscure Statistics Reveals an Annual Near Doubling of Total Unexplained UAP (from 143 to 314 to ca. 600 Cumulative Total Reports)!
As mentioned above, AARO’s predecessor UAP Task Force had a total of 143 Unexplained UAP cases as of March 2021. This was more than doubled to a cumulative total of 314 unexplained in the first AARO Annual Report as of August 2022. Now it appears that the number may nearly double again to about 600 unexplained in 2024 (see table below). Unfortunately, due to a lack of clarity or transparency, we are forced to analyze and disentangle AARO’s obfuscated UAP statistics in order to deduce this.
Interestingly, the October 2023 AARO “Consolidated Annual Report” (or “AARO Cons” for short) to Congress on UAP, makes the Blue Book-style prediction that:
“Based on the ability to resolve cases to date, with an increase in the quality of data secured, the unidentified and purported anomalous nature of most UAP will likely resolve to ordinary phenomena and significantly reduce the amount of UAP case submissions [i.e., apparently discourage making of UAP reports].”
But each year or so, the total cumulative number of unidentified anomalous UAP reports increased from 143 to 314 to 600. That suggests that each year or so the added new reports with supposedly better “quality of data” were more unexplainable not more resolved with the better data. A later obscure statement in the AARO Cons report admits that AARO has not been able to explain away its UAP case backlog (the excuse being a “lack of data,” but perhaps really a lack of investigation?) hence the new cases with better data are not helping AARO, they’re still highly unexplainable (AARO Cons., Oct. 2023, p. 8).
Once again, history repeats itself. During Project Blue Book the Air Force repeatedly suggested that the primary problem in identifying and explaining UAP was lack of quality data, when often the reverse was true. When Blue Book sorted UAP cases into categories based on the quality of data, its ability to find conventional explanations steadily decreased as the quality of the witnesses and data increased (see table below from data in Blue Book Special Report 14).
Because there is no mention in the 2024 AARO report of even its alleged current 2024 caseload of 1,200 UAP cases – a number shared by AARO Acting Director Tim Phillips with CNN on March 6, 2024 – the next most recent stats with any kind of hint at an explained/unexplained breakdown we can find are in the previous AARO Annual Reports: the October 2023 AARO Report and the belated 2022 Annual UAP Report to Congress of January 2023 (a confusing array of dates and reports).
The January 2023 report gives the breakdown of only the new cases, with the numbers if one adds them up, 195-to-171 explained-to-unexplained or 53-47% (of the new, not of the total caseload), calling it “more than half,” language that subsequent AARO reports have blurred into the more vague single word “majority.” Both the October 2023 and 2024 AARO reports thus have similar language stating that an apparently bare “majority” of the UAP reports were explained, and some of the remaining “anomalous.”
Then the 2024 AARO report in effect adopts the bare “majority” language as the current UAP status, implying a roughly 51-49% type breakdown (possibly even the same 53-47% ratio as the previous new cases, in view of the vagueness). By implication, AARO seems to broadly apply the older reports’ fuzzy breakdown to the final UAP 2024 situational wrap-up in this current 2024 AARO report. AARO thus admits in subdued non-numerical language the surprising fact that nearly half of its UAP caseload is still unexplained today or does not “have an ordinary explanation” – thus seeming to undermine its position. (AAROR pp. 25-26; similar statement in AARO Cons., Oct 2023, p. 8) It would be helpful in the future if AARO would clarify the data and present the actual numbers.
Presumably, the current 2024 numbers are close to this implied 51-49% split of Explained-Unexplained, or AARO would have said differently and given us the exact figures in the AARO report. (The AARO official website does not help, it gives UAP Reporting Trends from cases 1996 to November 20, 2023, including percentages of shapes (“morphology”) of UAP but for some reason gives no numbers of total cases or percentages of cases resolved or explained – much more important numbers insofar as rating AARO’s mission performance and assessing the level of UAP activity being encountered by DoD and the IC.)
In any case, if applied to the current UAP total then there may be close to 600 Unexplained in the 1,200 UAP reports total in March 2024 (and this does not account for AARO sweeping away Insufficient Data cases as if fully explained as Blue Book did in the past, which might push the 600 Unexplained still higher depending on the definition of Insufficient Data being applied consistently). If so, then this represents almost a doubling of the 314 unexplained cases from August 2022 (a figure AARO also omits). And that 314 unexplained was a more-than doubling from the previous 143 unexplained.
If the stats were much better than this from AARO’s viewpoint, they would likely have said so. AARO had plenty of room – and months of time remaining before the report was due to Congress – to provide explicit numbers in its historical report.
Why are we forced to resort to guessing games on nuances of AARO’s language? Why doesn’t AARO release the statistics openly and transparently?
In still another revealing statistical admission worded in non-numerical language, AARO admits, as mentioned above, that “A small percentage of cases have potentially anomalous characteristics or concerning characteristics.” (AAROR p. 26)
What exactly is that “small percentage” numerically, what exactly do they mean by “small” and are they understating and minimizing it in various ways? What is a “concerning” characteristic? A national security threat? A danger to air safety?
Is this “small percentage” the same category for which AARO then-Director Kirkpatrick gave CNN some UAP stats in October 2023 not found in the formal AARO Cons Annual Report just then released? Kirkpatrick said that 2-4% of the cases are “truly anomalous and require further investigation” (he had also previously given that same ambiguous figure to the media). Why the uncertainty of 2% or 4%? That is a double-factor uncertainty. Is there a “moderately” anomalous category below “truly anomalous” at AARO and what percentage of Unexplained or Total UAP cases might fall into that category?
The AARO 2022 Annual Report uses an interesting new term, “unknown morphologies” (= unknown shapes?), and says such “interesting signatures” are found “only in a very small percentage” of cases – as if stressing the “very small” number makes it better, as in old Air Force Project Blue Book debunker fashion that it was just a little ways to go to be completely explained away (AARO Jan 2023, p.8). How can a shape be “unknown”? Either one sees a shape or not.
It all adds up to a profound mystery that AARO seems to be deliberately obscuring if not obfuscating.
AARO is Playing the Same Games with Data as Old UFO Project Blue Book – Flooding its Files with Insufficient Data Cases
It appears that AARO has adopted the old Air Force Project Blue Book’s strategy of flooding their case files with Insufficient Data cases wrongly claimed to be explained. But if there are insufficient data to explain a UFO case or cases, then they are by definition unexplained. However, as Hynek taught, these don’t rate as “officially” Unexplained either, because that requires fully Sufficient Data and must go through IFO screening investigation. “Insufficient Data” does not identify an object or its cause, it says there is not enough data to do so. This AARO policy of caseload dilution with Insufficient Data reverses its predecessor UAP Task Force’s smart approach of selecting higher quality “focused” UAP cases with an emphasis on multi-sensor incidents (80 of the initial 144 UAPTF cases or 56%) which yielded only one IFO out of 144.
And unlike Blue Book, AARO does not even bother to give a breakdown of the status of the current 1,200 UAP cases on file that AARO’s new Acting Director Tim Phillips told the media about but strangely are not mentioned in AARO’s Historical Report. Perhaps AARO doesn’t want anyone to focus on numbers – specific numbers involving the alleged “assessed” UAP identifications instead of vague generalities.
Where are the UAP cases with data so that scientists can independently verify AARO’s conclusions, which is the core of the scientific process?
If the government favors transparency as it claims, why is it that not even redacted UAP case files are being released? Why is it that after the Navy Go Fast, FLIR, and Gimbal videos were confirmed to be unclassified other videos of precisely the same kind, obtained over US training ranges, are still being withheld? I know this to be the case because I’ve seen one of the unreleased videos and raised this issue directly with DoD. I initially got a polite reply and an assurance the matter would be reviewed, but months have passed and I’ve heard nothing further. Unsurprisingly, nothing further has occurred. And why is it that Customs and Border Patrol official IR videos can be released without damage to national security, but not similar DoD videos? I’m confident that with over 1,000 new cases there must be others like “Gimbal”, “Flir” and “Go Fast” that have not been released.
AARO appears to be the “New Blue Book,” trying to “get rid” of UAP just like the old Air Force Project Blue Book in its heyday of the 1960s strived to “get rid” of UFOs by every trick in the (blue) book (Hynek UFO Report, ch. 3). In sum, with great irony, AARO seems to repeat some of the same methodological errors and mistakes that undermined the credibility of the historical UAP investigation it is reporting. These appear to include:
misuse or obfuscation of objective statistics;
mislabeling or treating Insufficient Data cases as fully solved (when by definition “insufficient” means insufficient data to positively solve);
floating bogus stories of UFO witness mistakes to distract from the real issues;
flooding case files with poor data + insufficient data + Identified “IFO” cases to drown out and conceal the genuine Unexplained UFO cases, etc.
AARO’s methodology for UAP case handling is murky (confusing and inconsistent use of language, undefined terminology, etc), making it necessary to piece together hints from across multiple AARO reports, rather than just the latest 63-page report. No copies of formal AARO Analytic Division UAP case handling procedure and methodology documents have been released either; perhaps because there aren’t any.
Last month the U.S. government’s new UAP investigation office, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), submitted a report to Congress entitled, “Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena” (UAP, the new term for UFO). This new report is itself anomalous for several reasons.
First, who ever heard of a government report being submitted months before it was due? Especially one so rife with embarrassing errors in desperate need of additional fact-checking and revision? Was AARO Director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick rushing to get the report out the door before departing, perhaps to ensure that his successor could not revise or reverse some of the report’s conclusions?
Second, this appears to be the first AARO report submitted to Congress that the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) did not sign off on. I don’t know why, but Avril Haines and her Office were quite right not to in this case, having spared themselves considerable embarrassment in the process.
Third, this is the most error-ridden and unsatisfactory government report I can recall reading during or after decades of government service. We all make mistakes, but this report is an outlier in terms of inaccuracies and errors. Were I reviewing this as a graduate student’s thesis it would receive a failing grade for failing to understand the assignment, sloppy and inadequate research, and flawed interpretation of the data. Hopefully, long before it was submitted, the author would have consulted his or her professor and received some guidance and course correction to prevent such an unfortunate outcome.
Another irregularity worth noting is the fact that before its release, Department of Defense (DoD) Public Affairs sponsored a closed-door pre-brief on the report’s findings for a select group of press outlets on an invitation-only basis. Outlets like TheDebrief, which closely follow the UAP issue, were excluded. Following the report’s release, most of the news agencies that had participated in the pre-brief went on to publish articles that uncritically parroted the report’s findings. Moreover, they seem to have done so without consulting any of the scholars or experts who have studied and written extensively on this topic as would normally be the case in another field.
What about consulting the famous scientist, author, venture capitalist, and UAP expert Dr. Jacques Vallee, who worked with Air Force astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek on Project Blue Book and lived much of the history this UAP report purports to cover? Neither AARO nor the press bothered to speak with him. How about Robert Powell, Director of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies and author of the outstanding new book UFOs: A Scientist Explains What We Know (and Don’t Know)? Or professor Alexander Wendt at the Ohio State University? I’m sure these and many other authors and scholars would have been happy to assist AARO or the press, had they been contacted.
That America’s leading press outlets missed the problems and issues identified below and failed to present an alternative perspective, is itself typical of the stigmatized history of UAP press coverage since WWII. Those interested in the role of the press on the UAP topic may want to read Terry Hansen’s provocative book, The Missing Times.
The disappointing lack of critical press coverage of this important report prompted me to begin compiling the insights of UAP scholars and experts who have studied the history of UAP and the US government. I hope the observations below will prove helpful to members of Congress and the public seeking to understand the history of the US government’s involvement with UAP. Perhaps, when AARO publishes Volume II of its report, some effort will be made by the mainstream press to consult UAP subject-matter experts before rushing their articles into print.
One of the other concerns I have about press coverage of this report is the tendency to conflate the UAP topic generally with allegations the government has recovered off-world technology. The UAP issue is distinct and critically important regardless of the truth about allegations of recovered extraterrestrial, nonhuman technology. Asking AARO to investigate that allegation was unfortunate since a subordinate DoD or IC office finding its superiors innocent was never going to satisfy the critics anyway.
Moreover, a disruptive secret of that colossal magnitude affecting every person on the planet would never be revealed in a report to Congress from a mid-level official or organization. Only the President, or an independent Congressional investigation, could reasonably be expected to reveal such a profound and transformative issue. If Congress wants to be confident it knows the truth, it needs to conduct its own independent investigation.
In the meantime, Congress and the public deserve a great deal more transparency and clarity regarding US government data on the UAP issue. Too many well-documented incidents are occurring at too many locations, a problem greatly exacerbated by the rise of sophisticated drone technologies. If you don’t think this is a serious issue, consider that just a few months ago fighter aircraft were transferred from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to Naval Air Station (NAS) Oceana after weeks of intrusions by unidentified drone-like craft. The Air Force seemed powerless to capture or deter these intruders and has still not been able to identify them. Similar incidents have been afflicting Navy warships and other bases around the country.
If the Air Force can’t defend its own bases, how can it defend the rest of the country? Don’t we need to get on top of this sooner rather than later? As journalist Tyler Rogoway (incidentally a skeptic of ET theories) said in one of his many superb articles at The War Zone (emphasis added here and elsewhere below): “The gross inaction and the stigma surrounding Unexplained Aerial Phenomena as a whole has led to what appears to be the paralyzation of the systems designed to protect us and our most critical military technologies, pointing to a massive failure in U.S. military intelligence.”
In sum, the number of UAP reports and the number of intrusions into US military airspace are both increasing, so we need to embrace the full range of UAP and drone issues and pursue them vigorously, rather than trying to diminish or trivialize the topic the way AARO’s historical report seeks to do.
Hopefully, Volume II of AARO’s history of UAP will be far more accurate and informative, and will also garner more serious, informed, and independent press coverage.
Missing the Target
The new UAP investigative agency of the U.S. Government is currently called the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). It reports jointly to the leaders of DoD and the Intelligence Community (IC). AARO recently sent the classified version of its first historical report, Vol. I, to Congress. Ostensibly, it covers the period from 1945 to October 31, 2023. The administrative cover date is February 2024. Volume II is due on about June 15, 2024.
The Congressional legal mandate, meaning by statutory law, required that this AARO historical report present the detailed history of UAP as recorded in US Government records. However, AARO instead presented a summary history of the records of flawed USG investigations of UAP, rather than what was actually mandated: thehistory of UAP and “relating to” UAP, meaning the history of UAP sightings and investigations (and to be completed using USG records and other official information).
The law required a “written report detailing the historical record of the United States Government relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena,” and the word “investigations” nowhere appears – the phrase does not say it is to be a historical report solely “relating to” investigations of “unidentified anomalous phenomena.” (NDAA FY2023 Sec. 6802(j)(1)(A), codified statute 50 U.S. Code § 3373(j)(1)(A), as amended.)
In another breach of the explicit terms of the law, AARO failed to compile, itemize, and report on US intelligence agency abuses on UAP (per 50 U.S.C. § 3373, below). The AARO Historical Report was required to:
“(ii) include a compilation and itemization of the key historical record of the involvement of the intelligence community with unidentified anomalous phenomena [UAP], including— …
“(III) any efforts to obfuscate, manipulate public opinion, hide, or otherwise provide incorrect unclassified or classified information about unidentified anomalous phenomena [UAP] or related activities.” [NDAA FY23 Sec. 6802(j)(1)(B); 50 U.S. Code § 3373(j)(1)(B)]
Contrary to Congressional direction, AARO completely omits entire agencies – NORAD, NSA, DIA (prior to 2009), CBP, etc. – agencies with known investigations or activities relating to UAP, and also omits any discussion of “any efforts to obfuscate, [or]… hide … unclassified or classified information about unidentified anomalous phenomena [UAP] or related activities.” AARO omits these agencies even when there are unclassified documents available on those agencies’ records and investigations of UAP (for example, see the approximate 100 pages of CBP Customs & Border Protection agency internal memos of Records on UAP, plus 10 videos, released in August, 2023, but unmentioned by AARO; Also see McMillan, Hanks, Plain, “Incursions at the Border,” The Debrief, May 27, 2022).
Excessive Secrecy
In the past, extreme and excessive secrecy has been displayed in efforts to “hide … unclassified or classified” UAP-related information, illustrated by the AARO predecessor’s UAP Security Classification Guide, first distributed internally on April 16, 2020 (see graphic below) which is itself heavily redacted, removing most indications of the type of UAP report content requiring classification. This is a binding secrecy regulation – don’t be fooled by the word “guide,” it is absolutely mandatory. The secrecy regulation specifically states that only a general statement of an increase in UAP sightings can be released to the public, and “without [releasing] any further information regarding when [or] where” a UAP “sighting [has] been reported” as that is classified. Additionally, the “times and places” of UAP detections are classified and are required to be “unspecified” and can’t be released; it is not “U” (Unclassified) (p. 6, subparagraphs. 4.1b-c).
The internal Pentagon talking points on the UAP subject are a gag order that specifically forbids DoD officials from even revealing to the media and the public the fact that “virtually everything” about UAP is unreleasable, citing the above UAP Security Classification regulation (produced by AARO’s predecessor, the UAP Task Force). Specifically, it states: “Except for its existence, and the mission/purpose, virtually everythingelse about the UAPTF [UAP Task Force] is classified, per the signed Security Classification Guide.”
Similar UAP security regulations no doubt are applied throughout the US Government. There is not one single item of government information about a UAP sighting that is not classified according to this secrecy regulation. Why is that? How can the US Government be transparent about UAP sighting incidents if nothing will be released? (See John Greenewald of The Black Vault, in “What’s NOT in AARO’s recent “Historical Record” UAP Report?” from his X/Twitter post on March 31, 2024).
How can this be, when DoD itself confirmed, prior to the creation of this (excessive) classification guide, that the three famous Navy UAP videos I provided the New York Times and Washington Post were unclassified, and their release would not damage national security? In fact, by bringing a major intelligence failure occurring in US airspace to the attention of policymakers, the public release of those videos clearly advancednational security. The bureaucratic fiasco of this classification guide occurred despite a broad consensus in government, including among our military and intelligence officials and members of Congress, that over-classification is a major problem that needs to be addressed. As Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) said in a letter to Congress in 2022, “Over-classification of government secrets both undermines national security by blocking the intelligence community’s ability to share critical information and erodes the basic trust that our citizens have in their government.”
Air Force intelligence agency “efforts to … manipulate public opinion” on UAP since the 1950s are what caused the harsh stigma attached to the entire UFO subject in society. But this powerful anti-UAP stigma is not investigated or historically documented by AARO – or even mentioned – contrary to its legal obligation (more on this below). In addition to the AF-instigated Robertson Panel of 1953, and all that followed after it, there are even admissions by a retired USAF OSI officer of allegedly spying on civilian UFO researchers and spreading disinformation on behalf of the Air Force.
The unclassified version of the historical AARO Report (AAROR) was released on March 8, 2024. But prior to that, AARO quietly released the report 2 days in advance to several friendly media outlets to cultivate favorable media coverage. These outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post, faithfully carried the government’s message forward, apparently without consulting any of the scholars and researchers who could have helped them understand the report’s numerous errors, omissions, and shortcomings to provide a more balanced assessment. More objective reporting would have uncovered numerous major problems and serious errors in the AARO Report.
What follows are only a select few of the many issues and questions raised by the AARO Historical Report.
The AARO Report is Filled with Hundreds of Errors
The AARO report (AAROR) is pervaded by hundreds of unfortunate errors and absurdities involving the history, science, and facts presented in its 63 pages, with dozens–or more–errors on some pages (see graphic below of 14 errors alone just on the first page of the Table of Contents).
The report is replete with so many mistakes and misunderstandings that, page for page, it appears to be the greatest single repository of UAP errors, arguably surpassing even the Air Force’s Project Blue Book. Call AARO the New Blue Book. Speaking of which, the report utterly fails to convey any of the fundamental flaws or national controversies that dogged Project Blue Book, including the admission by its own chief scientist that Blue Book was a deeply flawed Air Force public relations effort to dispel public and Congressional concerns, rather than an objective inquiry.
To begin with, AARO asserts the Kenneth Arnold sighting that launched the whole UAP era occurred on June 23, 1947 (AAROR, p. 14).
Simple Googling would have gotten the correct June 24 date and the correct shape (it wasn’t actually “circular,” and neither was the Flying Flapjack which they call the “Flying Pancake” to erroneously emphasize its circularity even more). Arnold insisted the press’s label “flying saucers” for his sighting was a misnomer. Significantly, it is the important watershed event that launched the entire modern age of UAP. It’s not a typo in a minor detail that can just be brushed off.
There are unbelievable statements and insinuations in the AARO report such as the peculiar claim that the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bomb somehow caused “sightings” and “erroneous UAP reporting” (AAROR pp. 4, 39-40) and did so even after it terminated on December 31, 1946 (a date they omit because it would not explain the sightings that began the modern UAP era in June 1947). That is a bit like saying trailer parks cause tornadoes. Since the Manhattan Project did not launch special aerial vehicles of any kind that could be “misidentified” as UAP, did the Project’s buildings fly up in the air and cause “sightings” and “erroneous UAP reporting”? This incredible claim is not explained by AARO.
Indeed, the truth is precisely the opposite of what AARO suggests. Not only is there no evidence of outside civilians mistaking the Manhattan Project and successor operations for UAP, but we know that personnel working inside the US nuclear weapons program were sighting UAP, reporting them, and thereafter collecting hundreds of their own authentic UAP reports. The senior AFOSI (Air Force Office of Special Investigations) officer responsible for Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory compiled a detailed catalog of 209 recent “Unknown Aerial Phenomena” sightings and instrument tracking incidents in the Los Alamos area and surrounding regions (see sample p. 38 below). He sent the catalog with a classified memo to his superior, the agency director in Washington DC, General Joseph P. Carroll, on May 25, 1950, stating that security officials agreed:
“… the frequency of unexplained aerial phenomenon in the New Mexico area was such that an organized plan of reporting these observations should be undertaken…”
Other documents explain this “organized plan” included instrumented UFO / UAP tracking stations and networks that were set up by scientists and security officials in the Los Alamos Lab, Sandia Lab, Kirtland AFB, and Holloman AFB–White Sands areas, and put on base-wide alert, consisting of missile-tracking telescopic cameras, radars, nuclear radiation detectors, radio communication networks, aircraft for interception, etc. Yet, no AARO discussion of this.
“The observers of these phenomena include scientists, Special Agents of the Office of Special Investigations (IG), USAF, airline pilots, military pilots, Los Alamos Security Inspectors, military personnel, and many other persons of various occupations whose reliability is not questioned.”
Many of the UAPs reported by scientists and military personnel were described as either “green fireball phenomena” or flying “disks” (or “variation”). AARO has completely misrepresented the situation: The Manhattan Project and subsequent nuclear weapons activities were not causing spurious UAP sightings by civilians awed by “new technologies” they did not understand – the government scientists and military personnel themselves were actually seeing UAP and recording hundreds of UAP in authentic and well-documented reports.
These sightings officially reported by US Government personnel were consistent with what the external “unknowing” civilians (as AARO calls them) were reporting at the time – sometimes the government personnel and civilians sighted the same UAP at the same time, confirming each other.
Seemingly AARO is confusing secrecy-bred lurid rumors of aliens with a careful sighting of a UAP, up in the air, at an exact date, time, and location, having unexplainable motions and appearance, and backed up with scientifically valuable directional data involving speed, size, altitude, sensor data, radar tracking, etc. Yet AARO suggests that many of these documented sightings are just rumors or mistaken reports based on unwitting civilian observations of “new technologies” in classified US military activities.
AARO claims the first US satellite, Explorer 1 in 1958, and even the Apollo moon landings (pp. 41-42) caused UAP sighting misidentifications and were “formerly classified and sensitive … national security programs” (AAROR, pp. 39-40) – which they were not, and Apollo was just civilian NASA. AARO insinuates that the Apollo missions were “classified and sensitive”, and yet, apart from a limited number of contingency missions later revealed to have had classified components, the vast majority of NASA’s objectives with the missions were fully known to the public, with the moon landing broadcast to the entire planet on live television.
AARO states (pp. 10-11, 36):
“AARO assesses that some portion of [UAP] sightings since the 1940s have represented misidentification of never-before-seen experimental and operational space, rocket, and air systems… From the 1940s to the 1960s especially, the United States witnessed a boom in experimental technologies… Many of these technologies fit the description of a stereotypical Unidentified Flying Object (UFO). It is understandable how observers unfamiliar with these programs could mistakesightings of these new technologies as something extraordinary, even other-worldly.”
“AARO assesses that the incidents of UAP sightings reported to USG organizations … most likely are the result of a range of cultural, political, and technological factors. AARO bases this conclusion on the aggregate findings of all USG investigations to date [and] the misinterpretation of all reported named sensitive programs…”
What “new technology” let alone “many” was ever flown that “fit the description of a stereotypical … UFO” (e.g., a flying saucer)? Yet just before “naming” the Manhattan Project and Apollo as supposed “examples,” AARO reiterates the unsubstantiated point, claiming that many:
“…UAP sightings … were the result of misidentifications … of new technologies that [civilian] observers would have understandably reported as UFOs…. [O]bservers unknowingly … witnessed … and report[ed] as UFOs … classified and sensitive programs that involved … rocket launches … which AARO assess [sic] most likely were the cause of many UAP reports. AARO assesses that this common and understandable occurrence—the misidentification of new technologies for UAP— is present today [and] are reported as UAP.” (AAROR, p. 39)
Subsequently, AARO lists the Apollo program as one of 28 alleged examples (pp. 40, 42).
But no such UAP or “stereotypical UFO” sightings of a “misidentified” Apollo are known or cited by AARO and frankly, it is baffling to suggest anyone on Earth could see the Apollo moon landings with their eyes from 240,000 miles away or Apollo anywhere along the flight trajectory. AARO makes a point of stating that there were in the Apollo program “12 astronauts walking on the moon” without explaining how that is relevant or giving a single UAP sighting they seem to insinuate was caused by that. Are there any actual, serious UAP sightings misidentifying Apollo launches to the moon as UAP?
Scientific errors by AARO thus abound in its secret-project-inflated report, including those pointed out above regarding the miraculous feats of human vision sighting Apollo moon landings and Explorer 1 from outer space – besides insinuating apparent errors of logic and physics and injecting a non-issue of misleading irrelevancies (non-secret “secret” projects that did not and could not actually cause UAP sightings).
Did AARO Miss 64,000 Pages of Air Force Blue Book UAP Files?
AARO may have “partnered” with the National Archives in retrieving old Air Force Project Blue Book files but AARO seems to think there are only 65,778 pages of Blue Book files (within some 7,000 larger digital files), instead of the actual total of some 130,000 pages.
Is AARO aware there are 130,000 pages of Air Force UAP files on microfilm at the National Archives (and some additional files that were never microfilmed)?
All that anyone has to do is check the Fold3 Ancestry.com website, available on the Internet since 2007, to find its total Blue Book page count of 129,658 pages (round off to 130,000) that Fold3’s predecessor digitized from Blue Book microfilm at NARA (see Fold3 internet screenshot below). (Page count includes about 6,000 AFOSI pages, some duplicative of the files and released with Blue Book.) And again it is documented that many records and files are missing from Blue Book, many with exact file numbers that determined investigators such as Jan Aldrich have documented over the years.
Did AARO somehow miss half of Blue Book’s files–some 64,000 pages–in its supposedly “thorough”, “complete”, and “accurate” history (AAROR, p. 12)? Did someone lose 64,000 pages of Blue Book UFO files? Did AARO investigate where these apparently missing Blue Book files disappeared or how the accounting error arose if it is just that?
Even aside from missing half of Blue Book’s files, which therefore could not be reviewed for history, AARO’s review of Air Force Blue Book history is so cursory that AARO seems to merely rehash old Blue Book press releases (see AAROR, pp. 18-19).
AARO claims it established 6 Lines of Effort (“LOEs” they call them) to prepare a “complete” and “accurate” history of the UAP “record” of government investigations (just not of UAP sightings as Congress also wanted): (1) open source, (2) classified, (3) personal interviewing, (4) National Archives, (5) private companies, and (6) intelligence/nat sec agencies (AAROR, pp. 22-13).
But obviously, AARO’s Six Lines of Effort were unmindful of 64,000 missing pages of Blue Book UFO files that only they at AARO were missing – while the rest of the world has, and has had, access to the pages through the Fold3 website since 2007 or by going to the microfilms at the National Archives or buying copies (all available since 1976). Additionally, as will be explained further below, AARO seems completely unaware of the existence of numerous important US government UAP investigation programs, activities, sightings, and radar/sensor-tracking incidents.
An unidentified object that was traveling under the ocean at a speed greater than the speed of sound came dangerously close to a nuclear submarine. This claim was made by a researcher who was working on a classified operation aboard the USS Hampton when he made the statement. For many years, Bob McGwier worked in clandestine intelligence. He disclosed two incidents about underwater UFOs or USOs, that he saw while performing covert operations. This claim was made several months after a video had been made public by the United States military, in which it appeared to show an unidentified flying object moving from the sky into the water in the year 2019.
UFO researcher and former fighter pilot Chris Lehto heard the story from Bob McGwire, who said that the submarine passed at incredible speed while “going deep and fast” in the late 1990s. McGwire stated that this encounter was corroborated by a member of the crew who was surprised by the speed of the Unidentified Submerged Object, also known as the USO. (Source)
“We were underway and all of a sudden I hear the sound it was really strange… it was moving so fast. I just cannot believe it because this submarine is limited in the speed it can go by the incompressibility of the water in front of it and this thing blew by us like we were standing still. I’m not going to throw anybody else under the bus here but I guarantee you the following happened: a person with knowledge of onboard systems came out and said ‘oh my God’ this goddamn thing is going faster than the speed of sound underwater but that’s faster than the speed of sound in air.”
Robert G. McGwier is the founder and Technical Advisor at Hawkeye 360. He serves as Technical Director of Federated Wireless, Inc. Dr. McGwier is the Director of Research for the Ted and Karyn Hume Center for National Security and Technology, and Research Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech. At Virginia Tech, he leads the overall execution of the Center’s research mission and leads the university’s program development efforts in national security applications of wireless and space systems. His area of expertise is in radio frequency communications and digital signal processing.
UFO researcher Chris Lehto with Scientist Bob McGwier: Image credit: YouTube screencap
McGwire had another USO encounter that took place onboard the USS Blue Ridge (LCC-19) in 2008 while it was in a violent Typhoon. “I wanted to look outside and see what I could see and I was on the bridge so I was right up there underneath the American flag looking out the windows. When I noticed that even though we were in a typhoon and it was raining like mad there was no rain hitting the ship and I’m going what the heck and I looked out the window and looked up and I could see a glow above us in the sky. It was not very bright but I could see it and whatever it was blocking off the rain from the entire ship stem to stern.”
McGwire continued: “I believe I was on the port side and the reason I say that is because I took a peek outside and I could do that because I was Leeward in other words the winds were from behind me and the bulkhead of the ship were blocking the winds. So, I could look up easily so anyway it suddenly grew brighter and took off straight up and the rain returned.”
Similar to McGwire’s second encounter, in 1991, USS Kirk FF108 USO Encounter took place off the west coast of South America. The witness stated that at that time, he was a Chief of Operations and Intelligence serving aboard the Knox-class escort destroyer USS Kirk FF1087 and that they were part of a drug interdiction force consisting of the USS Kirk and three other Navy ships. Their main task was to patrol using a network of radars to track and then intercept drug planes flying out of Colombia, Panama and Guatemala, as well as to seize any smuggling ships that they could find. (Source)
USS Kirk (FF-1087). Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
The witness said that his primary position was at the CIC Combat Information Center, which he and 22 other specialists maintained 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, rotating in two shifts of 11 people.
At 2 a.m. on December 16, he was on duty at CIC. The night was calm and nothing unusual happened. He said he used the break to go up to the bridge. At this time, the entire ship was in a status called “darkened ship,” when all external lights were turned off, as well as on the bridge, that is, everything around was dimly lit only by instrument panels. His friend was on deck duty that night, and they chatted when they had some free time. And suddenly, everything around was lit up in the red color:
“All of a sudden and out of nowhere, like a huge flash from a camera, emanating from the starboard bow sea level upward was a huge flash of red glowing light, which lit up our entire ship. It only lit up our ship, not the surrounding ocean, just our ship. It happened so fast, that the OOD, the navigator and I were speechless for about 5 seconds, at which time I looked at the OOD and asked him if he just saw that light. He stated yes in a sullen voice.
I then asked the navigator and he replied yes. I then took the navigator’s sound powered headset, and asked the forward and aft look outs, if they had just seen the same red flash, to which the forward look out stated, “YES! WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?”
After lookout said yes as well. I then immediately contacted CIC, and asked the CIC officer if we had any aircraft or surface ships in our vicinity, to which he replied clear as a whistle. I asked if we had any submarine activity in the area, to which he replied, no. At this point I looked at the OOD and asked him if we should wake up the captain or as we would call him, The Old Man. The OOD sat there stunned for a minute, as did I and everyone else.
What had just happened did not make any sense. The flash emanated from the sea, directly off of our starboard bow (like it was touching our bow), and ascended upwardly so rapidly, creating the effect of the bright red flash. The other weird aspect of this event was that only our ship was lit up within the red flash, not the surrounding sea, but our vessel only. The OOD elected not to wake the captain, and the entire incident was logged in our ship’s log as an unexplained phenomenon.
Up until this event, I did not believe in UFOss or USOss. I have no doubt that our ship, steaming along at 12 knots, came right up on a submerged unidentifiable aircraft. I don’t think the aircraft or USO had any idea we were sailing up to them. I think whatever it was, took off in a very unplanned and fast manner, and wanted to quickly identify us, thus the flash.”
In the end, after much deliberation, they decided not to wake the captain up, but simply to register it in the ship’s log as an “unexplained phenomenon.”
Many members of the United States Navy have reported fascinating sightings, and video showing UFOs entering water has even been made public. A video that was shot by the sailors of the USS Omaha in July 2019 off the coast of San Diego is one of the pieces of evidence that are being put up to support this claim. A spherical object is seen soaring over the ship and then plunging into the ocean in a video that was shared by UFO researcher and investigative director Jeremy Corbell. During this time, a member of the crew can be heard saying, “Wow, it splashed!”
The video generated considerable interest online, and when Corbell revealed that a Navy submarine had been dispatched to look for the object without success, things got even more intriguing. It is interesting to note that at around the same time, American submarines also spotted other mysterious anomalous objects that defied the laws of physics in the water nearby. The Navy has verified the authenticity of the video but claims to have no explanation for its existence.
More specifically, Luis Elizondo, a former director of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, said:
“Imagine a technology that can do 6-700 g-forces, which can fly at 13,000 miles per hour, which can evade radar and which can fly through air and water and eventually. in the space. And oh, by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces and yet can still defy the natural effects of Earth’s gravity. This is precisely what we are seeing.” (Source)
‘I was the Pentagon’s UFO chief – I’ve held alien matter in my hands’
‘I was the Pentagon’s UFO chief – I’ve held alien matter in my hands’
Interview
Luis Elizondo caused a worldwide sensation with his revelations about US government research into suspected non-human aircraft - but can his latest claims really be true?
Rob is Special Projects Editor at i. He won the Legal Reporting Award in 2019 and was shortlisted for the Washington Post's Laurence Stern Fellowship and Amnesty's Gaby Rado Prize in 2015.
September 7, 2024 10:00 am(Updated 4:25 pm)
They are three of the most mysterious “UFO” videos the world has ever seen.
Footage of unknown objects appearing to fly at extreme speed and perform astounding manoeuvres, filmed by US navy pilots, caused a global sensation when they were leaked in 2017. One was famously shaped like a Tic-Tac sweet.
These recordings were part of an even bigger revelation: that US intelligence officers had been secretly studying possible evidence of “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena” or “UAPs”, as they are officially termed.
That disclosure, which made the front page of The New York Times, didn’t just excite conspiracy theorists. It almost single-handedly spurred a series of congressional hearings and government reports in to UFOs. It eventually led the US Defence Department to admit that of 144 incidents they had researched, 143 of them remained unexplained.
The source of the story and those three videos was a former Pentagon official, Luis Elizondo. As director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme (AATIP), he had grown concerned that a potential national security threat wasn’t being taken seriously, leading him to resign in 2017 and brief journalists.
Even then, however, Elizondo was frustrated. He felt the articles did not get across the true gravity of what his team had apparently been working on. He wanted to say more.
Now, he is doing just that – even if many people may find it hard to believe him.
Speaking from his home in Wyoming, USA the 52-year-old tells i: “This topic has been kept secret for far too long.”
Startling new accounts in his book Imminent – in which he writes that UAPs could pose “an existential threat to humanity” – have led him to make headlines again in recent weeks.
These three videos of “unidentified anomalous phenomena” captured the public’s imagination when Luis Elizondo’s work was revealed to the world in 2017 (Images: US Navy)
He claims to have been told categorically by senior fellow researchers that the notorious Roswell incident in New Mexico in 1947 really did involve a UAP crash, perhaps involving two flying saucers – and that “four deceased non-human bodies” were recovered from the wreckage and examined.
Asked what happened to these supposed bodies, he says on our video call: “We know where they were. We don’t know where they are.” He adds: “I’ve got to be careful what I say here, to not get in trouble – I still have my security clearance.”
Other bodies have also been retrieved from subsequent incidents, he alleges, including in Mexico in 1950 and Kazakhstan in 1989.
He accuses major aerospace companies of trying to obtain crashed UAPs, to “reverse-engineer” the advanced machinery and replicate it.
He warns that UAPs appear to be attracted to nuclear technology, sometimes interfering with weapons and bringing nations close to war. He claims to have once even discussed setting a “trap” to catch a UAP by using US nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines as bait.
And he believes that UAPs have already cost lives. Ten people are said to have died in the “Colares incidents” after being harmed by lasers on a Brazilian island in the 1970s.
Elizondo’s testimony is undeniably fascinating but can any of this possibly be true?
When the existence of the AATIP was first revealed in 2017, a US defence spokesperson confirmed that the programme was real and had been run by Elizondo. Later, however, the Pentagon changed its story, telling another journalist that Elizondo “had no responsibilities” for AATIP.
Some reporters have labelled Elizondo a “crank” but the late Harry Reid, a former Democratic majority leader in the Senate, confirmed a few months before his death in 2021 that Elizondo had led the AATIP in the Pentagon.
‘Chasing flying saucers’
Luis Elizondo joined the US army aged 23 and began working in military intelligence, serving three combat tours in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
He later worked with several government agencies, countering everything from insurgencies and terrorism to drugs and foreign spying – targeting the likes of Isis, al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
In 2009 he was invited to join a “highly classified programme” at the US Defence Intelligence Agency. After sizing him up in several meetings, the intel officers decided to finally reveal what the work would involve, when one of them asked him: “What do you think about UFOs?”
Elizondo was being recruited to a unit researching aircraft that “didn’t conform to physics as we understood it”, studying data about suspected sightings. At first, he was sceptical about “chasing flying saucers”. But a few days later, he agreed – a decision that changed his life.
Luis Elizondo, left, was a military intelligence officer who was employed by the US Department of Defence, based at the Pentagon building in Washington, DC, right (Photos: Bonnier Books; Getty Images)
Recalling his own mysterious sightings
Many of Elizondo’s assertions rely on unnamed people, who he describes as “credible sources”, telling him astonishing things during his career. But he also believes he’s seen pieces of a UAP himself – and that he’s even handled “alleged alien implants found in humans”.
In our video interview, he explains: “I have held in my hand material that scientists for the US government have conducted research on, and they’ve said: ‘This is very special material, it’s highly unlikely that it’s made by human beings – and it’s engineered.’”
He adds: “I’ve also held in my hand biological samples, tissue samples, that have been removed from human beings – that when analysed, do not behave like anything that we are normally used to associating with being a natural part of the human body, and certainly looks to be some sort of technical device.”
His most direct experiences came when his own home supposedly began to be visited by glowing orbs, which he believes were spying on him.
“They were diffused, green balls of light,” he says. “They were between the size of a volleyball and a softball, and they would float right through the house… We didn’t fear them. They didn’t damage anything. It was just really bizarre.”
He continues: “Could it be a natural phenomenon? Sure? Could it be ball lightning? St Elmo’s fire? Absolutely could be.”
But what made him more suspicious was that this apparently started when he joined the UAP programme and ended when he left. “I felt like it was some sort of reconnaissance. Something was interested.” He says that colleagues had similar experiences.
Yet Elizondo says: “We didn’t fear them. They didn’t damage anything. It was just really bizarre… It was more a curiosity for us than anything else.”
Of course, the inevitable question is: why didn’t he photograph them? He says the incidents were “impossible to predict”, with no pattern of when or where they would appear in his home. He adds that he was using a BlackBerry phone at the time which didn’t have a camera. “It is frustrating that I was not able to take a photo of it,” he admits, but believes colleagues may have done so. He is “optimistic” photographic evidence will emerge.
“I have held in my hand material that scientists for the US government have conducted research on”
Luis Elizondo
The 1947 Roswell incident led to front-page stories at the time, but interest largely died away for decades after the US authorities said the remnants were merely parts of a high-tech balloon (Photos: Wikimedia Commons)
Another case he worked on was a rumoured UK visitation: the Rendlesham Forest incident of 1980, which has been called “the British Roswell”. This involved a UAP hovering “over an underground bunker where the two allies had secretly stockpiled nuclear weapons” at a base in Suffolk, he writes in his book.
“They took impressions of the ground where it landed. It was a very real event, whatever it was, and it definitely elicited a US response.”
The greatest proof, he claims, is that two former servicemen are receiving medical benefits, “100 per cent because of injuries sustained resulting from an encounter at Rendlesham”. He adds: “I’ve seen the paperwork.”
Overall, he is adamant that UAPs exist. “I’ve got stacks of US government reports that these things are real, and they’re manoeuvering in ways that we cannot replicate. These are not aberrations or atmospheric anomalies. These are real, tangible pieces of technology.”
Perhaps what’s most remarkable, however, is what he says when I utter the “A” word.
Politely interrupting, he affirms: “I never said ‘aliens’. I said ‘non-human intelligence’.
Arguing that we can’t assume any UAPs would be “from outer space”, he explains: “We don’t know that yet – these things could be being from here. They could be as natural to Earth as we are to this planet.
“People say that’s nonsense, but is it really? Maybe they’re from under the water – 10 per cent of the ocean floor is mapped, that’s it.”
“They were diffused, green balls of light”
Luis Elizondo
The Rendlesham Forest incident prompted a front-page report by News of the World, and a UFO-themed walking trail has since been opened in the area by the UK’s Forestry Commission, featuring a sculpture (Photos: Getty Images)
A subject that can prompt scorn
At times in our conversation, it’s hard to know how to respond to some of these spectacular stories. Elizondo is smart and speaks articulately. He’s passionate yet measured, and he appears sincere. He’s been taken seriously by many US politicians and media outlets.
Many people will want to believe him. Many others will feel they need more evidence. Much more. But Elizondo says if the public are sceptical, they can “take it or leave it”.
Elizondo agrees that sources can be wrong. “We’ve been burned before,” he says. “The entire premise for the Iraq War, for the US, was based upon a source named ‘Curveball’. It ended up being complete nonsense. You’ve got to be very careful.”
That Roswell tape “hurt” the study of UAPs, says Elizondo. “There are a lot of hucksters and fraudsters out there that have made a cottage industry for themselves, basically putting out misinformation and disinformation. That’s not been helpful to the serious national security conversation.”
“There are a lot of hucksters and fraudsters out there”
Luis Elizondo
The faked ‘Alien Autopsy’ video, left, caused a wave of new interest in the Roswell incident in the 1990s, even leading to replicas like this one on right going on display in Glenn Dennis’s UFO Museum in the New Mexico town (Photos: Getty Images)
When we all constantly carry phones around with us, armed with powerful cameras – unlike his old BlackBerry – why aren’t there more genuine photos and videos of UAPs if they really exist? And why aren’t they clearer than the grainy black-and-white footage in those three US navy recordings?
Elizondo responds that when he was choosing which three videos to release to the world in 2017, he could only pick non-classified examples to avoid breaking security laws, and these were typically the “least compelling” ones.
“We have videos in ultra 4K high definition that would knock your socks off,” he says. “If you were to actually see these, there’s no doubt what you’re looking at: it is not a US technology, and it’s not a foreign adversary’s technology. This thing is something else.
“There are lots of these videos. Are they going to be released? That’s not up to me. I wish they would.”
In the appendix of his book, Elizondo quotes Bill Clinton to support his claims. On a talk show in 2022, Clinton revealed that while he was president, he “made every attempt to find out everything about Roswell”. However, it’s notable that Elizondo does not include something else Clinton went on to say. Adding that he “also sent people to Area 51 to make sure there were no aliens”, the former president concluded: “There’s no aliens, as I know.”
In fact, Elizondo alleges, defence officials keep UAP research so confidential that even US presidents aren’t informed about what they really know.
“We have videos in ultra 4K high definition that would knock your socks off”
Luis Elizondo
At a press conference in Washington last year, ‘ufologists’ presented research on UAPs including this artist rendering of extraterrestrials (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Denials and accusations
Elizondo is not alone in making staggering claims about UAPs. David Grusch, a former US intelligence official, said last year that covert US programmes have obtained “intact and partially intact” alien vehicles, including one as big as a “football field”.
Grusch later told a congressional committee hearing that he has interviewed experts who recovered “non-human” biological material from crashed UAPs. However, he admitted to never seeing any alien bodies or craft himself.
The US Department of Defence denies such allegations. In a report published in March, it said there was “no evidence” that the US government had encountered alien life or spacecraft. Most suspected UAP sightings are in fact linked to experimental flights of classified technology, it said – including Roswell, which probably involved a high-altitude balloon fitted with microphones to detect Soviet nuclear tests.
Elizondo is unbowed, however. “That report is full of holes, full of inaccuracies,” he says.
Parts of his book, ranging from individual words to full paragraphs, are greyed out where they’ve been redacted by the US authorities. He says it took a year to obtain security clearance for publication.
Parts of Luis Elizondo’s book, Imminent, have been redacted (Photo: Bonnier Books)
The book includes scans of his resignation letter and some of his emails.
He says: “Our Pentagon never lies, right? Unless you talk about, oh, I don’t know, the Pentagon Papers, and Iran-Contra, and the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The list goes on and on and on.”
“I was ridiculed… It has been very tough on my family”
Luis Elizondo
David Grusch, centre, was among three people who offered testimonies about UAPs to a US congressional committee last year (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Elizondo has become a hero figure for many so-called ufologists. He has hosted a History Channel documentary series on the subject, produced by perhaps the most famous of all UFO obsessives, Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge.
Whatever the truth of his claims, however, becoming a UAP “whistle-blower” has been costly. It ended his intelligence career and he says it left him on the verge of bankruptcy.
“I was ridiculed… It has been very tough on my family.”
He adds: “I’ve been a creature of the shadows my entire life. Being in the intelligence field, anonymity is your friend… I’m actually very introverted as well, so it’s very tough for me to be public.
“Imagine being an albino newt somewhere in the recesses of a nice, moist, dark cave – and all of a sudden, schoolchildren come in on a field trip, they pluck you out of obscurity, they put you out in the hot desert sun, and they start poking you. That’s what it feels like.”
Nevertheless, he is glad to have made the sacrifices. “I don’t necessarily enjoy the attention, but there’s no other way to get the conversation going.”
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.”
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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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 73 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!'