A classified report on unidentified aerial phenomena ordered by Congress earlier this year says that there was no evidence that the 120 incidents that Navy pilots witnessed involving strange aircraft performing astonishing feats of speed and maneuverability were extraterrestrial in origin, sources told The New York Times. However, the report did not rule out the possibility of otherworldly origin, it just noted that there was no evidence that an alien civilization built the aircraft.
An unclassified version of the report is expected to be released as early as Tuesday.
The report concluded that the vast majority of the incidents did not originate with the American military or other advanced U.S. government technology. That some of them might have is an intriguing possibility. Just what is it that the U.S. military is flying around up there?
It should be noted that the intelligence agencies mostly examined incidents involving Navy pilots. Most of the incidents occurred at sea while a few of the occurrences were recorded by Navy vessels in the open ocean. A few other incidents studied came from foreign militaries.
The final report will also include a classified annex, the officials said. While the annex will not contain any evidence concluding that the phenomena are alien spacecraft, the officials acknowledged that the fact that it would remain off limits to the public was likely to continue to fuel speculation that the government had secret data about alien visitations to Earth.
Many of the more than 120 incidents examined in the report are from Navy personnel, officials said. The report also examined incidents involving foreign militaries over the last two decades. Intelligence officials believe at least some of the aerial phenomena could have been experimental technology from a rival power, most likely Russia or China.
Since “UFO” merely stands for “unidentified flying object,” scores of videos have captured spectacular feats of flying involving UFOs. By definition, we don’t have evidence about the origins of UFOs, so it’s not likely any report will be able to explain how the unknown aircraft are able to achieve speeds in the atmosphere thought to be impossible or how the craft can seemingly defy the laws of physics by turning at right angles.
The question the military is most concerned with is, are they a threat to the United States?
Navy pilots were often unsettled by the sightings. In one encounter, strange objects — one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind — appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.
The new NASA chief, former Senator Bill Nelson, says that NASA isn’t formally investigating the phenomenon.
“We don’t know if it’s extraterrestrial. We don’t know if it’s an enemy. We don’t know if it’s an optical phenomenon,” Nelson said. “We don’t think [it’s an optical phenomenon] because of the characteristics that those Navy jet pilots described … And so the bottom line is, we want to know.”
Indeed, one thing the report will be definite about is that the UFOs are “real.” They have mass. Many of them have thermal heat signatures. Many pilots report that their compasses go haywire in the vicinity of the objects, suggesting they carry some kind of electromagnetic charge.
But this is evidence that they exist in our universe, not evidence that they come from somewhere else.
It seems likely that we won’t have definitive proof that U.S. Navy jets are being buzzed by extraterrestrial aircraft unless or until we can examine one of them.
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