The U.S. intelligence community’s long-anticipated report on UFOs, or “Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon” (UAPs) — released on Friday — gives some fascinating details about individual, unexplained sightings but sheds no light on what these crafts are or where they’re from. It did raise important “safety concerns” about some of the possible explanations for UFOs, however.
The report’s conclusion: There’s zero evidence that the phenomena in question are extraterrestrial in origin.
Thanks to more than half a century of lies, misleading statements, and coverups from Washington on the UFO phenomenon, a large percentage of Americans are rejecting the report out of hand. The skeptics believe the government is still hiding something.
Seventy percent of registered voters in the June 17-18 survey said the government is not telling the public everything when it comes to UAPs, while 30 percent of respondents said the government is sharing everything on the matter.
The survey found a majority of voters across demographics, including partisans, agree that the government is holding back information on UAPs.
The report sheds some light on the question of how the military views UAPs. Indeed, the military definitely sees UAPs as a threat — a wise point of view since we don’t know where they came from or what the intentions of whatever or whoever sent them are.
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The military only knows that the aircraft encountered by military pilots outperform anything anyone can put in the skies. And that is a cause for concern. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks wrote in a memo to U.S. military leaders that a large number of the UAPs appeared around U.S. military installations.
There were 18 cases in which witnesses saw “unusual” patterns of movement or flight characteristics, the report said, adding that more analysis was needed to determine if those sightings represented “breakthrough” technology.
The report, Hicks wrote, confirmed that the scope of UAP activity “expands significantly beyond the purview of the Secretary of the Navy, who heads the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), and suggested process improvements to ensure timely collection of consistent data on UAP.”
Not only are there no indications that the UAPs are alien in origin, but there’s also no evidence that they were put up by Russia or China. The report did not attempt to narrowly define each UAP, choosing to use broad categories to catalog the sightings.
According to the nine-page document, each report of an UAP would “probably… fall into one of five potential explanatory categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, USG or US industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall ‘other’ bin.”
A few of those categories lead the report authors to highlight potential concerns:
“Safety concerns primarily center on aviators contending with an increasingly cluttered air domain,” the report said. “UAP would also represent a national security challenge if they are foreign adversary collection platforms or provide evidence a potential adversary has developed either a breakthrough or disruptive technology.”
The report did not address the question of a rising frequency of sightings around military assets like airbases and missile sites that some researchers say could suggest some kind of reconnaissance mission. But the acceptance of the sightings as being “real” in recent years has at least partially removed the stigma that pilots and other observers felt was being applied to them for formally reporting a UAP. The increased sightings may possibly reflect more ease with reporting the phenomenon rather than an actual increase in UAP activity.
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To say that the report was unsatisfying is an understatement. It’s a disappointment. The kind of physical evidence of alien origins for UAPs — metallurgical, biological, chemical — that would convince skeptical scientists of their existence doesn’t exist.
But surely that nine-page report is not the sum total of knowledge about UAPs possessed by the government. The report is a good start, but the U.S. government will have to release much more if it wants to regain any credibility on this issue at all.
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