Posted On: November 6, 2022

For more than a decade, the U.S. Department of Defense has been quietly cataloging and investigating scores of bizarre encounters—most from the U.S. Navy—of ships and fighter jets tangling with, or being tailgated by, unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Beginning in 2017, videos and eyewitness accounts of these weird sightings found their way into public view, ultimately spurring Congress to demand that the Pentagon produce a report summarizing all that the U.S. government knows about so-called unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP (an alternate term with considerably less stigma than the much maligned “UFOs”).

Upon establishing the task force, the DOD released an accompanying statement explaining the justifications for its existence: “The safety of our personnel and the security of our operations are of paramount concern. The Department of Defense and the military departments take any incursions by unauthorized aircraft into our training ranges or designated airspace very seriously and examine each report. This includes examinations of incursions that are initially reported as UAP when the observer cannot immediately identify what he or she is observing.”

Meanwhile all this strangeness has garnered considerable media attention, from front-page stories in the New York Times to 13,000-word articles in the New Yorker, as well as prominent coverage on 60 Minutes and other prime-time television programs. Through it all, a sizable contingent of true believers have steadily proclaimed, “We told you so,” insistent in their conviction that, whether called UFOs or UAP, the entities seemingly slipping through our skies are actually alien spacecraft—and have been visiting Earth for a very long time.

Those deeply entrenched public beliefs, paired with the apparent reinvigoration of investigative interest in these incidents at the highest levels of government, can lead to dazzling speculations. Might we be on the verge of a formal disclosure—backed by irrefutable evidence—that humankind is not alone and is indeed being monitored by extraterrestrial civilizations? Or could it be that UAP are entirely homegrown products of revolutionary and clandestine technological advances, whether by other countries now challenging American airspace or by the U.S. itself as part of some supersecret domestic program meant to detect flaws in the nation’s defenses? The mind boggles.

The task force’s unclassified assessment was released on June 25, 2021, but the New York Times provided a cursory preview of its contents in an article on June 3. Citing anonymous senior officials familiar with the report’s contents, the story said that the assessment has come up short of explaining what UAP are and that it provides no evidence to link them with any putative alien visitation—despite reviewing more than 120 incidents from the past 20 years. The report’s firmest conclusion, it seems, is that the vast majority of UAP happenings and their surprising maneuvers are not caused by any U.S. advanced technology programs.

 

 

Lastly, according to the New York Times article, the final report includes a “classified annex” of information deemed unsuitable for public release—leaving more than enough room for die-hard UFO advocates to remain convinced that the U.S. government is hiding the truth.

Andrew Fraknoi, an astronomer at the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of San Francisco, echoes the widely held sentiment among scientists that, for decades, the media has lavished too much attention on sensational claims that vague lights in the sky are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft. “Recently, there has been a flurry of misleading publicity about UFOs [based on military reports]. A sober examination of these claims reveals that there is a lot less to them than first meets the eye,” Fraknoi says. Given sufficient evidence (which, arguably, many of the recent reports fail to provide), UFO sightings can essentially always be tied to terrestrial or celestial phenomena, such as lights from human-made vehicles and reentering space junk, he adds.

There is not going to be any “big reveal,” says Robert Sheaffer, a leading skeptical investigator of UFOs. “There are no aliens here on Earth, and so the government cannot ‘disclose’ what it does not have. Some people think that the government knows more about UFOs, or UAP, than the public, but it’s clear that they know less on the subject than our best civilian UFO investigators, not more.”

The DOD employs some very competent photographic analysts and other technical experts, “none of whom obviously were consulted in this comedy of errors,” Sheaffer says. “The Pentagon has already suffered enough embarrassment from the [apparent] incompetence of its UAP Task Force.” He says it is time to rein in such “rampant foolishness” and ensure that proper experts will shape the task force’s conclusions rather than “clueless, self-important people who don’t even recognize out-of-focus images when they see them.”

Skeptical science writer Mick West has taken on the chore of analyzing the spate of UAP videos released by the U.S. military, steadfastly investigating how some of the incidents could merely be mirages from flaws in newly deployed radar systems, as well as various sorts of well-understood visual artifacts regularly seen in cameras. Despite his work to debunk the recent claims, West maintains that reports of mysterious aircraft stalking military assets should be taken quite seriously.

“Firstly, there’s a set of very real issues that could be grouped together as ‘UAPs’ or ‘UFOs,’” West says. “Any time something unidentified shows up in restricted airspace, then that’s a real problem that needs solving.” There have been many reports of drones above or near restricted areas, he notes. “We know that drones have been used for terrorist attacks, and drones will very much be a significant factor in future conflicts,” West says. “So we need to figure out how to identify and mitigate such things.”

None of this should come as a major surprise, the experts are just reiterating what’s been going on since the 40s. The government is hiding all sorts of information from us, it’s only a matter of time until the dominos of truth come crashing down

Posted On: November 6, 2022

For more than a decade, the U.S. Department of Defense has been quietly cataloging and investigating scores of bizarre encounters—most from the U.S. Navy—of ships and fighter jets tangling with, or being tailgated by, unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Beginning in 2017, videos and eyewitness accounts of these weird sightings found their way into public view, ultimately spurring Congress to demand that the Pentagon produce a report summarizing all that the U.S. government knows about so-called unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP (an alternate term with considerably less stigma than the much maligned “UFOs”).

Upon establishing the task force, the DOD released an accompanying statement explaining the justifications for its existence: “The safety of our personnel and the security of our operations are of paramount concern. The Department of Defense and the military departments take any incursions by unauthorized aircraft into our training ranges or designated airspace very seriously and examine each report. This includes examinations of incursions that are initially reported as UAP when the observer cannot immediately identify what he or she is observing.”

Meanwhile all this strangeness has garnered considerable media attention, from front-page stories in the New York Times to 13,000-word articles in the New Yorker, as well as prominent coverage on 60 Minutes and other prime-time television programs. Through it all, a sizable contingent of true believers have steadily proclaimed, “We told you so,” insistent in their conviction that, whether called UFOs or UAP, the entities seemingly slipping through our skies are actually alien spacecraft—and have been visiting Earth for a very long time.

Those deeply entrenched public beliefs, paired with the apparent reinvigoration of investigative interest in these incidents at the highest levels of government, can lead to dazzling speculations. Might we be on the verge of a formal disclosure—backed by irrefutable evidence—that humankind is not alone and is indeed being monitored by extraterrestrial civilizations? Or could it be that UAP are entirely homegrown products of revolutionary and clandestine technological advances, whether by other countries now challenging American airspace or by the U.S. itself as part of some supersecret domestic program meant to detect flaws in the nation’s defenses? The mind boggles.

The task force’s unclassified assessment was released on June 25, 2021, but the New York Times provided a cursory preview of its contents in an article on June 3. Citing anonymous senior officials familiar with the report’s contents, the story said that the assessment has come up short of explaining what UAP are and that it provides no evidence to link them with any putative alien visitation—despite reviewing more than 120 incidents from the past 20 years. The report’s firmest conclusion, it seems, is that the vast majority of UAP happenings and their surprising maneuvers are not caused by any U.S. advanced technology programs.

 

 

Lastly, according to the New York Times article, the final report includes a “classified annex” of information deemed unsuitable for public release—leaving more than enough room for die-hard UFO advocates to remain convinced that the U.S. government is hiding the truth.

Andrew Fraknoi, an astronomer at the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of San Francisco, echoes the widely held sentiment among scientists that, for decades, the media has lavished too much attention on sensational claims that vague lights in the sky are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft. “Recently, there has been a flurry of misleading publicity about UFOs [based on military reports]. A sober examination of these claims reveals that there is a lot less to them than first meets the eye,” Fraknoi says. Given sufficient evidence (which, arguably, many of the recent reports fail to provide), UFO sightings can essentially always be tied to terrestrial or celestial phenomena, such as lights from human-made vehicles and reentering space junk, he adds.

There is not going to be any “big reveal,” says Robert Sheaffer, a leading skeptical investigator of UFOs. “There are no aliens here on Earth, and so the government cannot ‘disclose’ what it does not have. Some people think that the government knows more about UFOs, or UAP, than the public, but it’s clear that they know less on the subject than our best civilian UFO investigators, not more.”

The DOD employs some very competent photographic analysts and other technical experts, “none of whom obviously were consulted in this comedy of errors,” Sheaffer says. “The Pentagon has already suffered enough embarrassment from the [apparent] incompetence of its UAP Task Force.” He says it is time to rein in such “rampant foolishness” and ensure that proper experts will shape the task force’s conclusions rather than “clueless, self-important people who don’t even recognize out-of-focus images when they see them.”

Skeptical science writer Mick West has taken on the chore of analyzing the spate of UAP videos released by the U.S. military, steadfastly investigating how some of the incidents could merely be mirages from flaws in newly deployed radar systems, as well as various sorts of well-understood visual artifacts regularly seen in cameras. Despite his work to debunk the recent claims, West maintains that reports of mysterious aircraft stalking military assets should be taken quite seriously.

“Firstly, there’s a set of very real issues that could be grouped together as ‘UAPs’ or ‘UFOs,’” West says. “Any time something unidentified shows up in restricted airspace, then that’s a real problem that needs solving.” There have been many reports of drones above or near restricted areas, he notes. “We know that drones have been used for terrorist attacks, and drones will very much be a significant factor in future conflicts,” West says. “So we need to figure out how to identify and mitigate such things.”

None of this should come as a major surprise, the experts are just reiterating what’s been going on since the 40s. The government is hiding all sorts of information from us, it’s only a matter of time until the dominos of truth come crashing down