I am Disappointed; No Little Green Men Revealed by the Pentagon! By Brian Simpson
The long-awaited UFO report by the Pentagon, not to be confused with Satanic symbolism being just the shape it had to be, has been released, and it says, in short, that we have seen these things, and don’t know what they are. That’s mighty helpful, I could have written that up for nothing!
“After a great deal of speculation, the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have released a long-awaited report about their investigations into unidentified flying objects. The unclassified document, called “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” examined 144 incidents that occurred between November 2004 and March 2021 in which military pilots encountered something they couldn’t explain. Promoters of the idea that UFOs represent something beyond this world have been hyping up the release for months.
In only one case was the $22 million report able to deduce an exact nature of what their pilots saw with high confidence—it was a large, deflating balloon. But it also concludes that the majority of the other incidents can be traced back to some terrestrial cause, such as airborne debris, natural atmospheric phenomena like ice crystals, or flight vehicles from the US or other countries. But by their very nature, most of the reported cases are difficult to identify.
“The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP,” wrote the authors, using the military’s preferred parlance.
Today’s report is the culmination of a program known as the the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, set up in 2007, whose existence was made public in a front page story in The New York Times in 2017. Though it contains no indication that any of its incidents could have been caused by things not of this Earth, it will be seen as a major victory by those who have been pushing for increased government disclosures about strange lights in the skies.
“No question, this is the story of the millennium,” says former CIA officer Jim Semivan, who helps run To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, a company that researches UFOs and other unexplained phenomena. “This is going to reorder our consensus reality.”
His partner at To the Stars, Tom DeLonge (yes, from the punk-pop band Blink-182), agrees. “There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle,” DeLonge says.
Susan Gough, a spokesperson for the Defense Department, declined requests for an interview, writing in an email that the department “does not discuss publicly the details of either the observations or the examination of reported incursions into our training ranges or designated airspace.”
The new report is less a major turning point in our understanding of life in the universe and more a product of our current cultural climate, a time when expertise and authority are increasingly being called into question. The debate over UFOs instead highlights the limits of knowledge and humanity’s continued need to believe in something beyond our mundane experience of the world.
It’s important to note that this isn’t the first time the government has acknowledged that its pilots on occasion see things that bewilder them. “The US military has done this before, in multiple ways, at multiple times,” says Kathryn Dorsch, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Last summer, for instance, the Department of Defense authorized the release of three videos showing purported encounters with unidentified phenomena, which featured oblong dots hovering and moving in eerie ways. In April, the Pentagon also confirmed that leaked video of a bizarre triangular object taken in 2019 was a legitimate recording of something it had yet to explain.
Dorsch, who specializes in scientific knowledge production, points out that UFOs are very much a Cold War phenomenon. Almost as soon as World War II ended, US military officials began reporting observations of funny lights and odd-shaped entities.”
“An Office of the Director of National Intelligence report released Friday said there were at least 143 unidentified aerial phenomena between 2004 and 2021 that are “unexplained.”
The report said there were 144 reports of UAP between that time frame that were largely witnessed firsthand by military aviators and collected from systems considered reliable. Of those, 80 reports involved observation with “multiple sensors.”
The report said a UAP task force (UAPTF) was able to identify only one reported UAP out of the 144 reports “with high confidence.”
“In that case, we identified the object as a large, deflating balloon. The others remain unexplained,” it said.
Most reports described the UAP as “objects that interrupted pre-planned training or other military activity.”
The report said that most of the UAP reported “probably do represent physical objects given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation.”
In a limited number of incidents, UAP reportedly appeared to exhibit unusual flight characteristics, it said. However, it added that those observations “could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception and require additional rigorous analysis.”
The ODNI report said “limited data and inconsistency” in reporting were key challenges to evaluating the UAP, and that no standardized mechanism for reporting them existed until the Navy established one in 2019. The Air Force adopted that mechanism in November 2020.
The number of UAPs could be much higher — the task force “regularly heard anecdotally…about other observations that occurred but were never captured in formal or informal reporting by those observers,” the report said.
The report did list potential sources of UAP, however.
It said that UAP documented demonstrated an “array” of aerial behaviors, suggesting there are multiple types of UAP requiring different explanations.
The report said there are five potential categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, U.S. government or industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall “other” bin. The descriptions of each category were as follows:
Airborne Clutter: These objects include birds, balloons, recreational unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), or airborne debris like plastic bags that muddle a scene and affect an operator’s ability to identify true targets, such as enemy aircraft.
Natural Atmospheric Phenomena: Natural atmospheric phenomena includes ice crystals, moisture, and thermal fluctuations that may register on some infrared and radar systems.
USG or Industry Developmental Programs: Some UAP observations could be attributable to developments and classified programs by U.S. entities. We were unable to confirm, however, that these systems accounted for any of the UAP reports we collected.
Foreign Adversary Systems: Some UAP may be technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity.
Other: Although most of the UAP described in our dataset probably remain unidentified due to limited data or challenges to collection processing or analysis, we may require additional scientific knowledge to successfully collect on, analyze and characterize some of them. We would group such objects in this category pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them. The UAPTF intends to focus additional analysis on the small number of cases where a UAP appeared to display unusual flight characteristics or signature management.
The report said the UAP pose a flight safety hazard and a possible national security danger — if some instances are part of sophisticated collection of U.S. military activities by a foreign government or demonstrate a “breakthrough aerospace technology by a potential adversary.”
The report said there were 11 reports of documented instances in which pilots reported near misses with a UAP.
On a potential national security danger, the report said:
We currently lack data to indicate any UAP are part of a foreign collection program or indicative of a major technological advancement by a potential adversary. We continue to monitor for evidence of such programs given the counter intelligence challenge they would pose, particularly as some UAP have been detected near military facilities or by aircraft carrying the USG’s most advanced sensor systems.
The report said explaining UAP will require continued analytic, collection, and resource investment.
The UAPTF’s long-term goal is to widen the scope of its work to include additional UAP events documented by a broader swath of U.S. government personnel and technical systems in its analysis.
“Consistent consolidation of reports from across the federal government, standardized reporting, increased collection and analysis, and a streamlined process for screening all such reports against a broad range of relevant USG data will allow for a more sophisticated analysis of UAP that is likely to deepen our understanding. Some of these steps are resource-intensive and would require additional investment,” the report said.”
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