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
Zoeken in blog
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 Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
07-06-2019
WTC UFO/Happens with three more words
WTC UFO/Happens with three more words
WHOA!! That was close.
Looks pretty real to me. This video back in the day had some pretty wierd conspiracy theories. Like the guy filming was one of the hijackers scoping out the intended targets.
The Navy tracks UFO sightings. Scientists explain what's really going on.
The Navy tracks UFO sightings. Scientists explain what's really going on.
NOGA AMI-RAV/STARS AND STRIPES ILLUSTRATION
By TOM AVRIL | The Philadelphia Inquirer
(Tribune News Service) — The Navy caused a bit of a sensation this spring when it implemented a formal process for pilots to report unexplained aerial phenomena – what most people call UFOs – after being accused in the past of not taking such reports seriously.
Alas for those who might be tempted to make the leap, such sightings are not evidence of life on other planets.
No one doubts that the pilots are seeing something, but psychologists and specialists in aviation medicine say there are plenty of reasonable explanations for such sightings other than extraterrestrial beings. Earthly sources of light reflected by clouds or haze, for example, or optical illusions wrought by fatigue after staring through a cockpit window for hours on end.
Another possibility is that the pilots were seeing some sort of experimental drone or other advanced technology about which they had not been briefed. Or, the objects were simply satellites, such as those launched in May by the Elon Musk-founded company SpaceX, which prompted a flurry of UFO reports from puzzled observers, the news agency AFP reported.
That does not mean scientists doubt the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. On the contrary, they say there is a good chance we are not alone. That is the view of astronomers who search for other planets that might have water – an essential substance for life as we know it – and geologists who study the conditions on Earth when life arose more than 3.5 billion years ago.
But it would not be the sort of complex organism that could communicate with us, much less send a spaceship our way. Think instead of microbe-like organisms – possibly something that derives energy from a chemical process other than photosynthesis, said Alexandra Davatzes, an associate professor of earth and environmental science at Temple University.
The odds of extraterrestrial life are reasonably good even in our own solar system – given the ample evidence that liquid water has existed on Mars and is present today beneath the icy surface of Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, Davatzes said.
"I am optimistic," she said.
But first, some explanations for what those pilots might be seeing.
Though we treat our sense of vision as if it provides an exact representation of our surroundings, it is far from perfect in many respects, said Alan Stocker, a University of Pennsylvania associate professor of psychology who studies the neuroscience of perception.
First, most objects do not emit light, so we see them only because they are reflecting light from another source.
"It's an indirect signal," Stocker said. "It's not the object itself."
Additional uncertainty arises from the fact that the brain must process and interpret the two-dimensional signals that are projected onto the retina, converting them into a representation of the actual three-dimensional world.
Humans get by with their imperfect eyesight pretty well, using knowledge of prior experiences and context from other senses to fill in the gaps, but there are times when it breaks down.
Among the earliest to document that fact was Aristotle, who found that if he stared at a moving stream for a while, then shifted his gaze to some rocks nearby, they appeared to move in the opposite direction. This phenomenon, now called motion aftereffect, occurs because the neurons that detect motion in a certain direction will adapt after being stimulated for a period of time, temporarily slowing their firing rate, Stocker said. That response results in the illusion of stationary objects moving in the reverse direction.
"It's very clear that people don't see the world the way it is in all kinds of ways," Stocker said.
Another biological factor that can skew the vision of airborne personnel is fatigue – no surprise given that some long-range crews stay aloft more than 24 hours at a time, said Brian S. Pinkston, director of the aerospace medicine center at University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Extreme fatigue can cause the brain's visual cortex to register something that is not there, he said.
Equally potent is a phenomenon called autokinesis: the illusion that a stationary point of light is moving when it is viewed against a dark, featureless background.
"Your eyes have some inherent movement in them, and it will make it appear as if the object is moving," said Pinkston, a former Air Force flight surgeon. "You can have stars in the sky, and it will appear as if they're moving."
Harder to explain are the occasions when similar sightings are experienced by multiple people, as in the case of Navy pilots interviewed by the New York Times. But there is some evidence that the culprit is advanced government technology of which the pilots were unaware, according to the Drive, a media outlet focusing on military affairs.
Whatever the true explanation, the key to analyzing new phenomena is a scientific principle called parsimony, said Scott Engle, an assistant professor of astrophysics and planetary science at Villanova University. In everyday English, parsimonious means being frugal with money. To a scientist, it means being frugal in making unwarranted assumptions.
"The explanation that requires the fewest assumptions or modifications to your understanding is usually going to be true," said Engle, who studies the habitability of planets outside the solar system.
In the case of unexplained aerial sightings, that means – absent some extraordinary evidence – that the notion of alien spaceships simply does not hold water. There are so many questions. Among them: Wouldn't we detect communication signals or some other sign of advanced beings before they traveled the vast distances needed to get here? And how would such a spacecraft even work?
Proxima b, a planet Engle has studied, is considered one of the nearest where conditions might be right for liquid water to exist on the surface. Yet it is 25 trillion miles away, a distance that would take decades to travel with known technology. There is no reason to think some other life form has cracked the code of interplanetary travel.
"So they have the type of technology to visit us and are doing so in secret, but they accidentally slip up every once in a while and get spotted and then turn away?" Engle said. "Versus humans are imperfect and our eyes are imperfect and our optical processing is imperfect."
No surprise: he goes for door No. 2.
Still, that has not stopped scientists from looking.
The modern quest for signs of extraterrestrial life is said to have been launched about 1950, when Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi posed a provocative question to some colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
"Where is everybody?" he asked.
Others at the table immediately understood what he meant. Given the sheer size of the Milky Way and the billions of years that have elapsed since its formation, surely there must be someone else out there. Why are we so special?
A decade later, astronomer Frank Drake expanded Fermi's observation into something called the Drake equation, which seeks to calculate the probability that other advanced civilizations exist in the galaxy. Among the variables it includes are the rate at which stars are formed, the estimated fraction of those stars that have orbiting planets, and the still-smaller fraction with conditions that might harbor an ecosystem.
It is a thought experiment, tantalizing but fraught with lots of uncertainty.
Davatzes focuses on a more concrete problem: the conditions that gave rise to life on Earth.
In her office at Temple, she has a 3.5 billion-year-old hunk of rock called a stromatolite – a rusty-red specimen from western Australia that contains fossils of some of the earliest known forms of life on Earth.
The rock is interspersed with wavy layers of pinkish sediment revealing the activity of long-ago microbial "mats" – communities of microbes. The rock was formed as layers of sand were deposited on top of the mats. The microbes grew upward through each successive layer, giving them their wavy, "crinkly" appearance, she said.
Conditions on Earth were far different back then. The atmosphere contained little or no oxygen, for one thing, and it would not for a billion years more.
Yet life began. Who's to say it can't happen somewhere else?
WINDHAM, New Hampshire — In 2004, Commander David Fravor, an aviator in the U.S. Navy, saw something in the skies he'd never seen before. He wasn't sure what it was, but he decided to follow it in his F/A-18 Super Hornet, and he became convinced that the object's maneuvering could not be explained by the existing capabilities of modern aircraft.
“It was far beyond the technology that we have,” he told VICE News.
For a long time, Fravor, a skeptic of the notion of extraterrestrial visitors, said nothing. But in 2017, he and his co-pilot went public with their stories in the New York Times. The response was immediate: The UFO community saw their accounts as proof of extraterrestrial life, and Fravor became a sort of messiah.
The newfound notoriety made Fravor deeply uncomfortable.
“I’m not that kind of person," he said. “I underestimated the power of a New York Times article. I’ll never do that again.”
He also vowed to stay out of the spotlight. But last month, Fravor reluctantly agreed to be a featured speaker at the McMenamins UFO Fest, in McMinnville, Oregon, the world's premier extraterrestrial expo.
VICE News was there for Fravor's first public appearance since the article in the Times — and, he swears, his last.
Flying saucers: Why Roswell was just the tip of the iceberg
Flying saucers: Why Roswell was just the tip of the iceberg
By New York Post Video
For decades after a UFO crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, eerily similar flying saucer sightings dominated headlines around the globe. In this episode of “The Basement Office,” Nick Pope, formerly of the UK’s Ministry of Defence, joins us to connect the dots between those sightings and analyze the most credible reports.
Check out the last episode of “The Basement Office” here,and subscribe to our YouTube!
Nick Pope said that there is now enough evidence about UFOs that 'you can't really ignore it'
THE new claims of UFO sighting by US Navy pilots which The National reported last week should be taken seriously, according to the man who headed up the Ministry of Defence’s 1990s project on UFOs.
Nick Pope, speaking in the US at the weekend, said that there is now enough evidence about UFOs that “you can’t really ignore it”.
Speaking on John Catsimatidis’s “The Cats Roundtable” radio show on AM 970 in New York, Pope said: “There has been an increased number of cases where not only has the radar tracked these objects performing extraordinary speeds and manoeuvres but then the pilots have been vectored to intercept them. And they’ve had visual sightings. So when you have visual sightings and the radar evidence together, at that point, you can’t really ignore it.”
Pope said that sightings of unidentified objects are “happening much more often than people realize. The issue is that a few years ago these sorts of things were often ignored. And it was easier for service chiefs to say, ‘Well, maybe there was a problem with the radar system.’ They can’t say that anymore.”
Pope explained that people used to say that these type of sightings were by those who were unfamiliar with next generation aircraft or drones, but “the US Navy in their most recent statement put this beyond debate”.
Pope said that American usage of the phrase, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” was proof that the incidents were being taken seriously “That is the military and intelligence community’s absolute standard term for UFOs,” said Pope.”These stories are now everywhere.
“The British Government is just in the final stage now of an 11-year project to declassify and release lots of documents about UFOs.
“In fact, around 60,000 documents on UFOs have been declassified and released by the British Government in the last few years.”
This is reportedly a US government video taken by the forward-looking infrared system of a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet that encountered an unidentified aircraft off the East Coast in 2015. The fighter jet’s pilots were excited by what they saw.
Credit: To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science/YouTube
As Politico first reported in late April, the US Navy “is drafting new guidelines for pilots and other personnel to report encounters with ‘unidentified aircraft,’ a significant new step in creating a formal process to collect and analyze the unexplained sightings—and destigmatize them.” In a statement to Politico, the Navy cited “a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years.”
A former senior intelligence officer recently told the Washington Post that the newly drafted guidelines for pilots mean the Navy has credible evidence of things “that can fly over our country with impunity, defying the laws of physics, and within moments could deploy a nuclear device at will.”
In addition to “unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft,” the Pentagon refers to such sightings as “unexplained aerial phenomena” or “suspected incursions.” But please don’t call them UFOs. By definition, UFOs are nothing more than unidentified flying objects, but in the popular imagination they have become closely associated with creatures from outer space. As the New York Timesnoted in a report last week, “No one in the Defense Department is saying that the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasize that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents.”
Many UFOs turn out to be identifiable flying objects, atmospheric phenomena, or hoaxes. Sometimes they are secret military projects. The mother of all UFO narratives, the so-called Roswell Incident, is deeply rooted in the nation’s nuclear history.
In 1995, the US Air Force published a 994-page collection of records and information about the July 1947 incident, the alleged crash and recovery of a flying saucer and its alien occupants in a remote part of New Mexico. An Air Force Declassification and Review Team concluded that the Army Air Forces (as the Air Force was known at that time) did indeed recover material near Roswell in 1947. However, this material was debris from a secret experiment launched in the early days of the Cold War.
Called Project Mogul, the experiment was an attempt to detect Soviet nuclear weapon explosions and ballistic missile launches. Maurice Ewing, a researcher at Columbia University and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, had previously discovered an ocean layer that could easily conduct the sound of underwater explosions for thousands of miles, and he hoped to find a similar channel in the upper atmosphere. Launched from New Mexico’s Alamogordo Air Field in June 1947, Mogul was a string of weather balloons more than 600 feet long that carried acoustical sensors and oddly constructed radar-reflecting targets. Ultimately, detecting explosions with seismic sensors and air sampling proved to be more accurate and less expensive than acoustic detection. As the Air Force explained in a 1997 follow-up report, claims that alien “bodies” were recovered near Roswell, which did not begin appearing until the 1970s, were probably references to anthropomorphic test dummies carried aloft by high-altitude balloons used in unrelated scientific research.
At the time of the Roswell Incident, the nation’s only nuclear strike force was based at the Roswell Army Airfield—a closely held secret. That may have contributed to the secrecy surrounding the recovery of Project Mogul debris.
Long after the Cold War ended, some observers continue to report a pattern of suspicious UFO activity near missile silos and other nuclear weapons sites. Perhaps it is not surprising that two subjects that have long raised intense fears—nuclear war and alien invasion—should be linked.
While military sightings of unidentified aircraft are getting more attention of late, UFO sightings by the general public have actually been declining for the past few years, according to the National UFO Reporting Center and the Mutual UFO Network, two online sites that collect and analyze reports. One possible explanation: the military’s increased transparency about reporting and investigating alleged encounters.
Greatest American Military UFO Experiences via The Nimitz Encounters
Greatest American Military UFO Experiences via The Nimitz Encounters
November 2004, 90 miles of the coast of Mexico near San Diego, California, the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was conducting routine training and aerial defense exercises when unexplained events occurred.
No one could have predicted what would soon confront the world’s most advanced naval war ships and fighter jets.
Aerial craft would appear that forever changed all those that encountered them. The answers to the question of “what are they?” remains unanswered by the sailors and the US Gov. After years of cloaked secrecy the true story can finally be told. With multiple witnesses from the ships, their first hand testimony is impossible to deny.
Our film features CGI re-creations as told by the sailors and naval aviators that witnessed them. Aside from the historical fictionalized dialog (no one recorded the radio conversations), the story itself is based on the facts of the case, including official US government docs, witness statements, news reports and official timelines.) See www.thenimitzencounters.com for links to the official documents.
Some military personnel have requested their names be removed or remain anonymous, out of respect for their privacy we have changed names and details to protect their identity. All similarities to persons living or dead is unintentional. The producers have made every attempt to verify details and deny any liability for errors or omissions.
Ministry of Defence releases final ‘X Files’ containing the truth about Britain’s secret UFO investigations
Ministry of Defence releases final ‘X Files’ containing the truth about Britain’s secret UFO investigations
Jasper Hamill
Details of Westminster’s probe into ‘unexplained aerial phenomena’ have been slowly making their way into the public domain over the past 11 years. (Image: Getty)
The Ministry of Defence has quietly released two final ‘X Files’ which detail the secrets of Britain’s quest to understand the phenomenon of UFOs.
Over the past 11 years, the MoD has declassified 60,000 pages exposing the secrets of a government investigation into unexplained sightings over the UK.
In April, the last pair of files were published and made available to the public at the National Archives in Kew, where they must be viewed in person because they have not yet been digitised.
The latest files to be released do not contain a smoking gun which proves the existence of aliens, but they reveal fascinating aspects of investigators’ attempt to understand the phenomenon.
They expose bitter arguments between a division that set the policy on UFOs and the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) resulting in a total breakdown of communications.
The team which set policy on UFOs was shown to be cautious and worried about what the public might think of a probe into unexplained aircraft spotted in the skies, whilst the DIS was more open-minded and called for further investigation into the mystery.
Nick Pope, a former MoD UFO investigator, has been studying the files and said they also demonstrate the UK’s influence on the US, where ‘bombshell revelations about the US Navy’s encounters with UFOs have moved this subject out of the fringe and into the mainstream’.
He told Metro: ‘These last two files are particularly fascinating and I can understand why sensitivities over their contents may have delayed their release.
‘They show how a sceptic versus believer debate was raging at the MoD, with a total breakdown in relations between the division that set the policy on UFOs and the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS), who provided the lead division with scientific and technical intelligence.
‘This all happened a few years after I left, but the documents show the policy division – where I worked – being sceptical and overly-concerned about what the media and the public might think, while the DIS were more open-minded and wanted to conduct more in-depth research and investigation into the phenomenon.’
Nick Pope is a former defence insider who headed up the Ministry of Defence’s UFO investigation department
(Provider: David Howard/ Flickr)
A screenshot from a US Navy pilot’s video of a ‘Tic Tac’ UFO seen in 2004
In America, details of a secret research drive called AATIP are slowly being made public, revealing sightings of advanced aircraft as well as classified investigations into ‘exotic technologies’ including wormholes, antigravity, invisibility cloaking, warp drives and high energy laser weapons.
Investigators even explored the health ‘consequences’ of close encounters.
In the US, UFOs are now refered to as unexplained aerial phenomena (UAPs), a phrase the MoD coined in the 1990s.
Pope added: ‘The recent release of the final British government UFO files couldn’t have come at a better time. Interest in UFOs is at an all-time high.
‘If people look at the MoD UFO files and the recent US revelations, one can easily see the UK influence.
‘The most obvious sign of this is the fact that the US military now use the term ‘UAP’ in place of ‘UFO’. We changed the terminology back in the Nineties, because ‘UFO’ was too loaded a term, with too much pop culture baggage.
‘Using ‘UAP’ enabled us to escape from the science fiction connotations of ‘UFO’ and reframe the internal MoD debate about the phenomenon in terms of the defence and national security issue most of us believed it to be.
‘This is exactly what the US military is doing now, and the US Navy in particular is trying to de-stigmatize the issue so that Navy pilots who encounter these mystery objects will make an official report, instead of staying silent, as most do at present.’
Here’s some good news on the UFO front. Despite their alleged technical superiority and potential military might, the Chinese are worse than the US when it comes to identifying unidentified flying objects. In fact, their UFOs seem to be less advanced that ours too. U-S-A! U-F-O! U-A-P! U-S-A!
“It is reported that the UFO occurrence time is about 4:28 in the morning on the 2nd, and the areas where the UFO can be visually observed include Shandong Province, Shanxi Province, Henan Province, Hebei Province and other provinces.”
According to multiple Chinese news sources, UFOs were seen in various locations over a large swath of China on the morning of June 2, 2019. Many of them repeated the observation that “Some netizens said that this is not the first time to witness similar UFOs,” and the Global Times in a late report observed that “the objects remain a mystery” and “No official explanation has been given as of press time.” However, it and other sites speculated that the UFOs might be related to naval operations in the Bohai Sea and Bohai Straits on the coast of Northeastern China.
“Some military experts combined with the navigation warning issued by the Liaoning Maritime Safety Administration on June 1st that this may be a new type of submarine-launched missile launched by the submarine-launched ballistic missile range in the Bohai Bay.”
Ha! Those Chinese ‘netizens’ can’t even tell the difference between a missile and an alien spaceship or top-secret military test vehicle. The photos accompanying the articles (see them here and here and here) would have caused laughter and derision if they’d been released in the U.S. as UFO sightings – remember those nighttime secret rocket launches off the California coast last year? In order to defy identity, a UFO has to look strange (like a Tic-Tac) and make maneuvers that no known aircraft can make (like those UFOs dogging our own navy ships that even The New York Times can’t identify). Now THOSE are UFOs.
A glowing UFO spotted in the sky on Sunday morning across multiple provinces of China. Photo: screenshot of Sina Weibo
On the other hand, those with knowledge of the Chinese military suggest these “UFOs” might be Julang 3 submarine-launched ballistic missiles. If that’s the case, there’s some non-UFO cause for alarm.
“According to the current widely said, Julang 3 has a range of more than 12,000 kilometers. It is a land-based Dongfeng-41 transformation, which can be deployed on the coast of China and can cover the whole world. The analysis pointed out that Julang 3 will be carried on the 096 strategic nuclear submarine and become an important part of China’s Trinity’s second strike nuclear force.”
The identifiable Julang 3 (Giant Wave 3) is China’s best ICBM and this test may prove it’s now being launched by submarines.
These are not the Tic Tacs you are looking for.
On the other other hand, there’s speculation that those Tic-Tac UFOs seen over US naval operations are actually top top secret US next-next-generation aircraft, which means our maybe-not-UFOs are still better than their probably-not-UFOs.
Perhaps the announcement of the “Space Force” really is just a farcical diversion to trick others into the delusion than we’re really lagging in technology. Perhaps those Tic-Tacs and triangles are going to be our response to those missile-shaped UFOs.
Do you want to believe in UFOs or in U.S. dominance in space.
Linda Moulton Howe: MO41, the Incredible UFO Case Before Roswell
Linda Moulton Howe: MO41, the Incredible UFO Case Before Roswell
COAST TO COAST AM. Earthfiles investigative reporter Linda Moulton Howe presented a report on the new book, “MO41, The Bombshell Before Roswell,” interviewing its author Paul Blake Smith, a longtime Missouri resident who decided to dig deeply into the 1941 crash of a UFO near Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
The incident began on the night of April 12, 1941, when local resident, Pastor William G. Huffman, was called by police authorities to travel immediately to a crash site to give ministerial rites to three passengers, two dead and one still alive, Smith recounted.
According to Huffman, when he was escorted to the site, he saw a crashed metal spaceship, and nearby were three identical Grey aliens, “almost as if they were released from a cookie cutter.” The recovered aliens were “incinerated from within” as though they could not breathe our atmosphere, Rev. Huffman recalled.
U.S. Navy pilots and sailorswon't be considered crazy for reporting unidentified flying objects, under new rules meant to encourage them to keep track of what they see. Yet just a few years ago, the Pentagon reportedly shut down another official program that investigated UFO sightings. What has changed? Is the U.S. military finally coming around to the idea that alien spacecraft are visiting our planet?
The answer to that question is almost certainly no. Humans' misinterpretation of observations of natural phenomena are as old as time and include examples such as manatees being seen as mermaids and driftwood in a Scottish loch being interpreted as a monster. A more recent and relevant example is the strange luminescent structure in the sky caused by a SpaceX rocket launch. In these types of cases, incorrect interpretations occur because people have incomplete information or misunderstand what they're seeing.
Based on my prior experience as a science advisor to the Air Force, I believe that the Pentagon wants to avoid this type of confusion, so it needs to better understand flying objects that it can't now identify. During a military mission, whether in peace or in war, if a pilot or soldier can't identify an object, they have a serious problem: How should they react, without knowing if it is neutral, friendly or threatening? Fortunately, the military can use advanced technologies to try to identify strange things in the sky.
Taking the 'U' out of 'UFO'
"Situational awareness" is the military term for having complete understanding of the environment in which you are operating. A UFO represents a gap in situational awareness. At the moment, when a Navy pilot sees something strange during flight, just about the only thing he or she can do is ask other pilots and air traffic control what they saw in that place at that time. Globally, the number of UFO reportings in a year has peaked at more than 8,000. It's not known how many the military experiences.
UFOs represent an opportunity for the military to improve its identification processes. At least some of that work could be done in the future by automated systems, and potentially in real time as an incident unfolds. Military vehicles – Humvees, battleships, airplanes and satellites alike – are covered in sensors. It's not just passive devices like radio receivers, video cameras and infrared imagers, but active systems like radar, sonar and lidar. In addition, a military vehicle is rarely alone – vehicles travel in convoys, sail in fleets and fly in formations. Above them all are satellites watching from overhead.
Military vehicles bristle with antennas, cameras and sensors of all kinds. Credit: U.S. Army
Drawing a complete picture
Sensors can provide a wealth of information on UFOs including range, speed, heading, shape, size and temperature. With so many sensors and so much data, though, it is a challenge to merge the information into something useful. However, the military is stepping up its work on autonomy and artificial intelligence. One possible use of these new technologies could be to combine them to analyze all the many signals as they come in from sensors, separating any observations that it can't identify. In those cases, the system could even assign sensors on nearby vehicles or orbiting satellites to collect additional information in real time. Then it could assemble an even more complete picture.
For the moment, though, people will need to weigh in on what all the data reveal. That's because a key challenge for any successful use of artificial intelligence is building trust or confidence in the system. For example, in a famous experiment by Google scientists, an advanced image recognition algorithm based on artificial intelligence was fooled into wrongly identifying a photo of a panda as a gibbon simply by distorting a small number of the original pixels.
So, until humans understand UFOs better, we won't be able to teach computers about them. In my view, the Navy's new approach to reporting UFO encounters is a good first step. This may eventually lead to a comprehensive, fully integrated approach for object identification involving the fusion of data from many sensors through the application of artificial intelligence and autonomy. Only then will there be fewer and fewer UFOs in the sky – because they won't be unidentified anymore.
You know a UFO has earned its "unidentified" status when cockpit transcripts from elite Navy fighter jets include this frantic pilot exclamation: "Holy s___, what is that?"
When Luis Elizondo ran a small team at the U.S. Department of Defense investigating military-based reports of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), he heard numerous such accounts—by some of the most highly trained aeronautic experts in the military. They describe objects that appeared to be intelligently controlled, possessing aerodynamic capabilities that far surpass any currently known aircraft technology.
Now pursuing his investigations as part of To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences, Elizondo is an integral part of the investigative team featured on HISTORY's “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation," where they have continued to gather eyewitness accounts:
"It's white. It has no wings. It has no rotors."
"It didn't fly like an aircraft. It was so unpredictable—high g, rapid velocity, rapid acceleration."
"I didn't see a trail."
"It was going 70-plus knots underwater."
Those reports—from Navy fighter pilots, radar operators and other witnesses from the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group incident from November 2004—were among a handful of shocking encounters the Unidentified team explored. When Elizondo ran the Defense Department initiative, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP, he compiled a list of extraordinary, logic-defying capabilities most commonly associated with unidentified aerial phenomena sightings. He calls those traits the “five observables”:
Unlikeanyknown aircraft, theseobjects have been sighted overcoming the earth’s gravity with no visible means ofpropulsion. They also lack any flight surfaces, such as wings. In the Nimitz incident, witnesses describe the crafts as tubular, shaped like a Tic Tac candy.
2) Sudden and instantaneous acceleration.
The objects may accelerate or change direction so quickly that no human pilot could survive the g-forces—they would be crushed. In the Nimitz incident, radar operators say they tracked one of the UFOs as it dropped from the sky at more than 30 times the speed of sound. Black Aces squadron commander David Fravor, the Nimitz-based fighter pilot who was sent to intercept one of the objects, likened its rapid side-to-side movements, later captured on infrared video, to that of a ping-pong ball. Radar operators on the USS Princeton, part of the Nimitz carrier group, tracked the object accelerating from a standing position to traveling 60 miles in a minute—an astounding 3,600 miles an hour. According to manufacturer Boeing, the F/A 18 Super Hornet fighter jet typically currently reaches a maximum speed of Mach 1.6, or about 1,200 miles an hour.
If an aircraft travels faster than the speed of sound, it typically leaves "signatures," like vapor trails and sonic booms. Many UFO accounts note the lack of such evidence.
4) Low observability, or cloaking.
Even when objects are observed, getting a clear and detailed view of them—either through pilot sightings, radar or other means—remains difficult. Witnesses generally only see the glow or haze around them.
5) Trans-medium travel.
Some UAPhave been seenmoving easily in and between different environments, such as space, the earth’s atmosphere and even water. In the Nimitz incident, witnesses described a UFO hovering over a churning "disturbance" just under the ocean's otherwise calm surface, leading to speculation that another craft had entered the water. USS Princeton radar operator Gary Vorhees later confirmed from a Navy sonar operator in the area that day that a craft was moving faster than 70 knots, roughly two times the speed of nuclear subs.
No one has yet gotten close to crafts that display these traits, so their origins are still unknown. Are they a super-top-secret U.S. defense project? Do they hail from Russia? China? Or from even further afield? The only thing we do know is that their capabilities exceed any technologies currently in the U.S. arsenal.
FORMER MILITARY INTELLIGENCE OFFICIAL: ‘LOW PROBABILITY’ UFO TECHNOLOGY IS OF THIS WORLD
FORMER MILITARY INTELLIGENCE OFFICIAL: ‘LOW PROBABILITY’ UFO TECHNOLOGY IS OF THIS WORLD
Scott Morefield | Reporter
Fox News host Tucker Carlson discussed the military’s “different approach” to UFO sightingswith former military intelligence official Luis Elizondo on Friday’s edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
WATCH:
Tucker began the segment by describing the U.S. government’s new way of dealing with sightings. Whereas they once “dismissed” them as “crank stuff,” they are now “finally admitting that UFO sightings are in fact routine and the government is now being systematic in investigating the question of UFOs.”
After playing footage of a new History Channel documentary on the subject, the Fox News host introduced Elizondo, a “former military intelligence official and special agent in charge.”
When asked about why the government lied for so many years, Elizondo listed several reasons, including lack of technology and the “taboo” surrounding the subject.
Elizondo described “five observables” that differentiate UFO technology from known technology: Instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic velocities, low observability, transmedium travel, and positive lift or anti-gravity.
“There have been enough sightings over a long enough period that the idea this is a computer glitch, that these are generated somehow by radar systems, that can’t be right, correct?” asked Tucker.
“Tucker, we are well beyond right now establishing whether or not these things exist,” responded Elizondo. “It is an absolute fact that they are there. Now, what they are, where they are from, who is behind the wheel, we simply don’t know. Is it possible these things are a foreign adversarial technology that somehow was developed in secret and we are just now trying to figure these things out? It’s possible. But, there are also other possibilities as well, of what these things could be.”
When pressed to assign a likelihood that the UFOs were foreign technology, Elizondo said, “I think it’s a low probability.”
Very low probability. Look, we have the most sophisticated weapon systems right now on the face of the planet, and we can identify not only a 737 or a MIG 25 or F-22, we can tell you even what airline it is and the difference between the models of aircraft within that type of aircraft. So, I think it’s highly unlikely that a foreign adversary was successful in developing something like this.
“Let me ask you one last question,” said the Fox News host. “Do you believe, based on your decade of serving in the U.S. government on this question, that the U.S. government has in its possession any material from one of these aircrafts?”
“I do. Yes,” he responded.
“Do you think the U.S. government has debris from a UFO in its possession right now?” asked Carlson.
“Unfortunately, Tucker, I really have to be careful of my NDA,” said Elizondo, cautiously. “I really can’t go into a lot more detail than that … But simply put, yes.”
The U.S defense establishment, Pentagon, has admitted that it has been studying the existence of UFOs and other generalized UAP or unidentified aerial phenomena for long.
Revealing this, a Defense spokesman told New York Post that the study covering aliens was held under a secret initiative called AATIP—an abbreviation for the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
“We did pursue research and investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena,” spokesman Christopher Sherwood added.
The disclosure was hailed by Nick Pope, who had investigated UFOs for the British government. He dubbed the DOD’s comments a “bombshell revelation.”
Pope is a former UK defense official. He said the revelation has erased the ambiguity that AATIP was only dealing with aviation threats from aircraft, missiles, and drones.
Sightings of alien spacecraft
Although DOD has said it scrapped the AATIP in 2012, spokesman Sherwood said probes still go on with regard to any claims over “sightings of alien spacecraft.”
“The Department of Defense is always concerned about maintaining positive identification of all aircraft in our operating environment, as well as identifying any foreign capability that may be a threat to the homeland,” Sherwood said.
John Greenewald Jr. Who runs a website The Black Vault and archives declassified government documents on UFO reports urged Pentagon to release more information about the UFO study.
The involvement of AATIP in UFO investigation was first revealed in 2017 when a 33-second DOD video showed an airborne object being pursued by two Navy jets off the coast of San Diego.
A surge in aerial intrusions
Pentagon’s revelation of UFO investigation follows reports of asurge in sightings of unidentified flyingobjects. This prompted the U.S Navy to launch formal guidelines to allow pilots to document such encounters and escalate them to higher authorities.
Many former officials hailed the step and said Navy guidelines for reporting UFOs were long overdue.
Luis Elizondo, a former intelligence officer said new Navy guidelines have helped in removing the stigma from discussing UFOs and called it “the single greatest decision the Navy made in decades.”
According to Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, aerial intrusions have become too regular since 2014. The latest instance was an unidentified aircraft trying to enter military-designated airspace many times in a month.
Gradisher said it would “investigate each and every report” to determine who is doing it, and what their intent is.”
Two airline pilots traveling over Arizona claim they were passed by unidentified flying objects while flying at over 30,000 feet in the air, March 27, 2018. Above is a representational image.
Photo: PhotoVision/Pixabay
Chris Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence said the intelligence community was short in “curiosity and courage” in reacting to the patterns of sightings.
He said pilots who have claimed seeing small spherical objects flying in formation were astonished by these curious objects moving with no air intake, no wind, or exhaust. He called them “mysterious and exceeding our aircraft in speed’ and a radical technology as well.
UFOs seen visiting HUGE volcano which is an ALIEN BASE - shock claim
UFOs seen visiting HUGE volcano which is an ALIEN BASE - shock claim
UFO watchers have been alerted to a pair of ‘alien probes’ spotted flying over one of the largest volcanos in Mexico and conspiracy theorists are convinced it is being used as an alien base.
Eagle eyed viewers spotted two objects hovering near Popocatepetl, near Mexico City, and some are even claiming they were dropping off ‘passengers’. The objects appear to be bright lights, one much larger than each other, and seem to be dancing around one another. As a result, alien enthusiasts believe the two crafts are working in tandem to supply the alleged alien base which is apparently up to six miles beneath the surface.
The footage was uploaded to YouTube channel UFO Mania and quickly went viral with conspiracy theorists offering opinions.
Prominent alien hunter Scott C Waring wrote on ET Database: “The large UFO and the small UFO appear to actual fly into each other on purpose, as if they both were dropping off passengers and cargo with one another.
“Why? Because its been long believed by researchers like me that there is an alien base about 4-6 miles below the surface of this volcano.”
Other people have other ideas, saying aliens could be monitoring the volcano, colloquially known as El Popo, for activity.
UFOs seen visiting HUGE volcano which is an ALIEN BASE - shock claim
(Image: GETTY • YOUTUBE)
One person commented on the original YouTube video: “The volcano starts activity/erupting and a ufo turns up. Could it be a probe sent to gather current data or is it a device sent to heighten or decrease the activity. Are we being helped or hindered?”
However, others have a more logical explanation, believing the ‘alien spaceship’ could be very much of a terrestrial nature.
One commenter wrote: “Could be a chopper investigating inside of the volcano, and or news crews?”
Do aliens live on Earth?
(Image: GETTY)
At 5,426 metres tall Popocatepetl, which is 70 kilometres away from the capital Mexico City, is the second largest volcano in North America, but experts say that it does not pose a huge threat to locals due to its usually dormant nature.
In 2017, Popocatepetl erupted for the first time since 2000 when ash was propelled a staggering three kilometres into the sky. Since then, there have been several eruptions.
UFO Investigations: Revealing Documents from HISTORY's 'Unidentified'
UFO Investigations: Revealing Documents from HISTORY's 'Unidentified'
Check back each week during the run of the show for new, behind-the-scenes documents from the Department of Defense and more
From Episode 1:
Resignation letter of Luis Elizondo
Why did Luis Elizondo, director of the Pentagon's hush-hush program investigation UAPs, or unidentified aerial phenomena, step down from his post? "It was because of my allegiance to the Department of Defense and the American people," Elizondo told HISTORY. For the full letter, read below:
From Episode 1:
Tic Tac UFO Executive Summary
This Executive Summary of the 2004 USS Nimitz “Tic Tac” event was obtained by investigative journalist George Knapp, from KLAS-TV Las Vegas. According to Knapp, the 2009 report was created for the U.S. military and includes statements from seven Navy pilots as well as radar operators. The summary notes the advanced sensors used to detect the Tic-Tac shaped craft, the exact location of Commander David Fravor’s intercept and the Tic Tac’s extraordinary capabilities. CLICK HERE TO SEE THE REDACTED 13-PAGE REPORT.
Check back next week for more insider documents from "Unidentified."
During the May 26th, 2019 edition of Coast to Coast AM, George Knapp and Luis Elizondo spoke of a Pentagon UFO hotspot map in episode two of To the Stars Academy‘s new breakthrough television series Unidentified.
George Knapp: “Gary Vorhis…I hope I’m not giving too much away, but he’s in an episode. He was a radar guy. I dont know… Im trying to remember what ship he was on, maybe he was on the Princeton too, backing up the same story. He comes close to talking about something that was underwater. That he had contact with a submarine and somebody on the sub about a sonar ping. I tried to pin down Dave Fravor about this as well, about what object was seen in the water cause there was something really big. If he hadn’t seen this really big thing that was under the water, sort of creating white caps, he may not have not seen the Tic Tac at all cause it was so small. Can you address that at all? Was there something under the water, or are you going to dodge me like Dave Fravor did?
Luis Elizondo: You know what? As I’ve said before in a few…the few times I’ve spoken publicly, there seems to be some interesting correlations, and in my resignation to the Secretary of Defense, one of them was potentially our nuclear capabilities, and I won’t go into detail about that but certainly you can imagine why that would be important. But there also seems to be some very interesting…some congruences as it relates to water. Now does that mean large bodies of water, small bodies of water, running bodies of water? You know of course there is still a lot of unknowns. But there is reporting out there, alot of reporting in fact, that for some reason UAP activity is associated many many times near or above water.
George Knapp: “Um, I guess that’s all I’m going to get out of you. Let me try it this way…So this is kind of a hint from episode two, if you can talk about it. There is a UFO map. It is created by and for the Pentagon. It will be shown for the first time, highlights…I guess you could call it UFO/UAP hotspots…anything you can say about it?”
Luis Elizondo: “Um, I can say that it’s an authentic map, that is correct, and there were areas designated where UAP activity had been observed.”
AATIP’s use of hotspot maps is interesting. The majority of researchers subscribe to the idea that hotspots exist, but UFO hotspots have been a debated topic. Dr. Eric Davis and possibly the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) organization didn’t seem to agree with the notion after studying it, saying that you could throw a dart on a map randomly and find a hotspot. However, and possibly before coming to that conclusion, they investigated Skinwalker Ranch among other hotspot areas.
Martin Willis: “And you know, the thing that I’ve always thought as I’ve looked at this subject over the years, is that it is so strange that there is reoccurring what they call ‘flaps’ or whatever. You know, it just makes you wonder why they’re in one area. You know, it’s a big world to explore.”
Anthony Lappé: “And that is one of the topics that we actually get into. That’s a really good point. That is one of the questions that we ask because we clearly are seeing that there are some sort of what they call ‘hotspots’ for these incidents that are happening in certain parts of the world. And even as, I believe you see in episode one (two), AATIP even created a map in 2009 that we reveal that shows some of…just a very small smattering of plot points on a global map where the military had reporting seeing incidents. So that is one of the enduring mysteries of this whole thing which is fascinating and we delve into that question. Again, probably raising more questions than we have answers, but we definitely are…this show I hope will push the needle forward in this conversation…”
Now the History Channel and Unidentified have seemed to release a version of the map:
Is this just a generalized promotional graphic or does this represent the actual Pentagon map displaying AATIP’s findings?
Detractors of TTSA’s efforts and critics of the show have speculated wildly, claimed and even hoped that Unidentified would not include any new information, thus being written off quickly and forgotten – proving their disparaging comments right and returning the UFO research community to the doldrums of previous decades where the flow of information was much slower, and sometimes nonexistent. A place where they apparently feel comfortable and thrive in. But we do not.
I expect there will be serious information bombs dropped (including the map) in the show, or surrounding it, that will change the UFO “conversation” as Luis Elizondo has stated. If the recent Navy reporting guideline changes, the Pentagon admitting AATIP studied UFOs, and the blockbuster NY Times article (elements of which have appeared in Silva Record over the past days and months – before the NY Times – thanks to public comments from TTSA, Lue Elizondo, Chris Mellon, George Knapp, Dave Fravor, Jeremy Corbell, Dr. Eric Davis and Dave Beaty) aren’t enough to do so, then maybe unverified but seemingly solid rumors of partnerships between TTSA and Lockheed Martin/Boeing coming to fruition will. Highly plausible partnership scenarios aside, Unidentified will have already released new information immediately proving the detractors wrong in episode two, namely the Pentagon/AATIP UFO hotspot map. Episode two is also slated to discuss trans-medium travel, or the ability to travel through space, air and water almost equally. An ability no known man-made technology possesses. Less than two years ago we would have never imagined the pentagon releasing gun camera footage of UFOs/UAP. Since then, the Navy has admitted multiple sightings and interactions with UFOs around each coast of the United States and the middle east. Apparently in episode two we will also be able to confirm the government’s ufo program, AATIP, tracked these occurrences in many more locations than previously known. An admittance of a government UAP hotspot map by ex-government employees is shocking and yet another piece we can fit into the greater confirmation/disclosure puzzle.
Is this the map featured in episode two or just a promotional version? We will have to wait until June 7th to find out.
Is the truth really out there? It's an age-old question, with reports of UFOs going back decades. We looked back at actual UFO and alien investigations by the U.S. and other countries. Check it out!
1. Projects Sign and Grudge – 1948-1951
Shutterstock
Many accounts of UFOs in the United States describe something called the Roswell incident. Local accounts of a "flying saucer" landing near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 led to many alien conspiracy theories, but the U.S. Air Force denied an E.T. connection. In the 1990s, the Air Force said the object was actually a balloon that was searching for Soviet Union nuclear test signals under Project Mogul.
However, the incident did prompt official U.S. investigations into unidentified flying objects in the next few years. A report published for the U.S. Air Force's Project Sign (1948-1949) stated that the things people saw were "real" but that at least "some of the incidents may be caused by natural phenomena" and others may be related to domestic or foreign aircraft. The Air Force's Project Grudge, which issued a report in 1949 prior to its shutdown in 1951, continued the investigation but found no conclusive evidence of UFOs.
2. Project Blue Book – 1952-1969
U.S. Air Force
Project Blue Book was yet another program from the U.S. Air Force, following up on Projects Sign and Grudge. The program conducted a series of studies between 1952 and 1969 to figure out if UFOs could hurt national security and to search for UFO data. More than 10,000 of those case files are freely available on the Internet Archive.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, investigators ultimately collected more than 12,000 sightings and classified them as either "identified" (meaning the events could be explained by astronomical, atmospheric or human phenomena) or "unidentified." That category made up about 6 percent of the total number of reported cases.
3. The Condon Committee – 1966-1968
Dutton
The Condon Committee, more formally known as the University of Colorado UFO Project, was a group funded by the Air Force that looked at UFOs under leadership from physicist Edward Condon. The group re-examined the information from Project Blue Book and published its efforts in the "Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects" (also known as the Condon Report) in 1968.
According to How Stuff Works, the Condon Report found that about one-third of the cases couldn't be explained, even though the introduction stated that "further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified on the expectation that science will be advanced thereby."
Some reports say that the ultimate purpose of the report was to stop U.S. investigations into UFOs. Whether or not that was true, Blue Book ceased operations in 1969, the year after the Condon Report was released.
4. Project Ozma – 1960
Chris Dorst/AP
Project Ozma stands out because it was the first time humans tried to look for radio signals from outside of the solar system. (It was named after the imaginary land of Oz in the 1900 book "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and the 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz.") Funding came from the National Science Foundation.
According to the SETI Institute, for this project, radio astronomer Frank Drake chose to examine the stars Tau Ceti in the constellation Cetus (the Whale) and Epsilon Eridani in the constellation Eridanus (the River). These stars were monitored at the 21-centimeter (8.3 inches) emission line for 6 hours a day, from April to July 1960. No signal was found, except for "an early false alarm caused by a secret military experiment," the SETI Institute stated.
5. NASA's SETI – 1970s-1993
Shutterstock
SETI is a term for a group of researchers who participate in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. NASA conducted SETI searches using the Arecibo and Goldstone antennas starting in the 1970s. The program was canceled in 1993, shortly after observations officially started. (NASA renamed the program the High Resolution Microwave Survey program late in its existence, which some say was done to mask that it was actually a SETI program.)
However, SETI searches still exist informally at universities around the world. The SETI Institute in California was founded in 1984 and uses private funding. In 2007, the Allen Telescope Array, which is devoted to observations from the SETI Institute, opened with the help of funding from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It continues observations to this day.
6. NASA Astrobiology Institute – 1998-present
NASA
While astrobiology doesn't focus on UFOs, it does examine under what circumstances life, from microbial to intelligent, could arise. The NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) seeks to encourage researchers to collaborate across disciplines to answer a range of questions: Is life possible on icy moons? What kind of microbes could survive the extreme conditions of Mars? What is the habitable zone of a star?
NAI is only one of six branches of NASA's astrobiology program. The rest are called the Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program, Planetary Science and Technology Through Analog Research, the Planetary Instrument Concepts for the Advancement of Solar System Observations (PICASSO), the Maturation of Instruments for Solar System Exploration (MatISSE), and the Habitable Worlds Program.
7. Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program - 2007-2012
Shutterstock
In December 2017, the U.S. government's research into UFOs received global attention when reports emerged of a secret Department of Defense program(called the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, or AATIP) that ran from at least 2007 to 2012. The program tracked reports of UFOs, including descriptions of some strange aerial activities that two Navy pilots said they saw in 2004. Luis Elizondo, the former head of the program, told several media outlets that we may not be alone.
AATIP is only the most recent example in decades of work by the U.S. government looking into the unexplained.
If that's not enough to satisfy your UFO appetite, you can look at unclassified documents from the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Other government agencies reportedly have files as well, such as the Defense Intelligence Agency.
For international efforts, Emma Best (who publishes regularly on the government-transparency website MuckRock) has requested thousands of pages of U.S. government documents under the Freedom of Information Act. Her website alone — which claims it has the largest collection of UFO-related documents in the world — lists files from governments from all over the world, including Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, New Zealand, Panama and Spain. (Other governments that were listed, but with no uploaded files on this site, included Ecuador, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and Uruguay.)
Academic Says UFOs Exist, But That Doesn't Mean 'Aliens' Do
( Ava-Leigh/iStock)
Academic Says UFOs Exist, But That Doesn't Mean 'Aliens' Do
DANIEL W. DREZNER, THE WASHINGTON POST
The term "UFO" automatically triggers derision in most quarters of polite society.
One of Christopher Buckley's better satires, "Little Green Men", is premised on a George F. Will-type pundit thinking that he has been abducted by aliens, with amusing results. UFOs have historically been associated with crackpot ideas like Big Foot or conspiracy theories involving crop circles.
The obvious reason for this is that the term "UFO" is usually assumed to be a synonym for "extraterrestrial life." If you think about it, this is odd. UFO literally stands for "unidentified flying object."
A UFO is not necessarily an alien from another planet. It is simply a flying object that cannot be explained away through conventional means. Because UFOs are usually brought up only to crack jokes, however, they have been dismissed for decades.
One of the gutsiest working paper presentations I have witnessed was Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall presenting a draft version of "Sovereignty and the UFO."
In that paper, eventually published in the journal Political Theory, Wendt and Duvall argued that state sovereignty as we understand it is anthropocentric, or "constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone."
They argued that the real reason UFOs have been dismissed is because of the existential challenge that they pose for a worldview in which human beings are the most technologically advanced life-forms:
UFOs have never been systematically investigated by science or the state, because it is assumed to be known that none are extraterrestrial. Yet in fact this is not known, which makes the UFO taboo puzzling given the ET possibility.... The puzzle is explained by the functional imperatives of anthropocentric sovereignty, which cannot decide a UFO exception to anthropocentrism while preserving the ability to make such a decision. The UFO can be "known" only by not asking what it is.
When Wendt and Duvall made this argument, there were a lot of titters in the audience. I chuckled, too. Nonetheless, their paper makes a persuasive case that UFOs certainly exist, even if they are not necessarily ETs.
For them, the key is that no official authority takes seriously the idea that UFOs can be extraterrestrials. As they note, "considerable work goes into ignoring UFOs, constituting them as objects only of ridicule and scorn."
In recent years, however, there has been a subtle shift that poses some interesting questions for their argument.
For one thing, discussion of actual UFOs has been the topic of some serious mainstream media coverage.
There was the December 2017 New York Times story by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean about the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which was tasked with cataloguing UFOs recorded by military pilots. DoD officials confirmed its existence.
Though this story generated some justified skepticism, it represented the first time the US government acknowledged the existence of such a program.
Oumuamua's shape and trajectory were unusual enough for some genuine astrophysicists to publish a paper suggesting the possibility that it was an artificial construction relying on a solar sail.
Again, this prompted skeptical reactions, but even those skeptics could not completely rule out the possibility that extraterrestrial activity was involved.
The 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.
"These things would be out there all day," said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. "Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we'd expect."....
No one in the Defense Department is saying that the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasize that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents. Lieutenant Graves and four other Navy pilots, who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in 2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of their provenance.
The Times reporters broke new ground by getting pilots on record. What is interesting about this latest news cycle, however, is that DoD officials are not behaving as Wendt and Duvall would predict.
Indeed, Politico's Bryan Bender reported last month that, "The US Navy is drafting new guidelines for pilots and other personnel to report encounters with 'unidentified aircraft,' a significant new step in creating a formal process to collect and analyze the unexplained sightings - and destigmatize them."
My Post colleague Deanna Paul followed up by reporting that "Luis Elizondo, a former senior intelligence officer, told The Post that the new Navy guidelines formalized the reporting process, facilitating data-driven analysis while removing the stigma from talking about UFOs, calling it 'the single greatest decision the Navy has made in decades.'"
What appears to be happening is that official organs of the state are now acknowledging that UFOs exist, even if they are not literally using the term. They are doing so because enough pilots are reporting UFOs and near-air collisions so as to warrant better record-keeping.
They are not saying that these UFOs are extraterrestrials, but they are trying to destigmatize the reporting of a UFO.
Still, the very fact that this step has been taken somewhat weakens the Wendt and Duvall thesis. This was always a two-step process: (a) Acknowledge that UFOs exist; and (b) Consider that the UFOs might be ETs.
In recent years, the US national security bureaucracy has met the first criterion. What happens to our understanding of the universe if great powers meet that second one?
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
Opinions expressed in this article don't necessarily reflect the views of ScienceAlert editorial staff.
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...
Druk op onderstaande knop om je bestand , jouw artikel naar mij te verzenden. INDIEN HET DE MOEITE WAARD IS, PLAATS IK HET OP DE BLOG ONDER DIVERSEN MET JOUW NAAM...
Druk op onderstaande knop om een berichtje achter te laten in mijn gastenboek
Alvast bedankt voor al jouw bezoekjes en jouw reacties. Nog een prettige dag verder!!!
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 75 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.
.jpg)
