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.
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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.
27-12-2023
Journalist Said 2023 Alaska Object Was ‘Anomalous’; It Looked Like A Giant Tic-Tac
Journalist Said 2023 Alaska Object Was ‘Anomalous’; It Looked Like A Giant Tic-Tac
The series of events involving the US military shooting down multiple Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) in February 2023 has been staggering, particularly concerning the incident with an object detected over Alaska. When this object was intercepted above Alaska, the administration of the US president promptly ordered its takedown without hesitation.
So, on February 10, 2023, a U.S. F-22 fighter jet successfully brought down the object, which was flying at an altitude of approximately 40,000 feet over Alaska. “We don’t know who owns this object,” said the White House spokesperson John Kirby, adding that it was unclear where its flight originated. The object fell inside the United States Territorial Waters. Mr. Kirby explained that those waters were frozen but still within American territory, implying that the recovery of the debris would be much easier.
U.S. Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, indicated that it was the size of a small car. According to him, the pilots who had been observing the object before it was shot down confirmed that there was no human presence on board. He further remarked that it lacked the ability to change direction and did not resemble any conventional aircraft. “It wasn’t an aircraft per se,” Ryder informed the media.
Interestingly, the pilots involved in the sighting gave inconsistent reports. Some stated that the object interfered with their plane’s sensors, while others did not experience this. Some also claimed that they could not discern any recognizable source of propulsion on the object and were unable to explain how it was able to remain afloat while cruising at an altitude of 40,000 feet.
Alaska Object was “Anomalous”
On August 12, 2023, investigative journalist Ross Coulthart shared his thoughts at the Victorian State Library as part of an event called “Close Encounters Australia.” He talked for around two hours, including an hour-long Q&A session where he told the audience some interesting things he had learned about the Alaska shootdowns. (Source)
Coulthart wanted to be clear about something. He was not completely sure about the things he talked about. He thinks they are true, but he was not completely confident. He said: “I’m happy to be proved wrong, but it would be very very interesting to see an explanation from the White House.” What he found interesting is that some of the people he talked to, who know about defense and secrets, said that something weird happened in Alaska.
“Can you update us on the sphere and the US shootdowns from February?” This question was asked by someone in the audience, to which Coulthart replied, “On the balloons, we’re talking here about the balloons here in February, the February shoot downs. Now, to give you some official response to this, I think a very senior defense official was just recently quoted in the newspapers as saying there’s nothing alien or extraterrestrial about these shootdowns, about the objects that were shot down.”
He continued, “And I thought that was a very interesting comment because… the information I have is that two of the objects were indeed prosaic, they were just mundane objects. Probably weather balloons. But there is an abundance now of sources, including a guy who… heh… literally lives at the end of the road in Alaska where this object was encountered by an F-22 jet.”
Coulthart talked about one of the things that got shot down in Alaska. He said it was not like the other two things; it was different, or “anomalous.” He mentioned he could be wrong, but this is what he had heard. According to what he learned, the Alaska object looked like a big “tic-tac.” When the F-22 hit the objectwith missile, something fell off, but it kept going despite being hit.
“There was definitely a missile fired at an object which was described as… looking a little bit like a giant tic-tac, funnily enough. That something was seen to fall off that object. That even though it was hit with an AIM missile, which is a top of the line air-to-air missile, that the object kept on going. And uh… I’ve put this to different people in defense and intelligence, and I’ve been told yes… the Alaska object was anomalous. And um, anytime I try to get a response from anybody on an official basis they run 100 miles an hour,” Coulthart said.
He spoke to other individuals who were knowledgeable about military matters and secrets. They confirmed that the Alaska incident was strange indeed. He wanted to learn more from those in charge of defense, but they were unwilling to discuss it. When he asked them, they declined to provide an answer.
Coulthart explained, “But you might notice, that nobody has given a report back to the American public or the world about what it was that the U.S., for the first time in the history of NORAD, they shot down something over North America. That’s a historic event. And yet we haven’t been told, neither has America, the full story of what those shoot downs involved.”
Some people find Coulthart’s statement convincing because if the Alaska object was indeed anomalous, that would explain why the Department of Defense (DOD) responded to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information about the object by referring the request to Advanced Aerial Research Organization (AARO).
Below is a response from the Department of Defense about a FOIA request submitted on February 11, 2023, asking for several data presumably collected during the Alaska object shot-down on February 10, 2023.
“This responds to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request # [ ] requesting “all available visual data (photographs in visual and Infra-Red spectrum, films in visible and Infra-Red spectrum, drawing and all related visual information) and tracking data (radar data, sonar data, timer data) that were presumably gathered about the object that was shot down at 1:45PM EST on 2/10/2022 over Alaska.”
We are providing a no records response in subject to your request. After a lengthy and exhaustive search through multiple offices on Elmendorf Air Force Base it has been determined that this request should be sent to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) which falls under the Defense Intelligence Agency. You can send a request to their office through the contact below.”
It’s intriguing to mention that there seem to be “no records” at Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska about this case. This is puzzling because the base should have been involved in the mission to recover whatever was related to this case.
Even more fascinating, the request for information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is being sent to the “All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which is a part of the Defense Intelligence Agency.” This is happening even though officials described the objects in question as “likely mundane.” (Click to read the DIA resposne)
On September 4, 1971, members of the Instituto Geográfico Nacional (National Geographic Institute) took photographs above Lake Cote for the Costa Rican governmental company that provides electricity and telecommunication services. The photographs were taken for the construction of a hydroelectric dam near lake Arenal, when the mapping agency members accidentally captured a UFO in their high-resolution camera that was mounted on the plane, pointing downwards. The photograph is considered to be the clearest and best UFO photograph ever taken.
Sergio Loaiza, Juan Bravo and Francisco Reyes were flying in a Canadian-made Areo-Commander model F680 piloted by Omar Arias, and Loaiza was in charge of aerial photography that day. They were flying above Costa Rica with a 100-pound map-making camera when Loaiza captured a photograph of a metallic disc like a typical alien “flying saucer” that can be seen flying between the F680 aircraft and the ground.
They were flying at 10,000 feet, mapping the landscape beneath with the high-resolution camera that was programmed to take photos every 20 seconds. While reviewing the negatives, Loaiza could not believe his eyes. He even said that they were completely banned from talking about it. According to UFO researcher Oscar Sierra, the photographs were analyzed in the USA and France and found to be 100% real. (Source)
The object can only be seen in the photograph in frame number #300 in the sequence, and there is no indication of it in either the frame of film that came before it or the one that was taken immediately after it. Due to the film stock and the quality of the camera, the image was incredibly clear. This object was not in either the frame before it (#299) or the frame after it (#301).
UFO photograph Taken in Costa Rica on September 1971
During the actual flight, the captain and his three crew members did not witness anything, and neither did the other passengers. It is estimated that the UFO was anywhere between 120 and 220 feet across, but the actual width would have depended on the object’s exact altitude.
New York Times writer and author Leslie Kean revealed that she has a framed copy of the photo taken at Lake Cote in the May 10, 2021 issue of The New Yorker by Gideon Lewis-Kraus. The article states, “…On the wall behind her desk, there is a framed black-and-white image that looks like a sonogram of a Frisbee. The photograph was given to her, along with chain-of-custody documentation, by contacts in the Costa Rican government; in her estimation, it is the finest image of a U.F.O. ever made public.”
On the New Yorker Radio Hour, she said: “I love this photo. It’s probably the best photograph of a UFO ever taken. It was taken in the 70s from a government mapping plane in Costa Rica which had a camera strapped on the bottom of the plane and it was like going over the terrain. There was this disc object and you clearly see the sun reflecting off this round object that’s got a little dot on the top and what’s important about it is that it was a government photo. There’s a clear chain of custody. It’s always been in possession of the Costa Rican government so you know it’s authentic and it’s completely unexplained.” (Source)
In 1985, computer scientist and astronomer Dr. Jacques Vallee obtained a copy of the negative and circulated it to his contacts in the United States government and at a California tech company. However, none of them helped Dr. Vallee in analyzing the negative.
Eventually, in December 1987, Vallee took it to Dr. Richard Haines in San Francisco. Haines was a retired aerospace engineer who had worked for NASA, and Vallee knew him. The photo was scanned, blown up, and looked at. Haines’ first focus was on the lighting. In 1989, Vallee and Haines wrote a “Photo Analysis of an Aerial Disc Over Costa Rica” for the Journal of Scientific Exploration. The 19-page report concluded: (Source)
“In summary, our analyses have suggested that an unidentified, opaque, aerial object was captured on film at a maximum distance of 10,000 feet. There are no visible means of lift or propulsion and no surface markings other than dark regions that appear to be nonrandom… There is no indication that the image is the product of a double exposure or a deliberate fabrication.”
There has always been speculation as to whether the craft had just emerged from or was about to enter Lake Cote. There are numerous local stories concerning UFOs emerging from the water. But it is impossible to understand the path of the craft because it only appeared in one frame #300. The original negative has been kept by the Costa Rican government, and it may be found in the country’s National Archive. There are copies available, such as the one that Vallee and Haines analyzed.
Loaiza’s UFO photograph has never been explained, despite the fact that UFO skeptics have thoroughly examined it. UAP Media, a UK-based UFO research company has got a brand fresh ultra-high resolution drum scan of the original photograph.
Comparison of old and new crops of the Lake Cote image (old on left, new on right). via UAP Media UK
Graeme Rendall – Author of UFOs Before Roswell and Flying Saucer Fever: “It’s a really intriguing photograph, and one which totally captures the imagination. I’m always impressed as to how “right” it looks. As to its veracity, though, I can’t say, but I’d love it to be true. It definitely looks a lot more convincing than a lot of other images I’ve seen over the years. I’d have to leave it to the photo analysis experts to pronounce sentence on it though.”
Vinnie Adams – member of UAP Media: “After looking into the case, reading about the circumstances surrounding what was seen from that aeroplane that day, and reading the analysis done previously by Dr. Jacques Vallée, it does come across as a very compelling case. The fact that after 50 years it still hasn’t been conclusively proven or debunked is very interesting. Now that we have this high-resolution drum scanned version of the image, hopefully it might reignite interest in the case and lead to further analysis and some sort of conclusion.”
Luis Elizondo – Former director of AATIP: “Although I was not around during this incident, pilot reports of smooth, shiny, lenticular craft are not new. In fact, even to this day, pilots, both civilian and military, along with their aircrew, continue to witness these types of craft and oftentimes displaying performance capabilities well beyond state of the art. Thankfully, some of these newer incidents are finding their way to Congress due to the courage of our fine men and women in uniform. During my time in AATIP, these incidents were surprisingly common.”
Jeremy Corbell – Filmmaker:“As we search for meaning behind the UFO presence, it’s important that we remember we are more effective collectively when perusing analysis. Historic images like this one from Costa Rica still have stories to tell, and new insights are sometimes just around the corner. If we can socially democratize and crowdsource our search for answers – we will arrive closer to the truth than if we simply wait for further confirmation from our governments. I’m elated higher fidelity imagery continues to emerge, especially when it allows us to get a glimpse into our UFO past. Makes one wonder what other UFO evidence is lurking in boxes or files that have remained elusive until now. I’m confident that more and more people will be coming forward with valuable insight and evidence in the near future.”
There’s nothing like a little trouble at home to make you look for greener pastures. And green or not, aliens were everywhere in 2023. Well, at least in the news.
From Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP, the classy new way to talk about UFOs) to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and all the way to tiny molecules clinging to frozen dust grains in interstellar space, the eyes of experts and the public were looking for life elsewhere.
The biggest alien stories — at least the most popular — came from military releases of data, hinting at cover-ups (or just ill-prepared government officials). But the most important — at least by our reckoning — were those that were steeped in science, offering hints of what life might look like outside of our planet, and where to find it. If you really do want to turn over that rock, that is.
Here, ranked from 11 to 1 by their chances of introducing us to real alien life, are the top alien and UAP events of 2023 that remind us the truth really is out there.
11. NASA RELEASED A GRIPPING REPORT ON UAPS
A resolved UAP sighting. The dot in the middle, and two dots that appeared to move in tandem with the central dot are airplanes waiting to land.
AARO/NASA TV
In September, ASA released its much-anticipated report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, and the agency says some of the sightings — between 16 and 40 out of roughly 800 — just can’t be explained — but Inverse spoke to experts, and it turns out the problem might just be that we don't have enough information. Most UAP reports come from sensors designed to guide weapons to objects, not gather detailed data about them, so it’s easy for fairly mundane objects to look bizarre when viewed through these sensors — or so says NASA.
Meanwhile, Inverse argues that the agency still needs a dedicated UAP office to take the investigation mainstream.
10. ... AND SO DID THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE.
The Department of Defense also published its own UAP report in January 2023, admitting that it has investigated more than 500 cases of possible UAP. Of those, more than a quarter were (of course) weather balloons; to be fair to DoD, weather stations in the U.S. alone launch 240 balloons every day. But according to a Pentagon spokesperson, “Some of these uncharacterized UAP appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis.”
But don’t worry; experts tell Inverse that the military probably couldn’t pull off an alien cover-up. Swarms of commercial satellites, along with ubiquitous smartphones and social media — not to mention political pressure — would make it almost impossible to keep the cat in the bag for long.
“I still strongly maintain that alien visitation is not something that could be kept secret. The size of such a secret is just too big,” wrote SETI researcher Seth Shostak in a July 2023 essay for the SETI Institute.
9. THE MYSTERIES OF OUMUAMUA WERE UNVEILED.
This artist’s illustration shows Oumuamua venting gas as the Sun heats it, although no such venting was actually visible to astronomers.
ESA
Speaking of UAP, a chunk of interstellar debris called ‘Oumuamua caused a stir when it passed through our Solar system a few years ago — and an even bigger uproar when it seemed to accelerate under its own power, without leaving a tail like a comet. This year, a study suggested a possible explanation. Spoiler alert: It’s definitely not aliens.
8. WE CRAFTED A DECENT IDEA OF WHAT ALIEN SPACECRAFT COULD LOOK LIKE
A space station wheel orbiting planet Earth. The space station wheel is a habitat that a human crew can live for extended periods of time.
One team of SETI researchers did some math and suggested that if an alien probe ever does visit our Solar System, it’s likely to be a zippy high-tech model, not an alien version of the Voyager probes.
7. ... AND ALSO WHAT CELESTIAL SIGNS MIGHT POINT US TO ALIEN CIVILIZATIONS.
An illustration of a futuristic sci-fi city on a ring planet.
EDUARD MUZHEVSKYI / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/GETTY IMAGES
SETI researchers also proposed some ways we might be able to spot high-tech alien civilizations from a distance — and some really wild ways the aliens might make themselves known to the rest of the universe, such as rearranging an entire star system into a cosmic “Kilroy Was Here” sign.
Other telltale signs to look for around distant stars include giant megastructures, built to siphon off mass and prolong the life of a dying star or the gleam of starlight on sprawling alien cities. But it may be easier to just look for pollution in a distant world’s atmosphere.
6. WE RULED OUT A WHOLE LOT OF HABITABLE PLANETS FOR INTELLIGENT LIFE
Humans wouldn’t be able to search for extraterrestrial intelligence today if our ancestors hadn’t learned to harness fire around a million years ago.
ANADOLU AGENCY/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES
None of that advanced alien technology is likely to happen in a world without a lot of oxygen in its atmosphere, though. One study this year pointed out that unless about sixteen percent of the atmosphere is made of oxygen, you can’t start a fire. And without fire, you can’t work metals, cook food, or signal to distant alien civilizations.
5. ... AND LEARNED ALIENS PROBABLY WON’T THINK TOO FONDLY OF OUR INTELLIGENCE.
UFOs flying over winter landscape. 3D generated image.
GREMLIN/E+/GETTY IMAGES
If intelligent, technologically advanced aliens are out there, they may not recognize us as intelligent. That could be good news because it means they may not see us as a threat — and they may even think we need protection, according to one 2023 study.If the first aliens we contact are vastly more advanced than we are — or just very different — they may not realize we're sentient. That means they probably won't see us as a threat to galactic peace, which needs to be eliminated posthaste. But the jury's out on whether these hypothetical aliens might turn Earth into a nature preserve or treat us with callous indifference.
4. ALIEN LIFE, INTELLIGENT OR NOT, IS PROBABLY QUITE COMMON
An artist’s depiction of the star PDS 70 and its inner disk. The haze represents the water vapor. In the top right of the image appears an exoplanet.
A few decades ago, we thought the chemicals involved in building cells and making them work might be rare in the universe, but now it looks like many of those ingredients could be part of the standard starter pack for new star systems. And that means life may — eventually — turn out to be more common than we ever dared to hope.
3. ... AND K2-18B IS A GREAT PLACE TO LOOK FOR IT.
This artist’s illustration shows what K2-18b might look like, with its dim red star in the background.
NASA, ESA, CSA, JOSEPH OLMSTED (STSCI)
One team of astronomers says they’ve found an ocean world orbiting a distant star, called K2-18b — and its atmosphere may contain evidence of life somewhere in that alien ocean. Even the researchers who studied the planet with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) aren’t convinced, though. It’s going to take more data to settle the debate, but the possibility is intriguing.
2. TRAPPIST-1 OFFERS EXPERTS HOPE AND FRUSTRATION.
The star and six of the planets as they would appear from the vantage point of the fifth outermost planet, Trappist-1f. All of the planets and the Sun are to scale. One of the worlds is seen transiting in front of the star.
MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/GETTY IMAGES
Another swirl of debate, also fueled by JWST observations, is centered on the TRAPPIST-1 system. Home to at least seven rocky planets, three of which are in the habitable zone, TRAPPIST-1 is a hotspot for hopeful astrobiologists.
Earlier this year, JWST revealed that the system’s innermost two worlds — TRAPPIST-1b and TRAPPIST-1c — look like airless rocks, although it’s possible they just have really thin atmospheres. Neither of those planets is in the habitable zone, but many astronomers took the news as a discouraging sign that the star TRAPPIST-1 might have swept away the atmospheres of all its closest planets, including the potentially habitable ones. But others say it’s too soon to give up hope.
1. BUT DO WE NEED TO LOOK THAT FAR? ALIEN LIFE MIGHT BE RIGHT HERE IN OUR BACKYARD.
The Juno spacecraft’s Junocam instrument captured this detailed photo of Jupiter’s icy moon Ganymede during a June 2021 flyby.
NASA
Closer to home, several studies this year show that Jupiter’s icy moons look extremely promising for alien life, or at least habitability, in a part of our Solar System that we used to consider totally uninhabitable.
NASA’s JUNO spacecraft spotted salt and organic molecules splattered across the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, and JWST revealed frozen carbon dioxide on the surface of Europa. Both moons are hiding vast, dark oceans beneath their thick, icy exteriors, and finding those chemicals on the surface suggests two important things: one, material from the ocean can reach the surface, where it might be easier for us to study. And two, those ice-covered alien oceans seem to have chemistry that could support life as we know it.
Professor Garry Nolan is one of the most reputable experts examining the enigma of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs). He has been studying UAP materials for many months and has made numerous astonishing statements about UFOs. His contributions lend credibility to this particular mystery, which many mainstream scientists hesitate to discuss.
Dr. Nolan works at Stanford University as a professor of Immunology. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize, which is a big honor. He is known as one of the best immunologists in the world. He has many patents and has written a lot of research papers. He has also started two companies listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange because of his successful inventions.
In June 2022, Australian investigative journalist Ross Coulthart interviewed Dr. Nolan and learned from him shocking UAP information that the U.S. government had been investigating for the past few years. Dr. Nolan said that one thing he is sure about is that we do not know what UAPs are: “We do know that there is something here something that I think defies explanation but that something can be studied from a scientific Viewpoint.”
Although this interview was recorded in 2022, Dr. Nolan adheres to David Grusch’s statement that the U.S. government has been lying about UAPs for the last 60-70 years. He believes the reason behind this is that the U.S. government itself does not know what they are dealing with. “Absolutely, there is a cover-up,” says Dr. Nolan. “I mean, there has been both a cover-up and a disinformation campaign to make people appear as if they were crazy.”
Coutlhart questions the potential dangers of admitting one’s thoughts on these mysterious events, to which Dr. Nolan responds, “I think it’s dangerously necessary… ignoring the physics of what these things are capable of doing.” Coutlhart further asks, “Let’s talk about ‘It.’ What is it?”
Dr. Nolan replies, “You know, I wish I knew… Whatever it is appears to be so far advanced from us that it beggars understanding.” When pressed further by Coutlhart if he believes the phenomenon to be of human origin, Dr. Nolan decisively states, “I’m sure it’s not human..I think it’s whatever it is it’s been here a long time so and certainly it’s been here longer than we’ve been civilized so at the very least who really owns the planet who was here first uh I’m not sure it was.”
Dr. Nolan explained he studied the brains of pilots who claimed to have encountered the phenomena. After their UAP/ UFO encounters, they all got damaged or hurt such as buzz noises in their head, got sick, etc. Most of them have had similar kinds of bad things. He showed the MRIs of some people that revealed damage in the middle of the basal ganglia – an area responsible for motor control and other core brain functions, including intuition.
Dr. Nolan said the damage should have killed those people, yet they were alive. He obtained MRIs of some prior to their encounters and they had the damage, so they were most likely born with it. “These are all so-called high-functioning people. They’re pilots who are making split-second decisions, intelligence officers in the field, etc,” he said.
Alleged UFO material
Former Pentagon UFO official Lue Elizondo shared a truly eye-opening statement in his interview with James Iandoli of Engaging The Phenomenon on June 11, 2021. They discussed crash retrievals and materials related to unidentified flying objects (UFOs) or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs). Elizondo acknowledged the sensitivity of the topic and the potential consequences of discussing it openly.
However, Elizondo expressed his belief that the US government does possess exotic materials but could not provide further details due to the lack of transparency from the government. He mentioned the three layers of analysis that can be conducted on a piece of material, namely physical, chemical, and atomic or nano-level research.
Coulthart asked the Stanford professor about this research on a peculiar material known as Bismuth magnesium. Dr. Nolan described it as a layered substance consisting primarily of bismuth, with traces of lead and magnesium. Despite his assessment of its isotope ratios showing nothing out of the ordinary, he expressed his intent to study a significantly larger sample in the future. This expanded sample size would allow him to conduct more comprehensive tests, potentially shedding light on its properties.
Terahertz Transmistter
Coulthart speculated on the material’s ability to levitate when exposed to a specific waveform. While Nolan acknowledged hearing about such claims, he had not personally witnessed or tested the phenomenon. When pressed by Coulthart about whether he had attempted any experiments, Nolan clarified that the required waveform for levitation would be “Terahertz Waves,” which he had not utilized.
Coulthart highlighted that the U.S. Army possessed the necessary terahertz transmitter for potential experiments with the Bismuth magnesium material. However, Dr. Nolan remained tight-lipped about the specifics, stating he could not discuss whether such research had been conducted.
Coulthart mentioned that Tom Delonge’s To the Stars Academy (TTSA) worked with the U.S. Army to study this material using the right equipment. Coulthart wondered why the U.S. government keeps such materials if stories about flying objects are just made up. Nolan thinks there is a lot of false information out there but believes there might be real materials that we should know about. He wants the government to tell us clearly if those special materials are real or not.
In 2019, Tom DeLonge claimed that his UFO research organization had acquired “potentially exotic materials featuring properties not from any known existing military or commercial application.” “The structure and composition of these materials are not from any known existing military or commercial application,” Steve Justice, TTSA’s COO and former head of Advanced Systems at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works said in a statement. (Source)
According to the press release, some of these materials were in the possession of investigative journalist and UFO researcher Linda Moulton Howe, who, in 2004, gave a presentation at the Xcon Conference regarding these materials. In her lecture, a video of which has been on the Internet for years, she suggests that the material could become a “lifting body” with the right amount of electromagnetic static and certain RF frequency. These are undoubtedly the same materials mentioned byTom DeLonge on his Joe Rogan interviewwhere he stated, “if you hit it with enough terahertz, it’ll float.”
In this video, Dr. David Chester, a scientist from Quantum Gravity Research, makes several references to pulsed terahertz waves. Towards the end, he mentions that pulsed terahertz waves in a metamaterial can slow down the speed of light. He further explains that this is beneficial for anti-gravity engineering. According to him, due to the way everything couples together in the equations, a reduced speed of light requires less energy to achieve the desired anti gravitic effects.
This is some really interesting information on terahertz, thanks to Observing The Anomaly.
AAWSAP commissioned 37 scientific papers that are now public. Someone FOIA’d about UAP materials being studied and DIA responded with 5 of these papers. One paper was on spintronics and another on metamaterials. TTSA bought an alleged sample of Roswell crash material and gave it to the Army to study in 2019. According to Puthoff it appeared to be a metamaterial that acts as a waveguide at the terahertz frequency. The two papers on spintronics and metamaterials also touches on creating materials that operate at this frequency and specifically that such materials would be radiation resistant and ideal for long space travel.
Hal Puthoff also discusses the sample with UFO Joe. Notice the bolded statement below. (Source)
So the answer is, we don’t, yet, really know where it came from. And it’s true that ten years ago Linda Howe provided us with a sample. And we did a lot of tests. Got electron microscope pictures and irradiated it with various gigahertz frequencies, megahertz frequencies and so on. We couldn’t make anything out of it. So it kind of went on the shelf. And it was only after this paper on meta-materials was published, we said, “Oh my gosh. The claim here, that this could have some real utility as microscopic waveguides, would actually fit the structure, you know, that we see there.” Okay, well where do we go with that?
Well, the truth of the matter is, that piece is actually pretty mangled and what you’d really like to do is say, “Okay, well let’s have a nice, clean piece of this, and let’s irradiate with terahertz frequencies, first of all, to see if it really does act as a microscopic waveguide for terahertz frequencies. And then, if that works, we’ll iradiate it with other kinds of fields and see if there are any unexpected responses and so on.” So it is still, despite the fact it gets unbelievable publicity out there, it’s still an absolutely unknown. It does range all the way from…this was a fraud of junk material sent to us, to…no, this came off the wedge of an ET craft.
We don’t know the answer to that, and the only way we are going to get something of value is to determine its properties or maybe reproduce it under nice conditions and determine its properties. So, it is still a giant question mark out there. So even though it’s, you know, it’s like…a few percent of our effort at TTSA, it’s like 99% of our criticisms (laughs). That’s just what you get in this field. That’s the way it goes. Some of us have developed very hard skins. Another question?
Puthoff elaborates further in another interview: (Source)
Well, years later, decades later actually, finally our own science moves along. We move into an area called metamaterials, and it turns out exactly this combination of materials at exactly those dimensions turn out to be an excellent microscopic waveguide for very high frequency electromagnetic radiation terahertz frequencies. So, the wavelength is 60 microns, which is a pretty small size. But it turns out because of the metamaterial aspect of this material, those bismuth layers that act as waveguides can be one twentieth the size of the wavelength, and usually when you make a waveguide it’s gotta be about the size of the wavelength. So, in fact this turned out to be a material that would propagate sub-wavelength waveguide effects. Why somebody wants to do that we still don’t know the answer to that.
Dr. Nolan is said to have a good friendship with Jacques Vallée, Kit Green, Eric Davis, and Colm Kelleher. They all came to him to analyze the UAP materials after he had developed some wonderful instruments using mass spectrometry.
“Some of the objects are nondescript, and just lumps of metal. Mostly, there’s nothing unusual about them except that everywhere you look in the metal, the composition is different, which is odd. It’s what we call inhomogeneous. That’s a fancy way of saying ‘incompletely mixed.’ The common thing about all the materials that I’ve looked at so far, and there’s about a dozen, is that almost none of them are uniform. They’re all these hodgepodge mixtures. Each individual case will be composed of a similar set of elements, but they will be inhomogeneous,” he explained.
Dr. Nolan found out that some of the fragments from the so-called UFO crash in Brazil have extraordinarily altered isotope ratios of magnesium. He explained:
“It was interesting because another piece from the same event was analyzed in the same instrument at the same time. This is an extraordinarily sensitive instrument called a nanoSIMS – Secondary Ion Mass Spec. It had perfectly correct isotope ratios for what you would expect for magnesium found anywhere on Earth. Meanwhile, the other one was just way off. Like 30 percent off the ratios. The problem is there’s no good reason humans have for altering the isotope ratios of a simple metal like magnesium. There’s no different properties of the different isotopes, that anybody, at least in any of the literature that is public of the hundreds of thousands of papers published, that says this is why you would do that. Now you can do it. It’s a little expensive to do, but you’d have no reason for doing it.”
Dr. Vallée collected purported metal from the UFO cases dated back to 1947 and brought them to Stanford University for analysis. Dr. Gary Nolan, a Stanford microbiologist analyzed the 3-D atomic structure of the unknown metal with a state-of-the-art Multiparameter Ion Beam Imager (MIBI) capable of discerning the precise composition of matter at the level of its isotopes.
The result might be shocking for non-believers, as when he put the sample in the vacuum chamber of the machine, he found out that their composition was unlike any other known metal on Earth.
“If you’re talking about an advanced material from an advanced civilization you’re talking about something that I’ll just call it an ultra material right it’s something which has properties where somebody is putting it together again at the atomic scale so we’re building our world with 80 elements somebody else is building the world with 253 different isotopes,” Dr. Nolan said.
Could humans be altering the isotopes in these strange objects for unknown purposes? Dr. Nolan speculates that it is possible, but proving it requires getting down to the atomic level, possibly with a super quantum interference device (SQUID). However, neither his budget nor the budgets of the groups analyzing UFO/UAP encounters have that kind of funding yet.
A MYSTERIOUS triangular craft zipped across the sky over a military base and, as astonished Ministry of Defence police looked on, aimed a search light at the ground below.
The incredible sighting above Cosford RAF Base in Shropshire on March 31, 1993, was one of hundreds reported across the UK by members of the public, police officers and military personnel over a two day period.
A UFO sighting over Cosford RAF Base in Shropshire in 1993 was one of hundreds reported over a two day period
Credit: facebook/Royal Air Force Cosford
Nick Pope is former head of the MoD's UFO research programme
Credit: Chris Loomis / National Geographic
Thirty years on the Cosford Incident, as it came to be known, remains unexplained.
For Nick Pope, then head of the MoD’s UFO research programme, it proved an intriguing mystery.
He tells The Sun there was a “spooky postscript” that linked the sightings to similar events in Belgium.
“There was a wave of sightings over a period of about six hours on March 30th and 31st, 1993, involving a vast triangular shaped craft that was capable of moving from very slow speeds of 30-40mph to high Mach speeds in an instant,” he recalls.
“At that acceleration, the G forces would kill a human pilot, and yet there was no sonic boom reported.
“Some of the witnesses heard an unpleasant, low frequency humming sound that they could feel as well as hear.
“One witness saw it fire a narrow beam of light down at the ground, tracking backwards and forwards as if it was looking for something.
“A small cluster of sightings at 1.10am turned out to be a Russian rocket re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, but that would only result in a high altitude firework display, so there was something else going on.
A huge triangular shaped UFO over Belgium (pictured) bore resemblance to that spotted over Cosford RAF base
“We investigated and drew a complete blank.
“All the time I was doing my investigation, there was something niggling away at the back of my mind that I couldn't put my finger on. I knew I was missing something.
“Weeks later, a light bulb went off and I realised it’s the date. On March 30 and 31, three years earlier, there was a wave of sightings, again of a huge triangular shaped UFO over Belgium.
“The Belgians scrambled two F16 fighters to try and intercept this thing, which the airborne radar locked onto, but the UFO kept breaking the lock. It was playing cat and mouse with them.”
'More than coincidence'
The Chief of Staff of the Belgian Air Force, General Wilfried de Brouwer, personally investigated the UFO and ruled out stealth aircraft from other military powers, including the US.
“The official position of the Belgian government is that these sightings remained unknown,” says Nick.
“The unofficial postscript was ‘thank goodness they were friendly, because if they hadn't been there was nothing we could have done’.”
Nick believes the matching dates are more than coincidental.
“Every now and then the phenomenon of UFOs does that to you,” he says. “It's almost like it’s toying with you.”
The unofficial postscript was ‘thank goodness they were friendly, because if they hadn't been there was nothing we could have done’
Nick Pope, Former Head Of The MoD’s UFO Research Programme
As well as being taken seriously by the UK intelligence departments, Nick believes the sightings would have been among the global incidents that were investigated by the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme (AATIP).
The top secret £17.5million unit, which ran between 2007 and 2012, features in the first episode of National Geographic’s new documentary series UFOs: Investigating The Unknown.
Through the testimony of first hand witnesses, the five part series looks into five decades of US government secrecy around the subject.
It includes the notorious secret desert base Area 51, and the unexplained malfunction of U.S. nuclear missiles after a sighting nearby.
'Tic Tac' incident
US Commander David Fravor reported seeing a 'Tic Tac' shaped UFO off the coast of Southern California in 2004Credit: ABC
A UFO similar to the infamous 'Tic Tac' seen by US Navy pilots, spotted over the UK hovering over Leicestershire in 2021
Credit: Lucy Jane Castle
The opening episode includes intriguing footage of a “Tic Tac” shape spotted by two RAF pilots off the coast of Southern California in 2004.
Lt Commander Alex Dietrich and Commander David Fravor recall seeing a “churning” on the surface of the ocean as an unidentified object hovered over the water and then shot upwards at astonishing speeds.
Commander Fravor describes it as a “long cylindrical white object, with rounded ends, roughly 40 feet long, that looked like a giant Tic Tac. It was pure white. It had no windows, no wings, no visual signs of propulsion”.
He says the object was changing direction rapidly, like a “ping pong ball bouncing off a wall”.
Former US Army Counterintelligence agent Luis Elizondo reveals the ‘Tic Tac’ was travelling at speeds unachievable in the SR71 - the fastest US jet of all time - but was able to change direction in an instant.
“We fly the SR71 at 3,200mph and if you want to turn that takes over half the state of Ohio to do it,” he says.
“But these can turn instantly. And we’re not talking about 3,200mph, they have been recorded at 13,000mph. The question arises, how is that possible?”
Luis Elizondo worked in the AATIP programme until it ended in 2012Credit: Alamy
Elizonda - who worked in the AATIP programme until it ended in 2012 - became increasingly frustrated with the government’s refusal to take sightings seriously.
He eventually resigned from the Department of Defence in 2017, over “excessive secrecy and internal opposition". In his resignation letter, he warned that “ignoring these threats is not in the best interest of the Department”.
Nick, who ran the UK equivalent of the AATIP programme from 1990 to 1994, says the secrecy of governments around the issue stems from “embarrassment”.
“The US government portrays itself as the world's preeminent superpower, so to acknowledge that there are things in their airspace, whatever they are, that are faster and more manoeuvrable and run rings around fast jets doesn't play very well,” he says.
“So there’s the embarrassment factor, and maybe a little bit of fear that either an adversary has made a quantum leap in development, which has left the US in a poor second place, or, as some believe, this really is extra terrestrial, in which case we're not at the top of the food chain anymore."
'Secretive'
He adds that the UK government is "just as secretive".
"Even when the Ministry of Defence had its programme, we consistently downplayed both our involvement and the phenomenon itself," Nick explains.
"We dismissed it as being of little or no defence significance and routinely sent out letters to the public saying, ‘We glance at these reports to see if there's anything of defence interest, but we don't do much else.’
"But behind closed doors, there were highly classified intelligence assessments, trying to figure out if it could be Russia or China or something truly exotic.”
The Pentagon's top secret £17.5m Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme (AATIP) ran between 2007 and 2012Credit: Getty
The existence of the US programme was exposed by Elizondo after he quit, leading to demands for its reinstatement and more transparency from the government.
“It was embarrassing for them because publicly, they said for years that we don't have a programme anymore,” says Nick.
“Since a programme called Project Blue Book closed in 1969, they had denied there was any interest in UFOs or AUPs - unidentified aerial phenomena - as they were renamed.
“Then suddenly, it was revealed that not only did the Pentagon have this shadowy programme called AATIP, but the US Navy had been routinely encountering these things for years and had got some on camera.
“Arguably, the US government was caught in a lie.”
In 2020 the US set up the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) which, earlier this month, reported to Congress that it was reviewing 650 incidents, but that there is no evidence that any of them are of extra-terrestrial origin.
'Game-changer'
A suspected Chinese spy balloon was shot down off the coast of South Carolina in FebruaryCredit: Reuters
Nick believes the shooting down of a Chinese “spy balloon” off the coast of South Carolina earlier this year is a game-changer for the military's approach to UAPs.
“I think it both helps and hinders,” he says.
“Balloon sounds very low tech, but this was carrying immensely sophisticated, insidious signals intelligence equipment which, according to assessments released by the State Department, was attempting to hack into secure US military communication systems.
"But these things are very slow so nobody supposes spy balloons are the same things, for example, as we see in the 2004 Navy videos.
“Some UFOs will turn out to be spy balloons, but that has blurred the lines and may be taking people's eye off the ball.
“But where it's helped, immensely, is for years the military have had this conventional, one-dimensional view of monitoring airspace.
“They have filters on their radars and if it doesn't behave like an aircraft, they're not interested.
"They missed the spy balloon, which was spotted by members of the public, and the government only got involved when it made a local news station.
“As a result of that they changed the filters and they're picking up a lot more, so it's going to be interesting.”
'200 sightings a year in UK'
During his time at the MoD Nick says he dealt with around 200 sightings a year in the UK.
Of those, 80 per cent were easily explained, 15 per cent were lacking the information or evidence to investigate, and only five per cent were “weird, genuinely unexplained”.
“Typically they were sightings from pilots, police officers, military personnel, tracked on radar or where we had good photos or videos that intelligence analysts looked at and couldn't come up with a conventional explanation," he adds.
The UK programme closed in 2009 - but Nick now believes we are lagging behind the US.
“In the US there has been a 180 degree flipping of the narrative from fringe to mainstream,” he says.
“Five years ago this was all crazy conspiracy theories, sci-fi fantasy; now it’s discussed in Congress and NASA's doing a study. So at some level this is out in the open.
Five years ago this was all crazy conspiracy theories, sci-fi fantasy; now it’s discussed in Congress and NASA's doing a study... the UK is still playing catch up. We need to up our game
Nick Pope
“But the UK is still playing catch up. We need to up our game because this is a global phenomenon and whatever we're dealing with doesn't just fly in the US. There are sightings all around the world, and many in the UK.”
While UFOs and extra-terrestrials conjure up images of little green men with domed heads and huge eyes, Nick believes that if a spaceship ever lands, we’d be in for a surprise when we looked inside.
“Almost certainly we would find AI, not an alien,” he says.
“Even if they could work around the apparent barrier of lightspeed, the impact of micro meteors and gamma ray bursts means interstellar travel for biological life forms is very difficult.
“But even here we are on the verge of creating sentient AI, so imagine what a civilization with a million years' head start has probably achieved.
“I think there would be a secure radiation-proof metal box or sphere and deep inside that would be sentient AI.
Even here we are on the verge of creating sentient AI, so imagine what a civilization with a million years' head start has probably achieved
Nick Pope
“They would be coming here, hopefully, as scientists, explorers and anthropologists or even tourists - and not as conquerors.”
Nick remains “undecided” on whether the UFO reports are evidence of extra-terrestrial activity, but believes there is life on other planets.
“We don't yet have a smoking gun but we have a lot of interesting material,” he says.
“I'm 100 per cent convinced there's life out there in the universe, and not just life but other civilizations.
“As to whether we're being visited, I don't know. But I hope so.
"Of all the explanations, it would be the most interesting. And let's face it, the world would be a more fun place with aliens in it than without.”
UFOs: Investigating The Unknown premiers on Tuesday 2nd May at 8pm on National Geographic UK
On September 15, 1950, a remarkable interview took place in Washington, D.C., but it remained classified until the early 1980s, when Canadian UFO researcher Arthur Bray discovered a memo written by Canadian engineer Wilbert B. Smith that discussed an alleged UFO crash rumor confirmed by a former student of Einstein, Dr. Robert Irving Sarbacher.
Dr. Sarbacher (1907-1986) was a preeminent scientist. He went to Harvard and was Dean of the Graduate School, Director of Research at Wedd Laboratories, a successful inventor, and a Scientific Consultant to the U.S. Marines and government agencies. He was also connected to the Joint Research and Development Board (JRDB) of the US Department of Defense. He did a lot of research on rockets that could be controlled from a distance. Later, he would start the Washington Institute of Technology. (Source)
In the 1980s, Dr. Sarbacher confirmed several facts about UFOs and ET to researchers William Steinman, Stan Freidman, Jerry Clark, and William Moore. He said that he had been officially told about the crash of an extraterrestrial craft in the Southwest in the early 1950s. This crash may have been the Roswell UFO crash, or it may have happened at a different time. (Source)
He confirmed to them (as well as to Wilbert Smith three decades before) that the issue was classified as more important than the development of the Atom Bomb. According to him, the debris was both incredibly light and highly durable. He understood that the aliens were lightweight and constructed somewhat like insects. He stated that a limited group of individuals, including Von Braun, Vannevar Bush, Oppenheimer, and Eric Walker, were likely involved in the crash debris analysis. They were unsuccessful in their attempts to reverse-engineer the technology.
Back in 1983, William Steinman, the author of the book “UFO Crash: Aztec, New Mexico, March 1948,” wanted to talk to Sarbacher about UFOs and dead aliens. He tried to get in touch with him and start a conversation. Steinman received a reply from Sarbacher in an amazing way. Sarbacher wrote him the following in a letter: (Source)
“Dear Mr. Steinman: I am sorry I have taken so long in answering your letters. However, I have moved my office and have had to make a number of extended trips. To answer your last question in your letter of October 14, 1983, there is no particular reason I feel I shouldn’t or couldn’t answer any and all of your questions. I am delighted to answer all of them to the best of my ability. You listed some of your questions in your letter of September 12th. I will attempt to answer them as you had listed them.
1. Relating to my own experience regarding recovered flying saucers, I had no association with any of the people involved in the recovery and have no knowledge regarding the dates of the recoveries. If I had I would send it to you.
2. Regarding verification that persons you list were involved, I can say only this: John von Neuman was definitely involved. Dr. Vannevar Bush was definitely involved, and I think Dr. Robert Oppenheimer also.
My association with the Research and Development Board under Doctor Compton during the Eisenhower administration was rather limited. o although I had been invited to participate in several discussions associated with the reported recoveries, I could not personally attend the meetings. I am sure that they would have asked Dr. von Braun, and the others that you listed were probably asked and may or may not have attended. This is all I know for sure.
3. I did receive some official reports when I was in my office at the Pentagon but all of these were left there as at the time we were never supposed to take them out of the office. 4. I do not recall receiving any photographs such as your request so I am not in a position to answer. 5. I have to make the same reply as on No. 4.
I recall the interview with Dr. Brenner of the Canadian Embassy. I think the answers I gave him were the ones you listed. Naturally, I was more familiar with the subject matter under discussion, at that time. Actually, I would have been able to give more specific answers had I attended the meetings concerning the subject. You must understand that I took this assignment as a private contribution. We were called “dollar-a-year men. My first responsibility was the maintenance of my own business activity so that my participation was limited.
About the only thing I remember at this time is that certain materials reported to have come from flying saucer crashes were extremely light and very tough. I am sure our laboratories analyzed them very carefully.
There were reports that instruments or people operating these machines were also of very light weight, sufficient to withstand the tremendous deceleration and acceleration associated with their machinery. I remember in talking with some of the people at the office that I got the impression these “aliens” were constructed like certain insects we have observed on earth, wherein because of the low mass the inertial forces involved in operation of these instruments would be quite low.
I still do not know why the high order of classification has been given and why the denial of the existence of these devices. I am sorry it has taken me so long to reply but I suggest you get in touch with the others who may be directly involved in this program.”
According to UFO researcher Anthony Bragalia, researcher D.M. Duncan located Sarbacher’s son, Robert Sarbacher Jr., living in Texas. Duncan had a revealing dialogue with Sarbacher. It turned out that the younger Sarbacher had once questioned his father about the UFO phenomena. His father spoke sparingly about the saucer subject. (Source)
Sarbacher Jr. said of his father: “He knew that they were real for the obvious reason that they would be going 600 mph and then make a direct 90-degree turn in mid-air without slowing down… separated from all inertia and gravity. Dad said that the reason he was called in was to build the right kind of missile to track these things since they were way too fast for any of our planes to catch. They wanted the missile to not destroy any of the UFOs, but to be able to track them. So Dad had cameras installed (like on the V-2 rockets) so when the UFO comes into our air space we would shoot missiles at them with cameras on them, since only a missile could keep up with the speed turns.”
Stunned at the revelation, Duncan wanted to clarify this, and Sarbacher’s son replied, “Yes, exactly to track UFOs, or rather to photograph and watch them… When he first told me about the missiles… the first thing I thought was, what? You were trying to destroy them? He (Sarbacher Sr.) said very normally and matter of factly, ‘No, we put cameras on the end of them.'”
Sarbacher never changed his story, and he resisted the urge to expound or make assumptions. Everyone who spoke with him was impressed. However, his statement could not be corroborated because all of the people he mentioned had passed away. It was the summer of 1986 when Sarbacher passed away.
But advocates had hoped for even more transparency.
The dome of the United States Capitol lit at night in Washington, DC.
(Image credit: Getty Images/Phil Roeder)
The United States Congress just passed legislation that directs the U.S. government to release records related to UFOs.
Some UFO records, anyway. According to new provisions in the Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, the law that funds the U.S. military and related activities, the U.S. National Archives must collect for release all documents that "pertain to unidentified anomalous phenomena, technologies of unknown origin, and non-human intelligence."
None of those terms is defined in the bill, however. "Unidentified anomalous phenomena," or UAP, is a relatively a newly adopted and broadly defined term that encompasses UFOs in the sky in addition to unidentified objects underwater, in space or that appear to travel between these domains.
The records are to be released once 25 years has passed since their creation, unless the president directs them to remain classified, and newer records can be released sooner if the agency that created them allows it.
The language directing these records is known as the the UAP Disclosure Act, or the Schumer-Rounds Amendment. An earlier version of the amendment contained much stronger language that ordered the Department of Defense (DoD) to declassify records "relating to publicly known sightings" of UFOs without review, but the measure was removed from the legislation that eventually passed.
Despite the mandate in the bill, some UAP transparency advocates say the failure to pass the original amendment as written is a serious disappointment for those who feel the truth is out there and that the U.S. government has a responsibility to reveal it to the public.
"The most important components of the Schumer-Rounds language were dropped — an independent Senate-confirmed review board with subpoena power, professional staff to search out records, and other serious resources," said Douglas Dean Johnson, an independent researcher who writes on various aspects relating to UAP. "What is being enacted instead is a modest mechanism that is far less likely to result in the location, extraction and disclosure of important UAP-related records that may be tightly held or even long forgotten," Johnson told Space.com.
Christopher Mellon, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, called the bipartisan back-and-forth over the NDAA "shockingly dysfunctional."
"Regarding the UAP issue, DoD and the [intelligence community] clearly have a serious trust issue with important members of Congress who are not backing down and likely to escalate," Mellon told Space.com via email. "I've seen this pattern many times. So, although the Executive Branch feels they dodged a bullet on the Schumer language, until they earn Congress' trust, they are going to be fighting a prolonged and likely losing battle."
As word began to trickle out onto social media that the Schumer-Rounds amendment was not going to pass as originally written, many UAP transparency advocates claimed that lobbyists working for for aerospace contractors were working to kill the language in the bill, in order to protect an alleged decades-long cover-up of crashed UFO technologies. "An extremely powerful Defense Aerospace lobby is pushing key politicians in Congress to block the Schumer Amendment to the NDAA," Australian journalist and UFO transparency advocate Ross Coulthart wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter).
However, those familiar with the NDAA amendment and the legislative process that eventually passed it think those claims are merely hearsay.
"I have seen no evidence of any substantial lobbying activity by aerospace firms against the UAPDA over the past 5 months. One cannot completely exclude some such influence, but any sizable campaign would leave tracks. I don't see them, and nobody has produced a single named congressmember who has referred to such activity, nor any document to support the notion," Johnson said.
Instead, resistance appears to have come from the DoD. According to the New York Times, a "person familiar with the talks who insisted on anonymity to describe them noted that the Defense Department also had pushed back forcefully on wider measures" in the bill.
A still from footage shot by an MQ-9 reaper drone showing an unidentified spherical object soaring through the air, shown during an April 2023 hearing of the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services. (Image credit: U.S. Dept. of Defense)
Much of the current movement to pass legislation that could release U.S. government UFO records stems from a broader disclosure movement that has been building momentum in recent years both on social media and in the halls of Congress, thanks to claims made by former U.S. military and intelligence community personnel.
In July 2022, the DoD formed the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, an office established within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security that was tasked with collecting and studying reports of UFOs/UAP near U.S. military installations or "other areas of interest."
In April 2023, the office's director told the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services that AARO had found "no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics."
Even NASA commissioned an independent panel to inform the U.S. government how the agency might help better collect and analyze data related to UAP. "The top takeaway from the study is that there is a lot more to learn," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in September 2023 when the panel released its first public report.
"The NASA independent study team did not find any evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin, but we don't know what these UAP are."
In July 2023, two former U.S. Navy aviators recounted their now-famous encounters with seemingly anomalous objects in military airspace to the House of Representatives' Subcommittee on National Security at the Border and Foreign Affairs.
Another witness at the hearing, David Grusch, a U.S. military combat veteran and Pentagon intelligence officer, told the committee that the U.S. government is in possession of crashed UAP and that "biologics came with some of these recoveries."
In response, some of the members of Congress even formed a UAP caucus in support of efforts to compel the federal government to release what records or information they claim it possesses related to UFOs and the alleged "UAP reverse engineering programs" it operates.
Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN), one of the more vocal members of Congress when it comes to the UAP transparency issue, said that the government has evidence that UFOs can "travel light-years" or at speeds that "defy physics as we know it," even claiming that some UFOs have technology that can "turn us into a charcoal briquette."
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Going back into history affirmed that most of the United States presidents showed interest in extraterrestrial life and unidentified flying objects. From the time of Eisenhower to Mr. Obama, the world came to know about this mysterious phenomenon and the life that can exist beyond Earth. The Washington flap (1952 D.C. UFO incident) magnified the UFO subject over the whole world as it was the first time that UFOs were seen hovering over the city where the president works. Then the case of President Richard Nixon who left evidence of aliens in the White House sparked a huge controversy.
According to the 2015 book “The Presidents And UFOs: A Secret History From FDR To Obama,” virtually all of them wanted to go public with the knowledge of who (or what) is responsible for sightings of unidentified flying objects, but were blocked by intelligence officials. According to the book’s author Larry Holcombe, Nixon was convinced that “a limited level of UFO disclosure” would ensure his place in history. He went to extraordinary lengths to preserve that information for posterity, as more recent reports claim.
Robert Merritt, a federal informant from the Watergate era revealed a letter in which President Richard Nixon confirmed the existence of aliens. The letter was made public by the journalist and researcher Linda Moulton Howe.
Note: Robert Merritt is a confidential informant for the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division. He has also worked for the Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department, the FBI, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Marshals Service, the ATF, the Manhattan District Attorney, and the U.S. Attorney for New York City. He lives in New York City.
Richard Nixon, pictured above in the Oval Office on Feb. 19, 1970. Image credit: National Archives/Getty Images
In this historic Dark Journalist Episode, Merritt stepped forward for the first time ever in public and revealed his three meetings with President Nixon in a deep underground location beneath the White House.
During the first meeting, the president read aloud to Merritt a letter written in his own handwriting, where he revealed that they were protecting an extraterrestrial being. Scientists at Los Alamos eventually learned to communicate with the Being and developed vast knowledge from this interaction which helped them to achieve advanced technology and science. After reading it, Nixon sealed the letter in a time capsule, hiding it somewhere in the White House unknown to himself.
The second meeting was to give Merritt a copy of the letter. His mission was to give it to the National Security Advisor at the time, Henry Kissinger. No one else could know of the existence of the letter. Years later, the co-author of the letter, Douglas Caddy notified the National Archives that the capsule is still in the White House and that he would reveal its location if they assured that it would be released publicly.
Note:Douglas Caddy, LLD, is an attorney, the cofounder of Young Americans for Freedom, and served as the criminal lawyer for the burglars in the Watergate break-in.
Merritt’s influence was so great within the White House that he was a key witness in the Watergate scandal. The Huston Plan referred to was a 43-page report of proposed security operations put together by White House aide Tom Charles Huston in 1970 at the request of President Richard Nixon, who wanted more control over domestic intelligence on so-called left-wing radicals and the anti-war movement.
Caddy’s conditions on the National Archives were simple, they could take possession of Nixon’s time capsule as long as they publicly revealed the content of the letter. As a person interested in history, politics, conspiracy theories, and the existence of extraterrestrial life, Linda Moulton Howe began to follow the events. Howe discovered that the Huston Plan accidentally revealed the existence of the time capsule hidden in the White House and its contents.
This is from a partial transcript of the interview provided by Linda Howe:
MERRITT: He had this letter. He pulled it out, and he read this one piece of paper to me. And then he put that letter in a manila envelope, and he put a gold seal over the top of the middle, and then he put a piece of tape across that, and on the front was handwritten, “To Henry Kissinger.” He asked for it to be hand-delivered or mailed, whichever was best or safest to do.
LISZT: Now, this letter was very important. Can you describe the letter to me?
MERRITT: It was two red lines. They looked like a scientific formula with letters, numbers, and other scientific symbols that would be used, like chemistry symbols. He said, “We possess the knowledge, and we have in our protection,” and he said, “Subjects from Planet X.” I asked him one question, and he didn’t seem to like what I asked him, but I said, “Are these the things in Mexico or Area 51?” He seemed to be offended by the fact that maybe I knew this.
LISZT: Okay, now in this final meeting with Nixon, he’s reading you this letter, he shows you this formula, and he’s now mentioning an alien that they have in protection, and he’s a little annoyed that you mentioned the being was in custody or being held.
MERRITT: Yes. The word he used was “protected,” not “captured,” not “in captivity.” He didn’t use any words that would mean against the will. You know as well as I do that if we had a being like that, yes, it would be in captivity. I don’t think we’d let it walk down the street.
LISZT: You said he mentioned that scientists at Los Alamos had learned to communicate with this being. What did he say about that?
MERRITT: That we had obtained a very vast amount of knowledge, very powerful, to possess this knowledge and was able to learn from it, would be the most powerful nation or government in the entire world and could rule the world.
“Nixon said that Star Trek was antiquated. He laughed and said, ‘Robert, we are so, so far advanced it would take your breath away!’”
- Robert Merritt in a secret 1972 meeting with President Nixon beneath the White House.
The Dark Journalist video lasted 75 minutes but the interesting points are summarized. The real question is: what to make of it? Nixon’s gone and Kissinger never talked about anything like this. Why would Nixon trust Merritt with such a secret and a subject (extraterrestrials) which has nothing to do with anything else in the Watergate scandal nor the Huston Plan, which is still partly classified?
Ufo's in de geschiedenis: waarnemingen, ontvoeringen en mysteries
Ufo's in de geschiedenis: waarnemingen, ontvoeringen en mysteries
De hype rond ufo's is terug van (nooit) weggeweest
Sinds het Pentagon afgelopen mei toegaf dat het sinds 2004 minstens 400 waarnemingen van 'ongeïdentificeerde vliegende objecten' heeft geregistreerd in de Verenigde Staten, is de publieke belangstelling voor dit fenomeen toegenomen.
Een "frequent” fenomeen
Het was 50 jaar geleden dat de ufo-kwestie voor het laatst in het Congres werd besproken. Maar dit jaar was de verrassing nog groter, omdat de adjunct-directeur van de inlichtingendienst van de marine in de VS, Scott Bray, verzekerde dat ufo-waarnemingen "frequent en aanhoudend" zijn.
Ufo-waarnemingen in andere landen
Andere landen zoals Frankrijk (in 2007), of het Verenigd Koninkrijk (in 2011) hebben nationale dossiers over ufo's gedeclassificeerd. Japan kondigde in 2020 zelfs een nieuw actieprotocol aan voor zijn leger in het geval van waarnemingen.
Foto: Albert Antony/Unsplash
Historische waarnemingen
Als we teruggaan in de tijd, zijn er veel momenten rond het ufo-fenomeen die de geschiedenis zijn ingegaan. Laten we eens kijken naar de beroemdste gevallen ...
Kenneth Arnold: de eerste waarneming?
De eerste geregistreerde waarneming van een ufo dateert van 24 juni 1947. De Amerikaanse piloot Kenneth Arnold (in het midden op de foto) aanschouwde wat als de eerste ufo-waarneming kan worden beschouwd. Hoewel er eerdere soortgelijke gevallen werden gemeld, kreeg deze waarneming veel publiciteit en aandacht.
Onregelmatig, helder en snel
Arnold verklaarde dat, terwijl hij op zoek was naar een vermist vliegtuig, hij boven Mount Rainier (Washington) niet minder dan negen objecten met abnormale bewegingen zag die samen in een lijn vlogen. Hij beschreef ze als "extreem heldere objecten", met een "onregelmatige vliegwijze" die zich met "enorme snelheid" verplaatsten.
Vliegende schotels
Het is door deze waarneming dat de mythe van de ovaalvormige ufo is ontstaan en de term 'vliegende schotel' begon te worden gebruikt, aangezien, in zijn eigen woorden, "ze onregelmatig vlogen, als een schotel die in het water werd gegooid".
Een vonk in de wolken
Anderen gaan echter veel verder terug in de tijd. In het Zuid-Amerikaanse Chili werden in de 19e eeuw verschillende vreemde dingen gezien. Zo meldde Maria Graham in haar boek 'Journal of a Residence in Chile' (1822) dat ze een reeks vreemde lichten boven de zee had gezien. Ook zag commandant Buenaventura Martínez Díaz in 1853 dat hij en voorwerp had gezien dat "de wolken doorkruiste in de vorm van een vonk."
Een alien in Talca
En op 15 mei 1861 berichtte de Chileense krant La Esperanza over de dagen van verschrikking die de inwoners van de stad Talca beleefden. Niet vanwege een ufo, maar vanwege de aanwezigheid van een wezen dat van een andere planeet leek te komen.
Foto: Stephen Leopardi/Unsplash
De ufo's van Copiacó
In die Chileense precedenten springen "drie onverklaarbare luchtverschijnselen" het meest in het oog. De krant El Constituente had het over drie waarnemingen in maart, juli en november 1868. Ze waren allemaal in Copiacó, een stad waar vele jaren later, in 2013, nog eens een waarneming werd gemeld.
Duizenden ufo-waarnemingen
Sindsdien zijn er duizenden ufo-waarnemingen gemeld, door strijdkrachten van verschillende landen, vliegtuigpiloten of gewone mensen. Waarnemingen die in veel gevallen een wetenschappelijke verklaring hebben, maar die in andere gevallen verontrustend mysterieus blijven.
Project Blue Book
Van 1948 tot 1969 werd in de Verenigde Staten Project Blue Book gelanceerd, een overheidsinitiatief om ufo's te onderzoeken als een mogelijke bedreiging voor de nationale veiligheid. Dit alles in een tijd waarin de luchtmacht 12.618 waarnemingen rapporteerde, waarvan er vandaag de dag nog 701 ongeïdentificeerd blijven.
Geen bewijs dat ufo's buitenaards waren
Project Blue Book werd in 1969 afgesloten vanwege de hoge kosten. De conclusie van het onderzoek luidde dat de ufo's geen bedreiging vormden voor de nationale veiligheid en dat er geen bewijs was dat het om buitenaardse vaartuigen ging, noch om technologische ontwikkelingen die de moderne wetenschap te boven gaan.
Het Roswell-incident
In 1947, hetzelfde jaar van de waarneming van Kenneth Arnold, vond ook een van de meest legendarische ufo-gebeurtenissen plaats: het Roswell-incident. Een ongeïdentificeerd vliegend object stortte neer in een veld in deze stad in New Mexico, en onmiddellijk daarna volgde een ontmoeting met buitenaardse wezens.
Velen geloven nog steeds dat het een ufo was
De Amerikaanse regering probeerde de commotie rond het Roswell-incident te sussen door te beweren dat het om een weerballon ging en niet om een vliegende schotel, zoals velen aanvankelijk beweerden. Volgens een opiniepeiling van CNN uit 1997 denkt echter bijna twee derde van de Amerikanen nog steeds dat het een ufo was die er was neergestort.
Betrouwbare getuigen?
Er waren vermeende getuigen die toen verklaarden dat ze hadden gezien hoe militairen het ongeïdentificeerde object en de lichamen van de buitenaardse wezens uit het gebied van het incident hadden weggehaald. Toch was er geen echt bewijs.
Ufo-toerisme
Momenteel leeft Roswell van het toerisme van ufo- en alien-liefhebbers uit de hele wereld die blijven zoeken naar antwoorden. De stad heeft zelfs een drukbezocht 'UFO Museum'.
Area 51
En als Roswell een mythische plek is binnen het ufo-fenomeen, dan wat gezegd van Area 51, een gebied midden in de Nevadawoestijn? Velen geloven dat de Amerikaanse regering er zowel ufo's als lichamen van aliens verbergt.
Programma's tegen de Sovjets
In 2013 declasseerde de CIA documenten waarin officieel werd erkend dat Area 51 een geheime militaire basis was waar niets buitenaards werd verborgen, maar dat het werd gebruikt om de luchtbewakingsprogramma's U-2 en OXCART te testen tegen de Sovjets tijdens de Koude Oorlog.
Ufo's en kernwapens
Zeven voormalige leden van de luchtmacht van de Verenigde Staten beweerden in 2010 dat ze tussen de jaren zestig en tachtig ufo's hadden waargenomen in de buurt van kernwapeninstallaties.
Gedeactiveerde raketten
Over een van de waargenomen ufo's zei Robert Salas, een voormalige kapitein van de luchtmacht: "Onze raketten begonnen in wat men een niet-actieve toestand noemt te komen; ze konden niet worden gelanceerd. Ze werden gewoon gedeactiveerd, terwijl dit object om ons heen was."
Buitenaardse interesse in kernwapens
Ufoloog Robert Hastings, die de persconferentie organiseerde waarop deze waarnemingen werden gemeld, zei: "Deze heren geloven dat de planeet wordt bezocht door wezens uit een andere wereld, die geïnteresseerd zijn in de geschiedenis van nucleaire wapens die begon aan het einde van de Tweede Wereldoorlog."
Bevolen om een ufo neer te halen
Op 20 mei 1957 kregen volgens de krant The Times twee Amerikaanse piloten het bevel een ufo neer te halen die boven het Engelse platteland zweefde. Enkele veteranen van het leger, zoals die op de afbeelding, hebben het verhaal publiekelijk verteld.
De ufo die de piloten achtervolgden
Volgens Milton Torres (een van de betrokken piloten) bewoog het object "onregelmatig". Bovendien was het zo groot als "een vliegend vliegdekschip" en "hing het enkele ogenblikken in de lucht voordat het verdween met een geschatte snelheid van 12.000 kilometer per uur."
Een ontvoering in Chili
Door de zaak van korporaal Armando Valdés kwam de Chileense ufologie wereldwijd onder de aandacht. Armando zag in 1977 samen met zeven andere soldaten een ufo. Ze zagen vreemde lichten in de lucht en daarna verdween Armando gedurende 15 minuten.
Hij herinnert zich de ontvoering niet
In een interview met Agence France Presse in november 1978 zei Armando dat hij zes of zeven stappen zette weg van de groep, richting het licht, en dat hij geen idee had wat er daarna gebeurde. Hij zei: "Iets trok me aan. Het was als een interne communicatie met het licht."
Het onverklaarbare verstrijken van de tijd
Korporaal Armando, die zich de vorige dag had geschoren, had een baard van vijf tot zes dagen. Bovendien duidde zijn polshorloge de datum 30 april aan in plaats van 26, en liep de klok 15 minuten achter.
Foto: age barros/Unsplash
Het ufo-incident in Voronezh
Op 27 september 1989 meldde het persbureau TASS dat voetballende jongens in een stadspark in Voronezh (Rusland) een roze gloed in de lucht zagen, een dieprode bal die zweefde, en een alien met drie ogen. De kinderen waren de enige getuigen, maar een politieagent meldde dat hij "een object in de lucht zag vliegen".
De Phoenix Lights
De Phoenix Lights (soms ook wel de 'Lichten boven Phoenix' genoemd) waren een reeks op grote schaal waargenomen ufo's boven Arizona, Nevada en de Mexicaanse staat Sonora, op 13 maart 1997. Er werden verschillende soorten lichten gezien door duizenden mensen.
Een deltavorming schip
Fife Symington, de voormalige gouverneur van Arizona en een voormalig luchtmachtofficier, verklaarde op CNN: "Ik zag een enorm deltavormig schip stilletjes over Squaw Peak vliegen, een bergketen in Phoenix. Het was echt indrukwekkend. Ik was stomverbaasd, omdat ik me naar het westen keerde op zoek naar de Phoenix Lights in de verte."
Waarnemingen van Chileense piloten
In 2007 onthulde het Chileense leger tijdens een bijeenkomst van ufologen in Viña del Mar dat enkele van zijn piloten ufo's hadden waargenomen. Kapitein Rodrigo Bravo omschreef het volgens het persbureau EFE als "spectaculaire ervaringen op verschillende plaatsen".
Winston Churchill hield ufo-waarnemingen geheim
In 2010 werd via de BBC en na enkele door het Ministerie van Defensie openbaar gemaakte rapporten onthuld dat de voormalige Britse premier Winston Churchill de opdracht gaf om vermeende ufo-waarnemingen door de luchtmacht vijftig jaar lang verborgen zodat er geen paniek zou ontstaan onder de bevolking.
Vernietigd ufo-bewijsmateriaal
Wetenschapper Nick Pope verklaarde aan de BBC dat "Churchill en Eisenhower besloten om de buitengewone waarnemingen van ufo's geheim te houden". Hij merkte ook op dat "het meeste archiefmateriaal uit de jaren vijftig werd vernietigd".
Oumuamua: een asteroïde of een buitenaards ruimteschip?
Oumuamua was een mysterieus object dat in 2017 door het zonnestelsel trok en werd ontdekt en drie dagen lang gevolgd door verschillende telescopen tot het verdween. Het incident veroorzaakte een groot debat in de wereld van de wetenschap. De meesten verzekerden dat het om een zeldzame asteroïde of komeet ging, maar anderen beweerden dat het misschien een enorm buitenaards ruimteschip was.
Kenmerken van het meest controversiële object
Volgens de gemaakte berekeningen was Oumuamua ongeveer 400 meter lang en 40 meter breed, en had het een roodachtig oppervlak. Het meest verrassende kenmerk was dat de baan ervan niet lineair was, maar eerder chaotisch, zeer snel draaiend en met zeer uitgesproken richtingsveranderingen.
Doelbewust gestuurd door aliens?
Volgens astronomen Shmuel Bialy en Abraham Loeb (foto) is Oumuamua mogelijk een volledig operationele sonde die opzettelijk door een buitenaardse beschaving naar de buurt van de aarde is gestuurd.
Een nooit eerder gezien opject
Loeb is een groot verdediger van het feit dat Oumuamua het eerste ontdekte object in het zonnestelsel is dat daarbuiten is ontstaan. Hij herinnerde ons in een interview met de BBC eraan dat het ongewone kenmerken heeft die het tot een nooit eerder gezien zeldzaam object maken.
Buitenaardse bezoeken tijdens de pandemie
De laatste vermeende waarnemingen deden zich voor en namen exponentieel toe tijdens de maandenlange lockdown van de COVID-19-pandemie. Plots was − volgens de getuigenissen op sociale media met foto's en video's − het luchtruim gevuld met ufo's.
Andere gemelde waarnemingen
Om enkele historische waarnemingen te noemen in de wereld: de waarneming op Antarctica (1965); het ufo-incident in Teheran (1976); die van Manises (1979), de Canarische Eilanden (1976-1979) en Ochate (1981), alle drie in Spanje; het Colares-incident in 1977 (Brazilië) ...
Beroemdheden en ufo's
De Republikeinse kandidaat voor het Congres in Miami, Bettina Rodríguez, heeft gezegd dat ze in 2009 werd ontvoerd door aliens. Ook de Argentijnse artiest Andrés Calamaro heeft bevestigd dat hij een ufo zag in de jaren tachtig, toen hij op tournee was met zijn groep Los Plateros.
Zijn we echt alleen in het heelal?
Het ufo-fenomeen is nog steeds zeer interessant en bevat, zoals alle regeringen toegeven, mysteries. Voor veel van deze incidenten is er geen wetenschappelijke verklaring, al kan dat zijn omdat we niet over alle gegevens beschikken. Hoe dan ook: vliegende schotels zijn iconische, literaire en cinematografische elementen.
5,500km Boomerang UAP Passes Sun On Nov 27, 2023, Video, UFO Sighting News.
5,500km Boomerang UAP Passes Sun On Nov 27, 2023, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Nov 27, 2023, 16:46:53 Location of sighting: Earths Sun Source: Helioviewer.org
I was looking at objects near the sun on Helioviewer. It's a NASA program that is designed for the public and educators to share. I found that in a single frame of the video, there is a huge craft that measures 5,500km across from wing tip to wing tip. Yes you heard me right, it's long and it's a boomerang type UAP shape. As it passes the sun it is unphased by the suns powerful gravity, showing no sign of bending. Also, the UAP seems to be pulling the suns material toward it and creating a stream behind the UAP, much like a ship moving through the ocean and living long lines in its wake from the plankton. A similar shaped UFO was seen by thousands of residence in Phoenix, Arizona on March 13, 1997, where a huge boomerang UFO blocked out the stars in the sky for miles.
It's hard to believe that this craft was caught in only one frame, that means it was traveling faster than anything we have on Earth. I looked at the frames:
16:36:41 frame before
16:46:53 UAP here ++++
16:56:29 frame after
And I found that there was a ten minute per frame rate. This tells us that the UAP was traveling very fast, not only faster than any rocket today, but faster than any comet or meteor ever recorded. It's traveling at partial light speed, about that of 1/10. Which tells me that not only was it fast, but if object can come close to light speed, there must be those that can travel faster than light speed, which is what makes time travel possible. The speed of the object, size and shape all indicate a massive alien ship passed our sun and was in our solar system on Nov 27th, but NASA of course would never mention it, because they believe the public is not intelligent enough to ever discover or find this info in their data bases. Clearly NASA needs to catch up to my speed, because they are falling far behind.
Sightings of UFOs may challenge our entire worldview, but the facts are too compelling to ignore, and they’re not going away. So, it’s time to wash off the sticky stigma and engage in serious discussion about the evidence, and its implications.
Most UFO sightings are attributable to man-made objects like experimental aircraft or satellites, innocent misidentifications of Venus and other celestial objects, or outright hoaxes. However, we now know that in a minority of cases, there appears to be something else going on: something quite extraordinary and beyond our current comprehension.
According to the U.S. Department of Defense, there are objects of unknown origin, evidently under intelligent control, which behave in ways that seem to challenge our understanding of physics. These objects don’t just “fly” without any apparent lift surfaces or means of propulsion; according to some military testimony, they would appear to be the fastest technological objects on Earth, capable of accelerating so quickly that they should create sonic booms, superheat the air around them into a glowing plasma, and instantly kill any occupants on board.
Instead, they silently maneuver with perfect agility through the atmosphere and, according to some eyewitness reports, underwater, as if basic rules of inertia and friction simply don’t apply to them.
There’s general acknowledgment that these phenomena have been documented in America since at least the late 1940s, and probably much earlier. Hence, many longtime UFO advocates, as well as those newer to the subject, are now asking why it has taken 70 years for government offices to openly regard UFOs as a subject of serious inquiry. This is a question that deserves a lengthy public discussion.
Today, serious researchers are beginning–sometimes grudgingly–to admit that UFOs (or UAPs if you prefer the rebranded version) are a valid area of study, and pockets of scientific enthusiasm are emerging. After the New York Times made the revelation of a secret Pentagon UFO study their front page story, the Department of Defense subsequently admitted that leaked UFO videos were in fact real (and that it has others it’s not showing us). Since that time, a NASA UFO research initiative headed by Princeton’s former chair of astronomy has been launched, former Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project wants to determine if the strange phenomena are extraterrestrial. The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office is now investigating UFO phenomena across all the branches of the military; the US Navy has revised its protocols to counter stigmas against UFO reporting and encourage sighting reports by pilots (like this one); and there have been briefings in the US Senate and House regarding the more than 650 sightings now being studied by AARO, marking an almost singular point of bipartisanship in a traditionally fractured Congress.
This explosion of interest and influx of expertise, credibility, and funding into UFO research will create a flow of ideas between old-hat UFO researchers and establishment newcomers to the subject. As some scientific communities shift to incorporate the nascently-legitimate subject of UFO research, they may have to accommodate elements of the other’s conceptual frameworks, methodologies, and research agendas, and this will require questioning old assumptions about what sort of evidence actually exists and how to interpret it. Likewise, it is the perfect moment for UFO-interested folks to pause and evaluate their own assumptions about the subject, many of which seem to have been in place since the very beginning of the Flying Saucer craze that in 1947 began simultaneously in bothAmericaandCanada. As career researchers and academics (like me) join the conversation, the contours of the conversation itself will inevitably shift–I think for the better.
HOW I CAME TO THE SUBJECT, AND WHAT I NOTICED AS A NEWCOMER
My own journey down the UFO rabbit hole began one day early in 2019. As I flipped through a catalog from Oxford University Press, one title, in particular, jumped out at me: American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology by Diana Walsh Pasulka, a tenured professor of religion at the University of North Carolina. What surprised me most was that the blurb in the catalog suggested the author thought that it was not merely the UFO believers that were interesting, but that the phenomenon itself was worth serious attention. I promptly ordered a copy, and once it arrived I spent the next few days absorbed in the most bizarre piece of nonfiction I’d ever read.
The UFO enthusiasts Pasulka spent the most time with–two men she dubbed “James” and “Tyler” to preserve their anonymity–were both experiencers of the phenomenon. However, they weren’t tinfoil-hat-waring obsessives; they were scientists and academics, and not long after her book was published, a prodigious Stanford biomedical scientist named Garry Nolan revealed that he was the man referred to in the text as “James”. Around the same time, members of Reddit, by perusing the Vatican archive visitors’ log for the days Pasulka and “Tyler” visited, discovered that the latter appears to have been Timothy Taylor, founder of Endius.
Screenshot from the Vatican Observatory 2017 Annual Report
(Vatican Observatory).
What I found as I slipped into the deep end of the pool of UFO research was that, first, there is no shallow end. It’s deep ends everywhere you go, and once you clear away the debris of obvious hoaxes and non-evidential sightings, every drop in the pool–that is, every case warranting sustained attention–is a little ocean with its own perplexing depths where nothing is what it at first seems to be. The important facts of each case are often so embedded in the commentaries and interpretations that have grown around them that it’s difficult to consider them separately from the belief systems of the UFO community itself.
QUESTIONING COMMON SENSE WITH RELATION TO UFOS
Like all communities defined by a belief system, over time the most important beliefs become accepted so widely that they eventually feel too obvious even to mention. It’s similar to the way we don’t ever point out that murder isn’t nice; beliefs like these are accepted so widely and deeply that they pass out of consciousness altogether to some deeper place, where they operate out of sight.
We are born into an atmosphere of these powerful but unspoken beliefs, and we adopt them not by reasoning about the evidence for or against them; rather, we simply accept them as part of the foundation of beliefs that we need in order to do any reasoning at all. If reasoning were a game of chess, these beliefs wouldn’t be pieces in the game or moves made by players: they’d be the board.
These beliefs–the ones paradoxically so obvious that they’re invisible–are what some people in my field call ideology. The word is sometimes used pejoratively, but the fact is that everyone has an ideology. Questioning a person’s foundational beliefs can be so uncomfortable that it feels like an existential threat, and we respond defensively, even violently. Likewise, if we encounter any idea that flatly contradicts our foundational beliefs, it will seem patently false and absurd.
These responses to strange new ideas are, of course, mistakes. Different people can have wildly different belief systems. And our familiarity or comfort with a belief is not evidence of its truth.
If we’re concerned with uncovering the actual truth of the world outside our skulls, it’s essential that we sometimes do the very uncomfortable work of identifying and questioning the assumptions about the world that feel most comfortable and sensible to us. It’s the only way to ensure we’re not trapped in an echo chamber, looking for a truth hidden in one of our ideological blind spots.
What I’m proposing we all do regarding our ideas about UFOs is not so much taking a new perspective or “thinking outside the box”, but thinking about the box itself, by turning our eyes away from the problem at hand, to take a look at the constraints, expectations, and assumptions we bring to the problem in the first place, to see how they might be limiting or obstructing our attempts to solve the problem we’ve set within them, and to ask how we might construct a better box. As with most good ideas, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said it best, capturing my suggestion in his dictum that “Whatever wobbles, you should push.”
And this is exactly what I think the UFO community should do right now, in light of the growth of attention and collaboration regarding the topic. Shaking up the community’s ideology, and pushing at the wobbly bits will help identify areas ripe for creative thought, and will make collaboration more smooth and transparent. We may even surprise ourselves once we all lay our ideological cards on the table.
To us take a few first steps in this direction, I’ve identified four assumptions that seem to me to act as a kind of ideological orthodoxy among experiencers and researchers, and even among everyday people who maintain a quiet interest in the subject. These assumptions, I think, have their roots in our shared experience of Western culture and its worldview with relation to UFOs, from our suspicions toward governments to familiar tropes from science fiction stories to Hollywood’s speculative depictions of our intergalactic neighbors. When it comes to asking serious questions about the unknown, though, we need better foundations than these, and building those foundations starts with deconstructing our current ones.
FOUR ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT UFOS WORTH PRODDING
I’ve noticed four basic assumptions prevalent among UFO researchers and enthusiasts, as well as the general public that, as a philosopher, I think deserve some prodding.
ASSUMPTION ONE: THE SUPREMACY OF ETH
The first culture-wide assumption that, as a philosopher, I think deserves a close look is the one that, at first glance, seems most sensible; this is the assumption that the most obvious explanation for real UFOs is also the best one: that they’re extraterrestrial craft, under the control of intelligent extraterrestrial beings. This idea, often called the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (or ETH for short), seems to come to mind spontaneously for nearly everyone when they think of UFOs (including me). But, after a lot of reflection, as far as I can tell, it’s not our brains’ automatic first choice because there is really strong evidence that ETH is a better explanation than any other. Rather, I think it’s our default assumption because most of us don’t think outside the possibilities presented to us in science fiction.
The consequence is that most of us aren’t even aware that the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis (ETH), with its either/or logic of “ if it’s not humans, then it must be ETs”, is certainly not the only plausible explanation for these phenomena. There are other views that deserve serious consideration. One possibility is that there is some natural process that occupies some unknown area of physics, and that can mimic intelligent behavior. This may sound far-fetched, but we already know of other natural phenomena thatseemto behave in inexplicably intelligent ways: unintelligentslime molds can solve mazesand can even reproduce maps of Tokyo’s railway system. Similarly, totally blind evolutionary processes produce biological objects that seem like the product of design by intelligence. Perhaps some UFOs are themselves natural phenomena that simply seem to behave with intelligence. This of course leaves the question of how they defy our understanding of physics, but it’s a start.
Another possibility is that UFOs are a special kind of mental phenomenon that can manifest in visible, external ways. Some Renaissance scientists studying the eye pointed out that it had the same structure as a projector, and reckoned that the eye might sometimes work in reverse, projecting light to create external images, rather than receiving light and turning it into mental images.
Fig 1. Oculus arteficialis from Elementa Opticae et Perspectivae by Jan-FransThysbaert, public domain. Just as a speaker is a microphone that works in reverse, the eye is a projector that works in reverse.
Fig 2. Aerial perspective, by Johann Zahn, Oculus artificialis teledioptricus sive telescopium, 1702, public domain.
We can be confident today that this particular phenomenon isn’t real, but arguably stranger phenomena are now well-established realities. From robots controlled entirely by brain waves to machines that can render our dreams in visible images, technologies are allowing the contents of our minds to have a powerful presence in the world outside our heads. None of this even mentions theories of reality that totally throw into question the distinction between the “internal” and “external” world–ideas like the Simulation Hypothesis and holographic theories of the universe.
Another alternative to the ETH put forward by one of the most credentialed and intellectually rigorous UFO investigators out there, Jacques Vallée, is that reality itself has within it some fundamental mechanism for disrupting our certainty about the world. This mechanism, he theorizes, kicks in at opportune moments to manifest weirdness that is calculated, often humorously, to mystify us into wonder or incomprehension. For Vallée, who calls his theory the “Control System Hypothesis”, reality itself may be a trickster whose purpose is to nudge our collective consciousness in ways that encourage society to develop in particular ways.
As bizarre as this idea sounds, it’s not one that Vallée brought into his research into UFOs, but rather a notion he began to formulate after decades of flying around the world, personally investigating reported encounters and interviewing experiencers. By his own account, he was initially persuaded by the ETH, but case by case, he became convinced that the details simply didn’t add up to an extraterrestrial explanation. He found that, when experiencers were allowed to describe the details of their encounters as they experienced them, rather than simply responding to standard data-collection questions about the size and shape of craft, number, and arrangement of lights, etc., these sane, intelligent experiencers who shunned publicity and sought no personal gain, recalled details that are flatly absurd. The occupants of UFOs disembark for no other apparent reason than to argue with witnesses about what the time is, or to offer bystanders pancakes. Such encounters seem intentionally surreal to Vallée as if they were constructed in order to mystify experiencers with their absurdity.
Another category of (quasi) encounters with UFOs that is rife with the absurd is the category of reported alien abductions. Abduction reports often describe beings who, despite obviously possessing ultra-sophisticated technology, inflict pseudo-medical “examinations” upon abductees using tools and methods that would be laughable for their medieval silliness if they weren’t so traumatizing for those who report these experiences.
The bizarre details of abduction encounters make them easy to dismiss out of hand, but it’s probably a mistake to ignore these reports. Pulitzer Prize-winner and then-chair of psychiatry at Harvard, John Mack, spent over a decade conducting hundreds of hours of interviews with self-identified abductees. In the end, he published collaborations with other psychiatrists, and severalrelatedbooks in which he reached three firm conclusions: 1) the people he interviewed were not crazy, 2) they were not lying, and 3) the only thing they seemed to have in common was the fact that they reported being abducted. Simply put, these sane, otherwise normal people really believed these things had happened to them.
You may, at this point, decide that we have strayed too far from respectable scientific speculation; Mack’s colleagues at Harvard suspected the same of him, and, in an attempt to oust him and formally discredit the incredible conclusions he drew, they descended upon his work with a formal investigation, the first Harvard had ever conducted upon one of its own faculty members. Their investigation alleged that Mack had committed gross professional irresponsibility by “communicat[ing], in any way whatsoever, to a person who has reported a ‘close encounter’ with an extraterrestrial life form that this experience might well have been real”. For fourteen months the team of Harvard professors pored over piles of Mack’s notes, data, and recorded interviews before they were finally forced to conclude that, despite a few methodological criticisms, there was no basis to deny the credibility of his work. Harvard subsequently declared that Mack–a man who publicly argued for the reality of abduction cases– was, and always had been, a member of Harvard’s faculty in good standing and that his scholarship was worthy of one of the greatest universities in the world.
Mack openly acknowledged that the abduction phenomenon is “some kind of psychological, spiritual experience” that is “both literally and physically happening”, and speculated that the events were “originating, perhaps, in another dimension.” He never made the surreal absurdities of abduction encounters a focal point of his study, but he left us with good reasons to believe these experiences were genuine–absurdities and all–which means the absurdity at the heart of many UFO and abduction encounters still requires an explanation. Vallée’s hypothesis seems, to a degree, like an attempt to address some of the questions raised by Mack’s research.
A totally different approach to understanding the incredible and sometimes absurd facts of the UFO phenomenon–an approach I call the “missing concepts” view–would be to consider that, if UFOs are the work of other intelligent beings, they are almost certainly the product of beings who have forms of experience, conceptual categories, and kinds of activities, and aims that would be incomprehensibly foreign to us. Our current relationship to the phenomena may then be akin to a race of intelligent, but totally blind aliens who have found and are trying to understand a human-made kaleidoscope. UFO phenomena, in other words, may be conceptually incomprehensible to us both in how they work, and what their basic purpose is. Our mental toolbox may be missing some of the essential concepts that are necessary for describing the phenomena, even at a rudimentary level, the way intelligent beings without a concept of visual experience simply can’t theorize their way to a good explanation of a kaleidoscope.
Each of these hypotheses—Vallee’s “control system”, the possibility that some are exotic but natural intelligence-mimicking phenomena, that they’re somehow of terrestrial origin, or that UFOs are currently conceptually incomprehensible–all deserve consideration alongside the ETH, and we should be trying to design many other new hypotheses too, along with empirical tests to eliminate them if they don’t fit the evidence. The standard assumption that any legitimate UFOs are extraterrestrial craft shouldn’t simply be discarded, but it should be tested alongside these other hypotheses.
ASSUMPTION TWO: THE UNITY OF THE PHENOMENA OF UFOS
The second assumption that seems to underlie nearly every conversation about UFOs is the belief that these unexplained phenomena are each individual manifestations of a single root phenomenon; that they’re all ultimately the same kind of thing and so, whatever the explanation may be, we only need one explanation. Like all assumptions, this is rarely stated, but I’ve yet to come across anyone who wants to distinguish between types of UFOs for the purpose of attributing unrelated causes to them.
When we’re trying to explain a collection of distinct phenomena spread across space and time, each with its own unique, noteworthy features, the best default assumption is that there are multiple distinct causes at play. The body of documented UFO phenomena includes glowing orbs, military encounters with craft-like objects, accounts of human and humanoid creatures, massive air battles among flying objects of wildly varying descriptions, and celestial apparitions, to name a few. This raises a serious methodological question: how do we draw the boundaries to define UFOs in the first place? How, for instance, are we to distinguish in every case between religious or mystical encounters–like the 1917 events at Fatima, Portugal–and more “normal” UFO encounters, with which they share some important features? This question becomes even more complex when we consider that experiencers can interpret the same details very differently depending on their worldview.
What is needed is for us to develop a rigorous, standardized taxonomy of the different kinds of encounters according to both empirical and subjective elements, and then to consider, for each type, which explanation fits with and explains the data best. There’s no good reason to assume, in the face of so much perplexing evidence, that there’s really only one kind of weird thing going on.
ASSUMPTION THREE: THE CONSISTENCY OF THE GOVERNMENT
Another idea joined at the hip of nearly every discussion about UFOs is the belief that The Government (usually the US) has probably already solved the mystery, and they’re playing dumb. The reasoning is clear: how could a technological superpower with a military spanning the globe not know what’s behind these phenomena, especially given the serious national security implications of strange objects in our airspace?
The heart of this suspicion is an assumption that the government–and here it’s more like The Government–is unified enough that it can harbor within itself a kind of secret society that spans its various branches and bureaus and operates effectively, and in secret. However, take a cursory glance at any major government project (and here, again, I am thinking especially of the US Government); whether it’s an interstate system, national healthcare, public education, taxation, natural disaster response, or even passing an annual budget, one will quickly conclude that our governments very often lack the unity required for accomplish even their most fundamental tasks.
This is just the nature of the beast: a large group comprising various ideologies tasked with pursuing multiple complexes and often competing goals is always at the risk of fracturing from internal stress, at which point it may be unable to accomplish even its day-to-day duties. Any system constantly fighting the tides of such internal stresses is almost certainly incapable of perpetrating a coordinated, decades-long, system-wide coverup of the most important truths humanity has ever known. If we consider that there are also thousands of dogged and competent journalists sniffing for corruption, ethically motivated insiders ready to blow the whistle, and hundreds of other governments with their own messy innards and competing interests, it is possible, at most, to believe that single incidents–maybe even massively important ones–could be concealed if they fell under the purview of a single office or bureau, but the possibility that large numbers of people across multiple, often-quarrelsome governments have cooperatively succeeded at suppressing monumental truths about our place in the universe for decades seems vanishingly small.
We would be better off avoiding attributing such awesome power and competence to our governments, and instead, adopt a more nuanced conception of governments that sees them not as unified wholes, but as loose collections of bureaus that cooperate or share information with one another when it serves their individual interests, but often operate with disregard or outright antagonism toward one another. A more accurate picture of the situation would then emerge, one in which the UFO phenomenon is a very large jigsaw puzzle of which each government likely only possesses a few pieces, which are then scattered across that government’s chain of island-like bureaus and offices, which are not particularly cooperative with each other, and so may not even acknowledge that they have any of the pieces, or that the puzzle is even real.
ASSUMPTION FOUR: THE INEVITABILITY OF DISCLOSURE
There is, however, a growing acknowledgment that the puzzle of UFOs is “real”, and this appears, at least for some within the UFO community, to confirm a long-held belief so important it verges on the prophetic: the belief that many of those in power –usually government officials– already know what is really behind these phenomena, and that a day of Disclosure is coming when the weight of the evidence and public concern about UFOs will become so great that it breaks down the wall of silence. On that day, the government will admit it has known for a long time that UFOs are real and that they’re not terrestrial in origin.
Disclosure is usually conceived as the end result of a grass-roots effort: there will come a moment when the UFO community accumulates enough of its own evidence and public demand for the truth grows strong enough. Then the veil will fall and the government will come clean to the public about what it knows and the world will simply believe because the truth will be so unambiguous that no interpretation is required to understand it.
The fourth assumption I want to interrogate concerns this supposedly-inevitable result of disclosure. The deluge of government revelations is expected by many to be a watershed moment that brings about the global realization that we are not alone in the universe and that we can no longer pretend to occupy its center. This will be a moment of enlightenment that unites humanity with a shared truth that transcends our differences. The utopian vision of disclosure is founded upon a single essential, but hidden, assumption: that there is a kind of evidence so powerful that when it is presented to any sane, reasonable person, they will be convinced and draw the same conclusion. In this case, it is the belief that there’s some kind of evidence that, upon revelation, would overwhelmingly convince the global public that we’re not alone in the universe.
There is, however, no such evidence. In fact, there never could be.
This may seem like an odd claim, and maybe you feel inclined to reply, “Look, I guarantee that if a fleet of UFOs showed up at the White House, the whole world would believe”. But this would only prove that clear evidence doesn’t compel belief the way we tend to think, because, as it turns out, sightings of UFOs have already been reported at the White House on multiple occasions. Similar cases, like the time a UFO forced Chicago’s O’Hare airport to shut down one of its terminals, led to the launch of an investigation by a civilian aviation safety organization in 2006. But events like these just didn’t seem to move the needle of public belief, perhaps because the public is committed to a version of reality that leaves little room to take seriously the hard evidence for phenomena that we don’t already have an explanation for. The result is that we shrug, assume there’s some non-weird explanation we’re missing, and go on with our business.
This is just the very nature of evidence though, regardless of whether it’s everyday people or professional scientists; evidence is neverabsolutelycompelling. Here I am importing a concept from the philosophy of science called “underdetermination.” For philosophers of science, it is a well-known adage that theories are always underdetermined by the evidence. This means that, while a set of evidence might strongly support one theory, there will always be an array of other, totally different theories that could account equally well for that same set of evidence. It follows that, no matter how concrete or well-documented the evidence may be, evidence cannot ever conclusively compel us to accept any particular theory over all of the others.
To illustrate, consider a theory that you almost certainly hold. You don’t believe minotaurs are real. That is, you deny Minotaur Theory (a belief in minotaurs, which we’ll call MT) in favor of No Minotaur Theory (NMT). Now, try to imagine some set of evidence that, if it were shown to you, would force you to abandon NMT and accept MT. You might say that, if a minotaur walked into the room you’re in right now and said “Hi. I’m a minotaur”, you’d give up NMT and accept MT. Maybe you would, but would you have to? Is there no other option? Couldn’t you hold on to NMT, and instead believe that something very serious had gone wrong in your brain? Or that you’d been the unwitting victim of a Darren Brown TV special? Or that someone had dosed your coffee with a potent hallucinogen? Or that you’ve died and gone to some very confusing hell?
As with minotaurs, so it is with UFOs, and everything else. While you might be able to specify the evidence that would convince you to conclude, say, that extraterrestrials are behind some UFO phenomena, there is simply no possible set of evidence that would persuade every rational person, regardless of their belief system, to accept the same conclusion
Those who’ve noticed the American public’s inability to agree on any consensus reality will understand: if flying saucers landed on the promenade of the United Nations headquarters, and lanky gray-skinned humanoids emerged with greetings from Venus, some people would believe what they saw at face value. But millions would also believe it was a hoax perpetrated by global super-elites, or a deep fake operation, or a demonic apparition, and any further evidence would only challenge them to elaborate, and thereby strengthen their beliefs.
It may be worth hoping that government disclosure will one day solve the mystery of UFOs for us all by making the truth clear, especially given how confused and divided we all are. Imagine a moment of reprieve from the turmoil of the world. But believing that it will actually happen is philosophically naive. There’s no topic or evidence with the power to cut through our ideological divisions, and ideological shifts, when they happen, tend to take generations. This is what will happen if solid evidence of UFOs continues to gain public attention, so the UFO community should begin now to reflect on how to frame evidence in ways that appeal to various belief systems so that the growth of public awareness brings more viewpoints and novel ideas into the community.
The UFO community faces a challenging paradox: On the one hand, it must maintain a kind of social unity in the face of skeptics who dismiss the subject out of hand, without considering the evidence. On the other, it must avoid the sort of intellectual unity that demands acceptance of a single viewpoint, and instead seek out new ideas and viewpoints to prevent stagnation and cultivate the diversity of ideas that make for a thriving intellectual ecosystem.
CONCLUSION
For my part, I hope the community flourishes. When it comes to exploring the unexplained, the danger is never that we will entertain too many ideas but too few. I think that reflecting on our assumptions and destabilizing the ideas that feel most familiar and sensible is the best way to spur the kind of broad, collaborative thinking that the community needs as we see more and more public acknowledgment that these exciting and bewildering phenomena are real. Because, whatever else they may be, they are undoubtedly an invitation to joyfully expand our openness to the unknown and to the possible.
Michael Glawson, Ph.D., is a writer, researcher, and consultant with extensive experience. He served as a professor at the University of South Carolina, Georgia State University, and the College of Charleston for over ten years. During his tenure, he taught philosophy courses on logic, technology, and science & religion, as well as ethics courses for medical students, and engineers.
Dr. Glawson hasmade scholarly contributions in philosophy of religion, philosophyof technology, pedagogy, and corporate ethics. As a teacher he co-created one of the United States’ pioneering engineering ethics curricula, which has empowered thousands of STEM students to pursue technical careers while upholding their core values. As a consultant, he developed a corporate ethics curriculum adopted by numerous government agencies and Fortune 500 companies.
Michael is a member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies. In his leisure time he enjoys the company of his partner and his cats, and indulging in the exploration of strange, rare, and old books. You can follow him on Twitter @michaelglawson, reach out to him via email at michaelglawson[at]me[dot]com, or find his work at linktr.ee/michaelglawson.
Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson called out the U.S. government Tuesday on his show, questioning its transparency over releasing information about unidentified flying objects (UFOs).
Carlson released his 42nd Twitter episode in which he discussed the issues he has found between the U.S. government and UFOs. Before bringing on Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett, Carlson questioned why the federal government would allegedly create a “coordinated effort” to hide information about UFOs for the last “80 years.”
“Federal agencies have been lying about UFOs for more than 80 years, this has been a coordinated effort. It is both highly time-consuming and very expensive. Many Americans have been hurt in the process. But what’s the point of this? Would it be a lot easier just to release the facts?” Carlson stated.
“The conventional explanation for why they haven’t been released is that the U.S. government is lying about UFOs because the truth about UFOs is too scary to reveal — that they’re real. And our leaders wouldn’t want to panic the population. But that’s not true. In fact, it’s ridiculous.”
“Terrifying the population is what our government does best and most avidly. Officials regularly gin up irrational fears about COVID or white supremacy or Vladimir Putin or a dozen other topics as part of a pretty obvious control strategy,” Carlson continued. “So why would they lie about UFOs? Well, because they’re covering up a crime, obviously, and it’s their crime.”
Carlson continued to call out the government, begging questions that should be asked by “honest lawmakers” if they were concerned about the issue. The Daily Caller co-founder asked if taxpayer money was ever used to “procure advanced non-human technology,” the possible whereabouts of it, and — if real — whether the public has benefited from it.
However, the “most pressing” question Carlson asked was if the government has had any contact with potential “beings.”
“And then this question, the most pressing of all, has the U.S. government communicated directly with the beings that piloted these craft? Have American officials ever entered into any sort of agreement with them? And if so, what are the terms of that agreement? These are not random questions, they are informed questions. And at this point, Americans have a moral right to know the answers,” Carlson stated.
Burchett was later brought on by the Twitter host to discuss the lack of transparency from the federal government, with Carlson honing in on why the government would allegedly want to hide information in the first place. The Tennessee representative discussed how power, influence, money, and corruption could be the root of the cause, noting that he believes the slow release of information is “intentional.”
Burchett has notably been outspoken regarding issues surrounding UFO sightings and their possible technological capabilities. The Tennessee lawmaker made some hefty claims over the summer on a podcast about the capabilities that he believes UFOs and aliens have, emphasizing that there are some things “we do not control in our military airspace.”
Imagine you were just elected President of the United States. During one of your first classified briefings, you learn that the US military has recovered advanced extraterrestrial technology. You are told we’ve made only modest headway in understanding how this technology works, where it is from, or why these intelligently controlled machines are here. What would you do in that circumstance?
As President, your top priority is to keep the American people safe from all threats, both foreign and domestic. Hundreds of millions of people, including tens of millions of children, place their faith in you. Are you going to hold a press conference revealing that aliens are visiting planet Earth, but we don’t know where they’re coming from, why they are here, or whether we can defend ourselves from them?
It is hard for me to imagine any of the politicians I’ve worked for over the years leaping at that opportunity. The sudden, unexpected confirmation of an ET presence on Earth would not only unsettle but inevitably terrify millions—if not billions—of people. And for what purpose? What chance would you have as President of moving forward on other vital issues on your agenda, given the tumult that would result? What reason is there to believe the net effect for society would be positive rather than negative?
These are questions that need to be addressed by those advocating the release of information confirming an extraterrestrial presence on Earth. Such information has the potential to be a genuine Pandora’s box, and it is, therefore, vital we think this through carefully before proceeding.
This is a pressing issue, as various committees and members of Congress are seeking to determine whether the US government has incontrovertible proof of an extraterrestrial presence on Earth. Such a revelation would undoubtedly be the most shocking, profound, and transformative discovery in human history. Yet, despite the gravity of the issue, Congress has been proceeding without holding any hearings or requesting any studies to assess the impact of this potential bombshell. It appears that our legislators are failing to heed the maxim, “Don’t ask the question if you aren’t prepared for the answer.”
Strangely, there is little discussion of this critical issue among proponents of disclosure in the UAP community. Perhaps advocates of disclosure simply assume that truth and transparency are always for the better. Although I applaud the sentiment, the issue is not so simple for government officials bearing the weighty responsibility of governing. I therefore thought I would offer some thoughts from the standpoint of a former national security official because national security concerns are inescapably central to this discussion.
The first question that arises is, “How can we make a fair determination about the potential risks and benefits of disclosure without access to all the facts?” Suppose the US government recovered extraterrestrial technology decades ago. In that case, there has inevitably been some progress in assessing it and, hopefully, some insights gleaned regarding the nature and intent of its designers. However, no credible individuals purporting to have access to such information have provided any details. One of the only things we can say with certainty is that unless ETs prove to be angelic, which is not what our military is reporting, disclosure would undeniably frighten, if not terrify, large segments of the population.
Moreover, what if disclosure precipitated a change in the behavior of an alien civilization, given that they no longer had an incentive to remain elusive and clandestine? What is the risk potential that disclosure might cause some governments to overreact, precipitating fearful and aggressive interactions? If these risks are substantial, does it still make sense to release such disruptive information?
When I first became publicly involved in the UAP topic, the alleged recovery of ET technology was not an issue. My immediate goal was to alert policymakers to a dangerous intelligence failure, namely, the fact of serious and recurring intrusions into restricted DoD airspace by strange, unidentified aircraft. It was shocking to learn our vaunted multi-billion-dollar intelligence system was paralyzed by ineffable stigma, as effectively as any electromagnetic warfare (EW) weapon, placing US personnel and the nation at risk. This situation reminded me of both Pearl Harbor, where vital warning information was not forwarded up the chain of command, as well as 9/11, when intelligence agencies failed to share vital information that could have saved the lives of thousands of innocent civilians. Having survived the attack on the Pentagon myself, this was not a purely theoretical consideration.
Admittedly, I was also hoping to generate enough Congressional pressure to compel the DoD and the Intelligence Community to use their vast capabilities to study UAP. Knowing our technical intelligence systems well, I was tantalized by the prospect of what we might learn if these sometimes mind-boggling capabilities were brought to bear on the UAP mystery. Therefore, it was also an opportunity to potentially solve this fascinating and profound mystery.
At the time, the ET issue was present but remained unspoken for good reason; if we had approached Congress with an explicit focus on aliens, we would have quickly been shown to the exit. Many legislators were privately curious about UAP, but we needed to focus on the national security angle to provide a politically viable justification for engaging on the UAP issue. Nevertheless, as time passed and new information became available, Congressional interest expanded to include credible allegations of recovered extraterrestrial materials.
I confess I was partly responsible for this change of emphasis because I brought physicist Eric Davis to Capitol Hill to meet with oversight committee staff in October of 2019. This was, to my knowledge, the first time a Congressional oversight committee had been provided credible information on the issue of allegedly recovered non-human technology from an individual with knowledge of such operations. Later, I played a role in helping bring other witnesses forward, including whistleblower David Grusch. In doing so, I was forced to wrestle with the same simple but critical question that guides everyone in the national security community: “What is in the nation’s best interest?”
Eventually, members of Congress began to realize that the alleged recovery of off-world materials was a serious issue. Consequently, they enacted a provision requiring the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which reports jointly to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and the Deputy Director of National Intelligence, to investigate this sensational allegation. Congress understandably did so without deciding in advance whether to make the report’s findings public. Although it is true that some key members of Congress, such as Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN), have expressed support for releasing the facts, whatever they prove to be.
However, it is not clear how many of their colleagues agree. It is also conceivable their views might change if confronted by disturbing revelations in the event such allegations prove to be true. For example, Senator Gillibrand has young children, and it is conceivable that if sufficiently alarming information emerges, she might reconsider her admirable desire to share as much information as possible with the public.
At this point, it already seems clear that AARO will report that it found no credible evidence the US government has recovered alien technology or knows of any extraterrestrial activity. However, I don’t think this finding by AARO will satisfy key members of Congress or the public. This is entirely understandable because asking AARO to investigate this issue is roughly comparable to asking the Intelligence Community to investigate the Iran-Contra Affair. AARO has a clear conflict of interest in that it must protect this explosive information if directed to do so. Alternatively, AARO could also be denied access to the information. The only way for Congress to assure itself of the truth is to continue pressing ahead with its own investigation, as advocated by members of both parties in the House of Representatives.
In that regard, I want to challenge the recurring assertion that the UAP issue is primarily for scientists, not politicians or government officials. Although UAP deserves serious attention from the scientific community, as NASA itself recently acknowledged, national security considerations are inevitably paramount.
I say that partly because we are not dealing (at least not exclusively) with remote signals from deep space or an intangible interdimensional intelligence that seeks to subtly influence human affairs. For all we know, something along those lines could be happening, and it is a fascinating proposition, but what current intelligence collected by the US indicates is that our military is encountering intelligently controlled, solid objects invading restricted military airspace, sometimes even flying in formation, on an almost daily basis. Many of these objects are emitting radiation in the 1-3 and 8-12 gigahertz range. Multiple credible reports indicate that UAP has rendered segments of our nuclear deterrent inoperable; in other cases, they are jamming radars on fighter aircraft. We also have multiple cases of near-mid-air collisions and cases involving serious injuries to military and civilian personnel. Therefore, as much as we need and want scientific investigations, the government cannot be permitted to divest itself of the UAP issue.
Similarly, the government does not have the luxury of limiting itself to pristine scientific information. This is one of the areas in which I differ with Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the current Director of AARO, who claims there is no “credible” evidence of UAP demonstrating capabilities or doing things that violate our understanding of science. To my mind, the USSNimitz(CVN-68) aviators, radar operators, and technicians who encountered an anomalous craft during training exercises off the California coast in 2004 areeminentlycredible. The Intelligence Community prefers rigorous scientific information whenever possible. Still, it would be untenable—if not suicidal—for either the Intelligence or Law Enforcement communities to limit themselves to pristine, scientifically repeatable sensor data. We rarely have the luxury of having sensor information when facing the intentions of foreign leaders or the precise capabilities of adversary military forces. Hence, the Intelligence Community does its best with what it has in those circumstances, including reliance on human intelligence reporting.
Therefore, by its own standards, the Intelligence Community should consider the accounts of the Nimitz aviators and radar operators as highly credible evidence of intelligently controlled craft doing things we cannot emulate and simply don’t understand. For example, the “Tic Tac” UAP they encountered accelerated to supersonic speeds without producing a sonic boom; it overcame g-forces that would destroy anything built by man, and there was no evidence of the electrically charged plasma we would normally expect to see on manmade aircraft moving at hypersonic velocities. I realize the inherent limitations of human reporting. Still, I also see no reason to suddenly change the normal rules and standards the Intelligence Community relies on in cases that involve evaluating UAP.
I’m raising these issues to provide a reminder that the paramount question about UAP, both for government policymakers and the public, will undoubtedly be whether UAP poses an existential threat. I’m thrilled to be supporting investigations of UAP signatures, propulsion systems, metamaterials, and UAP effects on humans, but national security, rather than science, will be at the forefront in the minds of government officials assessing the potential costs and benefits of disclosure. In sum, we can’t dodge the national security issue when making the case for disclosure; we must address it head-on.
Admittedly, nothing as potentially ontologically shocking as UAP disclosure has probably ever occurred, certainly not in modern times. However, there are still some interesting historical precedents we can examine.
Consider the Sputnik issue that arose in 1957. Sputnik was merely a small satellite emitting tracking signals, not a weapons system. Yet the mere fact America was lagging behind the Soviet Union in space and missile technology immediately became a major political issue, reminiscent of the furor over the more recent Chinese spy balloon incident. It was not long before Congress and the White House responded, and the space race got underway. Thankfully, what began as a military competition with the Soviet Union eventually turned into a collaborative space exploration effort involving the Russians and many other nations. So, in that case, the initial fright and concern, which was a national security issue, ultimately led to major scientific and technological breakthroughs and laudable international cooperation. I would like to believe the UAP issue can follow that same path from national security to science.
Admittedly, other examples are tragic. When we look at the first contact between more technologically advanced civilizations and indigenous peoples, the consequences often proved catastrophic for the less technologically advanced. In part, this was due to the spread of lethal diseases for which indigenous peoples had no immunity. But it was much more than that; contact often proved psychologically and culturally devastating, as the leadership and cherished religious and cultural beliefs of many indigenous groups were eradicated without being replaced by a viable substitute. We all need psychological and cultural maps to navigate reality. For many indigenous people, those maps were destroyed but not replaced, leaving behind a devastating psychological and spiritual void that millions of people are still contending with as they seek to reconcile Western secular views with their traditional beliefs.
Note the difference between these two cases. In the case of Sputnik, we have an awareness of a potential threat; in the second instance, we have an actual invasion and occupation. So, a key question for us to ask ourselves (again, a national security issue) is whether disclosure might provoke hostilities. That seems highly unlikely; so, although the Sputnik case is far less shocking and provocative than disclosure would be, it may be a more appropriate model than the tragic cases involving European contact with pre-industrial indigenous societies.
I believe that a graduated process of disclosure would avert a crisis atmosphere while prompting new investments in technology, scientific research, and a rash of collaborative international meetings and initiatives. Processing this unsettling information would certainly take time, but danger and fear of the unknown have always been inherent in the human condition, and people would, as always, adapt. For example, few Americans are losing sleep over the fact they live in cities targeted by Chinese and Russian thermonuclear weapons. Similarly, if some UAP proves to be extraterrestrial, people would still get out of bed the next day, go through their morning wake-up rituals, and head to school or work.
Although it would be a much more disturbing provocation than Sputnik, I believe the inevitable ontological shock would eventually prove highly beneficial, stimulating immense creativity, investment, and research. Moreover, and most importantly, it could have a profound, positive, and desperately needed impact on mankind and international relations.
Earlier this year, I penned an article for Politico titled, “If the US Government has UFO Crash Materials It is Time to Reveal Them.” In the article, I made several points, including the following:
Democracy requires transparency.
The American people own any materials recovered by our government.
The public can handle disclosure.
The government cannot forever stifle the truth, so it is better to get ahead of it.
Secrecy stifles Science.
There is no evidence of an imminent threat.
If there is a threat, we need to know so we can prepare.
Finally, I argued that disclosure could transform international tensions, catalyzing desperately needed international collaboration. I’d like to expand on this last point as it is both the most important point and the least obvious.
In my view, both domestically and internationally, we are presently on an extremely dangerous trajectory that requires urgent intervention. Disclosure would undoubtedly alter the trajectory of our species, but almost certainly for the better.
It is obvious that our nation, our species, and the environment are in serious and growing jeopardy. If this were solely my view, it would be easy to dismiss, but unfortunately, that is not the case. I don’t have the time here to list all my concerns, nor all the ways our society is presently financing its own downfall through perverse incentives that have developed over many decades, nor is there space here to do justice to the growing dangers we face abroad. Hence, rather than attempt to make the case myself, I’ll offer the perspective of two renowned analysts of world affairs.
Ray Dalio is the ingenious billionaire who established the world’s largest hedge fund. Yuval Hariri is a dazzling Cambridge-trained historian and author. Their perspectives are as different as their occupations, but their analyses are complimentary and equally sobering.
Mr. Dalio’s views are available to us through his fascinating book Principles for Dealing with a Changing World Order. His argument, supported by myriad graphs and piles of data, is that the evolution of human societies runs in discernable cycles. It appears he has handsomely profited from understanding these cycles. In short, when a nation or civilization becomes debt-ridden and over-extended, wealthy but complacent, with massive disparities in wealth, dangerous internal fractures and civil strife emerge.
Today, the US is more deeply indebted than at any time since WWII, and the debt is rapidly growing even as interest rates rise, making repayment of this mountain of debt far more difficult. When interest on debt crowds out productive investments, the economy suffers. Eventually, economic hardship and disputes over how to share the pain of deficit reductions occur, leading to polarization and instability.
When this instability and economic stagnation occur simultaneously with challenges from a rising foreign power, as is the case with China today, history shows that war and disaster for the declining power usually follow. Regrettably, military confrontation between the US and China is a real and growing risk, especially in the South China Sea and Taiwan. Dangerous encounters between US and allied nations and Chinese forces are occurring with disturbing and growing frequency. Meanwhile, President Xi is moving China in the direction of North Korea, a state where an ambitious and intolerant dictator with near godlike status imposes his views at every level of society from the classroom to the boardroom. A fanatically nationalistic 1.5-billion-person version of North Korea, replete with AI security systems controlling Orwellian surveillance capabilities, is a daunting prospect.
For all these reasons, I share Mr. Dalio’s concerns about the prospect of tectonic and possibly catastrophic change occurring in the years immediately ahead. As Dalio states:
“The most reliable signs of an escalation to civil war are 1) the rules being disregarded; 2) both sides emotionally attacking each other; 3) blood being spilled.”
It’s not hard to see the relevance of these factors given the riots and demonstrations of recent years, the assault on the nation’s Capital, and the incredible partisan hatred gripping the nation, making it impossible to pass desperately needed legislation. To my knowledge, the US has never before failed to pass a defense bill at a time when the US military is under fire and already stretched to its limits supporting friends and allies. This growing crisis of government legitimacy is toxic and only getting worse; meanwhile, there are no efforts in sight to correct the massive fiscal imbalances that are undermining our children’s future.
Mr. Dalio also observes that when change comes, it is generally swift, devastating, and unanticipated. This conservative businessman sees a shocking 30% risk of civil war in America with what he characterizes as the “next big risk point” occurring around the time of the next Presidential election.
Dr. Harrari offers a very different perspective, one that focuses primarily on global existential challenges facing our species. He states:
“Each of these problems – nuclear war, ecological collapse, and technological disruption – is enough to threaten the future of human civilization. But taken together, they add up to an unprecedented existential crisis, especially because they are likely to reinforce and compound one another.”
Harrari later adds:
“If despite these common threats humans choose to privilege their particular national loyalties above everything else, the results may be far worse than in 1914 or 1939.”
Thankfully, there is a potential solution. As Dr. Harari further observes:
“A common enemy is the best catalyst for forging a coming identity…”
Suppose a common threat is the best recipe to achieve a desperately needed common bond. What could be more helpful or consistent with our long-term prosperity and survival than learning that one or more advanced civilizations are visiting our planet? It would be a shock, to be sure, and many would initially be frightened or even terrified—whether or not for good reason—but that fear would quickly subside if little change occurred in UAP activity. Regardless, we need a jolt to reframe international perspectives in order to manage issues such as AI, global warming, and WMD effectively.
Much as NASA recently demonstrated the ability to alter the trajectory of an asteroid, in the event we detect one on a collision course with Earth, we need a powerful ontological jolt to promote the collaboration required to manage these common global threats. This is why, in addition to democratic principles, I support UAP transparency and believe our nation and species would hugely benefit from an awareness that we are not alone.
And on the chance that a threat does exist, aren’t we better off knowing so we can take appropriate action? When has ignorance ever been a good national security strategy?
In conclusion, I’d like to cite a third figure quite different either from Mr. Dalio or Dr. Harriri: a former US President who had an extraordinary personal UAP sighting. Whether Ronald Reagan was prescient or speaking from an awareness of secret government information remains to be seen, but his statement to the UN General Assembly in 1987 is most apt:
“In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?”
For all the reasons above, I hope our elected officials will seek and reveal the truth of what our government knows about UAP. We need and deserve the truth, however unsettling it may be, and the sooner we are made aware, the better.
Christopher Mellon spent nearly 20 years in the U.S. Intelligence Community, including serving as the Minority Staff Director of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. He actively participates in Harvard’s Galileo Project and, in his free time, works to raise awareness regarding the UAP issue and its implications for national security. Follow him online at his official website and on X: @ChrisKMellon.
A version of this essay was originally presented at The Sol Foundation’s first annual symposium, held at Stanford University November 17-18, 2023.
During the summer of 1954, the United States Air Forcewas on high alert. A pair of mysterious objects had been located in orbit between 400 and 600 miles from Earth, and now officials were in a state of confusion as to what they might represent. Could they be non-terrestrial objects of natural origin, or could they be something else entirely?
A more concerning possibility also lurked in the minds of officials at the time: what if the objects were manmade, and possibly of Soviet origin?
Dr. Lincoln La Paz, then the head of the Extra-Terrestrial Bodies Institute at the University of New Mexico, had been in constant communication with the Air Force about their unusual new problem. For weeks, he shot back and forth between the Palomar Observatory in California and the missile test center at White Sands, New Mexico, until it was finally determined by the astronomer that the objects were indeed natural: they were only meteors.
The story received tremendous attention after it first appeared in Aviation Week, and just days later, a source close to the Army Office of Ordnance Research assured the New York Times that no satellites deemed to be of artificial origin had been detected yet, adding about La Paz’s meteors that “there was absolutely no connection between the reported satellites and flying saucer reports.”
The search for objects in Earth’s orbit had been virgin territory in 1954, and the events in the fall of that year were only a foreshadowing of the kind of public fear yet to come. Once the Soviets actually did launch Sputnik 1 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the early days of October 1957, concerns about a technological gap among Western nations escalated into a full-blown crisis.
The world would never be the same. In the aftermath of the “Sputnik crisis,” the United States accelerated its space-bound efforts, eventually placing its own satellites into orbit, followed by successful manned space missions and, eventually, humans landing on the Moon in July 1969. Today, on any clear night one can look at the night sky and see tiny points of light moving silently along in their positions in orbit, representing objects that range from satellites and the International Space Station, to tiny reflective bits of debris from past space missions that have accumulated in Earth’s orbit steadily over time.
In addition to the satellites we have placed into orbit around our own planet, humans have also sent several spacecraft to further locales, some of which we have positioned around nearby planets like Mars. It seems logical to assume that if there were any intelligent extraterrestrials out there, they might do the same.
This brings to mind an interesting question for modern astronomers: what if aliens have surveilled our planet, either in the past, or even in the present day? If so, how might we detect evidence of their technologies?
(Credit: NASA)
With the amount of debris that clutters the space around our planet today, it would prove difficult to locate any prospective alien probes that may be watching us. Based on current European Space Agency data, there are 5,800 functioning satellites in orbit, with nearly 31,590 debris objects that have been logged and continuously tracked by Space Surveillance Networks.
However, not all objects in orbit around our planet are being tracked. According to current statistical models, smaller space objects between 1 mm and 10 cm could number greater than 131 million.
In short, the orbital area around our planet has become a very cluttered place since the dawn of the Space Age, making it increasingly difficult to search for any possible outliers that might represent evidence of non-terrestrial technological artifacts that might be observing our planet.
That’s why one group of researchers, led by Beatriz Villarroel of the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics and Stockholm University, has undertaken a citizen science effort to search for evidence of such non-terrestrial artifacts in what some might consider an unusual place: data that has already been publicly available for decades.
Prior to the launch of manmade satellites like Sputnik 1 in the late 1950s, Earth’s skies were free of the clutter that hinders modern searches for prospective non-terrestrial objects. According to Villarroel and her team, one way to overcome this problem is by scanning earlier photographic plate projects such as the First Palomar Sky Survey (POSS-1), which is the focus of the Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project.
“We expect the project to yield many interesting findings over time,” reads a statement on the website of the VASCO Network, “maybe even some anomalous objects and events — could aliens be responsible for any of those?”
“We show that even the small pieces of reflective debris in orbit around the Earth can be identified through searches for multiple transients in old photographic plate material exposed before the launch of the first human satellite in 1957,” the researchers state in the paper’s abstract. According to Villarroel and her coauthors, images depicting what they identify as “simultaneous transients” may hold the key to detecting evidence of non-terrestrial artifacts that may have been lurking in Earth’s orbit since the days prior to Sputnik.
Beatriz Villarroel of the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics and Stockholm University
(Image Credit: Karl Nordlund/Stockholm University)
“About 80% of the very fast bright flashes (glints) in our sky are the result of artificial objects with highly reflective, flat surfaces,” Villarroel recently told The Debrief. These objects, many of them relatively small according to Villarroel, may be found in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth.
“A fast glint like this will look like a star in an image,” Villarroel says, “and sometimes one can see several glints from the same object in an image (or from different ones). Space debris and satellites in geosynchronous orbits can leave multiple glints in an image.
“Multiple glints in sky images is, therefore, a typical signature of artificial objects,” Villarroel says. By looking at some of the earliest photographic plates collected by 20th-century astronomers, the VASCO team thinks they could easily discern the presence of any reflective objects in geosynchronous orbits (GEO) since they would appear as short lines in these photographs, the length of which can be used as an indicator of their speed and position in orbit (satellites at higher GEO altitudes produce fast, transient glints that result from the light they reflect from the Sun).
Of particular interest to Villarroel and her colleagues are the appearances of multiple glints, which may indicate a single object tumbling through space producing a series of flashes as its surfaces reflect sunlight, or possibly even the presence of several objects.
“We propose to look for multiple glints in image data before Sputnik I,” Villarroel told The Debrief. “If such signatures are found in a time when there were no high-altitude satellites, that could imply the presence of Non-Terrestrial Artifacts (NTAs) in orbits around the Earth.”
Although surveying photographic data from pre-satellite times offers obvious benefits to the search for non-terrestrial artifacts, there are challenges for modern researchers using this approach, since multiple glints in older sky survey imagery could be accounted for by a number of other things. These could include defects in the images that produce the appearance of star-like objects which, in fact, may simply be photographic artifacts.
“If one finds multiple glints in an image, we cannot know for sure that the observation is real as some defects might possibly look star-like,” Villarroel says. “And it is difficult to access the original photographic plates to examine the ‘stars’ under a microscope.”
One simple way that Villarroel and her colleagues have proposed to help narrow down any likely anomalies is to search or instances where they appear in a single line.
“The main proposal of the paper is, therefore, to look for an even clearer signature, which is to search for these multiple glints-events that on top of everything, also are aligned along a line,” Villarroel told The Debrief. Unlike plate defects, which could most often be expected to appear randomly across the image, Villarroel says that genuine glints of light detected by cameras, possibly produced by debris or satellites of unknown origin, would produce consistent glints of light along a line in an image.
Villarroel says there are several sources of imagery that astronomers can use for such surveys, many of which are freely available. However, an added benefit of conducting multiple surveys could be that the presence of any anomalies detected in one photographic plate collection, if thereafter found in a separate set of images, could help confirm the presence of a genuine anomaly.
“Many observatories have their photographic plate collections,” Villarroel says. “Finding similar examples of ‘multiple transients’ in other image data sets could help to confirm the effect. Also, we have predicted some shapes and glinting patterns in our recent preprint that one can use to search for the predicted objects in modern datasets.”
Along with her efforts with the Vasco Network, Villarroel is a research team member of The Galileo Project, a scientific effort led by astronomer Avi Loeb aimed at detecting extraterrestrial technological signatures produced by Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETCs).
“The Galileo project is excellently suited for these searches,” Villarroel told The Debrief.
With decades of imagery now in hand, modern advances in computer imaging and artificial intelligence could prove to be instrumental in helping astronomers make a breakthrough in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Considering some of the early observations by Lincoln La Paz and other astronomers at the dawn of the Space Age, it would indeed be ironic if it were ever proven that evidence of extraterrestrial technologies had been lurking much closer to home than most would have ever expected.
When asked about some of the intriguing observations that preceded the earliest launch of artificial satellites in 1957, Villarroel says cases from decades ago might indeed be worthy of renewed attention from modern astronomers, especially if the current efforts to analyze photographic plate collections ever turns up anything odd.
“These historical examples would be very interesting for us to look at through the VASCO glasses,” Villarroel says.
Micah Hanks is Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on Twitter: @MicahHanks.
Alex Dietrich (Ret.) served as one of the nation’s first female strike-fighter aviators as a F/A-18 pilot from 2001-2020.
Yesterday, the President held a press conference on the issue of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) due to a flurry of recent activity.
The nation was captivated by a suspected Chinese reconnaissance balloon floated across the continental United States. This incident prompted NORAD and other U.S. agencies to adjust their radar scans. The filter changes have exposed more unidentified objects, and another three were shot down over the weekend. These events highlight a longstanding domain awareness gap confronting our collective consciousness on three fronts: military defense, aviation safety, and scientific inquiry.
Officials have since disclosed that the Chinese military had previously breached U.S. airspace on at least four other occasions. We are now aware of these earlier incursions due to political and popular pressure to investigate and disclose UAP activity.
“UAP” replaces the antiquated (and stigmatized) term “UFO” to describe “anything in space, in the air, on land, in the sea or under the sea that can’t be identified,” per the FY22 National Defense Authorization Act. The bipartisan-sponsored UAP amendment requires DoD to establish a dedicated UAP program and publish annual unclassified reports to Congress (and thus the public) in the hopes of answering interminable questions.
Are they a threat? Are they natural phenomena? Are they disruptive tech? Should we shoot them down? Who has jurisdiction? If we don’t know what it is, how can we establish who is responsible and pays for the surveillance, response, and subsequent operations? It’s a slippery slope that deters even a hesitant first step toward attempting an answer.
I started asking the same questionsnearly 20 years ago in an F/A-18F flying off the coast of California. My colleagues and I encountered something we could not explain: an anomalous flying object in broad daylight against a clear blue sky and calm waters. Our carrier strike group had been watching anomalous hits on the radar for days. Once airborne, we were vectored and asked to investigate. We merged and visually acquired the object, a matte white oblong shape with no apparent flight control surfaces, visible means of propulsion, or smoke trail. Yet it outmaneuvered us with ease. We communicated in real-time via radio and then debriefed the intelligence team and chain of command back aboard the ship. Another F/A-18F launched and managed to capture video of the object with its forward-looking infrared (FLIR). A screenshot of that video has since become an iconic symbol of UAP encounters.
The Nimitz encounter is one of many. Pilots and credible eyewitnesses on the ground for years have reported and verified objects with unknown provenance and exotic capabilities. It would be irresponsible to suggest that any or all of these reports represent the same tech or are of the same origin. They are, by definition, unidentified. But we do know that collectively these anomalies expose a blindspot in our ability to sense them in the first place, track them in real time, and predict where they might pop up next.
Are UFOs real? Yes. Are they a foreign adversary? Maybe. Are they extraterrestrial in nature? It’s possible. Should we keep investigating? Absolutely.
There are many potential answers to the UAP mystery, and those answers are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Truth is persistent. Whatever is happening here, it will be revealed. How quickly depends on our collective commitment to authorize and resource appropriate agencies who can effectively leverage sensor technology, capture crowdsourced reporting, and mine the collective data.
Despite persistent snickering, anytime the topic of UFOs is broached, NASA has managed to convene a committee of respected high-ranking representatives from the DoD, FAA, and academic institutions for an ongoing UAP study.
The Pentagon’s commitment has evolved from the small Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification (AATIP) program into the robust All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Private industry is rising to the occasion with rapid innovation and agile solutions.
Alex Dietrich in the early 2000s in service with Strike Fighter Squadron 41 (VFA-41) also known as the “Black Aces”
(Credit: Alex Dietrich).
Enigma Labs is on the leading edge with a mechanism to systematically capture and analyze reporting at scale.
Congress has also made an impressive bipartisan push on the issue, with Senators Gillibrand (D-NY), Rubio (R-FL), Warner (D-VA), Graham (R-SC), Heinrich (D-NM), Blunt (R-MO), and Representative Gallagher (R-WI) speaking out to break the taboo and push agencies to cooperate and take UAP seriously.
The partnership between multiple objective parties, systematic data collection, and careful analytical methods will move us toward reporting and listening, away from ridicule and stigma. We can move the needle away from the unknown and toward the known.
Be vigilant. Stay curious. Look up. We have barely tasted the sky.
Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich (Ret.) served as one of the nation’s first female strike-fighter aviators as a F/A-18 pilot from 2001-2020. She logged more than 1,250 flight hours, 375 carrier-arrested landings, and was awarded a Combat Air Medal for 206 combat missions flown in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). She was also awarded a Bronze Star medal for a boots-on-ground deployment to Afghanistan in 2010. She has since taught leadership, ethics, and critical thinking at the George Washington University, U.S. Naval Academy, and now serves on the faculty of the University of Colorado School of Engineering in Boulder. Dietrich is an advocate for Legacy Flight Academy, a foundation that promotes diversity in aviation, and Wings for Val, supporting women in aviation.
For nearly 18 months, he’s been the first head of the Pentagon’s fledgling office tasked with investigating what the government calls “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” which military pilots have increasingly reported seeing in the skies.
Kirkpatrick set up an entire system for collecting data, waded through hundreds of reported UFO sightings and batted down whistleblower claims that the government covered up a program to reverse-engineer alien craft. And don’t forget the Chinese spy balloon episode.
In an interview with POLITICO Magazine, he talked about why he’s stepping down in December and how he sought to “institutionalize the solution for getting at the heart of these anomalies.” The Pentagon has a real interest in deciphering the sharp rise in unidentified crafts spotted by military pilots; if these aren’t aliens, they could be foreign adversaries posing incredibly new threats.
Kirkpatrick, 55, was perhaps the perfect person to lead what’s formally known as the Defense Department’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which was established in July 2022. A physicist who spent decades working in the defense-intelligence arena, he’s open to the possibility that we’re not alone in the universe, having co-authored a hotly-debated paper about alien motherships. But his bottom line is to focus on the science.
“If you are talking with NASA or the European Space Agency, and you’re talking about looking for life out in the universe, it is a very objective, very scientifically sound discussion and discourse,” he said, describing the public discourse. “As that discussion gets closer to the solar system, somewhere around Mars, it turns into science fiction. And then as you get even closer to Earth, and you cross into Earth’s atmosphere, it becomes conspiracy theory.”
Part of Kirkpatrick’s work going forward, he added, will be to “raise the level of the conversation” about these unidentified objects.
And yes, we did ask him if aliens are real.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Lara Seligman: You’ve only been in the job less than 18 months. Why are you leaving now?
Sean Kirkpatrick: When I took the job, I promised going in that I would do a year, and we would reevaluate. I have decided to stay on until towards the end of this year because there’s a couple more things I need to finish.
One of those is finishing Volume One of the historical review [required by the law], which really encompasses all of the interviewees that have come in to talk to us. And then laying that out as “Here’s what we’ve been able to prove is true, here’s what we’ve been able to prove is not true,” as a very thorough and objective research product. The legislative requirement for the historical report is not due until June of next year. I decided, because of the desire for more transparency faster, we are doing a Volume One, and then Volume Two will be delivered next year. Volume One covers everything up to about a month ago. Volume Two is going to cover anything new that comes up since we’ve turned on the reporting button on our website.
I deferred my retirement because I was asked to come do this. I set out those goals. It’s been about 18 months. I’m ready to move on. I have accomplished everything I said I was going to do.
Seligman: What changes to the office can we expect once you are gone?
Kirkpatrick: It won’t get a new name. They are not going to get a major makeover. The team has done a really exceptional job of setting the foundational stone for the vision I laid out and how we’re going to execute on this. Whoever comes in next, that will be really to execute the rest of those foundational stones and ensure that is projected into the future.
Kirkpatrick: No, these are all expected challenges. The balloon, that’s a very interesting case of the interagency in the U.S. government trying to understand the differences between a known anomalous thing, if you will, and an unknown anomalous thing. Our job is harder than “Hey, there’s a Chinese spy balloon, you know what it is? What is it doing?” That’s not our job. Our job is to understand the unknowns and what could be there. What are the possibilities that threaten us? And how do we get at it? How do I apply technical rigor to go after that “hunt” mission, if you will?
The whistleblowers are an interesting bit. We’ve had greater than 30 people now come in to talk to us. We have investigated every single one of them, every single story, every lead that provided any substantive evidence for us to go after.
David Grusch is a unique instance in that he has refused to come and share any of that information. We still can’t get him to come in. I’ve got five different people who have gone to talk to him to get him to come in. And the answers have always been everything from “We’re not cleared” to “It would jeopardize his whistleblower protections” to “Why can’t we just go get the information that he shared from the IG?” It’s every excuse that I have heard, why not to come in. And that’s been a challenge because now here we are, we’re about to put out Volume One of the historical review, which I believe captures most all of the people that he’s spoken with, but I can’t say that 100 percent because I can’t hear what he thinks he has. If he has evidence, I need to know what that is.
Seligman: What are the biggest accomplishments of your year and a half as the head of AARO?
Kirkpatrick: I laid out a plan about 18 months ago on what we needed to accomplish in order to make this mission area successful and to institutionalize the solution for getting at the heart of these anomalies. That included really several main areas. There was there was an analytic area, there was an operational area. There was a science and technology area. And then there was a strategic messaging or communications information sharing area.
In all of those, I mapped everything that the congressional language asked us to do for the last couple of years and kept a scorecard: These are all the things I needed to accomplish coming into this job.
We have standardized the analytic framework for how we deal with these observations in a very rigorous fashion. We have run that framework successfully now, and are ramping up the number of cases that are being resolved.
Operationally, we have institutionalized how to respond to and mitigate these incidents. We have worked with the Joint Staff and the commands and the combat support agencies and the intelligence community on questions like: When one of these things is observed, how do we get more data? How do we save that data that’s been collected? That was historically a very big problem: That data was not retained. Now data is required to be retained so that we can have something to analyze.
In the science and technology area, how do you look at all of these sensors and ensure that we understand, when an F-35 or an F-22 or ground radar sees an anomalous object, how do we know that’s not a normal object that you just haven’t calibrated against? We’ve run a campaign against those sensors, making sure that we measure each and every one of the unknown objects against them. And we turn those into additional modeling, simulation and training back to the operators so that we can reduce false alarms. The other thing that we’re doing there is a campaign of pattern of life: understanding what is normal, so that you can understand when an anomalous or an abnormal peak and activity occurs.
In the information sharing area: It’s been a long time coming, but we have gotten to the point now where we have a dedicated website. We are pushing material out, it is a living website, there will be updates on a periodic basis.
If I go back to the fundamental definition of a UAP [unidentified anomalous phenomena] that we had written into law, it is an unknown object that is not initially understood by the sensor or the people observing it. That doesn’t mean that it’s not understandable. It just means that initially when you look at it, you may not understand what that is.
People are subject to optical illusions, sensors are subject to being fooled or spoofed or even just having errors. Understanding what all of that is out in the real world is a very challenging mission space. It is hard to apply science and technology to the real world. It’s easy to do in a lab.
So putting all that together and putting it into an institutionalized space and getting it formalized and getting it into policy and getting it into orders: Those have all been major accomplishments that we set out to do, that I set out to do. And that has been achieved today.
Seligman: Are aliens real?
Kirkpatrick: That is a great question. I love that question. Number one, the best thing that could come out of this job is to prove that there are aliens, right? Because if we don’t prove there are aliens, then what we’re finding is evidence of other people doing stuff in our backyard. And that’s not good.
Two, from a scientific perspective: The scientific community will agree that it is statistically invalid to believe that there is not life out in the universe, as vast as the universe is and the number of galaxies and solar systems and planets. That is what part of NASA’s mission is to look for that life. The probability, however, that that life is intelligent and that it has found Earth and that it has come to Earth and that it has repeatedly crashed in the United States is not very probable.
So part of what we’ve been trying to do, and part of what I will continue to do until I’m done, is raise the level of the conversation. Let me explain. If you are talking with NASA or the European Space Agency, and you’re talking about looking for life out in the universe, it is a very objective, very scientifically sound discussion and discourse. As that discussion gets closer to the solar system, somewhere around Mars, it turns into science fiction. And then as you get even closer to Earth, and you cross into Earth’s atmosphere, it becomes conspiracy theory.
We need to change the level of the [public] conversation. It’s one of the reasons why we’ve engaged academia to work on a number of scientific papers that look at the probabilities of these things, and what are the signatures associated with that? So that we can benchmark what we’re doing in scientific proofs and in scientific fact and not hearsay and pointing fingers and government cover ups and conspiracies with no evidence of any of them.
Seligman: Is that why you wrote that paper with Harvard professor Avi Loeb about the theory that UAPs are probes from an alien mothership?
Kirkpatrick: That was the start of that work where we were looking at, if you want to believe these hypotheses, what are the signatures that you would expect to see from that? Because if I don’t see any of those signatures, with any of the data that we see, then that’s not a valid hypothesis. That’s how science works. Right? You have to have a hypothesis. You have to have measurables with that hypothesis, and then your data has to meet it. And you have to lay that out in a peer-reviewed journal so that you have something to pin it against.
Seligman: That paper though with your name attached made it look like you were backing the theory. Is this something that you regret?
Kirkpatrick: That paper was in draft when it was leaked. We hadn’t actually finished that paper and it needed a lot of editing before it went out.
Seligman: It wasn’t leaked. Avi Loeb posted it online.
Kirkpatrick: Well, yeah, he posted it without permission.
Seligman: Do you regret your involvement in that?
Kirkpatrick: No, because it’s the same principle. We are standing up for the facts. We are standing up for the scientific method. And this is how you go about doing it. You either do it or you don’t.
Seligman: What’s next for you?
Kirkpatrick: I have a number of things that I’m exploring right now. One of them for certain is going to be consulting, doing some board work, working with a number of folks across the interagency, the space community, the science and technology and intelligence community as we go forward. I think we’ll hear more in the coming month.
Pentagon UFO boss says strange sightings are either 'aliens' or a foreign power - and he hopes it's extraterrestrials
Pentagon UFO boss says strange sightings are either 'aliens' or a foreign power - and he hopes it's extraterrestrials
'If we don't prove it's aliens,' Pentagon UFO chief Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick said, 'then what we're finding is evidence of other people doing stuff in our backyard'
Kirkpatrick - formerly a laser physicist for the CIA - added, 'that's not good'
READ MORE: New analysis of 200ft 'saucer-shaped object' spotted over the Andes Mountains in 2010 finds it is 'a genuine UFO,' not 'a camera artifact'
According to the director of the Pentagon's UFO investigation office, 'the best thing that could come out of this job is to prove that there are aliens.'
The alternative to what would be a literally Earth-changing discovery of extraterrestrial life exploring our own planet would be that a rival foreign power could be 'doing stuff in our backyard,' he said.
Dr. Kirkpatrick's 18-month tenure as AARO's first ever director has been laced with controversy, as expected for a mandate once relegated to the scientific fringe.
According to the director of the Pentagon 's UFO investigation office, physicist Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, 'the best thing that could come out of this job is to prove that there are aliens.' Last July, Kirkpatrick described his national security mandate as helping avoid 'technical surprise'
'I'm ready to move on,' Kirkpatrick told Politico Tuesday, upon official confirmation of his retirement. 'I have accomplished everything I said I was going to do.'
Dr. Kirkpatrick added that there remains lingering tasks he hopes to have finished — including AARO's congressionally directed 'Historical Record Report' on UFOs, which is due to Congress in June 2024, over six months after Kirkpatrick's departure.
At a press conference this past Halloween, Kirkpatrick announced a new secure reporting mechanism designed to help AARO investigate claims of alleged highly secretive and potentially illegal US government UFO programs.
'The reporting mechanism is for current or former US government employees, service members, or contractors with direct knowledge of alleged US government programs or activities related to UAP [UFOs] dating back to 1945,' he said.
In its annual UAP (i.e. UFO) report, published this past October, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office stated that, 'None of these UAP reports have been positively attributed to foreign activities'
Ever since UFOs exploded back into public consciousness with a series of New York Times exposes in December 2017, government officials, scientists and devotees have reframed the mysteries as unidentified aerial, or anomalous, phenomena: 'UAP.'
The new name hopes to add caution and reduce preconceived notions as to the true nature these airborne mysteries.
When asked at the Halloween press conference whether AARO has reached out to officials from adversarial foreign nations in an effort to pool UAP data, Dr. Kirkpatrick replied that the concept was a non-starter from a national security standpoint.
'We certainly have not reached out to any adversaries, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which they're adversaries,' Kirkpatrick said.
While AARO's annual UAP report released this October found that 'none' of its hundreds of military UFO cases 'have been positively attributed to foreign activities,' Kirkpatrick expressed concern over telling, but less concrete, evidence.
'I am worried from a national security perspective,' Kirkpatrick told CNN in advance of the report's release.
'There are some indicators that may be attributed to foreign activity, and we are investigating those very hard,' he said.
Last summer, the AARO chief, who once worked on optical and laser physics projects for America's intelligence gathering agencies, including the CIA, described AARO's national security mandate to ABC News as avoiding 'technical surprise.'
To judge from AARO's own presentations to Congress and NASA's UAP advisory panel, the office has zeroed-in on a series of troubling cases involving so-called 'metallic orb' UAP.
This time last year, a classified 22-page report, compiled by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), described hundreds of unresolved cases, some involving 'orbs' caught on drone cameras that were then seen 'suddenly bolting off the screen.'
Some non-government groups, including OSINT specialists Bellingcat, have offered prosaic explanations for one of these 'orbs' — but Kirkpatrick has openly speculated in a paper with Harvard physicist Dr. Avi Loeb that these UAP could be alien probes.
Despite serious concerns from AARO's soon-to-be-departing director that the solution the UAP mystery might prove to be advanced tech flown by a foreign power, evidence exists that these 'metallic orbs' predate even the Cold War era.
Then too, journalists and investigators suspected it was a wartime anti-radar device from one of America's then-adversarial nations, Nazi Germany.
'It could be that those floating silver balls encountered by American airmen over the Reich are another German attempt to create interference for radio communications,' the AP's wartime radio editor wrote.
'The most common misconception is that [the possible phenomena] are all the same thing and they're all extraterrestrial,' as Kirkpatrick told ABC News last July, 'and neither of those are true.'
Have YOU seen one? The Pentagon reveals what the most commonly reported UFO looks like
But that could finally change following the official release of information from the Pentagon about the mysterious aerial phenomena.
The new Department of Defense document reveals characteristics of the typical UFO, including the colour and the shape, velocity, and flight level
Based on clues from reported sightings, the typical UFO has a round shape, usually described as spherical or an orb, with a white or silver colour, often translucent.
It also has a size of between 3 and 13 feet (1 to 4 metres) and usually travels through the air at a height just below commercial passenger planes.
The universe is so vast, it is unlikely that we are alone.
The universe is so vast, it is near impossible that alien life will ever physically reach us.
UFOs have always turned out to be celestial objects, airborne clutter, and even ground-bound objects.
The government task forces set to examine UFO reports lack the relevant expertise.
Part I of a Series
The UFO Movie They Don’t Want You to Seeis not just a movie, it’s a documentary that utilizes and even teaches critical thinking. It might as well have been called “A Logical Take on UFOs.” Skeptic, and the host of the Skeptoid podcast, Brian Dunning has exposed the truth behind over 900 urban myths, legends, and fantastic stories. It’s a master class on how to engage a logical take. Thus a logical review of Dunning’s new movie is essential.
We Are Not Alone
First, the movie presents a pretty compelling case that we are not alone in the universe. The universe is just too large, there are just too many planets and stars, and the conditions that make life possible are just too common, relatively speaking.* Life very likely exists, if not elsewhere in our galaxy, then elsewhere in the universe. At the same time, however, the same thing that makes alien life so likely—the vastness of the universe—makes it exceedingly unlikely that it will ever visit us. The distances are just too great, and the speed of light (the fastest anything can move) too slow, for life that evolved elsewhere to ever visit us in person. Interestingly, Dunning argues that some alien life likely already does know about us (or will soon); our planet teems with evidence of our existence. He also thinks that we (via a telescope) will likely detect evidence of life on another distant planet soon (within the century maybe). But physical visitation, by advanced biological alien beings, in advanced craft, near or on Earth, is almost statistically impossible.
What Are UFOs?
Why, then, are there so many UFO sightings? If they aren’t aliens, what are they? Dunning points out that there is good data on this: huge collections of UFO reports and what they turned out to be. In all of history, every time a UFO sighting has been verifiable (and not just an unverifiable incredible story, fuzzy video, or blurry photo), it has always, without exception, turned out to be one of three things:
A (misidentified) celestial object (for example, planet, meteor, satellite, rocket, Star Link launch)
A (misidentified) piece of airborne clutter (for example, weather balloons, planes, blimps, birds)
A (misidentified) object on the ground (for example, lighthouses, radio tower lights, grounded objects that look airborne from a plane window because of visual illusions)
Although the data proves this, Dunning goes on to illustrate his point by explaining four of the most famous UFO stories and videos of all time—evidence that believers have claimed to be the most rock-solid proof of alien visitation: The Rendlesham Forest incident, the Ariel School incident, the 1967 Malstorm AFB incident, Jimmy Carter’s UFO sighting, and the Gimel, Go Fast, Tic Tac, and Green Triangles videos. In each case, the explanation falls into one of the three above categories; it is beyond any reasonable doubt, in each case, that nothing extraordinary happened. What’s more, in each case, some illusion, trick of perception, or fault of memory is at play. The explanation was not, and never has been an extraordinary craft—for example, an alien craft, or one vastly beyond our current technology.
Want to prove yourself right? Try to prove yourself wrong
That’s not to say that it could never be, but Dunning rightly points out that a claim that a UFO is an extraordinary craft is an extraordinary claim—and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And when one wants to prove an extraordinary claim, with extraordinary evidence, one must try to falsify the extraordinary claim; you must consider and rule out all the non-extraordinary explanations.
This is one of the most basic rules of both scientific and critical thinking. Because anyone can find some evidence for anything, if you want to prove yourself right, but try to do only that, you inevitably will—even if what you believe is blatantly false. If you want to actually prove yourself right, you must try to prove yourself wrong; only if you honestly try to do that and fail, will you actually have good reason to believe that you are right. This is how scientists protect themselves against self-deception; they'll even invite others to try to prove them wrong.
What the UAP Task Force Needs, But Is Lacking
This brings me to the overarching conclusion of the documentary: the government’s Unidentified Arial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) is not actually up to its stated task. He shows a government official describing the experts that the UAP Task Force has brought on board: academics like physicists and metallurgists. Although that sounds impressive, these are the kinds of experts you would only need if a UFO turned out to be a spectacular craft (that was recovered). But since in the entire history of UFO sightings this has never happened, the task force is stacked with the experts that it is least likely to need.
What it needs is experts who can rule out the, historically and statistically, most likely explanations: celestial bodies, airborne clutter, and ground-bound objects. You need a host of (observational) astronomers, experienced personnel who are experts at looking at the sky and identifying what is in it. You need UFO skeptics,** who have spent their lives falsifying claims that UFOs are aliens; critical thinkers who know all the trip-ups that lead people to faulty conclusions. And you need NTSB air crash investigators—mainly because they know best what kind of illusions and faulty perceptions lead pilots, and the rest of us, astray. The task force doesn't seem to have them.
In Part II of this series: The possible criticism of the documentary.
Notes:
To be fair, most of the universe is inhospitable to life. However, the conditions that led to life on Earth are not unique to Earth. As Dunning puts it, “Those same conditions have been happening on rocky planets throughout the universe since the beginning of time.”
UFO enthusiasts, Dunning observes, won’t like this; they’ll claim the presence of skeptics will bias the conclusions. But a true quest for knowledge always invites skepticism; that viewpoint must be represented. Again, to prove something true, one must honestly try but fail to prove it false.
UAP Makes Three Changes In Direction Near Sun, UFO Sighting News.
UAP Makes Three Changes In Direction Near Sun, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Oct 27, 08:30:07
Location of sighting: Earths Sun
Sun camera: LASCO C3
I sent a message to NASA on X platform (formerly Twitter) today asking them if they can explain this unusual object. I wrote...Hey @NASA @NASAJPL @NASAKennedy Whats up with this UAP changing directions three times in the span of a few seconds on Sun imager LASCO C3? Can you give us a zoom in image of this craft? UFO Sighting News. In space, an object that doesn't have any propulsion system or external forces acting upon it will generally continue to move in a straight line at a constant velocity, following Newton's first law of motion (the law of inertia). This means that without any propulsion or external influences, it will not change its direction on its own.
If they answer I will let you know. But this UAP makes three course corrections in a few seconds time. That means it's intelligently controlled. Therefore, it's an alien ship.
In every war there are often lesser known experiences floating about beyond the typical tales of fighting and heroism. Here in the background of all of the conflict and death often lurk outlandish accounts of something strange going on, something perhaps even more frightening than the enemy. Strange things in the sky have long been said to loiter around places of war, going all the way back to ancient times, but this is far from just in the realm of superstition and the ignorant of the past misunderstanding common celestial phenomena, and here we will look at some of the stranger cases of these things congregating to war all the way up into modern times.
Starting from World War I we have the spectacular time the Red Baron supposedly shot down a flying saucer. The so- called Red Baron was the German ace pilot Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, who was both renowned and feared for his unrivaled flying skills, often considered to be “the ace of aces” and racking up at least 80 air combat victories over his wartime carreer. In the book UFOs of the First World War, by Nigel Watson, there is a curious account that seems to show that human pilots were not the only ones the Red Baron hunted down and engaged. The story goes that as he was flying over the Belgian trenches in the spring of 1917 with fellow pilot Peter Waitzrick, the Baron spotted an unidentified object that was described as “an upside down silver saucer with orange lights” hovering in clear blue skies. After a moment of awe, fear and wonder, the Red Baron opened fire upon it, and Waitzrick, who reportedly saw the whole incident, described what happened next as follows:
We were terrified because we’d never seen anything like it before. The Baron immediately opened fire and the thing went down like a rock, shearing off tree limbs as it crashed into the woods.
But wait, it gets even weirder still. As they passed over the wreckage, two humanoid figures were supposedly seen to climb out of the otherworldly wrecked craft and scurry off into the trees, after which they were not seen again. Waitzrick would keep the whole bizarre story to himself until 80 years later, in 1999, when he would tell the world about it. There are certainly some suspicious aspects of the whole tale, not the least of which is that Waitzrick chose to come out with his amazing experience after 8 decades of silence to The Weekly World News, which many readers will recognize as perhaps not the most trustworthy of news publications. Also, the planes they were piloting were claimed to be Fokker triplanes, which is odd since these planes would not be used in the war until some months after the alleged event, in August of 1917. Perhaps Waitzrick just didn’t know anyone who would take his story seriously and didn’t know any better so it just happened to be that the Weekly World News picked it up, and perhaps with the planes his memory after nearly a century was not what it once was, but one thing he seems to be quite sure of is that the infamous Red Baron shot down a UFO, saying:
There’s no doubt in my mind that the Baron shot down some kind of spacecraft from another planet and those little guys who ran off into the woods were space aliens of some kind.
Other UFOs encountered during World War I are the so-called “Flaming Onions” which were typically described as glowing green balls that would zip around, do flips, other aerial maneauvers, and very often chase aircraft, easily outpacing and outmaneuvering them but not actually ever attacking them in any way. This strange phenomenon was purportedly seen throughout the war by both sides of the engagement, and it always terrified those who experienced it. One theory as to what the Flaming Onions were is that they might have been flares fired by the Germans, but flares typically do not actively chase aircraft and seasoned pilots can usually recognize flares as such. They remain a curious unexplained mystery of the war.
Besides spaceships and weird lights, another baffling aerial phenomenon reported during World War I began with a very strange sighting made by a Lieutenant Frederick Ardsley as he was on a morning patrol in northern France on January 9, 1918. As he flew along, another biplane of the same make and model as his own positioned itself next to him, and when he looked to see who was in the cockpit he was surprised to see a beautiful woman with long flowing blonde hair blow him a kiss and do a Can Can dance in her cockpit before swiftly flying away. Ardsley attempted to chase the mysterious pilot, but she was reportedly a far superior pilot and was able to easily lose him. Unbelievably, the mystery woman would show up at other times during the war and engage German pilots, usually easily beating them and shooting them down, and sighted by both pilots and civilians alike. Some reports even say that her plane was impervious to bullets or that she would vanish into thin air. She came to be known as “Lady Sopwith” or “The Valkyrie,” and became legendary. No one knows who she was or whether this is all just another wartime myth.
If alien forces are somehow attracted to war, then considering that World War II is one of the greatest and most massive wars of all time it is perhaps no surprise at all that they should be drawn there as well. On the evening of November 27, 1944, a Lt. Fred Ringwald of the U.S. Air Force was riding as an observer on a night operation over the Rhine Valley, just north of Strasbourg on the French-German border when he saw something in the sky that was not supposed to be there. There over a hill in the distance were eight to 10 of lights in a row, glowing fiery orange, and when he pointed them out the pilot and the rest of the crew saw them too. They checked with Allied ground radar, but they registered nothing. As they decided whether to engage, the lights then simply vanished. It was completely baffling to them, as these lights had not been any known aircraft they were familiar with and defied any rational explanation, and they decided to keep it to themselves.
Ringwald and his crew were part of a U.S. Air Force unit called the 415th Special Operations Squadron. Formed in 1943, it was tasked with carrying out missions in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations, and then later in northwestern Europe during World War II. As the name suggests, they were mostly involved in nighttime operations and missions, which made them especially likely to notice strange lights in the skies around them. Although Ringwald’s crew stayed quiet about what they had seen on that mission, they would soon learn that other flights from their unit were starting to see something similar in the sky, in particular over the German-occupied Rhine Valley. Pilots were coming forward with stories of strange lights, usually red, orange, or green following them, or even flying parallel to their planes to pace them. They were reported as typically cigar-shaped, with no wings or visible propulsion system, and very maneuverable and fast, as well as often flying in formation of up to 10 of them and never showing up on radar. These mysterious lights had a habit of seeming to toy with the pilots, before suddenly tearing away at breathtaking speed or simply vanishing into thin air, and no one had any idea of what they were. One baffled airman would give a good representative account when he said:
I was flying and there was an object next to me. I couldn’t get rid of it, I slowed up, it was there. I sped up, it was there. I would dive, it would be there. I turned to starboard and two balls of fire turned with me. I turned to the port side and they turned with me. We were going 260 miles an hour and the balls were keeping up with me. I called. Nothing on radar.
These objects defied all explanation, and there were whispers that they were not of this planet. Sightings began pouring in from all over the European Theater of war, and it was looking more like the War of the Worlds than World War II. Before long these mysterious glowing craft were being called "Foo Fighters," which is a silly name that came from the comic strip Smokey Stover, in which the main character had the catchphrase “Where there’s foo there’s fire.” Considering the reliability and experience of these witnesses, on top of the sheer number and consistency of reports, the military launched an investigation into the phenomenon. At first they suspected that the Foo Fighters were some sort of top secret German weapons, but the rabbit hole got deeper when they learned that enemy pilots were seeing the same thing and they also realized that the objects never actually seemed to attack or act in a threatening manner. After a full investigation there was no official conclusion reached. Theories include that these Foo Fighters were enemy tech, some sort of atmospheric phenomenon, or just combat fatigue and the pilots seeing things, but their true nature remains unknown.
Interestingly, over in the Pacific Theater of Operations of the war pilots there were also reporting bizarre things in the sky. In this case, rather than glowing objects zipping about doing aerial maneuvers, pilots typically reported “balls of fire” hanging in the sky, often just hovering there before shooting off or vanishing. Once again, theories were thrown around that these were just some kind of Japanese weapon, but as with the Foo Fighters of Europe they never seemed to attack and the enemy fighters were seeing them as well. Although the terms UFO and flying saucer had not yet been coined, both the Foo Fighters and the Pacific balls of fire would have certainly fit the bill. Aliens or something else? The answer remains lost to the mists of time.
Moving on to the Korean War, fought between North Korea and South Korea from 1950 to 1953, we have a case that has largely remained confined to the shadows of history, and which supposedly involved a whole regiment of men who seem to have come under attack by forces from beyond this world. A very bizarre account from the Korean War emerged in January of 1987, when John Timmerman, of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), sat down for an interview with a former U.S. Army private first class (PFC) by the name of Mr. Francis P. Wall, who had a most unusual tale to tell. Wall had been deployed with the Army infantry, 25th Division, 27th Regiment, 2nd Battalion, 'Easy' Company, and in May of 1951 they were operating outside of Chorwon, in an area known by the military as the Iron Triangle, on a mission to reach a small village in the mountains. The village in question was in an area marked to be bombarded with artillery fire, wiped off the face of the earth, and Wall and his men were there to make sure that any innocent civilians were properly warned of the impending rain of fire. Indeed, the air was already reverberating with the thumps and booms of shells hitting, the dark of night occasionally lit up with flashes in the distance. Wall and company had made their way to a steep slope overlooking the village and the fiery flowers of artillery airbursts painting the scene with fire, and that was when they saw something they could not explain up there in the air in the middle of this war ravaged scene. Wall would say of this:
We suddenly noticed on our right-hand side what appeared to be a jack-o-lantern come wafting down across the mountain. And at first no one thought anything about it. So we noticed that this thing continued on down to the village to where, indeed, the artillery air bursts were exploding. It had an orange glow in the beginning. We further noticed that this object was [so] quick that it could get into the center of an airburst of artillery and yet remain unharmed. But then this object approached us. And it turned a blue-green brilliant light. It's hard to distinguish the size of it; there's no way to compare it. The light was pulsating. This object approached us.
The men were understandably very unsettled by this point, as the object was obviously not one of theirs, nor any known aircraft any of them had ever seen before, and they radioed the situation in to their superiors, requesting permission to open fire on it. Why they would think that their rifles would do any good when they had just witnessed it casually make its way through artillery explosions is anyone’s guess, but the permission was granted and Wall claims that he would then open fire on it with his M-1 rifle loaded with armor piercing bullets. He claims that he hit the object several times, hearing the pings of the bullets against what sounded like metal, and the bullets seemed to have an effect on it where the artillery had not, apparently damaging it and causing it to exhibit some strange behavior. Wall would say:
Now why would that bullet damage this craft if the artillery rounds didn't? I don't know, unless they had dropped their protective field around them, or whatever. But the object went wild, and the light was going on and off. It went off completely once, briefly. And it was moving erratically from side to side as though it might crash to the ground. Then, a sound -- we had heard no sound previous to this -- the sound of, like, diesel locomotives revving up. That's the way this thing sounded.
This was where things would get pretty harrowing, as according to Wall the craft unleashed some sort of a retaliatory attack on them. The craft allegedly emitted a kind of ray or beam that came in pulses, and which they could see aiming at them “like a searchlight.” When the ray swept over them the men found themselves overcome with a tingling, burning sensation, and while it didn’t seem to be causing any visible damage they could feel it penetrating through their skin and the pain was enough to make them scramble for cover, scurrying in a panic into their bunkers, where the attack seemed to continue. Wall describes the terrifying and otherworldly scene thusly:
So the company commander, Lt. Evans, hauled us into our bunkers. We didn't know what was going to happen. We were scared. These are underground dugouts where you have peep holes to look out to fire at the enemy. So, I'm in my bunker with another man. We're peeping out at this thing. It hovered over us for a while, lit up the whole area with its light, and then I saw it shoot off at a 45-degree angle, that quick, just there and gone. That quick. And it was as though that was the end of it.
Unfortunately for Wall and the others, this seemed to be far from the end of it, as over the next few days they would begin to develop an array of debilitating physical symptoms, including disorientation, memory loss, headaches, stomachaches, nausea, and extreme weakness that was potent enough that some of them had trouble even walking. Doctors who examined them could find no reason or cause for these symptoms, the only evidence that anything was wrong being an unusually high white blood cell count that could not be explained. Despite nothing really officially being wrong with them, the men were nevertheless all physically ill and suffering from something, and it was widely assumed by them that this was the doing of the beam that UFO had fired at them. According to Wall, many of them continued to suffer from ill health for years after the encounter, with him saying that even to that day he had frequent bouts of disorientation, memory loss, weakness, and difficulty putting on weight.
In later years it has been speculated that the men were probably suffering from radiation sickness, but there have been plenty of other ideas by those who have heard of this rather obscure case. One idea is that the Soviets or even the Chinese had been carrying out covert military experiments in the remote region testing anti-gravity technology and sonic weaponry, and indeed this has been used as an explanation for many of the dozens of other UFO sightings made during the Korean War. Of course there is also the notion that this encounter was exactly what it looks like, being an attack by an actual UFO, perhaps having been present in the region observing the combat for inscrutable reasons, and it has even been suggested that the craft did not mean to launch a fatal attack, but to merely disorient and immobilize them, hence the fact that that they did not suffer any severe injury or death.
Then again, maybe this is all hallucinations and the result of trauma, tiredness, and stress in the war-torn environment. It could even just be a tall tale conjured up by Wall himself, as he is the only official witness, and although he claims that 25 other men witnessed this event none of these others seem to have ever been tracked down and independently interviewed. Just about the only thing known for sure is tht he was indeed a soldier in the Korean War in the area specified on the date specified, but after that no one knows. Although he swore an oath that his story is true, in the end we are really left to take the word of one witness. So was this just war time hallucinations, Soviet or Chinese experiments, or an actual attack by an otherworldly UFO? It is quite likely we will never have a concrete answer, and that this will just remain another curious account lost in the fog and history of warfare.
By all accounts it seems that troops in the Vietnam War were also absolutely plagued by UFO activity, and some of the most spectacular reports of alien encounters that seem to have occurred during the Vietnam War have to do with actual military engagements with UFOs. One such incident allegedly occurred on June 15, 1968, along the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Vietnam, where a patrol boat known as PCF-12, commanded by a Lieutenant Pete Snyder, was on a routine night patrol near Cua Viet. At 12:30AM, PCF-12 reportedly received a frantic distress call from another patrol boat in the vicinity, PCF-19, claiming that they were being attacked by unidentified lights they were calling “enemy helicopters,” which seemed odd because the North Vietnamese enemy were not known to utilize combat helicopters at the time.
Snyder ordered the PCF-12 to head for PCF-19’s position to offer assistance, and they as they closed in reported spotting in the sky two circular bright lights immersed in a “strange glow” hovering over PCF-19’s position. As they approached, one of the strange lights reportedly emitted a bright flash of light, after which PCF-19 exploded in a cascade of water and flying debris. Directly after the destruction of PCF-19, the two enigmatic lights were described as rapidly accelerating away towards the sea as PCF-12 scouted the area for any possible survivors of the carnage they had just witnessed. Two wounded men were found and recalled that the two UFOs had been trailing them for miles along the river. The survivors then claimed that they had decided to fire upon the threatening, mysterious objects, and that was when one of them had issued a piercing blast of light to obliterate the boat. At first it was thought by officials that the PCF-12 had been the victim of an enemy missile fired from shore, but a later AP dispatch from Saigon would quote a military spokesman as having attributed the loss of PCF-19 to an “unidentified object,” and not enemy coastal batteries or missiles.
The PCF-12 continued its patrol up the river and were soon approached by the same two unidentified lights, which took up positions hovering on the port and starboard sides around 300 yards away and 100 feet above the water. PCF-12 called in to headquarters to try and get an idea of what they were dealing with, but were met with the response that there were no aircraft in the area at the time. Realizing that these craft were not friendly, Snyder ordered his men to open fire on the lights, which apparently did little to faze or even slow them down, and PCF-12 began to retreat at full speed as the two mysterious aircraft tailed and stalked them, flickering in the night the whole time. Second engine man Jim Steffes would later claim that he got a good look at the craft and described them as having “a rounded front like an observation helo,” and what looked like “two crewman sitting side by side.”
Strangely, although no weapons could be seen mounted on the unidentified aircraft, PCF-12 nevertheless found itself being fired upon. Steffes remembered seeing tracer rounds piercing up into the night from the nearby base Point Dume, with their targets being what he said were other far-off blinking circular lights whizzing about in the sky above. Eventually, a group of Phantom F4 fighter jets arrived to converge upon and chase off the strange lights that were plaguing PCF-12 out to sea, leaving the crew to wonder what in the hell had just happened.
At roughly the same time, another very strange incident was unfolding out in the South China Sea with an Allied ship of the Royal Australian Navy, the HMAS Hobart, which was patrolling near Tiger Island, about 20kms off Cap Lay and reported sighting up to 30 unidentified slow-moving lights hovering in the night sky near their ship, which were at first thought to be Russian-built M-14 ‘Hound’ helicopters, but upon closer inspection it could be seen that they were not. US 7th Air Force Phantom fighter-bombers were sent to engage, supported by generous anti-aircraft fire from the ground. The lights flew out to sea as they were pursued by the fighters, which fired upon them mercilessly along with several other military ships in the area, which unfortunately contributed to the friendly fire incident in which a U.S. swift boat was sunk by missiles, killing 5 of the 7 crew.
The HMAS Hobart was prepped for battle when the radar room detected an incoming unidentified aircraft coming in fast with no identification number to mark it as friend or foe. Word soon came in that the craft was “friendly,” but it was then that a missile struck the ship to kill one and injure two others, followed by a barrage of two more missiles. Whatever the craft was swiftly fled the scene before it could be shot down. In the meantime, F4 jets scrambled about firing upon the lights, joined by a hail of anti-aircraft fire from the ground, with attempts to communicate with whoever was onboard the mystery craft going unanswered. Eventually, the lights floated off and the fighter pilots were ordered back to base. The following morning, a complete search of the area turned up not a single shred of wreckage of an enemy helicopter, or any other enemy aircraft for that matter, despite the intense fighting that had occurred. The complete and utter lack of any wreckage of any aircraft was baffling considering that these enemies had come under such resistance and been met with so much concerted, relentless fire. The Royal Australian Navy News would later confirm:
No physical evidence of helicopters destroyed has been discovered in the area of activity nor has extensive reconnaissance produced any evidence of enemy helicopter operations in or near the DMZ.
There was little confidence among the men engaged in the incident that the aggressors had been “enemy helicopters” as was at first claimed. After all, if that were the case they should have been decimated by the potent retaliatory force displayed upon their arrival and attacks. There was also no trace whatsoever of helicopters at the time in the area before or during the incident and no wreckage afterwards. A skipper aboard the Hobart during the baffling engagement would later claim that it was certainly not enemy helicopters, expressing his doubt of such a theory by saying:
Neither before nor after the incident … was there any report by any of the ships of a helicopter being there [around Tiger Island]. Now having said that, the captain of one of the American ships told me later at Subic Bay that he thought there were helicopters there, but the fact is he didn’t report, and if he believed there was a helicopter … it was his duty to report it at the time, but there was no report.
Whatever the lights were that caused so much chaos continued to be sighted sporadically for months afterwards along the DMZ, furtively skirting around the area, wandering back and forth over the line, and baffling those who saw them. They were often sighted by radar roaming up and down the coast, and apparently no one could quite figure out what they were. They appeared on radar to be low, slow moving objects just like helicopters, but often there would be no visible confirmation or they would not look at all like helicopters. They were also prone to just disappearing into thin air, and jets scrambled to intercept the objects would arrive to find nothing there. Troops on the ground would sometimes witness the lights appear and disappear out of nowhere, and in one such case American artillerymen reported seeing a group of mysterious lights along the Ben Hai River, but when they had opened fire on them the objects had suddenly vanished as if they had never been there at all. At no point did anyone report seeing an actual helicopter, and the strange objects were always described as moving lights, often hovering erratically or moving in sudden bursts of speed inconsistent with a helicopter.
The origin of the strange lights remains unknown to this day. There were theories at the time that somehow a misreading of radar signals had occurred, which had then made other friendly vessels appear to be slow moving flying blips, or that the North Vietnamese had more helicopter power than had been previously assumed. In the end the official explanation was that it was all due to atmospheric disturbances or possible enemy helicopter activity, coupled with panicked friendly fire, and there have also been theories that it was all due to bird flocks or even insect swarms, but does any of this really match up to what occurred? Would trained Navy and fighter jet personnel go to engage such mundane phenomena? What hit the Hobart? Indeed what attacked the PCF 12 and 19 at precisely the same time? If there were enemy helicopters involved where was all the wreckage, why were they never successfully shot down, and wouldn’t these trained men know helicopters when they saw them? It is also strange that an enemy helicopter would so brazenly venture over the heavily defended DMZ, and it would be strange that they should fly around with their lights on all of the time for hours on end. In the case of the Hobart it seems obvious that this was some sort of concerted attack, but by who or what remains open to debate and speculation.
It is interesting that these reports make mention of “enemy helicopters,” as this was a term used so often to describe any unidentified lights in the sky in Vietnam that it became sort of a code word for “UFO,” regardless of any relation the object had to an actual helicopter, becoming sort of a catch-all phrase for anything weird in the sky. The fact that the Viet Cong were not known to use helicopters made it a perfect way to explain discreetly when men were seeing something in the sky that shouldn’t be there. On October 16, 1973, the USAF Chief of Staff, General George S. Brown, gave a press conference in Illinois where he addressed this terminology to some extent when asked about UFOs in Vietnam, saying:
I don’t know whether this story has ever been told or not. They weren’t called UFOs. They were called enemy helicopters. And they were only seen at night and they were only seen in certain places. They were seen up around the DMZ [demilitarized zone] in the early summer of ’68. And this resulted in quite a little battle. And in the course of this, an Australian destroyer took a hit and we never found any enemy, we only found ourselves when this had all been sorted out. And this caused some shooting there, and there was no enemy at all involved but we always reacted. Always after dark.
Another comment on the matter was made by a patrol boat captain by the name of Bill Cooper, who served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969. During a UFO conference in Los Angeles in 1989, Cooper would say of his own experiences:
After about five months I was sent up north to the DMZ, to a place called Qua Vieaf [perhaps Qua Viet] on the Tacan [sic] river …. It was while there that I discovered that there was a tremendous amount of UFO and alien activity in Vietnam. It was always reported in official messages as ‘enemy helicopters’. Now any of you who know anything about the Vietnam war know that the North Vietnamese did not have any helicopters especially after our first couple of air raids into North Vietnam [during 1965]. Even if they had, they would not have been so foolish as to bring them over the DMZ, because that would have ensured their demise.
Another American ship was not directly attacked, but nevertheless allegedly had a very intimidating and threatening encounter with an Unidentified Underwater Submersible, or USO. In 1974 the ammunitions ship the USS Kilauea was operating in the Indian Ocean along with a destroyer and a carrier, and the witness claims that one evening at around 9PM he had been on deck with two friends looking up at the brilliant array of stars in the night sky. Their attention was drawn to the eerie beauty of the shifting light trails formed by phosphorus algae in the wake of the ship in formation in front of them, yet as they watched this light display of nature something else began glowing in the depths, becoming brighter and brighter until it became a blinding orange/yellow ball just under the surface. The mysterious blazing orb then spectacularly burst forth from the water to arch right over the top of the destroyer, just missing smashing into it, before crashing back into the ocean on the other side and sinking back into the dark depths. The witness would say of the puzzling, frightening incident:
We all just stared at each other with our mouths open. We could not believe what we saw, but I asked friends of mine who were on watch on the bridge if they saw it and they all did. There was nothing ever reported that I know of though and we just quit talking about it. I bet the destroyer got a good look at it. It went right over the bridge of that ship and it was big. Maybe 150 to 200 feet in diameter. That was my big encounter.
It is all a very intriguing peek into some of the more mysterious aspects of these wars. Such tales lurk beyond the known history of these conflicts, hiding in the cracks and shadows and invisible, lost to the mists of time save for the few who are willing to share their bizarre tales. What went on out there in the skies above all of the fighting? What were these troopers and pilots dealing with? Were these cases some sort of experimental aircraft, the stresses of combat playing tricks on the imagination, or something altogether more bizarre? The true answers have been buried by history and lost to the mysterious shadows of history.
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...
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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 74 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.