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How UFO sightings went from joke to national security worry in Washington
In 2007, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid called his colleagues Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye to a specially secured room in the Capitol where highly classified information was discussed.
Stevens, a Republican from Alaska, and Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii, controlled funding for supersecret Pentagon operations. Reid wanted to put an idea on their radar, one that needed to be kept hush-hush not just for national security but because it was, as Reid’s aides told him, kind of crazy.
He wanted the Pentagon to investigate UFOs.
“Everyone told me this would cause me nothing but trouble,” said Reid, a Democrat who represented Nevada, home of the military’s top-secret Area 51 test site, a central attraction of sorts for UFO hunters. “But I wasn’t afraid of it. And I guess time has proven me right.”
That’s because official Washington is swirling with chatter — among top senators, Pentagon insiders, and even former CIA directors — about UFOs. What was once a ticket to the political loony bin has leaped off Hollywood screens and out of science-fiction novels and into the national conversation. There are even new government abbreviations.
For some Navy pilots, UFO sightings were an ordinary event: ‘Every day for at least a couple years’
“This used to be a career-ending kind of thing,” said John Podesta, who generally kept his interest in UFOs to himself when he was President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. “You didn’t want to get caught talking about it because you’d be accused of walking out of an ‘X-Files’ episode.”
But now there isn’t just talk.
An F/A-18 Super Hornet military jet captured this infrared video from several miles away of an unidentified flying object moving at high speed. The Department of Defense removed the date and location of the footage before releasing it. (To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science)
Last summer, the Defense Department issued a news release with the following headline: “Establishment of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.” The mission of the UAPTF “is to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security,” according to the Pentagon.
A few months later, as part of President Donald Trump’s spending and pandemic relief package, the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), included a provision calling for the director of national intelligence to help produce an unclassified report on everything government agencies know about UFOs, including scores of unusual sightings reported by military pilots.
That report is due sometime next month.
Thanks to Trump-era covid relief bill, a UFO report may soon be public — and it’ll be big, ex-official says
In the meantime, ex-government officials have been saying some remarkable things.
Late last year, former CIA director John Brennan, appearing on a podcast hosted by George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowen, said it was “a bit presumptuous and arrogant for us to believe that there’s no other form of life anywhere in the entire universe.”
And last month, former CIA director R. James Woolsey said in an interview with the Black Vault, a website that collects paranormal sightings, that he wasn’t “as skeptical as I was a few years ago, to put it mildly, but something is going on that is surprising to a series of intelligent aircraft, experienced pilots.”
Both former CIA directors were referring to Air Force and Navy pilot videos that have surfaced in recent years showing unexplained objects on radar traveling at unusual speeds and performing aerial maneuvers that defy logic when compared with what even the most advanced military planes are known to be capable of.
“Look at that thing!” a pilot screams in one video as his radar locks in on a strange flying object.
“It’s rotating,” another pilot says.
“My gosh,” the other pilot says.
FAA recording: "A UFO!"
A possible UFO sighting is discussed in audio recorded during a flight on February 24. (Allie Caren/The Washington Post)
The authenticity of the videos has been confirmed by Pentagon officials. Some of them were recently featured on “60 Minutes.”
“I’ve seen some of those videos from Navy pilots,” Brennan said, “and I must tell you that they are quite eyebrow-raising when you look at them.” He added, “I think some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”
This is not the first time UFOs have appeared on Washington’s radar — literally or figuratively.
In 1952, there were reports that “flying saucers” were seen on radar flying around the nation’s capital, prompting front-page headlines around the country. “SAUCERS SWARM OVER CAPITAL” a breathless headline in the Cedar Rapids Gazette declared. The Washington Post was a bit more sedate on its front page: “‘Saucer’ Outran Jet, Pilot Says; Air Force Puts Lid on Inquiry.”
Television owners reported that their TVs were acting wacky. Air Force fighter jets were scrambled. They found nothing. Senior military officials blamed the weather.
In 1966, future president Gerald Ford, then a congressman from Michigan, demanded a congressional investigation after his constituents reported seeing UFOs back home. He didn’t get one. A few years later, future president Jimmy Carter reported seeing a UFO just before giving a speech at a Lions Club supper in Leary, Ga.
“There was a bright light in the sky,” Carter told GQ magazine in 2005. “We all saw it. And then the light, it got closer and closer to us. And then it stopped, I don’t know how far away, but it stopped beyond the pine trees. And all of a sudden it changed color to blue, and then it changed to red, then back to white.”
What we know — and don't know — about aliens and UFOs
The Post's Cleve R. Wootson Jr. explains why a 2017 admission from the government was like pouring kerosene on UFO conspiracy theories. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
Washington’s more modern, post-“X-Files” interest seems to have started with Reid’s meeting in the Capitol. His own interest in UFOs dates to the mid-1990s, when a TV reporter in Las Vegas invited him to a UFO conference among academics and the UFO-curious.
“I found it really interesting and compelling,” said Reid, who has yet to see a UFO for himself.
A decade or so later, Reid was contacted by Robert Bigelow, a wealthy acquaintance in the motel industry whose father died in a plane crash and whose family reportedly blamed UFOs. Bigelow, a UFO enthusiast, owned a ranch in Utah where there had been a number of paranormal events. Cattle vanished. UFOs were spotted. Strange magnetic fields appeared. A Defense Intelligence Agency official wanted to visit, so he called Reid. His interest convinced the majority leader that it was time to get serious about UFOs.
It only took about 10 minutes to persuade his colleagues, Stevens and Inouye, to support approximately $22 million in funds for the Pentagon to start a program to investigate. Stevens was a particularly easy sell, Reid recalled, because as an Air Force pilot during World War II he had seen some pretty weird stuff, including an object that didn’t appear to be a plane that mimicked his movements in the air.
Reid is now retired but still talking about UFOs to anyone who asks. The man at the center of Washington chatter on the matter these days is Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence officer who, according to Reid, ran the Defense Department unit that emerged from the secret meeting held in the Capitol building.
Elizondo recently appeared on “60 Minutes,” saying, “I’m not telling you that, that it doesn’t sound wacky. What I’m telling you, it’s real. The question is, what is it? What are its intentions? What are its capabilities?”
In an interview with The Post, Elizondo explained why the issue in Washington had turned from farce to serious inquiry.
“We are now relying on military and intelligence-collection capabilities to collect the data and then try to interpret the data,” he said. “This is not a conversation about how grandma saw some lights in the backyard and then people wind up scratching their heads wondering what it was.”
The country can’t wait any longer to take the matter seriously, he said.
“We’re seeing these things on a daily basis,” he said. “The longer we keep a lid on it, the more problematic it becomes. It actually works against our interests to keep a cork on this.”
But the willingness to publicly discuss UFOs is, for some Washington officials, still complicated. Warner, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, declined an interview request.
“We won’t have a comment on this,” his spokeswoman said.
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NASA Scientist: We Should Take UFOs as Seriously as Mars Research
"Ultimately, understanding UAP is a science problem. We should treat it that way."
/ Robots & Machines/ Aliens/ Uaps/ Ufos
Image by maxime raynal via Flickr/Futurism
A long-awaited report by Congress’ Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force is set to be released next month — the culmination of years of inquiries by lawmakers and decades of reports of unexplained sightings made by military pilots.
Numerous officials have raised concerns over the sightings, arguing that adversaries may be behind them, invading US airspace without our knowledge.
And now even a NASA scientist is weighing in.
In a Washington Post opinion piece, planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Ravi Kopparapu argues that rather than starting with the “what” question about UFOs, it would be more effective to start by “asking how we can figure out what they are.”
“This is where scientists, notably absent from the current UAP conversation, come in,” Kopparapu argues. For too long, he says, the topic of UFOs been disregarded as baseless conspiracy, driven by a “vacuum of knowledge that is being filled by unscientific claims thanks to a lack of scientific investigation.”
The news comes after several military pilots have discussed strange objects that appeared to defy the laws of physics, traveling without visible means of propulsion at many times the speed of sound.
“It’s a technology that outstrips our arsenal by at least 100 to 1,000 years at the moment,” retired US Navy Chief Master-at-Arms Sean Cahill told CNN in a televised interview earlier this month.
That means, if they are indeed adversaries within US borders, that would be bad news.
“We had a massive intelligence failure, and we have an unknown threat that we need to figure out,” Christopher Mellon, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, told CNN during the same interview.
But rather than arming ourselves against a largely invisible threat, according to Kopparapu, we should first figure out how to get a better understanding of what the pilots saw.
He says that we should be treating the UAP reports with the same seriousness as exploring the surface of Mars for signs of life.
“The research has been complex, evidence-based and demanding, pulling in scientists from across disciplines and all around the globe,” he writes in his opinion piece. “The same should be true for the exploration of UAP sightings.”
To Kopparapu, we simply need more data, from visual, infrared, radar, and other observations with the help of scientists from across the various disciplines. Such a scientific approach could eventually “go a long way toward lifting the taboo in mainstream science.”
“Ultimately, understanding UAP is a science problem,” he concludes. “We should treat it that way.”
NASA Scientist: We Should Take UFOs as Seriously as Mars Research
Scientists are "notably absent from the current UAP conversation."
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Whether they're top secret military aircraft or something otherworldly, UFOs are real.
Footage and descriptions of them are a worldwide phenomena.
During the cold war, aircraft which looked like flying saucers were made and there is footage of them being tested. These have probably been responsible for many reportings.
However those incidences of extremely high-speed aircraft which can maneuver unlike anything man-made, which dive into the water and exit at will, are the ones which really stand out. Militaries all around the world have reported encounters with these.
Honestly there are probably 2 explanations for these.
Footage and descriptions of them are a worldwide phenomena.
During the cold war, aircraft which looked like flying saucers were made and there is footage of them being tested. These have probably been responsible for many reportings.
However those incidences of extremely high-speed aircraft which can maneuver unlike anything man-made, which dive into the water and exit at will, are the ones which really stand out. Militaries all around the world have reported encounters with these.
Honestly there are probably 2 explanations for these.
- Advanced propulsion systems exist which are so ahead of their time that any sane government wouldn't want the public to know about it. The type of propulsion allows for unusual aircraft types which don't resemble conventional fixed or rotary winged aircraft. However these aircraft are highly experimental and no one has perfected them. Perhaps they are nuclear powered, making them far too controversial to be revealed to the public. This explains why there has been a correlation between incidents and radiation-caused illnesses.
- We are indeed being watched, and these aircraft are drones sent by extraterrestrials which scout out the planet. Think of the Zoo Hypothesis. Highly unlikely, but really, it's the only other explanation.
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List of alleged extraterrestrial beings
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Flatwoods monster[2][3] | Tall humanoid with a spade-shaped head.[2] |
Greys[4][5]
| Grey-skinned humanoids, usually 3–4 feet tall, hairless, with large heads, black almond-shaped eyes, nostrils without a nose, slits for mouths, no ears and 3-4 fingers including thumb. Greys have been the predominant extraterrestrial beings of alleged alien contact since the 1960s.[5] |
| Hopkinsville goblin[6] | Small, greenish-silver humanoids.[7] |
| Little green men[8] | Diminutive green humanoids. Even though a few abductions have referred to green skin, no report has ever involved anything that would fit the classic cultural stereotype of "Little Green Men". They are included here only for cultural reference.[8] |
| Nordic aliens[9][10] | Humanoids with stereotypical "Nordic features" (tall, blonde hair, blue eyes) and have featured in several cases of contact. It is said they are from Ancient Earth but presenting themselves as ETs in the past, they moved from living on the surface to live underground around the Himalayas area after a natural event.[11] |
Cryptozoological animals and cryptobotanical plants, including those from folklore, religion (e.g. golem), mythology (e.g. dwarf (see also dwarfism); giants from Atlantis (see also gigantism), etc.), and even some reports of ghosts, poltergeists, and time travellers (alleged)
| Some people claim that many of the various allegedly real creatures from the Fortrean (see also: Fortean Times and William R. Corliss) archives and related reports on anomalous phenomena[16] are actually of extraterrestrial origin or mixed origin: extraterrestrial hypothesis, interdimensional hypothesis, and cryptoterrestrial hypothesis. Often associated with the occult and esoteric, and linked with supernatural and paranormal happenings. Others dismiss these and explain them away via skeptical cultural tracking and via the psychosocial hypothesis as well as some of these being moneygrabbing hoaxes and scams to sell more newspapers or more fringe science books, often linked to boost commercial activities by means of local tourism-popularizing media spins. |
Reptilians and Reptiloids (sometimes spelled as reptillians)[17]
| Tall, scaly humanoids. Reptilian humanoid beings date back at least as far as Ancient Egypt, with the crocodile-headed river god Sobek. The Reptilian conspiracy theory has been advocated by David Icke. |
| Rods[18] or Skyfish | Elongated visual artifacts appearing in photos and video recordings, sometimes claimed to be extraterrestrial beings. Generally thought to be caused by motion blur from flying insects. |
Secret results of genetic engineering (alleged)
| Some have speculated that some reports of extraterrestrials are due to escaped creatures which are the result of secret government and/or corporate genetic engineering and hybridization projects (or even such genetic-engineering experiments being done by extraterrestrials, sometimes with cooperation from the military-industrial complex) or are due to encounters with normal people who exhibit heightened ESP, esoteric, occult, and siddhi powers and/or just possessing very high-level intelligence, and/or who are natural mutants/hybrids who are a genetic oddity (or with genetic syndrome deformities and/or congenital deformities) and are the result of evolutionary natural selection and sociocultural adaptation (see nature versus nurture), but are ostracized by mass society due to being different from most people, much in the way modern-day autists, genius polymaths, people who have experienced mystical psychosis and cosmic consciousness and ended up in mental wards due to 'weird' behavior according to most other people, and disabled people are treated. |
List of alleged extraterrestrial beings - Wikipedia
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Close encounters: Democrats and Republicans unified in taking UFOs seriously
A White House employee directs Marine One to the Ellipse as President Biden and first lady Jill Biden return from Delaware on April 18. (Sarah Silbiger/For The Washington Post)
By
Ashley Parker
June 1, 2021 at 11:30 a.m. GMT+2
In early April, former CIA director R. James Woolsey told Black Vault, a website that collects paranormal case files, that he is “not as skeptical as I was a few years ago, to put it mildly,” about UFOs, and that “something is going on that is surprising to a series of intelligent aircraft, experienced pilots.”
Speaking to CBS’s “60 Minutes” last month, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said that while UFOs can still prompt a “giggle” from some lawmakers, “I don’t think we can let the stigma keep us from having an answer to very a fundamental question.”
And a day after Rubio’s comments aired, former president Barack Obama told CBS’s “The Late Late Show with James Corden” that “what is true — and I’m actually being serious here — is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.”
UFOs — also known as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs, in official parlance — are having their moment in politics, and a bipartisan one at that.
This month, President Biden’s director of national intelligence will release a report containing everything unclassified that the U.S. government knows about UAPs as part of a provision contained in former president Donald Trump’s pandemic relief package.
When the report lands, as early as Tuesday, it will do so in a moment of rare agreement across the ideological spectrum that UAPs are worthy of further study. An increasing number of Democrats and Republicans — from former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and former Democratic Senate leader Harry M. Reid to Fox News host Tucker Carlson — have expressed an openness to UAPs, urging the nation’s leaders to investigate the phenomenon.
“After this last year, it’s kind of nice to see something that’s bipartisan,” said Robert Powell, an executive board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, a think tank of scientists examining UAPs.
And why now, exactly? “Because!” said former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who served as Obama’s chief of staff. “It’s all speculative unknown and a little sci-fi makes it intriguing.”
Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), shown here in April 2014 when he was Senate majority leader, is among those urging the nation’s leaders to investigate the UAP phenomenon. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
The government’s effort to better understand UAPs began in earnest in 2007 with Reid, then the Senate majority leader whose home state of Nevada includes Area 51 — the Air Force’s top-secret testing site that has long attracted UFO hunters. Reid privately approached Sens. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) to request $22 million in Pentagon funding for a secret operation that became known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
The program, which no longer exists, studied UAPs, including encounters between UFOs and the nation’s military. Now a new government program, known as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, has continued investigating UAPs.
“Let me be clear: I have never intended to prove that life beyond Earth exists,” Reid wrote in a New York Times op-ed on May 21. “But if science proves that it does, I have no problem with that.”
For years, UFOs remained a taboo topic, relegated to the fringe of society, and certainly of politics. But by 2015, while campaigning for president in New Hampshire, Clinton told the Conway Daily Sun she thought Earth might have already been visited by extraterrestrial life and pledged to “get to the bottom of it.”
The following year, Clinton’s interest in the phenomenon earned her a full story in the New York Times — “Hillary Clinton Gives U.F.O. Buffs Hope She Will Open the X-Files,” blared the headline. John Podesta, a noted UFO-phile and Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that if she won the White House, “she’ll ask for as many [UFO] records as the United States federal government has to be declassified, and I think that’s a commitment that she intends to keep and that I intend to hold her to.”
How UFO sightings went from joke to national security concern in Washington
More recently, in addition to Woolsey, former CIA director John Brennan also expressed openness to UAPs, as did Carlson, who has devoted portions of his prime-time Fox News show to exploring the phenomenon.
After the “60 Minutes” segment on UFOs aired last month, Carlson said that the issue is “a very big problem” from a national security perspective, arguing that the military under Biden is focusing on the wrong priorities.
“UFOs, it turns out, are real, and whatever else they are, they’re a prima facie challenge to the United States military,” Carlson said. “They’re doing things the U.S. military does not allow, and they’re doing it with impunity.”
Trump told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos in 2019 that he did “not particularly” believe in UFOs. But he was more coy about the topic when asked by his eldest son, during an interview for his 2020 campaign, to share some details about a 1947 incident in Roswell, N.M, that holds outsize significance among UFO believers.
“I won’t talk to you about what I know about it, but it’s very interesting,” Trump said.
Former president Donald Trump, shown here speaking in Orlando in February, told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos in 2019 that he did “not particularly” believe in UFOs but was more coy about the topic a year later during an interview with his eldest son. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Huge swaths of the country are divided on basic facts — like who actually won the 2020 presidential election (Biden) — while the two political parties can’t even agree on a definition for what constitutes “infrastructure.” Yet when it comes to UAPs, there is emerging bipartisan and mainstream consensus that, as the “X Files” famously popularized, “The truth is out there.”
Christopher Mellon, a former intelligence official at the Defense Department and the Senate Intelligence Committee who has worked to push UAPs in into mainstream discourse, said there were two major turning points recently: a December 2017 New York Times article in which the Pentagon admitted the existence of its program to study UFOs, and public interviews with members of the military talking about their personal encounters with UFOs.
The “60 Minutes” segment, for instance, featured interviews with Cmdr. Dave Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, two former Navy F/A-18F pilots, offering their firsthand account of a 2004 incident over the Pacific Ocean southwest of San Diego, where they say they encountered and tried to engage with “this little white Tic-Tac-looking object,” as Fravor described it.
“Coming from the U.S. military — that’s the one institution in our government that everybody still supports and the one institution in our government that everybody still trusts,” Mellon said.
For some Navy pilots, UFO sightings were an ordinary event
Adam Jentleson, a former top aide to Reid in the Senate, said that as the country moves its faith away from institutions, a growing openness to the paranormal makes sense — even if it is taking the unlikely form of bipartisanship toward UAPs.
“I can’t tell if this bodes well or ill for the direction of our democracy, but there’s certainly some irony around the fact that we can define bipartisanship around what used to be conspiracy theories,” Jentleson said. “Maybe the lesson is that we are expanding our imaginations and the full range of things that are possible. The possibilities of what the future may hold may be beyond the bounds of what a worldview circumscribed by norms can envision.”
Powell said the media’s depiction of UAPs has also evolved. “Most of the time in the past when the media highlighted what was then called a UFO-type incident, they really were highlighting a person who was really a little bit wacky and they were trying to get ratings.”
He pointed to Dennis J. Kucinich, the former Democratic congressman from Ohio, who was mocked during a 2008 Democratic presidential primary debate after being asked about a book by actress Shirley MacLaine, who wrote that Kucinich had seen a UFO while visiting MacLaine in Washington state and found the experience very moving.
“It was an unidentified flying object, okay?” Kucinich said when asked about the account. “It’s like, it’s unidentified. I saw something.”
But now, “this subject today is considered seriously by a lot of scientists,” Powell said.
After Obama expressed his openness to UAPs last month, Fox News’s Peter Doocy recounted Obama’s comments to Biden, and asked him what he thought. “I would ask him again,” Biden said, to laughter, brushing off the question.
“We take reports of incursions into our airspace by any aircraft identified or unidentified very seriously and investigate each one,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki recently told reporters. (Oliver Contreras/For The Washington Post)
Administration officials are unlikely to weigh in further on UAPs until the release of the report, a White House official said. This person added that Vice President Harris, in her role as head of the administration’s National Space Council, is also likely to be briefed on the findings before they are released.
Thanks to Trump-era covid relief bill, a UFO report may soon be public
The interest in UFOs shows how the extremes of the ideological spectrum can end up closer to each other than to any political center — not unlike the two prongs of a horseshoe.
“It’s like who was the viewership of the ‘X Files’ in the 90s?” Jentleson said. “If you saw someone walking down the street wearing an ‘X Files’ shirt, it was a coin flip as to whether they were going to be a hard-right conspiracy theorist or a hard-left conspiracy theorist.”
UAPs, he added, “unites conspiracy theorists of all ideological stripes,” born out of a shared “distrust of government and authority.”
A 2019 Gallup poll found that 33 percent of adults said they think some UFOs have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies, while 60 percent said all sightings can be explained by human activity or natural phenomenon. The belief was largely bipartisan, with 32 percent of Democrats, 30 percent of Republicans and 38 percent of independents saying some UFOs have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth.
Both the Gallup poll and a more recent CBS News poll from this year found skepticism of the U.S. government’s handling of information on the issue. The 2021 CBS poll found 73 percent saying the U.S. government “knows more about UFOs than it is telling the general public,” as did 68 percent in the 2019 Gallup poll.
Steve Bassett is a registered lobbyist, political activist and “Disclosure” advocate — someone who pushes for the formal acknowledgment by heads of state of an extraterrestrial presence engaging with the human race. He argues that being more forthcoming about UAPs will serve to strengthen the credibility of the evidence and the government itself.
“The American people may hear from their government the biggest truth, ever relayed, in a formal way to the human race,” Bassett said. “Now if you’re going to start truth-telling, to regain trust, why not start with a big one?”
Scott Clement contributed to this report.
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U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can’t Rule It Out, Either
A new report concedes that much about the observed phenomena remains difficult to explain, including their acceleration, as well as ability to change direction and submerge.June 3, 2021
WASHINGTON — American intelligence officials have found no evidence that aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots in recent years are alien spacecraft, but they still cannot explain the unusual movements that have mystified scientists and the military, according to senior administration officials briefed on the findings of a highly anticipated government report.
The report determines that a vast majority of more than 120 incidents over the past two decades did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology, the officials said. That determination would appear to eliminate the possibility that Navy pilots who reported seeing unexplained aircraft might have encountered programs the government meant to keep secret.
But that is about the only conclusive finding in the classified intelligence report, the officials said. And while a forthcoming unclassified version, expected to be released to Congress by June 25, will present few other firm conclusions, senior officials briefed on the intelligence conceded that the very ambiguity of the findings meant the government could not definitively rule out theories that the phenomena observed by military pilots might be alien spacecraft.
Americans’ long-running fascination with U.F.O.s has intensified in recent weeks in anticipation of the release of the government report. Former President Barack Obama further stoked the interest when he was asked last month about the incidents on “The Late Late Show with James Corden” on CBS.
“What is true, and I’m actually being serious here,” Mr. Obama said, “is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.’’
The report concedes that much about the observed phenomena remains difficult to explain, including their acceleration, as well as ability to change direction and submerge. One possible explanation — that the phenomena could be weather balloons or other research balloons — does not hold up in all cases, the officials said, because of changes in wind speed at the times of some of the interactions.
The final report will also include a classified annex, the officials said. While the annex will not contain any evidence concluding that the phenomena are alien spacecraft, the officials acknowledged that the fact that it would remain off limits to the public was likely to continue to fuel speculation that the government had secret data about alien visitations to Earth.
Many of the more than 120 incidents examined in the report are from Navy personnel, officials said. The report also examined incidents involving foreign militaries over the last two decades. Intelligence officials believe at least some of the aerial phenomena could have been experimental technology from a rival power, most likely Russia or China.
One senior official briefed on the intelligence said without hesitation that U.S. officials knew it was not American technology. He said there was worry among intelligence and military officials that China or Russia could be experimenting with hypersonic technology.
He and other officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the classified findings in the report.
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Russia has been investing heavily in hypersonics, believing the technology offers it the ability to evade American missile-defense technology. China has also developed hypersonic weaponry, and included it in military parades. If the phenomena were Chinese or Russian aircraft, officials said, that would suggest the two powers’ hypersonic research had far outpaced American military development.
Navy pilots were often unsettled by the sightings. In one encounter, strange objects — one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind — appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.
Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who was with the Navy for 10 years, told The New York Times in an interview, “These things would be out there all day.” With the speeds he and other pilots observed, he said, “12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”
In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed. Some of the incidents were recorded on video, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching.
The Defense Department has been collecting such reports for more than 13 years as part of a shadowy, little-known Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program within the Pentagon. The program analyzed radar data, video footage and accounts provided by the Navy pilots and senior officers.
The program began in 2007 and was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time. It was officially shut down in 2012, when the money dried up, according to the Pentagon. But after the publication of a New York Times article in 2017 about the program and criticism from program officials that the government was not forthcoming about reports on aerial phenomena, the Pentagon restarted the program last summer as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.
The task force’s mission was to “detect, analyze and catalog” sightings of strange objects in the sky that could pose a threat to national security. But government officials said they also wanted to remove the stigma for service members who report U.F.O. sightings in the hope that more would be encouraged to speak up if they saw something. The goal, officials said, was to give authorities a better idea of what might be out there.
A video shows an encounter between a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unknown object. It was released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.CreditCredit...U.S. Department of Defense
Last year, lawmakers inserted a provision in the Intelligence Authorization Act that said the government must submit an unclassified report on what it knows about U.F.O.s. That report is the one to be released this month.
Officials briefed on the report said it also examined video that shows a whitish oval object described as a giant Tic Tac, about the size of a commercial plane, encountered by two Navy fighter jets off the coast of San Diego in 2004.
In that incident, the pilots reported an interaction with the craft, which lasted for several minutes. At one point, the object peeled away, one of the pilots, Cmdr. David Fravor, later said in an interview with The Times. “It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he said.
The report studies that incident, including the video that accompanied the interaction. The provenance of the object, the officials said, is still unknown.
U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can’t Rule It Out, Either (Published 2021)
A new report concedes that much about the observed phenomena remains difficult to explain, including their acceleration, as well as ability to change direction and submerge.
