Trump-ordered UFO report set for June landing

One of Donald Trump’s final acts in office was a barely-noticed order for a report into ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’.

A UFO report ordered by former US President Donald Trump is due in June. Pictures: Supplied/AFP

When the history of the Trump era comes to be written, earthling controversies such as the storming of the Capitol are bound to feature prominently. Yet what if his presidency is remembered light years into the future as the start of the American government taking UFOs seriously?

Tucked into a marathon COVID-19 relief bill signed into law last December by Donald Trump, in one of his final acts in office, was a barely-noticed order for the director of national intelligence to submit a report within 180 days into “unidentified aerial phenomena” or “anomalous aerial vehicles” — flying saucers to you and me.

Hold on to your tinfoil hats, this is not fake news. The Pentagon and US intelligence agencies have been duly collecting the data, for release in June. John Ratcliffe, Trump’s former director of national intelligence, confirmed on Fox News last weekend that the report would include previously unknown occurrences from “all over the world”.

“There are a lot more sightings than have been made public,” he said. “We’re talking about objects that have been seen by navy or air force pilots or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain … that we don’t have the technology for, or travelling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.”

‘Year of the UFO’

Beam me up, Scotty! According to Forbes magazine, 2021 is shaping up to be the “year of the UFO” because of the coming report. It is no coincidence that, just as fascination with flying saucers took off during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, interest in “unidentified aerial phenomena” has surged at a time of intense space rivalry with China.

Part of the mission, as set out in the bill, is to examine any links these mysterious objects might have to “adversarial foreign governments, and the threat they pose to US military assets and installations”.

The Soviets lacked the technology to surpass America, but the Chinese are building satellites and rockets for the next generation of space warfare. “We used to be able to say they were x-million years behind us, but they are moving much more quickly than we anticipated,” a former defence official who served under President Barack Obama told me.

The pressure to declassify unexplained sightings comes after The New York Times revealed in 2017 the existence of a mysterious $AU29 million “advanced aerospace threat identification program” in the Pentagon, looking into these phenomena.

It was set up in 2007 and officially disbanded in 2012, though it was said to have continued its work.

‘There’s a whole fleet of them’

The newspaper released two videos showing a series of encounters between US navy F/A-18 fighter jets and egg-shaped vehicles, hovering, spinning and manoeuvring at speed. The pilots’ expression of disbelief in the cockpit can be heard in one of the videos, shot in 2014. “There’s a whole fleet of them! … They’re going against the wind … Look at that thing, dude!”

Trump said, keeping his options open: “I just wonder if it’s real. That’s a hell of a video.”

Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official, was in charge of the Pentagon program but resigned in frustration in 2017. He is now associated with a private organisation, To the Stars Academy of Arts and science. “For the first time, the government is finally taking this topic seriously. The evidence is overwhelming at this point,” he said. “We’re dealing with some very advanced technology that, from a national security standpoint, is very significant.”

Unidentified aircraft ‘swarm’

Further evidence emerged last week of a possible “swarm” of six unidentified aircraft, referred to by the US navy as “drones” or “unmanned aerial vehicles” (UAVs), that buzzed around naval vessels in 2019 off the coast of southern California, where there are sensitive military installations.

The US navy in 2020 officially released three videos showing unidentified flying objects that sparked a resurgence in UFO research and speculation. Source: US Navy

Elizondo told me foreign rivals with superior technology were unlikely to be responsible for these incursions. “We may be dealing with a totally different paradigm. I don’t think this is a US phenomenon. It is a global phenomenon,” he said. “Is it a threat? My response is, it could be, so we’d better find out what it is.”

China is already in a space race with the US. In December, it planted its flag on the moon, and in February, a spacecraft, Tianwen-1, began orbiting Mars and will soon land its own rover on the red planet. Is it also vying to be the first nation to make “first contact"?

Earlier this year the Chinese opened the biggest radio telescope in the world to international scientists, the Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (Fast), buried deep in Guizhou province. One of its uses is to listen for signs of extraterrestrial life.

The author of The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin, China’s foremost science-fiction writer, visited the site in 2017. “It’s like something out of a science-fiction film,” he said. “Perhaps tomorrow we’ll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the moon parked in orbit,” he speculated in the prologue to one of his books.

That year, a far smaller object streaked through our solar system, seemingly under its own propulsion, and was given the name ‘Oumuamua, Hawaiian for “scout”. The Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb claimed it could be the first evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth and has just published a best-selling book, Extraterrestrial, supporting his theory. (Other scientists think ‘Oumuamua might be a block of nitrogen ice from an exoplanet.)

I rang the professor to see what he thought about the coming US intelligence report. He was over the moon. Well, I exaggerate, but he does think the information about unidentified aerial phenomena should be made public and examined by scientists.

Loeb compares snobbishness about aliens to the refusal by 17th-century church leaders to look into Galileo’s telescope. “The best way to determine whether the [US navy] sightings were an illusion is to deploy state-of-the-art instruments at the same locations and see if we can reproduce them,” he said.

“It shouldn’t be a matter of national security but a matter of science. Let’s get to the bottom of this. We have much better cameras now than we had a decade ago. Why not use them?”

Just so. Only last week, the space entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has described himself as an “alien”, tweeted a picture of two charts showing that while camera resolution has advanced, pictures of UFOs have remained as blurry as ever. “Strongest argument against aliens,” he concluded.

Other space enthusiasts are equally guarded. Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in California, which monitors radio waves for signs of extraterrestrial life, has suggested half-seriously that we could find “ET” in the next decade or so. But he is not impressed by the US navy videos.

“There is little that convinces me that aliens are sailing through our airspace without our approval,” he said. “The fact they have been seen by F/A-18 planes raises suspicions right away. It is as if you can see Big Foot in the northern Pacific, but only if you are driving a Honda.”

The skies are teeming with commercial jets and satellites, yet nothing of the kind has been recorded elsewhere. The videos could be evidence of “an alien spacecraft that looks like a peanut”, said Shostak, but the principle of Occam’s razor would suggest a more earthbound explanation, such as the tailpipe of another aircraft.

When the Pentagon releases its report, we may finally get more insight into the mystery. “My thing is very simple: we don’t know what that stuff is that’s flying over the top of our installations. Let’s find out,” Marco Rubio, the vice-chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said last week.

On the other hand, the intelligence agencies may decide to release only a summary of their findings. A significant chunk of the report could well be classified, which will only increase the speculation. Is the truth out there? My guess is we will remain in the dark.

The Times