US intelligence homes in on UAPs as public appetite grows for the truth out there
The public antenna for alien contact is on high alert, especially since a bombshell Pentagon revelation made discussion about them mainstream.
But that is the unlikely time trip that the debate on unidentified flying objects, now known as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, has taken.
The study of the existence and nature of UAPs has now moved beyond people dressed as Jedis at sci-fi conventions to teams of uniformed officers poring over classified information inside the Pentagon.
After decades of spasmodic studies that examined and then dismissed the existence of UAPs, the US government is making the most concerted push in its history to find genuine answers.
It is being watched every step of the way by congress, which this month held its first public hearings on the topic in a half-century.
“When we spot something we don’t understand or can’t identify in our airspace, it’s the job of those we entrust with our national security to investigate and report back,” said Adam Schiff, the head of the US House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
“It’s not about finding alien aircraft,’’ committee member Republican Rick Crawford added. Rather, he said, a failure to explain mysterious UAPs, especially in sensitive military zones, was “tantamount to an intelligence failure that we want to avoid”.
The study of UAPs is slowly shedding the popular notion, fuelled by Hollywood, that it is looking for aliens from other planets. Rather, it is a serious search to explain the unexplained through a marriage of modern technology, sensors, science and Sherlock Holmes-style guesswork.
“The debunkers often retreat to a default straw man argument which is ‘they are all saying these are aliens from another planet and this is bullshit therefore it’s all bullshit’,” says Ross Coulthard, an award-winning Australian journalist who has written a book, In Plain Sight, about the UAP debate.
“Mythology has it, and this is the line the US Air Force has pushed since 1970, that most UFOs can be explained by prosaic phenomena such as weather balloons, atmospheric phenomena, et cetera, and it’s not a threat to national security or flight safety.
“On June 25 last year, all of that changed when the UAP task force tendered its report to congress which admitted not only that UAPs are real but it made a fundamental reversal by acknowledging they are a possible threat to national security and a definite threat to flight safety. That has been hardened further in the recent congressional hearings.”
So how did we get here? For centuries, people have spotted unexplained objects in the sky but it was during the Cold War that the public’s fascination with flying saucers, strange lights and the notion of alien life really took off. In 1969, a USAF investigation into UAPs called Project Blue Book was closed down after finding that although there was much that could not be explained, no flying object had ever been confirmed or deemed a threat to US national security.
For decades, UAPs remained the plaything of Hollywood scriptwriters and amateur ufologists. But then in 2017 The New York Times made the bombshell revelation that the Pentagon had been formally investigating reports of UAPs since 2007. This revelation suddenly brought discussion of UAPs into the mainstream.
All of a sudden, congress and intelligence officials began to talk about something that was previously taboo, and in 2020 president Donald Trump ordered US intelligence agencies to deliver an unclassified report on UAPs.
“This used to be a career-ending kind of thing,” said John Podesta, president Bill Clinton’s former 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.”
Former CIA director John Brennan weighed into the debate, saying it was “a bit presumptuous and arrogant for us to believe that there’s no other form of life anywhere in the entire universe”.
Last year, former CIA director James Woolsey admitted he wasn’t “as sceptical 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”.
When the much anticipated report on UAPs by the US Director of National Intelligence was released in June last year, it examined 144 UAP sightings of which it could explain only one of them.
These included accounts from naval pilots who said they witnessed flying objects that lacked visible means of propulsion and had movements that defied knowledge of aerodynamics and physics. Despite the unexplained nature of many of these encounters, the report found no evidence that they were extraterrestrial – but it did say the unidentified objects could pose a threat to national security.
In December last year, the Biden Administration signed into law a requirement that the military establish a permanent office on UAP research – now called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronisation Group.
At the congressional hearing last month, Pentagon officials played unclassified videos and images of unexplained phenomena. These included a split-second image of a spherical object shot through the window of an FA-18 fighter jet last year that continues to defy explanation.
The most famous unexplained sighting was recorded by jets from the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier in 2004 showing a capsule-shaped object that darts through the air in numerous directions at enormous speed.
Scott Bray, deputy director of US Naval Intelligence, told the hearing he had no explanation for these or many other incidents.
“We’ll go wherever the data takes us; we’ve made no assumptions about what this is or isn’t,” he said. “(But) we have no material, we have detected no emanations within the UAP task force that would suggest it’s anything non-terrestrial in origin.”
Bray said US pilots had recorded “11 near misses” with UAPs but no collisions. He said the military had never attempted to fire on a UAP and that no wreckage had been recovered that would point to an extraterrestrial origin.
The US government states that UAPs generally fall into one of five categories, four of which can be explained. Those are “airborne clutter”, such as birds or balloons; “natural atmospheric phenomena”, such as ice crystals or thermal fluctuations; “industry developmental programs”, meaning “classified programs by US entities”; and “foreign adversary systems” from Russia, China or other countries. The final category – and the one that sparks most interest – is called “other”.
The US government says that to understand exactly what “other” is “may require additional scientific knowledge to successfully collect on, analyse and characterise”.
What annoys those who follow the UAP debate is the secrecy that the Pentagon cloaks over the program. Each report and briefing has an unclassified and a classified version. The Pentagon defends this by saying that to release too much information about UAP sightings would help an “adversary” – meaning China or Russia, not aliens – to understand sensitive US sensors and other technologies.
“We do not want potential adversaries to know exactly what we’re able to see or understand, or how we come to the conclusion,” Bray said. “Therefore disclosures must be carefully considered on a case-by-case basis.”
The Pentagon is sceptical, but not totally dismissive, of the theory that at least some of the UAPs are actually new hypersonic technology pioneered by China or Russia to spy on the US. A disproportionate number of UAP sightings occur around sensitive military bases, which further fuels such a theory.
However, cynics argue that UAP images are captured in these areas more often because of the presence of so many advanced sensors and recording devices.
Another possibility – which would only add to the secrecy inside the Pentagon – is some of the sightings are of experimental cutting-edge US weaponry or new stealth technology. To conspiracy theorists – which include many UAP enthusiasts – the Pentagon’s reluctance to be more transparent on UAPs has nothing to do with national security. Rather it is proof that the truth is not “out there” but is instead being held under lock and key inside the Pentagon for reasons known only to the country’s top brass.
But several congressmen who attended the hearings were also nonplussed about the lack of transparency about the Pentagon’s findings and the refusal of officials to consider the possibility of extraterrestrial alien craft.
“We just got hosed. On some level I think it is a cover-up,” said Tennessee Republican Tim Burchett after sitting in on the hearing. “I have a T-shirt I sell on my website. It says, ‘More people believe in UFOs than believe in congress’.”
Indiana Democrat Andre Carson, chairman of the house intelligence subcommittee, also accused the Pentagon of trying to play down the significance of so many unexplained phenomena.
“You need to show us – congress, and the American public, whose imagination you have captured – that you are willing to follow the facts where they lead,” said Carson. “We fear sometimes the Department of Defence is more focused on emphasising what it can explain, not investigating what it can’t.”
Ronald Moultrie, the Under Secretary of Defence for Intelligence and Security, insists the Pentagon is determined to learn more about UAPs and denies that it is not putting serious effort into solving the mysteries.
To bolster his credentials Moultrie even admitted he was a sci-fi fan who had attended a sci-fi convention even if he didn’t “necessarily dress up”.
“We have our inquisitiveness, we have our questions,” he told the committee. “We want to know what’s out there as much as you want to know what’s out there.”
But it might be a challenge to match the public’s enthusiasm for the topic. The congressional hearings on top of last year’s UAP intelligence report has made 2022 a bumper year for UAP sightings and debate.
After years of stigmatising pilots and service members who reported UAP sightings, the Pentagon is now encouraging all service personnel to report anything they see, and it has established proper channels to do so.
Coulthard says the developments in the US have sparked enormous interest in the UAPs in Australia: “I have now had about 30 people contact me from the Australian air force, navy and army telling me about sightings of really weird anomalous phenomena that have been detected by sensor systems or other sophisticated technology.”
Coulthard says unlike in the US, there is no requirement to report such sightings to the authorities and the Australian government needs to wake up and take the issue more seriously.
“Australia takes about 10 years to catch up with what happens in the US, and what Australia hasn’t quite realised is that there has been a seismic shift in Washington on this issue,” he says.
In the US, the interest in UAPs is thriving to an extent not seen since Orson Welles faked an alien invasion in his 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast.
The small town of Roswell, New Mexico, in early July will celebrate the 75th anniversary of America’s most celebrated space mystery when, in 1947, the US army said it had recovered a “flying disc” from a local ranch. The army quickly clarified that it was a “weather balloon” but not before the local paper in Roswell splashed with the headline “RAAF captures flying saucer on ranch”.
Since that day, Roswell has been America’s UFO capital and – given the recent congressional hearings – it is expecting huge crowds for its anniversary party, which will include a 5km “alien chase” run, an “alien pub crawl” and a screening of the 1951 movie The Day The Earth Stood Still.
When Barack Obama visited Roswell as president he joked “I come in peace”.
When Trump was asked about what happened at Roswell, he replied: “I won’t talk to you about what I know about it, but it’s very interesting.”
Recent polls show that four out of 10 Americans now think some UAPs that people have spotted have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth. Around half believe all such sightings can be explained by human activity or natural phenomena.
Either way, the Pentagon and the congress are taking UAP’s well beyond the cheesy space kitsch of Roswell and into the realm of serious debate. The Pentagon’s database has a record 400 incidents under investigation, with the numbers growing each month.
“Unidentified aerial phenomena are a potential national security threat, and they need to be treated that way,” said Carson.
“For too long, the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis, good reporting, or pilots who were laughed at when they did.
“Defence officials relegated the issue to the backroom or swept it under the rug entirely. Today we know better.”
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If you believe in UFOs, the journey from Hollywood science fiction to the US congress once seemed far, far away.