There are many things we as a divided nation are in disagreement on but I would wager to guess that we would all agree to wanting to find out if we share this vast universe with other organic and intelligent life forms.
If there is anything that can bring bickering nations together it’s an alien civilization hovering in our atmosphere for what could be hostile reasons.
Hollywood has capitalized on the concept of alien civilizations for decades. If we followed Hollywood’s lead we would be dating and dancing with all sorts of life forms – it would humble us and any differences we have with persons of different colors, ethnicities, and religions here on earth would seem almost quaint and archaic in comparison.
At the moment most everyday people have not had a close encounter and if anyone is hiding ET in their closet it’s classified to a level the president may not know about.
But that may be about to change. On June 1 the Pentagon is set to release the report on unidentified aerial phenomena (or UFO’s) which would explain information on “difficult to explain” sightings.
https://www.inverse.com/science/ufo-report-june-2021
Former director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe described the report this as:
“We are 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, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don’t have the technology for or are traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.”
What will this report contain, exactly?
“In December 2020, the government enacted the Intelligence Authorization Act, which called for the release of an unclassified and all-sources report on unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) — the official military term used for unidentified flying objects. The act was included in the mammoth appropriations bill that also included financial aid checks for people living with the economic fallout from Covid-19.”
“The report will include a thorough analysis of
- Available data
- Intelligence reporting on UAPs”
“It will be presented to the congressional intelligence and armed services committees on UAPs.”
How much of the report is made public remains to be seen. As a sneak preview I suppose on April 27 the Pentagon leaked these videos taken by the U.S. Navy pilots of “unidentified aerial phenomena”:
“Pentagon spokeswoman Sue Gough told CNN the videos and images are part of their “ongoing examinations” of UFOs. The Department of Defense created the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force in August to investigate such sightings”.
“As we have said before, to maintain operations security and to avoid disclosing information that may be useful to potential adversaries, DOD does not discuss publicly the details of either the observations or the examinations of reported incursions into our training ranges or designated airspace, including those incursions initially designated as UAP,” Gough added”.
Luis Elizondo — former head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which operated out of the secretive fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring — “said the upcoming report touches down on the unexplainable”.
The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program “was a secret effort, funded at the initiative of the then Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, starting in 2007, to investigate aerial threats including what the military preferred to call “unidentified aerial phenomena” or just “objects. This was big news because the United States military had announced as far back as 1969 that U.F.O.s were not worth studying”. It was the reason Luis Elizando resigned – “to protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition”.
There have been UFO sightings for years. Steven Greer, “an American ufologist who founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) and the Disclosure Project, which seeks the disclosure of allegedly classified secret UFO information” addressed the National Press Club in Washington D.C. in 2001 and disclosed what were shocking “secrets”.
“Over several decades, according to Greer, untold numbers of alien craft had been observed in our planet’s airspace; they were able to reach extreme velocities with no visible means of lift or propulsion, and to perform stunning maneuvers at g-forces that would turn a human pilot to soup. Some of these extraterrestrial spaceships had been “downed, retrieved and studied since at least the 1940s and possibly as early as the 1930s.” Efforts to reverse engineer such extraordinary machines had led to “significant technological breakthroughs in energy generation.” These operations had mostly been classified as “cosmic top secret,” a tier of clearance “thirty-eight levels” above that typically granted to the Commander-in-Chief. Why, Greer asked, had such transformative technologies been hidden for so long? This was obvious. The “social, economic and geo-political order of the world” was at stake.”
There we have it. The president does not even have clearance for these matters. If that logic follows then the storyline for the movie Independence Day is quite telling. Lives were lost because the commander-in-chief was not clued in to the truth.
Leslie Kean is an investigative journalist and author of “UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials”.
“On 16 December 2017, the New York Times featured an article written by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Kean, which revealed the fact that the US Department of Defense had spent $22.5M on a secret program titled the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program that investigated UFOs.”[8]
“Joe Rogan, the popular podcast host, has often mentioned the article, praising Kean’s work as having precipitated a cultural shift. “It’s a dangerous subject for someone, because you’re open to ridicule,” he said, in an episode this spring. But now “you could say, ‘Listen, this is not something to be mocked anymore—there’s something to this.’ ”
Kean who had some curiosity about UFOs became impassioned after reading what was known as the COMETA report. https://www.narcap.de/dokumente/COMETA-Report-englisch.pdf
“Later, while I was working at KPFA, a friend from France sent me this extraordinary report about UFOs that was written by generals, admirals, scientists, and engineers: the COMETA report [cc]. The authors had completed a three year study into the phenomenon and come to the conclusion that the most rational explanation for the best cases was what they called the “extraterrestrial hypothesis.” These were official cases that had been studied by very credible people, and I was struck by the report, the authority of the authors, and their conclusion: We are likely being visited by extraterrestrial vehicles. They said there was no way to prove it, but for me as a journalist, that’s a huge story. Imagine if American generals said the same thing at a press conference. It would be major news. Afterwards, I did a story about the report for the Boston Globe. It was well received, and people who were interested in the UFO phenomenon were happy that a journalist was taking it seriously. This was very rewarding for me, and it became the beginning of the whole process. I started focusing on UFOs full time.”
Washington is waking up to the reality that this is real and no longer the stuff of Hollywood movies.
“Last July, Senator Marco Rubio, the former acting chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, spoke on CBS News about mysterious flying objects in restricted airspace. “We don’t know what it is,” he said, “and it isn’t ours.”
“In December, in a video interview with the economist Tyler Cowen, the former C.I.A. director John Brennan admitted, somewhat tortuously, that he didn’t quite know what to 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 cost logical explanation”.
But it wasn’t always this way. There was a long period of time when the government and scientists intentionally tried to debunk any notions about the existence of UFOs.
“It’s generally agreed that the modern U.F.O. era began on June 24, 1947, when a private aviator named Kenneth Arnold, while flying a CallAir A-2, saw a loose formation of nine undulating objects near Mt. Rainier. They had the shape of boomerangs or tailless manta rays, and in his estimation they moved at two to three times the speed of sound. He described their motion as that of a “saucer skipped over water.” A newspaper headline conjured “flying saucers.” By the end of the year, at least eight hundred and fifty similar domestic sightings had been reported, according to one independent U.F.O. investigator”.
“Within government circles, the issue of how seriously to take what they renamed “unidentified flying objects” provoked a deep conflict. By September of 1947, incoming reports of sightings had become too profuse for the Air Force to ignore”.
The concern initiated a classified study called Project Sign to investigate the phenomena – was it the Russians with some incredible Nobel prize winning technology that would put any other scientist to shame or was it the unbelievable “Man from Mars”? A “full twenty percent of sightings lacked ordinary explanations”. But unexplainable phenomena kept happening to credible people.
“In 1948, two pilots in an Eastern Airlines DC-3 saw a large, cigar-shaped light speed toward them at a tremendous velocity before making an impossibly abrupt turn and vanishing into a clear sky. A pilot in a second plane, and a few witnesses on the ground, gave compatible accounts”.
Then the unthinkable happened in July 1952 when a fleet of UFOs were seen over the White House. I only wonder if the panic looked like this?
“The Times headline resembled something out of a Philip K. Dick novel: “flying objects near washington spotted by both pilots and radar: air force reveals reports of something, perhaps ‘saucers,’ traveling slowly but jumping up and down.”
In their infinite wisdom the following January the CIA convened a secret advisory group of experts – The “Robertson panel” – and determined that they were not being visited by UFOs but that they were being inundated with too many reports about UFO visits. The United States had to show that they had control over their airspace lest the Soviets think the Americans were unraveling in hallucinations of flying saucers and alien sightings. So the government did what it’s good at – quashing the truth.
“To stem the flood of reports, the panel recommended that “the national security agencies take immediate steps to strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired.” It also suggested that civilian U.F.O. groups be infiltrated and monitored, and enlisted the media in the debunking effort”.
But the cat was already out of the bag and not everyone was happy about stuffing it back in.
“Not all members of the military were content with this stance. Vice Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first director of the C.I.A., told a Times reporter, “Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about the UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.”
“The government maintained one public repository for U.F.O. reports: Project Blue Book, a continuation of Project Sign, which operated out of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio”.
Out of this project came one high profile study, The Condon Committee, the University of Colorado’s UFO Project, which was funded by the airforce to study UFOs under the direction of the physicist, Edward Condon. The Condon Report produced an exhaustive volume of disappointing and slanted research into the non-existence of UFOs.
“The Committee delivered its Report to the Air Force in November 1968, which released it in January 1969.[27] The Report, 1,485 pages in hardcover and 965 pages in paperback, divided UFO cases into five categories: old UFO reports from before the Committee convened, new reports, photographic cases, radar/visual cases, and UFOs reported by astronauts. Some UFO cases fell into multiple categories. Condon authored 6 pages of “conclusions and recommendations,” a 43-page “summary,” and a 50-page history of UFO phenomena and research over the preceding twenty years.”[27]
“In his introductory “Conclusions and Recommendations”, Condon wrote: “Our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge. Careful consideration of the record as it is available to us leads us to conclude that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.”[28] He also recommended against the creation of a government program to investigate UFO reports.[29] He also described the problem that confronts the scientific community, that each scientist must evaluate the record for himself, and that the Report’s recommendation against further research “may not be true for all time.”
Project Blue Book ended in December 1969 after studying UFOs since March 1952 and concluded that of the over 12,000 reports collected that “most of them were misidentifications of natural phenomena (clouds, stars, etc.) or conventional aircraft”. However, Condon did advise “that government agencies and private foundations “ought to be willing to consider UFO research proposals…on an open-minded, unprejudiced basis….[E]ach individual case ought to be carefully considered on its own merits.” The report had a mixed reception at that time. I suspect if it came out today it would be booed off the stage.
Though there were two principal critics of the Condon Report.
“Astronomer J. Allen Hynek wrote that “The Condon Report settled nothing.”[4] He called Condon’s introduction “singularly slanted” and wrote that it “avoided mentioning that there was embedded within the bowels of the report a remaining mystery; that the committee had been unable to furnish adequate explanations for more than a quarter of the cases examined.”[4] Hynek contended that “Condon did not understand the nature and scope of the problem” he was studying[4] and objected to the idea that only extraterrestrial life could explain UFO activity. By focusing on this hypothesis, he wrote, the Report “did not try to establish whether UFOs really constituted a problem for the scientist, whether physical or social.”
“Astrophysicist Peter A. Sturrock wrote that “critical reviews…came from scientists who had actually carried out research in the UFO area, while the laudatory reviews came from scientists who had not carried out such research.”[49] As an example, Sturrock noted a case in which an allegedly supersonic UFO did not produce a sonic boom. He notes that “we should not assume that a more advanced civilization could not find some way at traveling with supersonic speeds without producing a sonic boom.”[50]
Perhaps the obstacle lies in the fact that the truth is hard to digest. What if we are not alone? To this day NASA continues to detect the unexplainable. https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/11/world/nasa-voyager-1-intl-scli-scn/index.html
What if we have not been alone for quite some time? That is a truth that will bring oligarchs to their knees. Jeff Bezos and his new toy of a yacht would be play doh at the hands of an intelligence able to travel light years into our atmosphere. That is a truth that makes Virgin Galactic’s space tourism look like a shuttle bus to Disneyland. The implications of an intelligence far beyond our own would forever change the way we as a global society relate to each other and to our planet. Hopefully, our government on June 1 will be transparent in what they have on the most important discoveries in human history.
Author: Sherri Margolin (Dark Matters)