After decades of secrecy and over-classification, the U.S. government is gradually beginning to reveal to the public what it knows about UFOs —now known as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). In 2021, Congress directed the Department of Defense (DOD) to investigate UAP by establishing an office now called the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which recently published a report describing 274 observations of UAP by DOD units over the period from August 2022 to April 2023. Congress then doubled down on government transparency this year, with both the House and Senate drafting separate versions of the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023, which is being considered this week as part of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.
This about-face on UAP by the government has resulted in a similar response by the media. Once a subject of skepticism and stigma, UAP reports are increasingly regarded as mainstream news. In 2017, the New York Times was the first to reveal a Defense program to collect and analyze data on UAP, including videos captured by U.S. Navy pilots of aerial objects whose flight characteristics were impossible to reproduce with modern military aircraft. These pilots also provided eyewitness accounts of UAP to other respected mainstream outlets, such as CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2021.
More recently, The Debrief broke the biggest development to date with its remarkable report about Pentagon whistleblower David Grusch, who claimed that the U.S. government has been covering up programs to retrieve crashed UAP materials and reverse-engineer them. Unable to resist such a sensational story, news networks nationwide have made the move to cover it regardless of the previous absurdity associated with the topic, in addition to the historic House hearing this year with Grusch and two former Navy pilots who testified on their astonishing observations of UAP while conducting training missions off the East and West Coasts and alleged the government was in possession of non-human “biologics” recovered from crash sites. Just this weekend, NBC’s Meet the Press even featured one of those pilots, Ryan Graves, who discussed his nonprofit, Americans for Safe Aerospace, which he established to investigate UAP and improve safety and awareness of the aerospace domain.
Hellbound and Down 