The United States, China and Russia could be locked in a secretive new arms race involving unidentified flying objects, raising extraordinary questions about whether America’s biggest adversaries are competing to unlock technology that could transform modern warfare, according to the New York Post.
The possibility of a UFO arms race is drawing renewed attention as lawmakers, former intelligence officials and military veterans warn that Washington could be falling behind its geopolitical rivals in the race to understand mysterious aerial phenomena.
Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) has warned that America’s failure to release promised UFO information could give China and Russia a major propaganda victory, allowing the rival powers to portray themselves as more transparent than Washington.
“I think it would definitely be a misstep because of what we would be demonstrating to our people,” Burlison said in an interview with the New York Post. “We’re supposed to be the most transparent country in the world to its citizenry and if another country is able to be more transparent than the United States on this topic it would be a blemish on our otherwise pristine legacy on transparency.”
Former U.S. intelligence official David Grusch has also claimed, without public evidence, that China and Russia possess crashed UFOs, suggesting that America’s adversaries could be attempting to reverse-engineer technology of unknown origin.
Grusch made headlines in 2023 after testifying before Congress about alleged secret government programs dedicated to recovering and studying mysterious spacecraft.
In 2021, China publicly acknowledged investigating unexplained aerial sightings, including using artificial intelligence to analyze reports of mysterious objects.
The South China Morning Post reported at the time:
According to Wuhan-based researcher Chen Li from the Air Force Early Warning Academy, human analysts have been overwhelmed in recent years by the rapidly mounting sighting reports from a wide range of military and civilian sources across the country.
“The frequent occurrence of unidentified air conditions in recent years … brings severe challenges to air defence security of our country,” said Chen, in a 2019 report to a conference of senior information technology scientists in Beijing in 2019.
Russia’s interest in UFOs reportedly dates back to the Soviet era.
