Tag: close encounters

Senators want to boost Pentagon UFO office funding, transparency

Senators want to give the Pentagon’s unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, office a major funding boost to scan the skies and near space for threats from China and beyond – part of the fallout from the Chinese spy balloon that U.S. jets shot down after it drifted across the U.S. continent.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., announced a funding boost for the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, tasked with researching and analyzing UAPs, in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. House lawmakers have not made their funding request for the office public. The final spending bills will be debated later this summer.

“With aggression from adversaries on the rise and with incidents like the Chinese spy balloon, it’s critical to our national security that we have strong air domain awareness over our homeland and around U.S. forces operating overseas,” Gillibrand said in a statement. The Senate bill covers more than just the office’s basic operating expenses, as the 2022 defense budget did last year. It also includes measures to reveal more of what they are finding,which will “reduce the stigma around this issue of high public interest,” she added.

The funding push comes after the Chinese spy balloon served as a reminder that U.S. adversaries are increasingly operating in Earth’s upper atmosphere — and as the public’s fascination with unidentified phenomena grow. In a 2021 Gallup poll, more than 40% of respondents blamed alien spacecraft forat least some of the unidentified incidents in recent years.

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Why the UFO whistleblowers are getting a mixed reaction

David Grusch, a retired career intelligence officer, continues to generate attention with his claims that a secret UFO recovery program has operated beyond congressional oversight for decades. Grusch is receiving a mixed reception on and off Capitol Hill.

Still, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s vice chairman, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), appears to think Grusch might be on to something.

Speaking to NewsNation last week, Rubio noted that other whistleblowers have come forward to the committee to make similar claims of a concealed UFO recovery program. While Rubio said the committee was investigating these claims, it had to be careful. As he put it, “Some of these people still work in the government, and frankly a lot of them are very fearful. Fearful of their jobs, fearful of their clearances, fearful of their career. And some, frankly, are fearful of harm coming to them.”

Rubio, who has an enduring interest in UFOs, is a member of the so-called Gang of Eight group of congressional leaders who are briefed on some of the most classified U.S. intelligence and military activities. Yet not all of the Gang of Eight agree with Rubio’s stance. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH), for example, recently expressed skepticism about Grusch’s claims. Turner’s comments suggest Congress does not yet possess any smoking gun UFO evidence. This is not to say that such evidence does not exist, but rather that it has been very well hidden within very small groups of people if it does exist.

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‘True’ or ‘crazy’? UFO whistleblowers coming ‘out of the woodwork’

In a June 26 interview with NewsNation, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) stated that multiple individuals had corroborated a whistleblower’s explosive allegations of a secret, decades-long UFO crash retrieval and reverse-engineering effort.

As the top Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and a member of the so-called Gang of Eight, Rubio’s extraordinary comments carry particular weight.

According to Rubio, only one of two remarkable outcomes will ultimately explain recent developments, “Either what [the whistleblower] is saying is partially true or entirely true,” he said, “or we have some really smart, educated people with high clearances and very important positions in our government who are crazy and are leading us on a goose chase.”

“Most of these people,” Rubio continued, “have held very high clearances and high positions within our government. So, you ask yourself: What incentive would so many people with that kind of qualification — these are serious people — have to come forward and make something up?”

Pressed for details, Rubio stated that individuals with “firsthand knowledge or firsthand claims” are “saying to us what you’ve seen out there in the public record, whether it’s about legacy [UFO] programs or about current events.”

According to Rubio, the whistleblowers’ statements are beyond “the realm of what any of us [on the Senate Intelligence Committee] has ever dealt with.”

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Are UFO Sightings Taking Off Again?

UFO belief has long been considered a fringe phenomenon, but those who “want to believe” were given a boost in 2021 as U.S. intelligence services delivered an official report on “unidentified aerial phenomena” to Congress.

As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, it showed that of all 143 unexplained sightings between November 2004 and March 2021, only one UAP was later identified as a deflating balloon. In early 2023, another unclassified report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence revealed 171 not yet identified flying objects out of 366 recorded between March 2021 and August 2022.

Considering the renewed buzz around UFOs – or UAPs –  how have global UFO sightings been developing in recent years?

There is a National UFO Reporting Center in the United States which documents sightings of unexplained aerial phenomena all over the world and interestingly, sightings have been picking up again.

While there were two dips in 2018 and 2021, there were once more around 5,000 alleged UFO sightings in 2022.

This is still below peaks of 8,800 in 2014 and 7,400 in 2020 – when conspiracy beliefs were running high at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

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My Dad Was A Famous Alien Abductee. I Thought He Was A Joke — Now I’m Not So Sure.

There’s one video available on the internet concerning my father, Patrick McGuire. It’s strange. Uploaded to YouTube 15 years ago — though clearly recorded much earlier — the video frames another TV screen. There is constant static, and the image is fractured as if the broadcast comes from far away. My father is discussing cattle mutilations under hypnosis.

“We come up on a cow that was dead. They cut the nose off, tongues out and the sex organs were gone,” he recounts as though he is sleepwalking through a nightmare. He goes on to describe in great detail a “spaceship” that landed on his ranch and took members of his herd ― their distant, terrified animal cries filling those dark prairie nights.

One comment below the video reads, “Having lived and worked with cow-men, can you immagine this guy going to town after this got out publicly. I mean they are a finicky bunch to say the least.”

I don’t have to imagine. I grew up with him walking through our small Western town, his life by then fractured like that broadcast. He was completely destitute, picking through my classmates’ garbage, and when a classmate came to school the next day and told me what they saw, their grin, and subsequent laughter, left little to the imagination. However, I then joined in with their laughter. That commenter was right: We are a finicky bunch, to say the least.

On May 14, 2009, my father passed away in a Colorado hospital due to cancer. He was 67. I did not speak to him before he died. His last years were spent in homelessness, though he hadn’t always lived that way. His last words, so I heard, were about grand conspiracies and sinister deep states, though he hadn’t always spoken about such topics. My father’s legacy in our small Wyoming town ― and inside our family ― is stained with his tales of alien abduction, interstellar prophecy and the insistence he was chosen, though he had not always been chosen. There was a time before my birth when he was obsessed with the lore of his rural community, the spiraling complexities of high school dances and the schemes of enlarging his Roman Catholic family. He was normal, caring and complete. That was before the stars came knocking.

When I first saw the bold headline “Intelligence Officials Say U.S. Has Retrieved Craft of Non-Human Origin,” published June 5, 2023, in The Debrief, I initially didn’t think about whether the headline was true. I didn’t contemplate what the recovered crafts might look like or that “non-human” was just another euphemism for the same thing we have been talking about since 1947 ― I thought about my father.

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Las Vegas police set up cameras at house where family called 911 to report aliens

Las Vegas Metro police set up cameras in the yard of the family who called 911 to report an alien sighting, the department confirmed to the 8 News Now Investigators.

On April 30 around 11:50 p.m., a Las Vegas Metro police officer’s body camera video recorded as something streaked low across the sky. Several people across eastern California, Nevada and Utah reported seeing the flash, according to the American Meteor Society.

About 40 minutes later, a young man called 911, saying he and his family saw something fall from the sky and that there were two moving things in his northwest valley backyard.

“There’s like an 8-foot person beside it and another one is inside us and it has big eyes and it’s looking at us — and it’s still there,” the caller told a dispatcher around 12:30 a.m. on May 1. “They’re like 8 foot, 9 feet, 10 foot. They look like aliens to us. Big eyes. They have big eyes. Like, I can’t explain it, and big mouth. They’re shiny eyes and they’re human. They’re 100% not human.”

The Metro police call log the 8 News Now Investigators obtained shows several other family members confirmed the sighting to police. The dispatcher sent two officers to the home to investigate. The 8 News Now Investigators obtained body camera video from both officers.

“I’m so nervous right now,” one officer said as he is preparing to drive to the house. “I have butterflies bro — saw a shooting star and now these people say there’s aliens in their backyard.”

In the days after the report, at least one officer interviewed neighbors, who said they too felt something “land” in the area, sources told the 8 News Now Investigators.

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Las Vegas family claims to see aliens after several report something falling from sky

A Las Vegas family claims something crashed in their backyard, prompting them to call 911 about “non-human” beings – the thing is, this time, several people saw it.

On April 30 around 11:50 p.m., a Las Vegas Metro police officer’s body camera video recorded as something streaked low across the sky. Several people across eastern California, Nevada and Utah reported seeing the flash, according to the American Meteor Society.

Sources tell the 8 News Now Investigators that it is likely something crashed into the yard, but exactly what remained unclear more than a month later. Drone video showed a circular imprint in the dirt.

About 40 minutes later, a man called 911, saying he and his family saw something fall from the sky and that there were two moving things in his northwest valley backyard.

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The CLASSIFIED ‘Mosul Orb’ UAP Case: A New Chapter in Government Secrecy Tactics Unfolds

The Pentagon has maintained its silence on the leaked image of the so-called “Mosul Orb” depicting an alleged Unidentified Aerial [Anomalous] Phenomena or UAP seen over an active conflict zone in Iraq back in 2016. The case has been left unaddressed and unconfirmed by the Department of Defense (DoD) since the image and case details first appeared online in January 2023, despite the significant public interest UAP have generated, and the fact that the Pentagon has previously offered commentary on past leaks related to the same. The Pentagon would only say that, “We’re not going to comment on remarks by unnamed sources alleging leaks from a classified report,” in a statement received about the “Mosul Orb” by The Black Vault in January.

The “Mosul Orb”, obtained and released by investigative journalists Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp, shows what has been alleged as a UAP, captured by an MC-12, medium-to-low altitude, twin-engine turboprop aircraft over Mosul, Iraq, on April 16, 2016.

However, a new response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by The Black Vault (23-F-0389), may indicate the classified and sensitive nature of the “Mosul Orb” case, which sheds light on why the Pentagon refused to comment. The DoD states in a FOIA denial letter received today by The Black Vault, that information relating to the case is “classified,” and it also relates to an ongoing “law enforcement investigation.”

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US military has been observing ‘metallic orbs’ making extraordinary ‘maneuvers’

At a historic NASA briefing on UFOs — “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (UAP) in government parlance — a key Defense Department official made a striking disclosure. Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, director of a new UAP analysis office, stated that U.S. military personnel are observing “metallic orbs” “all over the world.”

An image, along with two brief videos of such objects are now publicly available. 

According to Kirkpatrick, spherical objects account for the largest proportion — nearly half — of all UAP reports received by his office. Critically, some of these objects are capable of “very interesting apparent maneuvers.” 

To be sure, rigorous scientific analysis may ultimately identify a prosaic explanation for such observations. In the meantime, however, such “metallic orbs” are prima facie evidence of extraordinary technology. After all, how would spheres, lacking wings or apparent forms of propulsion, execute “maneuvers” of any kind? 

In his presentation, Kirkpatrick also described the UAP characteristics most frequently received by his office. This range of attributes, in short, amounts to a UAP profile that Kirkpatrick’s staff is “out hunting for.”

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The Strangest Aspect of the Men in Black & Women in Black: They Don’t Know How to Eat or Drink

Hollywood did a very good job of creating a series of MIB movies that entertained and excited audiences the world over – and made those same audiences laugh loud and hard, too. But, there is nothing to laugh about when it comes to the real Men in Black. In the movies, the MIB are in the employ of an agency more powerful, and far more secretive, than even Edward Snowden’s old “friends” at the National Security Agency.  But, we should not forget that the Men in Black movies are fiction. As is so unfortunately often the case, the real world often outdoes the domain of fiction – and seldom in a positive fashion. The so-called “modern era” of UFOs began in the summer of 1947, specifically on June 24. That was the date upon which a pilot named Kenneth Arnold encountered a squadron of strange-looking aircraft flying near Mount Rainier, Washington State – as the man himself noted in his 1952 book with Ray Palmer, The Coming of the Saucers. As an experienced pilot, Arnold was deeply puzzled that he was unable to identify the things ahead of him. As he got closer, Arnold realized exactly why he was unable to figure out what the objects were: they were not regular airplanes, but futuristic-looking half-moon shaped vehicles that resembled absolutely nothing in the United States’ arsenal at that time. And that was surely the case for the Russians, too. It was not long before word of Arnold’s encounter reached the eyes and ears of the media – in fact, less than a day. The terms “flying saucer” and “flying disk” all-but-immediately became the talk of 1947. Today, the term “UFO” is far more popular than the now largely antiquated flying saucer.

Although the latter part of the 1940s proved to be a period in which sightings of apparent unearthly craft abounded, it wasn’t until the early 1950s that the Men in Black stepped out of the shadows – in force –and set about snaring us, manipulating us, and ultimately digesting us. And, no, the “digesting” term is not an exaggeration. Over the years there have been numerous investigators of the Men in Black phenomenon, such as UFO researchers Gray Barker, Jim Keith, and Harold Fulton – all of whom are now long gone. None of them, however, came anywhere close to Albert K. Bender – the man without whom our knowledge of the MIB and their agenda would be sorely lacking, and who created the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB). Born in 1922, Bender was someone who served his country during the Second World War in the United States Army Air Corps. Post-World War Two, Bender lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in a somewhat creepy-looking old house that stood at what was, at the time, the junction of Broad Street and North Frontage Road. Today, the house is no more, the secrets it once held now being just memories and stories in books.

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