Tag: close encounters

US government has received more than 360 new UFO reports

The US government has received 366 new reports of “unidentified aerial phenomena” — commonly known as UFOs or unidentified flying objects — since March 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence noted in an unclassified report released Thursday.

The 11-page document noted that about half the sightings remain unexplained.

The new sightings are in addition to 144 reports during the previous 17 years, bringing the total to 510.

According to the report, “initial analysis and characterization of the 366 newly-identified reports, informed by a multi-agency process, judged more than half as exhibiting unremarkable characteristics.”

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Pentagon Releases Annual Report on UFOs

A highly anticipated report on the Pentagon’s efforts to study UFOs has been released to the public and, sadly, it seems that the phenomenon remains as mysterious as ever. Meant to serve as an update to their preliminary assessment issued in June of 2021, the annual report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) for 2022 provides an enlightening look at the progress that has been made by the DoD’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Remarkably, they indicated that the group have received an additional 366 cases since their initial assessment, bringing the total number of UAP accounts collected by the office to a whopping 510.

In noting the increase in reports, the office seemed to indicate that this did not necessarily mean that there were suddenly more UFOs in the skies, but that witnesses are now encouraged to share their accounts “due to a concentrated effort to destigmatize the topic of UAP and instead recognize the potential risks that it poses.” Breaking down their investigation into the fresh batch of reports, the AARO revealed that their analysis “judged more than half as exhibiting unremarkable characteristics.” To that end, they explained that 26 were drones, a staggering 163 were “characterized as balloon or balloon-like entities,” and 6 were simply classified as “clutter.”

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Questions remain 75 years after mysterious Fort Knox UFO incident, downed pilot

His 2,867 flight hours, much of it in combat, and Distinguished Flying Cross and four Air Medals weren’t enough to avoid a fatal crash near a Franklin, Kentucky farm.

Exactly 75 years later, Capt. Thomas Mantell’s flight that afternoon still remains shrouded in mystery. He died while pursuing a UFO that was seen in the skies over Godman Army Airfield by countless people throughout the region surrounding Fort Knox.

On Jan. 7, 1948, Mantell sat in the cockpit of his F-51D Mustang as flight leader headed north from Marietta Air Force Base in Georgia back to Louisville’s Standiford Field. He and three other pilots from the Kentucky Air National Guard’s Flight C, 165th Fighter Squadron had been participating in a low-altitude navigational training exercise when the request came from Godman Commander Col. Guy Hix to investigate the sightings.

The 25-year-old World War II hero acknowledged the request, and he and two other pilots climbed to 15,000 feet to intercept it. The fourth, a “Lt. Hendricks”, continued on to Standiford Field.

According to a Jan. 6, 2005 article by Turret editor Larry Barnes, several hundred people in Central Kentucky had already witnessed the UFO by 1:15 p.m. on that Wednesday, a day described by some observers as partly cloudy with high-altitude feathery cirrus clouds. That day is recorded by Wunderground.com as also having relatively calm winds, mild temperatures — a high of 49 degrees — zero precipitation, and visibility for at least 10 miles.

“It would have been probably a typical winter day. If they had cirrus clouds in the sky, the visibility would have been great,” said an area weather forecaster. “There was just nothing much else going on weatherwise, so it probably made for a pretty good day.”

News agencies wasted no time turning the crash into front-page news. The big questions on everyone’s minds: What did Mantell encounter, and why did he crash?

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Government UFO report timed for Halloween seems to downplay spooky sightings

Right in time for Halloween, U.S. intelligence agencies were due on Monday to deliver a classified progress report on UFOs to Congress, with an unclassified summary of the report expected to be posted online later this week. Earlier this month, NASA also announced the 16 members of its new unclassified independent team, consisting of prominent scientists, an astronaut and a science journalist, to look at the phenomenon from “a scientific perspective.” 

Monday’s report comes after Congress called for the establishment of a permanent office to study UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena, the government’s new and improved term for UFOs) at the Pentagon last year and then held its first public hearing on the topic in more than 50 years this spring. That hearing discussed an unclassified report issued by a Department of Defense task force in 2021. 

Many UFO investigation proponents like myself were underwhelmed by the Pentagon’s unclassified 2021 report, which offered an explanation for only one of the 144 incidents the department said were being investigated. But at least it correctly acknowledged that it couldn’t rule out any explanation, including extraterrestrial origins. After all, in some of the incidents, Navy pilots publicly stated that they’d encountered exotic objects that were “not of this world” and “accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

But leaked details and communications from officials ahead of Monday’s report and the announcement of NASA’s new team suggested that some in the government are eager to put the issue to rest without a full, open-minded investigation — just as it did in the last open attempt to get to the bottom of the phenomena back in the 1960s. 

It’s particularly frustrating that NASA seems to be drawing its conclusions before even really getting started. In its tweet announcing the UAP panel members 10 days ago, NASA declared: “There is no evidence supporting the idea that UAP are extraterrestrial in origin.” This statement seems to prematurely signal its conclusions so no one will be surprised when the final report repeats the same finding.

Meanwhile, the headline of a New York Times article on Friday based on what it said was classified information from the intelligence report read, “Many Military U.F.O. Reports Are Just Foreign Spying or Airborne Trash.” Nodding to the Halloween timing, the author of the article, Julian Barnes, tweeted what might have been the subtext: UFOs are nothing “spooky or hypersonic” — in other words, just ordinary things, there’s nothing to see here and it’s time to move on.

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People claim they saw aliens after UFO crash-landed in Brazil in 1996, documentary reveals

It sounds like science-fiction. On Jan. 13, 1996, the United States Air Force shoots down a UFO, which crashes six miles from a medium-sized town in southeastern Brazil.

Seven days later, two sisters aged 14 and 16, and a 21-year-old friend spot a tiny, frightened alien with big red eyes, crouching by a wall. They run screaming back to their mother.

The Brazilian police and military capture at least two aliens, one of which scratches an officer, infecting and ultimately killing him, before dying along with its extraterrestrial comrades. The US Air Force confiscates the alien bodies and takes them to an unknown location. A vast cover-up by the Brazilian military, enforced with death threats, lasts for 26 years.

But if it’s all made up, it is one of the greatest works of science fiction in history. Most everyone who hears the witnesses tell their story a quarter century later is convinced they are telling the truth.

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NASA begins investigating UFOs with new team

NASA on Monday launched a new independent study team to investigate unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) and pave a path forward for future probes into mysterious sightings and aircraft in the sky.

The 16-member team will investigate UAPs, now the formal name for what were previously called UFOs, over the course of nine months as it seeks to lay the groundwork for future studies.

The team will focus on how data collected by civilians, governments and commercial businesses can be analyzed to shed light on UAPs — and then construct a road map for future NASA analyses.

Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., said the focus on data is important because the raw information is the “language of scientists and makes the unexplainable, explainable.”

“Understanding the data we have surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena is critical to helping us draw scientific conclusions about what is happening in our skies,” Zurbuchen said in a statement. “Exploring the unknown in space and the atmosphere is at the heart of who we are at NASA.”

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‘New territory’: America’s top aerospace sleuths join UFO hunt

America’s top aerospace engineers and scientists are joining forces to protect us from UFOs.

The country’s largest organization of government and private sector technical experts is launching a project to study “unidentified aerial phenomena,” after concluding that recent incursions by mysterious craft pose a safety hazard to military and commercial aircraft, according to people involved in the effort.

The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, which includes among its members the country’s largest defense and NASA contractors, has established three committees to study the technology, how incursions affect pilot and passenger safety, and to coordinate with government agencies and international researchers also focused on the topic.

“We’re stepping in a new territory,” said Ryan Graves, a former Navy fighter pilot and defense contractor who is co-chairing AIAA’s Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Community of Interest. He’s joined by Ravi Kopparapu, a planetary scientist at NASA who is studying the potential habitability of Earth-like planets.

“This topic is not for everyone,” added Graves, who came forward with his own experience with UFOs hovering over his F/A-18 Hornet fighter jet in 2014 and 2015. “It is not about forcing people to look into this if they are not ready yet. People have to come to terms with it.”

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‘Never Seen Anything Like This’: UFOs Reported By Pilots Over Pacific Ocean In August, September

Various veteran pilots flying over the Pacific Ocean in August and September have claimed that they saw UFOs flying in circles above them in the night sky.

Former FBI agent Ben Hansen, the host of the Discovery+ show “UFO Witness,” obtained recordings of reports to the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) in which pilots described what they saw.

“We’ve got a few aircraft to our north here and he’s going around in circles, much higher altitude than us. Any idea what they are?” Mark Hulsey, who was flying a a Gulfstream charter jet, radioed ito ARTCC.

“Uh, no, no I do not,” the air controller replied, according to The Daily Mail. “You’re not entering any [military] airspace or anything. I am not sure.”

Hulsey claimed he could see “maybe three aircraft there” before calling again 23 minutes later, clarifying, “There’s now like seven of them … at least 5 or 10,000 feet above us. … They just keep going in circles. I was an F-18 pilot in the Marine Corps, and I’m telling you, I’ve done many intercepts: I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Expert aviators say they believe the circular movement and duration of the sightings – some for hours – ruled out satellites,” The Daily Mail noted.

Veteran pilot Chris Van Voorhis, who has been flying for nearly 50 years and has amassed 32,000 hours in the air, told The Daily Mail he witnessed between three and five objects brighter than stars flying in a race track circular motion on an August flight between Honolulu and Los Angeles.

“They were lights that would come on very bright, you would see them move, then they would go out,” he stated. “It had to be in a very, very high orbit, or actually even out in space quite a ways away from anything that a satellite would be, because every time we were seeing it, it was in the lower right hand corner of the Big Dipper, no matter where we were in the world. It lasted for such a long time that it actually became boring, almost. If it was Starlink, or anything like that, then it’s going to be moving in a linear fashion, and all of them will be moving in the same direction. These weren’t. They were moving different directions.”

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Navy says all UFO videos are classified, won’t be released

Awatchdog group seeking access to unidentified flying object footage has been rejected with the unambiguous message that, due to heavy classification, none of the government’s media on UFOs will be released.

The Black Vault reported this week that starting in April 2020 it sought to acquire all “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” videos within the files of Naval Air Systems Command. Three such videos had already been leaked from government databases before being officially released by NAVAIR.

The division subsequently denied that request, citing no such videos in its possession. A request filed with the Office of Naval Intelligence was met with a similar response. 

A third request filed with the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations was finally met with a comprehensive rejection, one that said “the requested videos contain sensitive information pertaining to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and are classified and are exempt from disclosure in their entirety.”

The agency also said: “The release of this information will harm national security as it may provide adversaries valuable information regarding Department of Defense/Navy operations, vulnerabilities, and/or capabilities. No portions of the videos can be segregated for release.”

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UFO in Texas? Mysterious lights caught on camera in Round Rock

Did people in Central Texas see some UFOs in the sky?

That’s what many people are wondering after several videos captured some mysterious lights in the evening on September 1.

Video shared to FOX 7 Austin caught the lights in the Round Rock area of Brushy Creek.

Emily White, who spoke to FOX 7 Austin’s Rudy Koski, says, “It was mesmerizing, honestly. It was so silent because if it was one light, then I would have maybe thought, ‘Oh, a helicopter, a plane, something like that.’ But like there was so many of them together.”

When asked if she thought it was a close encounter, White said, “I’ll be honest, kind of. I don’t know if I believe in all that, but, I don’t know. Maybe, I hear a lot of it in like America that that kind of things happens. I think it’s just because of like it didn’t make any noise at all, which I just thought was really odd. But, yeah, definitely, definitely felt like it was like the alien invasion or something on the way.”

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