Tag: close encounters

Startling claims made at UFO hearing in Congress, but lack direct evidence

US government employees have been injured by UFOs and the US government has conducted a secret UFO retrieval program, a former department of defense official told a congressional committee on Wednesday, though the hearing lacked any direct evidence to back up the startling claims.

The hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), which has become the more accepted term for UFO, also heard that the government has a “huge amount” of secret information on UAPs, including “photos, video, photos, other information”. But it also learned, following a query from Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert, that there is no evidence of aliens having a secret underwater “base” on this planet.

The hearing came more than a year after the Pentagon was accused of running a secret UFO retrieval program by whistleblower David Grusch, though no physical evidence has also ever emerged to back up these claims.

The lack of concrete proof has been a consistent thorn in the side of those who believe the government is harboring UAPs, with Wednesday’s hearing again focussing on testimony from people who said they were aware of secret government programs, rather than witnesses presenting actual hard evidence.

It followed a blockbuster congressional hearing last year in which Grusch, a former American intelligence official, claimed that the US government conducted a “multi-decade” program which collected and attempted to reverse-engineer, crashed UAPs, as members of Congress investigate allegations the government is hiding knowledge of alien craft and beings from lawmakers.

The two hearings reveal the remarkable extent to which discussions around UAPs – previously mostly the domain of conspiracy theorists and believers in aliens – have now penetrated the US military and the corridors of Congress.

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Department of Defense agency which investigates UAPs, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the Pentagon has previously denied the existence of any secret government programs to retrieve alien spacecraft and no evidence of these programs has ever emerged.

A standout moment on Wednesday came when Nancy Mace, the chair of the hearing, questioned Luiz Elizondo, a former department of defense official who this year claimed in a memoir that the US is “in possession of advanced technology made off-world by non-human intelligence”.

“Has the government conducted secret UAP crash retrieval programs? Yes or no?” Mace asked. Elizondo, who was speaking under oath, said yes.

“Were they designed to identify and reverse engineer alien craft? Yes or no?” Mace said. Elizondo said yes.

Mace continued: “In your book, you mentioned government employees who’ve been injured by UAPs placed on leave and receiving government compensation for their injuries. Is that correct?” Elizondo said it was correct.

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“Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth” Hearing – November 13, 2024

The Black Vault has launched a dedicated page to document all materials related to the upcoming congressional hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs). Scheduled for November 13, 2024, the joint hearing, titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” will be led by Chairwomen Nancy Mace and Glenn Grothman from the Subcommittees on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, Government Innovation, and National Security, respectively.

This session marks the second UAP-focused hearing by Congress, aiming to bring greater transparency to government research on UAPs and address the Department of Defense’s (DoD) reluctance to declassify information. The hearing will include testimony from witnesses Navy Rear Admiral Dr. Tim Gallaudet, former DoD official Luis Elizondo, former NASA Associate Administrator Michael Gold, and journalist Michael Shellenberger.

This page will archive these proceedings, related documents, and transcripts, providing a comprehensive resource on government transparency efforts around UAPs.

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Series of Missouri UFO Sightings Continue to Baffle

Missouri resident Justin Johnson captured something extraordinary on his phone– a silver cube spinning like a disco ball. But what was it? Johnson is still waiting for an answer. He reached out to weather balloon enthusiasts and air traffic controllers, but no one could identify the hovering object. He tried to follow it in his pickup truck but lost sight of it. Three years later, the memory still baffles him. At the time, it was hard to find someone to objectively assess the video.

Just a few weeks ago, Johnson recorded a new video that shows enigmatic white light objects moving in the sky at sunrise. But today, he has a new option for analysis– an app called Enigma that allows users to upload videos and information about unexplained objects in the sky. The goal is to create a comprehensive database of these sightings for researchers to analyze.

Alejandro Rojas, a consultant to Enigma Labs, says most cases are simply explained– airplanes, drones, military flares, or satellites. But sometimes, Enigma’s experts encounter something more puzzling, like footage an airline passenger recorded of a thin, white object zooming across the sky over north central Missouri.

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Shocking UFO allegations make the case for the Disclosure Act

Amid the political spectacle of the election, former President Donald Trump appeared on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast and spoke about UFOs. According to Trump, Air Force pilots told him how mysterious spherical objects outperformed one of the most advanced fighter jets America has.

Similar accounts date back to at least the 1940s. More recently, military encounters with spherical objects and other unknown craft that exhibit seemingly extraordinary capabilities generated a series of eyebrow-raising headlines.

But a host of other, ostensibly credible UFO-related allegations is even more remarkable.

Last month, Kirk McConnell, a recently retired 37-year veteran professional staff member on the congressional armed services and intelligence committees, confirmed publicly that whistleblowers provided firsthand testimony to Congress alleging the existence of ultra-secret programs that retrieve and seek to reverse engineer advanced craft of unknown or non-human origin.

McConnell is not alone. He joins Sen Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; former House Intelligence Committee member Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.); and ex-intelligence official David Grusch, who have all stated publicly that individuals with firsthand knowledge have confirmed the existence of such efforts to Congress or to the internal watchdog that oversees America’s spy agencies.

Such remarkable statements provide important context for what is arguably the most extraordinary legislation ever proposed in Congress.

Introduced by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act defines “non-human intelligence,” “technologies of unknown origin” and “legacy program.”

As characterized in the bipartisan Disclosure Act, “legacy program” refers to any “endeavors to collect, exploit, or reverse engineer technologies of unknown origin or examine biological evidence of living or deceased non-human intelligence.” The term “non-human intelligence” appears two dozen times throughout the 64-page legislation.

The Disclosure Act would also require the U.S. government to take possession of “any and all” recovered UFOs and “biological evidence of non-human intelligence” transferred to private defense contractors.

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President Trump Discusses Area 51, UFOs, and Aliens in Interview With Joe Rogan

President Trump sat down with America’s number one podcaster, Joe Rogan, in an interview that has already amassed nearly 10 million views in less than 10 hours.

In the interview, Trump and Rogan discussed a plethora of topics, such as the assassination attempt against his life, the FBI, Kamala Harris, the JFK files, RFK Jr., and much more.

Toward the end of the three-hour interview, Trump and Rogan switched gears to discuss Area 51, UFO reports, and aliens.

The topic was raised when Trump said, “There’s a lot of interest in people coming from space.”

Trump continued, “I interviewed a few people, but it’s never been my thing. I have to be honest. I have never been a believer. Area 51 is the number one tourist attraction in the whole country.”

”So anyway, I interviewed jet pilots that say they saw something,” added Trump.

Rogan responded, “I had a couple of them here.”

The 45th president added that the pilots said, “We saw things, sir, that was very strange, like a round ball, but it wasn’t a comet or meteor, and it was going four times faster than an F-22, and it was round.”

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The Midwest is flyover country — even for UFO sightings

The Midwest is used to hearing flyover jokes, but when it comes to unidentified flying objects in the sky, we really seem to be missing out.

Driving the news: Enigma Labs is a startup that developed an app where users can upload videos of odd sightings in the sky to share with others.

  • While the West and Southwest are hotbeds of strange activity, the Midwest has some of the fewest reports per capita, Alejandro Rojas, a UFO researcher, tells Axios.

How it works: An AI program on Enigma Labs app generates a score to help determine whether an uploaded user video captures something truly unidentifiable or just a plane, satellite or other known object.

  • Because the government typically doesn’t have enough data to study these anomalies, the app’s goal is to crowdsource as much information as possible, Rojas says.

Zoom in: Since the app started in 2023, Iowa users have submitted 118 sightings.

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Police reveal 10 years of Wiltshire UFO sightings first time

Police have revealed all the UFO sightings in Wiltshire over the last 10 years for the first time.

Following a freedom of information request, Wiltshire Police published all the reports they have received mentioning UFOs, UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena), aliens and more.

The results are both bizarre and intriguing, telling of mysterious and largely unreported experiences of the unknown.

As well as your common and garden UFO sightings there are alleged physical interactions with aliens, even inside people’s own homes.

The first log from September 11, 2016, describes a UFO in the sky and an alien in someone’s living room in Swindon.

Further information on why an alien would visit a living room in Swindon is not known, as the logs provided in the FOI are brief.

Down in Salisbury, a woman reported she was abducted by aliens the very same month.

There were a quiet three years with no incidents before another abduction was reported in Chippenham on April 5, 2019 – this time a man, naked.

Six months later a UFO was sighted in Trowbridge.

The last log is from January 17, 2021, again in Chippenham, and is not so much a sighting as a hearing. It simply states: “Ex-friend talking about aliens”.

Wiltshire Police’s slogan is “Keeping Wiltshire safe”, but it is not known what actions the local force take to tackle extraterrestrial tampering.

Wiltshire is not alien to unexplained phenomena as the county is famed for its crop circles which some people think are the result of otherworldly interference.

It had the most crop circles in England in 2023 and Honey Street, near Pewsey, is the home of the Crop Circle Centre.

Until 2009 the British government published an annual report on UFO sightings.

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The Chicago O’Hare UAP Incident: Physics Team’s Analysis Offers a Fresh Look at This Famous 2006 Case

Shortly after 4:15 pm CST on November 7, 2006, it might have seemed like any ordinary overcast winter afternoon for United Airlines employees outside Gate C17 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport (ORD). Ordinary, except for what looked like a hole in the sky above one of the country’s busiest hubs for international air travel.  

Visible in the 1,900 ft cloud base was an almost perfect hole, the apparent footprint left by a round unidentified object that had been seen hovering there just moments earlier before it rapidly ascended, punching through the clouds on its departure.   

What unfolded over Chicago that afternoon would become one of the most talked about UAP incidents of the new millennium. Today, what is remembered as the 2006 O’Hare International Airport UAP incident also remains a stark reminder of the potential hazards that aviators face amidst reports involving unrecognized objects that seemingly invade America’s most sensitive airspace with utter disregard for federal aviation ordinances.  

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said nothing had been detected on radar that afternoon. Still, several employees—and possibly even a few of the pilots and crew aboard outgoing flights—all observed something in the skies above O’Hare.  

One of the earliest witnesses was a United Airlines employee assisting the pushback of a Boeing 737-500 from gate C17. As the witness would later tell investigators, he was “compelled to look straight up for some reason and was startled to see the craft hovering silently.” Upon seeing the object, the employee radioed to notify the United Airlines Zone 5 control coordinator, then alerted the cockpit crew in the plane next to him about the object, who reportedly opened their windows to observe the object.  

Meanwhile, another employee that would soon become a witness learned of the hovering object after hearing his coworkers discussing it over company radios.   

“I’m a management employee for a major airline and was sitting in my office at around 1630 on Nov. 7th when an employee made a radio call to our station operations center concerning an object hovering over gate C17,” read a report the witness later anonymously filed with the Seattle, Washington-based National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC). 

“I ran out of my office and saw a relatively small object hovering in place over C17,” the employee’s account read. “The METAR was reporting OVC 1900 and I initially estimated the object hovering at about 1000 feet.” 

“After about a minute, I saw the aircraft zip to the east and disappeared.” 

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Did a US F-22 shoot down a UFO? Photo of aerial object adds to mystery

Remember February 2023? It was a wild time. There were cocaine-addled bears, mushroom zombies and Air Force fighters shooting sketchy, inflatable objects out of the sky left and right.

That month began with a Chinese balloon — the U.S. said it was loaded with spy equipment; Beijing claimed it was just a weather balloon blown off course — drifting across much of the contiguous United States and igniting a furor. That was before it was blowed up real good — the technical terminology — by an F-22 off the coast of South Carolina.

But February’s bizarre occurrences didn’t stop there. U.S. pilots soon shot down three more mystery objects over Alaska, Canada’s Yukon territory and Lake Huron in as many days.

None of those subsequent objects were ever recovered, with the official line indicating they were probably hobbyist or research balloons.

But one grainy image — it’s always a grainy image, isn’t it? — of the object shot down over the Yukon has now emerged, and it’s giving significant “I want to believe” vibes.

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Image released of mysterious object shot down over Yukon in 2023

An image of the unidentified object shot down over Canada’s Yukon territory in February 2023 has been obtained by CTVNews.ca.

Released through a Canadian freedom of information request, the grainy image appears to be a photocopy of an email printout.

Heavily redacted documents show how the image was approved for public distribution within days of the headline-grabbing incident, but then held back after a public affairs official expressed concerns that releasing it “may create more questions/confusion.”

CTVNews.ca has requested a higher resolution copy.

A U.S. F-22 fighter jet shot down the object on Feb. 11, 2023, shortly after it entered Canadian airspace in the Yukon territory, which borders Alaska. It was one of three unidentified aerial objects(opens in a new tab) blasted out of the sky that month following the high-profile Feb. 4, 2023 downing of an apparent Chinese surveillance balloon(opens in a new tab). Shot down over Alaska, Yukon and Lake Huron between Feb. 10 and 12, 2023, the three objects were reportedly much smaller than the towering Chinese balloon.

At the time, officials described the Yukon object(opens in a new tab) as a “suspected balloon” that was “cylindrical” in shape. A reported Pentagon memo(opens in a new tab) said it appeared to be a “small, metallic balloon with a tethered payload below it.”

Released as part of the freedom of information request package, an email from a Canadian brigadier-general offered what they described as the “best description that we have” of the Yukon object.

“Visual – a cylindrical object,” they wrote in an Feb. 11, 2023, email. “Top quarter is metallic, remainder white. 20-foot wire hanging below with a package of some sort suspended from it.”

The image appears to have been taken from an aircraft below it, although that has not been confirmed.

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