Tag: pentagon

DoD Releases New Document Disclosing the ‘World’s UFO Hotspots’

The U.S. Department of Defense unveiled a document detailing the world’s primary UFO sighting locations, according to a report from the Daily Mail.

The document includes a map pinpointing areas reporting the highest number of unidentified object sightings, based on data from 1996 to 2023, according to the Daily Mail report.

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, stated, “We see these all over the world, and we see these making very interesting apparent manoeuvres.”

The map highlights several regions, including Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan, the east and west coasts of the U.S. and parts of the Middle East as primary locations for UFO sightings, the report noted.

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Pentagon releases new website on UFOs

The Defense Department on Thursday released a new website that will provide official declassified information on UFOs, including pictures and videos, for the public to easily parse through.

The website is the official page for the public to interact with the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), a relatively new Pentagon office tasked with reviewing and analyzing UFOs.

The site appears to still be under construction, but it can be found here. The Hill has reached out to the Defense Department for more information about when the full website will go live.

The U.S. government, which now refers to UFOs by the name of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), has taken the presence of unknown flying objects more seriously in the past few years, as has Congress.

In a Thursday release about the website, the Pentagon said it was “committed to transparency with the American people on AARO’s work” on UAPs.

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Pentagon To Send Ukrainian Pilots For F-16 Training To Texas & Arizona

A US official has informed The New York Times on Thursday that the Pentagon plans to begin training Ukrainian pilots on F-16 fighter jets inside the US, as part of a program which could start as early as September.

Already a program has been kicked off in the Netherlands and Denmark, which Kiev has complained has been too slow to get off the ground, also given it only includes six Ukrainian pilots. At this rate, the expected date that Ukraine could be piloting the US-made jets in battle keeps getting pushed back – from estimates of next summer to now perhaps end of 2024.

“[We’re] open to training existing pilots if capacity is reached in Europe,” a Pentagon spokesperson had initially previewed days ago, on Monday.

“That’s the condition. So, if Denmark and the Netherlands are taking the lead on training, if they just do not have the capacity … to train as many pilots as Ukraine wants to send or plans to send, then we will… help train stateside,” the earlier statement added.

But on Thursday more details have come out, apparently with a fuller US commitment, which will see training locations which includes Texas and Arizona.

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Lawmakers Slip Censorship Provisions Into Pentagon Spending Bill

The biennial Pentagon budget reauthorization usually presents ample opportunities for wasteful spending, as lawmakers slip provisions into routine legislation that compels the government to purchase unnecessary and overpriced military equipment.

But this year, lawmakers have also quietly pushed changes to the National Defense Authorization Act that aim to silence military personnel and purge the internet of certain information.

One particularly alarming provision comes from Rep. Mike Turner, a Republican from Ohio, which prohibits the Department of Defense from engaging with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a civil rights group advocating for the separation of church and state.

MRFF represents service members of all religions and denominations, helping them report instances of inappropriate proselytizing and the presence of religious symbols in official military affairs. The organization has previously succeeded in having crusader imagery removed from a Marine squadron and a Bible taken down from display at the F.E. Warren Air Force Base near Cheyenne, Wyoming.

“It is unprecedented in American history that Congress has ever tried to basically extinguish or assassinate a civil rights organization,” said Mikey Weinstein, an attorney, and former Air Force officer who founded the group in 2005.

Under this provision, not only is Defense Department staff prohibited from communicating with MRFF or Weinstein, but the military is also barred from taking any action in response to “any claim, objection, or protest made by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation without the authority of the Secretary of Defense.”

In an interview, Weinstein raised concerns about the impact on a current case involving a Jewish cadet or midshipman at a major military academy, questioning where they would turn for assistance. He emphasized that filing a grievance or simply contacting MRFF by phone could potentially result in a court-martial.

Weinstein believes that Turner holds a grudge against MRFF ever since the organization petitioned for the removal of a Bible from Wright Patterson Air Force Base, which is located in Turner’s Ohio district. The amendment was added to the NDAA without any debate and received unanimous consent from the committee, indicating support from House Democrats as well.

The bill passed the House last Friday and now moves to the Senate, where lawmakers aim to exploit this must-pass legislation to advance another broad restriction on speech.

Senators Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, and Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, are preparing to introduce an amendment to the NDAA that would grant lawmakers extraordinary powers to censor a wide range of information on the internet.

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PENTAGON JOINS ELON MUSK’S WAR AGAINST PLANE TRACKING

A TECHNOLOGY WISH LIST circulated by the U.S. military’s elite Joint Special Operations Command suggests the country’s most secretive war-fighting component shares an anxiety with the world’s richest man: Too many people can see where they’re flying their planes.

The Joint Special Operations Air Component, responsible for ferrying commandos and their gear around the world, is seeking help keeping these flights out of the public eye through a “‘Big Data’ Analysis & Feedback Tool,” according to a procurement document obtained by The Intercept. The document is one of a series of periodic releases of lists of technologies that special operations units would like to see created by the private sector.

The listing specifically calls out the risk of social media “tail watchers” and other online observers who might identify a mystery plane as a military flight. According to the document, the Joint Special Operations Air Component needs software to “leverage historical and real-time data, such as the travel histories and details of specific aircraft with correlation to open-source information, social media, and flight reporting.”

Armed with this data, the tool would help the special operations gauge how much scrutiny a given plane has received in the past and how likely it is to be connected to them by prying eyes online.

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Pentagon typo leaked millions of sensitive messages to African nation

A common typo within the U.S. military has misdirected millions of emails and messages containing sensitive information to the African country of Mali, the Pentagon confirmed Monday.

The issue comes from the U.S. military’s “.MIL” domain name used for emails, which is commonly mistyped as “.ML,” the domain for Mali. The leak has resulted in the exposure of unclassified but sensitive information, such as diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and the travel details of top officers, according to an initial report from the Financial Times.

The Pentagon acknowledged the issue in a statement to Fox News on Monday, saying emails sent outside the “.MIL” domain are typically blocked.

“The Department of Defense is aware of this issue and takes all unauthorized disclosures of Controlled National Security Information or Controlled Unclassified Information seriously. DoD has implemented policy, training, and technical controls to ensure that emails from the “.mil” domain are not delivered to incorrect domains. Such emails are blocked before they leave the .mil domain and the sender is notified that they must validate the email addresses of the intended recipients,” the Pentagon said.

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Army exempts trans service members from physical fitness standards

Diversity is our strength. Except, apparently, the more diversity the military seeks, the less strength it requires.

That seems to be the lesson of the Army’s physical fitness standards, which do not apply to people who are getting “gender-affirming” care.

One of the shibboleths of the Left is the claim that increasing the acceptance of “gender-diverse” individuals into the military merely extends the same opportunities to transgender folks as those afforded to people who identify with their natal sex (man, finding the right words is impossible when discussing these issues!).

Combine this idea with the claim that “diversity is our strength,” and you are led to believe that the military will be improved by expanding opportunities to transgender applicants.

Yeah, right. Even the Army doesn’t believe that, and they are the ones saying it.

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HOW A NOTORIOUS GEORGIA ARMY SCHOOL BECAME AMERICA’S TRAINING GROUND FOR GLOBAL TORTURE

Fort Benning, the infamous Georgia U.S. military base, is once again in the news, changing its name to Fort Moore, thereby ditching its Confederate name. Yet none of the media covering the rebranding – not The New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN, ABC, CBS News, USA Today nor The Hill – mentioned the most controversial aspect of the institution.

Across Latin America, the very name of Fort Benning is enough to strike terror into the hearts of millions, bringing back visions of massacres and genocides. This is because the fort is home to the School of the Americas (now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation or WHINSEC), a shadowy academy where around 84,000 Latin American soldiers and police officers have been taught on the U.S. dime on how to kill, torture and how to stamp out political activists.

Thus, these units effectively serve as shock troops for the U.S. Empire, making their country safe for American multinationals to pillage. MintPress has found that no fewer than 16 School of the Americas graduates would go on to become heads of state in their country.

“The school is controversial partly because of its role in promoting US hegemony in Latin America, which undermines the sovereignty and independence of other countries,” James Jordan, national co-coordinator at Alliance for Global Justice, told MintPress, adding,

But even worse, it is how the school has promoted this: teaching methods of torture – even publishing torture manuals, counterintelligence, psyops, repression of political voices that don’t meet the approval of Washington DC. If one looks at cases of human rights abuses by the military throughout Latin America, the number of those responsible who were trained at the School of the Americas is simply staggering.”

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Inside the Pentagon office leading UFO investigations

The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office leads the department’s efforts in investigating and understanding what it calls unidentified aerial phenomena, more commonly known as UFOs.

The office, which is within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, was formed last July due to a provision within the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act that expanded the scope of the previous iteration of the office, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Group.

There are six primary lines of effort for the office — surveillance, collection, and reporting; system capabilities and design; intelligence operations and analysis; mitigation and defeat; governance; and science and technology.

Sean Kirkpatrick, the AARO’s first chief, revealed that the office is tracking a total of over 650 UFO cases during a hearing in front of a Senate Armed Services subcommittee in mid-April. He told lawmakers that the office had “prioritized about half of them to be of anomalous interesting value.”

“AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics,” Kirkpatrick added. “In the event sufficient scientific data were ever obtained that a UAP encounter can only be explained by extraterrestrial origin, we are committed to working with our interagency partners at NASA.”

Kirkpatrick’s remarks came after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report in January of this year that noted that “there have been 247 new reports and another 119 that were either since discovered or reported after the preliminary assessment’s time period,” of its initial report from June 2021.

The AARO investigated the 366 claims and found that 163 were characterized as “balloon or balloon-like entities,” 26 were characterized as “unmanned aircraft systems,” and six were attributed to clutter. The office describes the remaining 171 reports as “uncharacterized and unattributed UAP reports,” though it later noted that “many reports lack enough detailed data to enable attribution of UAP with high certainty.”

This report was a follow-up to a “preliminary assessment” on UFOs from the ODNI’s office from June 2021, stating that 144 UFO reports originated from U.S. government sources, with “a handful” of the UFOs “appear[ing] to demonstrate advanced technology.”

“One of the first things that we’re doing” is assessing all existing sensors and calibrating them best to spot and monitor unidentified objects, Kirkpatrick added, according to Defense Scoop, and he noted that only 2%-5% of reported UFO sightings are deemed “possibly really anomalous.”

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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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