Tag: pentagon

Pentagon creates UFO task force to see if aerial objects pose threat

The concern is out there.

Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed the existence of a Navy-led “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force” that will monitor ongoing encounters with strange aerial objects and determine whether these phenomena should be perceived as a threat.

Approved on Aug. 4 by Deputy Secretary of Defense David L. Norquist, the task force was officially launched “to improve its understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAPs,” according to a Friday evening news release. “The mission of the task force is to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.”

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What does the Pentagon’s new UFO task force mean? Experts weigh in.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) announced the creation of a task force to analyze and understand the “nature and origins” of UAPs. The Department of the Navy, under the cognizance of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, will lead the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF).

The mission of the UAPTF “is to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security,” DoD officials said in a brief statement released on Friday (Aug. 14).

But before you set up greeting signs and start tossing out welcome mats for the incoming aliens, a little perspective and context are in order. I asked some UFO specialists what they thought of the newly announced task force.

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TikTok and America’s fake Internet Freedom War

Just about every layer of America’s media and political class shares his view that China is a force of pure undemocratic evil that needs to have its kneecaps shot out. From the respectable prog-left, to the radical center, and the right — the push to restrict China’s incursion into America’s telecommunication space enjoys multi-spectrum partisan consensus. Everyone who is anyone backs Steven Bannon’s vision. So no surprises there.

What interesting about seeing this “the Internet is a threat” stuff put into an official presidential executive order is that for years the Chinese government has been basically saying the same exact thing: that the Internet is a dangerous weapon that can be wielded by an aggressive foreign power.

But instead of being seen as a sensible and correct position — which it was, especially in the beginning — China was mocked and criticized as a weak, authoritarian power that’s afraid of letting its people communicate freely with the outside world. “THIS IS WHAT CHINESE COMMUNISM LOOKS LIKE,” we were told. “THIS IS HOW EVIL THEY ARE!”

Meanwhile, as if to prove China’s point, America launched bottomless-dollar initiative to make sure China wouldn’t be able to control its own domestic Internet space. Under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, this came to be known as America’s war for “Internet Freedom” — a war which actually started back in the early 2000, when this privatized Pentagon tech first began to go global.

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The Pentagon has made more UFO revelations, but Canada’s had a public UFO database for decades

Earlier this year, the Pentagon confirmed that Tom Delonge had actually leaked some legit UFO videos; and just last week, The New York Times buried even more UFO revelations on the 17th page of the print edition.

It’s definitely weird that the former lead singer of Blink-182 emerged from a paranoid painkiller addiction to become a legitimate UFOlogist, in communication with John Podesta and Hillary Clinton. It’s even weirder that his colleagues in the To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences include a former Defense Department employee who may be lying about his involvement with the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program; the former head of the CIA’s “men who stare at goats” program, who also claimed to scientifically “confirm” that Russian magician Uri Geller had actual psychokinetic abilities, even though Geller himself admitted it was a trick; and a scion of the Gulf Oil fortune who also worked for the DOD and involved in a UFO interest group with the co-author of the NYT articles about the Pentagon’s UFO program. Or that TTA purchased supposedly “alien” metals from the billionaire owner of Budget Suites for America.

But what’s even more ridiculous is that the Canadian government has had most of their UFO information easily available for decades. The info they have is no more damning or exciting than that blurry Pentagon footage of a pill-shaped aerial vehicle that’s probably just an unmanned drone or satellite. But the truth, as they say, is out there, nonetheless.

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It’s time to take UFOs seriously. Seriously.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon released three videos of UFOs recorded by the Navy — one taken in 2004 and the other two in 2015. The videos, which first leaked a couple of years ago, show … well, it’s not exactly clear.

There are various objects — two of which look like aircraft — spinning through the sky and moving in ways that defy easy explanation. As the images bop across the screen, you can hear the pilots’ excitement and confusion in real time as they track whatever it is they’re seeing.

I’m not what you would call a UFO enthusiast, but the videos are the most compelling I’ve ever seen. They seem to confirm, at the very least, that UFOs are real — not that aliens exist, but that there are unidentified objects buzzing around the sky.

Now, do I think aliens are real? Yeah, probably. Are they flying spaceships into our atmosphere? Who the hell knows?

The best anyone can say is that there’s a non-zero chance that some of these UFOs were made by non-human hands, and that, I’d argue, is reason enough to talk about them. But it’s barely cracked the news cycle. Even in a pandemic, you’d think we’d have a little time for UFO talk.

So in an attempt to force a UFO conversation into the public discourse, I contacted Alexander Wendt, a professor of international relations at Ohio State University. Wendt is a giant in his field of IR theory, but in the past 15 years or so, he’s become an amateur ufologist. He wrote an academic article about the political implications of UFOs in 2008, and, more recently, he gave a TEDx talk calling out the “taboo” against studying UFOs.

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Pentagon Has ‘Off-World Vehicles Not Made on This Earth’

For years, the U.S. government has repeatedly changed its tune regarding its official involvement with UFO research.

As recently as February, a Pentagon spokesperson told Popular Mechanics that, while a government program did investigate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and other unexplained aerial phenomena for some time last decade, funding dried up in 2012. But when Popular Mechanics thoroughly investigated the covert program, multiple sources said it’s still ongoing to this day.

Now, a new report in the New York Times confirms those accounts. The government’s UFO unit currently resides in the Office of Naval Intelligence, where it “deals with classified matters,” per the report, even though the unit itself isn’t classified. The Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force is meant to “standardize collection and reporting” on sightings of UAVs and publicly divulge “at least some of its findings” twice a year, according to the Times.

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A World of ‘Killer Robots’ But Not ‘National Security’

Think of this as an early public sign of the rise of naval robotic warfare, which is finally leaving dystopian futuristic fantasies for actual future battlefields. In the Navy’s version of this altered landscape, large numbers of unmanned vessels (both surface ships and submarines) will roam the world’s oceans, reporting periodically via electronic means to human operators ashore or on designated command ships. They may, however, operate for long periods on their own or in robotic “wolf packs.”

Such a vision has now been embraced by the senior Pentagon leadership, which sees the rapid procurement and deployment of such robotic vessels as the surest way of achieving the Navy’s (and President Trump’s) goal of a fleet of 355 ships at a time of potentially static defense budgets, recurring pandemics, and mounting foreign threats. “I think one of the ways you get [to the 355-ship level] quickly is moving toward lightly manned [vessels], which over time can be unmanned,” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper typically said in February. “We can go with lightly manned ships… You can build them so they’re optionally manned and then, depending on the scenario or the technology, at some point in time they can go unmanned… That would allow us to get our numbers up quickly, and I believe that we can get to 355, if not higher, by 2030.”

To begin to implement such an audacious plan, that very month the Pentagon requested $938 million for the next two fiscal years to procure three prototype large unmanned surface vessels (LUSVs) and another $56 million for the initial development of a medium-sized unmanned surface vessel (MUSV). If such efforts prove successful, the Navy wants another $2.1 billion from 2023 through 2025 to procure seven deployable LUSVs and one prototype MUSV.

Naval officials have, however, revealed little about the design or ultimate functioning of such robot warships. All that service’s 2021 budget request says is that “the unmanned surface vessel (USV) is a reconfigurable, multi-mission vessel designed to provide low cost, high endurance, reconfigurable ships able to accommodate various payloads for unmanned missions and augment the Navy’s manned surface force.”

Based on isolated reports in the military trade press, the most that can be known about such future (and futuristic) ships, is that they will resemble miniature destroyers, perhaps 200 feet long, with no crew quarters but a large array of guided missiles and anti-submarine weapons. Such vessels will also be equipped with sophisticated computer systems enabling them to operate autonomously for long periods of time and – under circumstances yet to be clarified – take offensive action on their own or in coordination with other unmanned vessels.

The future deployment of robot warshipson the high seas raises troubling questions. To what degree, for instance, will they be able to choose targets on their own for attack and annihilation? The Navy has yet to provide an adequate answer to this question, provoking disquiet among arms control and human rights advocates who fear that such ships could “go rogue” and start or escalate a conflict on their own. And that’s obviously a potential problem in a world of recurring pandemics where killer robots could prove the only types of ships the Navy dares deploy in large numbers.

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