Tag: ufo

Mysterious ‘Dorito-Shaped’ Aircraft Spotted at Night Near Area 51

A nighttime thermal image captured during flight activity involving a B-2 Spirit shows a sharply triangular aircraft that resembles an unexplained platform photographed over Wichita in 2014.

Anders Otteson, the man behind the popular Uncanny Expeditions YouTube channel (that we have featured before here at The Aviationist), spotted something particularly intriguing during his latest trip to the Groom Lake area. While camping along Groom Lake Road and monitoring nighttime flight activity, early on Jan. 14, 2026, Otteson captured thermal imagery of a sharply triangular, “Dorito-shaped” aircraft operating in the restricted airspace surrounding Area 51. “Dorito” is a nickname commonly used by observers to describe an aircraft with a sharply triangular shape.

Otteson is not a casual observer. A videographer, explorer, and content creator, he routinely sets up camp in remote and unlikely locations with the specific goal of documenting activity rarely seen by the public. His epic expeditions into the deserts surrounding Groom Lake and other classified sites combine long nights in the field with thermal imaging equipment, optical sensors, and scanner monitoring, offering a unique perspective on flight activity associated with stealth aircraft and black programs.

However, the latest sighting is even more interesting than usual, as the aircraft he spotted flying at night over Nevada bears a striking resemblance to the now somewhat famous triangular aircraft photographed in daylight over Wichita, Kansas, in 2014, an image that, as our analysis at the time showed, appeared to be legitimate and unaltered.

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Two veterans shaped the UFO phenomenon from a joke into real federal policy

For more than three quarters of a century, reports of strange objects in the sky have unsettled pilots, challenged scientists, and tested the credibility of governments.

What began in the late 1940s as scattered sightings of so-called flying saucers has evolved into a modern national security issue discussed openly in Congress under the term Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAP. Two men, separated by generations but united by military service and a refusal to accept official dismissals, played defining roles in that transformation. Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe and Luis Elizondo each forced the United States to confront uncomfortable questions about what is operating in its airspace and how much the government should tell the public.

Their work reflects not only changing technologies but also changing attitudes toward secrecy, transparency, and the responsibilities of democratic institutions. Together, they form a continuous historical thread linking the earliest UFO debates of the Cold War to today’s formal federal reporting systems.

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Bank of England must plan for financial crisis sparked by aliens

The Bank of England must plan for a financial crisis being triggered by an official announcement confirming the existence of alien life, one of its former policy experts has claimed.

Helen McCaw served as a senior analyst in financial security at the UK’s central bank, preparing for events that could impact the economy.

She has now written to Andrew Bailey, the Bank’s governor, urging him to organise contingencies for the possibility that the White House may one day confirm we are not alone in the universe.

McCaw, a Cambridge graduate, believes a declaration of that magnitude would send shockwaves through the markets and could trigger bank collapses and civil unrest.

Until recently, suggestions that governments were covering up the existence of alien life were limited to a small coterie of conspiracy theorists and UFO activists.

However, a host of senior American officials, including the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, the New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence, have recently indicated their belief in the possibility of intelligent non-human life.

Rubio, a close ally of President Trump, told the makers of the recently released UFO documentary The Age of Disclosure: “We’ve had repeated instances of something operating in the airspace over restricted nuclear facilities, and it’s not ours.”

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We Were Told There Is No Scientific Evidence for UFOs. Our Research Says Otherwise

Two months ago, the documentary The Age of Disclosure premiered in theaters and on Amazon Prime Video.

In the film, 34 government officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and senior members of Congress from both parties, reveal what they are able to disclose publicly about unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

Rarely have so many highly credible testimonies been assembled in a single production, which quickly became the most-purchased film on the streaming platform.

We learn not only about UFO sightings, but also about serious allegations of secret government programs studying UFOs, crash-retrieval efforts involving non-human vehicles, and threats directed at whistleblowers.

The implications are enormous: our planet may be visited — or even inhabited — by another intelligent species, far more advanced than ourselves.

The Age of Disclosure has been met with both fascination and skepticism. The skeptics’ central response has been, “Where is the data? Where is the evidence?”

Unsurprisingly, many news outlets have opted for lighter undertones in their coverage, choosing their language carefully to distance themselves from the exotic nature of the claims made in the film.

The topic has long been ridiculed and stigmatized within scientific circles, where engaging with it was considered a near-certain path to career ruin. Media houses and editors often fear publishing pieces that might appear to support such claims, and any articles that do emerge tend to downplay their significance.

But is there truly a serious lack of evidence for UFOs, as skeptics have insisted since the 1950s?

For the past several years, my colleagues and I have analyzed “transients,” intriguing astronomical phenomena which change in brightness – or disappear entirely – over short periods of time.

Our research has zeroed in on hundreds of thousands of bright, star-like short flashes of light, recorded in photographic surveys of the night sky. Importantly, these astronomical observations are from the years before the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik, in 1957.

In two papers published recently in respected, peer-reviewed scientific journals, we make a compelling case that at least some of these bright flashes are reflections of the Sun off of objects of unknown, but non-natural, origin.

We also find a statistically significant correlation among these bright flashes, historical eyewitness UFO reports, and above ground nuclear tests that were being conducted at that time. Unsurprisingly, our work has garnered significant attention from our scientific colleagues.

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Bill to Establish State UFO Panel Introduced in Vermont Legislature

A Vermont lawmaker has introduced a bill to establish a panel to investigate UFOs that appear in the skies over the Green Mountain State. According to a local media report, the envisioned Vermont Airspace Safety and Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Task Force would function in a fashion similar to the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Specifically, the panel would “evaluate reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, assess airspace and public safety risks, coordinate with academic institutions and federal agencies, and develop recommendations to improve incident reporting, response, and analysis.”

The ten-person group would consist of representatives from the Vermont state government, law enforcement agencies, the aviation industry, and experts in aerospace and radar systems. Additionally, the group would receive technical assistance from the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, an independent UFO research group boasting an array of scientists and professionals with an active interest in the phenomenon. Remarkably, the bill defines “unidentified anomalous phenomena” as unknown drones or conventional aircraft as well as objects that display “performance characteristics not consistent with currently understood technologies,” such as “instantaneous acceleration” and “hypersonic velocity.”

The proposal for the panel was introduced to the Vermont House of Representatives on Tuesday by Rep. Troy Headrick. The lawmaker offered no opinion on the envisioned UFO group nor an endorsement of the idea itself, indicating that his role was simply to advance an issue of interest to a constituent, Maggie Lenz, who came up with the concept after the mystery drone wave of late 2024. The bill will next move to the House Government Operations Committee, where members will debate its merits and decide if it should advance further towards becoming law. To that end, one would be wise to temper their expectations as, last summer, a similar effort to create a state UFO commission in New Hampshire failed to pass.

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Alien Abduction Odds Index 2026: Where Reports Cluster Across the U.S. and Canada

Tracking Where Alien Abduction Stories Consistently Surface

Most alien abduction stories begin quietly — a strange light, a missing moment, something that feels off. Many are never reported. Others are quickly dismissed.

But when years of UFO data are compared, a clear pattern emerges: these reports don’t appear evenly across the map.

The Alien Abduction Odds Index 2026 compares where abduction-related UFO reports are most often recorded across the United States and Canada. It doesn’t predict events — it compares patterns.

Each state and province is given an implied probability, an odds-style measure that shows how frequently these reports have appeared in one place compared with others.

The odds are low everywhere. But the takeaway is simple: these reports don’t appear everywhere — they appear somewhere.

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CIA can neither ‘confirm nor deny’ existence of 3I/ATLAS file — hinting at possible threat: Harvard scientist

Is this the new Area 51?

3I/ATLAS may have left Earth’s neighborhood, but it’s still very much on our radar. In a new Medium post, Harvard Scientist Avi Loeb pointed out that the CIA hinted at the existence of classified documents related to the interstellar comet, suggesting that it could potentially be a threat to humanity.

“It’s very interesting that they did not dismiss the existence of documents within the CIA on this matter,” the astrophysicist told the Post.

Loeb was referencing the CIA’s response to a query by UFO researcher/conspiracy theorist John Greenewald Jr.

In the letter, which Greenewald Jr. shared to X, the agency wrote that it can neither “confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records” related to 3I/ATLAS. 

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The Pentagon Is Rebranding Miracles as Threats

The U.S. government is afraid.

For the last few years, we have watched a slow-motion collision between the Department of Defense and a reality it cannot explain. We have seen Congressional hearings where decorated pilots testify about objects performing impossible maneuvers. We have heard intelligence officials invent sterile, bureaucratic language to describe the inexplicable: “Instantaneous acceleration,” “transmedium travel,” and “signature management.”

They call these objects UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena). They treat them as a technological surprise—a potential national security threat from China, Russia, or somewhere further afield. The Pentagon is scrambling to collect data, desperately trying to catch up to a phenomenon they believe is new.

But it isn’t new. If the intelligence community bothered to open a theology textbook—or even a history book—they would realize they are thousands of years late to the conversation.

The Ancient Data Set

The Church has the oldest, most verifiable data set on this phenomenon in the world. But even before the Church, this reality was recorded by every major civilization.

We see it in Egyptian hieroglyphs. We hear it in the oral traditions of indigenous peoples who spoke of “Star People” long before the Old Testament was written down. This phenomenon has been a constant companion to humanity. The only thing that changes is the language we use to describe it.

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Advanced alien civilizations could be communicating ‘like fireflies’ in plain sight, researchers suggest

Advanced alien civilizations may communicate via a series of flashing lights, similar to how fireflies do, a new paper hints. This would potentially make extraterrestrials much harder to spot if we continue to rely on our current observation techniques, the researchers argue.

However, while this thought experiment raises interesting questions about alien intelligence, it does not provide any evidence that these signals actually exist.

So far, the quest to uncover alien intelligence has focused on finding evidence of distant human-like civilizations. For example, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute — the world’s leading organization dedicated to searching for alien life — spends most of its time searching for radio signals from distant exoplanets or heat given off by technological megastructures, such as the theoretical Dyson sphere.

However, some scientists believe that these searches suffer from an “anthropocentric bias” — meaning we’re trying to understand nonhuman entities through a distinctly human lens — and do not account for potential civilizations that are wholly different from our own. Due to this bias, we may be overlooking promising signs of life.

In the new study, uploaded Nov. 8 to the preprint server arXiv, researchers proposed a new way that an alien civilization could communicate — by flashing to one another like fireflies. These flashing signals could be used for specific and complex communications. However, the researchers argue that they are more likely being widely broadcast to other civilizations, like a luminous repeating beacon. (This paper has not yet been peer reviewed, but is now under consideration for publication in the journal PNAS.)

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Reports of UFOs sightings on the rise in Belgium – with spike reported in March

Belgium’s UFO hotline recorded 237 sightings of unidentified flying objects in 2025, according to its annual report published on Monday.

The Belgische UFO-meldpunt (Belgian UFO Reporting Centre) has been analysing strange aerial phenomena in Belgium since 2007, supported by a team of five scientists.

Sightings in 2025 rose by 44% compared to the previous year, following a significant drop from 227 reports in 2023 to 161 in 2024. Most incidents occurred in March and September.

March’s spike was attributed to the release of excess fuel by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket during a satellite launch. The fuel created a spiral-shaped illuminated cloud, made up of water and carbon dioxide.

Reports were also driven by “skytracers” – bright lights used to illuminate clouds – and sightings of Starlink satellite trains.

In November, only 11 sightings were linked to drones spotted near military bases and airports.

In most cases, misidentifications involving aeroplanes, helicopters, or stars were found to be the cause.

The French-speaking counterpart, the Belgian Committee for the Study of Space Phenomena (Cobeps), is set to release its 2025 report in the coming days, according to its president Patrick Ferryn.

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