Tag: ufo

Former UFO Office Director’s Opinions Draw Scrutiny on Impartiality and Investigation Handling

A recent opinion article written by Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the former director of the U.S. government’s Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) office, known as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), has prompted concerns regarding the impartiality and handling of the office under his leadership.

In the article published in Scientific American, Dr. Kirkpatrick took swipes at whistleblowers under threat from reprisals and current members of Congress currently investigating UAP.

Dr. Kirkpatrick, referring to former senior intelligence official and UAP whistleblower David Grusch, wrote:

‘Our efforts were ultimately overwhelmed by sensational but unsupported claims that ignored contradictory evidence yet captured the attention of policymakers and the public, driving legislative battles and dominating the public narrative.’

Dr. Kirkpatrick in October 2023 admitted that as director he had not spoken to Grusch about the allegations, casting doubts over his position to know whether they are unsupported. 

Grusch has lodged an official complaint with Thomas Monheim, the Intelligence Community’s Inspector General (ICIG), addressing UAP programs and the reprisals he endured. The complaint has been recognized as both credible and urgent.

That complaint was lodged in May 2022, almost two months before the AARO was stood up. 

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THE VANISHING STAR ENIGMA AND THE 1952 WASHINGTON D.C. UFO WAVE

As we look up at the starry sky, countless celestial bodies silently peer down upon us. Most of these have been there for billions of years as stellar processes slowly unfold, starting from their birth until their final demise. Light from other celestial objects, though long vanished, has only recently reached us. In other instances, swift changes in the sky occur at timescales as short as seconds or minutes, like when a dwarf star momentarily flares up or when a human satellite crosses the field of view.

My team has been searching for objects that may have vanished. As an unexpected result of our searches, we found cases where multiple star-like objects (transients) appeared and vanished in a small image within an hour, and even more peculiarly, two of our brightest cases happened in July 1952, coinciding in time with the 1952 Washington D.C. UFO flyovers. But what have we actually found, and how do these two events potentially link to one another?

In the Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project, our team has been dedicated to the search for celestial objects that vanished over the span of 70 years. In the grand scheme of cosmic time and the billions of years needed for a low-mass star to turn into a white dwarf, seventy years is only a fleeting moment in cosmic time. But 70 years is also much longer than the time needed for a satellite to pass through the telescope’s field of view. Our original objective was to search for a star that had vanished, with the hope of detecting instances where a star directly collapses into a black hole (failed supernova), an event predicted by supernova theoreticians. Alternatively, we were intrigued by the prospect of finding a star that vanishes entirely without a trace or explanation; a signature of a highly advanced civilization.

However, this task was far from straightforward. My colleague spent two years developing powerful methods [5] for sifting through the vast terabytes of image data involved. In parallel, we were (and still are) running a citizen science project together with scientists, amateur astronomers, and students primarily in Algeria and Nigeria, to search for these vanishing stars.

For our searches, we employed an object catalog sourced from the US Naval Observatory (USNO) together with archival images dating back to the early 1950s, captured at the Palomar Observatory in California. The images from Palomar predate the dawn of human space exploration. This night sky was pristine, and a far cry from today’s sky that is littered with tens of thousands of debris pieces from human satellites in orbits around the Earth, many producing flashes lasting fractions of a second as they reflect sunlight and tumble through space. These images we compared to the modern databases from Palomar Sky Survey, PanSTARRS, and the Gaia satellite in our quest to find disappearing objects.

We still haven’t found a single failed supernova candidate. However, our exploration has led us to a more intriguing discovery: several images where multiple star-like objects appear in a single snapshot of the sky, never to be seen again. In a specific instance [1], nine faint objects looking like stars were visible in an image captured on April 12, 1950, during a 50-minute exposure. However, they were absent in the image taken just 30 minutes earlier and in another image from six days later. We searched through all available archives in an attempt to locate the nine objects. We directed the world’s largest optical telescope, the Gran Telescopio Canarias, with its 10.4-meter aperture, to the locations where the transients had been. Nothing was found. The objects had simply vanished.

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UFO Hearing Witness: New UAP Bill Will ‘Close the Gap’

A new bill that hopes to protect civil aviators from reprisal for reporting unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) will “close the gap” between reports of UFOs and national security channels, a whistleblower who testified to Congress last year has said.

Speaking to Fox News on Monday, Ryan Graves, a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot, said commercial pilots were “sometimes our best sensors that we have available to us in the sky,” but faced a stigma for reporting sightings.

He added that the Safe Airspace for Americans Act, introduced in the House on Thursday, would create a channel through which pilots could make reports about objects they had seen in the sky, to “make sure that we’re listening to what they say, both for national security reasons and for whatever UAP turn out to be.”

The bill, introduced by California Rep. Robert Garcia, a Democrat, would require the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to establish procedures for reporting UAP sightings and evaluate any threat they might present to American airspace.

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Mysterious ‘Jellyfish’ UFO Video Released

A bizarre aerial object seen in leaked footage has been dubbed the ‘Jellyfish’ UFO. Said to be recorded using thermal imaging in 2017 at a US military base in Iraq, a Marine veteran, Michael Cincoski, told NewsNation that the object did not appear to be threatening and was eventually considered like a “ghost story” at the base.

Researcher and documentarian Jeremy Corbell, who said the footage was leaked to him, described the UFO as being submerged in water for 17 minutes before rapidly ascending.

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Air Force Whistleblower’s Concerns “Legit” Over US Govt UFO Program Cover-Up; House Oversight Committee

A classified briefing on UFOs delivered to members of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on Friday elicited a mixed response, with some saying they were dissatisfied by the fragmented information presented, while others were grateful to receive some more clarity.

Interest in UFOs, which officials now call unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), surged in July 2023 when the Oversight Committee invited Air Force veteran David Grusch to speak after he’d filed a formal complaint with the Inspector General of the U.S. intelligence community, claiming “the U.S. government is operating with secrecy—above Congressional oversight” on the subject.

During that hearing, Mr. Grusch accused the Pentagon and its private contractors of covering up a “multi-decade” program to reverse-engineer technology retrieved from crashed UFOs piloted by “non-human” beings, or “biologics” as he called them.

He also mentioned knowledge of people harmed or injured in efforts to cover up or conceal the extraterrestrial technology program.

Though apparently only limited information was disclosed during Friday’s 90-minute briefing at the Capitol Building in Washington, the attendees agreed that the hearing seemed to confirm Mr. Grusch’s claims.

“Based on what we heard,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) said, “many of Grusch[’s] claims have merit!”

“I think everybody left there thinking and knowing that Grusch is legit—if they didn’t think that before,” attested Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.).

The Tennessee legislator, one of the stronger voices calling for transparency on the issue of UAPs, nevertheless left the meeting somewhat frustrated, saying the meeting was just “more of the same.”

“By design this issue is very compartmentalized,” he explained. “It’s like looking down the barrel of a .22 rifle. All they know is just right in that little circle.”

“Now it’s just whack-a-mole—you go to the next [briefing], until we get some answers.”

For Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) the limited information presented only proved there was a “concerted effort to conceal as much information as possible—both in Congress and to the general public.”

“I asked very specific questions and was unable to get specific answers,” he said. “And so that’s a problem, and we’re not going to stop until we get the truth.”

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‘Aliens’ which sparked global debate by Mexican Congress are actually dolls, say Peru scientists

Two doll-like figures and an alleged three-fingered hand that were seized by customs authorities in Peru, have been dismissed as “not alien” by scientists.

Picked up in a shipment headed to Mexico last year, forensic experts have determined that the objects were made with paper, glue, metal and human and animal bones.

It comes after Mexico’s congress sparked international debate after hearing testimony purporting to show the existence of extraterrestrial life.

The findings quash some people’s belief that the figures come from an “alien centre or come from another planet, all of which is totally false,” said forensic archaeologist Flavio Estrada, who led the analysis.

“The conclusion is simple: they are dolls assembled with bones of animals from this planet, with modern synthetic glues, therefore they were not assembled during pre-Hispanic times,” Estrada told reporters.

“They are not extraterrestrials; they are not aliens.”

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Lawmakers investigating UAPs, or UFOs, remain frustrated after closed-door briefing with government watchdog

House lawmakers emerging from a classified, closed-door briefing with an internal government watchdog on Friday said they remained frustrated in their attempts to get more information about explosive whistleblower claims made about unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs.

Thomas Monheim, the inspector general of the intelligence community, briefed members of the House Oversight Committee’s national security subcommittee on Capitol Hill. The meeting came months after the subcommittee held a high-profile public hearing that featured tantalizing testimony from a former military intelligence officer-turned-whistleblower named David Grusch.

At the hearing in July, Grusch said he was informed of “a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program” and accused the military of misappropriating funds to shield these operations from congressional oversight. He claimed he had interviewed officials who had direct knowledge of aircraft with “nonhuman” origins, and that so-called “biologics” were recovered from some craft. The Pentagon denied his claims.

The subcommittee has been leading the charge to improve transparency about what the government knows about anomalous phenomena. Rep. Glenn Grothman, a Republican from Wisconsin and the subcommittee’s chairman, said before Friday’s meeting that lawmakers were looking “to track down exactly what the military thinks of individual instances of these objects flying around.”

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NEW BIPARTISAN BILL AIMS TO STRENGTHEN UAP REPORTING FROM CIVILIAN PILOTS AND AVIATION PERSONNEL

A new bipartisan bill, the Safe Airspace for Americans Act, has been introduced to encourage reporting of sightings of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) by pilots and other civilian aviation personnel and offer legal protection against repercussions from sharing their sightings.

The bill, introduced by Congressman Robert Garcia (D-CA) and Congressman Glenn Grothman (R-WI), will help to facilitate reporting of UAP sightings by civilian aircrew, air traffic controllers, flight attendants, maintenance workers, dispatchers, and airlines to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The FAA will also be required to collect data and conduct investigations into UAP reports it receives under the bill’s provisions, after which the information is to be shared with the DoD’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).

Significantly, the legislation also aims to provide legal protections for pilots against possible retaliations that may result from reporting their UAP sightings, such as medical disqualifications or cease-and-desist notifications from airlines.

“UAP transparency is incredibly important for our national security, which is why we need to create a space where those working in aviation have the ability to report their findings and experiences,” Congressman Garcia said in a statement.

Calling the bill “another step forward for disclosure,” Garcia added that the newly proposed legislation will offer a safe means by which civilian and commercial aviation personnel may report UAP sightings.

“UAPs continue to raise serious questions and pose a unique risk to our national security,” Congressman Grothman said, calling the Safe Airspace for Americans Act “a crucial initiative that empowers those on the frontline of our skies to contribute valuable intelligence regarding UAP sightings that can help ensure that potential threats are thoroughly investigated.”

Grothman, currently the Chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, added that the bipartisan effort “highlights our need for transparency from the federal government regarding UAPs to better protect the safety and security of American citizens.”

The text of the bill was made available on Thursday and can be read online.

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PILOT’S BIZARRE ENCOUNTER WITH 30-FOOT-TALL TRIANGULAR UFO PROMPTS AVIATION SAFETY CONCERNS

A baffling incident unfolded in the skies above Frederick County, Maryland, last month as a private pilot reported a mid-air encounter with a 30-foot-tall triangular UFO, newly released audio recordings reveal.

The pilot, flying a Piper Cherokee Arrow (P28R), registration N30024, was flying from Allegheny County Airport in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Frederick Municipal Airport in Maryland at the time of the incident, which occurred on December 20, 2023.

Approximately 50 miles northwest of his destination, the pilot contacted air traffic controllers (ATC) to report sighting an object he described as appearing to be “approximately 30 feet tall” as it passed him flying “at about 6500-6800 feet.”

“Not sure what it is,” the pilot can be heard saying in an audio recording of the incident uploaded to the YouTube channel You Can See ATC, which specializes in reconstructions of non-standard and emergency situations that occur in flight.

“It was 30 feet tall?” an obviously perplexed ATC operator can be heard replying.

“It was pretty tall, probably about 30 feet tall,” the pilot confirms. “It was going opposite direction of us.”

Asked if the object was moving at a fast pace, the pilot, just prior to entering his descent, also confirmed that the object appeared to be moving quickly as it passed him.

“Arrow to 024, what does the object look like?” the ATC operator can then be heard asking.

“It’s kinda hard to describe,” the pilot responds. “It was just, uh, tall and, uh, pointy.”

“Like a triangle?” the ATC operator then asks.

“It was in the shape of a triangle. It was bottom and flat on top. I’m not sure what it is.” Intriguingly, the pilot then adds, “[I] do have a picture of it,” clarifying that there “did not appear to be any danger” resulting from the appearance of the unusual flying triangle.

“It was pretty far away from us. Just noticeable enough for caution to other aircraft,” the pilot says.

Following this exchange, the ATC operator can then be heard advising the pilot to call his supervisor due to safety concerns that were raised after the pilot’s bizarre sighting.

“Just wanna make sure everything is safe up there, uh, for future aircraft flying through that. So give him a call once you’re on the ground safely please.”

The Debrief has reached out to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for comment on the December 2023 incident. The pilot who reported the sighting of the strange object has not been identified.

For decades, observations of flying objects of unknown origin, which the Department of Defense now calls unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), have often involved triangular UFO sightings. Beginning on November 29, 1989, a wave of sightings involving large, triangular aircraft erupted over Belgium, culminating in an intercept attempt involving two Belgian Air Force F-16s in the early morning hours of March 31, 1990. Sightings of the unusual craft continued until April of that year.

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‘Unlikely’ that object in new UAP video is camera smudge: Expert

When Dr. Matthew Szydagis first saw new footage of a purported UAP in Iraq, it reminded him of a pop culture icon: a Star Wars droid.

“It is not a standard or common shape of UAP,” Szydagis said Tuesday on “Elizabeth Vargas Reports.”

The professor of physics at the University of Albany has authored a prodigious number of scientific publications on the topic, including one published in December.

The new video, released by journalist Jeremy Corbell, shows something that resembles a jellyfish flying in the sky, its tentacles dangling in the air. NewsNation has not independently verified the footage.

The video was apparently taken at a U.S. joint operations base in Iraq, and according to Corbell, the object is officially designated a UAP — unknown aerial phenomenon — by the Pentagon. The footage was taken with thermographic/forward-looking infrared radar.

The object’s color changes quickly throughout the video, indicating a temperature change. That’s notable, Szydagis said, because it’s not possible for any known objects to change temperature that fast.

“That implies either a camera artifact, that it’s not really changing temperature that quickly, or it implies some sort of signature management, which would then beg the question if you have that ability, why wouldn’t you just stay invisible?” Szydagis said. “It asks a lot of questions without very many answers right now.”

A “camera artifact” could be something like a smudge on the lens. Several replies to Corbell’s post on X suggest this may be the case here, but Szydagis said that’s unlikely for multiple reasons.

“That was one of my initial thoughts, but when you look at the video carefully, you can actually see that the object changes in size with the zoom,” he said. “You also see the camera reticle, sort of the central four marks on the camera, will be changing position relative to the object.”

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