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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Why the UFO whistleblowers are getting a mixed reaction

David Grusch, a retired career intelligence officer, continues to generate attention with his claims that a secret UFO recovery program has operated beyond congressional oversight for decades. Grusch is receiving a mixed reception on and off Capitol Hill.

Still, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s vice chairman, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), appears to think Grusch might be on to something.

Speaking to NewsNation last week, Rubio noted that other whistleblowers have come forward to the committee to make similar claims of a concealed UFO recovery program. While Rubio said the committee was investigating these claims, it had to be careful. As he put it, “Some of these people still work in the government, and frankly a lot of them are very fearful. Fearful of their jobs, fearful of their clearances, fearful of their career. And some, frankly, are fearful of harm coming to them.”

Rubio, who has an enduring interest in UFOs, is a member of the so-called Gang of Eight group of congressional leaders who are briefed on some of the most classified U.S. intelligence and military activities. Yet not all of the Gang of Eight agree with Rubio’s stance. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH), for example, recently expressed skepticism about Grusch’s claims. Turner’s comments suggest Congress does not yet possess any smoking gun UFO evidence. This is not to say that such evidence does not exist, but rather that it has been very well hidden within very small groups of people if it does exist.

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‘True’ or ‘crazy’? UFO whistleblowers coming ‘out of the woodwork’

In a June 26 interview with NewsNation, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) stated that multiple individuals had corroborated a whistleblower’s explosive allegations of a secret, decades-long UFO crash retrieval and reverse-engineering effort.

As the top Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and a member of the so-called Gang of Eight, Rubio’s extraordinary comments carry particular weight.

According to Rubio, only one of two remarkable outcomes will ultimately explain recent developments, “Either what [the whistleblower] is saying is partially true or entirely true,” he said, “or we have some really smart, educated people with high clearances and very important positions in our government who are crazy and are leading us on a goose chase.”

“Most of these people,” Rubio continued, “have held very high clearances and high positions within our government. So, you ask yourself: What incentive would so many people with that kind of qualification  these are serious people — have to come forward and make something up?”

Pressed for details, Rubio stated that individuals with “firsthand knowledge or firsthand claims” are “saying to us what you’ve seen out there in the public record, whether it’s about legacy [UFO] programs or about current events.”

According to Rubio, the whistleblowers’ statements are beyond “the realm of what any of us [on the Senate Intelligence Committee] has ever dealt with.”

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A Researcher Says the First UFO Really Crashed in Italy in 1933. And He Has Evidence.

Is Italy—not Roswell, New Mexico—the actual site of the first UFO crash on Earth?

An Italian researcher claims to have proof that backs up recent allegations that a crashed UFO was recovered in Italy in 1933. It adds to a growing interest in Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) that now includes elected officials and a NASA panel—even in the face of broad scientific skepticism.

In an interview published by the Daily Mail, Italian ufologist Roberto Pinotti says that fascist dictator Benito Mussolini got his hands on a flying saucer after it crashed on June 13, 1933. But the alien craft, Pinotti said, was captured by American forces at the end of World War II and sent to the U.S.

Pinotti showed documents to the newspaper that he claims are evidence of both the crash and a secret department set up by Mussolini to study the alleged saucer.

“I and my colleague Alfredo Lissoni began investigating the story of the 1933 UFO crash in Lombardy in 1996 when we received some original secret documents about the case,” Pinotti told the newspaper.

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Are UFO Sightings Taking Off Again?

UFO belief has long been considered a fringe phenomenon, but those who “want to believe” were given a boost in 2021 as U.S. intelligence services delivered an official report on “unidentified aerial phenomena” to Congress.

As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, it showed that of all 143 unexplained sightings between November 2004 and March 2021, only one UAP was later identified as a deflating balloon. In early 2023, another unclassified report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence revealed 171 not yet identified flying objects out of 366 recorded between March 2021 and August 2022.

Considering the renewed buzz around UFOs – or UAPs –  how have global UFO sightings been developing in recent years?

There is a National UFO Reporting Center in the United States which documents sightings of unexplained aerial phenomena all over the world and interestingly, sightings have been picking up again.

While there were two dips in 2018 and 2021, there were once more around 5,000 alleged UFO sightings in 2022.

This is still below peaks of 8,800 in 2014 and 7,400 in 2020 – when conspiracy beliefs were running high at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

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UFO fever grips Washington: Republican Congressman says UFOs may be ‘ancient civilization’ as Senator Marco Rubio worries craft retrieval programs are being run by ‘internal military complex’ that is ‘accountable to no one’

UFO fever appears to be gripping Washington after a series of extraordinary claims and revelations from lawmakers this week.

Claims of an illegal, hidden UFO crash retrieval program operating within the shadows were made public this month by Air Force and intelligence agency veteran David Grusch.    

Congressman and Marine veteran Mike Gallagher let loose his theories on the mystery this Tuesday, suggesting that UFOs might be time-traveling craft piloted by humans from the future, as in the 1984 film ‘The Terminator.’

Florida Senator Marco Rubio also revealed he had been approached by several high ranking Government officials with top-level security clearances who said they had ‘first-hand’ knowledge of UFO programs.

Appearing on ESPN analyst Pat McAfee’s sports talk show, Rep Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican, floated his hypothesis that the unexplained phenomena ‘could actually be an ancient civilization that’s just been hiding here and is suddenly showing itself.’

But Rep. Gallagher also brought the conversation back down to Earth, airing his concerns that the airborne mysteries might prove to be breakthrough aerospace technology mastered by a US foreign adversary. 

‘I’m probably the most interested in is whether it’s adversary technology, particularly from China,’ said Gallagher, who is also the chair of the House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. 

Whether or not we are alone in the universe, the congressman is not alone among his fellow lawmakers in openly airing his UFO concerns. 

Senator Rubio — in the unaired portions of his interview with NewsNation on Monday — voiced concern over the apparent and ‘very problematic’ lawlessness of the alleged UFO crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program.

Behind closed doors, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, where Senator Rubio is vice chairman, has heard even more ‘firsthand’ testimony on these covert UFO programs from senior military and intelligence whistleblowers beyond Grusch.  

In a complete and uncut transcript of his recent interview, supplied to the DailyMail.com by a member of Senator Rubio’s office, Rubio described the alleged UFO program as ‘in essence, some sort of an internal military complex that’s their own government and is accountable to no one.’

‘It would be a huge problem,’ the Florida Republican said, ‘if it’s even partially true.’ 

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Top US Officials Have ‘First-Hand Knowledge’ of Secret UFO Program: Rubio

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has claimed that multiple senior government officials—including Pentagon employees with “high clearances”—are aware of a secret UFO craft crash retrieval program being run by the United States.

The Republican lawmaker made the claims in an interview with NewsNation on June 26, shortly after Air Force veteran and former intelligence officer David Grusch alleged that the Pentagon had discovered dead alien bodies from spacecraft that had crashed.

“There are people that have come forward to share information with our committee over the last couple of years … I want to be very protective of these people,” said Rubio, who serves as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“A lot of these people came to us even before protections were in the law for whistleblowers to come forward,” Rubio said, adding that many of those claimed to have “first-hand knowledge” of the alleged extraterrestrial retrieval program.

The Florida Republican alleged that some of the whistleblowers who have stepped forward with similar claims to Grusch are public figures with “high clearances” and “high positions within our government.”

“We’re trying to gather as much of that information as we can … Some of these people still work in the government,” Rubio said. He added that many of them are fearful of losing their jobs, losing their clearances, and being harmed.

Rubio’s comments come amid an ongoing investigation—led by House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.)—into the alleged secret military UFO program. The committee is expected to hold a hearing on the matter soon.

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My Dad Was A Famous Alien Abductee. I Thought He Was A Joke — Now I’m Not So Sure.

There’s one video available on the internet concerning my father, Patrick McGuire. It’s strange. Uploaded to YouTube 15 years ago — though clearly recorded much earlier — the video frames another TV screen. There is constant static, and the image is fractured as if the broadcast comes from far away. My father is discussing cattle mutilations under hypnosis.

“We come up on a cow that was dead. They cut the nose off, tongues out and the sex organs were gone,” he recounts as though he is sleepwalking through a nightmare. He goes on to describe in great detail a “spaceship” that landed on his ranch and took members of his herd ― their distant, terrified animal cries filling those dark prairie nights.

One comment below the video reads, “Having lived and worked with cow-men, can you immagine this guy going to town after this got out publicly. I mean they are a finicky bunch to say the least.”

I don’t have to imagine. I grew up with him walking through our small Western town, his life by then fractured like that broadcast. He was completely destitute, picking through my classmates’ garbage, and when a classmate came to school the next day and told me what they saw, their grin, and subsequent laughter, left little to the imagination. However, I then joined in with their laughter. That commenter was right: We are a finicky bunch, to say the least.

On May 14, 2009, my father passed away in a Colorado hospital due to cancer. He was 67. I did not speak to him before he died. His last years were spent in homelessness, though he hadn’t always lived that way. His last words, so I heard, were about grand conspiracies and sinister deep states, though he hadn’t always spoken about such topics. My father’s legacy in our small Wyoming town ― and inside our family ― is stained with his tales of alien abduction, interstellar prophecy and the insistence he was chosen, though he had not always been chosen. There was a time before my birth when he was obsessed with the lore of his rural community, the spiraling complexities of high school dances and the schemes of enlarging his Roman Catholic family. He was normal, caring and complete. That was before the stars came knocking.

When I first saw the bold headline “Intelligence Officials Say U.S. Has Retrieved Craft of Non-Human Origin,” published June 5, 2023, in The Debrief, I initially didn’t think about whether the headline was true. I didn’t contemplate what the recovered crafts might look like or that “non-human” was just another euphemism for the same thing we have been talking about since 1947 ― I thought about my father.

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Congress doubles down on explosive claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

Asked June 26 about allegations of secret UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering programs, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) made several stunning statements.

In an exclusive interview, Rubio told NewsNation Washington correspondent Joe Khalil that multiple individuals with “very high clearances and high positions within our government” “have come forward to share” “first-hand” UFO-related claims “beyond the realm of what [the Senate Intelligence Committee] has ever dealt with.”

Rubio’s comments provide context for a bipartisan provision adopted unanimously by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which would immediately halt funding for any secret government or contractor efforts to retrieve and reverse-engineer craft of “non-earth” or “exotic” origin.

This extraordinary language added to the Senate version of the Intelligence authorization bill mirrors and adds significant credibility to a whistleblower’s recent, stunning allegations that a clandestine, decades-long effort to recover, analyze and exploit objects of “non-human” origin has been operating illegally without congressional oversight.

Additionally, the bill instructs individuals with knowledge of such activities to disclose all relevant information and grants legal immunity if the information is reported appropriately within a defined timeframe. Moreover, nearly 20 pages of the legislation appear to directly address recent events by enhancing a raft of legal protections for whistleblowers while also permitting such individuals to contact Congress directly.

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Coming to a Rooftop Near You: A UFO-Spotting Spycam

An ex-spook made an incredible claim about aliens last week. David Charles Grusch, a former official with the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, told The Debrief that the feds possess what the publication described as “intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin.”

But there’s a catch: There’s no actual evidence to back up Grusch’s claim. No evidence that the government is sitting on a bunch of derelict alien spacecraft. And no evidence aliens even exist, for that matter. Worse for Fox Mulder-style true believers, no one’s even looking for extraterrestrials near Earth—at least not with any real scientific rigor.

That last caveat is about to change. Harvard physicist Avi Loeb and his alien-hunting startup, the Galileo Project, is building what they hope will be a global network of skyward-pointing sensors whose purpose is to scan, look, and listen for UFOs—or, to borrow the in-vogue and official U.S. government term, Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAP).

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