Tag: ufo

Senators to offer amendment to require government to make UFO records public

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is part of a bipartisan group of senators who have offered an amendment to the annual Defense authorization bill requiring the federal government to collect and make public records related to unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

The proposed amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act would direct the National Archives and Records Administration to create a collection of records on UAPs and UFOs to be disclosed to the public immediately unless a review board provides reasons to keep them classified.  

“For decades, many Americans have been fascinated by objects mysterious and unexplained and it’s long past time they get some answers,” Schumer said in a statement. “The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena.  

“We are not only working to declassify what the government has previously learned about these phenomena but to create a pipeline for future research to be made public,” he added.  

Schumer said he is carrying out the legacy of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who more than a decade ago pushed funding for the Pentagon’s secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. 

Keep reading

UFO DISINFO: Four times the US military hoaxed alien contact through the decades

In June 2021, if you were to new to ‘UFO Twitter’ or other social media and websites discussing the UFO topic, you might quite reasonably conclude that this is the year of upper-case D ‘Disclosure’ – finally, the long-awaited revelation from the U.S. government about the existence of alien craft visiting the Earth. From the last four years of revelations in major newspaper and television features regarding military pilots sighting UFOs, through the regular release in recent months of new UFO videos ‘leaked’ from military sources, to this month’s upcoming official report from the Pentagon on what they know about UAPs/UFOs, there has been an accumulation of new information that has led to a growing anticipation of ‘something big’ around the corner.

Many older heads in the UFO scene, though, have been more circumspect. While they have been dismissed by the ‘noobs’ in the scene as being bitter, overly cynical, living in the past and/or not being able to keep up with the recent deluge of information, there is a reason for their skepticism: they know that, for many decades now, certain elements of the U.S. military have worked to seed fake UFO and alien contact information into the public consciousness for their own purposes.

Whatsmore, as Adam Gorightly points out in his book Saucers, Spooks and Kooks: UFO disinformation in the Age of Aquarius, a number of these cases involved supposedly rogue US military and intelligence employees revealing secret UFO/alien information to ambitious film-makers and researchers covering UFO and paranormal topics. Sound familiar?

Keep reading

Is Congress Getting Serious About UFOs?

When Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is in your back yard, you grow up hearing about the little green men stored in freezers and their saucer-shaped ships. It is a fact that whatever the government retrieved at Roswell ended up at Wright-Patterson, Ohio where Project Blue Book was headquartered between March 1952 and December 1969. 

Project Blue Book was the code name for the U.S. Air Force’s investigation of Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) phenomena. It was initially directed by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt and followed similar projects established by the Air Force — Project Sign in 1947, and Project Grudge in 1948.

The results of these investigatory programs were, predictably, lackluster. Or, at least, the publicly available information pointed to mundane explanations of fantastical eye witness accounts. Officially, no physical evidence of any determinative value was ever submitted or collected by Project Blue Book. So, after the collection of over twelve thousand UFO reports, the books were closed by the official Air Force. 

But, in the public’s consciousness, those books were never closed. 

The investigative training and experience I gained from twenty years as an FBI Special Agent have only deepened my interest in UFO theories, testimony, and evidence (direct or circumstantial). And, I have resolved any personal theological questions concerning extraterrestrial life.  

Recently, the UFO acronym has fallen out of favor — an attempt to create distance from the stigmas associated with “flying saucers.” Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon (UAP) is now in vogue. 

Keep reading

20 Chilling Facts You Never Knew About The Horrifying Alien Abduction Of Travis Walton

On November 5th, 1975, a group of loggers were driving home from a long day’s work in the forests of northeastern Arizona when they stumbled upon an eerie sight. Hovering above the treetops was a glowing disc-shaped craft, and as they approached, one of their crew, Travis Walton, was struck by a beam of light and seemingly abducted by the craft. The story of Walton’s alleged alien abduction has captured the imaginations of millions, and sparked intense debate over the years. Was it a hoax, a hallucination, or did Walton really experience an encounter with extraterrestrial life?

Join us as we uncover the truth behind one of the most controversial alien abduction stories in history, and ask ourselves the question: could we be alone in the universe, or is there truly something out there beyond our comprehension?

Keep reading

Declassified Top Secret CIA Memo Reveals Senator’s “Saucer-Like” Craft Sighting in 1955

A 1955 memo has recently been further declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), chronicling a unique event: the sighting of a “saucer-like” craft by a former U.S. Senator while in Russia during the height of the Cold War. The declassified top-secret memo, written by Herbert Scoville Jr., then-Assistant Director, Scientific Intelligence for the CIA, provides a fascinating account of former Senator Richard B. Russell‘s encounter with unknown objects seen by multiple witnesses.

The document was released after The Black Vault filed a Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) case on January 6, 2020. The case took just over two years to review and declassify the two page memorandum, and despite the memo being released prior in redacted form in 1978, the memo has now been released, in full.

The memo is a record of an interview conducted with Senator Russell by Dr. Francis Clauser, a consultant with the Office of Scientific Intelligence, and Scoville himself, which took place on October 27, 1955. Russell’s observations are detailed and reveal a scenario that appears to remain unexplained after the Senator’s return to the United States.

“On an hour and one-half out of Baku,” the document states, “the subject [Russell] suddenly noticed a greenish-yellow ball rising rapidly.” Russell was quick to alert the rest of his party, exclaiming that he had just witnessed a “flying saucer.” Despite initial skepticism, the entire group soon became convinced after observing a second similar object ascending rapidly into the sky.

Keep reading

Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he’s found fragments of alien technology

Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he may have found fragments of alien technology from a meteor that landed in the waters off of Papua, New Guinea in 2014.

Loeb and his team just brought the materials back to Harvard for analysis. The U.S. Space Command confirmed with almost near certainty, 99.999%, that the material came from another solar system. The government gave Loeb a 10 km (6.2 mile) radius of where it may have landed.

“That is where the fireball took place, and the government detected it from the Department of Defense. It’s a very big area, the size of Boston, so we wanted to pin it down,” said Loeb. “We figured the distance of the fireball based off the time delay between the arrival of blast wave, the boom of explosion, and the light that arrived quickly.”

Their calculations allowed them to chart the potential path of the meteor. Those calculations happened to carve a path right through the same projected 10 km range that came from the U.S. government. Loeb and his crew took a boat called the Silver Star out to the area. The ship took numerous passes along and around the meteor’s projected path. Researchers combed the ocean floor by attaching a sled full of magnets to their boat.

“We found ten spherules. These are almost perfect spheres, or metallic marbles. When you look at them through a microscope, they look very distinct from the background,” explained Loeb, “They have colors of gold, blue, brown, and some of them resemble a miniature of the Earth.”

An analysis of the composition showed that the spherules are made of 84% iron, 8% silicon, 4% magnesium, and 2% titanium, plus trace elements. They are sub-millimeter in size. The crew found 50 of them in total.

Keep reading

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.”

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

‘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.”

Keep reading