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...we’re in hearty agreement about one of the oddest phenomena in recent news: the remarkable 180° pivot that has Pentagon brass earnestly insisting that UFOs really are buzzing around the skies of our planet.
You have to have some sense of the development of the UFO phenomenon over the last three quarters of a century to realize how bizarre this is. From the day in 1947 when Kenneth Arnold landed at an airfield in Washington State to report that he’d seen something in the air that moved “like a saucer skipped over water”—yes, that’s where the label “flying saucer” came from—the US military has had a consistent and curious relationship to reports of strange things in the sky. On the one hand, officials denied that there was anything happening at all. On the other, a steady stream of leaks, reports, off-the-record statements, and tantalizing scraps of data from military sources have fed the controversy, and kept it going when it would otherwise have gone to the same Valhalla of forgotten fads as phrenology and Richard Shaver’s Dero hoax.
That was the Pentagon playbook, and they followed it to the letter for longer than either Brin or I have been alive. Now all of a sudden that playbook has gone out the window. Media flacks from the armed services are giving press briefings in which they brandish photos that are blurry and ambiguous even by the rock-bottom standards of UFO imagery—the sort of thing you’d expect from a VHS video camera circa 1980, as though the US military has no better cameras than that—and insist gravely that there are things buzzing through our planet’s skies that do things no mere Earthling technology can imitate.
David Brin doesn’t buy it. He proposes that what’s actually happening is that the US military is using all this babble about UFOs to provide camouflage for secret military technologies. I admit I grinned when I saw this comment of his, because my 2009 book on the UFO phenomenon (reissued this year in a revised and expanded edition as The UFO Chronicles) identified exactly this as one of the primary sources of UFO reports. That’s why they’re donning sun hats on Nix and popping open cold beers on Kerberos right now: Brin and I, starting from radically different basic stances, have come to the same conclusion, which is that a set of official statements from national authorities are complete hogwash and shouldn’t be trusted.
NASA is getting serious about UFOs
NASA's new chief is setting up an effort to further study unidentified flying objects within his first month in office.
Bill Nelson, the former Florida senator and spaceflight veteran, told CNN Business' Rachel Crane during a wide-ranging interview on Thursday that it's not clear to anyone — even in the upper echelons of the US space agency — what the high-speed objects observed by Navy pilots are.
8bitagent » 05 Jun 2021 09:54 wrote:It's such a bizarre timeline, when offworld UFO craft being taken seriously by the CIA, Pentagon, politicians, and the media is met with a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ shrug by most people. I mean if it's not US "black budget", "China/Russia adversarial leap frog tech", or "anomalous weather/birds/swamp gas"...well what else is there?
To me the big news of today is that NASA is now taking "UAP" seriously. Scientists, astro physicists, etc are always out there saying there's nothing to the UFO phenomenon...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/04/tech/ufo ... index.htmlNASA is getting serious about UFOs
NASA's new chief is setting up an effort to further study unidentified flying objects within his first month in office.
Bill Nelson, the former Florida senator and spaceflight veteran, told CNN Business' Rachel Crane during a wide-ranging interview on Thursday that it's not clear to anyone — even in the upper echelons of the US space agency — what the high-speed objects observed by Navy pilots are.
Pentagon report acknowledges 143 UFO sightings that it can’t explain
Posted June 25, 2021
The U.S. military has no terrestrial explanation for the dozens of unidentified flying objects that it’s documented in recent decades — but that doesn’t mean the UFOs are proof of alien visitors, according to a long-awaited intelligence report provided to U.S. Congress on Friday.
The unclassified, nine-page report acknowledges 144 encounters with what the government calls Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) since 2004. It only manages to explain one of those sightings as a deflated weather balloon, and it does not provide any new videos or photos of the other mysterious encounters
Intelligence officials say that most of the sightings were likely physical objects and not tricks of the light. They say none of those objects were secret American projects, and they found no evidence that the UFOs might be advanced hypersonic technology from Russia or China.
They also found no evidence to suggest that the objects were spacecraft from another world, nor did they claim to have evidence of captured alien bodies or technology. The report itself does not include the word “alien” anywhere in its text.
“Of the 144 reports we are dealing with here, we have no clear indications that there is any non-terrestrial explanation for them — but we will go wherever the data takes us,” a senior U.S. official told CNN.
In other words, officials can’t say that these strange UFOs are — or are not — aliens. They simply remain unidentified.
The report says that 80 of the sightings showed up on multiple sensor devices, and that 11 cases involved “near-miss” collisions with American personnel.
Some of the objects “appeared to exhibit unusual flight characteristics,” the report says, echoing public comments made by pilots who claim to have seen UFOs firsthand. The report also acknowledges that these strange movements “could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing or observer misperception.”
It goes on to say that there is likely not one single explanation for the 143 mystery sightings.
Investigators compared many of the sightings to possible causes such as birds, weather balloons, military tests, foreign technology or natural occurring phenomena. They did not have enough data to fully categorize everything they found, and the 143 remaining sightings were simply listed as “other.”
The report acknowledges that there may be some bias in the data, as most of the documented sightings were made by pilots who were using advanced sensors in U.S. testing and training areas. It also cites “unit expectations and guidance to report anomalies” as potential issues with the data.
The report adds to the mystery surrounding these UAPs, acknowledging their existence while offering no evidence to point to their origins.
Several senior government officials spoiled the gist of the report earlier this month, when they shared details of an advance briefing with the New York Times. Those early reports underestimated the number of UFO sightings in recent years.
The report itself is unclassified, but it includes an appendix that remains classified.
Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who had pushed for the report, hailed its release on Friday.
“For years, the men and women we trust to defend our country reported encounters with unidentified aircraft that had superior capabilities, and for years their concerns were often ignored and ridiculed,” he said.
“This report is an important first step in cataloging these incidents, but it is just a first step. The Defense Department and Intelligence Community have a lot of work to do before we can actually understand whether these aerial threats present a serious national security concern.
https://globalnews.ca/news/7973359/congress-ufo-report-aliens-uap/
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