Tag: Congress

Rep. André Carson Calls for Public Hearing on UFOs

Article by Celine Castronuovo                                             July 4, 2021                                                                 (thehill.com)

• On July 4th, Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.) (pictured above), chairman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation, was on the CBS news show “Face the Nation”. The discussion turned to the newly released unclassified government report on UFOs which Carson admitted was largely “inconclusive” on the origins of more than 140 unidentified flying objects that the US military has observed since 2004. (see 5 minute video below)

• Carson called on Congress to hold hearings on reported UFOs. “My hope … is that we will have a series of hearings and possibly a public hearing in the very near future,” Carson said, though he did not give a specific timeline. “What we do know is that … there have been nearly 150 (UFO) sightings. Eighty of those sightings have been detected with some of the best technology the world has ever seen.”

• The UAP Task Force report noted that many UFO sightings have occurred near US military assets, our naval bases, our military installations. One of the possible explanations for the still unidentified UFOs could be advanced technologies developed by U.S. adversaries such as China or Russia. “We don’t want our adversaries to have … a technological advance over us in terms of what they can do with their capabilities,” Carson said, warranting concern and the need for further investigation. But Carson added that sightings around US military bases may result from a ‘collection bias’ due to “focused attention, greater numbers of latest-generation sensors operating in those areas, unit expectations, and guidance to report anomalies.”

• Finally, Carson admitted that government officials “can’t rule out something that’s otherworldly” in a small percentage of cases. It would be “arrogant to say that there isn’t life out there,” said the Congressman. “If it is otherworldly, we have to take into account our advancements in terms of our cellphone technology and why aren’t these images being captured? We have to think about the nearly 4,000 satellites that are orbiting the Earth right now. Most of those satellites have cameras attached to them. Why hasn’t any of that information been released?”

[Editor’s Note]  Congressman André Carson claims not to know why there isn’t more information available on UFOs or if they even exist. Two possible explanations why Carson seems to be so out of touch with reality might be: 1) Carson knows full-well about the long-standing extraterrestrial presence around our world and our government’s ongoing interaction with a number of different ET beings since at least WWII, but he has been told to play dumb so as not to cause a public panic; or 2) Carson really is ignorant of the most important reality in human history due to a lack of any intellectual curiosity whatsoever.

 

Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.), chairman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation, is calling on Congress to hold a “series of hearings” on reported UFOs following last month’s highly anticipated release of an intelligence report on the subject.

The congressman said in interview Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that because the newly unclassified report on UFOs, referred to by the Pentagon as “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP), was largely “inconclusive” on the origins of more than 140 objects, additional probes are needed.

“My hope … is that we will have a series of hearings and possibly a public hearing in the very near future,” Carson said, though he did not give a specific timeline.

“What we do know is that … there have been nearly 150 sightings,” he added. “Eighty of those sightings have been detected with some of the best technology the world has ever seen.”

While Carson said officials “can’t rule out something that’s otherworldly,” he added that was possible in only a “very small percentage” of cases.

Last month’s highly anticipated UAP report said that nearly all of the 144 such encounters documented by the U.S. government since 2004 remained a mystery, though the Office of Naval Intelligence’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force was able to confirm that one of the objects was a “large, deflating balloon.”

One of the possible explanations included in the report was that the UAP could be advanced technologies developed by U.S. adversaries such as China or Russia, potentially posing a national security threat.

5:05 minute clip of André Carson on CBS news show (‘Face the Nation’ YouTube)

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UFO Report: A Big Nothingburger

Article by Luis Martinez                                         June 25, 2021                                         (abcnews.go.com)

• An unclassified version of a highly anticipated report on UFOs, prepared by the U.S. intelligence community and delivered to Congress on Friday, does not provide definitive explanations for 143 UFO/UAP encounters reported by the U.S. military between 2004 and 2021. The report (see here) does not contain the words “alien” or “extraterrestrial”, and says further study or “pending scientific advances” may be needed to help explain UFOs that fall into a vague category: “other.”

• A senior U.S. government official noted that the report does not indicate that a foreign adversary had made significant technological leaps. He said that future data may lead to ‘non-Earth-related’ technologies. “We are open to other hypotheses that is meant to recognize that we have many things that we are currently unexplained,” said the official. “We are open to the possibility that some things may be unexplainable with our current level of understanding.”

• The seven-page report presented to congressional committees on Friday met a requirement Congress put in place last year requesting that the U.S. intelligence community take six months to prepare an unclassified and classified report on what the U.S. government knew about UAP/UFOs. “The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP,” said the report.

• The report reviewed 144 UAP incidents reported by U.S. military personnel in recent years. Only one could be explained and was attributed to a large deflating balloon. The report lists five hypotheses that may possibly explain some of them in the future: “airborne clutter” (birds, balloons, or drones); “natural atmospheric phenomena” (ice crystals, etc); “U.S. government or industry developmental programs”; “systems from a foreign adversary”; and the catch-all category listed as “other.”

• “Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation,” the report said. However, as the UAP incidents represent “an array of aerial behaviors”, “not all UAP are the same thing… [T]here is a wide, wide range of phenomena that we observe.”

• “There is not one single explanation for UAPs, it’s rather a series of things,” said the official. “And our analytic approach to this is to create a framework in which we have considered five explanatory categories that we believe are plausible explanations for a UAP that we observe.”

• The report cited 18 incidents “that appear to demonstrate advanced technology” based on flight characteristics. In those incidents, UFOs “appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion.” “In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings,” the report added. As for some of the incidents captured on video, the official said some are “propulsion that we can’t explain” though in some cases objects that appeared to be moving fast “may not be moving as quickly as it appears that they are in that video.”

• With the need for more data to analyze UFOs, the Pentagon announced new steps designed to standardize reporting and analysis of UAP reports across the military. The Pentagon’s UAP Task Force has begun to receive additional data from the Federal Aviation Administration from civilian pilots reporting “unusual or unexpected events.”

• “This report is an important first step,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., the former chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence who championed the drafting of the bill ordering the DNI report. “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.” Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the committee, labeled the report “inconclusive”.

[Editor’s Note]   While the UAP Task Force report is a big ‘nothingburger’, I see two positive aspects of it. First, the report cites 18 incidents “that appear to demonstrate advanced technology” based on flight characteristics. The report includes a fifth category of UFOs as “other” – leaving room that extraterrestrials may have provided this advanced technology. Second, the report includes a category of UFOs created by “U.S. government or industry developmental programs”. So they admit that the UFOs seen by military personnel could have been manufactured by the military industrial complex, utilizing advanced technologies provided by “other”… which of course they were. The missing variable which the government is only willing to label as “other” is that this advanced technology was either provided directly by extraterrestrials or were derived from the reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial vehicles. The fact that these experimental drone craft employ extraterrestrial electromagnetic anti-gravity propulsion – which the US Navy has publicly patented under the inventor Salvatore Pais – is the ultimate conclusion that the U.S. government is trying so hard to avoid.

 

A highly anticipated report on UFOs, prepared by the U.S. intelligence community and delivered to Congress on Friday, does not provide definitive explanations for 143 encounters the U.S. military reported with unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, that took place between 2004 and 2021.

An unclassified version of the report, released on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence website, does not contain the words “alien” or “extraterrestrial” and says further study or “pending

 Senators. Marco Rubio and Mark Warner

scientific advances” may be needed to help explain what are known as unexplained aerial phenomena or UAP’s that fall into a vague category the report lists as “other.”

But a senior U.S. government official did not rule out the possibility that future data may lead to non-Earth-related technologies.

“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,” said a senior U.S. government official, who also noted that they did not show that a foreign adversary had made significant technological leaps.

“We are open to other hypotheses that is meant to recognize that we have many things that we are currently unexplained,” said the official. “We are open to the possibility that some things may be unexplainable with our current level of understanding.”

The seven-page report presented to congressional committees on Friday met a requirement Congress put in place last year requesting that the U.S. intelligence community take six months to prepare an unclassified and classified report on what the U.S. government knew about UAP’s.
“The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP,” said the report.

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$2.2 Billion Budget Boost for Space Force

Article by Sandra Erwin                                             May 28, 2021                                                  (spacenews.com)

• On May 28th, the Pentagon unveiled details of Administrator Biden’s funding request for the coming 2022 fiscal year that begins on October 1st. Biden is asking Congress to approve $6 trillion in federal spending. The defense budget proposal for 2022 is $715 billion. $17.4 billion of that amount earmarked for the US Space Force, which is $2.2 billion more than what Congress enacted in 2021. Space Force accounts for about 2.5% of total Defense Department spending.

• Much of the $2.2 billion in additional funding to Space Force was transferred from the Air Force, Navy and Army, to be used for new investments in space systems. “Competitors like China and Russia are challenging America’s advantage in space by aggressively developing offensive weapons to deny or destroy U.S. space capabilities in conflict,” the Pentagon said. The Space Force budget “funds capabilities for the contested domain of space”.

• The $17.4 billion request for the Space Force excludes $930 million for personnel costs that are funded in the Air Force’s budget. The Space Force is expected to grow by about 2,000 people in 2022. The budget funds 12,000 personnel in 2022, including 8,400 active-duty military.

• $3.4 billion of the Space Force’s budget will go toward operations: the organization of Space Force headquarters and field commands, doctrine development and professional military education. $20 million will go toward the establishment of a National Space Intelligence Center. The budget proposal increases Space Force funding for research and development from $10.5 billion last year to $11.3 billion. Procurement also grows from $2.3 billion to $2.8 billion in 2022.

• Funding for the National Security Space Launch program includes $1.4 billion for five missions, compared to $1 billion for three missions in 2021. There is also $239 million for launch-related research and development. The five missions planned for 2022 will be split between United Launch Alliance and SpaceX.

 

WASHINGTON — President Biden’s $715 billion defense budget proposal for 2022 includes $17.4 billion for the U.S. Space Force, about $2.2 billion more than what Congress enacted in 2021.

The proposed $715 billion defense budget is $11.3 billion more than what Congress appropriated in 2021.

The Pentagon on May 28 unveiled details of the president’s funding request for the coming fiscal year that begins Oct 1. The White House is asking Congress to approve $6 trillion in federal spending.

The Space Force accounts for about 2.5% of total Defense Department spending. The $2.2 billion increase sought for 2022 represents a significant boost for the smallest branch of the armed forces established 18 months ago.

The Pentagon said the $2.2 billion in additional funding sought for the Space Force includes new investments in space systems and much of this funding was transferred from the Air Force, Navy and Army.

The president’s budget “funds capabilities for the contested domain of space,” the Pentagon said in budget documents released May 28. “Competitors like China and Russia are challenging America’s advantage in space by aggressively developing offensive weapons to deny or destroy U.S. space capabilities in conflict.”

The $17.4 billion request for the Space Force does not include $930 million for personnel costs that are funded in the Air Force’s budget. The Space Force would grow by about 2,000 people in 2022. The budget funds 12,000 personnel in 2022, including 8,400 active-duty military.

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Military and Spy Agencies ‘Stiff-Arming’ UFO Investigators

Article by Bryan Bender                                            March 25, 2021                                       (politico.com)

• The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the director of national intelligence and the Defense Department to provide a public accounting on unexplained sightings of advanced aircraft and drones that have been reported by military personnel or captured by radar, satellites and other surveillance systems by June 25th. The request came after revelations in 2017 that the Pentagon was researching a series of unexplained intrusions into military airspace, including high-performance vehicles captured on video stalking Navy ships.

• But those in the UAP Task Force advising the investigations are advocating for significantly more time and resources to retrieve information from agencies that have shown reluctance, if not outright resistance, to sharing classified information. They worry that without high-level involvement, it will be difficult to compel agencies to release what they have. “I know that the Task Force has been denied access to pertinent information by the Air Force and they have been stiff-armed by them,” said former Pentagon intelligence official Christopher Mellon. “That is disappointing but not unexpected.”

• The report due to Congress was to include “a detailed analysis of unidentified phenomena data” collected by a host of means, including imaging satellites, eavesdropping equipment and human spies. It was to include a detailed analysis of data collected by the FBI and a detailed description of an interagency process for “ensuring timely data collection and centralized analysis of all unidentified aerial phenomena reporting for the federal government, regardless of which service or agency acquired the information.”

• Gathering such information from across the national security bureaucracy is enormously challenging, Mellon said. “They have to repeat that painful process with scores of different agencies,” citing the Army, CIA, National Reconnaissance Office, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. A spokesperson for Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said that the report to Congress is in the works, but declined to offer further details. “We are aware of the requirement and will respond accordingly.”

• There is growing pressure from Congress for a more organized effort to compile what the government has learned and reveal how it is trying to solve the mysteries. “I can tell you it is being taken more seriously now that it ever has been,” said Florida Senator Marco Rubio who sits on the Senate committee who requested the UFO report. Rubio does not believe military and intelligence agencies have come to any solid conclusions about the origin of the UFOs. But he insisted that the reports demand a more comprehensive intelligence-gathering effort. “We have to try to know what it is,” said Rubio. “Maybe there’s a logical explanation. Maybe it’s foreign adversaries who made a technological leap?” Of course, any delay will be perceived by the public as another attempt by the government to hide what it knows.

• The pressure to disclose what the government is doing has only intensified after recent comments from the former top intelligence official. “We have lots of reports about what we call unmanned aerial phenomenon,” said John Ratcliffe, who served as director of national intelligence under President Donald Trump. “When we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have [been] seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain.”

• Ratcliffe cited UFO/UAP “movements that are hard to replicate that we don’t have the technology for … or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.” One such case was recently revealed by The Drive website where a swarm of unidentified “drones” bedeviled a flotilla of Navy destroyers off the California coast in 2019.

• There has been enormous resistance inside the government bureaucracy to releasing findings on UFO/UAP. Lue Elizondo led research on UFOs/UAPs in the Pentagon until 2017 when he publicly resigned in frustration that the issue was not being treated seriously enough. “You have all the stigma and the taboo that is associated with it,” said Elizondo, who now serves as an informal adviser to the military. “There’s been so much public taboo about this for decades that no one wants to risk their professional careers and that of their bosses on a topic like this without being directed.” Elizondo describes military and government reluctance to cooperate as “passive resistance”. “[T]hey’re just not going to do anything to support it.”

• “One of the challenges that [the Defense Department] has had in the past is that a lot of these intelligence-gathering organizations, a lot of the military services’ organizations that gather data on intrusions, are all extremely stovepiped and federated,” said Ellen Lord, who served as Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment until January. “In reality, there is a lot of technology that has been leveraged by our adversaries and we have ways to deal with that.”

• The secrecy surrounding the effort has been demonstrated by the Pentagon’s refusal to even discuss any details of its UAP task force, not even how many personnel are assigned to it or what budget it has been given. Elizondo believes there is little chance such obstacles can be overcome by June and is advocating for an interim report that requests more time and resources. “We can do this right or we can do it right now,” he said. “It’s certainly not sufficient time to provide a comprehensive, government-wide report that Congress not only expects, but that Congress deserves and frankly, so does the American people,” Elizondo added.

• Mellon thinks the process could take months or longer. “In addition to the onerous job of trying get everyone to come clean, there will be a sensitive and probably difficult process of getting all the players … to agree on the language and approve it. That process alone could take weeks or months.” Mellon thinks that the direct involvement of senior executive branch officials “is likely to prove necessary to compel the cooperation needed to do the job properly.” However, Mellon does believe that “the leadership on both sides appear to be taking this issue seriously and are acting in good faith.”

 

The truth may be out there. But don’t expect the feds to share what they know

           Florida Senator Marco Rubio

anytime soon on the recent spate of UFO sightings.

Some military and spy agencies are blocking or simply ignoring the effort to catalog what they have on “unidentified aerial phenomenon,” according to multiple current and former government officials. And as a result, the Biden administration will likely delay a much-anticipated public report to Congress.

       Christopher Mellon

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the director of national intelligence to work with the Defense Department to provide a public accounting by June 25 on unexplained sightings of advanced aircraft and drones that have been reported by military personnel or captured by radar,

               Avril Haines

satellites and other surveillance systems.

The request came after revelations in 2017 that the Pentagon was researching a series of unexplained intrusions into military airspace, including high-performance vehicles captured on video stalking Navy ships.

But those advising the investigations are advocating for significantly more time and resources to retrieve information from agencies that in some cases have shown reluctance, if not outright resistance, to sharing classified information. And they worry that without high-level involvement, it will be difficult to compel agencies to release what they have.

                   Ellen Lord

“Just getting access to the information, because of all the different security bureaucracies, that’s an ordeal in itself,” said Christopher Mellon, a former Pentagon intelligence official who lobbied for the disclosure provision and is continuing to advise policymakers on the issue.

            Luis Elizondo

For example, he asserts that a Pentagon task force established last August and led by the Navy has had few personnel or resources and only modest success acquiring reports, video or other evidence gathered by military systems.

The Pentagon task force is expected to be the primary military organization contributing to the wider government report.
“I know that the task force has been denied access to pertinent information by the Air Force and they have been stiff-armed by them,” Mellon said in an interview. “That is disappointing but not unexpected.”

The Air Force, which is historically most associated with UFOs from its investigations during the Cold War, deferred all questions on the subject to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which has similarly said little publicly about the effort.

“To protect our people, maintain operational security and safeguard intelligence methods, we do not publicly discuss the details of the UAP observations, the task force or investigations,” said Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough, who declined to address the criticism.

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Government Will Have to Share Info on UFOs

Article by Daria Bedenko                                           March 12, 2021                                        (sputniknews.com)

• As there has been “thousands” of reports of UFO/alien-related occurrences in the US military, and military pilots who “were afraid to report these strange things happening—for fear it would affect their advancement in the officer corps”, former Senator Harry Reid helped secure funding for UFO-studying efforts in the Pentagon. “The one thing that we established is that not a dozen people have seen these occurrences. Not 100 of them,” noted the former senator. “Thousands of people have seen them.”

• In August 2020, the Pentagon re-established a task force dedicated to investigating UFO sightings and alien-related incidents. It is unclear what the ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force’ will be doing, but the Pentagon will soon have to provide members of Congress with what is currently known about the existence of UFOs and aliens.

• Whether UFO sightings are of an extraterrestrial origin or will be found to come from an Earth-bound adversary, people expect the task force to use sophisticated technology to find the truth. “Space travel is difficult—for many reasons,” says Dr. Joseph Pesce, an astrophysicist with the National Science Foundation’s division of astronomical sciences. “I’m not arrogant enough to think that we know everything about nature and the universe, and the laws of nature.” Dr. Pesce does not rule out the possibility of out-of-this-world ‘tools’ to be used to “understand the universe around us and our part in it.”

 

  former Nevada Senator Harry Reid

In 2020 the Pentagon established a task force dedicated to puzzling UFO sightings and

               military image of a UAP

several reports of alien-related incidents. With possible extraterrestrial activity long bothering the minds of both scientists and citizens, the new agency has only boosted curiosity around the “little green men”.

There have been “thousands” of reports of alien-related occurrences in the military, according to former Senator Harry Reid, who helped secure funding for UFO-studying efforts during his time at Congress, Nextgov reported.

“In the past, pilots were afraid to report these strange things happening—for fear it would affect their advancement in the officer corps”, Reid told Nextgov in one of the episodes of the podcast ‘Critical Update’.

         Dr. Joseph Pesce

He also noted that many people he randomly encounters at work often ask him about UFOs, and the report outlined that the government will soon have to provide members of Congress with what is currently known about allegations of the existence of aliens.

“The one thing that we established is that not a dozen people have seen these occurrences. Not 100 of them. Thousands of people have seen them”, the former senator noted.

In August 2020, the Pentagon announced the formation of a task force dedicated to what is believed to be UFO-related issues. Although it is unclear what the so-called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force will be doing, some are hyped about the mysteries in space that could potentially be solved.

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Why the US is Risking a Pearl Harbor in Space

Article by Brandon J. Weichert                              September 12, 2020                                    (nypost.com)

• For the last decade, Beijing and Moscow have both reorganized their militaries — and developed weapons to wage a space war against the United States. President Trump created the US Space Force and charged it with ensuring American dominance in space. But over the past 20 years, US leaders have failed to maintain American dominance in space. The situation is now so precarious that we could see another “Pearl Harbor” in space.

• Without the Space Force, America’s satellites would be left completely open to attack. Still, Space Force is criticized, lampooned, or opposed based only on partisan politics. It has received no support from the US Air Force, as it thinks that the Space Force will siphon funding and resources away from it. Congress itself has not adequately resourced the new military branch, and in-fighting at the Pentagon has not helped.

• Meanwhile, China has developed multiple ways of deactivating or destroying an orbiting satellite, from powerful lasers that can blind American satellites to ground-based anti-satellite (ASAT) rockets. In 2007, China demonstrated its capabilities by launching an ASAT weapon to decimate a derelict Chinese weather satellite, thereby creating the largest debris field in human history. Beijing even has the ability to “spoof” American GPS satellites, to confuse American military units and weapons in times of war.

• On September 3rd, China launched a reusable spacecraft that, before returning to Earth three days later, released a smaller object that still remains in orbit today. There is concern that this device is an offensive “space stalker” designed to covertly tailgate American satellites and push them from their orbits. (see ExoArticle here) Russia has nearly identical counter-space capabilities. As recently as July, the US and UK governments accused Russia of illegally testing a space stalker in orbit.

• Without the dominant protection of our assets in space, US forces patrolling the South China Sea could find themselves under attack and unable to respond due to our satellites being disabled. Russia could do the same to nudge US satellites out of orbit, rendering vulnerable our NATO forces in Eastern Europe. Space Force will need considerably more support and less bureaucratic squabbling to provide this essential protection – and it must happen in relatively short order.

[Editor’s Note]   The US’ military and those of China and Russia are well aware of the United States’ vast but undisclosed secret space program which is decades ahead of anything that the Chinese or the Russians have. Starting with Space Force, President Trump is consolidating our disparate space assets and programs to secure space dominance in near orbit (cis-lunar) space while the Navy’s Solar Warden will continue to patrol the solar system and deep space. Not that there aren’t other advanced space programs out there to worry about, such as the Draco Reptilian fleet and the Nazi Dark Fleet. But from an exopolitical standpoint, China and Russia are the least of our worries.

 

For the last decade, Beijing and Moscow have both reorganized their militaries — and developed weapons — to wage a space war against the United States. The situation is now so precarious that America could face a Pearl Harbor in space.

As far back as 2007, China shocked the world when it launched an antisatellite (ASAT) weapon into low-Earth orbit and decimated a derelict weather satellite. ASAT technology is not new but the way China deployed it was both irresponsible and aggressive. Traditionally, countries have publicly announced when they planned to conduct ASAT tests, because they could damage satellites passing by the test site. China told no one. Then, China’s ASAT test created the largest debris field in human history. It also signaled to the West that China was ready for a new form of combat.

China has invested heavily in lasers powerful enough to blind American satellites. Beijing has also developed the ability to “spoof” American GPS satellites, which could confuse American military units and weapons in times of war. On Sept. 3, China surprised the world when it launched a reusable spacecraft that, before returning to Earth three days later, released a smaller object that still remains in orbit today. There is concern that this device is an offensive “space stalker” designed to covertly tailgate American satellites and push them from their orbits.

Russia has nearly identical counterspace capabilities. As recently as July, the US and UK governments accused Russia of illegally testing a space stalker in orbit.

This is all deeply worrying. Either Beijing or Moscow could use their technological might to rewrite the geopolitical order in their favor. US forces patrolling the South China Sea, for example, could find themselves under attack from China but unable to call for reinforcements or coordinate a viable defense — simply because their critical satellites have been destroyed before the siege began.

Similarly, Russia could disable NATO forces charged with defending an Eastern European state — simply by nudging US satellites out of orbit.

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Ex-Defense Official: Take UFO Reports Seriously

Article by Eric Mack                                August 1, 2020                              (newsmax.com)

• Christopher Mellon (pictured above) is a former deputy assistant of defense for intelligence, the third highest ranking intelligence post at the Pentagon. On August 1st, he told CNN‘s Michael Smerconish that it is time for Americans and Congress to take UFO reports seriously. (see 5:43 minute video below)

• Mellon said that the assertion by Navy pilots of seeing aerial vehicles maneuvering in ways that are beyond the technology currently possible on this Earth should be taken seriously as well. Mellon is also a host of History channel’s “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation.”

• “[T]he Defense Department and the Navy themselves have stood up and publicly acknowledged that this (UFO) phenomenon is real,” Mellon points out. “That this is happening. That our Navy pilots are encountering these vehicles….” imparts a credibility that is causing a “sea change” in public perception of UFOs.

• “[N]one other than that Scientific American itself has published an article saying the (UFO) subject ought to be taken seriously and investigated by the scientific community,” Mellon told Smerconish. (see Scientific American ExoArticle here)

• To think that these UFOs could be some sort of advanced drones or aircraft developed without the technology derived from intelligent extraterrestrials is “too simplistic”, says Mellon. “[W]e had information from multiple systems, infrared systems, multiple personnel in the ground and in the air, tracking these objects performing maneuvers that clearly indicate they were under intelligent control. They’re responding to our aircraft. They’re outmaneuvering them and doing things far beyond any capability we possess.”

• The Pentagon plans to release more details about the highly advanced UFO sightings by US Navy pilots. Contractor and Pentagon consultant Eric Davis told The New York Times that he had briefed a Defense Department agency this spring on research that showed the Navy found “off-world vehicles not made on this Earth.” (see NY Times ExoArticle here)

• The reports and the pending Pentagon release are making UFO reports switch from being decades-old wild theories to being “real” phenomenon now, according to Mellon.

 

It is time for Americans and Congress to take UFO reports seriously, according to a former Defense Department intelligence official.
“I think this is a topic the Oversight Committee should take seriously and investigate,” Christopher Mellon, former deputy assistant of defense for intelligence, the third highest ranking intelligence post at the Pentagon, told CNN‘s “Smerconish” on Saturday morning.

Mellon was referring to the Pentagon reportedly planning to release more details about the famed UFO sighting by U.S. Navy pilots that reported a vehicle moving in a way world technology would not allow.

Contractor and Pentagon consultant Eric Davis told The New York Times that he had briefed a Defense Department agency this spring on research that showed the Navy found “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”

“What I will say about that is I think that assertion should be taken seriously,” Mellon, also a host of History channel’s “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation,” told CNN‘s Michael Smerconish on Saturday.

The reports and the pending Pentagon release are making UFO reports switch from being decades-old wild theories to being “real” phenomenon now, according to Mellon.

5:43 minute video clip of Chris Mellon discussing UFO disclosure on CNN (‘CNN’ YouTube)

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This UFO Hunter Was Right All Along

Article by Max Ufberg                                May 12, 2020                              (gen.medium.com)

• A decade ago, Luis Elizondo headed the Pentagon’s UFO research program, the ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’. In 2017, Elizondo left the government to work with other former government scientists and intelligence operative, and rock star Tom DeLonge, to form ‘To the Stars Academy’ (TTSA). ‘To the Stars’ was instrumental in the New York Times’ release of three UFO videos taken by Navy pilots, videos which the Department of Defense has fully acknowledged. So if we find out one day that aliens really do exist, we’ll have Luis Elizondo to thank.

• The ‘medium’ publication website, ‘GEN’, recently interviewed Elizondo about these Navy UFO videos. Elizondo says that he was “encouraged by the Pentagon’s forthcomingness and honesty”. “I remain optimistic the Pentagon will continue this trend of transparency.” This topic, however, “requires a conversation not just inside the government, but outside as well.”

• The UFO topic is fraught with stigma and taboo. The government’s release of the Navy’s UFO videos helped to establish the legitimacy of TTSA’s mission. “It’s a huge win for the American people that we can now have a conversation about UAPs without thinking about Elvis on the mothership or little green men,” says Elizondo.

• “Whether or not these videos are real is no longer up for speculation. They are real,” says Elizondo. Congress has been briefed on the video footage, and the President has acknowledged it. “For many years this topic was relegated to the fringe. Now this is a discussion we can have around the dinner table — and maybe even in the hallways of Congress.”

• Regarding those who say that the videos simply reveal atmospheric anomalies, reflections, or bugs in the system, “this doesn’t explain eyewitnesses seeing it with the naked eye. It also doesn’t explain the radar return.” Says Elizondo, “That doesn’t make sense.”

• Elizondo discussed the launch of the new TTSA mobile apps ‘SCOUT’ and ‘VAULT’, which uses “some of the most sophisticated A.I. technology we have right now.” If someone sees an anomaly in the sky, they can use the SCOUT app to immediately identify and filter out things such as a plane, a star, a planet, a meteorological effect, a weather balloon, or a rocket reentering the atmosphere. If the object remains ‘unidentified’ then it is “crunched and housed and stored” in the VAULT app, and “[a]nybody out there with a smartphone can quickly be alerted if there’s something in their sky.” With a smartphone, anyone can “triangulate and record audio and video” of the UFO. “I think we’re going to be really surprised by what we can collectively capture,” says Elizondo.

• With regard to the US government ‘covering up’ the UFO phenomenon, “… it is the job of the government to always have answers, especially from a national security perspective,” says Elizondo. “If there is a country out there with a technological capability that surpasses our own, then it is the job of our intelligence community to figure it out and warn certain individuals in our government… (But the government doesn’t) necessarily want to broadcast that something has this capability.”

• The TTSA often pushes the Pentagon to release documents and footage pertaining to UFOs. Might the TTSA’s new collaboration with the US Army Futures Command effect this whistleblower relationship? Elizondo points out that “we’re all ex-government or military intelligence officials… The fact we are working with the United States Army and other sections within the U.S. government isn’t a bad thing.”

• But as far as the government hiding information on UFOs, Elizondo says, “I (wouldn’t) want to be the last guy standing in the Pentagon saying, ‘This stuff isn’t real, nothing to see here folks’.”

 

          Luis Elizondo

If we find out one day that aliens really do exist, there’s a good chance we’ll have Luis Elizondo to thank. Elizondo works as the director of government programs with To The Stars Academy (TTSA), an aerospace and science company founded in 2017 by a physicist for the Department of Defense, a former CIA operations officer, and Blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge.

TTSA specializes in research around unidentified aerial phenomena — military-speak for any extraterrestrial presence in the atmosphere. Before joining TTSA, Elizondo headed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program at the Pentagon, an initiative secured and promoted in 2009 by Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada for the study of “anomalous” aircraft.

Soon after joining TTSA, Elizondo helped facilitate the release of three videos taken by Navy pilots of unidentified objects. Those videos quickly caught the public’s attention, thanks in part to credulous write-ups in the New York Times. Just last month, the Defense Department officially released the videos and finally acknowledged the presence of these unidentified aerial phenomena.

GEN: What was your reaction to the Pentagon’s acknowledgment of unidentified aerial phenomena in the video?

Luis Elizondo: I was encouraged by the Pentagon’s forthcomingness and honesty. This is something I have been engaged with for the last two and a half years after I left the Pentagon because I think this topic requires a conversation not just inside the government, but outside as well. I remain optimistic the Pentagon will continue this trend of transparency. Acknowledging there’s an issue is always the first step in remedying it.

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An Unmet Threat

 

Article by Christopher Mellon                           February 18, 2020                              (legion.org)

• This article is a plea to the US government written by Christopher Mellon (pictured above), a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Today, Mellon is an adviser to Tom DeLonge’s ‘To the Stars Academy for Arts and Science’ and he serves as a contributor to HISTORY’s television series: “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation.”

• Ever since the days of Project Sign in 1948 and Project Bluebook which ended in 1969, the US Government’s reports on UFOs were designed to debunk UFO sightings and discredit civilian UFO researchers. The government’s only objective was to reassure the public that no case “reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security,” and that there is “no evidence of developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge.” The stigma the Air Force sought to create worked only too well, causing most US military and intelligence personnel to conceal rather than report UFOs – a self-blinding process that resulted in decades of lost data.

• But on December 16, 2017, The New York Times ran a front-page story revealing the existence of a Congressionally mandated Pentagon program to study UFOs. The article was accompanied by two declassified DoD videos obtained by Navy F-18 fighter pilots. The UFOs were seen in broad daylight by numerous Navy personnel and demonstrated revolutionary aeronautical capabilities. These reports were independently corroborated by sophisticated military sensor systems. And a Navy spokesman admitted that the Navy videos were neither a hoax nor secret US test aircraft. They were “UAPs” – ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’. With this short statement, the Navy upended the conclusions of every prior US government examination of the UFO phenomenon.

• There is nothing more compelling than hearing the Navy pilots’ stories firsthand. Navy pilot Commander David Fravor who encountered the ‘tic tac’ UFO off of California in 2004 and Lieutenant Ryan Graves, a Navy pilot who said that the UFOs followed his Navy strike group for months, have expressed how anxious they are to find out what technology these strange craft are using to defy the laws of physics, tumbling through nonsensical angles to maintain a dominant position. In the “Gimbal” video (off of the coast of Florida in 2015) posted by The New York Times, one of the pilots is heard to exclaim, “There’s a whole fleet of them out there!” He was referring to a V-shaped formation of smaller craft approaching the fighters as they observed a larger “mothership” in the video. At close range, these bizarre craft appear to be black cubes, the corners of which are touching the inside of transparent spheres a mere six feet in diameter. There are no discernible air inlets, exhaust, wings, or means of lift or propulsion, yet they have been tracked at supersonic speeds and seem able to remain aloft indefinitely. Fravor’s anonymous female ‘wingman’ pilot noted, “We didn’t stand a chance against it.” Navy F-18 pilots would not say that about any Russian or Chinese fighter.

• This should be taken to heart by DoD officials and Congress. Commander Fravor and his colleagues expect their nation to find out where these things come from, why they are here, and how they work. A handful of senators and representatives on national security oversight committees have sought briefings. Yet an obdurate DoD bureaucracy seems to be making almost no effort to determine the origin of these craft or their means of propulsion.

• If we knew for certain that the Russian or Chinese militaries had leapfrogged the United States technologically, there would be a public uproar for increased investigation and action. Such initiatives were spurred on by the Soviet’s Sputnik satellite in the 1950s and paid handsome dividends with thousands of new patents and the US taking the lead in science and technology. The only response we’ve seen to these UAPs has been the Navy updating and formalizing its reporting process. No major investigations have been launched. There is no indication that DoD or the intelligence community leadership is engaged at all.

• There is still no process for collecting and integrating pertinent UFO/UAP information among the myriad US agencies and departments. At the same time, the House Committee on Space, Science and Technology directed NASA to begin looking for “technosignatures,” i.e.: alien space probes. There is no denying the possibility that some UAPs encountered by our military are probes launched by distant civilizations. Inability to identify the radical UAPs violating our airspace is an ongoing intelligence failure, one that arguably requires written notification to the House and Senate intelligence committees pursuant to Section 502 of the National Security Act of 1947.

• Indeed, there are things we could be doing. Analysts could review archived data of the ‘tic tac’ UFO incident in November 2004 from the Nimitz carrier strike group’s infrared radar system, or the International Monitoring System, or various space-based electronic sensors. Reviews of this kind for incidents occurring off the East Coast since 2015 should also be conducted. Direction from Congress or a senior administration official is all it would take to initiate the process. With little effort or expense, the Trump administration could request a National Intelligence Estimate on “anomalous aerospace threats”. Or Congress could fund an independent civilian panel under the auspices of the National Science Foundation.

• Our government’s failure to thoroughly investigate these UFO anomalies is due to our policymakers prioritizing political expediency over national security. This is a state of affairs reminiscent of the declining Roman Empire when the needs and concerns of troops in the field were largely ignored by self-serving politicians in Rome. Hopefully, support for our troops is one thing that still unites us.

 

On Dec. 16, 2017, The New York Times ran a front-page story revealing the existence of a congressionally mandated program to study unidentified flying objects (UFOs). The article was accompanied by two recently declassified DoD videos obtained by F-18 fighter pilots. On both occasions, the UFOs were seen in broad daylight by numerous Navy personnel, the reports were independently corroborated by sophisticated military sensor systems, and the unidentified aircraft demonstrated revolutionary aeronautical capabilities. For example, some of the craft were observed descending from altitudes above 80,000 feet, then hovering as low as 50 feet above the ocean before accelerating to hypersonic speeds from a dead stop.

     David Fravor

As more information emerged, including the release of another official DoD UFO video, a handful of senators and representatives on the national security oversight committees sought briefings. At this point, the Navy and DoD could no longer conceal the truth.

Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for the deputy chief of naval operations, admitted that the vehicles in the declassified Navy videos are neither a hoax nor secret U.S. test aircraft: “The Navy designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAP. In other words, they might be Russian, Chinese or even alien spacecraft. Whatever they are, they are real, they aren’t ours, and they continue to violate U.S. airspace with impunity.

With that short statement, the Navy upended the conclusions of every prior U.S. government examination of the UFO

                      Ryan Graves

phenomenon, from Project Sign in 1948 to Project Blue Book, which was terminated in 1969. Written when the Cold War was in full swing, these reports were designed to debunk UFO sightings and discredit civilian UFO researchers in order to reassure, rather than inform, the public. It is hardly surprising, then, that despite hundreds of cases defying explanation the Air Force concluded there was “no evidence of developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge” and that no case “reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security.”

The only scientist assigned full time to Project Blue Book, astronomer Allen Hynek, expressed his contempt for these findings, calling the project’s statistical methods “nothing less than a travesty” and the attitude and approach within Blue Book “illogical and unscientific.” It is now obvious that the stigma the Air Force sought to create worked only too well, causing most U.S. military and intelligence personnel to conceal rather than report UFO/UAPs – a process of self-blinding that resulted in decades of lost data.

The evidence provided by DoD videos and radar is vital for intelligence analysis, yet there is nothing more compelling than meeting the Navy pilots and hearing their stories firsthand. In my conversations with Cmdr. David Fravor, his excitement was palpable and contagious, as were the fears of his anonymous female wingman when she described the surreal manner in which the UAP seemed to defy the laws of physics, tumbling through nonsensical angles to maintain a dominant position vis-à-vis Fravor’s F-18.

Internet talking heads like to cast doubt on these accounts, proposing spurious theories of ghost aircraft lacking transponders lurking in restricted DoD airspace. Clearly they have not interviewed the pilots and radar operators who encountered these objects at close range. Had they done so, they would find no ambiguity, doubt or confusion. Fravor’s wingman told me, and Fravor agreed, “We didn’t stand a chance against it.” I cannot imagine Navy F-18 pilots saying that about any Russian or Chinese fighter. These sobering words from badass Navy combat pilots should be taken to heart by DoD officials and Congress.

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US Space Force to Stand Up a Doctrine Hub

 

Article by Valerie Insinna                       January 10, 2020                        (defensenews.com)

• Space Force was formally established on December 20th as an independent military branch inside the Department of the Air Force. Major General John Shaw, who leads Space Operations Command as commander of the U.S. Space Command’s combined force space component, said on January 10th that the Space Force is setting up a “space doctrine center” where planners from both the Air Force and Space Force “can figure out how …(to) set up a United States Space Force.” “[E]ven as we speak,” said Shaw, “there are folks meeting in Colorado Springs trying to lay this all out.”

• Although Shaw predicts that “war fighting (in space) is going to happen very quickly”, much needs to be done from laying out an organizational structure and creating a Space Force logo, to establishing bases and recruiting personnel. In December the 14th Air Force “Space Command” (headquartered at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California) was re-designated as Space Force Operations Command.

• At the January 10th event in Washington D.C., Shaw assured the audience that they’ve been working on Space Force’s structure. In December, before President Trump had even signed Space Force into law, Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett told reporters an initial planning cadre was beginning to hammer out some details. They created monthly goals leading up to February 1st when an initial organizational structure for the Space Force is due to be presented to Congress.

• Shaw has told his planning team to “create a war-fighting service for the 22nd century.” “‘Don’t even think about… the next decade or even the century.” “We started with that.” Shaw predicts that next century technology is going to come ‘fast’, and envisions Space Force as “ a lean, agile service that can quickly respond to threats.”

• Shaw also spoke about the “nerdy” aerospace engineering students who normally wouldn’t be interested in joining the military, but are attracted to a career in the Space Force. “[T]here’s something going on,” says Shaw. “There’s an excitement about space that I feel we can tap into.”

 

WASHINGTON — The Space Force is setting up a “space doctrine center” where the brand-new American armed service can begin to hammer out how to optimally operate in space, the head of Space Operations Command said Friday.

                  Maj. Gen. John Shaw

The Space Force was formally established on Dec. 20 as an independent military branch inside the Department of the Air Force. But much still needs to be done to get the fledgling service up on its feet, including laying out its organizational structure, creating a logo, potentially changing the name of bases and transferring airmen over to the Space Force.

Both the Air Force and Space Force have been working to fulfill these tasks, said Maj. Gen. John Shaw, who leads Space Operations Command and holds the title of U.S. Space Command’s combined force space component commander. Space Operations Command was formerly known as 14th Air Force up until the creation of the Space Force.

“We have been authorized some billets for a space doctrine center, and we’ll be holding a space doctrine conference in Colorado Springs next month,” Shaw said at a Jan. 10 breakfast event. “So I think we’re already thinking about how do we think about this anew.”

In December, just hours before President Donald Trump signed off on legislation that would codify the Space Force into law, Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett told reporters that her service had identified an initial planning cadre that would hammer out many of the major details needed to stand up the Space Force.

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The Navy Acknowledges UFOs – Why Aren’t They on Washington’s Radar?

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Article by Christopher Mellon                        November 2, 2019                         (thehill.com)

• Government paralysis is something we’ve grown accustomed to on domestic matters but, when it affects national security as well, we truly are a nation at risk. Sixty years ago, Americans were shocked when the Soviet Union put Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, into orbit. Congress promptly acted on Americans’ concerns and spurred “the space race”, culminating in a Moon landing twelve years later.

• The U.S. Navy has publicly acknowledged that the vehicles observed and recorded by U.S. Navy fighter pilots (off of both the East and West coasts), which are able to maneuver above 80,000 feet; can hover and then instantly accelerate to supersonic and even hypersonic speeds; and use a means of propulsion and control that does not appear to involve combustion, exhaust, rotors, wings or flaps, are indeed ‘unidentified aerial phenomenon’.

• This shocking announcement has scarcely been noticed by Congress. To date, there have been congressional oversight committee briefings but no hearings, no funds appropriated to study the phenomenon, not even a request for a report or a threat assessment. It appears that Congress has no problem with being kept in the dark all of these years by the military regarding these UFOs. Is the information too radical to process? Is the U.S. government in denial? It would seem a matter of utmost urgency.

• The writer, former Defense Department and US Senate intelligence staffer Chris Mellon, has interviewed numerous active-duty and retired military personnel who have encountered these UFOs. Without exception they express grave concern for their colleagues and near disbelief that our government is not reacting more vigorously. Policymakers should pay close attention to the experiences of U.S. military personnel, investigate thoroughly, and respond effectively.

• Myriad services and agencies including the National Reconnaissance Office, Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA, Air Force and Navy, FBI and National Security Agency, possess a pool of relevant data on UFOs, says Mellon. But we are not analyzing the vast quantity of data already collected by America’s vast ‘sensor networks’. We simply need to implement a strategy for the centralized collection and analysis of this data.

• We have entered a new frontier. Similar to our forebears who settled the Western half of the continent, we must still confront the unknown. But as President Eisenhower said in a speech he gave in 1958 in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, nineteenth century frontiersmen “were not turned back by terror; they did not succumb to the tensions …encountered beyond the fringes of civilization. They moved ahead as companions in adventure, well-knowing that danger is often the inseparable partner of progress and honor.”

 

In what could be a precursor to further stunning developments, the U.S. Navy has publicly acknowledged that the advanced aircraft depicted in several recently declassified gun-camera videos are UFOs, or what the Navy prefers to call “Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon” (UAPs). “The Navy designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena,” acknowledged Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for the deputy chief of naval operations, referring to the bizarre vehicles that have brazenly operated in restricted U.S. military airspace.

Christopher Mellon

Strangely, this shocking announcement seems to have scarcely been noticed by Congress or the Trump administration. Is the information too jarring and radical to process? Are U.S. government officials in denial? One can only wonder, given the glaring disconnect between the Navy’s announcement and the limited government actions to protect U.S. military personnel and the nation as a whole.

The vehicles observed and recorded by U.S. Navy fighter pilots seem impervious to altitude or the elements; they are able to maneuver above 80,000 feet; they can hover and then instantly accelerate to supersonic and even hypersonic speeds; they have very low radar cross-sections and use a means of propulsion and control that does not appear to involve combustion, exhaust, rotors, wings or flaps.

Since the Navy asserts these are not U.S. aircraft, we are confronted by the daunting prospect that a potential adversary of the United States has achieved the ability to render our most sophisticated aircraft and air defense systems obsolete. Much like the Japanese reacting to the appearance of Admiral Perry’s steam-powered fleet in Tokyo Bay in the 1850s, it would seem a matter of utmost urgency to determine who is operating these craft, how they work and the intentions of those commanding them.

I’ve interviewed numerous active-duty and retired military personnel who have encountered these mysterious vehicles. Without exception they express grave concern for their colleagues and near disbelief that our government is not reacting more vigorously.

This situation is not altogether unprecedented. Some 60 years ago Americans were shocked when the Soviet Union orbited Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. Sputnik garnered sustained front-page coverage, however, and Congress promptly acted on Americans’ concerns by approving increased space and defense expenditures and enhanced education programs for math and science. The concerns roused by Sputnik spurred America to enter “the space race.” The nation rallied to the cause and the commitment paid off when astronaut Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon a mere 12 years later.

Consider by contrast our government’s tepid response to the latest news about UAPs. Some congressional oversight committees have asked for and received briefings, but none has held a hearing, either open or closed; none has appropriated funds for collection or analysis; none has even asked for a report or a threat assessment. Nor have Congress members expressed concern over apparently being kept in the dark on this issue for years by the executive branch, a situation that changed only after a small private organization — To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, which I advise on national security affairs — made Department of Defense gun-camera footage available to the press and to Congress.

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Esper Affirms Support for U.S. Space Command and for an Independent Space Force

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Article by Sandra Erwin                  August 28, 2019              (spacenews.com)

• On August 28th, in his first news conference as defense secretary, Mark Esper (standing alongside Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford in image above) endorsed the US Space Command as the “next crucial step” in the Pentagon’s reorganization of space forces “to ensure the protection of America’s interests in space.”

• Esper also voiced support for the creation of an independent Space Force as a branch of the armed forces. But the DoD cannot move forward on the establishment of a Space Force branch of the military until Congress authorizes it. Congress is on recess until September 9th . Sources told SpaceNews that DoD officials met with congressional committee staffers over the August recess to discuss Space Force legislation.

• The Pentagon is pushing back on the Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act, which re-designates the Air Force Space Command as the U.S. Space Force without revising Title 10 of the U.S. Code to establish a new military service as necessary. The Senate proposes a one-year transition to consider Title 10 revisions out of concerns about excessive costs and growth in the military bureaucracy. The House version does not require a transition period.

• During his confirmation hearing in July, Esper told the Senate Armed Services Committee that this is the right time to create a separate Space Force service. Referencing the creation of a separate Air Force in 1947, Esper said, “[We’ve] got to realize that it is a new domain of warfare and it requires a different organizational construct and a different way of thinking about it.” “I urge the committee to provide the necessary technical legislative authority to establish the Space Force as the sixth branch of the Armed Forces within the Department of the Air Force. I also request the committee to provide the department with the necessary resources to ensure its success.”

[Editor’s Note]    This is a stand-off between the Trump-backed independent Space Force, and the Deep State-backed US Space Command. The Deep State players in the government want this whole space service under the control of Air Force generals whom the Deep State can still manipulate, in spite of the Air Force’s recent shift away from the Deep State. Trump and the Alliance want the space service separate from the Air Force and the US Space Command, so that he can staff the military branch with non-Deep State officials.

 

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Wednesday gave the United States Space Command a forceful endorsement and described the standup of the new command as the “next crucial step” in the Pentagon’s reorganization of space forces.

Esper spoke on Wednesday in his first news conference as defense secretary alongside Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford. Esper insisted that he does not intend to depart from the broad goals of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which calls for DoD to work closely with allies and to modernize the U.S. military to outpace China and Russia.

On Thursday at the White House, President Trump and Vice President Pence will host an establishment ceremony with Esper and the commander of U.S. Space Command Gen. John Raymond.

“I’m excited for tomorrow’s activation of the United States Space Command to ensure the protection of America’s interests in space,” Esper said. “We must apply the necessary focus, energy and resources to the task. That is exactly what the command will do.”

Esper also voiced support for the establishment of an independent Space Force as a branch of the armed forces. But DoD cannot move forward until Congress authorizes it.

“As a unified command, the United States Space Command is the next crucial step toward the creation of an independent Space Force as an additional armed service — an independent additional armed service,” said Esper.

Congress is on recess until Sept. 9. But DoD officials have met with congressional committee staffs over the August recess to discuss Space Force legislation, sources told SpaceNews. The Pentagon specifically is pushing back on the Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act, which re-designates the Air Force Space Command as the U.S. Space Force but does not rewrite Title 10 of the U.S. Code to establish a new military service. The Senate proposes a one-year transition after which it would consider Title 10 revisions. The House version of the NDAA does not require that transition period.

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UFO Sightings Frequently Reported Across Western Pennsylvania

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Article by Stephen Huba                      July 27, 2019                      (triblive.com)

• Retired journalist Bob Gatty, 76, originally reported on the Kecksburg UFO incident for the Greensburg Tribune-Review, when on December 9th, 1965, people across six states and Canada reported seeing a fireball streak across the sky before crashing into a wooded area in Mt. Pleasant Township, Pennsylvania, a southeastern suburb of Pittsburgh. (Note: The Army and State Police cordoned off the area, and claimed that they found nothing there in the woods. But locals have come forward to say they saw a military truck removing an acorn-shaped object the size of a Volkswagen Beetle with hieroglyphics on it.)

• The Kecksburg UFO sighting has become part of local lore, but Gatty says, “It’s not going away. Whether you believe or don’t believe in this stuff, the fact remains there is a lot happening for some reason.” Reports of unexplained aerial phenomena are getting serious attention from Congress, the U.S. military and longtime UFO watchers. “Congress apparently is taking this stuff… seriously,” says Gatty.

• UFO researcher Stan Gordon, 69, has spent the past 54 years investigating the Kecksburg incident. Gordon says that there has been a recent “surge” in sightings of unexplained phenomena in Western Pennsylvania. Says Gordon, “We’ve had a surge of UFO and Bigfoot activity in the area in the last couple of weeks. Many of these sightings are very detailed reports… from credible people that you cannot easily dismiss.” Most end up in the growing repository of unexplained phenomena, with no conclusive explanation.

• Gordon continues to report UFO sightings in Pennsylvania on his website, StanGordon.info. Pennsylvania is ranked seventh in total UFO sightings in the U.S., with 3,937 UFOs reported since 1947. There have been 84 sightings so far in 2019, which already matches the total for 2018. The most recent was a sighting over Greensburg on July 5th of a red/orange round object moving across the sky at night, lasting about six minutes.

• On July 4th, an orange-red sphere was spotted at night in both Erie and Cecil, in Washington County. On June 28th, a shiny silver saucer was seen over Mt. Lebanon. After about 15 minutes, it disappeared. On June 23rd, an Elizabeth resident reported seeing five amber-colored, circular shapes move in all directions in the sky, and then form an arrowhead shape before disappearing after about 4 minutes.

• Peter Davenport, director for the National UFO Reporting Center, has been collecting UFO data for 25 years. In 2004, Davenport presented a paper to the Mutual UFO Network on the use of “passive radar” for detecting UFOs in the near-earth environment. This was acknowledged by the CIA and the FBI. Davenport says that the US government has known about the UFO phenomenon for a long time. Solving the mystery of UFOs will require “a government that still serves the people”.

• UFO sightings by Navy fighter pilots have reached the highest echelons of the US government, according to the ‘To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science’. Former Pentagon intelligence official Christopher Mellon, an adviser to the Academy, wrote in the Washington Post in 2018 that the existence of UFOs is no longer in question. What is lacking is a commitment from the Defense Department to investigate the growing body of evidence from the military. Said Mellon, “It is time to set aside taboos regarding ‘UFOs’ and instead listen to our pilots and radar operators.”

 

While the Kecksburg UFO sighting has become a quaint part of local lore, more recent reports of unexplained aerial phenomena are getting serious attention from Congress, the U.S. military and longtime UFO watchers.

reproduction of Kecksburg “acorn” UFO

“It’s not going away,” said retired journalist Bob Gatty. “Whether you believe or don’t believe in this stuff, the fact remains there is a lot happening for some reason.”

                Bob Gatty

Gatty, who originally reported on the Kecksburg incident for the Tribune-Review in 1965, recently noted on his blog NotFakeNews.biz that the Navy has issued new guidelines to fighter pilots regarding UFO sightings, and members of Congress are seeking more frequent briefings on the subject.

“Congress apparently is taking this stuff — at least the Navy reports — seriously,” said Gatty, 76, a former Sykesville, Jefferson County, resident who lives in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Meanwhile, longtime local UFO researcher Stan Gordon said there has been a “surge” in sightings of unexplained phenomena in Western Pennsylvania — whether extraterrestrial or not.

Stan Gordon

“We keep getting reports of very strange things that people see around here,” said Gordon, 69, of Greensburg. “We’ve had a surge of UFO and Bigfoot activity in the area in the last couple of weeks. Many of these sightings are very detailed reports.”

While sightings usually spike in the spring and summer, when people are outside more, reports in 2018 and 2019 have been more consistently year-round, he said. Sightings are mostly of unexplained things in the sky or of earthbound cryptids — animals such as Bigfoot, whose existence is unsubstantiated.

Gordon has spent the past 54 years investigating the Kecksburg incident, when on Dec. 9, 1965, people across six states and Canada reported seeing a fireball streak across the sky before crashing into a wooded area in Mt. Pleasant Township.

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Yes, I’m Searching for Aliens – And No, I Won’t Be Going to Area 51 to Look For Them

Listen to “E47 7-31-19 Yes, I’m Searching for Aliens – And No, I Won’t Be Going to Area 51 to Look For Them” on Spreaker.

Article by Bryan Keogh                 July 19, 2019                  (theconversation.com)

  • Astronomy professor Jason Wright is a participating scientist with SETI, the ‘Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence’, and the 2018 winner of the Frank Drake Award that SETI bestows on its researchers who are “dedicated to understanding humanity’s place in the universe”. “Believe me, no one wants to find evidence of extraterrestrial life more than those of us in this field,” says Professor Wright. “We scour the skies for evidence of such extraterrestrial technologies with some of the most advanced equipment in the world for understanding what’s going on in the sky, and we haven’t found anything compelling yet.”

  • With regard to the recent interest in “Storming Area 51” to emancipate aliens, Wright says, “I don’t know very much about Area 51, but I can say that the intense interest in the goings on there related to aliens reveals a deep public interest in what kinds of life might exist elsewhere in the universe.” Wright finds the most fascinating thing about Area 51 is Project Mogul, where the government floated balloons to detect Soviet nuclear testing in the 1940’s. Says Wright, “When one of those balloons… landed in a farm in Roswell, New Mexico it helped fuel the whole alien craze we’re still living with today.”

  • SETI’s space telescopes are designed to detect “biosignatures” with signs of microfossils or metabolism in the atmospheres of distant planets. But SETI is a privately funded operation. NASA and the National Science Foundation spend next to nothing looking for intelligent life in the universe, including technological life.

  • Says Professor Wright, “I see this (Frank Drake) award as validation of my work to help elevate the field of SETI as an academic discipline, and to persuade Congress, NASA and the public that it is worthy of public investment. It is, after all, the scientific approach to answering one of the most profound questions ever asked: Is Earth life unique? Or are there other beings like us out there in the universe?”

  • [Editor’s Note]  Frank Drake was a founding member of SETI and developer of the “Drake Equation” in 1961, which uses a list of subjective variables to determine that the number of planets similar to the Earth that could possibly host an extraterrestrial civilization advanced enough to use radio-wave communication is astonishingly small. This is the basis for SETI’s nearly 60-years of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.

    As the most recent recipient of the Drake Award, Professor Wright is shilling for the re-establishment of SETI funding from the government which ended in 1993, even though SETI’s research has existed since the early 1960’s and they have found exactly nothing through this process. It seems that the purpose of SETI is to appear to the public to be scientifically searching for extraterrestrial civilizations, while actually finding nothing that might upset the Deep State’s cover-up of a long-standing extraterrestrial presence in our solar system. Wright pretends to know nothing about Area 51 or the Roswell crash, recognizing only Project Mogul which the Deep State used to cover-up the Roswell crash. This, apparently, is the primary criteria for being awarded the Frank Drake Award.

    This is further evidence that SETI is nothing more than a Deep State disinformation program to give the public the impression that serious scientists are doing serious work to locate extraterrestrial life, but there simply isn’t any in this universe to find besides humans on planet Earth. The “scientists” at SETI believe that they should be paid handsomely by the US government for doing the Deep State’s bidding.

 

What started as an internet joke has generated a stern military warning after more than a million people “signed up” to “raid” Area 51 – a secretive military installation in Southern Nevada long fancied by conspiracy theorists to be hiding evidence of a crashed UFO with aliens. The purpose of the planned raid is in order to “see them aliens.” In the following Q&A, astronomy professor Jason Wright discusses the public’s interest in answering the age-old question: Are we alone?

Professor Jason Wright

Since you have a longstanding scholarly interest in extraterrestrial life – and even wrote about the possibility of advanced civilizations in the distant past on Mars or Venus – I presume you’ve canceled your classes for Sept. 20 and signed up to go to the “raid” on Area 51?

To be honest, I was completely unaware of this “raid” until you brought it to my attention! I work in SETI, the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and believe me, no one wants to find evidence of extraterrestrial life more than those of us in this field. We scour the skies for evidence of such extraterrestrial technologies with some of the most advanced  equipment in the world for understanding what’s going on in the sky, and we haven’t found anything compelling yet. But we’re not paying much attention to what happens in Area 51.

Do you think the public knows enough about Area 51? Or is the widespread interest in this raid a good barometric read on how frustrated people are that the government appears to be hiding something there?

I don’t know very much about Area 51, but I can say that the intense interest in the goings on there related to aliens reveals a deep public interest in what kinds of life might exist elsewhere in the universe.

Have you yourself ever tried to do any real research into the happenings in Area 51?

Not Area 51, exactly. The closest I’ve come was a talk I heard by a physicist describing the fascinating science carried out by the military back in the late 1940s, especially Project Mogul, which launched microphones on balloons to see if they could detect nuclear testing going on in the Soviet Union. It’s an amazing story of physics and engineering ingenuity. When one of those balloons with its disc microphones and radar reflectors landed in a farm in Roswell, New Mexico it helped fuel the whole alien craze we’re still living with today. It’s a shame, because the science-fiction-inspired “aliens” conspiracy theory is – from my standpoint – so much less fascinating than the story of the research that was going on then.

There was a time when the federal government provided researchers with money to search for – and teach about the search for – extraterrestrial life. And you’ve lamented that that is no longer the case. If you had your way, how much money do you think the federal government should give America’s researchers to search for aliens or evidence of aliens?

The search for life in the universe is a major priority for NASA and American science. Many of our missions to Mars and our space telescopes are designed with the detection of biosignatures in mind – “biosignatures” being signs of life like microfossils or evidence of metabolism in the atmospheres of distant planets. But despite the billions of dollars spent on these missions, I think many members of the public would be surprised to learn that NASA and the National Science Foundation spend next to nothing looking for intelligent life in the universe, including technological life that might, after all, be easier to find. I think the level of funding for the field should be determined the way the rest of science is, by competitive peer review of proposals for research. So, I don’t know what the “right” level is, but I know it’s not zero.

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“Let’s See Them Aliens”: The Comic Futility of #StormArea51

Listen to “E43 7-27-19 “Let’s See Them Aliens”: The Comic Futility of #StormArea51” on Spreaker.

Article by Kate Knibbs                      July 17, 2019                      (theringer.com)

• Believing in aliens used to automatically catapult a person into kook territory, but things have changed. Prominent public figures are treating the UFO and extraterrestrial phenomenon seriously, from Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, to aerospace billionaire Robert Bigelow, to the New York Times, to members of Congress demanding briefings. All of this has lent credence to a Facebook event called “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us.” (see previous ExoArticle) Well over a million Facebook users have pledged to show up at a Nevada tourist spot, to invade en masse the secret military base known as ‘Area 51’ at 3 am, September 20th.

• A similar online phenomenon happened in 2017 as Hurricane Irma approached the Florida coastline. Ryon Edwards created a Facebook event called “Shoot at Hurricane Irma.” Over 80,000 people responded with interest in attacking the hurricane, though no one did. It was a way to diffuse a frightening situation with a lighthearted meme.

• Like the Irma event, this is an obvious stunt. The post reads: “If we naruto run (like an animated video game character), we can move faster than their bullets.” And the Facebook page itself is called “Shitposting cause im in shambles”. Many attendees responded tongue-in-cheek: “I only RSVP’d for the memes” and “Let’s see them aliens.”

• Samantha Travis, the manager of the Little A’Le’Inn tourist spot where the invaders are scheduled to convene, said people have been calling “nonstop, all day,” and all of their rooms are booked. University student, Jackson Weimer, imagines that it will turn into a big party. Travis noted that there is plenty of available campground space.

• While the vast majority of participants are openly kidding around and not seriously planning to attack a military base, the military itself appears to be treating this as a matter of real concern. An Air Force spokesperson told the Washington Post that it is “ready to protect America and its assets.”

• There’s a good chance “Storm Area 51” will be a distant memory by the time September 20th actually rolls around. In the same way that people took a moment to laugh at the concept of attacking a hurricane, the punch line to “Storm Area 51” is how cartoonishly futile life can feel. It is the sort of joke that can puncture the terrors of climate change and evil governments. The popularity of “Storm Area 51” reflects a larger mood of low-grade fatalism and hyperbolic violence that is percolating online this summer.

 

Over a million people have RSVP’d to an event on Facebook called “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us.” The military has warned people to stay away. It’s just a gag—but one particularly well-suited to this summer.

In 2017, as Hurricane Irma twirled menacingly toward the Florida coastline, a young Floridian named Ryon Edwards coped with storm-related anxiety in a very modern way. He logged onto Facebook and created an event called “Shoot at Hurricane Irma.” Over 80,000 people responded that they were interested in staging an attack on the “GOOFY LOOKING WINDY HEADASS NAMED IRMA.” No one ever opened fire on Irma; at least, there is no documentation of such an event. The Facebook post was a joke, a way to diffuse a frightening situation with a lighthearted meme. Despite some hand-wringing by local authorities, it wasn’t actually worth fretting over.

In recent days, a similarly playful Facebook event has reached an even greater height of popularity. “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us,” an event scheduled for 3 a.m. on September 20 at the famously mysterious Nevada military base, has racked up over 1.4 million RSVPs over the past week, with more than a million other people expressing interest in storming Area 51 en masse. “We will all meet up at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry. If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets,” the post reads. (“Naruto” is a reference to Naruto Uzumaki, an anime character who runs with an awkward stride.) “Lets see them aliens.”

Like the Irma event, it’s an obvious stunt. The viral appeal is equally obvious, as it is fun to imagine a ragtag group of strangers liberating Martians from one of the most notoriously locked-down places in the country, like the plot of a pleasantly stupid action movie.

“Honestly I only RSVP’d for the memes,” one event attendee told me via Facebook Messenger. A Discord chat room created to “strategize” about the attack is filled with memes about adopting aliens and chatter about role-playing. “I think we need a division of vapers. To make an escape cloud,” one participant suggested. “I don’t think no one is going to this,” another said. When I identified myself as a journalist and asked people on the event page whether they’d speak with me, I was repeatedly called a “Fed”—exactly what I deserved for posting on an event page co-created by an account called “Shitposting cause im in shambles.”

But for all the jokes, the event has sparked real-world uptick in interest in traveling to the Area 51 region. People have been calling the local hotel and bar Little A’Le’Inn, for instance, “nonstop, all day,” manager Samantha Travis told The Ringer. “Our rooms have been booked for a few days now.” (Travis noted that the area does have plenty of available campground space.) “I think that people actually might go and have a party,” Jackson Weimer, a University of Delaware student who runs a popular meme account and accepted that I was not a cop, told me. “Some idiots will probably take it too far and try and rush the base but I hope everyone is smart enough to realize when a meme is a meme.” While the vast majority of participants are openly kidding around and not seriously planning to attack a military base, the military itself appears to be treating this as a matter of concern. An Air Force spokesperson told the Washington Post that it is “ready to protect America and its assets.” (The Air Force did not respond to The Ringer’s request for comment.)

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What We Get Wrong When We Talk About UFOs

Listen to “E22 7-7-19 What We Get Wrong When We Talk About UFOs” on Spreaker.
by Faye Flam                       June 25, 2019                         (bloomberg.com)

• Navy pilots have reported seeing alien UFOs is the skies, and Congressmen are being briefed on it. These UFO sightings should be investigated in a scientific way, but errors in thinking are undermining the effort. There are two reasons why we should not conclude that these are extraterrestrial craft.

• But the pro-extraterrestrial visitation arguments rest on two serious errors. One is the confusion of observations with interpretations, and the other is a slight twist on an error called ‘god of the gaps’.

• The first error is that Navy pilots cannot know a flying object’s speed or acceleration without knowing whether these were little things seen up close, or bigger things farther away. Former NASA engineer James Oberg says, “The bizarre events reported by Navy pilots are not ‘observations’; they are interpretations of what the raw observations might mean.”

• The second error is that when a scientist cannot explain something, they go to the supernatural explanation or an “act of God”. The same thing is happening with UFOs, with alien visitors being used to fill gaps in our understanding of the latest detection technology, the sky and human vision. Extraterrestrial visitors and gods fall into the same category of unscientific explanation because they haven’t shown themselves to humanity in a coherent enough way for claims about them to be tested.

• The arguments for extraterrestrial UFOs falsely equate the possibility that extraterrestrial life exists with the plausibility that it’s visiting us. Yes, there are other planets out there, and some might harbor life forms. But why should we assume they’d want to come here? Are we really that exciting?

• Many UFOs have been explained scientifically. The Air Force conducted studies starting in 1947, and continuing through the 1960’s, when the matter was turned over to a panel of civilian scientists headed by physicist Edward Condon at the University of Colorado. The committee explained most of the outstanding cases as reflections, equipment glitches, balloons, astronomical phenomena and human-built craft. So what about the unexplained cases?

• Len Finegold, a retired UC physics professor who consulted on a few Condon cases says there are plenty of unexplained phenomena left in physics, “so we’re used to that.” Mysteries of life may one day be solved, but in the meantime, let’s get comfortable with the gaps.

[Editor’s Note]    This is a hard core Deep State response to the UFO phenomenon, which the government has maintained since the 1940’s. They roll out their greatest hits of half-baked, irrational arguments to prove that UFOs and aliens do not exist. First, experienced Navy pilots have no idea what they are looking at. Second, the ignorant public tends to attribute outrageous religious or supernatural explanations to natural but as yet undiscovered phenomenon. Thirdly, the government has thoroughly and scientifically examined the UFO phenomenon and proclaimed that there is nothing to it. Lastly – and this is the best one – why would any extraterrestrial want to come here? It appears that the Deep State has shifted its ‘deny and cover-up’ strategy from all-out ridicule to a reasoned argument that we’re all just a bunch of idiots who should leave the heavy thinking to the ‘experts’.

 

If you’re reluctant to believe the latest round of media claims that alien spacecraft are lurking around our airspace and surprising Navy pilots, well, you are not alone.

The New York Times leaned toward aliens as the reason Navy pilots have seen unexplained flying objects, and the Washington Post made a similar case in its news coverage followed by a guest editorial: “UFOs exist and everyone needs to adjust to that fact.” Others followed suit. Congress is getting classified briefings.

But the pro-extraterrestrial visitation arguments rest on two serious errors. One is the confusion of observations with interpretations, and the other is a slight twist on an error called god of the gaps. The UFO sightings should be investigated in a scientific way, but the errors are undermining the effort.

The first error made in most of the news coverage was to claim that Navy pilots observed craft that accelerated, rose upwards or turned faster than was physically possible. But pilots can’t know any object’s speed or acceleration without knowing whether these were little things, seen close up, or bigger things, that were farther away. It’s just one clue that the vocabulary is being blurred.

James Oberg, a former NASA engineer turned space journalist, pointed out: “The bizarre events reported by Navy pilots are not ‘observations’; they are interpretations of what the raw observations might mean.” To start an investigation from a conclusion rather than from data is, he says, “a recipe for confusion and frustration and dead-ended detours.” 1

The other error cropped up many times when I wrote newspaper stories about evolution. Readers would sometimes write in to argue that if scientists couldn’t completely explain some phenomenon – say, the origin of DNA – then it must be an act of God. Theologians sometimes use the term “god of the gaps” to describe the erroneous use of supernatural explanations for natural phenomena that aren’t yet explained. The same thing is happening with UFOs, with alien visitors being used to fill gaps in our understanding of the latest detection technology, the sky and human vision.

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Why Have There Been So Many UFO Sightings Near Nuclear Facilities?

“E17 Why Have There Been So Many UFO Sightings Near Nuclear Facilities?”
by Adam Janos                     June 23, 2019                        (history.com)

• Former high-ranking US defense and intelligence officials, aerospace-industry veterans, academics and others associated with ‘To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science’ are asking: ‘why are so many UFOs being reported near nuclear facilities—and why isn’t there more urgency on the part of the government to assess their potential national-security threat?’ Their investigations are the subject of HISTORY’s limited series “Unidentified.”

• In the past century, more than a few UFO sightings have been reported in military contexts. In late World War II, U.S. airmen called the bright orange UFOs flying along the French-German border “foo fighters”. During the Korean War, soldiers claimed that a blue-green light emitting “pulsing rays” made their whole battalion sick with radiation poisoning.

• In the last 75 years, high-ranking U.S. military and intelligence personnel have also reported UFOs near sites associated with nuclear power, weaponry and technology—from the early atomic-bomb development and test sites of the past to active nuclear naval fleets in the present. “All of the nuclear facilities—Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia, Savannah River—all had dramatic incidents where these unknown craft appeared over the facilities and nobody knew where they were from or what they were doing there,” said investigative journalist George Knapp.

• “There seems to be a lot of correlation there,” says Lue Elizondo, who from 2007 to 2012 served as director of the Pentagon UFO study program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

• Robert Hastings, a UFO researcher and author of the book: UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, says that ‘Nuclear-adjacent’ sightings go back decades. Witnesses to these incidents are often highly trained personnel with top security clearances. In recent years, their reports are being corroborated by sophisticated technology.

• In late 1948, “green fireballs” were reported in the skies near atomic laboratories in Los Alamos and Sandia, New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was first developed and tested. A declassified FBI document from 1950 mentions “flying saucers” measuring almost 50 feet in diameter near the Los Alamos labs. Over a dozen workers from the Nevada desert atomic test site told Knapp that UFO activity was commonplace.

• In the 1960s and ’70s, repeated UFO sightings emerged at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, a storage site for nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. At one such sighting in 1967, former Air Force Capt. Robert Salas reported several of those missiles becoming inoperative, or “unlaunchable”, at the same time that base security reported seeing a glowing red object, about 30 feet in diameter, hovering over the facility.

• In December 1980, the US Air Force secretly housed nuclear weapons in 25 fortified bunkers beneath the Royal Air Force base at Bentwaters in Suffolk, England. USAF master sergeant Ivan Barker saw an object on radar having remarkable speed and maneuverability, covering 120 miles in a matter of seconds. He looked out of the window and saw a craft hovering over a water tower. “It was between about 1,500 and 2,000 feet high. The thing was…at least a city block…in diameter,” said Barker. Barker says it was shaped like a giant basketball, with portholes around the center, from which lights were emanating outward. “I was shocked… There was nothing aerodynamic about it. Basketballs don’t fly.” Then in a second it was gone. But Barker didn’t report the sighting to his superiors. “You don’t understand what the Air Force did to people who reported UFOs,” he said.

• Colonel Charles Halt was the deputy commander at RAF Bentwaters that night. Halt led a patrol to investigate the strange colorful lights seen descending into the nearby Rendlesham Forest. He saw a red light moving horizontally though the trees, “obviously under some kind of intelligent control.” A laser-like beam, he said, “landed 10-15 feet away from us. I was literally in shock.” Then the object flew north towards the base. Says Halt, “We could hear chatter on the radios that the beams went down into the weapons storage area.” The Air Force generals closed the case without investigation.

• In recent years, the US Navy has reported several UFO encounters off of both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Navy F-18 fighter pilots saw UFOs almost daily for several months between the summer of 2014 and the spring of 2015 along the Eastern seaboard between Virginia and Florida. “Wherever we were, they were there,” said Ryan Graves, an F-18 fighter pilot who holds a degree in aerospace engineering. The objects appeared in three shapes, Graves says—some were discs, others looked like a cube inside a sphere, while smaller round objects flew together in formation. All lacked visible engines or exhaust systems. Some tilted, mid-flight, like spinning tops, as seen in cockpit video. One UFO almost caused a collision by zipping dangerously between two jets. Graves said that the UFOs also appeared in the Persian Gulf.

• In November 2004, Navy pilots and radar operators from the USS Nimitz carrier fleet saw a 40-foot long tic-tac shaped object flying just above the ocean, 100 miles off the coast of California near San Diego. When F-18 fighter jets were scrambled to approach the object, it accelerated and easily outran the supersonic Navy craft.

• Chris Mellon, former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence said that a carrier battle group being shadowed by UFOs all the way across the Atlantic to the Middle East “makes an extremely compelling case for the existence of technologies we didn’t think were possible.”

• There is an increasing openness in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill to taking these sightings seriously as potential threats. In April 2019, the US Navy announced that it was updating its guidelines for how pilots and personnel should report unexplained aerial phenomena—making it easier for military members to report sightings to superiors without facing stigma and backlash. And now Congress has taken more interest in these UFO briefings.

• George Knapp says there is more UFO activity now than he has seen in three decades. Knapp notes that personnel at the military facilities, bases, ships and submarines where nuclear weapons are built, tested and deployed “have seen these things”. “Are they all crazy?”

 

Why are so many UFOs being reported near nuclear facilities—and why isn’t there more urgency on the part of the government to assess their potential national-security threat?

Those are questions being asked by a team of high-ranking former U.S. defense and intelligence officials, aerospace-industry veterans, academics and others associated with To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science. The team has been investigating a wide range of these sightings—and advocating more serious government attention.

Their investigations are the subject of HISTORY’s limited series “Unidentified.”

Throughout history, unexplained aerial phenomena (UAPs) have shocked, frightened and fascinated sky watchers. And in the last century, more than a few have been reported in military contexts. In late World War II, U.S. airmen called them “foo fighters”: strange orange flying lights by the French-German border. During the Korean War, some soldiers claimed a blue-green light emitting “pulsing rays” made their whole battalion sick with what, to some, resembled radiation poisoning.

Less known: In the last 75 years, high-ranking U.S. military and intelligence personnel have also reported UAPs near sites associated with nuclear power, weaponry and technology—from the early atomic-bomb development and test sites to active nuclear naval fleets.

“All of the nuclear facilities—Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia, Savannah River—all had dramatic incidents where these unknown craft appeared over the facilities and nobody knew where they were from or what they were doing there,” says investigative journalist George Knapp, who has studied the UAP-nuclear connection for more than 30 years. Knapp has gathered documentation by filing Freedom of Information Act requests to the departments of defense and energy.

“There seems to be a lot of correlation there,” says Lue Elizondo, who from 2007 to 2012 served as director of a covert team of UAP researchers operating inside the Department of Defense. The program, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), received $22 million of the Pentagon’s $600 billion budget in 2012, The New York Times reported. Elizondo now helps lead To the Stars’ investigations.

The UFO-nuclear Connection Began at the Dawn of the Atomic Age.

Nuclear-adjacent sightings go back decades, says Robert Hastings, a UFO researcher and author of the book UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites. Hastings says he’s interviewed more than 160 veterans who have witnessed strange things in the skies around nuclear sites.

“You have objects being tracked on radar performing at speeds that no object on earth can perform,” Hastings says. “You have eyewitness [military] personnel. You have jet pilots.” Witnesses to these incidents are often highly trained personnel with top security clearances. In recent years, their reports are being corroborated by sophisticated technology.

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Lawmakers Are ‘Coming Out of the Woodwork’ to be Briefed on UFOs

by Matt Stieb                       June 20, 2019                          (nymag.com)

• The US Navy has been organizing UFO briefings for members of Congress, since Navy pilots’ reported encounters with ‘Tic Tac’-looking UFOs off of both US coasts. Briefings have been given to Defense Intelligence staff and Congressional oversight committee members.

• A spokesperson for the vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) (pictured above) said, “If naval pilots are running into unexplained interference in the air, that’s a safety concern Senator Warner believes we need to get to the bottom of.”

• Staffers on Intelligence, Armed Services, and Defense Appropriations panels are “coming out of the woodwork” to obtain the information. An active intelligence official confirmed that “more requests for briefings are coming in.”

• Despite his interest in a Space Force, and even though President Trump theoretically has more access to unredacted information on UFOs than anyone, he told George Stephanopoulos that he doesn’t ‘particularly’ believe in UFOs.

• On the other hand, former Nevada Senator Harry Reid, the godfather of the recent push to normalize the discussion of UFOs within government, said that he would encourage lawmakers to hold public hearings on the matter. “They would be surprised how the American public would accept it,” said Reid.

• When Reid was Senate majority leader in 2007, he allocated $22 million to a Pentagon study of military sightings of UFOs. “That money was spent developing page after page of information,” says Reid. “There’s been a lot of activity since that.”

• The Navy has taken major steps in cutting the stigma around the reporting of UFO sightings. In April, the Navy announced it is “updating and formalizing the process” of UFO reports by its pilots in an attempt to analyze the phenomenon from a more scientific approach. Luis Elizondo, a former Pentagon senior intelligence officer, claimed that this was “the single greatest decision the Navy has made in decades.”

 

According to congressional officials who spoke to Politico, three senators received a classified briefing from the Pentagon on Wednesday regarding Navy encounters with unidentified aircraft. The briefing is one of a number of recent requests from oversight committee members following a report in May of Navy pilots who frequently saw Tic Tac-looking UFOs flying off the southeast coast of the United States between 2014 and 2015.

“If naval pilots are running into unexplained interference in the air, that’s a safety concern Senator Warner believes we need to get to the bottom of,” said a spokesperson for Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, the vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. An active intelligence official confirmed to Politico that “more requests for briefings are coming in.” And a former government official, who has been present for some of the meetings with lawmakers, added that representatives and support staff on the Intelligence, Armed Services, and Defense Appropriations panels are “coming out of the woodwork” to obtain the information. The briefings have reportedly been organized by the Navy, and have included staff from the under secretary of Defense for Intelligence.

Despite his interest in a Space Force — even if it’s only a fundraising tool — Trump doesn’t seem engaged by the fact that he has more access to unredacted information on UFOs than, presumably, any other terrestrial being. “I did have one very brief meeting on it,” Trump told George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. “But people are saying they’re seeing UFOs. Do I believe it? Not particularly.”

But former Nevada senator Harry Reid, the godfather of the recent push to normalize the discussion of UFOs within government, remains quite invested. In an interview with Nevada’s KNPR last week, Reid said that he would encourage lawmakers to hold public hearings on the matter: “They would be surprised how the American public would accept it. People from their individual states would accept it.”

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‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects

by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean                    May 26, 2019                (nytimes.com)

• In the summer of 2014, F/A-18 Super Hornet (pictured above) pilots Lieutenant Ryan Graves and Lieutenant Danny Accoin were part of the VFA-11 “Red Rippers” squadron out of Naval Air Station Oceana, Virginia Beach, VA, a US Navy master jet base. They were training for deployment to the Persian Gulf using an upgraded cockpit radar system. As they would climb to 30,000 feet and then dive down to sea level, they noticed consistent UFOs that their older radar systems wouldn’t pick up. They ignored them, reasoning that these were false tracks. “It would be a pretty big deal to have something up there,” said Lt Graves.

• But the UFOs persisted, showing up at 30,000 feet, 20,000 feet, even sea level. They could accelerate, slow down and then hit hypersonic speeds. Lt Accoin interacted with the UFOs twice. The first time, he set his plane to merge with it, flying 1,000 feet below it. He said he should have been able to see it with his helmet camera, but could not, even though his radar told him it was there. A few days later, Lt Accoin said a training missile on his jet locked on the object and his infrared camera picked it up as well. “I knew I had it, I knew it was not a false hit,” he said. But still, “I could not pick it up visually.”

• In late 2014, Lt Graves was back at base in Virginia Beach when he encountered a squadron mate just back from a mission “with a look of shock on his face.” The pilot told Lt Graves, “I almost hit one of those things.” The pilot and his wingman were flying in tandem about 100 feet apart over the Atlantic Ocean east of Virginia Beach when something that looked like a sphere encasing a cube flew between them. An aviation flight safety report was filed. This was no secret drone. “It was going to be a matter of time before someone had a “midair collision,” said Lt Graves.

• The cockpit videos showed UFOs accelerating to hypersonic speed, making sudden stops and instantaneous turns -something beyond the physical limits of a human crew.“These things would be out there all day,” said F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot Lt Ryan Graves who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

• According to the Navy pilots, these UFOs appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. The pilots reported that the UFOs had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds. Some of the incidents were videotaped, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching. “Wow, what is that, man?” one pilot exclaims. “Look at it fly!” (see 1:38 minute “Go Fast” video below)

• No one in the Defense Department is saying that the UFOs are extraterrestrial. But they have the attention of the Navy, which earlier this year sent out new classified guidance for how to report what the military calls unexplained aerial phenomena (UAPs), or unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

• Leon Golub, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the possibility of an extraterrestrial cause “is so unlikely that it competes with many other low-probability but more mundane explanations.” He added that “there are so many other possibilities — bugs in the code for the imaging and display systems, atmospheric effects and reflections, neurological overload from multiple inputs during high-speed flight.”

• The UFO sightings were reported to the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which from 2007 to 2012 analyzed the radar data, video footage and accounts provided by senior officers from the USS Roosevelt. Luis Elizondo, a military intelligence official who ran the program until he resigned in 2017, called the sightings “a striking series of incidents” and included the infamous “Tic Tac” UFO off of the coast of San Diego in 2004. The Navy recently admitted that it still investigates military reports of UFOs.

• Lt Graves and four other Navy pilots, who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in 2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of the UFOs’ origin. Lieutenants Graves and Accoin, along with former American intelligence officials, appear in a six-part History Channel series, “Unidentified: Inside America’s U.F.O. Investigation,” beginning Friday (May 31st).

 

WASHINGTON — The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.

“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”
In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed. Some of the incidents were videotaped, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching.

“Wow, what is that, man?” one exclaims. “Look at it fly!”

No one in the Defense Department is saying that the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasize that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents. Lieutenant Graves and four other Navy pilots, who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in 2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of their provenance.

But the objects have gotten the attention of the Navy, which earlier this year sent out new classified guidance for how to report what the military calls unexplained aerial phenomena, or unidentified flying objects.

Joseph Gradisher, a Navy spokesman, said the new guidance was an update of instructions that went out to the fleet in 2015, after the Roosevelt incidents.

“There were a number of different reports,” he said. Some cases could have been commercial drones, he said, but in other cases “we don’t know who’s doing this, we don’t have enough data to track this. So the intent of the message to the fleet is to provide updated guidance on reporting procedures for suspected intrusions into our airspace.”

The sightings were reported to the Pentagon’s shadowy, little-known Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which analyzed the radar data, video footage and accounts provided by senior officers from the Roosevelt. Luis Elizondo, a military intelligence official who ran the program until he resigned in 2017, called the sightings “a striking series of incidents.”

1:38 minute “Go Fast” Navy cockpit video of UFO flying over the Atlantic
off of the coast of Virginia in 2015 (Global News YouTube channel)

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Navy: No Release of UFO Information to the General Public Expected

by Paul Sonne                  May 1, 2019                   (washingtonpost.com)

• In recent news, it was revealed that the U.S. Navy has drafted a procedure to investigate and catalogue reports of unidentified flying objects coming in from its pilots. (see article on new Navy UFO guidelines here) But the service doesn’t expect to make the information public, citing privileged and classified reporting that is typically included in such files.

• Joe Gradisher, a spokesman for the office of the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, said in a statement that the Navy expects to keep the information it gathers private for a number of reasons. “Military aviation safety organizations always retain reporting of hazards to aviation as privileged information in order to preserve the free and honest prioritization and discussion of safety among aircrew,” Gradisher said. “Furthermore, any report generated as a result of these investigations will, by necessity, include classified information on military operations.” “Therefore, no release of information to the general public is expected.”

• The Navy’s new UFO reporting guidelines follow the revelation that in late 2017 the Pentagon ran a secret, 5-year, $22M “UFO” office to collect and analyze “anomalous aerospace threats”. It was known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The program resulted in the release of video footage from the cockpit cameras of Navy aircraft, which appeared to document oval-shaped vessels that resemble flying Tic Tacs. (see NY Times article from Dec 2017 here)

• Reports of curious sightings from military aircraft aren’t new. During World War II, Allied military pilots witnessed unexplained objects and fireballs that they dubbed “foo fighters”. A number of official government investigations looked into such phenomena during the postwar period.

• Even though the Navy has indicated it has no plans to release any UFO data, unclassified portions of the information or broad overviews of the findings could come out, according to Luis Elizondo, an intelligence officer who ran AATIP before leaving the Pentagon. “If it remains strictly within classified channels, then the ‘right person’ may not actually get the information. The right person doesn’t necessarily mean a military leader. It can be a lawmaker. It can be a whole host of different individuals,” Elizondo said. Even if the information isn’t made available to the public, it could be reported to Congress.

 

The U.S. Navy has drafted a procedure to investigate and catalogue reports of unidentified flying objects coming in from its pilots. But the service doesn’t expect to make the information public, citing privileged and classified reporting that is typically included in such files.

Joe Gradisher, a spokesman for the office of the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, said in a statement that the Navy expects to keep the information it gathers private for a number of reasons.

“Military aviation safety organizations always retain reporting of hazards to aviation as privileged information in order to preserve the free and honest prioritization and discussion of safety among aircrew,” Gradisher said. “Furthermore, any report generated as a result of these investigations will, by necessity, include classified information on military operations.”

He added, “Therefore, no release of information to the general public is expected.”

The Navy’s recent decision to draft formal guidelines for pilots to document encounters with unexplained aerial phenomena comes after the revelation in late 2017 that the Pentagon ran a secret “UFO” office that spent $22 million over five years to collect and analyze “anomalous aerospace threats.” Funding for the office, known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP, officially ended in 2012, though operations continued.

Among other things, the program resulted in the release of footage from the cockpit cameras of military aircraft, which appeared to document oval-shaped vessels that resemble flying Tic Tacs.

Reports of curious sightings from military aircraft aren’t new. During World War II, Allied military pilots witnessed unexplained objects and fireballs that they dubbed “foo fighters”— a term that later inspired the name of the eponymous 1990s rock band. A number of official government investigations looked into such phenomena in the postwar period.

Now, the Navy has agreed to a more formalized process for cataloguing and investigating reports from pilots, a decision welcomed by former U.S. officials who want the military to take the matter seriously and remove the stigma in the armed forces of reporting such incidents.

Even though the Navy indicated it has no plans in the imminent future to release the data, unclassified portions of the information or broad overviews of the findings could come out, according to Luis Elizondo, an intelligence officer who ran AATIP before leaving the Pentagon.

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Buzz Aldrin: It’s Time to Focus on the Great Migration of Humankind to Mars

by Buzz Aldrin                  May 1, 2019                   (washingtonpost.com)

• In a Washington Post opinion piece, former NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin says that America should take the lead in a global effort to go to the moon and to Mars. ‘When Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and I went to the moon 50 years ago this July, we did so with… America’s can-do commitment to space exploration,’ wrote Aldrin. ‘More of that is needed now.’ ‘The United States should… offer itself as a willing team leader.’ Aldrin added that ‘Mars is waiting to be discovered… by living, breathing, walking, talking, caring and daring men and women.’

• ‘[M]embers of Congress, the Trump administration and the American public must… make human exploration missions to Mars a national priority. I do not mean spending billions of taxpayer dollars on a few hijinks or joy rides, allowing those who return to write books, tweet photos and talk of the novelty. ’ ‘It is time we get down to blueprints, architecture and implementation, and to take that next step — a sustainable international return to the moon, directly charting a pathway to Mars.’ ‘The United States… should focus on… the great migration of humankind to Mars.’

• ‘The next step would build on our early lunar landings and establish permanent settlements on the moon. In the meantime, preparations for permanent migration to the red planet can be made. All of this is within reach for humans alive now. …The nation best poised to make it happen is the United States.’

• [P]otentially, the ultimate survival of our species demands humanity’s continued outward reach into the universe. …Put simply: We explore, or we expire. That is why we must get on with it.

• ‘[T]he Trump administration and this Congress would be remembered decades forward for putting humans permanently on the moon and Americans on Mars — for making human footprints in red dust and subsequent migration possible.’ ‘I thank President Trump and the vice president for their commitment. But my eyes drift higher, to the red orb that, even now, awaits an American flag and plaque that reads: “We Come in Peace for All Mankind.”

[Editor’s Note]   What Buzz Aldrin is cleverly advocating here is transparency. There are already secret bases on the moon and colonies on Mars and elsewhere. President Trump’s public foray into space will reveal that, over the past seventy years, governments and corporations have secretly built a vast breakaway civilization within our solar system. It is time the world learned the truth.

 

Last month, Vice President Pence announced that we are headed back to the moon. I am with him, in spirit and aspiration. Having been there, I can say it is high time we returned. When Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and I went to the moon 50 years ago this July, we did so with a mission. Apollo 11 aimed to prove America’s can-do commitment to space exploration, as well as its national security and technological superiority. We did all that. We also “Came in Peace for all Mankind.” More of that is needed now.

Today, many nations have eyes for the moon, from China and Russia to friends in Europe and Middle East. That is all good. The United States should cooperate — and offer itself as a willing team leader — in exploring every aspect of the moon, from its geology and topography to its hydrology and cosmic history. In doing so, we can take “low-Earth orbit” cooperation to the moon, openly, eagerly and collegially.

Meanwhile, another looming orb — the red one — should become a serious focus of U.S. attention. Mars is waiting to be discovered, not by clever robots and rovers — though I support NASA’s unmanned missions — but by living, breathing, walking, talking, caring and daring men and women.

To make that happen, members of Congress, the Trump administration and the American public must care enough to make human exploration missions to Mars a national priority. To be clear, I do not mean spending billions of taxpayer dollars on a few hijinks or joy rides, allowing those who return to write books, tweet photos and talk of the novelty. I mean something very different.

The United States’ eyes — and our unified commitment — should focus on opening the door, in our time, to the great migration of humankind to Mars. Books aplenty have been written about how to do this, and they have inspired government and non-government leaders to make lofty plans. But plans without a detailed architecture, and without that “next step” into the future, are just fantasy.

Americans are good at writing fantasy, and incomparable at making the fantastic a reality. We did it with Mercury, Gemini, Apollo — and in thousands of other ways. It is time we get down to blueprints, architecture and implementation, and to take that next step — a sustainable international return to the moon, directly charting a pathway to Mars.

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Just Don’t Call Them UFOs

by Marina Koren                     April 27, 2019                      (theatlantic.com)


• Apparently, enough incidents have occurred in “various military-controlled ranges and designated airspace” in recent years to cause members of Congress to ask questions and to prompt military officials to establish a formal system to collect and analyze the unexplained phenomena. The U.S. Navy is drafting new rules for Navy officials and pilots to report such sightings. The Navy is trying to assure its pilots that they won’t be laughed out of the cockpit or deemed unhinged if they bring it up.

• While the Navy indicates it’s willing to discuss the taboo topic, it is loath to make any reference to “UFOs”. Instead, they’re called “unexplained aerial phenomena,” “unidentified aircraft,” “unauthorized aircraft,” and, perhaps most intriguing, “suspected incursions.” This is peculiar since it was the military that came up with the phrase “unidentified flying objects” in the first place.

• Government programs dedicated to investigating UFO sightings in the late 1940s treated UFO sightings as a big joke. As a rule, officials dismissed and debunked any reports as hoaxes and hallucinations. The military created Project Blue Book to investigate claims of strange objects in the sky. Its director, Edward Ruppelt, introduced the term ‘unidentified flying object’ sometime around 1953. The definition carried no hint of extraterrestrial life.

• Edward Ruppelt probably didn’t imagine the journey his three-letter abbreviation would take over the years. Military reports were careful to avoid any mention of the dreaded ‘UFO’. In 1955, Ruppelt wrote: “… facts have been obscured by secrecy and confusion, a situation that has led to wild speculation on one end of the scale and an almost dangerously blasé attitude on the other.”

• Notwithstanding, UFOs infiltrated the public consciousness. They sailed into Hollywood with stories about aliens, from friendly creatures to nightmarish monsters. The lines between fiction and reality blurred. People told harrowing stories of nighttime abductions. UFOs became the focus of conspiracy theories about government secrecy. The people who believed in UFOs and aliens were regarded as ‘crazies’, a lasting stigma surrounding UFO truthers.

• After two decades in operation, Project Blue Book eventually concluded there was “no evidence that [UFOs] were intelligently guided spacecraft from beyond the Earth.” They attributed most sightings to clouds, weather balloons, and even birds. And any project that studied UFO was deemed a waste of time and money.

• Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Clinton and Bush administrations and an advocate for UFO study, has said service members worry that reporting UFOs puts their careers at risk. They also worry that staying silent could threaten national security, in case one of those mysterious objects turns out to be a new form of aircraft from a rival country. “Nobody wants to be ‘the alien guy’ in the national-security bureaucracy,” Mellon wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last year. “Nobody wants to be ridiculed or sidelined for drawing attention to the issue.”

 

Pilots are about to receive a new memo from management: If you encounter an unidentified flying object while on the job, please tell us.

The U.S. Navy is drafting new rules for reporting such sightings, according to a recent story from Politico. Apparently, enough incidents have occurred in “various military-controlled ranges and designated airspace” in recent years to prompt military officials to establish a formal system to collect and analyze the unexplained phenomena. Members of Congress and their staffs have even started asking about the claims, and Navy officials and pilots have responded with formal briefings.

The Washington Post provided more details in its own story: In some cases, pilots—many of whom are engineers and academy graduates—claimed to observe small spherical objects flying in formation. Others say they’ve seen white, Tic Tac–shaped vehicles. Aside from drones, all engines rely on burning fuel to generate power, but these vehicles all had no air intake, no wind and no exhaust.

The Navy knows how this sounds. It knows what you must be thinking. But the fact stands that some pilots are saying they’ve seen strange things in the sky, and that’s concerning. So the Navy is trying to assure pilots that they won’t be laughed out of the cockpit or deemed unhinged if they bring it up. “For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report,” the Navy said in a statement to Politico.

Yet even as the Navy indicates it’s willing to discuss the taboo topic, it’s also shying away from three notorious little letters. UFO carries an airport’s worth of baggage, bursting with urban legends, government secrecy, and over-the-top Hollywood movies. The statements and quotes that the Navy provided to news outlets are devoid of any reference to UFOs. Instead, they’re called “unexplained aerial phenomena,” “unidentified aircraft,” “unauthorized aircraft,” and, perhaps most intriguing, “suspected incursions.”

The message is, if you see something, say something, but for God’s sake, lower your voice. Don’t call it a UFO. Which is funny, since the military came up with the name in the first place.

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The Pentagon’s Bottomless Money Pit

by Matt Taibbi                   March 17, 2019                    (rollingstone.com)

[Editor’s Note]  This lengthy article from Rolling Stone demonstrates that the Deep State controlled heads of both Congress and the Defense Department are doing all they can to keep the Department of Defense’s budget and accounting practices in such a dysfunctional quagmire that trillions of dollars in unaccountable funding can continue to be funneled into the government’s secret space program at various levels.

• In 1787, the US Constitution mandated “a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.” By the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, hundreds of billions of tax dollars were being spent annually, and no one really knew where. No independent examiner had ever fully checked the government’s books.

• So in 1990, US Senators Chuck Grassley and John Glenn, and Rep. John Conyers authored the “Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990” (the “CFO Act”). This forced government agencies to name a CFO, conduct audits and create a “modern federal financial management structure.” Twenty-three agencies, from Defense to Labor to State, were ordered to begin submitting “department-wide annual audited financial statements” by 1994. In the first year, only six agencies and departments were able to pass. Within a few years, however, most were in compliance. By 2013, the Department of Defense was the only federal agency that had not submitted a financial statement.

• For the most part, the Department of Defense (“DoD”) does not know how much it spends. It has a handle on some things, like military pay, but in other places it’s clueless. None of its services — Navy, Air Force, Army, Marine Corps — use the same system to record transactions or monitor inventory. Each service has its own operations and management budget, its own payroll system, its own R&D budget and so on. It’s an empire of disconnected budgets, or “fiefdoms,” as one Senate staffer calls them.

• Ahead of misappropriation, fraud, theft, overruns, contracting corruption and other abuses that are almost certainly still going on, the Pentagon’s first problem is its books. It’s the world’s largest producer of wrong numbers, an ingenious bureaucratic defense system that hides all the other rats’ nests underneath.

• In 2011, Congress passed the Budget Control Act which caps the defense budget at roughly 54 percent of discretionary spending. Almost immediately, the DoD began using so-called Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), a second checking account that can be raised without limit. In 2019, the Pentagon secured $617 billion in “base” budget money, which puts it in technical compliance with the Budget Control law. Then it used the OCO slush fund to generate another $69 billion. Other ‘defense’ departments received additional funding: the VA ($83 billion), Homeland Security ($46 billion), the National Nuclear Security Administration ($21.9 billion). Then the DoD drew from the OCO fund again for anti-ISIS operations. The resulting actual defense outlay is over $855 billion, and that’s just what we know about. Programs like the CIA’s drones are part of the secret “black budget” of the intelligence community (which this article doesn’t go into).

• The long-standing Antideficiency Act makes it illegal for any government agency to spend money appropriated for one purpose on a different program. Yet the military routinely commingles its various pots of money. The DoD is supposed to give its unspent money back to Congress. Instead, the DoD created a computer program algorithm called Mechanization of Contract Administration Services that spends “old money” first, i.e.: money from whatever funds were about to expire – in clear violation of the law. The DoD simply orders its accountants to make the numbers fit to avoid having to return any money.

• DoD accountants are told by superiors that if they cannot find invoices or contracts to prove the various expenses they should execute “unsubstantiated change actions”, i.e.: make them up. The accountants systematically “plug” in fake numbers to match the payment schedules handed down by the Treasury. These fixes are called “journal voucher adjustments”, “forced-balance entries”, “workarounds”, or “plugs.” Thus, the year-end financial statements submitted to Congress are fictions, a form of systematic accounting fraud that Congress has quietly tolerated for decades.

• A 2017 Michigan State University study revealed $21 trillion in plugs over a 17-year period. The Pentagon didn’t even receive that much money during the time period in question. In 2015, the Army with an annual budget of $122 billion, generated $6.5 trillion in accounting plugs – or 54 times its annual budget.

• The Pentagon compounded its lack of oversight by reducing its staff of internal criminal investigators. “No other federal agency could get away with this,” said one Senate staffer. The military has been told repeatedly to stop plugging and develop more rational accounting systems.

• The ubiquitous plugging and quantity of bad numbers in the Pentagon’s books are so massive that it will take a labor of the ages to untangle. Next to the enormously bloated DoD budget itself, the attempted accounting reconciliation effort has created a second massive DoD expenditure – accounting reformation.

• To appear as though it is attempting to cooperate with Congressional mandates, in 1991 the DoD created the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS), which would collect financial reports from all of the different DoD sub-agencies at the end of each month, without bothering to adjust its accounting rules. But the Pentagon’s books are so choked with bad data that discovering abuses in real time is virtually impossible.

• The Air Force awarded a “big four” accounting firm, Deloitte, $800 million to help with “audit preparation.”  The Navy countered with a $980 million audit-readiness contract spread across all four accounting firms: Deloitte, Booz Allen Hamilton, Accenture and KPMG. In 2003, Defense comptroller Dov Zakheim told the House Budget Committee, “We anticipate having a clean audit by 2007.” Soon after disavowing that promise, he said, “The further we dug . . . the more difficulties turned up.” Taxpayers were paying gargantuan sums to private accounting firms just to write reports about how previous recommendations had been ignored.

• In 2005, the Pentagon began to provide Congress with Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness (FIAR) reports. These reports’ purpose was to assure Congress that the DoD was getting closer to sorting all of this stuff out. December 2005: “Progress has been achieved.” September 2006: “Progress has been made.” September 2007: “Progress has been made in several areas.” March 2008: “Substantial progress has been made.” March 2009: “Significant progress has been made, but much needs to be done.”

• In an attempt to standardize the military’s payroll and personnel records system, in 2009 the DoD created the Defense Integrated Military Human Resources System. Over 12 years and more than $1 billion in expenditures later, it was scrapped. Earlier, in 2005, the Air Force set out to buy a standardized computer system from Oracle called the Expeditionary Combat Support System. It took 7 years and more than $1 billion for that plan to be scrapped.

• Despite the DoD’s 60,000 financial-management employees who’ve had 21 years to producing financial statements, by the mid-2000s the task was given to 200 auditors from the DoD inspector general to create a single annual financial statement. They made some helpful recommendations, but it didn’t get very far before they concluded that an audit was not possible. In 2011, then-Defense comptroller Robert Hale confessed to Congress, “We don’t really fully understand in the Department of Defense what you have to do to pass an audit for military service, because we have never done it.” You’ve heard of “too big to fail”. The DoD’s universe is too big to count. One exasperated DoD official complained, “Impossible. . . . We can’t do it. . . . It’s too big.”

• The annual DoD audit has brought enormously expensive accounting firms into the family of permanent high-end military contractors like Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing and Raytheon. One estimate puts the annual cost for accounting at about a billion: $400 million a year for audits by firms like Ernst & Young, and about $600 million for firms like Deloitte to fix problems identified by said audits.

• In April 2016, U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro testified before the Senate that the Pentagon had spent up to $10 billion to modernize its accounting systems. Those attempts, he said, had “not yielded positive results.” Asked how much progress has been made toward creating a workable accounting system at the Pentagon, Dodaro says, “At my level, I would have to say zero.”

• One thing that the audits did uncover was a tremendous amount of waste. The DoD found about $125 billion in administrative waste. Inspectors found “at least” $6 billion to $8 billion in waste in the Iraq campaign, and said that $15 billion of waste found in the Afghan theater was probably “only a portion” of the total lost.

• By the end of 2018, the DoD did submit an audit by some 1,200 auditors at a cost of $400 million. It was, however, a failure and did not “pass”. The auditors could offer no opinion, saying that the military’s acronymic accounting system was too illogical to penetrate. Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan said it was nothing to worry about, because “we never expected to pass it.” As one Senate staffer put it, “These systems were not designed to be audited.” Remarked Senator Chuck Grassley: “Based on the track record, it seems like they don’t want to fix it.”

• The Pentagon bureaucracy has no reliable method of recording financial transactions. Some of its accounting programs are still using COBOL, a computing language that was cutting-edge in 1959. The DoD still hasn’t progressed to serial numbered bar codes to tracking inventory. Assets tend to vanish on financial ledgers. A few years ago the DoD admitted to losing track of 478 buildings and 39 Black Hawk helicopters. A retired Air Force auditor said that the Air Force has no idea how much of anything it has at any given time. However, since 2006 when the Air Force accidentally loaded six nuclear weapons in a B-52 and flew them across the country, unbeknownst to the crew, it has made a special effort to track its nuclear weapons.

• In the 1980’s, Senator Grassley was inspired to scrutinize DoD accounting due to reports that it was spending $640 for toilet seats and $436 for hammers. Today, the DoD is still spending $10,000 apiece for 3D printed airborne toilet-seat covers and $1,280 each on reheatable drinking cups. In 1992, the military was under pressure to resolve its “poor cost estimating”, and created a middleman with the power to set prices and choose subcontractors known as the “prime vendor”. This system became corrupted and only inflated prices even further. By 2004, the Pentagon was spending $7.4 billion annually on prime-vendor purchases. In 2005 it was reported that the military was buying 85-cent ice trays from prime vendors for $20 apiece, and had purchased nine refrigerators from a prime vendor for $32,642.

• In 1997, the Army spent $4 billion on the Global Combat Support System ‘audit-readiness program’ to centralize its accounting system, and the Marine Corp spent $1 billion on a similar system. In 2009, the General Accounting Office complained about the $6 billion that had been spent in audit preparation with no results. In 2010, Chuck Grassley created an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to stop the runaway mobilization of hundreds of auditors that the CFO Act still mandated, creating a Catch-22 between the two opposing laws.

• Three decades into the effort, we’ve only been spending billions of dollars to get nowhere in one of the most expensive jokes any nation has played on itself. “When everything’s always a mystery,” says Grassley, “nothing ever has to be solved.”

• Even if there were a way for the DoD to reorganize its accounting practices, it would inevitably be mired in politics. There is a strong bloc of Congressmen whose office depends on campaign contributions from the defense sector (even though defense contractors themselves cannot make campaign contributions). They hold up any type of withholding on defense expenditures in committees such as Armed Services or Appropriations. Says one Congressional staffer, “You can’t get the Pentagon to take an audit seriously unless you threaten to stop funding, and you can’t stop funding without campaign finance reform.” Senator Bernie Sanders laments the unwillingness of Congress to take the real steps needed to enforce auditing compliance. The system of campaign contributions that keeps key committees captive will lock this problem in place until there’s reform on that end. “When it comes to the massive waste, fraud and abuse at the Pentagon, there’s a deafening silence,” says Sanders.

• The military has become an unstoppable mechanism for absorbing trillions of taxpayer dollars and using them in the most inefficient manner possible. The armed services are filling warehouses for some programs with “1,000 years’ worth of inventory,” as one Navy logistics officer recently revealed. According to a Congressional staffer: “[The] DoD loves to find inefficiencies. It just means more they can spend.”

 

A retired Air Force auditor — we’ll call him Andy — tells a story about a thing that happened at Ogden Air Force Base, Utah. Sometime in early 2001, something went wrong with a base inventory order. Andy thinks it was a simple data-entry error. “Someone ordered five of something,” he says, “and it came out as an order for 999,000.” He laughs. “It was probably just something the machine defaulted to. Type in an order for a part the wrong way, and it comes out all frickin’ nines in every field.” Nobody actually delivered a monster load of parts. But the faulty transaction — the paper trail for a phantom inventory adjustment never made — started moving through the Air Force’s maze of internal accounting systems anyway. A junior-level logistics officer caught it before it went out of house. Andy remembers the incident because, as a souvenir, he kept the June 28th, 2001, email that circulated about it in the Air Force accounting world, in which the dollar value of the error was discussed.

Wanted to keep you all informed of the massive inventory adjustment processed at [Ogden] on Wednesday of this week. It isn’t as bad as we first thought ($8.5 trillion). The hit . . . $3.9 trillion instead of the $8.5 trillion as we first thought.

The Air Force, which had an $85 billion budget that year, nearly created in one stroke an accounting error more than a third the size of the U.S. GDP, which was just over $10 trillion in 2001. Nobody lost money. It was just a paper error, one that was caught.

“Even the Air Force notices a trillion-dollar error,” Andy says with a laugh. “Now, if it had been a billion, it might have gone through.”

Years later, Andy watched as another massive accounting issue made its way into the military bureaucracy. The Air Force changed one of its financial reporting systems, and after the change, the service showed a negative number for inventory — everything from engine cores to landing gear — in transit.

Freaked out, because you can’t have a negative number of things in transit, Air Force accountants went back and tried to reverse the mistake. In doing so, they somehow ended up adding more than $4 billion in value to the Air Force’s overall spare-parts inventory in a single month.

This suspicious number is still there. You can see a sudden spike in the Air Force’s working-capital fund’s stagnant spare-parts numbers. It was $23.2 billion in 2015, $23.3 billion in 2016, $24.4 billion in 2017, and then suddenly $28.8 billion in September 2018.

That doesn’t mean money was lost, or stolen. It does, however, mean the Air Force probably has less inventory on hand than it thinks it does.

Now retired, Andy sometimes visits his neighborhood library, which uses RFID smart labels, or radio frequency identification, allowing it to know where all its books are at all times.

Meanwhile, the Air Force, which has a $156 billion annual budget, still doesn’t always use serial numbers. It has no idea how much of almost anything it has at any given time. Nuclear weapons are the exception, and it started electronically tagging those only after two extraordinary mistakes, in 2006 and 2007. In the first, the Air Force accidentally loaded six nuclear weapons in a B-52 and flew them across the country, unbeknownst to the crew. In the other, the services sent nuclear nose cones by mistake to Taiwan, which had asked for helicopter batteries.

“What kind of an organization,” Andy asks, “doesn’t keep track of $20 billion in inventory?”

Despite being the taxpayers’ greatest investment — more than $700 billion a year — the Department of Defense has remained an organizational black box throughout its history. It’s repelled generations of official inquiries, the latest being an audit three decades in the making, mainly by scrambling its accounting into such a mess that it may never be untangled.

Ahead of misappropriation, fraud, theft, overruns, contracting corruption and other abuses that are almost certainly still going on, the Pentagon’s first problem is its books. It’s the world’s largest producer of wrong numbers, an ingenious bureaucratic defense system that hides all the other rats’ nests underneath. Meet the Gordian knot of legend, brought to life in modern America.

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U.S. Navy Drafting New Guidelines for Reporting UFOs

by Brian Bender                 April 23, 2019                   (politico.com)

• The U.S. Navy announced that it is drafting new formal guidelines for pilots and other Navy personnel to report UFO encounters to the ‘cognizant authorities’. This is in response to a series of sightings by Navy pilots of UFOs, particularly the ‘tic tac’ UFO incident involving the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group in 2004 when Navy fighter jets were outmaneuvered by an unidentified aircraft that flew in ways that defied the laws of known physics.

• The development comes amid growing interest from members of Congress following revelations by POLITICO and the New York Times in late 2017 that the Pentagon established a $25 million UFO research office, known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. That program ostensibly ended in 2012. A statement by the Navy explained, “In response to requests for information from Congressional members and staff, Navy officials have provided a series of briefings by senior Naval Intelligence officials as well as aviators who reported hazards to aviation safety.”

• The Navy isn’t endorsing the idea that its sailors have encountered alien spacecraft. But it is acknowledging there have been enough strange aerial sightings by credible and highly trained military personnel that they need to be recorded in the official record and studied — rather than dismissed as some kooky phenomena from the realm of science-fiction.

• Chris Mellon, a former Pentagon intelligence official and ex-staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said establishing a more formal means of reporting UAPs (Unexplained Aerial Phenomena) would be a “sea change.” “Right now, we have situation in which UFOs and UAPs are treated as anomalies to be ignored,” said Mellon. “[I]n a lot of cases [military personnel] don’t know what to do with that information… They will dump [the data] because that is not a traditional aircraft or missile.”

• Advocates for treating such UFO sightings as a potential national security threat have long criticized military leaders for giving the phenomenon relatively little attention, and for encouraging a culture in which personnel feel that speaking up about it could hurt their career.

 

The U.S. Navy is drafting new guidelines for pilots and other personnel to report encounters with “unidentified aircraft,” a significant new step in creating a formal process to collect and analyze the unexplained sightings — and destigmatize them.

The previously unreported move is in response to a series of sightings of unknown, highly advanced aircraft intruding on Navy strike groups and other sensitive military formations and facilities, the service says.

“There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years,” the Navy said in a statement in response to questions from POLITICO. “For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.

“As part of this effort,” it added, “the Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities. A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft.”

To be clear, the Navy isn’t endorsing the idea that its sailors have encountered alien spacecraft. But it is acknowledging there have been enough strange aerial sightings by credible and highly trained military personnel that they need to be recorded in the official record and studied — rather than dismissed as some kooky phenomena from the realm of science-fiction.

Chris Mellon, a former Pentagon intelligence official and ex-staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said establishing a more formal means of reporting what the military now calls “unexplained aerial phenomena” — rather than “unidentified flying objects” — would be a “sea change.”

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