Tag: Marco Rubio

70 Years of UFO Cover-Ups Are Finally Coming to an End

Article by Gary Heseltine                                                    July 2, 2021                                                          (rt.com)

• For more than 70 years, highly trained, credible people have reported interactions with some kind of intelligence that is, literally, out of this world. Yet, the mass of corroborated testimony from military pilots, commercial pilots, astronauts, cosmonauts, radar operators, air traffic controllers, sonar operators, military personnel, and police officers from all around the world have been largely ignored by governments, military and scientists and the academic world. Why? Because governments across the planet, supported by the mainstream media, have poured scorn on and trivialized the subject of UFOs since the early 1950s. As the late Stanton Friedman used to say, “It can’t be, so it isn’t.”

• While the subject has opened up to the public in recent years, the manufactured stigma attached to the UFO topic makes it is still too ‘taboo’ for most. Scientists and academics still do not take the UFO phenomena seriously. It isn’t surprising, since for most of their lives they have been told that there is no evidence to support the premise that some of these reports are credible, cannot be explained, and may be of extraterrestrial/non-human origin.

• Almost all of these scientists, professors and the public in general do not realize that they have been hoodwinked by a huge propaganda machine that was deliberately created by the United States. In January 1953, a group of scientists met to figure out a way to ‘strip the aura’ from ‘flying saucers’. They decided the best way to do this was to dismiss, trivialize, scorn and debunk all UFO sightings through the use of the media in all its forms – television, film, newspapers, books, and magazines. They commissioned the ‘Robertson Panel’ to begin the process of stigma and ridicule that has plagued this topic for decades.

• Today, most astronomers won’t even consider looking at the mountain of UFO evidence, due to the perceived risk of ridicule and the effect on their careers. This has proven to be a powerful deterrent for those that dare to take the phenomena seriously. The message was clear to scientists and academics: stay away from UFO research or risk ruining your career.

• Yet over the past months, there have been significant developments on the UFO subject that seem to be signaling the end to this policy of deceit and denial. A government investigative task force just submitted a nine-page preliminary assessment report to Congress regarding US Navy encounters with UFOs off the east and west coasts of America in recent years. It cited 144 cases recorded by the US military since 2004 and stated that 143 remained unexplained. Given the huge technological resources the US has, it is a staggering statistic. We’ve also seen people at the highest levels of government and the military speak out about the phenomenon, in complete contrast to what leaders have said on the matter before.

• Said Senator Marco Rubio: “We have things flying around military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises, and we don’t know what it is and it isn’t ours. …I’d say frankly if it’s something outside this planet it would actually be better than the fact that we’ve seen some technology leap on behalf of the Russians, the Chinese, or some other adversary…” Rubio later added: “We cannot allow the stigma of UFOs to keep us from seriously investigating these encounters.”

• Former CIA Director John Brennan said to an audience at George Mason University: “I think it’s a bit presumptuous and arrogant for us to believe that there’s no other form of life anywhere in the entire universe… I think some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand, and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”

• John Ratcliffe, a former director of national intelligence, recently said on Fox News: “There’s actually quite a few of those (UFOs). … [T]here are instances where we don’t have good explanations for some of the things that we have seen. When we talk about sightings, it’s not just a pilot or just a satellite, or some intelligence collection. Usually, we have multiple sensors that are picking up these things.”

• Former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, told CNN: “I don’t know why we haven’t been more transparent about (UFOs) in the past, and I’m part of that crime I guess… I didn’t insist on more transparency with respect to this issue.”

• Even former President Barack Obama has talked in specifics about UFOs. On the James Corden talk show Obama said: “But what is true… is that there’s footage and records of objects in the sky that we don’t know exactly what they are. We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern.”

• These comments from such high-level individuals indicates the very real possibility that we have been witnessing UFOs in action around our Earth for decades, and that for the first time it will be taken seriously and investigated properly by the world’s top scientists. And this in turn is likely to have profound implications for humanity. In the second part of my article, I will detail some of the most astonishing unexplained encounters.

 

The policy of denial and debunking evidence of encounters with ‘alien spacecraft’,

   the late great Stanton Friedman

that’s been in place since the 1950s, is crumbling. Even ex-US presidents and CIA directors admit there’s something out there we can’t explain.

It’s often said that when mankind acknowledges that ‘life’ in the universe has been confirmed and an intelligent civilization reaches out to us, that ‘contact’ will be the most profound moment in human history. So, almost everyone is in agreement as to the ramifications of such ‘contact’, but have we actually not had an ongoing engagement between humans and super-intelligent creatures from other planets for decades?

                       John Brennan

Today, on World UFO Day, as we approach the summer of 2021, the world is potentially on the brink of learning something that most people will be astonished and perhaps shocked by.

For more than 70 years, highly trained, credible people have found themselves involved in multiple witness reports and having an interaction with some kind of intelligence that is, literally, out of this world. These cases from all around the

                            Marco Rubio

world have been fully investigated and documented, yet have largely been ignored by governments, military and scientists and the academic world.

                        James Clapper

Why?

The explanation is simple and stark: governments across the planet, supported by the mainstream media, have poured scorn on and trivialised the subject of unidentified flying objects, or flying saucers, since the early 1950s.

As the late Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist and huge UFO proponent, used to

                       John Ratcliffe

say, “It can’t be, so it isn’t.”

                         Barack Obama

That phrase is particularly apt if we ask the question as to why the scientific and academic worlds have largely ignored the mass of corroborated testimony from military pilots, commercial pilots, astronauts, cosmonauts, radar operators, air traffic controllers, sonar operators, military personnel, and police officers etc.

In recent years, a new acronym has been created to replace the term ‘UFO’ – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) – in the hope that science, academia, and the media would be more open to investigating the subject. However, such is the manufactured stigma attached to this topic that it is still deemed too ‘taboo’ for most.

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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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Elizondo Claims Pentagon Tried to Discredit Him

Alexandra Villarreal                                              May 28, 2021                                                   (theguardian.com)

• Luis Elizondo, the CIA spook – turned – Pentagon UFO investigator, has lodged a complaint with the Department of Defense’s Inspector General’s office claiming malicious activities, professional misconduct and other offenses at the agency. Politico learned that Elizondo’s legal team said he would be meeting with IG investigators in June. [ED: And apparently Steven Greer’s consigliere, Daniel Sheehan, is providing Elizondo’s legal representation. See several videos below.]

• Once a fringe talking point, UFOs are evolving far beyond science fiction to be viewed as real phenomena that could pose a national security threat. “I want us to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously,” Senator Marco Rubio told 60 Minutes.

• In the complaint, Elizondo also accused the defense department’s press arm of trying to discredit him through misleading comments. “Several internet bloggers were notified … that I had no duties regarding AATIP and that AATIP did not involve the study of UAPs,” Elizondo wrote. “As a result, the bloggers began to disseminate reporting, accusing me of being a fabricator.”

• Elizondo said one senior-level official went so far as to threaten to tell people he was crazy, potentially jeopardizing his security clearance. “I responded … by telling him that he can take any action he thinks is prudently necessary, but that I was not mentally impaired, nor have I ever violated my security oath,” Elizondo wrote, adding he feared retribution by the official.

• Since retiring from the Pentagon, Elizondo has called for more government interest and resources around understanding UFOs. “Leadership involvement was almost non-existent,” he said, even as “UAP reporting to our office was increasing”. “I became alarmed by the frequency and duration of UAP activity in and around controlled US airspace,” he wrote in the complaint. “The instances seemed more provocative, and during one instance, they came within feet of a US fighter aircraft.”

 

                          Luis Elizondo

A Pentagon whistleblower known for speaking out about UFOs is accusing his former

                          Daniel Sheehan

agency of waging a disinformation campaign against him, a report says.

Luis Elizondo, who headed the Pentagon’s now-defunct Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, lodged a complaint with the defense department’s inspector general claiming malicious activities, professional misconduct and other offenses at the agency, according to Politico.

He said one senior-level official went so far as to threaten to tell people he was crazy, potentially jeopardizing his security clearance. “I responded … by telling him that he can take any action he thinks is prudently necessary, but that I was not mentally impaired, nor have I ever violated my security oath,” Elizondo wrote, adding he feared retribution by the official.

The complaint comes a month before a highly anticipated report on unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, is set to land before Congress. Once a fringe talking point, unexplained objects in the sky are evolving far beyond science fiction to be viewed as real phenomena that could pose a national security threat.

                          Danny and Lue

“I want us to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously,” Senator Marco Rubio told 60 Minutes.

The inspector general’s office did not give Politico details on the status of Elizondo’s complaint, though his legal team said he would be meeting with IG investigators in June.
In the complaint, Elizondo also accused the defense department’s press arm of trying to discredit him through misleading comments.

1:09 minute breakdown by Daniel Sheehan on Elizondo’s IG Complaint (‘Contact Tour’ YouTube)

15:13 video about UFO disclosure and Steven Greer/Danny Sheehan’s
effort to turn Elizondo from the fake narratives that UFOs
are of unknown origins and pose a national security threat (‘Section 51 2.0’ YouTube)

For an even more in-depth interview of Sheehan discussing
the Elizondo matter, watch this clip starting at 107:30 minutes
(‘Grant Cameron Whitehouse UFO’ YouTube)

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Why Is the Pentagon Now Saying That UFOs Are Real?

Article by Charlie Burton                                                 May 18, 2021                                                   (gq-magazine.co.uk)

• On April 27, 2020, the US Department of Defense (DoD) released three fighter jet videos – one from 2004, two from 2015 – that showed close encounters with fast-moving objects seeming to interact with Navy aircraft and vessels. The footage had previously leaked to the media, but now the government was putting it on the record “in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public”. The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified’.

• The Navy pilot who captured 2004 UFO footage described the smooth, white, oblong object as resembling a ‘Tic Tac’. It seemed to defy the laws of physics – it had no visible wings, rotors, propulsion system or exhaust plume. Yet it could achieve hypersonic speeds without making a sonic boom; it could descend from 50,000 to 100 feet in a matter of seconds; and it could change direction instantaneously as if without inertia. None of that should even be possible.

• Commander David Fravor said the 40-foot object ran rings around his jet, reacting to its maneuvers and jamming its radar, before disappearing in a heartbeat. “After 18 years of flying, I’ve seen pretty much about everything that I can see in that realm, and this was nothing close,” he told ABC News. “I can tell you, I think it was not from this world.” The New York Times reported that between 2014 and 2015, Navy pilots observed UFOs almost daily. There was even a near midair collision.

• Last July, US senator Marco Rubio told CBS that the issue was a pressing national security concern: “We have things flying over our military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises. We don’t know what it is and it isn’t ours.” The Pentagon created the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force to study the UFO/UAP phenomenon, and in December, Congress passed a bill requiring the director of national intelligence and the defense secretary to submit a report on what they know about the UAP issue. This report is due in June.

• For decades, the notion of UFOs has been ridiculed and defined by a lack of hard evidence and official denials. In that context, the US government admitting UFOs are real is monumental. But officials haven’t made the leap to calling these objects extraterrestrial. In December, former CIA director John Brennan said UAPs might involve “a different form of life”. The implications are profound.

• And yet, UFOs are still often treated by news anchors with a smirk. In science and academia the subject remains taboo fringe research. Swaths of the public are unaware, and many of those who are aware either refuse to believe or simply don’t care. Christopher Mellon, a former senior defense official, told Joe Rogan that, after the 2017 New York Times front page UFO article, he was stunned that almost nobody in Congress asked for a briefing.

• How myopic do you have to be? Even if UFOs aren’t extraterrestrial, the consequences could be seismic. If China, say, has beyond-next-gen technology that can violate restricted airspace with impunity, that’s a paradigm shift.

• Christopher French, professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, says, “If people have made up their minds, one way or the other, it’s one of those issues where it’s very hard to change [their views]. Arguably the most powerful cognitive bias that we all suffer from is confirmation bias. We pay more attention to evidence that supports what we already believe to be true or what we would like to be true.”

• But in other contexts we are happy to countenance the idea of extraterrestrials. NASA’s primary goal for Mars exploration is to “seek signs of life”. The University Of California, Berkeley, facilitates a $100 million project called Breakthrough Listen “aimed at finding evidence of civilizations beyond Earth”.

• “Meanwhile we have these things flying around our atmosphere, that we’re seeing on the radar, that kind of look and act like what you might expect if somebody sent a probe [to Earth]… And yet the scientific community and the government have not wanted to dare to ask the question,” as Mellon told Rogan.

• It’s vital that this attitude changes. If you believe there is only the slimmest chance UAPs represents ‘impossible technology’, humanity owes it to itself to fully investigate. It has been said there are only two Holy Grail questions: is there an afterlife and are we alone in the universe? If whether UFOs are real is no longer a question, the question becomes: ‘what the hell are they?’

• [Editor’s Note]   We must keep in mind that so long as our governments are controlled by the deep state, it will never give the people the full truth about anything. Any information coming from the deep state government will be a contrived narrative to forward a deep state agenda. In the case of UFOs, the deep state has lied about and ridiculed the subject since World War II. Their agenda for the past 70 years has been to divert public attention from the true existence of intelligent and technologically advanced extraterrestrial beings visiting our planet in their UFO craft so that the deep state rulers could monopolize this extraterrestrial technology for themselves to develop their own secret space programs and breakaway civilization which doesn’t include us.

Notwithstanding the corrupt deep state government and the complicit media’s ridicule and suppression of ETs/UFOs, there are decades of widespread and compelling testimonial, documentary and photographic evidence that ETs and UFOs do exist. Of course, the deep state media is ignoring all of that and regards the only credible UFO evidence to be the grainy cockpit images of small drone-like objects that seem to have a fixation with our military ships and aircraft. They want the public to know that UFOs are real, but then act like they have no idea what they are. This creates a scenario where they could be labeled as a threat – either from a hostile extraterrestrial civilization or even from China or Russia.

So the deep state agenda here is to create an unknown threat from some drone UFOs swarming Navy ships off of California. (Keep in mind that even these drone UFOs have been around for a long time, and have had every opportunity to attack us if they wanted to.) The truth is that the positive extraterrestrials do not show themselves, and the negative extraterrestrials have already infiltrated our government and industries for their own agenda (i.e.: the deep state). The UFO craft that we now see are generally made by human secret space programs using extraterrestrial technologies – patented by the US Navy over the past five years.

The deep state doesn’t want the public to know that they have this capability. They want the public to think that no one knows what these drone UFOs are or where they come from. And apparently, they have been silencing anyone who threatens this deep state narrative. (see below Dr Michael Salla’s video: “Is Deep State Silencing Insiders That Threaten ‘UFOs Are a National Security Threat’ Narrative?”)

Now that more and more people are ‘waking up’ and the deep state is losing the ‘Information War’ to terrestrial and off-planet forces of the white hat Alliance, they plan to use this sudden revelation of the existence of UFOs in a last ditch effort to control the masses. It might even culminate in a fake ‘false flag’ UFO hologram invasion. This would come after they’ve sufficiently weakened our society by fraudulently installing a puppet president to facilitate a fake pandemic, spread death through gene-altering vaccines, crashed our economy, gutted our medical system, created an energy shortage and a food shortage, and targeted for prosecution so-called ‘domestic terrorists’, who are actually awakened patriots willing to stand up to save our republic from this evil deep state agenda.

So the question is not ‘what are these UFOs?’, but ‘what is the real agenda of the deep state in publicizing these UFO drones?’

 

             David Fravor

UFOs are real – and we have videos to prove it. It’s an extraordinary claim, but that’s precisely

                            Chris Mellon

what the Pentagon told the world last year. On 27 April 2020, the US Department Of Defense (DoD) released three videos, one from 2004, two from 2015, shot from the targeting cameras of US Navy Super Hornet fighter jets. They show close encounters with fast-moving, strange-looking objects and include audio of the pilots’ astonishment (“Wow! What is that, man?”). The footage had previously leaked to media organisations, but now the government was putting it on the record. “DoD is releasing the videos in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real,” it said in an official statement. “The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified’.”

The pilot who captured the 2004 UFO footage, while flying a mission from the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier, has described the smooth, white, oblong object as resembling a Tic Tac.

                          Tic Tac UFO

Although it was observed by multiple military aviators and detected by radar, it seemed to defy the laws of physics. The Navy pilots say it had no visible wings, rotors or propulsion system – infrared cameras didn’t even detect an exhaust plume. Yet it could achieve hypersonic speeds without making a sonic boom; it could descend from 50,000 to 100 feet in a matter of seconds; and it could change direction instantaneously as if without inertia. None of that should even be possible.

One of the other pilots who saw the UFO, Commander David Fravor, then head of the US Navy’s Black Aces combat squadron, said the 40-foot object ran rings around his jet, reacting to its manoeuvres and jamming its radar, before disappearing in a heartbeat. “After 18 years of flying, I’ve seen pretty much about everything that I can

                          pyramid UFO

see in that realm, and this was nothing close,” he told ABC News. “I can tell you, I

                     ‘transmedium’ UFO

think it was not from this world.” It wasn’t a one-off. The New York Times reports that between 2014 and 2015, Navy pilots observed UFOs almost daily. There was even a near midair collision.

In 2017, the New York Times made the Navy sightings – and the existence of a secret Pentagon programme investigating such occurrences – a front-page news story. Since then, further Navy videos have emerged and “unidentified aerial phenomena” (or “UAP”, the new official term that has replaced the now-stigmatised “unidentified flying object”) have become a serious talking point. Last July, for instance, the US senator Marco Rubio told CBS that the issue was a pressing national security concern: “We have things flying over our military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises. We don’t know what it is and it isn’t ours.” The following month, the Pentagon created the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force “to improve its understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAPs”. Most significantly, in December, Congress passed a bill requiring the director of national intelligence and the defence secretary to submit a report on what they know about the UAP issue. The report is due in June.

 

10:59 minute Michael Salla video discussing the mysterious silencing of UFO insiders (‘Michael Salla’ YouTube)

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Senator Marco Rubio is Taking UFOs Seriously

Article by Adrian Carrasquillo                                               May 11, 2021                                           (newsweek.com)

• UFOs have long been dismissed and relegated to movies and message boards. But after the release of footage of high-profile U.S. military encounters with aircraft of unknown origin, and confirmed as authentic by the Pentagon, Senator Marco Rubio wants to get past the UFO jokes and focus on the seemingly vulnerable national security of the United States. “We cannot allow the stigma of UFO’s to keep us from seriously investigating these encounters,” Rubio told Newsweek.

• Rubio has in many ways taken the baton from former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who previously led the way in pressuring Congress to try to understand what was going on. In June 2020, Rubio added language to the 2021 Intelligence Authorization Act requesting that the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense create a report with “a detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence reporting.” Two months later, the Pentagon created a UAP Task Force to investigate the encounters by U.S. military aircraft. The intelligence report has a soft deadline of June 1st.

• Rubio sees the UFO topic as a national security issue. “People think about space aliens,” Rubio told TMZ in March. “[T]here’s stuff flying over military installations and no one knows what it is, and it isn’t ours.” “[M]aybe it’s a foreign adversary that has made a technological leap,” Rubio elaborated to Fox News.

• Rubio is aware that stigma attached to UFOs is an impediment to reaching a hard conclusion about what the government is dealing with. This stigma goes back decades to a time when if a Navy pilot reported a sighting, he or she would have been sent to the flight surgeon “to check out your head and make sure you’re not seeing things,” said Rubio earlier this year.

• But today, Rubio takes the UFO matter quite seriously, and will take on a question about extraterrestrials head-on. “Well, if they made it all the way here they probably are, yeah, they’re probably more advanced,” he said. “If they can get here and we can’t get there that tells you they’re probably more advanced.”

• And should Biden and the U.S. government’s approach to extraterrestrials be friendly? Rubio laughed, saying only that it would be one heck of a way to top the last year and a half.

 

                  Senator Marco Rubio

Senator Marco Rubio believes the truth is out there and he wants to

        fmr Senator Harry Reid

get past the UFO jokes to make sure the national security of the United States isn’t threatened in any way, he told Newsweek.

“Dozens of men and women we have entrusted with the defense of our country are telling us about encounters with unidentified aircraft with capabilities we do not fully understand,” Rubio said in exclusive comments ahead of a 60 Minutes interview that will air this weekend. “We cannot allow the stigma of UFO’s to keep us from seriously investigating these encounters.”

UFOs, long dismissed and relegated to movies about aliens visiting earth and breathless message board posts, have begun to shed the farce label in recent years after the release of footage of high-profile U.S. military encounters with aircraft of unknown origin.

The 2019 leaked photos and video taken by U.S. Navy personnel of one such encounter, which showed triangle shaped objects flying through the air, were confirmed as authentic by the Defense Department in April of this year. Even the name of the objects — the branding if you will — has been revamped when discussed by the U.S. government, getting away from UFOs, to unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs.

Rubio has in many ways taken the baton from former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who previously led the way in pressuring Congress to try to understand what was going on.

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Puerto Rico UFO Video Deemed ‘Most Compelling’ as 55 Scientists Demand Release of Secret Data

Article by Henry Holloway                                             April 22, 2021                                         (thesun.co.uk)

• On April 25, 2013 at around 9:20 pm, pilots of a DHC-8 Turboprop flying near the Rafael Hernandez Airport in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico spotted a red light over the ocean. They contacted the control tower who could not identify the object. The object’s light went out as it approached the shore. The US Customs and Border Protection aircraft engaged its thermal imaging camera and went on to the follow the UFO. It captured video of an object about five feet in length moving at speeds of up to 120mph close the ground over the airport. (see 3:54 minute video below)

• The infrared camera footage was leaked to the Scientific Coalition for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (SCU), a ‘think tank’ dedicated to exploring UFOs and other phenomena, by an anonymous source. Jonathan Lace, spokesman for the SCU explained how the organization believes the 2013 Aguadilla UAP footage to be a “most compelling” footage of a UFO. In a 50-page report the coalition compiled on the incident (see here) SCU investigators who spent 1000 hours researching the UFO resolved that the object appears to be of “unknown origin”.

• “No bird, no balloon, no aircraft and no known drones have that capability,” the SCU report notes. When the object moves over the water again, it splits in two and plunges into the ocean. However, the mysterious UFO appears not to disturb the water when plunging beneath and then re-emerging from the surface – a phenomena known as “trans-medium” travel. “This video is the best documentation of an unknown aerial and submerged nautical object exhibiting advanced technology that the authors of this report have ever seen,” the report concludes.

• The SCU released a letter that it sent to Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio, ranking members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, urging them to release more information on UAPs. Some 55 members of the SCU signed off on the document as they offered their services in the investigation of these strange phenomena. They urge the two Republican Senators to get behind efforts to release more footage of the infamous 2004 “Tic Tac” UFO video from the USS Nimitz, and the “Go Fast” and “Gimbal” UFO videos filmed by the pilots from the USS Theodore Roosevelt in 2014.

• This report comes as the UFO debate reopened after the release of scraps of footage showing mysterious ‘pyramid’ objects from 2019, which the Pentagon confirmed as authentic. The videos were leaked from briefings by the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force. The world is awaiting an unclassified report on UFOs by the Director of the National Intelligence and the Department for Defense which is due for release in June.

• In a statement, the SCU said: “The SCU believes that all government data regarding unidentified aerospace objects should be made available to the public to be openly investigated by the broader scientific community, provided that such data does not compromise sources or methods of data collection. A full scientific investigation of such data would be able to uncover valuable information relating to both national security and advancement of our understanding of physics, aerospace engineering, and our world.”

• Competing theories on the strange videos continue to rage. Some claim that the pyramid UFOs are never-before-seen military aircraft or drones, or even hypersonic drones from China or Russia. Others claim it shows otherworldly craft possibly piloted by extraterrestrial beings. Diehard skeptics suggest that the bizarre videos are just camera tricks, natural phenomena or outright hoaxes.

 

                Aguadilla, Puerto Rico

The Scientific Coalition for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (SCU) told The US Sun

Aguadilla, Puerto Rico

they are encouraging the disclosure of more information so scientists can help to investigate these unexplained occurrences.

Jonathan Lace, spokesman for SCU, explained the organization believes “most compelling” footage of the anomalous activity was taken by a Homeland Security aircraft over Puerto Rico on April 25, 2013.

The eerie footage shows an object believed to be up to five feet in length moving at speeds of up to 120mph close the ground before seemingly plunging into the ocean and splitting into two.

        ‘Tic Tac’ UFO off San Diego 2004

“No bird, no balloon, no aircraft and no known drones have that capability,” the SCU noted in a 50-page report the team compiled on the incident.

SCU investigators said the object appears to be of “unknown origin” after spending 1000 hours researching the UAP.

   Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio

Mr Lace told The US Sun: “The SCU finds the 2013 Aguadilla UAP footage to offer the most compelling evidence of unusual UAP flight characteristics.”

              ‘pyramid’ UFO off LA 2019

He noted the group has “no official” position on a leading theory for UAP as questions mount over the strange encounters which are being investigated by the Pentagon.

The US Sun contacted SCU – a think tank dedicated to exploring UAPs and other phenomena – as they released a letter set to Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio urging for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) to release more information on UAPs.

Some 55 members of SCU signed off on the document as they offered their services in the investigation of these strange phenomena – but their names have been withheld due to privacy concerns.

 

3:54 minute 2013 Aguadilla UAP footage in Puerto Rico (‘Paris Match’ YouTube)

 

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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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Senator Marco Rubio Talks About UFOs Over Military Installations

Article by Leia Idliby                                       March 23, 2021                                        (mediaite.com)

• On March 22nd, at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., the guerrilla news organization TMZ accosted US Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL, pictured above) to ask for his comment on the impending unclassified UFO report that Rubio’s Senate Committee on Intelligence has requested from the Pentagon and government intelligence community within the next couple of months. “It’s common sense, right?” responded Rubio. “There’s stuff flying over military installations, and nobody knows what it is and it isn’t ours.”

• So should we be worried about potential foes from a galaxy far, far away? “I think the worry is that there’s stuff flying over our facilities and we don’t know what they are,” said the Senator. “You know what I mean? So that’s the concern. Maybe it’s the other logical explanation to it.”

• The TMZ reporter then asked Rubio if aliens or China imposed a bigger threat to the United States. Rubio answered by again stating that we don’t know who or what these UFOs are. “There’s stuff flying over the top of our military installations and they don’t know who’s flying it, they don’t even know who it is,” Rubio added. “So that’s a problem. We need to find out if we can.”

• Rubio did remark that the aliens must be smarter than humans if they “made it all the way here” but “we can’t get there.” “We don’t know what that stuff is that’s flying over the top of our installations, let’s find out,” he added. “Maybe it’s another country and that would be bad news too.”

 

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) shared his thoughts on aliens with TMZ — revealing he is worried about UFOs flying near United States military bases.

TMZ stopped the senator, a member of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, at Reagan National Airport on Monday, noting that the government is now required to release a report detailing everything officials know about UFOs.

“There’s stuff flying over military installations, and nobody knows what it is and it isn’t ours,” he said, adding that it’s logical to want to identify these unidentified flying objects. “It’s common sense, right?”

So should we be worried about potential foes from a galaxy far, far away? Rubio seems to think so.

“I think the worry is that there’s stuff flying over our facilities and we don’t know what they are,” said the senator. “You know what I mean? So that’s the concern. Maybe it’s the other logical explanation to it.”

The TMZ reporter went as far as to ask Rubio if aliens or China imposed a bigger threat to the United States, prompting the senator to repeat that he does not know what the object was.

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The Story That Changed Our Perception of UFOs

Article by Duncan Phenix                                    December 18, 2020                                   (krqe.com)

• Three years ago on December 17, 2017, the New York Times published a story that is still reverberating through UFO circles and government agencies. (see ExoArticle here) The report revealed the existence of a program called AATIP – Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program – and included a video of a “Tic Tac” UFO taken in 2004 by a Navy pilot from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz off of the coast of Southern California. The US Navy acknowledged the video as authentic in May of 2019.

• The “Tic Tac” video captured the imagination of the UFO community and the public. But it was the report that the government spent $22 million studying UFOs that pulled the media into the story and allowed the UFO topic to gain a foothold in the mainstream media. UFOs were no longer exclusively the butt of jokes.

• In July of 2020, the Times printed another article about the government’s role investigating UAPs, and the Pentagon’s new program called the UAP Task Force, run out of Naval Intelligence. This was revealed when Senator Marco Rubio included the language of the request in the 2021 Intelligence Authorization Act.

 

                Fmr Senator Harry Reid

MYSTERY WIRE — Three years ago this week, the New York Times posted a story on its website that is still reverberating through UFO circles and government agencies.

The report revealed the existence of a program called AATIP – Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program – and it put a video into the public eye 13 years after an encounter with a UFO was captured during a military mission off the coast of Southern California.

               image of ‘Tic Tac’ UFO

The “Tic Tac” video, which the U.S. Navy acknowledged as authentic in May of 2019, captured the imagination of the UFO community and the public. The video shows an object that a Navy pilot launched from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz had described in an up-close encounter.

But it was the report that the government spent $22 million studying UFOs, and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid‘s involvement, that pulled the media into the story.

Since the report, media attention to the UFO topic has gained a foothold in mainstream reporting. It was no longer exclusively the butt of jokes in the media.

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I Am Excited and Vindicated by Talk of UFOs

Article by AJ Vicens                                       November 2, 2020                                     (motherjones.com)

• Before the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton and her key staff were talking about UFOs. The issue was treated as a joke on late-night television. But time has shown that clearly there was something afoot.

• In December 2017, the New York Times published a groundbreaking story which included DoD videos of unexplained aerial objects. While credible UFO reports go back decades, the Times story advanced the UFO discussion into the mainstream media. (see previous ExoArticle) Since then, the Times has published a series of additional pieces, as have a host of other respected publications.

• In April 2019, the US Navy announced it was updating its procedures for pilots to report encounters with UFOs – to destigmatize the issue and collect better data. (see previous ExoArticle) By September, the US Navy confirmed to John Greenewald Jr. of The Black Vault website that the published UFO videos were officially “unidentified aerial phenomena”. In February 2020, Popular Mechanics published a piece concluding that “unidentified flying objects are neither myth nor figment of overactive imagination,” elaborating that evidence suggests UFOs are real.

• In June, the Senate Intelligence Committee tasked the director of national intelligence with submitting a public report outlining the government’s work on UFO/UAPs. Senator Mark Warner, the vice chair of the committee, confirmed that he had been given a classified briefing on UAPs. “The military and others are taking this issue seriously,” Warner said, “which, I think in previous generations may not have been the case.” A month later, Senator Marco Rubio, acting chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, characterized it as a national security issue. “We have things flying over our military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises and we don’t know what it is, and it isn’t ours,” Rubio said. “[F]rankly, if it’s something from outside this planet, that might actually be better” than the possibility novel aerial technology is being used by a foreign power. (see previous ExoArticle)

• The fact that two powerful senators are saying these sorts of things in public, with total earnestness, is huge. Greenewald, who has used the Freedom of Information Act to pry UFO documents from government vaults, agrees there is reason for optimism about further disclosures, but offered a note of caution. “The last two years have been fascinating in UAP world.” The Navy’s revelations provided renewed hope of transparency, and its acknowledgement that the objects on those famous videos were, in fact, UAPs, “was huge,” he said. “I never expected that.”

• However, Greenewald says a string of recently denied FOIA requests he filed indicates “that that door has shut,” and he warns that indications the government is taking UFOs as a serious potential threat could ultimately mean it will refuse to honestly disclose what it knows. “Whether or not we’re talking about a foreign adversary that has technology that we haven’t mastered yet, whether it’s one branch that’s being tested on by another branch of the military—which I think is a big possibility—or, what everybody wants, which is extraterrestrials, regardless, all of the above would be a national security risk,” said Greenewald.

• Greenewald is probably right. The government is not likely to tell us all it knows about these objects that can seemingly toy with the most advanced and sophisticated military equipment on the planet. But at least it’s now okay to talk about them in public. We must appreciate the wins where we can find them.

 

           Senator Marco Rubio

Over the last few years, amid the daily avalanche of scandal, corruption, and intrigue, one could be forgiven for tuning it all out in favor of something else. Anything else. One storyline I’ve found intriguing and exciting: the US government and UFOs.

               Senator Mark Warner

Before the 2016 election, I wrote a series of pieces about how Hillary Clinton and her key staff were saying interesting things about UFOs. Most laughed. The issue was treated as a joke on late-night television. But time has shown that clearly there was something afoot.

In December 2017, the New York Times published a groundbreaking story: “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program,” which included Department of Defense videos of aerial objects the government could not explain. While credible UFO reports go back decades, the Times story increased the latitude for discussion of the issue under mainstream mastheads. Since then, the Times has published a series of additional pieces, as have a host of other respected publications.

                  John Greenewald Jr.

In April 2019, the US Navy announced it was updating its procedures for pilots who wish to report encounters with UFOs to destigmatize the issue and collect better data. By September, the US Navy confirmed to John Greenewald Jr., the founder of a repository of publicly available government documents called the Black Vault, that the videos published by the Times were officially “unidentified aerial phenomena,” a the term used for “unauthorized/unidentified aircraft/objects that have been observed entering/operating in the airspace of various military-controlled training ranges.” In February 2020, Popular Mechanics published a deeply reported piece concluding that “unidentified flying objects are neither myth nor figment of overactive imagination,” elaborating that documentary evidence and people who would know both suggest “UFOs are real.”

In June, the Senate Intelligence Committee tasked the director of national intelligence with submitting a public report, with a classified annex, outlining the government’s work on “unexplained aerial phenomena.” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the vice chair of the committee, confirmed that he had been given a classified briefing on UAP. “The military and others are taking this issue seriously,” Warner said, “which, I think in previous generations may not have been the case.” A month later, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), acting chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, characterized it as a national security issue. “We have things flying over our military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises and we don’t know what it is, and it isn’t ours,” Rubio said, adding that “frankly, if it’s something from outside this planet, that might actually be better” than the possibility novel aerial technology is being used by a foreign power.

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The Pentagon Has No Intention of Sharing UFO Information

Article by Jazz Shaw                                  September 10, 2020                                         (hotair.com)

• All of the UFO/UAP (‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’) news this summer created a considerable excitement in the air. Florida Senator Marco Rubio made an unprecedented request for a report from the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force. Most people, civilians and government officials alike, didn’t even know we HAD a UFO task force. Then the Pentagon came out and officially announced the ‘formation’ of the task force. Then the NY Times published an article alluding to additional programs and an acknowledgment of a government “crash retrieval program” that could be in possession of “off-world materials”. Heady stuff.

• Journalist Roger Glassel contacted Pentagon UAP spokesperson Susan Gough with some specific questions about the new task force. Ms. Gough provided answers in a professional fashion, but seemingly doused most hopes for some new era of government transparency on the subject.

• Question: Will the public be informed about any findings from the UAPTF of the nature and/or origins of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena?   Answer: “[T]o avoid disclosing information that may be useful to our adversaries, DOD does not discuss publicly the details of either the observations or the examination of reported incursions into our training ranges or designated airspace, including those incursions initially designated as UAP.” (ie: “No.”)

• Question: Will the newly established UAP Task Force look into other aspects of the nature and origins of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or will the UAPTF just look at the aspect of UAP being a potential threat to U.S. national security?   Answer: “The Department of Defense established the [task force] to improve its understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAP incursions into our training ranges and designated airspace. The mission of the task force is to detect, analyze and catalog UAP incursions that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security. (ie: Pentagon is sticking to its position that they have no curiosity as to what these things are or where they came from, and are solely focusing on the potential national security threat, severely limiting the scope of what might be examined.)

• To summarize, the Pentagon’s UFO task force will take reports about UAP encounters if they might constitute a threat to national security and they promise to do a better job collecting and correlating such reports. But they won’t be releasing any of it for public consumption. The same goes for the Senate Intelligence Committee and the report the “requested”. That committee request may not even make it to the House bill, much less law. Furthermore, Congress hasn’t tied the request to any funding, so the DoD is under no obligation to comply. They can simply thank Congress for their input and proceed to ignore them, just as Ms Gough evaded the journalist’s questions.

• If there’s going to be any serious UFO disclosure it’s going to be up to the private sector and organizations such as Tom DeLonge’s ‘To The Stars Academy’, or whistleblowers like Luis Elizondo, or some high-ranking deathbed confessions – which the Pentagon can deny or obfuscate.

 

                 Roger Glassel

Some disappointing news on the UFO front came out this week, likely dampening the hopes of many people in the ufology community who have been eagerly looking forward to some sort of forthcoming disclosure from the government on this subject. As regular readers are already aware, there was considerable excitement in the air this summer following a number of revelations and surprising announcements on the topic of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs). First we saw a request from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, led by Marco Rubio, for a public report from the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force. This came as quite a surprise to people, including many in the government, who didn’t even know that we had a UAP Task Force.

           Susan Gough

That was followed by an official announcement of the formation of the task force by the Pentagon. After that, major newspapers such as the New York Times began digging into the subject, even raising the prospect of the potential disclosure of additional programs that might even include an acknowledgment of a government “crash retrieval program” that could be in possession of “off-world materials.

This led journalists in the ufology field to press the Pentagon for additional details. One such person was investigative journalist Roger Glassel, who contacted Pentagon UAP spokesperson Susan Gough with a number of specific questions about the new task force and its anticipated activities as they proceed to compile existing information on UAP encounters by the military and create channels for the collection of future reports. I first saw the article teased on Twitter.

The answers Roger received give us the disappointing news I alluded to above. Ms. Gough (which is pronounced “Goff,” by the way, as I only learned from her this week) provided Glassel with answers in a professional fashion, but seemingly doused most hopes for some new era of government transparency on the subject. Here are two of the key questions that produced bad news.

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California, Florida Report Highest in Number of UFO Sightings

Article by Scott Harrell                                   August 27, 2020                                      (baynews9.com)

• Every so often, a new UFO sighting or the release of documents reaches the mainstream news and reignites the public’s interest in unexplained aerial phenomena. In 2019, it was the US Navy’s acknowledgement that three leaked and ultimately declassified videos were in fact UFOs. No one, however, would go so far as to say they were spaceships from another planet. This renewed the curiosity of those American who are not too skeptical to consider at least the possibility of the existence of extraterrestrial life.

• In June of 2020, the Senate Intelligence Committee chaired by Republican Florida Senator Marco Rubio included a provision in its annual authorization bill requiring various military and intelligence agencies to compile a detailed analysis on UFOs. The analysis would be declassified and available to the public, and must be completed within 180 days of the bill’s passage.

• Not everyone in the UFO-watching community is excited about the subject’s current pop-cultural hype, however. “Coverage is trendy. That’s one of the problems we have,” says Peter Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center. “A lot of UFOlogists are very serious people indeed, doing serious work, and we only get covered if there’s a trend in [the culture].”

• Davenport, a former candidate for both Washington state legislature and U.S. House of Representatives who holds master’s degrees in biology and finance, has directed the NUFORC since 1994. Why did he choose to become the NUFORC Director? “Well, I saw one when I was a kid,” he says. The incident took place while he and his family were at a drive-in theater in St. Louis. “We were watching the movie, and a disturbance started brewing in the theater area,” Davenport says. “We didn’t know what it was. Then there were people walking in front of our car, looking up to the right, to the east of us. “There was an amazingly bright fire engine red object that looked something like an English rugby ball. It appeared to be almost motionless, then shot straight up, and then down behind [a building]. All of that happened in five or six seconds.” Hundreds, “if not thousands” of people witnessed the event. Since then, Davenport says he’s sighted other UFOs that he’s “reasonably certain were not made on this planet.”

• Since 1996, the NUFORC website has racked up more than 90,000 reported sightings, nearly all of them from North America. They include descriptions that run the gamut from “a series of bright spheres moved slowly, one-by-one, in a southerly direction, away from a stationary sphere” (Gloucester, Massachusetts, 7/8/18) to “White light circling a star” (Pearland, Texas, 8/14/20).

• California and Florida are the U.S. states that boast far and away the highest numbers of reported sightings, with 10,015 and 5,602, respectively. Both states are known for a lot of aerodynamic and space exploration research. “People report everything as UFOs, but I doubt that theory is correct,” Davenport says. “I can’t prove it, of course. The population, weather conditions, the fact that people are outdoors quite often [in those states]—there are many, many variables.”

 

FLORIDA — At least once or so a decade, a story about a new UFO sighting (or newly released documents about an old one) pops up on the

               Peter Davenport

mainstream media’s radar. When that happens, it always seems to instantly reignite the popular culture’s interest in unexplained aerial phenomena.
Last year, the U.S. Navy acknowledged that the objects seen in three widely leaked and ultimately declassified videos were, in fact, unidentified flying objects, in the most general sense of the term. (I.e., nobody in the military is saying they were spaceships piloted by beings from another planet.) The story was picked up by most major news outlets, and once again captured the imagination of those Americans not too skeptical to consider at least the possibility of the existence of extraterrestrial life.

That renewed curiosity has continued. In June of this year, the Senate Intelligence Committee—chaired by Republican Florida Senator Marco Rubio—included a provision in its annual authorization bill requiring various military and intelligence agencies to compile a detailed analysis of all of the other data on unexplained aerial phenomena. The analysis would be declassified and available to the public and must be completed within 180 days of the bill’s passage.

While the ostensible reason for the provision is defense against a potential threat to the U.S., its mere existence serves as evidence of the public’s continued interest.

Not everyone in the UFO-watching community is excited about the subject’s current pop-cultural hype and the public’s cycling infatuation, however.
“Coverage is trendy. That’s one of the problems we have,” says Peter Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center. “A lot of UFOlogists are very serious people indeed, doing serious work, and we only get covered if there’s a trend in [the culture].”

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Pentagon UFO Program Still Exists. But Navy’s Alien Sightings Don’t Add Up.

Article by Seth Shostak                                August 2, 2020                               (nbcnews.com)

• The New York Times recently reported that in spite of a Pentagon UFO research program being shut down in 2012, a new one has taken its place. This gives a hundred million Americans hope that there must be something worth looking at… aliens perhaps?

• When The New York Times reported in 2017 that Navy pilots captured video of a UFO outmaneuvering their jets over the Pacific Ocean, they felt compelled to look into it due to national security concerns. Or is this a ruse by the government to make the public think that the military thinks that these are probably Russian or Chinese technologies, so that the public won’t be thrown “into chaos”?

• The NY Times also revealed that the government has in its possession “retrieved materials” that are “not made on this Earth”, and possibly even recovered alien spacecraft. This claim seems suspect. The Navy pilots didn’t report picking up pieces of alien technology or strange metal alloys, so it’s unclear where these “materials” came from. This is a case where seeing might be believing. But no one has let us see anything, which is convenient.

• Senator Marco Rubio, R-Fla., says he is especially concerned by the fact that the extraterrestrials spend a lot of time hanging out above our military bases. But why would such technologically advanced aliens travel trillions of miles to our planet just to ‘play cat-and-mouse’ with Navy jets and monitor our far-less advanced weaponry? Perhaps these aliens come as saviors to protect us from ourselves.

• No, aliens wouldn’t be interested in our pitiful technology. If unidentified craft or drones are watching our military capabilities, then it is more likely they are Russian or Chinese intelligence. Humans are too quick to ascribe strange phenomena to superhuman beings, much as the Greeks believed that lightning bolts were javelins tossed by Zeus. There is no solid ‘science’ that supports these unidentified objects being extraterrestrial.

• The Office of Naval Intelligence will supposedly make regular reports on at least some of its UFO findings. Is this good news for the Fox Mulder crowd who ‘want to believe’ in UFOs? Or will it rob these believers of their best evidence – which is no evidence at all?

• [Editor’s Note]   As the Senior Astronomer for the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) which peers at distant stars through radio telescopes looking for clues of extraterrestrial civilizations, Seth Shostak’s continuing fame and fortune lies in never finding any aliens at all, so he can keep on “searching”.

To this end, he pens this article that twists and contorts until he finally reaches his foregone conclusion – that extraterrestrials have not yet come to this planet. Shostak’s tortured premise is that highly advanced extraterrestrial beings would have no interest in our inferior technology, although the Russians or the Chinese may have. To believe that UFOs are of an extraterrestrial origin is a testament to the feeble human mind that ascribes anything unknown to supernatural causes. There is no hard science supporting alien technology, and there are no ‘alien materials’ or recovered alien craft in the government’s possession.

Shostak is a proud standard-bearer for the Deep State, continuing to debunk the extraterrestrial presence in any way he can, just as others before him have done for over seventy years. He must be aware that aliens exist here in our solar system. But his job is to lie to the public and attempt to make a mockery of the UFO disclosure movement, while posing as a responsible scientist. Unfortunately for Shostak, more and more people are waking up to this deceit and recognizing him for the despicable charlatan that he is.

 

Is it vindication at last? The New York Times has recently reported that a supposedly canceled Pentagon project to investigate

                      Seth Shostak

strange aerial phenomena is still showing a pulse. The clandestine effort, originally known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, was said to have ended in 2012. But, apparently, it’s still doing its thing under the auspices of the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, and with a new name: the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force.

So, where there’s smoke, there’s fire, right? If the feds are still forking over tax dollars to delve into odd goings-on in the sky, it must be because they’ve got convincing evidence of extraterrestrial visitors. That’s the hope of the 100 million or so Americans who seem willing to swear on the Good Book that unidentified flying objects are, at least in some cases, alien objects.

But as with everything UFO-related, it’s worth taking a second, or third, look before rushing to lay out the red carpet for alien houseguests. When, in 2017, the Times first reported on a secret project to study unidentified aerial phenomena, it was in connection with some puzzling videos taken by Navy fighter pilots over the Pacific. The video showed unidentified objects ahead of the jets, objects that seemed to maneuver in bizarre ways. The military has always wanted to know about anything that can fly, so there are plenty of national security reasons for why they would continue such research.

That’s the most straightforward explanation for why the Navy has extended the Pentagon program. It’s also what they’ve said.
But isn’t it possible that what’s really going on here is not an investigation into unknown aircraft or drones, but a distraction to keep us from a more disturbing truth — that UFOs aren’t enemy flying machines, but alien flying machines? Maybe the government doesn’t want to admit this, because they figure the news might throw society into chaos.

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Sen Marco Rubio: It Might Be Better if the UFOs Are Aliens

Article by Jazz Shaw                               July 18, 2020                              (hotair.com)

• Last month, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence offered a bill that, if passed, would direct the Pentagon to issue a public report on what the government knows about UFOs. Florida Senator Marco Rubio (pictured above) is the acting head of that committee. When interviewed by Jim DeFade for CBS Miami on July 16th, DeFade asked Rubio if he thought there were non-human aliens in our galaxy visiting the Earth. Rubio first answered the question seriously in terms of national defense.

• But then Rubio said “Look, (here’s) the interesting thing for me about all this and the reason why I think it’s an important topic, OK? We have things flying over our military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises, and we don’t know what it is, and it isn’t ours. So, that’s a legitimate question to ask.”

• “I would say that, frankly, if it’s something outside this planet, that might actually be better than the fact that we’ve seen some technological leap on behalf of the Chinese or the Russians or some other adversary that allows them to conduct this sort of activity,” said Rubio. “But the bottom line is: If there are things flying over your military bases and you don’t know what they are because they’re not yours, and they exhibit, potentially, technologies that you don’t have at your own disposal, that to me is a national security risk and one that we should be looking into.”

• Interestingly, Rubio did not even consider the possibility that the high tech UFOs we’ve seen may have been developed within America’s own black budget Special Access Programs that he might not know about it.

• Then DeFade hit him with a broad question: “What’s your gut? Are we alone in the universe, or is there something else out there?” Rubio sidestepped the question, simply calling it a ‘phenomenon’. “It’s unexplained,” said Rubio. I just want to know what it is, and if we can’t determine what it is, then that’s a fact point that we need to take into account. I wouldn’t venture to speculate beyond that.”

• The argument against wanting it to be aliens is that means that we are sharing our space with beings that are vastly technologically superior to us. These things have been with us at least since the Nimitz encounters of 2004, but probably much longer. During the Vietnam War, American fighter pilots reported seeing identical things in their airspace. (see video below) If the aliens were going to attack us, they could have done it long ago, with impunity.

• But if these things represent the type of technology possessed by the Russians or the Chinese, then that’s not an ideal situation either. If the Russians indeed had this sort of technology, wouldn’t they have used it to end the Cold War conclusively in their favor? And if it’s our own gear, why haven’t we broken it out yet and dominated our adversaries? Also, if we have anti-gravity technology, why are we still burning fossil fuels to get around?

 

As we discussed last month, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has released a bill which, if passed, would direct the Pentagon to get their act together on the UFOs our military has been chasing around in our airspace and issue a report on what’s going on and make it available to the public. The acting head of that committee is Florida Senator Marco Rubio, so he’s been receiving a lot of predictable media attention on this subject. From everything I’ve seen, Rubio has been taking the question in an admirably serious fashion and not ducking away from opportunities to comment. One of those cropped up this week, when he was interviewed by investigative journalist Jim DeFade for CBS Miami.

   a UFO image captured by a US Navy jet

DeFade didn’t pull any punches, directly asking the Senator of he thought there were actually aliens in our galaxy and if we might not be alone. Rubio keeps a serious tone, discussing the possibility of a threat to national security as represented by these strange craft. But he then goes on to offer a rather startling opinion as to their origin. While not directly invoking the word “aliens,” he says that if it’s “something outside this planet,” that might be better than finding out that the Chinese or the Russians have gotten a huge leap on us in the technology race.

“Look, here’s the interesting thing for me about all this and the reason why I think it’s an important topic, OK? We have things flying over our military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises, and we don’t know what it is, and it isn’t ours. So, that’s a legitimate question to ask,” Rubio said in a Thursday interview with Jim DeFede of CBS4 News in Miami. “I would say that, frankly, that if it’s something outside this planet, that might actually be better than the fact that we’ve seen some technological leap on behalf of the Chinese or the Russians or some other adversary that allows them to conduct this sort of activity.”

Rubio added: “But the bottom line is: If there are things flying over your military bases and you don’t know what they are because they’re not yours, and they exhibit, potentially, technologies that you don’t have at your own disposal, that to me is a national security risk and one that we should be looking into.”

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