Article by Fabienne Lang April 14, 2021 (interestingengineering.com)
• A report in the New York Times stated that last year saw a surge in UFO sightings recorded in the United States. New Yorkers alone reported 300 UFO sightings — the highest number to date. Could extraterrestrial life forms be getting closer to Earth? Are there just more UFOs? Were they always there but are they now flying closer to Earth? Were the night skies just clearer during the pandemic?
• The number of sightings reported in 2020 by the National UFO Reporting Center was 7,263. That number is up from 6,277 in 2019, and jumps up radically from just a decade earlier in 2010, which saw 4,809 sightings reported. So there is a clear upwards trend.
• As more official agencies like the CIA share their official UFO documents, more people become interested in the topic and pay closer attention to what might be lurking above their homes at night. More satellites are being sent into orbit and the Pentagon recently confirmed that leaked Navy UFO footage was real, adding fuel to the UFO fire. Combine these factors with people having more time on their hands in lockdowns and clear skies, you have more opportunities for UFO sightings.
• To keep you occupied during lockdown you can have a little fun by checking out exactly where they’ve been seen through a cool UFO sightings map. Unless, of course, you prefer to take out your binoculars and look up at the starry sky directly.
Scientists have long suspected that extra-terrestrial life exists out there, but could
hybrid underwater UFO off of Virginia in 2019
more of these alien life forms be getting closer to Earth year on year?
An interesting report in the New York Times might believe so, as it stated that last year saw a surge in UFO sightings recorded in the U.S. New Yorkers alone reported 300 UFO sightings — the highest number to date.
‘pyramid’ UFO off of LA in 2019
This raises a number of questions. For instance, are there just more UFOs? Or, were they always there but are they now flying closer to Earth? Or, did people just have more time during lockdowns? And
‘Tic Tac’ UFO off of San Diego 2004
finally, were the night skies clearer during the pandemic?
Unfortunately, no clear cut answer can be given. However, if we look at the numbers recorded by the National UFO Reporting Center in the U.S., the number of reported sightings last year was 7,263. That number is up from 6,277 in 2019, and jumps up radically from just a decade earlier in 2010, which saw 4,809
‘Gimbal’ UFO off of Florida 2015
sightings reported.
The numbers vary over the years, but if you go down the fascinating list of
“Go Fast’ UFO off of Virginia 2015
reportings, they do trickle down, with some years even just recording one sighting. So there is a clear upwards trend.
Why are there more UFO sightings?
Another musing is that as more official agencies like the CIA share their official UFO documents, more people become interested in the topic and pay closer attention to what might be lurking above their homes at night. The Pentagon also recently confirmed that a recent leaked Navy UFO footage was real, adding fuel to the UFO fire.
Combine these factors with people having more time on their hands in lockdowns and clear skies, you have more opportunities for UFO sightings.
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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.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. ExoNews.org distributes this material for the purpose of news reporting, educational research, comment and criticism, constituting Fair Use under 17 U.S.C § 107. Please contact the Editor at ExoNews with any copyright issue.
Article by Alejandro Rojas October 23, 2020 (openminds.tv)
• The news has been ablaze with UFO headlines. The US government has been forced to seriously confront the UAP/UFO issue. In fact, The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has requested a public report from the Director of National Intelligence on what has been done thus far with regard to Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon.
• This focus on the UFO phenomenon was the result of a string of media events: a tweet by Sky Hub founder Steve McDaniel followed by a Danny Silva blog; an article by Leslie Kean in The Huffington Post in May 2016; Open Minds UFO Radio interviews of Bryan Bender and NY Times writer Leslie Kean in the summer of 2017; a blockbuster NY Times article in December 2017; a Washington Post op-ed in March 2018; an article by Politico’s Bender in June 2019; a History Channel show; and finally the US Navy authenticating Navy cockpit video of UFOs, admitting that they are for real, and issuing Navy personnel guidelines for reporting them.
• The focus of all of this media attention over the past four years has been former Senate intelligence analyst Chris Mellon and former Pentagon intelligence officer and head of its UFO program, Luis Elizondo. (both are pictured above with Tom DeLonge) It began with Elizondo’s difficulty in being granted a meeting with defense officials to reveal unexplained craft. It would end with Mellon and Elizondo invited to Capitol Hill for high level UFO briefings. “They couldn’t any longer deny it… when they had active-duty pilots and others going on the record,” said Mellon.
• In the documentary “The Phenomenon”, Mellon says his professional interest in UFOs arose from early claims by astronaut Gordon Cooper. Cooper was a part of the famed ‘Mercury Seven’, the first seven US astronauts to go into space. Prior to this, in 1951, Cooper’s squadron of jet fighters had chased a group of round objects that could stop mid-air and make instant 90 degree turns. In 1957, Cooper and his crew at Edwards Air Force base filmed a saucer-shaped object land on a dry lake bed and then take off again. The Air Force sent a courier to collect it. Cooper never saw the film again.
• Just prior to the end of President Clinton’s second term, Clinton told his Secretary of Defense, Michael Cohen, to investigate Cooper’s claims. Cohen assigned the matter to Chris Mellon, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Security and Information Operations for The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Mellon would later become the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence for the Senate Committee. Apparently, Mellon wasn’t satisfied with the records that the US Air Force kept on UFOs, including Cooper’s. He was told that most of them had been removed in order to “clean up” or “save space”. Mellon’s curiosity was piqued.
• Mellon retired from the government and joined a UFO monitoring system called UFODATA. Then he learned about the existence of a Pentagon UFO program. The UFO topic “was something that I had always been interested in,” said Mellon. “So, I was surprised to see they had anything organized at all.” Mellon quickly offered to assist Elizondo to help get data of the Nimitz Strike Carrier Group encounter with a UFO/UAP to the Secretary of Defense. The Office of the Secretary of Defense did not want to escalate the issue. “People were still afraid to touch it and afraid to let the secretary even be exposed to the issue,” says Mellon. Even with Mellon’s connections to senior officials in the Department of Defense, they were unable to secure a meeting with the Secretary of Defense.
• Mellon and Elizondo began to consider more drastic measures – to take their information directly to the media and the public in order to force Congress to take some action. They invited Leslie Kean to Washington on October 4, 2017. “I went down and went to Washington, and we spent three or four hours together,” says Kean. “Luis had resigned (his) position literally the day before we met.” “I was shown the videos… (and) was shown documents about Harry Reid’s involvement. [T]he story was kind of laid out for me at this meeting.” “I realized at that point that it was a New York Times level story, given the documentation that was available for the program and for the people involved and everything else,” Kean continued. “And so that’s how it all started.”
• The world was introduced to Mellon and Elizondo on October 10, 2017, with the press conference launch of Tom DeLonge’s ‘To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science’. Elizondo and Mellon had joined ‘To the Stars’ team of former high level UFO investigators. The announcement was accompanied by Kean’s article in The Huffington Post. Still, no one seemed to take notice of Elizondo who claimed that he ran a UFO program despite the government telling us for decades they had no interest in the topic.
• Then in December 2017, Kean along with co-writers Ralph Blumenthal and Helen Cooper, published a blockbuster NY Times article revealing that the Pentagon had run a secretive UFO program from 2007 to 2012 called the ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’ (AATIP). The article’s primary source was Elizondo who claimed AATIP did not end in 2012 and that it continues to this day. The Times article also included two videos allegedly showing infrared camera footage from Navy F-18 fighter jets of a UFO, which Mellon had clandestinely received from an anonymous DoD official in a parking garage. (see previous ExoArticle on this)
• On March 9, 2018, Mellon wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post (see previous ExoArticle here) asking ‘Why Doesn’t the Pentagon Care? “Senators and staffers have been kept in the dark,” said Mellon. “There’s some important unanswered questions here.” Soon thereafter, the US Navy announced new formal guidelines for Navy personnel to report UFO encounters. “There’s no doubt in my mind that that report requirement (by the Navy) would not be in there, wouldn’t exist if we had not been engaged in bringing witnesses forward and advocating this and writing about it and so forth,” said Mellon.
• Mellon called upon Congress to require an ‘all-source study’ by the Secretary of Defense, and promoted research into new forms of propulsion that might explain how these vehicles achieve such extraordinary power and maneuverability, as it pertains to national security. “[H]opefully (this attention) will force the Executive branch to get its act together… establish some accountability and force them to take a position in black and white, as opposed to just giving some briefings.”
• In less than three years, Mellon and Elizondo’s strategy has resulted in the US government admitting they take UAP seriously, reversing their decades-long denials of the fact, and the Senate Intelligence committee taking notice by asking for more information. “It’s a tremendous step forward,” said Mellon. “Regardless of what the phenomenon turns out to be in the end. At least now we can have some faith that a serious effort is going to be made to hold and analyze the data, probably implement a new collection strategy… So it has a lot of potential ramifications, all of them positive.”
Luis Elizondo
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) has requested that the Director of National
Chris Mellon
Intelligence organize research into Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP – aka UFOs) and provide a public report on what has been done thus far. It is an extraordinary move that further legitimizes a topic that has historically been relegated to mythological stories like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. However, the public did not know that there were those in the US military and intelligence communities who took the issue seriously and wanted more to be done to figure out what those UFOs are.
Leslie Kean
“We have an intelligence community for a reason, partly to support our military, partly to avoid strategic surprise, and the intelligence community was failing on both counts,” former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon told OpenMinds.tv in a recent interview. “The intelligence community was completely unresponsive, completely dropping the ball. I mean, it could be Russian, it could be Chinese, it could be something else.”
Bryan Bender
Mellon served for ten years as a Staff Director of the SSCI. From 1998 to 1999, he served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Security and Information Operations, and from 1999 to 2002, he was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
In a recent interview for a documentary called The Phenomenon, Mellon says his professional interest in the topic of UAP began with a request by astronaut Gordon Cooper.
Cooper was a part of the famed Mercury Seven, the first seven US astronauts to go into space. He claims to have had two UFO incidents. The first was in 1951. He claims his squadron of jet fighters chased a group of round objects that could stop mid-air and make instant 90 degree turns. He also claimed that in 1957 a crew he managed at Edwards Air Force base filmed a saucer-shaped object land on a dry lake bed and then take off again. He reviewed the film and reported it. The Air Force sent a courier to collect it. He never saw the film again.
the ‘Mercury Seven’
According to Mellon, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, Michael Cohen, tasked him to investigate the matter.
“Astronaut Cooper had spoken with the President,” Mellon says in The Phenomenon. “At a cabinet meeting, he raised this with Secretary Cohen, and then Cohen’s office called me and asked me to pursue this and chase it down.”
“The Air Force colonel that I spoke with got very frustrated, and when I asked him what happened to all of these records,” explained Mellon. “He said, ‘Well, that was all cleaned up or thrown out to save space.’ Something like that. It sounded ludicrous, but that’s what he told me.”
Mellon’s interest in the UFO topic was the focus of an article in The Huffington Post in May 2016 titled Is There a UFO Cover-up? A Government Insider Speaks Out. The article was written by Leslie Kean and was about Mellon joining a group of scientists interesting in developing a UFO monitoring system called UFODATA.
Kean was also one of The New York Times authors, along with Ralph Blumenthal and Helen Cooper, who broke the news in December 2017 that the Pentagon had run a secretive UFO program from 2007 to 2012 called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The article’s primary source was Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who claims he retired to get more attention to what he felt was important information regarding UFOs. He also claimed AATIP did not end in 2012 and that it continues to this day.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. ExoNews.org distributes this material for the purpose of news reporting, educational research, comment and criticism, constituting Fair Use under 17 U.S.C § 107. Please contact the Editor at ExoNews with any copyright issue.
Article by Come Carpentier de Gourdon October 21, 2020 (nyoooz.com)
• The UFO/UAP enigma presents a unique case in human history. Earth`s governments, religious organizations and scientific bodies seem to know no more about it than they did in the 1940s, even though they claim every now and then to launch an investigation only to close them on the grounds that nothing of value or substance has been found. What other unexplained multiple happenings taking place again and again during decades before millions of witnesses and often leaving material traces, in many countries, and yet remain a mystery?
• With the multiple statements from government-affiliated officials regarding their observations of vehicles and buildings on the Moon for which some provided photos and videos, and the persistent testimonies and visual proofs of US Navy jet close encounters with craft reportedly not from this Earth since 2004, reported on the New York Times and other major media and eventually confirmed by the US Navy and the Pentagon as being authentic, there is obviously something going on. The Pentagon has officially been monitoring UFOs at least since 2007 under a Congressionally funded program that still exists today. Recently retired high-ranking military and civilian Intelligence officers have devoted their lives and reputations to the disclosure of the UFO/UAP enigma. And more recently it was reported that the US legislators were informed that certain agencies and/or corporate entities are in possession of materials and substances of ‘non-terrestrial origin’ and not human-made.
• A number of high US ranking politicians and military officers have voiced publicly their awareness of the existence of UFOs after being briefed by scientists. But this public concern is only the latest in a very long series of official and public reports and statements that go back to the Second World War, if not much earlier. The lack of intellectual curiosity in the UFO phenomenon in modern times goes back to 1942 – the `battle over Los Angeles`; 1947 – the Roswell UFO crashes; and 1952 – the UFO fleets over the Capitol in Washington D.C. But behind the scenes, the UFO phenomenon has been a constant matter of concern at the highest levels of government and the military.
• The severely limited amount of unclassified data that has managed to see the light of day already proves without a doubt that there are advanced space-faring machines operated by superior forms of intelligent life, biological or `artificial`, circulating in our planetary environment. The US government has known about it for decades and has done all it could to deny or avoid officially recognizing it. Meanwhile, these craft enjoy complete freedom to operate in the atmosphere and under our oceans. These UAP craft frequently fly over army forts, navy bases, Air Force stations, ICBM silos, strategic defense headquarters, power plants, and even the residence of the US President. They sometimes jam the radars and command and control systems which is regarded as a technical impossibility by the system operators.
• The secrecy and cover up surrounding the UFO enigma has also rendered the scientific community inert, intimidated by the threat of losing their valued reputation within the scientific community by giving credit to the topic. Those who work on expensive mainstream projects looking for alien life in the cosmos tend to ignore any information provided by competent researchers and even military sources. They prefer the promise that some evidence of life on a remote planet will emerge in the next ten or twenty years.
• Rather than reveal to the public the truth, the powers that be still cling to an official denial of the very existence of the UFO phenomenon, which has seeped into our cultural norms, relegating it to a “fringe” topic. But in reality, governments have ascertained since the forties that there indeed are several `Alien` intelligent life forms in our ecosphere. They are so far ahead of our human species that we are entirely at their mercy. So profound a change this would make on our collective self-perception and our conceptions of the universe, life and mankind, the government felt it better to not reveal it to the people at large. Now they have hid it for so long that disregarding the legal requirement that the government should share relevant information with its citizens has become the norm.
• Perhaps some agreement was reached between the government and these Alien beings, with an exchange of knowledge and technology taking place for some good or service provided by the humans involved. Secrecy may have been a condition of the transaction in order to avoid unpredictable public interference. Multiple confirmed reports of human abductions by `Aliens`, sometimes supported by material evidence but apparently ignored by official authorities, over the last several decades, lend credence to the belief that governments are powerless to do anything about it or are complicit at some clandestine level.
• The evidence of an official policy of UFO secrecy cannot be ignored. Even the most garrulous high officials and heads of state have not made any positive statements about it. President Trump told his son in a television interview that he had learnt `some very interesting things` about what happened in Roswell, but declined to say what he knew. No person in a high position of any major country has stated in plain terms that he knows that UFOs are `extraterrestrial`, intelligently operated and pertain to a superior living system. All pronouncements in this connection are ambiguous, elusive and wrapped in doubt or humor. At their own peril, political leaders might say that they `believe in aliens” or that they have seen UFOS, but they will never affirm that there is evidence for their existence and `alien` nature. This is where the line is drawn between belief and awareness.
• In conclusion: The USA and some other major powers know a lot more than they let out on the matter of UFO/UAPs. They have evidently accumulated a lot of information and `know-how` since the end of the Second World War on this topic but have kept most of the world`s population in the dark while pretending every now and then to make efforts at investigating the mystery. Is this policy of denial and obfuscation masquerading as a lack of interest part of a larger plan? And who are the ‘unidentified insiders’ who are continually making these policy decisions, apparently keeping the ultimate secrets from heads of state and even the President of the United States?
A brief update on the matter of (so-called) Unidentified Aerial Phenomena which is now a regular feature in the major mainstream media is in order,. especially since it has been acknowledged by NASA that life appears to exists in the Venusian atmosphere and that it was in fact detected as far back as 1978.
No direct connection between this recognition, which follows decades of often acrimonious disputes about the presence of extraterrestrial microorganisms on meteorites the multiple statements from government-affiliated officials regarding their observations of vehicles and buildings on the Moon for which some provided photos and videos. and the persistent testimonies and visual proofs of US military close encounters with craft reportedly not from this earth since 2004, reported on the New York Times and other major print and audiovisual media and eventually confirmed by the US Navy and the Pentagon as being authentic (all those facts are documented in official documents and articles in major mainstream media, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, NBC, Fox News etc…).
Come Carpentier de Gourdon
The coming to light of the existence of the Congressionally funded AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program at the behest of then Senate majority Leader Harry Reid between 2007 and 2012, the foundation of the TTSA (To the Stars Academy) with the participation of high-ranking recently retired military and civilian Intelligence officers and the subsequent acknowledgment by the Pentagon that it maintains a UFO monitoring desk k are only a few of the many milestones on the road to the public disclosure that, among other data:
1-There are very advanced space-faring machines operated by superior forms of intelligent life, biological or `artificial` circulating in our planetary environment and at least one Government, the US Government, knows about it since decades and has done all it could until recently to deny or at least avoid recognizing and publicizing it.
2-The official information now available is that those craft enjoy complete freedom to operate in the atmosphere and under our oceans, arguably because of the inability of governments to control them with any of the means currently available. The craft also land every now and then and can usually not be intercepted or stopped.
3-Some of those crafts frequently fly over army forts, navy bases, Air Force stations and other sensitive and protected facilitiess such as ICBM silos, strategic defence headquarters, power plants, the residence of the US President and they sometimes jam the radars and command and control systems which in the words of some of the pilots and ICBM staff can be regarded as a hostile manoeuvers although they were apparently only intended for self-protection, On various occasions UAPs temporarily switched off the firing mechanisms of ICBM which is regarded as a technical impossibility by the system operators.
4-The Pentagon has been ordered by the US Congress`s Intelligence Committee in a directive as part of the Defence Authorization Act to provide within six months from July 2020 a report disclosing some of the hitherto classified information it has gathered about the nature, origin and objectives of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenal. It is however to be noted that the delay granted and the virtual discretion given to the Military as to what information they will release indicate that not much new information may come out and most of the press echoed the official line about the fear that the UAPS may in fact be Chinese or Russian vehicles, which is an old but long discredited hypothesis intended to elude the real issue at hand.
5-A number of high US ranking politicians and military officers have voiced publicly their awareness of the existence of UAPS (Senators Marco Rubio, Mark Warner, Mark Walker among others) after being briefed by scientists from AATIP but this apparently new wave of concern is only the latest in a very long series of official and public reports and statements that go back to the second world war if not much earlier. This time however it is reported that the Legislators were informed that certain US agencies and/or corporate entities are in possession of materials and substances of non-terrestrial origin and not human-made.
Even if we discount the historical records that allude to observations of and encounters with `alien` or strange craft and beings that take us back hundreds of years and possibly millennia, the series of confirmed events that took place between 1942 (the so-called `battle over Los Angeles`) and 1954 (the Roswell UFO crashes and retrievals in 1947, the UFO fleets over the Capitol in Washington D.C. in 1952), the press conferences by top US Army, Air Force and Navy Commanders, the multiple government-commissioned investigations et al. prove that the UAP (formerly UFO) phenomenon has been a constant matter of concern at the highest levels along the last several decades. Long spells of official silence and dismissal have been periodically interrupted by waves of statements usually pleading ignorance while admitting the reality and the outlandish nature of the incidents but always stopping short of affirming their non-human, extra-planetary character.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. ExoNews.org distributes this material for the purpose of news reporting, educational research, comment and criticism, constituting Fair Use under 17 U.S.C § 107. Please contact the Editor at ExoNews with any copyright issue.
Article by Susan Leighton September 17, 2020 (1428elm.com)
• October 6th will mark the digital release of the James Fox’ UFO documentary, The Phenomenon. Fox, who is known for a previous UFO related History Channel film, I Know What I Saw, brings out supporting evidence of UFOs from Biblical accounts to modern revelations brought forth by New York Times journalist Leslie Kean of the Pentagon’s AATIP UFO program, and the Navy’s cockpit video of the ‘Tic Tac’ and other types of UFO craft roaming around our skies.
• Narrated by veteran actor Peter Coyote and distributed on digital platforms by 1091 Media, The Phenomenon deals with the government’s ongoing efforts to cover-up the existence of UFOs with testimonies from “high-ranking government officials” including President Clinton, John Podesta and Senator Harry Reid. Audiences will have access to never-seen-before UFO footage.
• NASA rocket engineer, Josef Blumrich, constructed a blueprint of what the “wheel” spaceship depicted in the Old Testament’s Book of Ezekiel might have looked like based on the prophet’s account in the Scriptures. But if UFOs have been visiting us for thousands of years, what do they want? Why are they here?
The Phenomenon is a documentary from the mind of James Fox dealing with UFOs and the government’s ongoing efforts to cover-up their existence.
James Fox
Fox is well known for the History Channel film, I Know What I Saw, which featured detailed reports of alien crafts and investigations into the sightings by analysts and experts.
According to Deadline, veteran actor Peter Coyote, who appeared in Steven Spielberg’s, ET the Extra-Terrestrial, narrates the production. The Phenomenon contains testimonies from “high-ranking government officials” including President Clinton, John Podesta and Senator Harry Reid.
Audiences will have access to never seen before UFO footage. Also covered, the hard-hitting revelation of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification (AATIP) program in The New York Times by journalist Leslie Kean. The now famous declassified Navy fighter jet videos of the “Tic-Tac” and “Gimbal” incidences are mentioned, as well.
2:21 minute trailer for 1091’s “Phenomenon” the movie (‘1091 Pictures’ YouTube)
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Article by John Horgan May 18, 2020 (scientificamerican.com)
• Leslie Kean (pictured above) is a co-author of the 2017 New York Times front-page article on Pentagon investigations of UFOs. (see ExoArticle here “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program”). She is also the author of the 2010 bestseller UFOs: Generals, Pilots, And Government Officials Go On The Record and also her 2017 book Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife. John Horgan, who has a hard time believing in ghosts and alien visitations, interviewed her to ask about UFOs and the paranormal.
• Kean tells Horgan that she wasn’t interested in UFOs and the paranormal until she reached adulthood. When she was a child, she believed in the “supernormal magic” of Santa Clause because he took a bite from the Christmas cookies she left out which proved he was real. When she learned that Santa didn’t exist, she felt betrayed by “the authorities” – her parents – for lying to her. “Something precious had been taken away”” says Kean. “Maybe at some unconscious level this led me to want to find out what’s real and to prove the so-called authorities wrong.”
• When Kean was a freelance writer in 1999, she came across a 90-page ‘COMETA Report’ by retired French generals, police, scientists and an admiral. (see COMETA reports Part 1 here and Part 2 here) The group had spent three years documenting official military and aviation UFO cases. Their conclusion was that the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” was the most valid and logical one to explain the data. Their report proposed that pilots be trained on how to respond to UFOs to avoid future mishaps or even dangerous accidents. Given the stature and credibility of the group, Kean published a lengthy article based on the COMETA Report for the Boston Globe in May, 2000.
• Whether UFOs might be piloted by aliens, “I …will not rule it out,” says Kean. “There are many possibilities on the table. I have made the point over and over that we do not know what these objects are, and that’s where things stand.” “My book concluded that (the UFO) phenomenon exists, without question. …It’s physical, and well documented, even by our government. But what these objects are is another question…. (which) has led to all kinds of speculation. These flying machines, whatever they are, might not even have any drivers at all, for all we know.”
• The best evidence we have that UFOs have an extraterrestrial origin is the “extremely advanced technology that the objects have displayed since the 1950’s. They demonstrate tremendous speed and accelerations, the ability to make sharp right-angle turns, stand still in midair, zoom off and disappear in the blink of an eye, and operate under water. They appear to defy the laws of aviation as we know it, since they have no wings or visible means of propulsion. The documentation goes back more than 60 years, when no one on this planet had technology like this.”
• Kean says she doesn’t know what to make of alien abduction experiences. “I know sane, intelligent people who report such events, and some even have physical evidence of them. Their lives have been turned upside down by these experiences. … It points to the greater complexity of this issue which goes beyond any simple hypothesis.”
• What does Kean say about journalists like Keith Kloor who accused Kean’s NYTimes article as “thinly-sourced and slanted”? “I simply don’t agree with Kloor’s statement,” says Kean. “[I was] one of three people writing the Times stories, which include scrutiny by fact-checkers and multiple editors.” “[I] will continue to cover the (UFO) topic whenever we can.”
• Astrophysicist Katie Mack, said in Scientific American, that she doesn’t take alien spaceships seriously enough to debunk them. Kean says that she understands Mack’s position, as UFOs might not be “alien spaceships” at all. “[A]ny question about alien spaceships misses the point,” says Kean. “These are unknowns, plain and simple. But they are physically real. They interact with military pilots and commercial aircraft. Therefore, they deserve investigation.”
• “During the ten years I was investigating UFOs, I had been intrigued by the question of the possible survival of consciousness when we die,” says Kean. “I had poked around into some of the research, especially the work of Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia studying young children with verified past life memories. …This was another big mystery facing human beings: what happens when we die?” So Kean wrote the book: Surviving Death. “Most of my “paranormal” experiences occurred during the time I was involved in the (book’s) research, which began in 2012,” says Kean. “The experiences I had were beyond my imagination. They were life-changing. …So writing Surviving Death was a journey of discovery which unfolded while I was writing it.”
• In Surviving Death, Kean didn’t make any “claims about life after death” that she felt could discredit her as a writer. “I invited others to write their own chapters, and they said things that I didn’t say. My conclusion was that the evidence was suggestive (of life existing after death), but not definitive.” Kean received what appeared to be after-death communications from [her] brother, saw an apparition, and experienced genuine physical mediumship. “I think my narrative would have remained one-dimensional and abstract without this personal element. …It would have been dishonest to omit them, because they impacted my thinking and my effort to come to terms with many remarkable phenomena” while remaining analytical and discriminating with everything else. “The tricky aspect lies in the interpretation of the extraordinary events, not in their reporting.”
• “Paranormal phenomena exist,” insists Kean. “They seem to operate outside the limits of the current materialistic framework adapted by most scientists, while at the same time, nobody can explain what consciousness actually is. …I find it astonishing that there are still some scientists who adapt the position that ‘it can’t be, therefore it isn’t.’ …I have witnessed many paranormal phenomena myself, and I know they exist. Those who don’t want to believe these things will dismiss them no matter what they read.”
• “Cases of very young children who report accurate details of a past life, complete with nightmares about the previous death and knowledge from the previous career, are compelling when the memories can be verified and the previous person is identified,” says Kean. “Cases of responsive apparitions are also interesting – these “forms” demonstrate intelligence by reacting to multiple human observers, and sometimes provide information through telepathy about their lives on earth which are verified to be true.” “There is a wealth of literature on all of this,” says Kean. “[In] the words of William James: “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that all crows are black; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”
• The ‘life after death’ question centers “around the nature of human consciousness and its manifestations that appear to transcend the limitations of the brain. …Who are we really? Biological robots, or something else?” asks Kean. “I think all aspects of “superhuman” functioning – precognition, clairvoyance, telepathy, psychokinesis, and energy healing – should be taken seriously. They have been well documented. Where is the curiosity among scientists about the mysteries of the unknown?”
• Keans says that at first she was “skeptical about claims of alien visitations as being the simplistic answer to the UFO question. I was a skeptic about the afterlife when I began my work on that topic. It was my personal experiences that opened my eyes.” “Some ‘parapsychologists’ and other scientific investigators are doing brilliant work on all of this, but they are hampered by the mainstream scientific community’s irrational disrespect. Someday that dam will break.”
Like many long-time readers of The New York Times, I was shocked when the staid old paper published, in 2017, a front-page article on Pentagon investigations of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. This article, plus a shorter sidebar and a 2019 follow-up, heartened those who believe that extraterrestrials have visited us and annoyed skeptics like my friend journalist Keith Kloor. Last December, I met journalist Leslie Kean, a co-author of the Times articles and sole author of the 2010 bestseller UFOs: Generals, Pilots, And Government Officials Go On The Record, at a week-long symposium on challenges to conventional scientific materialism, about which I wrote here. At the meeting, which took place at the Esalen Institute in California, Kean talked about the possibility of life after death, a topic she explores in her 2017 book Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (which includes chapters from other contributors). Kean and I hit it off. I told her that, although I have a hard time believing in ghosts and alien visitations, I admire the courage and professionalism with which she investigates these topics. I also enjoy talking to smart people whose views diverge from mine, like renegade biologists Rupert Sheldrake and Stuart Kauffman. So last week, after the Times published yet another UFO story by Kean and her collaborator Ralph Blumenthal—which triggered more pushback from Kloor–I emailed Kean a few questions. – John Horgan
Horgan: When I was a kid, I was obsessed with UFOs and the paranormal. Were you like that too?
John Horgan
Kean: No, not until I was an adult. Although I do remember having mystical feelings about Santa Claus as a young child. It happened when I saw that my cookies, carefully placed next to the Christmas tree, had been nibbled on by Santa during his visitation into my world the previous Christmas Eve. It was solid evidence that something magic, something “supernormal” had actually occurred. This fantastical being who could be everywhere at once had been in my living room and left behind a physical bite mark to prove his existence. The authorities of the day, my parents, confirmed it. I felt momentarily transported, expanded, into a new level of connection to something big and mysterious. That may sound silly, but it was true. When I found out the truth about Santa later, I felt betrayed. Something precious had been taken away. My parents weren’t trustworthy because they lied to me. Maybe at some unconscious level this led me to want to find out what’s real and to prove the so-called authorities wrong. I’m not totally serious, but I suppose it’s possible.
Horgan: When and why did you first decide to write about UFOs? Was there any particular triggering event?
Kean: My serious interest in UFOs as a journalist began in 1999 when I was working as an on-air host and producer for public radio and publishing as a freelancer. I unexpectedly received an explosive 90-page report titled UFOs and Defense: What Should We Prepare For? by retired French generals, police, scientists and an admiral. The report intended to “strip the UFO phenomenon of its irrational layer”. The group had spent three years documenting official military and aviation UFO cases. Most stunning was their conclusion: that the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” was the most valid and logical one to explain the data. Of course there was no proof, only an hypothesis. The authors were concerned about the national security implications of the phenomenon and proposed that pilots be trained on how to respond to UFOs to avoid future mishaps or even dangerous accidents. Given the stature and credibility of the group, I thought this was a huge story. I published a lengthy article based on the report, known as the COMETA Report, for the Boston Globe in May, 2000, which required overcoming the reservations of a very nervous editor. [See links to the COMETA Report here and here.] That’s what set me on this path, and there was no turning back. And two decades later, I can hardly believe how things have changed. [See this Times story by Ralph Blumenthal for more background on Kean’s UFO coverage.]
Horgan: One admirer of your book UFOs describes you as an “agnostic” on whether UFOs are actually piloted by aliens. When I met you at Esalen, you struck me as a believer, not an agnostic. Am I wrong?
Kean: Piloted by aliens? I have an open mind, but no, I don’t believe that and have never said that. But I also will not rule it out. There are many possibilities on the table. I have made the point over and over that we do not know what these objects are, and that’s where things stand. My book concluded that a phenomenon exists, without question, named “unidentified flying objects” by the US Air Force in the 1950’s. It’s physical, and well documented, even by our government. But what these objects are is another question. That’s what everyone wants to know, and that desire has led to all kinds of speculation. On that question my 2010 book was agnostic, and it was recognized as such. These flying machines, whatever they are, might not even have any drivers at all for all we know.
Horgan: What is the best single piece of evidence that UFOs have an extraterrestrial origin?
Kean: The extremely advanced technology that the objects have displayed since the 1950’s. They demonstrate tremendous speed and accelerations, the ability to make sharp right-angle turns, stand still in midair, zoom off and disappear in the blink of an eye, and operate under water. They appear to defy the laws of aviation as we know it, since they have no wings or visible means of propulsion. The documentation goes back more than 60 years, when no one on this planet had technology like this. In some cases, experts, such as officials from the French Space Agency, had enough data to rule out all conventional explanations (meaning it wasn’t something natural or man-made). These cases represent only a small fraction of those reported, but they are the ones that matter. So, what are we left with?
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Article by Simon Green October 23, 2019 (dailystar.co.uk)
• US Navy jet cockpit video of a ‘tic tac’ UFO off of San Diego in 2004, and released by the New York Times in 2017, has become one of the most talked-about UFO sightings in history. In an interview with The Nimitz Encounters podcast (see entire 36:09 minute video below), Lead Petty Officer Ryan Weigelt who was in charge of the helicopters on the USS Princeton (pictured above), part of the Nimitz carrier battle group, reveals that soon after the mysterious tic tac UFO was spotted by the fighter jets, a group of US Air Force personnel landed on his ship to retrieve secret information.
• The Air Force personnel “weren’t assigned” to the carrier. When they arrived, they went straight to the Admiral’s Quarter and stationed a guard outside. They then retrieved “something” from the Princeton’s helicopters which grounded the helicopters. Weigelt says he couldn’t say “whatever box it was” that the Air Force personnel took away. But they logged it out and were directed by a higher authority to take it. “[W]e couldn’t fly our aircraft until we got them back… (because) [t]here was no way we could safely fly our aircraft in a battle group.”
• Weigelt said that the Air Force personnel then left the ship by a rigid-hulled inflatable boat, and forced the USS Princeton to harbor at a marina, something that was unheard of. Said Weigelt, “I’ve done a lot of cruises in my time in the military and never once did we pull in during a work-up to a harbor for any reason whatsoever.” “I’ve never even seen a ship anchor in the mouth of the harbor.”
• When the podcast’s host, Dave Beattie, suggested that the Air Force personnel may have removed more video footage of the UFOs, Weigelt agreed. “There’s no doubt in my mind that these guys were looking for data on the UFOs.”
A US Navy veteran who was on board the USS Princeton when a UFO was spotted by fighter pilots has revealed a group of mysterious officials boarded the cruiser soon after to retrieve secret information.
Footage of the moment an F/A-18 Super Hornet spotted the unknown object hurtling through the skies in 2004 became one of the most talked-about UFO sightings of all time, after it was released by the New York Times in 2017.
It led to the Pentagon admitting to having a top-secret programme devoted to looking at the existence of extraterrestrial objects.
The incident – which showed a tic-tac shaped UFO performing manoeuvres never seen before – took place off the coast of San Diego.
While the pilots had taken off from the USS Nimitz, they were part of a larger battle group which featured the USS Princeton.
Lead Petty Officer Ryan Weigelt was in charge of looking after the helicopters on board the Princeton at the time of the incident.
In an interview with The Nimitz Encounters, he revealed that soon after the mysterious aircraft was spotted by the fighter jets, a group of United States Air Force personnel landed on his ship.
Ryan explained that this group “weren’t assigned” to the carrier and, as soon as they arrived, they went straight to the Admiral’s Quarter and stationed a guard outside.
They then retrieved “something” from the Princeton’s helicopters which meant they could not fly.
36:09 minute interview with Ryan Weigelt (‘The Nimitz Encounters’ YouTube)
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Article by Harry Pettit September 30, 2019 (foxnews.com)
• Tom DeLonge’s “To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences” team has been dropping hints that they have acquired “exotic material” from what could be an alien spacecraft.
• The TTSA team most famously helped released classified footage of UFOs recorded by American pilots that were confirmed as real by the US Navy earlier this month. When a New York Times reporter recently asked whether the team had obtained “exotic material samples from UFOs,” the spokesperson responded: “Certainly.” It’s not entirely clear what “material” they were talking about, nor have they provided proof to back up this claim.
• Luis Elizondo, director of global security and special programs for “To The Stars”, told the Times, “What we have been doing is trying to find the most qualified individuals at the most respectable institutions to conduct scientific analysis.” “That scientific analysis includes physical analysis, it includes molecular and chemical analysis and ultimately it includes nuclear analysis.”
• In July, the “To The Stars” Twitter account wrote that researchers had acquired “potentially exotic materials featuring properties not from any known existing military or commercial application.”
• Elizondo said, “The last thing we want to do is jump to any conclusions, prematurely. Ultimately, the data is going to decide what something is or what something isn’t.”
• According to its website, the ‘To The Stars Academy’ is a “collaboration between academia, industry and pop culture to advance society’s understanding of scientific phenomena and its technological implications.”
A band of alien hunters led by an ex-punk rocker claim they’ve found evidence of UFOs.
‘exotic material’
The U.S. organization, bankrolled by former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge, says it’s acquired “exotic material” from what could be an alien spacecraft.
DeLonge, from California, co-founded the group To the Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2017 with the goal of researching extraterrestrials.
The team most famously turfed up classified footage of UFOs recorded by American pilots that were confirmed as real by the US Navy earlier this month.
‘exotic material’
Speaking to the New York Times, a spokesperson for the group gave a tantalizing tease of its next big scoop.
A reporter asked whether the team had obtained “exotic material samples from UFOs.”
The spokesperson responded: “Certainly.”
No further details were given, so it’s not entirely clear what “material” they were talking about.
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Article by Jake Massey September 19, 2019 (ladbible.com)
• Kevin H. Knuth, a former NASA research scientist, has written a research paper entitled: ‘Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles’ which claims that the ‘Tic-Tac’ UFO spotted by two jets from USS Nimitz carrier group off of San Deigo in 2004 may have been watching over something submerged under water.
• The Navy jets’ encounter with the ‘Tic-Tac’ UFO took place in 2004, but only came to light in December 2017 following a New York Times report which revealed the US Department of Defense ran a special program designated to tracking UFOs known as the ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’. The Times article included a video taken by Navy fliers of the Tic-Tac UFO in flight, (or “UAP” – “unidentified aerial phenomenon” as the Navy prefers to call them).
• On that day of the UAP sighting in 2004, Chief Petty Officer Kevin Day saw a mysterious submerged object in the water. Knuth relates in his research paper that, based on Day’s description, the UAPs acted as if they “were looking for something by slowly tracking south at 100 knots or so at a 28,000ft altitude. The Tic-Tac UAP was then observed to be hovering with erratic motion over the churning water.” “An encounter with the Tic-Tac UAP ensued. After the encounter the submerged object was no longer present.”
• Knuth continues: “Clearly, the UAP was interested in the submerged object.” “It is possible that this object and others like it are the reason that the UAPs were in the area.” “Day reported that the UAPs appeared to be avoiding the Nimitz Carrier Group and its aircraft, which is very different from the encounters on the East Coast involving the Roosevelt Carrier Group in which case the UAPs seemed to be seeking out encounters.”
A former NASA researcher has claimed the UFO spotted by two jets from USS Nimitz may have been watching over something submerged under water.
Kevin H. Knuth
If none of this means anything to you, a little explanation. Basically, the encounter took place way back in 2004, but only came to light in 2017 following a New York Times report which revealed the US government had a special programme designated to tracking UFOs.
A video showed the UFO – which is formally known as a Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) and looks a bit like a Tic-Tac – appearing to fly in front of camera.
Now, Kevin H. Knuth – a former NASA research scientist – has offered a theory as to what was going on, based on the description of witness and Navy Chief Petty Officer Kevin Day. The new hypothesis is based on the fact Day saw a mysterious submerged object in the water during the UAP sighting.
According to the Daily Star, Knuth writes in his research paper ‘Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles’: “The thought was triggered by Kevin Day’s description of the UAPs as acting as if they were migrating.
“They also seemed to act like they were looking for something by slowly tracking south at 100 knots or so at 28,000ft altitude. The Tic-Tac UAP was then observed to be hovering with erratic motion over the churning water.
“An encounter with the Tic-Tac UAP ensued. After the encounter the submerged object was no longer present.
“Clearly, the UAP was interested in the submerged object.”
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Article by Andrew Whalen September 6, 2019 (newsweek.com)
• A new Gallup poll of 1,522 adults in the United States found that one-third of respondents believe that “some UFOs have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies”.
• Carving out a demographic of young people, non-college graduates, and non-religious people, 40% believe that UFOs are from alien worlds. But no category fell below 27% in believing in extraterrestrial visitors. People in Western USA were more likely to believe in alien UFOs, while Mid-Westerners were the least likely to believe. But the belief in an alien presence was generally consistent across gender identity and income groups.
• Although the majority of Americans don’t believe aliens are visiting our planet, 3/4 do believe that extraterrestrial life exists on other planets. Half of Americans believe that “people somewhat like ourselves exist elsewhere in the universe.”
• While the extraterrestrial explanation for the UFO phenomena represents only a substantial minority of the United States, a large majority agree that the government of the United States knows “more about UFOs than it is telling us.” The percentage of those suspicious of the US government today is 68%, while a 1996 poll showed it was 71%. Gallup says that this belief is “similar among all main demographic groups,” including political party identification. It is surprising that this percentage has dipped slightly with the recent revelations from mainstream outlets such as the New York Times and Politico of the US Navy encountering UFOs.
• Meanwhile, actual UFO sightings have increased from a low of 9% in 1978 and 1987, to 16% of US adults saying they’ve seen a UFO in 2019.
A new Gallup poll of 1,522 adults in the United States found that one-third of respondents believe extraterrestrial spacecraft are visiting Earth.
When asked to choose between “some UFOs have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies” and “all UFO sightings can be explained by human activity on Earth or natural phenomenon,” 33 percent of all adults polled selected the first option.
Demographic groups more likely to believe in visiting alien spaceships include the young (18-29), non-college graduates and the irreligious, with respondents in those categories trending toward 40 percent. But even with variation across demographic groups, no category fell below 27 percent of respondents describing some UFOs as alien spacecraft.
The poll even found an interesting regional bump, with people from the West far more likely to prefer the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Midwesterners, on the other hand, were most skeptical of aliens coming to this planet. Belief in extraterrestrial vessels entering Earth’s atmosphere was consistent across gender identity and within the margin of sampling error across income groups.
While the majority of Americans don’t believe aliens are visiting our planet, three-quarters believe that extraterrestrial life exists on other planets, with half of Americans going further and agreeing that “people somewhat like ourselves exist elsewhere in the universe.”
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Article by Chelsea Hofmann September 8, 2019 (azcentral.com)
• In the first week of September, the International UFO Congress held its 28th annual conference and film festival at the Sheraton Hotel in Phoenix. The Guinness World Records lists it as the largest UFO conference. It contained five days of lectures including two dinner banquets, lunch workshops and a film festival that began the day before the conference.
• The Saturday panel addressed the question: “Mainstream Attitudes Toward UFO’s: Are UFOs now being taken seriously?” Panelist George Knapp said that attitudes have shifted dramatically in the media following the New York Times story in December 2017, making UFOs a more respectable topic to cover. Richard Dolan agreed, saying, “For the New York Times to cover UFOs in a way that’s not snarky, not insulting to our intelligence, which it always has been, that’s a sea change, and I don’t think they’re going to be able to go back to the old days.”
• But still, Dolan warned that these mainstream publications may have an agenda. “My take is that there are a faction of people who are motivated to promote their version of disclosure,” said Dolan during the panel discussion. Panelist Marc D’Antonio echoed Dolan’s concern, “I think that the truth really lies somewhere in the middle. I don’t think that the truth is being entirely told by any one news outlet.”
• Dolan also said that social media has skewed the topics discussed within the UFO community. “I think social media has somewhat ruined our ability to have a civil discourse, not just in ufology but in society in general, and in that kind of environment it’s very difficult to have a reasoned, careful, cautious examination of issues.” Knapp chimed in, “[E]verybody becomes an authority.” “Just because you’ve got a keyboard doesn’t mean you’re a journalist. Just because you file a FOIA request doesn’t mean you’re a journalist.”
• D’Antonio insisted that UFO research is not an actual science. “I think that we’re going to… solve (the UFO issue) with astronomers astrophysicists (and) with the assistance of NASA and the European Space Agency…” to determine “whether there’s life elsewhere.”
• [Editor’s Note] This conference is a good example of the rift occurring between separate factions of the broader UFO community. This Phoenix conference is made up of the more ‘conservative’ UFO researchers who still rely on the government, academic institutions, NASA, and the ESA to bring out the truth about UFOs and the extraterrestrial presence. Others, as represented at last month’s Dimensions of Disclosure conference in Ventura, California, don’t hold any faith in the government or NASA to assist in the disclosure of the truth. In fact, these progressive UFO researchers see the government and NASA as sources of disinformation, stagnating the progress of UFO/ET disclosure as they have done for the past 75 years. The revelations published in the NY Times and Politico, while intriguing, still portray only a limited disclosure which the government is willing to reveal. At this rate, it will take a hundred years for full disclosure to eventually reach the public. And this is the Deep State’s agenda.
The Sheraton Phoenix conference room filled with skeptics and believers alike Saturday, and all attendees were there to discuss the same topic: UFOs.
Richard Dolan
The International UFO Congress held its 28th annual conference and film festival Wednesday through Sunday in downtown Phoenix, which was named the largest UFO conference by Guinness World Records, according to the International UFO Congress website.
Marc D’Antonio
The conference hosts five days of lectures including two dinner banquets, lunch workshops and a film festival that began the day before the conference.
Attendees can participate in “Experience Sessions” hosted by a certified therapist, which provide a welcoming, safe environment for those who wish to share stories, as well as visit tables promoting healing energy, sacred geometry and psychic ability in the vendor room.
UFOs have become more respectable in news media
George Knapp
Experts in the field hosted the Saturday panel “Mainstream Attitudes Toward UFO’s: Are UFOs now being taken seriously?”
Panelist George Knapp said during the panel that attitudes have shifted dramatically in the media following the New York Times story, making UFOs a more respectable topic to cover and allowing other news organizations to go down the same path.
“Everyone seems to want in on it now,” Knapp, the chief investigative reporter for KLAS TV in Las Vegas, said in the panel discussion.
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• In July, Republican US Representative Mark Walker of North Carolina, wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Navy expressing concern over the recent surge in UFO-related events affecting American military forces. Walker noted a December 2017 article in the New York Times about the secret Pentagon UFO program called AATIP and revelations that Navy pilots encountered anomalous aerial objects off of the coast of California in 2004 and off of the East Coast in 2015, and whether it could pose a security risk.
• Tim McMillan, a law enforcement consultant and intelligence analyst interested in UFOs said, “It’s abundantly clear by the language of his letter, Rep. Walker is acting on information brought out by To The Stars Academy or their proxies.” TTSA is Tom DeLonge’s UFO study organization that has been promoting the government’s knowledge of the existence of UFOs. “What we see here,” says McMillan, is the “most successful component of TTSA—[as] a political lobby.”
• Walker concludes his letter to the Navy Secretary by asking: does the DoD “continue to dedicate resources to tracking and investigating these claims” of UFOs and have they found any “physical evidence or otherwise that substantiates these claims?” McMillan says, “The Navy’s response to Rep. Walker will be the most interesting aspect of all this.” “Will Representative Walker make the Navy’s response public? [W]ill Representative Walker push the issue further?”
• The study of UFOs is becoming serious political business and has convinced many within the UFO community that this is a pivotal moment in the study of the phenomenon. But Walker’s letter is just another example in a long history of politicians trying to get answers. Politicians and high-ranking officials have been questioning the UFO cover-up for decades.
• Republican Presidential candidate in 1964, Barry Goldwater was denied access to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in the late 1960’s and 70’s where he alleged that the Air Force was hiding evidence of flying saucers. In a 1994 interview, he stated, “I think the government does know [about UFOs].” Goldwater related that he called his former running mate, Air Force General Curtis LeMay, and said, “’General, I know we have a room at Wright-Patterson where you put all this secret [UFO] stuff. Could I go in there?’ … [H]e got madder than hell at me, cussed me out, and said, ‘Don’t ever ask me that question again!’”
• In 1967 in open dialogue on the floor of the Canadian House of Commons Ministers of Parliament, Ed Schreyer and Barry Mather demanded more information on UFOs from the Department of National Defence. This led to a formal motion to have all related UFO documents released. The motion was denied.
• In 1993, New Mexico Congressman Steven Schiff made several inquiries to the DoD regarding the Roswell UFO crash of 1947. This prompted a General Accounting Office investigation into the Roswell crash. In July 1995, the GAO determined that what crashed at Roswell was a Project Mogul balloon.
Last month, Republican representative Mark Walker of North Carolina wrote a letter expressing concern over the recent surge in UFO-related events affecting American military forces.
Walker’s concerns stem from the December 2017 article in the New York Times about the now defunded secret Pentagon UFO program called AATIP and the revelations that several Navy pilots in 2004 and 2015 engaged in bizarre encounters with anomalous aerial objects off the coast of California and Florida. The news that the Navy is now changing its protocols for personnel to report UFO sightings has spurred a renewed interest in the potential safety and security risks these unknown objects pose.
“The reports mention the existence of these encounters both domestically and abroad during various missions and trainings,” Walker wrote. “Based on pilot accounts, encounters with these UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena) often involved complex flight patterns and advanced maneuvering, which demand extreme advances in quantum mechanics, nuclear science, electromagnetics, and thermodynamics.”
What’s most notable is that what Walker is asking for closely aligns with what Blink 182 singer Tom Delonge’s To the Stars Academy (TTSA) has been uncovering and publishing over the last few years. While TTSA has made some odd claims, the sheer amount of attention the media is giving the UFO topic in the last two years has undoubtedly increased.
“What we see here with Mark Walker’s letter to the Secretary of the Navy is the undiscussed, but most successful component of TTSA—a political lobby,” Tim McMillan, a law enforcement consultant and intelligence analyst interested in UFOs, said in an interview. “It’s abundantly clear by the language of his letter, Rep. Walker is acting on information brought out by TTSA or their proxies.”
“The Navy’s response to Rep. Walker will be the most interesting aspect of all this,” McMillan added. “Will Rep. Walker make the Navy’s response public? If he feels the Navy’s response is inadequate, will Rep. Walker push the issue further?”
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Article by Katherine Hafner, Matt Jones and Gordon Rago August 2, 2019 (pilotonline.com)
• There have long been reports of UFOs buzzing above Hampton Roads. Located in Southeastern Virginia, Hampton Roads, which includes Norfolk and Virginia Beach, is home to several military installations and NASA facilities. Reports of UFOs in the region can be traced back to 1813, when a Portsmouth tavern owner claimed to have watched “a ball of fire” weave over Norfolk County. He wrote about the incident to Thomas Jefferson.
• Jimmi Bonavita was a Virginia Beach police officer in the summer of 1975. He was sitting in his patrol car about 2 am when he saw five crescent-shaped “semi-translucent” globes coming over the horizon several miles out at treetop level. The five objects were traveling in formation, moving up and down as if bouncing. Then four Navy fighter jets armed with missiles flew by, apparently chasing the UFOs. Bonavita followed them, driving north toward the Oceanfront tourist area (pictured above). He saw the objects reach the beach and disappear over the Atlantic Ocean, outdistancing the Navy fighter jets. Says the now retired Bonavita, “I know that what I saw was real. It wasn’t an illusion.”
• On July 14th, 1952, flight officers William Nash and William Fortenberry were alone in the cockpit of their Pan American Airways Douglas DC-4, en route from New York to Miami. As they cruised over the southern end of the Chesapeake Bay, they spotted six glowing discs, each about 100 feet wide. Two more UFOs joined the formation over the Newport News peninsula, then entered a steep climb and disappeared into space. Nash told the AP, “There is no doubt in our minds that we saw missiles of some kind operating under intelligent control.” Days later, three Norfolk residents confirmed seeing the UFOs that day. Air Force officials at Langley AFB on the peninsula said that the pilots had seen rockets or tracers being fired at a nearby bombing range.
• More local sightings soon followed in July of 1952, making national news. A Hampton couple told the Daily Press newspaper that they had seen eight yellow-orange lights near the Chesapeake Bay coastline. A commercial airline pilot said he saw two pulsating white lights. Finally, radar at the National Airport picked up a formation of UFO’s over the nation’s capital and scrambled Air Force fighter jets in the infamous Washington, DC sighting.
• In 1957, it was reported in a Pilot newspaper article that an “experienced Ground Observer Corps member” at Langley Field in Newport News saw a “flattened-oval object” hovering in the sky. After watching it for about ten seconds, the object disappeared.
• In 1958, a Pilot newspaper reporter at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront saw a long silvery cylindrical object hovering stationary in the sky for several minutes. It then slowly began to move south toward North Carolina, emitting a stream of white exhaust. The reporter described it as “no known plane or missile”.
• During the 1960’s 70’s and 80’s, folks in Hampton Roads reported waves of UFO sightings. A 15-year-old boy fired two shotgun blasts at a UFO he saw in Poquoson (on the peninsula). In 1983, an Alexandria, Virginia man sued the Air Force, claiming the Langley base in Hampton was hiding “long-dead creatures from outer space packed in ice.”
• In 1965, a sheriff in Western Virginia became alarmed by the number of citizens carrying arms, and asked whether they had the “right to mow the (UFOs) down? ” The Virginia Attorney General ruled that there was no law against shooting “little green men’ from outer space”.
• While UFO sightings have been routinely dismissed, that changed in the spring of 2019 when several Navy pilots in the “Red Rippers” fighter squadron at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach reported routinely seeing UFOs from Virginia to Florida for several years, starting around 2014. They told the New York Times that the objects flew up to 30,000 feet in the air at hypersonic speeds, had no exhaust plumes, and moved in ways impossible for humans, with sudden stops and turns. One UFO was described as “a sphere encasing a cube.” (see Navy video of UFO flying off of the Virginia coast in 2015 below)
• Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher told The Virginian Pilot newspaper, “For quite some time, and especially within the past few years, there’s been an increase of observed incursions into our training areas, especially off of the Virginia capes” down to Florida. These sightings have occurred on a quite frequent basis.” In a policy reversal, Navy officials have gone down to the Oceana Master Jet Base to encourage pilots to report new sightings as soon as they happen.
• In 2003, Virginia Beach native, Cameron Pack, was driving when he and a friend saw triangular lights with “no structure, no shape, no outline,” flying low above the treetops. The lights flew straight over their car, then turned and moved away. It made a “God-awful noise,” Pack said. “Not like a jet noise but… like alive, almost. But still in a machine way. … We kind of knew it was something not normal and not from here.”
• Pack sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the city’s police department. In response, he received dozens UFO sighting reports made by local citizens. Between 1976 and 2008, the Virginia Beach Police Department collected detailed UFO reports, passing them along to a central UFO hotline. Among these accounts: November 1995, a caller’s daughter witnessed a circular object with lights on the bottom and making a humming sound, flying very low to the house; May 1988, someone reported a group of lights stopped still in the sky, then shot straight up; One woman reported an object with lights had followed her car from Salisbury, Md., to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.
• Kelly Herbst is an astronomy curator at the Virginia Living Museum in Newport News, and a UFO skeptic. When she gets calls from people seeing a UFO in the sky, she says that 9 times out of 10 it is the planet Venus. Says Kelly, “Your brain wants to explain these things. By nature, we do pattern recognition. So it’s trying to fit what it sees into its known experience.” According to the American Meteor Society, meteors can move in unusual paths, burn different colors depending on their chemical composition or explode and disappear in a flash of light. Kelly Herbst says that “Just about anything that appears in the sky can end up being misidentified.” Kelly thinks that what Virginia Beach police officer Jimmi Bonavita saw back in 1975 was a meteor. Kelly also blames fast-moving birds, weather balloons, Chinese lanterns, drones, military aircraft, clouds and the aurora borealis for mistaken UFOs.
• Carter Bulger of Virginia Beach is a volunteer field investigator with the Mutual UFO Network, known as MUFON. Over the past three years, he’s been assigned about thirty local UFO cases. Someone from Newport News reported seeing a “small disc shaped object” glide in front of his truck about 60 feet in the air. It “looked transparent, but sunlight reflected off of rippled edges.” Bulger conducts recorded interviews with witnesses. He goes out to the scene and takes photos and videos. He checks weather records and submits public document requests to the Navy and Federal Aviation Administration seeking radar records. For the most part, Bulger has concluded his cases were indeed UFOs.
• [Editor’s Note] I won’t even go into the depth of cognitive dissonance that someone like Kelly Herbst must have to dismiss all UFO sightings across the board with such flimsy and boiler-plate explanations – birds, clouds and the aurora borealis. She basically says that Navy fighter jets were chasing a meteor over Virginia Beach in 1975. But I do find it very interesting that on July 14th, 1952, Pan Am pilots flying south to Miami spotted eight large glowing discs over the Virginia peninsula, with many others on the ground reporting the same. Newspapers across the country reported on the glowing lights seen flying in formation over Washington D.C. from July 12th thru the 29th, 1952 (see ExoArticle here), and insiders such as William Tompkins and Corey Goode have revealed that these were early models of Antarctic Nazi-German electromagnetic/anti-gravity spacecraft buzzing the nation’s capital in order to put pressure on government and military authorities to assent to entering into a secret treaty with the Antarctic Germans, which Eisenhower did soon thereafter. It would make sense that the Antarctic Germans would also buzz the Norfolk Naval Base to demonstrate their technical superiority.
VIRGINIA BEACH
Five crescent-shaped objects were traveling in formation, moving like saucers bouncing off the top of water. Up and down. Up and down.
Jimmi Bonavita, then a Virginia Beach police officer, saw the “semi-translucent” globes coming over the horizon, several miles out at treetop level. He revved up his patrol car.
It was early, around 2 a.m., in midsummer 1975.
Norfolk, Virginia
Then four Navy fighter jets came buzzing by, seemingly chasing the flying objects. Bonavita followed suit, zooming down the city’s roads to keep up. He wanted to keep them in sight.
The UFOs eventually went toward the Oceanfront and disappeared over the sea, outmaneuvering the pilots, said Bonavita, who’s now retired.
The scene, which could be straight out of a sci-fi movie, stuck with him the rest of his life — including the image of a jet flying right over his car.
“These planes were armed,” Bonavita, now a game warden with the Department of Defense and well-known local expert on snakes and other reptiles, recalled in an interview. “They had Sidewinder missiles. You don’t fly armed jets over a populated area unless it’s national security.”
It was his third and last UFO sighting. “I’ve long since given up what people think of me,” Bonavita said. “I know what I saw. I know that what I saw was real. It wasn’t an illusion. Can I explain it? No. But I’m not going to worry about it.”
There have long been reports of unidentified flying objects buzzing around Hampton Roads skies. It makes sense, with the region home to several military installations and NASA facilities.
Such reports can be traced as far back as 1813, when a Portsmouth tavern owner claimed to have watched “a ball of fire” weave over Norfolk County. He even wrote about the incident to Thomas Jefferson.
But often the sightings have been easily dismissed, written off and not taken seriously. That changed this spring.
The Navy updated its protocol for reporting what it calls unexplained aerial phenomena, and several pilots came forward saying they’d seen UFOs as close as Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach. The move by military brass brought the topic out of the shadows, providing a sense of legitimacy to obsessed amateur sky watchers.
And to what they’ve seen.
Police and news reports, interviews and emails are full of flashing lights and objects that move like no other. Astronomers and others offer logical explanations for some sightings — but not all.
Read their accounts, and see: You just might find yourself wondering what’s out there when you look up.
36 second Navy jet video of “fast moving” UFO off of the Virginia coast in 2015 (USA Today)
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• In 2017 when the New York Times ran an article about a secret Pentagon UFO program, the article tantalizingly noted that aerospace billionaire Robert Bigelow was housing “metal alloys and other materials…that [allegedly] had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.” These “alien alloys” quickly became the topic of great intrigue.
• Rocker-turned-Ufologist, Tom DeLonge (pictured above), now says that his ‘To the Stars Academy’ has acquired “potentially exotic materials.” It is not clear whether his metamaterials are the same ones as previously referenced in the NY Times article.
• “The structure and composition of these materials are not from any known existing military or commercial application,” said Steve Justice, the COO of the ‘To The Stars Academy’ and former head of Advanced Systems at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works. “They’ve been collected from sources with varying levels of chain-of-custody documentation, so we are focusing on verifiable facts and working to develop independent scientific proof of the materials’ properties and attributes. In some cases, the manufacturing technology required to fabricate the material is only now becoming available.” Justice says that the organization wants to reverse engineer the metals with hopes of manufacturing more of them.
• According to the press release, some of these materials were in the possession of UFO researcher and journalist Linda Moulton Howe, who, in 2004, gave a presentation at the Xcon Conference regarding these materials. In her lecture, she suggests that the material could become a “lifting body” with the right amount of electromagnetic static and certain RF frequency. These are undoubtedly the same materials mentioned by DeLonge on his Joe Rogan interview where he stated, “if you hit it with enough terahertz, it’ll float.”
• In an interview with Motherboard, Dr. Chris Cogswell, who hosts the Mad Scientist Podcast and who holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering, said that layered magnesium and bismuth alloys are pretty common and are certainly easily explainable by science. “Micrometer thick layers are made by mistake in metallurgy facilities all the time.” Cogswell says that if these materials are truly exotic, then initial results should come relatively quickly. “[T]hese tests would take all of a month to run and analyze to see if there is something worth pursuing.”
• Until some rigorous third party scientific testing occurs, or a peer-reviewed paper in an academic journal is published, the best course of action here is to just wait and see.
Former Blink 182 frontman and current UFOlogist Tom DeLonge says that his UFO research organization has acquired “potentially exotic materials featuring properties not from any known existing military or commercial application.” It has not yet provided any proof to back up this claim.
For 70 years, the UFO community has been engaged in active debate regarding physical debris from unidentified flying objects, but the general public got a true taste of that in 2017 when the New York Times ran an article about a secret Pentagon UFO program. The article tantalizingly noted that aerospace billionaire Robert Bigelow, whose interest in UFOs is no secret, modified buildings to house “metal alloys and other materials…that [allegedly] had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.”
These “alien alloys” quickly became the topic of great intrigue. DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy, a UFO research outfit that may or may not be broke, said that it has recently acquired some metamaterials, though it’s not clear whether they are the same ones referenced in the NY Times article.
“The structure and composition of these materials are not from any known existing military or commercial application,” Steve Justice, To The Stars Academy’s COO and former head of Advanced Systems at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works said in a statement. “They’ve been collected from sources with varying levels of chain-of-custody documentation, so we are focusing on verifiable facts and working to develop independent scientific proof of the materials’ properties and attributes. In some cases, the manufacturing technology required to fabricate the material is only now becoming available.”
Justice said that the organization wants to reverse engineer the metals with hopes of manufacturing more of them.
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Article by Ashley Jude Collie July 20, 2019 (bbntimes.com)
• Stephen Zoller, (an accomplished film writer and producer since the 1980’s), has strong opinions about UFOs and spoke with BBN Times about it. His fascination with all things alien began when he was an eight year-old in Dublin, Ireland and watched the film,‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ in the local theater. After immigrating to America, on a family car trip through Indiana in 1965, Zoller saw a saucer shaped object whiz by with blinding speed. Ten years later he found an old magazine with a photo of a UFO in Indiana dated 1965. Maybe he wasn’t daydreaming after all. So he devoured anything he could about UFOs.
• With all of the talk about UFOs lately, from the New York Times’ articles on a Pentagon UFO program, to Navy pilots’ stories of UFOs off of the coast of California, to Tom DeLonge, to Bob Lazar, to billionaire entrepreneur Robert Bigelow’s assertion that he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that UFOs have visited Earth, Zoller suggests that UFOs could well be hiding in plain sight.
• What is Zoller’s take on UFOs? “I suggest they’re not little green men from a far-flung part of the galaxy,” says Zoller. “Interstellar travel from our closest neighboring star would fly in the face of Einstein’s theory of mass-energy equivalence.” “I don’t think they are extraterrestrials. I think it’s more likely that they originate from planet Earth” – from the future. They’ve developed the ability to move freely through Earth’s timeline but are forbidden to alter the past in any substantial way, otherwise they would initiate temporal annihilation in the future.
• “After years of mounting evidence there is no longer any doubt that UFOs are real, and that the authorities have no idea from where they originate,” says Zoller. “The question is what does the military and intelligence community know and why do they refuse to share it with the public. Maybe, they fear that an admission would lead to economic and social upheaval which would be bad for business as far as the rich and powerful are concerned.”
• “There’s great unrest all over the globe,” say Zoller, “including ethnic and religious conflict, mass migration, left versus right, and worst of all, a willful denial of facts and science. The bulk of the blame rests with the powers-that-be who want to preserve their status quo at any cost. By that I mean political, religious and corporate elites.”
• Zoller continues, “With the climate crisis and global overpopulation having such deleterious effects on our beautiful blue planet, it’s curious that UFO sightings have dramatically spiked in the past few years. My gut tells me that the two are connected.” How? “Your guess is as good as mine.”
• Zoller offers hope for the future: “Despite the deep hole we humans have dug for ourselves, it’s a great time to be alive. The possibility exists that before long we will witness the game-changer to end all game-changers, one that may lead to scientific and spiritual enlightenment.”
• [Editor’s Note] Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1952, coming to America via Ireland, and establishing himself as an up-and-coming film producer by 1980, Stephen Zoller (age 68) is a good example of a person working in the mainstream who has also kept up with the UFO phenomenon with an open mind. No one really knows for certain how extensive the extraterrestrial presence truly is, and what types of beings are involved. So Zoller draws a somewhat contradictory belief that our future selves have time travel technology to come back here and observe us, while at the same time assuming that advanced extraterrestrial beings are absent because alien travel technology would be limited by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
What is quite interesting is Zoller’s intuition that we will soon experience a “game-changer to end all game-changers, one that may lead to scientific and spiritual enlightenment.” He might be intuiting a Solar Flash that Corey Goode, David Wilcock, and many others have predicted will initiate an energy wave washing over the solar system, and raising the spiritual consciousness of those who are prepared, to a fourth density reality, in addition to the planets themselves. Could this be the reason why we see so many UFO’s in the sky lately? Are these beings here to get a front row seat to one of the most awesome and marvelous events occurring in the galaxy?
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” — Hamlet to Horatio
When Shakespeare mentioned “more things in heaven and earth,” could he have whimsically meant UFOs?
Why not? Because there are so many amazing things beyond us as our science and technology on Earth proves daily. And, also as the Hubble telescope demonstrates as it continually allows astronomers to study the heavens and their awesome celestial events.
But when it comes to strange flying objects right here in our own skies, filmmaker Stephen Zoller suggests that the truth about UFOs could well be hiding in plain sight.
First, let’s backtrack. Early in 2017, on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” billionaire entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, who’s been working with NASA to produce craft for humans to use in space, asserted that he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that UFOs have visited Earth.
In December 2017, the New York Times ran eye-opening, back-to-back stories, including: one a front-page expose on a Defense Department program (AATIP) that investigated reports of unidentified flying objects; and, another about two Navy airmen (including Cmdr. David Fravor) in their F/A-18F Super Hornets off the California coast who actually saw an object that “accelerated like nothing” that Fravor had ever seen.
Inside America’s UFO Investigation
Remember the multi-million-selling punk-pop band, Blink 182, well its founder Tom DeLonge last concert was in front of 100,000 fans. Now, he’s been putting his money where his mouth is as executive producer of a new limited series called “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation” on the HISTORY channel.
Previously run by Luis Elizondo, AATIP was created to investigate Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) including numerous videos of reported encounters. The TV series “Unidentified” features DeLonge, Elizondo and several other investigative team members including Chris Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Intelligence. Early in the series, Mellon offers: “My hope is make a serious effort to acquire and analyze data which could tell us whether this UFO issue does involves some other civilization or reveals a breakthrough of adversaries or even allies…Evidence suggests these are not U.S. vehicles…(and) it’s inexcusable we don’t make the effort to answer such a profound question.”
Then, earlier this year, ace podcaster Joe Rogan interviewed Bob Lazar, the self-proclaimed former member of America’s ultra-secret alien technology’s reverse-engineering program. Lazar called the AAVs he observed as “borderline magic” describing nine vehicles with the potential of power levels that were “astronomical.” He saw the AAVs fly and also quipped about getting caught filming a craft doing “radical maneuvers” and suggesting that Navy pilot Cmdr. David Fravor “described exactly what we saw.”
The Day the Earth Stood Still
That’s where I return to Stephen Zoller, an accomplished filmmaker but a humble man who doesn’t have any abduction stories. But he has a lifelong fascination with UFOs that was inspired in a theater near Dublin in 1960 where as an eight year old he sat wide-eyed, watching the seminal sci-fi movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still.
image from “The Day the Earth Stood Still”
Next, after immigrating to North America and on a family car trip through Indiana in 1965, he saw a saucer shaped object whiz by with blinding speed. Known for having a vivid imagination, young Zoller’s “sighting” only provoked laughter. However, ten years later, while attending the University of Toronto, he found an old magazine with a photo of a UFO dated 1965 in Indiana. Maybe, he wasn’t daydreaming after all, so he devoured anything he could about UFOS, including reading about the Barney and Betty Hill incident.
Not Little Green Men
Q Mr. Zoller, after all that research, what’s your take today on UFO/AAVs?
A The prevailing sentiment with UFO watchers is that they’re of extraterrestrial origin. However, the more I’ve researched, the more I suggest they’re not little green men from a far-flung part of the galaxy. It’s just way too much of a scientific leap. Interstellar travel from Alpha Centauri, our closest neighboring star at a mere 26 trillion miles away, would fly in the face of Einstein’s theory of mass-energy equivalence.
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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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by Chris Gardner July 16, 2019 (hollywoodreporter.com)
• Billionaire Richard Branson, 68, (founder of the Virgin Group companies, including Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic airline, and a spaceflight company called Virgin Galactic) is getting closer and closer to launching himself into the stratosphere aboard a Virgin Galactic rocket. Still, Branson thinks that it is “extremely unlikely” that extraterrestrial beings are visiting the Earth.
• “There’s no question that there are millions of other civilizations out there, but none of them are within reach of Earth,” says Branson. Despite the New York Times reporting on multiple Navy pilots seeing strange objects flying through the skies at impossible speeds, Branson says, “Sadly, when you look closely you’ll find that there’s another explanation for all of them.” “If people had really discovered a UFO, you can’t keep things secret in this day and age. It would be everywhere. And so I don’t think there’s any credible sightings yet. It would be wonderful if it were true.”
• [Editor’s Note] Where have you been, Richard Branson? Yes, there are credible sightings. Yes, it has been possible for the Deep State to keep this a secret. And yes, extraterrestrial beings are visiting the Earth. Perhaps you ought to read the ExoNews, rather than the mainstream news.
Billionaire Richard Branson insists he’s getting closer and closer to launching himself into the stratosphere aboard a Virgin Galactic rocket. (“My trip to space will be very soon,” he teased in May.) But he’s not expecting much traffic once he lifts off.
Despite a May 26 New York Times bombshell report on how multiple Navy pilots have reported (and recorded) strange objects flying through the skies at impossible speeds, Branson, 68, remains skeptical. “Sadly, when you look closely you’ll find that there’s another explanation for all of them in the same way that in the Bermuda Triangle there’s another explanation for all the mysteries [there]. There’s no question that there are millions of other civilizations out there, but none of them are within reach of Earth and therefore, my instinct is: extremely unlikely.”
Branson, who sat down with Rambling Reporter during a June 20 private party to celebrate Virgin Atlantic’s new LAX-Manchester, England route, had another answer as to why UFOs and the prospects of alien life continue to transfix humans.
“I can’t understand why these UFO discussions are always behind closed doors and done in secrecy. It just creates even more suspicion. If people had really discovered a UFO, you can’t keep things secret in this day and age, it would be everywhere. And so I don’t think there’s any credible sightings yet. It would be wonderful if it were true.”
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• July 2nd was “World UFO Day”, commemorating the July 2, 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, NM. Seventy-two years later, people are still fascinated with the UFO phenomenon.
• In a New York Times exposé , two Navy pilots revealed that they had spotted UAPs flying over the East Coast almost daily for more than six months between 2014 and 2015. Experts have many theories as to where UFOs come from, ranging from glitches in radar technology to spacecraft belonging to other nations. Although the Navy pilots’ reports are credible, they do not link these objects to extra-terrestrial beings. In fact, there is no evidence that does so. The Roswell crash itself was officially just debris made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, and paper.
• Origins and cause aside, how can people actually spot a UFO? Astronomer Chris Rutkowski says that a place with a good view of the sky is crucial, and the later at night the better. “Most UFO sightings came between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m.” “I’d personally recommend simply finding a dark location at night, away from city lights, and watching the skies.”
• According to Rutkowski, places with higher populations tend to have more sightings. But “(UFO) ‘hot spots’ come and go from year to year,” says Rutkowski . “So in some years, the state with the most reports by population could be Vermont, while it might shift to Missouri another year.”
• Rutkowski also suggests using tracking app technology. “There are many planetarium and satellite tracking apps you can get that can help you pick out objects in the sky, and see which ones aren’t stars and planets!” he says. The app store lists a number of helpful ones with high ratings, including Orbitrack and ISS Detector.
• Jan C. Harzan of MUFON says knowing the places where UFOs are often spotted is key. “On a per capita basis Maine and Arizona are the two best states to see a UFO,” Harzan says. “But UFO sightings happen all over the world.”
• Rutkowski is of the opinion that UFOs are not aliens from another world. Harzan does believe in extraterrestrials. But both men agree that the chances of a civilian spotting a UFO in the United States are good. Says Rutkowski, “Polls have shown that 10 percent of all North Americans believe they have seen UFOs — in the USA alone. That’s about 33 million people.”
• [Editor’s Note] What I find disturbing is that the new normal which the mainstream is pushing is that, yes it is now undisputed that UFOs exist. But these thousands of UFO sightings cannot be of an extraterrestrial origin, because extraterrestrials do not exist. Once again the skeptics use the fact that the government has been hiding evidence, ridiculing witnesses, and covering up the ET presence for the past 72 years – to argue that there is no “actual” evidence of extraterrestrials. But the evidence is there for anyone who cares to do a little research.
On July 2, 1947, a rancher in Roswell, New Mexico, stumbled on what appeared to be debris from a “flying saucer” made up of “rubber strips, tinfoil, and rather tough paper.” Baffled, he turned the materials over to the sheriff, who began an investigation. The event, later known as the Roswell UFO Incident, would eventually be recognized as the first sighting of an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) in the U.S.
Seventy-two years later, the rancher’s discovery is one that is still commemorated, a day that is now officially known as: “World UFO Day.”
Chris Rutkowski
Aimed at both awareness and fun, the day celebrates the original sighting, while also recognizing how many have been recorded since. Although the vast majority of these have been shared by civilians, the U.S. government has confirmed its own encounters with what it calls “unexplained aerial phenomena” (UAPs).
Last month in a New York Times expose, two Navy pilots revealed that they had spotted UAPs flying over the East Coast almost daily for more than six months between 2014 and 2015. To be sure, although their reports are credible, they do not link these objects to extra-terrestrial beings. And in fact, there is no evidence that does so. Experts have many theories as to where these objects do come from, ranging from glitches in radar technology to spacecraft belonging to other nations.
Origins and cause aside, how do people interested in UFOs actually spot one? In honor of World UFO day, Yahoo Lifestyle tracked down two experts to find out.
Find an open view of the sky
While it’s important to note that places with higher populations tend to have more sightings, longtime ufologist (UFO expert) and acclaimed astronomer Chris Rutkowski says that “a good view of the sky,” is crucial. “Especially a horizon,” he tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “So downtown Manhattan might not be better than Mesa, Arizona, overall.”
Jan C. Harzan
Know the states where it’s most common
According to Jan C. Harzan, executive director of the nonprofit MUFON (a UFO investigation & research organization), knowing the places where they’re spotted the most is key. “On a per capita basis Maine and Arizona are the two best states to see a UFO,” Harzan tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “But UFO sightings happen all over the world.”
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• For years many have claimed to have seen alien spacecraft hovering above Earth, crop circles, and even evidence of alien species around us. Some scientists also believe that there are truly UFOs around us. But, scientifically speaking, this doesn’t necessarily mean that alien life exists.
• According to a study conducted by Alexander Wendt of The Ohio State University and Raymond Duvall of University of Minnesota, titled “Sovereignty and the UFO”, most of learned society accepts only the possibility that there are UFOs but not aliens because society is not yet ready to accept that a different and superior ET species exists. “UFOs have never been systematically investigated by science or the state, because it is assumed to be known that none are extraterrestrial.”
• Apparently, major educational institutions have accepted the possible existence of UFOs, but they do not confirm the existence of aliens. Perhaps more such institutions should take alien studies more seriously.
• Outside of academia, the existence of aliens and the study of UFO’s has received some serious media recognition. In 2017, the New York Times revealed the US Defense Department’s ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’ which studied UFOs and alien technology. It also released military video of UFOs.
Considering how vast the universe is, it would seem like a great waste of space if we discovered that we are the only living species in the whole cosmos. This is most likely why part of man’s space explorations include the search for life on other planets.
For years, however, some witnesses have claimed that there is evidence of alien species around us. In fact, many have claimed to have seen numerous sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFO) hovering above Earth as evidenced by mysterious formations such as crop circles. These are believed to be alien spacecraft manned by creatures not from around here.
But here’s the clincher: some scientists believe that there are truly UFOs around us. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that alien life exists.
According to a report, a study conducted by Alexander Wendt of The Ohio State University and Raymond Duvall of University of Minnesota, titled “Sovereignty and the UFO” argued that society is perhaps not yet ready to accept that a different, much more superior species exist which is why most of learned society accepts only the possibility that there are UFOs but not aliens.
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• Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev pictured above) told KNPR, the National Public Radio affiliate in Las Vegas, he wishes lawmakers would hold public hearings into what the military knows about UFOs. “They would be surprised how the American public would accept it,” Reid said on air.
• Reid himself was the lawmaker behind the $22M funding for the Pentagon’s AATIP UFO study program from 2007 to 2012, as reported by the New York Times in December 2017. (see article here) “That money was spent developing page after page of information,” said Reid. “[T]here’s been a lot of activity since that.” Reid says that he sees this as a national security issue, noting that he believes both Russia and China are looking into the issue. Last month, the Pentagon admitted to the New York Post that it is still actively investigating claimed sightings of alien spacecraft. (see article here)
• This past April, the US Navy announced new guidelines for Navy personnel reporting encounters with “unidentified aircraft” in response to more sightings of unknown, advanced aircraft flying into or near Navy strike groups or other sensitive military facilities. (see article here)
• On Fox News & Friends, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon remarked, “We know that UFOs exist. This is no longer an issue.” “The issue is why are they here? Where are they coming from and what is the technology behind these devices that we are observing?” (see article here)
• In January, the Defense Intelligence Agency revealed its funding of projects investigating wormholes, alternate dimensions, and other advanced propulsion technology research topics associated with UFOs (see article here).
Nearly two years after it was reported that the Pentagon set up a secret program to investigate UFOs at the request of former Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid, the former senator is clamoring for Congress to look into what the military knows about their existence.
Speaking with Nevada’s KNPR, Reid said he wishes lawmakers would hold public hearings into what the military knows.
“They would be surprised how the American public would accept it,” he said during the wide-ranging interview. “People from their individual states would accept it.”
Reid, who was able to get $22 million in funding for the study of military sightings of UFOs, said that his office produced a plethora of reports on the subject.
“That money was spent developing page after page of information,” he added. “Where people in the past had seen things and not one person but hundreds of people as a result of that there’s been a lot of activity since that.”
Reid mentioned that he would like further research into a topic he sees as a national security issue, noting that he believes both Russia and China are looking into the issue.
In December 2017, both The New York Times and Politico published stories that revealed the existence of the Pentagon’s now-defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The New York Times said the UFO program began in 2007, while Politico reported it began in 2009.
Last month, the Pentagon admitted to the New York Post that it is still actively investigating claimed sightings of alien spacecraft, despite claiming that it shut down the AATIP program in 2012.
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by Alligator Editorial Board Jun 3, 2019 (alligator.org)
Until recently, the human perception of aliens was these little guys way out in space. This is no longer the case. With a May 26thNew York Times article we learned of Navy pilots who witnessed UFOs with “no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes but could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.” Almost every day from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, these bizarre objects flew over the East Coast.
The lack of public interest from this report was surprising. What happened to people’s fascination with the unknown? Not a single meme appeared on the internet. Seriously? We didn’t expect much outspoken response from the average person who pays an average amount of attention to the news. But we expected more from the people that are so quick to judge journalism and share news articles with the caption “fake news!!!”
The size of the universe is hard to wrap our brains around. We can’t be the only ones. Even if we narrow our universal search just to the Milky Way, there would be around 1 million planets with potential life. The ‘zoo hypothesis’ claims aliens have set us aside in a planetary ‘wilderness’ like captive zoo animals. Or are the ETs waiting for us to reach a technological plateau before they reveal themselves to us?
Maybe we humans just refuse to give the extraterrestrials the attention they deserve. They flew all the way here, scared the crap out of some Navy pilot, got The New York Times to write about it, and we still didn’t care.
Earth’s hospitality rating could be cosmically low and aliens have better vacation destinations to spend their hard earned fuel traveling to. Why visit a planet whose inhabitants don’t even bat an eye when you visit? Earth could be the Mount Trashmore of the universe with only the crazies wanting to visit this dump.
[Editor’s Note] It’s the crazies who are running this planet. The rest of the civilized universe is waiting for the humans on Earth to get our act together, expose the treachery that has become our reality, and change our existence by way of higher consciousness. It is up to us as a sovereign race of beings to reclaim our planet, and not the ETs who, by cosmic law, must only sit back and watch it play out. Once we have successfully awoken, the patient and benevolent ETs will accept us as a new member of the Galactic family.
Aliens have fascinated humans since the discovery of space. E.T., ALF, Spock and Marvin the Martian are just a few of the extraterrestrial characters from humanity’s imagination. The human perception of aliens goes to show how dedicated we are to the unknown little (or very big) guys way out in space. At least this seemed to be the case until recently.
On May 26, The New York Times published an article reporting Navy pilots witnessed objects with “no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes but could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.”
Almost every day from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, these bizarre objects flew over the East Coast. Although the U.S. Department of Defense did not call this extraterrestrial activity, the lack of public interest from this report was surprising.
What happened to people’s fascination with the unknown?
Not even a meme or blurb in the Twitter-sphere about aliens came about. At least a bit on aliens getting “slept on” would have sufficed. Seriously? Not a single meme from this article? Shame on you Internet. What a wasted opportunity.
Given that the NYT article came out over Memorial Day weekend, people could have been too busy drinking and boating to care too much about the possibility of unidentified flying objects. We didn’t expect much outspoken response from the average person who pays an average amount of attention to the news. But we expected more from the people that are so quick to judge journalism and share news articles with the caption “fake news!!!” Isn’t this the kind of thing people love to make conspiracy theories about?
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by George Knapp and Matt Adams April 29, 2019 (lasvegasnow.com)
• U.S. Navy officials recently announced that it is changing its policy regarding the reporting of UFOs/UAPs by Navy pilots and personnel (see announcement article). But since a December 2017 New York Times article (see here) revealed a 5-year/$22M Pentagon UFO study program that ended in 2012, along with several videos with images of apparent UFOs, the Pentagon has insisted that the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) had nothing to do with UFOs, and it has denied that the videos came from the Department of Defense (DoD). Now, George Knapp’s ‘I-Team’ has learned that this is not accurate.
• The U.S. Navy’s 2004 encounter with a ‘Tic Tac’ UFO off of San Diego; the 2015 incursion by multiple unknowns off the coast of Florida dubbed ‘Gimbal’; and a zippy craft off of the coast of Virginia known as “Go Fast” did, in fact, come from the DoD. “The videos were released by the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense made the decision to release them,” said Lue Elizondo, a former DoD intelligence officer and director of the Pentagon’s AATIP study.
• Before Elizondo resigned from his Pentagon detail, he initiated a process to get the three videos, and many more, declassified for public release. He insisted in a June 2018 interview these UFO encounters were not isolated incidents. “There were many incidents we looked at and we looked at them on a continuing basis,” said former US Senator Harry Reid. Senator Reid confirmed ‘there’s a lot more where these came from’.
• To back up their assertions, the I-Team obtained a copy of the DD 1910 form issued by the Department of Defense office of prepublication and security review, the final step in a multi-step process to have them publicly released. (click here for the DD 1910 form) The request specifies the three videos: Go Fast, Gimbal and FLIR, which was the original name for the Tic Tac encounter. The document shows that authorization for release was granted on August 24, 2017. The I-Team also acquired the DoD directive which spells out how the video release procedure works.
• Since their release, the three videos and the pilots involved in those encounters have been part of several closed door briefings given to Congress, set up by Chris Mellon who formerly worked for the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Department of Defense. High ranking Navy officials claimed to be ‘just as surprised’ at the UFO evidence as congressional staff. The Navy now wants to encourage pilots to report unusual encounters without fear of damaging their careers.
• Mellon, now of ‘To The Stars Academy’, told the I-Team that the Navy officials realized it was “indefensible” to not have a system that allowed more reporting of these incidents.
U.S. Navy officials issued a stunning statement a few days ago. The Navy announced it is developing new policies that will make it easier for pilots and other military personnel to file official reports about encounters with “unexplained aerial phenomena”, otherwise known as UFOs.
What’s behind this dramatic announcement? And is it related to the UFO videos which were made public at the end of 2017?
For the U.S. Navy to issue such a forceful statement about UFOs and the importance of investigating each incident is such an abrupt change. It stands in marked contrast to all the conflicting statements made by the Pentagon in the past 15 months — claims that the secret study sponsored by Nevada Senator Harry Reid wasn’t really about UFOs, that it ended years ago, and that the three videos weren’t really released by the Department of Defense. Suffice to say, those Pentagon statements are simply not accurate.
The U.S. Navy’s 2004 encounter with an object dubbed the Tic Tac UFO. The 2015 incursion by multiple unknowns off the coast of Florida dubbed Gimbal. And a zippy craft aptly known as “Go Fast”.
Two of the three videos were made public in December 2017, released simultaneously by the New York Times and To The Stars Academy. The provenance of the videos has been disputed ever since.
“The videos were released by the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense made the decision to release them,” said Lue Elizondo, a former intelligence officer.
Reporter George Knapp: “So, someone gave this the green light?”
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by Jessica Pena March 13, 2019 (tvseriesfinale.com)
• The History Channel, along with A+E Originals, has announced it has ordered a six-episode, one-hour limited television docu-series entitled: “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation” to debut in May. The show’s executive producer is Tom DeLonge (pictured above) of the ‘To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science’, along with ‘To The Stars’ team members Luis Elizondo and Chris Mellon who are among its roster of scientists, engineers and intelligence experts. The UFO docu-series will “reveal newly authenticated evidence and footage, interviews from eyewitnesses and former military personnel who have never spoken out before and extensive breakthroughs in understanding the technology behind these unknown phenomena in our skies,” says DeLonge.
• Former DIA military intelligence official Luis Elizondo and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Intelligence Chris Mellon were instrumental in the release of a New York Times’ exposé about the Pentagon’s secret UFO research program, the ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’, in December 2017, along with several authentic videos of UFO encounters by the US military.
• “This is not a UFO hunting show,” said Eli Lehrer, Executive Vice President and Head of Programming at the History Channel, “but a series that will hopefully provoke a cultural conversation about unexplained phenomena and allow our viewers to ultimately draw their own conclusions. Tom’s curiosity and passion for this subject matter, combined with his team, are the perfect partners to deliver this breakthrough series.”
• DeLonge’s ‘To The Stars’ team also includes retired Program Director for Advanced Systems at Lockheed Martin’s Skunkworks, Steve Justice; renowned CIA researcher and quantum physicist, Hal Puthoff; and retired senior CIA member, Jim Semivan. The team will spearhead the disclosure of efforts being made to change government policy surrounding UFOs, and produce tangible evidence for the existence of UFOs ever assembled.
• “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation” will reveal newly authenticated UFO evidence and footage, interviews from eyewitnesses and former military personnel who have never spoken out before, and extensive breakthroughs in understanding the technology behind these Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. Says DeLonge, “I think everyone that watches the show will walk away with questions answered and a feeling of, “Wow, I get it now.”
New York, NY – March 12, 2019 – In December of 2017, The New York Times published a stunning front-page exposé about the Pentagon’s mysterious UFO program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). Featuring an interview with former military intelligence official and Special Agent In- Charge, Luis Elizondo, who confirmed the existence of the hidden government program, the controversial story was the focus of worldwide attention. Previously run by Elizondo, AATIP was created to research and investigate Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) including numerous videos of reported encounters, three of which were released to a shocked public in 2017. Elizondo resigned after expressing to the government that these UAPs could pose a major threat to our national security and not enough was being done to deal with them or address our potential vulnerabilities. Now, as a part of HISTORY’s groundbreaking new six-part, one-hour limited series “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation(TM),” Elizondo is speaking out for the first time with Tom DeLonge, co-founder and President of To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science and Chris Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Intelligence, to expose a series of startling encounters and embark on fascinating new investigations that will urge the public to ask questions and look for answers. From A+E Originals, DeLonge serves as executive producer.
Says DeLonge, “With this show, the real conversation can finally begin. I’m thankful to HISTORY for giving the To The Stars Academy team of world-class scientists, engineers and intelligence experts the opportunity to tell the story in a comprehensive and compelling way. I think everyone that watches the show will walk away with questions answered and a feeling of, “wow, I get it now.”‘
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by Niels Lesniewski January 10, 2019 (rollcall.com)
• On January 10th, former Nevada Senator and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told KNPR radio that he was scheduled to talk with an important senator about setting up a way for members of the military to support exploring UFO and USO (unidentified submerged objects) sightings without facing retribution. “I personally don’t know if there exists little green men… but I do believe that the information we have indicates we should do a lot more study,” the Nevada Democrat said.
• “What we found in the past is that these pilots, when they see something strange like this, they’re prone not to report it for fear that the bosses will think something’s wrong with them, and they don’t get the promotion,” Reid said. “So, many, many times they don’t say a word to anybody about these strange things.”
• “The facts are, they need a place to be able to report this, and that’s what I’m going to work on in a couple of hours, to make sure that somebody I think’s a powerful member in Congress, I want him to be able to sit down and talk to some of these pilots who have seen these things,” Reid said. “I can arrange this because of the contacts I have with members of the Congress.”
• Although Reid declined to identify the US Senator to whom he referred, Reid’s former deputy, Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., happens to be the ranking member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.
• Reid recalled how he lobbied the leaders of the Senate Appropriation’s Defense Subcommittee to get money for a Pentagon UFO research project, which the New York Times reported in December 2017. He related how the late Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, was entirely on board because of a suspicious aircraft he cited during his own time as military pilot. “Frankly, I think the federal government has done almost nothing to help us with this,” Reid said.
• In the radio interview, Reid also confirmed his knowledge about a notorious secret base in Nevada. “Oh sure, I’ve been to Area 51. …I know Area 51 quite well. I know what they’ve done there.”
Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is lobbying his former colleagues to do more to study unidentified flying objects.
“I personally don’t know if there exists little green men other places, I kind of doubt that, but I do believe that the information we have indicates we should do a lot more study,” the Nevada Democrat said. “We have hundreds and hundreds of people that have seen the same thing — something in the sky, it moves a certain way.”
Reid said that also included sightings of vessels at sea.
The topic of UFOs was on Reid’s mind Thursday because his interview with KNPR came just before he said he was scheduled to talk with an important senator about setting up a way for members of the military to support exploring suspicious sightings without facing retribution.
Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill.
“I’m going to have a call with a member of the Senate in an hour or two where we have people in the military who want to come and tell somebody what they’ve seen,” Reid said in the interview, declining to identify who that senator is. (Food for thought: Reid’s former deputy, Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., is the ranking member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.)
“What we found in the past is that these pilots, when they see something strange like this, they’re prone not to report it for fear that the bosses will think something’s wrong with them, and they don’t get the promotion,” he said. “So, many, many times they don’t say a word to anybody about these strange things.”
“The facts are, they need a place to be able to report this, and that’s what I’m going to work on in a couple of hours, to make sure that somebody I think’s a powerful member in Congress, I want him to be able to sit down and talk to some of these pilots who have seen these things,” Reid said. “I can arrange this because of the contacts I have with members of the Congress.”
Back in December 2017, the New York Times reported on a Pentagon program to study UFO sightings that came about because of Reid’s advocacy back when he was serving in the Senate.
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Scientists have long suspected that extra-terrestrial life exists out there, but could
Cooper was a part of the famed Mercury Seven, the first seven US astronauts to go into space. He claims to have had two UFO incidents. The first was in 1951. He claims his squadron of jet fighters chased a group of round objects that could stop mid-air and make instant 90 degree turns. He also claimed that in 1957 a crew he managed at Edwards Air Force base filmed a saucer-shaped object land on a dry lake bed and then take off again. He reviewed the film and reported it. The Air Force sent a courier to collect it. He never saw the film again.
raised this with Secretary Cohen, and then Cohen’s office called me and asked me to pursue this and chase it down.”
Footage of the moment an F/A-18 Super Hornet spotted the unknown object hurtling through the skies in 2004 became one of the most talked-about UFO sightings of all time, after it was released by the New York Times in 2017.
For 70 years, the UFO community has been engaged in active debate regarding physical debris from unidentified flying objects, but the general public got a true taste of that in 2017 when the New York Times ran an article about a secret Pentagon UFO program. The article tantalizingly noted that aerospace billionaire Robert Bigelow, whose interest in UFOs is no secret, modified buildings to house “metal alloys and other materials…that [allegedly] had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.”
