[ad_1]
Editor’s Note: Erik German is a producer and writer whose work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Time and Frontline. Peter Bergen is a national security analyst for CNN, vice president of New America, and professor at Arizona State University. The views expressed in this commentary are their own. View more opinions on CNN.
CNN
—
On Thursday, the Office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence released a congressional-mandated report on “unidentified aerial phenomena,” the Pentagon’s preferred nomenclature for what most people call “UFOs.”
The report is part of a relatively new effort by U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense to try to make sense of more than 500 UFO sightings over the past two decades, most of them carried out by U.S. military personnel. It is
As part of that push, the Pentagon set up a new office in July with the surprisingly obscure name of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office.
Simply put, this office is trying to understand what’s behind UFO sightings made by Pentagon officials or members of the U.S. intelligence community.
This office has sound national security reasons that have nothing to do with aliens or little green men. Evidence of a new and exotic weaponry being deployed by a US adversary? And whatever these UFOs are, they could pose a risk to US Air Force planes and commercial aviation.
The creation of this office is also part of a pattern in which the U.S. Department of Defense has strengthened its UFO claims since the late 1940s. In some cases, it was to camouflage a top-secret new aircraft the Air Force was developing. What the general public might believe to be alien craft is explained by more mundane phenomena such as weather phenomena, balloons, airborne debris, and good old human error.
Thursday’s new UFO report had some surprising findings. The number of UFO sightings increased dramatically between March 2021 and August 2022, with 247 new sightings reported during that time. Most of these reports were from pilots or others working in the US Navy and US Air Force.
The report notes that the increase in these sightings may be a result of a reduction in the stigma associated with reporting such sightings, and also that more people from the Pentagon to report “abnormalities” in the sky. In other words, if you’re told to look for something strange, you’re more likely to find it.
According to a 2021 Gallup poll, about 40% of Americans believe the unidentified flying objects they sometimes see in the skies are actually alien spacecraft.
For true UFO believers, the new reports don’t provide information to support their beliefs, but they do leave behind many unexplained sightings that UFO believers will surely seize.
In several cases investigated by the Department of Defense, unspecified UFO sightings were “due to sensor irregularities or fluctuations, such as operator or equipment error.”
The Department of Defense also found that a significant number of sightings (163) were in fact balloons or “balloon-like entities.” Meanwhile, 26 were from unmanned aerial systems (aka drones) and 6 were due to airborne ‘clutter’. plastic bags and birds.
Still, there are 171 sightings of unidentified objects that the Pentagon has yet to blame, some of which “displayed unusual flight characteristics.”
This is not the first time the Pentagon has investigated and provided information on UFOs, and in some cases has helped fuel a movement of UFO believers.
In July 1952, after months of sightings across the United States, pilots and ground personnel at Andrews Air Force Base said they had spotted a maneuverable object hovering over Washington, DC at inexplicable speed. rice field. Multiple military witnesses said they caught the objects on radar, and at least he reported that one pilot saw them with the naked eye.
As a result, U.S. Air Force intelligence officer Maj. Gen. John Samford held a televised press conference. A U.S. Air Force captain investigating the incident called Samford’s press conference “the largest and longest held by the Air Force since World War II.”
Sitting calmly behind some microphones, Samford told reporters that the “large majority” of UFO sightings could be dismissed as hoaxes, friendly aircraft or weather and light anomalies. Nevertheless, he said, there remains a certain percentage of reports made by “reliable observers of the relatively unbelievable”.
Of course, these relatively incredible possibilities infuriated UFO enthusiasts.
Newspapers across the country ran headlines like “Saucers flock to Capitol” and “Jets chase DC Sky Ghost.” One Air Force investigator in 1952 counted his more than 16,000 newspaper articles about his UFO that year.
However, less than a year after Samford’s press conference, a government commission of scientists, military and intelligence officials convened to gather evidence from more than 20 alleged UFO sightings. Investigated testimony. It came to the conclusion that UFOs actually posed a strategic threat to the United States, but not because of aliens, but because reports of UFOs could overwhelm US civil air defense systems.
Aerospace historian Curtis Peebles wrote that this concern “was not really about flying saucers, but about Pearl Harbor.” At the height of the Cold War, “the United States was haunted by the specter of a surprise Soviet nuclear attack.”
The commission proposed a policy of “debunking” the report, and officials “take immediate steps to strip the unidentified flying objects of their special status and the mysterious aura they unfortunately have acquired.” Recommended.
The US Air Force has commissioned a small office called Project Blue Book to do just that. By the 1970s, Blue Book officers tracked UFO reports, interviewed eyewitnesses, gathered evidence, and explained that most sightings could be attributed to ordinary aircraft, hoaxes, or meteorological phenomena. Consistently published stories to highlight in the press.
Then, as now, the majority of UFO reports were simply submitted to conventional explanations.
However, a small group of American UFO watchers remained and could not be interjected. And they continued to monitor the skies and reported on aircraft they believed could fly higher and faster than any known aircraft.
In some cases, they were discovering genuine, highly secret U.S. assets. It was presumed to be sightings of U-2 and Air Force SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance planes.
The need to protect these and later stealth projects has spawned new approaches from some of the US counterintelligence community.
“The US Air Force and CIA had their own UFOs to hide,” writes Mark Pilkington in his book Mirage Men. “The finer, meatier details were buried by the imagination of people on the ground, encouraged and embellished by the alphabet soup of the CIA and other intelligence agencies.”
Pilkington documented cases in the early 1980s of Air Force counterintelligence agents contacting and inciting UFO investigators. Stories like this will inevitably spread. And useful information about top-secret real-life aircraft was lost amid the increasingly strange noise of UFOs.
Pilkington described the Department of Defense’s communications strategy as a “two-channel system.” One to debunk and calm the public regarding UFO reports, and one he did to cover up a possible leak about classified US technology.
So where does it leave us today? Perhaps now that the Cold War is over, the Pentagon’s new UFO Office marks a new chapter of enlightened transparency surrounding the unknowns in the air that could pose a threat to our security. Given its long history of oscillating between intriguing and stifling the public, it seems unlikely that true believers in UFOs will give up on the mystery anytime soon.
[ad_2]
Source link
